Have you ever asked yourself who you really are, with all your distractions stripped away, sitting in the corner facing the wall in a Time-Out? Last time we looked at restlessness with Sophocles, Holderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.  We can see this horror loci demon winding its way through the history of Western thought.

 Heidegger says in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics “Man is that inability to remain and is yet unable to leave his place (cited in McNeil, Scarcely, 169).” McNeil suggests “Heidegger’s translation of to deinon, ‘the decisive word,’ as das Unheimliche – intends this word to be understood in the sense of das Unheimische, that which is ‘unhomely,’ something ‘not at home’ that nevertheless belongs, in an ever equivocal manner, to the worldly dwelling of human beings (Scarcely, 183).” In precise note, McNeill adds that for Heidegger “to deinon is “the fundamental word … of Greek tragedy in general, and thereby the fundamental word of Greek antiquity, (cited from Heidegger, Scarcely, 188n.47).” The Greeks long ago made a decision to cover up the essence of man and lose themselves in beings, so that they would never have to live in the truth of the essence of man. Sophocles, in Oedipus at Colonus, figuratively puts it in the following way: “But cease now, and nevermore hereafter awaken such lament (cited at Pa, Postscript to What is Metaphysics, 238).” Heidegger comments, referring to another place in Sophocles, that “[s]uch is the rise and the fall of man in his historical abode of essence – hupsipolis – apolis – far exceeding abodes, homeless, as Sophocles (Antigone) calls man (P, 90).”

In the Antigone Sophocles calls man  “deinon” which in German is “das Unheimliche ” in the sense of  “das Unheimische” figuratively meaning “not at home.”  This is similar to “apolis” in the Antigone figuratively meaning “homeless,” which is opposed to “parestios” meaning “being at home.”  What major theme does deinon and apolis point to in the Antigone and other Greek tragedies?

In Sophocles’ Antigone, the terms “deinon” and “apolis” contribute significantly to exploring several major themes.  “Deinon” (often translated as “wondrous” or “terrible”) reflects the awe-inspiring and fearsome aspects of human capability. In the context of Greek tragedy, it underscores the duality of human ingenuity and hubris. Humans can achieve great things but also fall dramatically when they overstep natural or divine boundaries. This theme is evident when Creon, in his attempt to assert absolute control, disrupts the natural order and brings about his own downfall.

“Apolis,” meaning “without a city” or “homeless,” directly relates to the theme of isolation from one’s community or the polis. Antigone, by defying Creon’s edict, becomes apolis, as she chooses loyalty to divine law and her family over the state’s law, leading to her exclusion from the community. This highlights the tension between individual moral conviction and societal norms, exploring how one becomes an outsider when personal ethics conflict with civic duties.

Both terms touch upon the central conflict in Antigone between the unwritten, divine laws (represented by Antigone’s burial of her brother) and the man-made laws of the state (represented by Creon’s decree). “Deinon” illustrates human law’s attempt to assert itself over divine law, while “apolis” underscores the personal and communal consequences of such conflicts.

The theme of “being at home” (parestios) versus homelessness (apolis) also delves into questions of identity, belonging, and what it means to be part of a community or family. Antigone’s actions isolate her from her community, emphasizing her identity through her familial roles over civic ones. This theme resonates in other Greek tragedies where characters often face crises of identity or exile from their homeland or family.

“Deinon” also reflects on the human condition’s inherent wonder and terror, particularly in relation to mortality. The tragedies often explore how humans confront or deny their mortality, leading to tragic outcomes. Antigone’s fate and Creon’s realization of his mistakes at the play’s end are poignant reminders of human limitations against the backdrop of the inexorable laws of nature or the gods.

Heidegger looked to Nietzsche for the individual answer to the problem of restlessness which we see in the famous letter to Overbeck discussed below, and Holderlin such as in “Homecoming” to reconnect to discover what it meant to be German  It is clear during his Nazi period Heidegger was trying to reimagine Greek polis culture with things like the Hitler Youth. 

