Modernism Outline
Intro
What is eternal return?
Explain. Use Nietzsche’s example.
Eternal recurrence what if everything in life would recur over and over again
eternally?
--Niet. The question would ‘lie on your actions as the heaviest weight’
--it tests youno to be overcome by the world’s horrors and its meaninglessness (impact
on Baudelaire)
--is it meaningless because, as Kundera suggests, things that happen but once
might as well not have happened at all? (Einmal ist keinmal)
We have no way of judging our decisions and actions (Benjamin!! Theses
III – awareness of “fullness of its past” p. 254)
UloB – “a life which does not return is like a shadow, without weight,
dead in advance. Its horror, sublimity and beauty mean nothing.” (pg 3)
History becomes mere words. Its horrors are not frightening.
The heavier the burden the closer we are to reality. Gravity pulls closer to
Earth.
No belief (religion?) could justify the world
Mencken calls it the “most hopeless idea, perhaps ever formulated by man” (Salter, 170)
Nietzsche not the first to think of it. Heraclitus, Stoa, many more (178)
Natural selection—weak could not endure it.
Gay Science
Pg 194, #341
ER is the heaviest weight
--what if one was offered by a demon (importance of a demon) this life again,
innumerable times; nothing new in it, every pain and every joy must return, in the same
sequence.
Questions:
Would you not think it a curse?
Have you ever experienced something that would have made you say yes?
Would the prospect not crush you, having to think about it in relation to every
thing and action?
It would “lie on your actions as the heaviest weight.”
If it does not, does that mean our lives are lightest?
 “It’s weight depends on us: if recurrence is a forbidding thought, is it not
because our life has failed to satisfy us, has been unworthy, or full of pain, or
at best commonplace—so that we want no more of it?” (Salter 170)
 “All joy seeks eternity”
 “It was the smallness, the meaninglessness that preyed on him.” (Salter 171)
What are its implications?
Why is it important?
It is a hypothetical. A ‘thought-experiment’
So why is it important? How heavy can something be if it is not real?
* to face the question, one must have an awareness of everything that has led to
the “now,” all the things/events, good and bad, that helped us achieve the things that we
value/find valuable.
Why not just forget about it?
--reference to Gatsby (xvii)
--“Tom and Daisy retreat back into their money and carelessness, or whatever it
was that held them together.” This is the remedy.
--The alternative to coming to terms with our actions, lives is to bury it.
--We veil the world
--What is the value of truthfulness? Why not just deceive others, ourselves?
Ethics of it
Could we “endure our immortality?”
--one should live as if actions were to recur innumerable times
--Buddhism: not live a certain way for heaven or reward, but as if we shall
live the same way eternally.
One’s outlook and ethics must come first and be foundation
We must not simply be content with ourselves, but with the world—if we
wish one moment, we must wish all
Niet: ER “redeems us from a sense of transitoriness of life.” (Salter, 173)
“Things are too great to be fleeting” (Werke, 173)
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati (love of fate): that one
wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.”
(Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 258)
Turning point in history when we started to place emphasis on afterlife
Is it possible?
Cannot be proven (Salter)
1. To Nietzsche, world was a finite quantity.
2. Refused to admit that there was empty space around the world.
3. Reality of time. There was a before and will be an after, no matter how we
think of it.
To the before and after, no limits can be set. If God exists, then he has always
existed, there is no beginning or end to Him. Therefore, there was, more than
likely something before us, and will be, most likely something after us.
There is a finite number of forces and infinite amount of time (164)
4. No beginning to force no end to force.
There is no end—if there is it would have happened—would have achieved an
equilibrium. Since there is a finite number of forces in an infinite amount of
time, every possible action would have/will eventually happen.
5. Everything is dependent on the smallest thing. If one thing is different, all
must be different.
At the end, there is an unorganized state at which it began. There will be another
beginning.
No guarantee that worlds will be alike. No controlling design. No ordering.
* it is all chance and accident but over an infinite amount of time, all possible
combinations will occur.
--Thesis XVIII-In relation to history, the period of man is like 2 seconds in a 24 hour day (at the
end). The period of civilized man = 1/5 of the last second.
* The present compresses the entire history
6. Then repetition of combinations will occur. New will eventually be
impossible.
God’s intervention?
In our world, no two things are alike, if only because they exist in different time and
space.
Dice example
It is true
Mémoire involuntaireenable by ER
Things are eternally recurring and we realize this when we recall them, have
experience with mémoire involuntaire.
Collective memory v. individual memory
Benjamin
Theses
III
major acts v. minor ones—if ER there is no difference
“nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history” (254)
V
Mémoire involuntaire (265) casual natureeach moment and image of the past
has importance for present (or it will disappear forever)
VI
Do we see past as it really was?
Benjaminmémoire involuntaire is the only true memory
Mémoire voluntaire is “remembrance”
Remembrance conserves. Memory destroys.
Remembrancedisappears with consciousness (160)
ERonly aware of it when not in consciousness.
Only recognize it as it applies to us individually
* Benjamin, Pg 160
“memory fragments are ‘often most powerful and most enduring when the
incident which left them behind was one that never entered
consciousness.”
Maybe ER is not solely events, but smells, sights, what we experience
unconsciously
Does ER threaten MI?
Where does ER existin our memory, as individuals and as a society.
Benjamin on Baudelaire
If ER, why do anything? It’s too risky.
159 we are isolated as individuals, collective past!
Time machine concept
Erfahrung
-experience (when stimuli brings out mémoire inv.)
Erlebnis (ER)
-the “memory” remains in “the sphere of a certain hour of one’s life”
Time in Baudelaire (181)
“is chopped up”focus on a few days
--days of recollection, not experience
“secret architecture” in FoE?
