Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same by Karl Lowith, trans. J. Harvey Lomax California 306pp, £29.95 in UK
There is a cartoon by the great Gary Larson in which a flock of sheep is seen contentedly grazing, save for one animal which has lifted its head above the backs of the herd in indignant wonderment to say: "Wait a minute. This is grass. This is grass we're eating!" A sense of humour was not among the more highly developed of Friedrich Nietzsche's faculties, yet surely Larson's witty and profound conceit would have wrung a wry smile of recognition from under that cow-catcher mous tache.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in Rocken, in Prussian Saxony, in 1844, to a long line of clergymen. In 1865, while still a student, he visited a brothel in Cologne and contracted syphilis, which was to would lead to a total mental collapse in January 1889, effectively the end of Nietzsche's life, although he was to live, silent and lost in himself, for a further eleven years.
Paul de Man has remarked "the specific difficulty of Nietzsche's works: the patent literariness of texts that keep making claims usually associated with philosophy rather than with literature". This raises the question of whether so purposely unsystematic a thinker as Nietzsche can properly be called a philosopher at all. Certainly philosophers who yearn for the rigour of the scientist strongly resist Nietzsche's "poetic" style and absence of system (the two attributes of his work which make it so appealing to artists) and, if they could, would exclude him from the academy altogether. Heidegger quotes Nietzsche: "For many, abstract thinking is toil; for me, on good days, it is feast and frenzy."29
The task Karl Lowith set himself was to locate in the apparent turmoil of Nietzsche's thought the sense of a system at work. "Nietzsche's philosophy," he declares at the outset of The Eternal Recur- rence of the Same, "is neither a unified, closed system nor a variety of disintegrating aphorisms, but rather a system in aphorisms". This is the first of many apparently paradoxical claims Lowith will make in the course of this passionate, painstaking, intricately argued defence of Nietzsche the rational philosopher.
In this work, as the translator's introduction has it, "Nietzsche's kaleidoscope of lovely fragments suddenly comes to view as a breathtaking, intelligible work of art". This edition is the book's first appearance in English; why it should have been so long in coming is inexplicable, for it is a key text in Nietzsche studies, as relevant today as it was when it first appeared more than sixty years ago.
Lowith, a German scholar of Jewish descent, published it in Berlin in 1935, under the disapproving eyes of National Socialist academics, among them Lowith's former teacher, Martin Heidegger, who comes in for strong criticism in one of Lowith's appendices ("He . . . reads his own thought into that of Nietzsche in order to interpret himself in Nietzsche"). As a teacher at Marburg in the later 1930s, Lowith had "wanted to make clear to the students that Nietzsche prepares the way for, and at the same time represents the severest rejection of, the present situation in Germany. Nietzsche is a `National Socialist' and a `cultural Bolshevik' - depending on how one manoeuvres him."
Throughout the book Lowith insists that Nietzsche's thought is systematic; the assertion requires some tricky somersaults: "Already in Nietzsche's attempt to refrain from a system, there rules first and finally a necessity that compels him to develop as a system the idea of eternally recurring Being."
For Lowith, eternal recurrence is the very core and justification of Nietzsche's philosophy. In this theory, formulated in Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Gay Science, Nietzsche held that everything that happens, down to the tiniest, most insignificant detail, will recur over and over again to infinity. It is the strangest and most difficult of Nietzsche's theories (though it seems to be offered support by certain present-day cosmologists, who suggest that the Big Bang will inevitably lead to the Big Collapse, which itself will be followed by another Big Bang, and so on to infinity). The theory was vital for Nietzsche, not least in that he saw it as making irrelevant such Christian concepts as sin, redemption and free will. "Let us imprint the likeness of eternity upon our life! This idea contains more than all religions that despise this life as ephemeral and have taught the faithful to focus their gaze on an indeterminate other life." Nietzsche aimed to transform the Christian "Thou Shalt" into the personal "I Will". Morality, he believed, was born in the smoky darkness of the prehistoric cave. He emphasised the predicament of early man as both hunter and hunted, huddled in fear and fixed in the yellow eye of the wolf, which in time becomes transformed into the eye of God: "danger," he declared, is "the mother of morals"
However, while it seems to get rid of the concept of free will, the theory at the same time requires a supreme act of will on the part of man, for in Nietzsche' formulation, man himself wills the eternal recurrence, thus overcoming nihilism and giving a meaning to human existence. Here lies the paradox. As J. Harvey Lomax says in his introduction to Lowith's book: "Lowith leaves little doubt that the doctrine of eternal recurrence shatters into incommensurable shards, for one need not will a fact, and the knowledge that one wills a fiction necessarily undermines the believability of what one wills."
Although many readers will find Lowith ultimately unconvincing in his central argument, the book remains a wonderfully stimulating and perceptive study of this most self-contradictory of philosophers - Nietzsche seems to have believed, to paraphrase Wilde, that in philosophy, a great truth is one of which the opposite is also true.
Whether we love or loathe him, without Nietzsche it would be hard to imagine the philosophical and literary map of the 20th century, from Heidegger to Paul de Man, from Freud to Lacan, from Thomas Mann to Milan Kundera. In casual-seeming aphorisms - "There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena" - he demolished whole walls of the house of Western philosophy. He set himself against the metaphysicians and their vaunting of "spiritual" over "physical" values, and insisted on putting the human body - "Has not all philosophy been a misunderstanding of the body?" - back at the centre of philosophy. Not least, he set in place, in prose which is beautiful even in translation, a poetic interpretation of life remarkable for its insight, honesty, grandeur and gaiety.
Ignored in his own time, misunderstood, misinterpreted and traduced in ours, Nietzsche, for all his failures - and he knew himself to be "human, all too human" - is surely the most profound, certainly the most fearless, of modern thinkers, and a determining figure whose light was quenched at the very dawn of a century so many of whose travails and terrors he prophesied. After him, the grass will never be the same again.
John Banville is Literary Editor of The Irish Times