Herodotus’s views concerning polis culture are summed up in the book five, section 78 of the Histories: “So the Athenians flourished. Now the advantages of everyone having a voice in the political procedure are not restricted just to single instances, but are plain wherever one looks.”  During the Pentekontaetia, Greek intellectual investigation gradually shifted from the community of the πόλις to the individuality of Man.  More importantly, conceptions of ἀρετή also changed during this period. Before, the term referred to the degree of virtue or perfection achieved through contributions to the community. Now it referred to the degree to which man could achieve honor and success for himself.  While this might be a noble goal for the individual, it proved disastrous for the πόλις culture. Therein lies the tragedy of Greek history, that the first democracy, a potent and vibrant force, used its potency to subjugate its neighbors and weaken the Greek world.  So, we have movement in the history of the Greeks from discovering and realizing oneself in unity with the polis as a single organism, to progressively distinguishing oneself from it.  Just as the history and evolution of the concept of polis changed what it meant for a human being to be in her being, from communal to individualistic, so did the history and evolution of restlessness shift from the outer to the inner as the basic stance of the individual in the world as being disconnected from it.  In an earlier time, there was no distinction between who one was and the state.

These themes are not only pivotal in Antigone but are recurrent in Greek tragedy, where the exploration of human nature, the confrontation with the divine, and the consequences of social exclusion are central to the dramatic narrative.

Oedipus’s journey from “deinon” — the awe-inspiring solver of the Sphinx’s riddle — to his tragic realization of his own fate illustrates the limitations and hubris of human knowledge and power. His curse of being “apolis” (an exile from Thebes) after his deeds are revealed underscores the theme of isolation due to one’s actions against the natural order or divine law.  The play delves deeply into human vulnerability and the inescapable nature of fate, showing how Oedipus, despite his best efforts, cannot escape what has been laid out by the gods.

Medea becomes “apolis” when she is exiled from Corinth by King Creon, highlighting her exclusion from the community due to her foreign status and her subsequent acts of vengeance. This theme explores the outsider’s perspective and the isolation that comes from such a position.  Medea’s struggle with her identity — as a mother, a woman, a foreigner, and a sorceress — and her ultimate act of killing her children reflect the tragic consequences of being unmoored from one’s community or “home”.

Pentheus’s refusal to acknowledge Dionysus’s divinity leads to his downfall, echoing the “deinon” aspect of human overreach. His literal dismemberment by his mother and the Bacchae represents a stark line between the divine order and human hubris.  The play starkly contrasts the divine ecstasy of Dionysus with the rigid human laws and order Pentheus tries to maintain, leading to chaos when human law attempts to dominate divine will.

Clytemnestra’s isolation after Agamemnon’s return and her subsequent actions reflect a form of being “apolis” within one’s own home due to betrayal and vengeance. Her act of killing Agamemnon and Cassandra marks her as an outsider in her own family and kingdom.  The play explores themes of returning home after war (nostos), but Agamemnon’s homecoming is fraught with danger and betrayal, illustrating how one can be “apolis” even in one’s own household.

Philoctetes, abandoned on an island due to his festering wound, embodies the concept of “apolis” through his physical and social isolation. His eventual return to the community to help win the Trojan War shows a redemption but also underscores the pain of exclusion and the human need for belonging.

These examples show how Greek tragedies repeatedly explore the themes of human limitations, the clash between individual and community, the struggle between divine and human law, and the profound isolation that can come from defying these norms or being cast out by society. Each character’s journey often mirrors the human struggle with identity, power, and belonging, resonating with the concepts of “deinon” and “apolis” seen in Antigone.

Given this, we can conclude there is a powerful connection between the theme of figurative homelessness (“apolis”) and the restlessness of man as explored in Greek tragedies. The concept of “apolis” or homelessness can be seen as a metaphor for the human condition’s inherent restlessness. Man, in Greek tragedy, is often depicted as in search of something—be it knowledge, identity, belonging, or peace—yet often finding himself at odds with the world or his own nature. This restlessness is a manifestation of man’s struggle to find his place in the world, to reconcile his ambitions with the natural or divine order, or to overcome his fate.

Characters who become “apolis” experience a profound sense of isolation, which fuels their restlessness. For instance, in Antigone, Antigone’s defiance leads to her literal and symbolic isolation from her community, her family, and ultimately, from life itself. This isolation is not just physical but existential, highlighting a deep-seated human need for connection and belonging, which, when unmet, leads to inner turmoil and restlessness.

The restlessness of man can also be linked to “deinon” – the awe-inspiring yet fearsome aspects of human capability. Characters often strive for control or knowledge beyond what is humanly possible, leading to their downfall and a form of spiritual or existential homelessness. This is evident in Oedipus Rex, where Oedipus’s pursuit of truth about his identity leads to his literal exile and a recognition of his own hubris, reflecting the instability in his quest for stability.

