[In section 341 of part 4 of The Gay Science] is the first full expression of the basic idea of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, the idea Nietzsche calls the "basic idea" of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the work he considered his most important. The question posed is whether this absolutely antitelelogical possibility of eternal repetition would be experience as crushing, nothing but "the greatest weight", or as a divine liberation. And in the light of what he have said heretofore, we should pay special attention to how he poses this latter possibility: "If this thought gained possession of you (über dich Gewalt bekäme), it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing. 'Do you want this once more and innumerable times more (wills du diess noch einmal und noch unzählige Male)?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have tgo become to yourself and to life to strive (verlangen) - for nothing more than for this confirmation and seal?" (274). Because this is a question about desire and its possibility, it can, given the mysterious and largely unreachable origins of desire, only remain a question in Nietzsche, whether the endlessness and futility of our desire for more than we need, whether our new sense that a completion and satisfaction of such a desire for significance can never come, would crush (zermalen) such a desire or not. As he said: "That is the question; that is the experiment."
Sometimes, lots of times actually, Nietzsche suggests that a good deal of the answer depends on him, on whether he can portray the heroism of such futile attempst well enough, can inspire a sense of nobility not dependent on guarantees, payoffs, benefits, and probabilities. Looked at broadly, though, the historical answer to Nietzsche's question is clearly negative; the experiemnt with him at the center did not take, his "truth" could not be successully incorporated. He did not become a new Socrates, and his cultural and historical impact has been much more as a kind of "dissolving fluid", a value debunker, an immoralist, than as any prophet for a new form of life. but something of what Nietzsche is suggesting is still visible, and in a way that testifies to the fruitfulness of his formulations.
That phenomenon is the continuing existence of philosophers, even though there is not, any longer, as a matter of wide and deep historical consensus, any possibility of philosophy, or let's say philosophical hope, as traditionally understood. Kant, as Nietzsche himself frequently noted, put an end to that. As Giorgio Colli expressed it in his afterword to The Gay Science, what Nietzche realized was that "die Philosophie existiert nicht mer, aber die Philosophen müssen weiter existieren" (philosophy doesn't exist any more, but philosophers must continue to exist.) What after all could be more futile and hopeless than the two-thousand-year tradition of philosophy? What desire less satisfiable, what striving easier to satirize? Can anyone say what philosophers want? Yet, even without any confidence in the possibility of a priori knowledge of substance, or the human good, or the nature of man, or the nature of numbers, the realization of the endless, infinitely repetive nature of philosophic striving has not crushed it.
Robert Pippin. in Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern. University of Chicago Press (2005)
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