If so, the cycle of poems that begins it is devoted to something
irretrievably lost
Correspondence
La Vie Anterieur
--have same motif
* Benjamin p.183
Proust’s restorative will=limits of earthly existence
Baudelaire transcends it
There is time that exists outside of history
186 New Technologies camera, recordersenable ER and mémoire vol.
The Gay Science
--lightness. “While it involves and encourages hard and rigorous thought…it is
meant to convey a certain spirit, one that in relation to understanding and criticism could
defy the ‘spirit of gravity’ as lightly as the troubadours…celebrated their loved ones.”
(xi)
--“new image and ideal of the free spirit’
The most personal of Nietzsche’s books
‘the value of life’
--“anyone who really understood the horrors of the world would be crushed or choked by
them.” (xv)
Books:
Freud Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Benjamin Arcades Project
Kossowski
--forgetting is “source as well as indespensible for ER”
Benjamin on Proust
“An experienced event is finite…confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered
event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything before and after it.” (Kairos)
Osborne
We assume continuous time
--“a homogenous continuum of historical time”
“is there a new conception of historical time implicit in the developmental perspective of
historical materialism?” (3)
Berman reduces modernity to the homogenization of historical time
Problem: “There is the differential character of the temporality internal to modernity
itself, which is established by its qualitative distinction between chronological and
historical time” (15) “The next is not necessarily the new”
Modernity is about new forms of experience of time
Kermode
“A need in the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end”
(4)
humans are programmed to accept a “wholly concordant structure of time”—an end,
middle, beginning, in harmony
saeculafundamentally arbitrary chronological divisions
--“bear our anxieties and hopes”
--they are ‘intemporal’ “but we project them onto history making it ‘a perpetual
calendar of human anxiety.” (11)
--they help us find ends and beginnings
** “imaginary numbers in mathematics, something we know does not exist, but which
helps us to make sense of and to move in the world.” (37)
temporal integration
“our way of bundling together perception of the present, memory of the past, and
expectation of the future, in a common organization” (46)
--within this, what was previously thought of as simply successive “becomes
charged with past and future”
chronos’passing time’ (Revelatiuons) which shall ‘shall be no more’
kairosthe season, a point in time filld with significance and meaning derived from
relation to beginning and end
** it recurs because it must for an end to make sense
kairos  (St. Augustine) critical time,
chronosquantitative time
“To see everything as out of mere succession is to behave like a man drugged or insane”
(57)
Bibleworld began out of nothing
Aristoteleansworld is eternal, w/o beginning or end
St. Augthere was a formless matter, between noithing and something, and the world
was made from this
(found figure for integration of p,p,f, that defies successive time (71))
(mann quote71)
God is not temporal
Beginning and end
Eternity
Thirda choiceeternal return
--“unusual variey of duration—neitehr temporal or eternal but, as Aquinis said,
participates in both the temporal and the eternal”
“it does not abolish time or spatialize it; it coexists with time and is a mode in
which things can be perpetual without being eternal”
aevum
Freud
Consciousness “yields perceptions and emotions of excitations coming from the external
world and of feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which can only arise from within the
mental apparatus” (18)
--call perceptual system
-exists on border between outside and inside
--turned towards the external world
--envelops other physical systems
all exciting processes and events leave permanent traces behind which “form the
foundations of memory” (19)
-often most powerful when the process that left them never entered consciousness
Is this stuff remained in consciouness there would soon be no more room for new
excitiations
Events and excitory processoccurs in consciousness, but leaves no trace. Leaves trace
in the unconscious.
Like firmament in eliot!
Repetition compulsion
--instinctual
--“the experiencing of something identical is clearly, in itself a source of
pleasure”
unconscious”’primary’ psychical process”
secondaryour normal waking life
Instint!
-“the representatives of all the forces originating in the interior of the body and
transmitted to the mental apparatus” (28)
Unconscious is fundamentally different from the consc.
Unconscious is timelss and not ordered temporally************
Margaret Church
Bergson
“time is that of a mdium in whoich our feelings, impressions, emotions are
arranged in the same kind of order that we find in space, that is, one after another. But, he
asks, ‘Does the multiplicity of our conscious states bear the slightest resembelnce to the
multiplicity of the units of a number?” (6)
--no
--time is a system of enumeration
--duration is different
different states of consciousness exist simultaneously
they are iunetrdependent and pervade each other
“Matter and Memory”
2 forms of memory
--habit (enables us to learn a lesson by heart)
--true memorywhich records every moment of duration (explain)takes place
continuously throughout life
spontaneous recollection (memoire involuntaire)bergson: mixed state: something of the
past, also what followed
memory image
memory trace
in reliving experiences, separarte from imagination, passion or selfish desires, we
touch real existence”
Proust
Opportunities of recalling the past
Real time is what lives within us
(54) “The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reac]h of the intellect,
in some material object (in the sensation which the material object will give us) which we
do not suspect.” (13)
--it depends on chance, whether we realize it before we die
past and present exist simultaneously
Proust feels as though he were living simultan eously in two different times
(15) “In sucvh moments he is entirely outside of time”
--it is not memory, but some part of his inmost selfuncounscioius
--doesn’t just bring single moment from the past
(15) ** “the being within me to seize, isolate, immobilize, for the duration of a liughtning
flash what it never apprehends, namely a fragment of time in its pure state’
(15) not just recall—“the actual sensation recurs”
”the restoration of being caused by recurring sensationb is a realiuty” (16)
(17) Life is not “continuité mélodique” but a “simple plurality of isolated moments,
remote from each other”
ER
(139) festal Mann’s description of the essence of recurrence
”feast celebrating the essential unity in All experience”
“time isn’t ‘actual’—when it seems long to you, it is long. Time itself has no divisions. It
is we who demarcate it
Collective unconscious