Greek tragedies often portray humans as restless because they are in constant negotiation or conflict with a divine or natural order that they cannot fully comprehend or control. This conflict can make one feel “not at home” in the world, as seen with characters like Pentheus in The Bacchae, who resists Dionysus’s divine order, leading to his own destruction and highlighting the restlessness caused by resisting or misunderstanding one’s place in the world.

The theme of “nostos” (return home) in tragedies like Agamemnon or Philoctetes underscores the restlessness of being away from home, both physically and metaphorically. The journey back, fraught with trials, reflects a deeper human desire for peace, belonging, or resolution, which is often elusive or comes with a cost, further emphasizing the theme of restlessness.

In essence, the figurative homelessness in Greek tragedy symbolizes not just physical displacement but also an inner state of unrest, a search for meaning, identity, or peace that is often unattainable or comes with tragic consequences. This restlessness is a core aspect of the human condition as depicted in these works, where the journey towards “home” — in whatever form it might take — is fraught with both external and internal conflict.

We think of Odysseus trapped on the Island of Calypso the “deine theos” where she offers him all the wonders of the gods but he just longs for home with his wife like with Holderlin’s poem “homecoming” and so the ironic theme that we are unsatisfied with the simple and familiar so we leave in search of wondrous but are never satisfied and so want home.

The narrative of Odysseus, particularly his time on the island of Calypso, indeed resonates with themes of restlessness, longing for home, and the human condition’s inherent dissatisfaction, which are also explored in Greek tragedies. Odysseus, offered immortality and endless pleasures by Calypso (referred to as “deine theos” or “uncanny goddess”), embodies the theme of “deinon” – the awe-inspiring and terrifying aspects of divine power. Despite these wonders, Odysseus’s heart longs for Ithaca, his wife Penelope, and his mortal life, highlighting the human yearning for home, for the familiar, and for identity tied to one’s origins and loved ones.

Odysseus’s experience can be seen as an allegory for human restlessness. The allure of the unknown or the divine (“deinon”) does not satisfy the deep-seated need for belonging and simplicity of “home” (the “parestios” or “being at home” concept). His journey reflects the human tendency to seek adventure or knowledge, only to find that true contentment might lie in what was left behind.  As I said last time, Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem “Homecoming” directly speaks to this theme, where the poet reflects on the joy and peace of returning home after being away, mirroring the Odyssey’s narrative. Hölderlin’s work often touches on the conflict between the divine and the human, the journey to find oneself or one’s place in the world, and the bittersweet nature of homecoming, which aligns with the themes in Greek tragedy and the epic of Odysseus.

The irony here is that humans often leave the simple and familiar in pursuit of the wondrous or the divine, only to discover that such pursuits do not necessarily bring satisfaction or peace. This theme is not just tragic but also deeply human; it’s about the eternal quest for meaning, identity, and belonging, where the journey itself, the longing, and the return are all part of the human narrative.

This theme of longing for home while being captivated by the “deinon” is reflected in tragedies where characters like Oedipus or Antigone are driven by forces beyond their control or understanding, leading them into a state of existential homelessness or restlessness until they confront their fates or return, in some manner, to their origins or true selves.  Thus, the story of Odysseus on Calypso’s island can be seen as an origin or at least a profound embodiment of these themes, which are then echoed in Greek tragedies and later in literature like Hölderlin’s poetry, where the journey, the divine, and the concept of home intersect in complex, often ironic ways.

In Hölderlin’s poem “Homecoming” (or “Heimkunft” in German), there is an underlying theme that suggests the value of distance or separation in gaining a deeper understanding or appreciation of one’s home or origin. Hölderlin does not explicitly state that one must go away to understand what home means, but the poem’s narrative and imagery suggest this interpretation.  Just as the philosopher must gain distance from life to see the forest despite the trees, the poet must lose home to appreciate it: absence makes the heart grow fonder.

The poem speaks of the poet returning to his homeland after being away, and through this journey, he reflects on the nature of home, belonging, and identity. The experience of being away appears to give him a perspective that enriches his understanding of what “home” truly signifies – not just as a physical place but as an emotional and cultural anchor. This can be inferred from lines where Hölderlin describes the joy and recognition of familiar landscapes, which might not have been as profoundly felt without the absence.

The narrative of returning home after absence underscores how absence can heighten the sense of what home represents.  The distance from home might allow for a clearer, more nuanced view of one’s roots, culture, and personal history.  Being in different environments might highlight aspects of home that one might take for granted when constantly present.

