The first time I read the words "eternal return" in Nietzsche I immediately had to recall Origen's pochaastasix.… For the Greek church father smuggled the genuinely Hellenistic idea of the eternal recurrence of things and the eternal repetition of the origin and end of the world without further ado into Christian theology and then built on it the magnificent doctrine of the bringing of men back to God … But this divinization of the world was, for Origen, not just an end, but also a beginning. When the cycle of things had reached its beginning again, it began all over. The terrible spectacle of the fall, sin, punishment, redemption, and return to God is repeated over and over again—from eternity to eternity or, as one could better translate the word aion from one world-cycle to the next.
One of the principal themes in Nietzschean thought is "the interpretive character of all that happens. No event exists in itself. Everything that happens consists of a group of phenomena that are gathered and selected by an interpretive being." For Nietzsche, these phenomena are not masks attached to a thing in itself, some lesser beings, or nothingness, or facts; their being belongs to an interpretive process, which consists only in the difference between an interpreting activity and a text. Being is text. It appears and makes sense; and the sense is multiple, manifested not in the way that an object is for a subject, but as an interpretation that is itself construed in terms of a multiplicity of perspectives. Interpretation, here, comprises the act of interpretation and the text interpreted, the reading and the book, the deciphering and the enigma. "One may not ask: 'Who then interprets?' for it is the interpretation, a form of the Will to Power, that exists." We are, Nietzsche claims, "ingenious interpreters and fortune-tellers whom destiny has placed as spectators on the European stage, faced with an enigmatic and undeciphered text whose meaning is gradually revealed."
Being is manifest, and this manifestation is a great rumbling and agitation of sense. But the sense is not directly decipherable. It receives nothing from beyond, and one would look in vain for an intelligible ground beneath the shimmer of appearance. No intuition or mental inspection can grasp it, still less synthesize it into a logical system. The very concept of totality—a logical system—is itself the product of an interpretation, and would not serve as immediate evidence. Because the phenomenon of being is a "text" and not a painting (which would display its contents to naive perception or to the philosopher's intelligence), it is essentially ambiguous: it withholds as much as it shows, it is an opaque revelation, a blurred sense—in short, an enigma. Because of this quality of ambiguity, Nietzsche will call the phenomenon a mask or veil.
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