So while Hölderlin does not explicitly state that departure is necessary for understanding home, the poem’s structure and thematic elements imply that such an experience can indeed deepen one’s appreciation and understanding of home. This interpretation aligns with many literary and philosophical discussions about the value of travel, exile, or simply stepping back from one’s daily environment to gain perspective.

The notion of “acedia,” “lack of care” or “indifference,” is very old, and is constructed out of  ἀκηδία, “negligence”, ἀ- “lack of” -κηδία “care.”  We see it mentioned in Homer’s Iliad (books 14 line 427 and book 24 line ), and in Hesiod’s Theogony (line 453).  Peter Toohey points out that in ancient times it was associated with depression, which makes sense since if one is depressed that implies indifference, and indeed sometimes irritation, with one’s world. 

The paradigmatic case of care-less homeless wandering in misery for the Greeks was Bellerophon.  Bellerophon is said to have suffered from melancholia (Aristotle, Problemata 30. 1). The usual Greek idea of the soul is the notion of feeding and sating oneself on the luster of the world, figuratively “being-addicted,” unlike thinkers who are a step back from life, not sated by the everyday, but rather need Being.  This can be gleaned from the distinction Heraclitus indicates of the comportment of the Best (aristoi) contrasted with the masses who are like well fed cattle, eating a patch of grass, finishing, and then moving on to the next patch/distraction. 

Bellerophon wanted the glorious satiety of the Gods, but denied this, wandered in the desert in horrific self isolation.  In the Iliad Homer writes: 

But when even Bellerophon came to be hated of all the gods, then verily he wandered alone over the Aleian plain, devouring his own soul, and shunning the paths of men; (Iliad, 6. 200). 

We can basically see Bellerophon living as a listless wandering shade, even while he still lived.  The shade, ripped from the context of its life and enjoyments of its body, was basically just left over as eternal restlessness in the face of ultimate monotony.  Pindar contrasts the misery of the homeless wanderings of Bellerophon with the joyous dwelling of the gods: 

“Bellerophon, who wanted to go to the dwelling-places of heaven and the company of Zeus. A thing that is sweet beyond measure is awaited by a most bitter end.” Pindar, Isthmian Odes, vii.44.  

On the Plain of Aleion (“Wandering”) in Cilicia, Bellerophon (who had fallen into a thorn bush causing him to become blind) lived out his life in misery, “devouring his own soul,” until he died.   Similarly, Sophocles writes Ajax was a prisoner of his own destiny, unable to live sated by natural human boundaries. (Ajax 250).”  Ajax was mocked and rejected by people for his exceptionality.  Sophocles says of Ajax, devouring his lonely heart he sits (613).  People and gold lost their luster for Ajax, (397-99), and so became distanced from man and gods, what Aristotle called estatikos egeneto. 

Bellerophon’s heroic life led him to feel he was beyond ordinary things (Euripiders, 286, 1-2), though he thought becoming an outcast was tantamount to death.  This may have inspired Heraclitus’ reminding word that even at the simple hearth gods come to presence.  Euripides in Bellerophon 287 1-2, the chorus in Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus 1388-91, and Kierkegaard all say life can seem not worth living because the more we strive for the great, the more we become dissatisfied with the ordinary, and it is the human condition to always return to the ordinary.  Bellerophon speaks to a life of suffering, and an awareness of such suffering.  Bellerophon chose to avoid the paths of men and suffer to less of a degree in private.

By contrast, we have the passion of Achilles:

“The archetypal warrior in the European tradition is Achilles. He is a naturally ferocious man—a lover of discord, as Agamemnon correctly describes him—who longs above all else for glory on the battlefield. He believes he will attain immortal fame by being foremost in slaughtering enemies. While we are likely to see him as a psychopath, the Greeks saw him as something superhuman, the manifestation of a primal cosmological power. What distinguishes Achilles from other humans is the character of his eros, his love or drive.” See Gillespie (loc 3320)

What distinguishes Achilles from other humans is the character of his eros, his love or drive. Humans as they appear in the Iliad are pulled toward one of the three human goods: power, honor, or pleasure. The story of the Iliad focuses on Achilles’ monomaniacal pursuit of honor, which is contrasted to Agamemnon’s pursuit of power and Paris’ pursuit of sensual pleasure. The warrior, as seen through this lens, is possessed by the desire for honor and driven mad, overcome by rage, when it is denied him. Plutarch in Pyrrhus 13 talks of a nauseous boredom (alus nautiodes), as what Achilles felt when there was ease:

13. At this time, then, when Pyrrhus had been driven back into Epeirus and had given up Macedonia, Fortune put it into his power to enjoy what he had without molestation, to live in peace, and to reign over his own people. But he thought it tedious to the point of nausea if he were not inflicting mischief on others or suffering it at others’ hands, and like Achilles could not endure idleness, but ate his heart away.  Remaining there, and pined for war-cry and battle. (Plutarch Pyrrhus 13)

To be dead was a meaningless and pointless to and fro that is disconnected from the shimmering luster of life people nurse off of.  This is what Pindar meant by “shimmering gold.”  Heraclitus says the masses are like well fed cattle.  Achilles says of the afterlife:

“No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus! By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive— than rule down here over all the breathless dead.” (Odyssey, Book 11, lines 555–58)

Homer describes the shades as:

Ah me, my child, ill-fated above all men, in no wise does Persephone, the daughter of Zeus, deceive thee, but this is the appointed way with mortals when one dies. For the sinews no longer hold the flesh and the bones together, but the strong might of blazing fire destroys these, as soon as the life leaves the white bones, and the spirit, like a dream, flits away, and hovers to and fro. Odysseus’ mother Odyssey, book 11, 215)

We can only imagine how such a view of the afterlife would have cast a pall over Greek existence.  Analogously, I once knew a woman who became listless and suicidal because she thought she was going to hell because of having an abortion.  Imagine living as a Greek and knowing what your destiny as a mortal was!  Ehrman comments:

One of the overarching points made throughout the scenes that follow is that the afterlife is not life. It is death. Those who have departed life are joyless, bodiless shades, with no possibility of pleasure or vibrancy of any kind. Tiresias calls the underworld “this joyless kingdom of the dead” (Odyssey, Book 11, line 105). Achilles later says that it is “where the senseless, burnt-out wraiths of mortals make their home” (Odyssey, Book 11, line 540). It is the realm of the “breathless dead.” Shades have no bodies, no strength, no knowledge of anything happening in the world above. And—an important point—they are not immortal. The term “immortal” for Homer is synonymous with “divine.” Only gods are immortal. Deceased humans are dead, not alive. (Ehrman)

Given this, we can now begin to isolate a tragic interpretation of Greek life.  The point seems to be that Apollo is saying “Why should I do battle for the sake of mere mortals!’ exclaims the sun god, ‘mortals, who are as wretched as the leaves on the trees, flourishing at first, enjoying the fruits of the earth as youths, but then, no longer with their hearts in the goings on of life (akerioi), fade away into old age and monotonous death.”

Greek tragedy ironically echoes either implicitly or explicitly the admonition of Solon, “Never count a person happy, until dead,” with its twofold connotation: the happiness of human life cannot be judged until the entire span of that life has been lived, and death is to be preferred to the vicissitudes of life. Herodotus, like most Greek writers and artists, takes his philosophy from Homer. In the last book of the Iliad, Priam, the great king of Troy, comes alone as a humble suppliant to the Greek hero Achilles, in order to beg for the body of his son Hector, whom Achilles has killed. In the course of their interview, Achilles who has also suffered much because of the death of his beloved Patroclus, divulges his conclusions about human existence:

“No human action is without chilling grief. For thus the gods have spun out for wretched mortals the fate of living in distress, while they live without care. Two jars sit on the doorsill of Zeus, filled with gifts that he bestows, one jar of evils, the other of blessing. When Zeus who delights in the thunder takes from both and mixes the bad with the good, a human being at one time encounters evil, at another good. But the one to whom Zeus gives only troubles from the jar of sorrows, this one he makes an object of abuse, to be driven by cruel misery over the divine earth.” Iliad, 24

The once great Priam will soon lose everything and meet a horrifying end and Achilles himself is destined to die young. His fatalistic words about the uncertainty of human life are mirrored in the sympathetic humanism of Herodotus and echoed again and again by the Greek dramatists who delight in the interplay of god and fate in human life and the tragic depiction of the mighty fall of those who were once great.  All human happiness and misery depend on a frighteningly unpredictable gods describes the gods of Homer and Herodotus. Jacob Burckhardt understood this as the essential tragedy of the Greek polis, “the frightfulness, the horribleness, the atrociousness of the Greek Polis (P, 90).” Burckhardt, adopting the insight of his teacher Bockh structured his teaching of the Greeks around the ground that “the Hellenes were more unhappy than most people think (P, 90; also cf. BQP, 40).” Heidegger indicates a young Nietzsche attained an auditors transcript of this lecture and, as Heidegger says, “cherished the manuscript as his most precious treasure (90).”

Ennius (239-169 BCE) points back to his interpretation of Euripides play and writes “We are not home and not on military service.  We go here.  We go there.  When we’ve gone there we want to go away.  The mind wanders indecisively; we only live a sort of a life.”  They go here and there, but cannot settle or derive satisfaction from life because of a lack of things to do (praeterpropter vitam vivitur).  We can see the connection to the wandering shades. “Horror loci:” revulsion at where one is.

Lucretius in “On The Universe,” later imitated by Horace and Seneca, speaks of the anxious, bored lives of the Roman rich going here and there, pursued relentlessly by anxiety and boredom (3. 1060-76).  Bailey remarks boredom and restlessness were an aspect of human life near the end of the Republic and the beginning of the empire.

Importantly, Horace’s description of Bullatius’s boredom and restlessness as horror loci woes in Epistles I. II were countered by philosophy (verses  25-30), with the exercise of logic (ratio) and prudence (prudential) that brought about a calm mind (aequus animus), though Horace did not think Philosophy to be a cure for him, who in the city wanted the country, and in the country wanted the city.  In Epistles 1.8 Horace describes the lethargic illness of boredom as a trait of old age.  Restlessness being brought to repose with a calm mind seems to be what Heidegger sees as the ancient purpose the Greeks had for philosophy.

Nietzsche points out the Greeks really suffered their existence, and even the last words of Socrates to Crito offering a cock to Asclepius where Socrates calls the poison a cure for life, life being a disease.  In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche says: 

“Socrates wanted to die: not Athens, but he himself chose the hemlock; he forced Athens to sentence him. “Socrates is no physician,” he said softly to himself, “here death alone is the physician. Socrates himself has merely been sick a long time.” 

Xenephon suggested Socrates wanted to die to avoid the tragedies of old age.

A particulary instructive example of the ancient experience of boredom is Horace:  Horace’s boredom has him restlessly switch between town and country, turn against friends, and switch between philosophical standpoints from Cyrenaic hedonist, to indifferent stoic sage, to apathetic Epicurean, to unbending cynic, to accommodating Peripatetic. His positions are opportunistic and fickle, unable to remain with one set of beliefs.  Horace calls this a kind of boredom and restless desire for change insanity (insanire).  Horace has intellectual horror loci, just as he does in his regular life.

Similarly, we see Seneca’s “nausea,” seasickness, which means profound boredom:

26.  Some people suffer from a surfeit of doing and seeing the same things. Theirs is not contempt for life but boredom with it, a feeling we sink into when influenced by the sort of philosophy which makes us say, ‘How long the same old things? I shall wake up and go to sleep, I shall eat and be hungry, I shall be cold and hot. There’s no end to anything, but all things are in a fixed cycle, fleeing and pursuing each other. Night follows day and day night; summer passes into autumn, hard on autumn follows winter, and that in turn is checked by spring. All things pass on only to return. Nothing I do or see is new: sometimes one gets sick even of this.’ There are many who think that life is not harsh but superfluous. (Seneca ep. mor. 24. 26)

We see a similar thought about this eternal return of the same expressed in the Jewish tradition by Ecclesiastes: Ecclesiastes in the bible makes the point about the tedium and pointlessness of life because there is just a circular bad repetition  ad nauseam of “the same” with the consequence that there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:8-9), that life becomes inherently meaningless in the face of eternal recurrence: 

All things are wearisome;

    more than one can express;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

    or the ear filled with hearing.

9 What has been is what will be,

    and what has been done is what will be done;

    there is nothing new under the sun.

Seneca says the rich are especially prone to boredom.  In Epistle 24 Seneca says boredom can be such a problem that it leads to suicide.  Life is seen not as bitter but superfluous, and one is prone to the libido moriendi or death drive.

Nietzsche knew well the difference between living a tragic life of eternal return of the same where everything is experienced “as though” it had been experienced an infinite number of times, like a worn out recording of a favorite song, and a creative life of eternal return of the same difference where everything is joyous and new.  Nietzsche said in a letter to Overbeck that his creative energies being poured into creating his Third Untimely Meditation left him invulnerable to the agitated boring eternal return of cabin fever that was effecting the people around him (Nietzsche, 1975,: 11.3 382). 

Regarding restlessness, In De tranquillitate animi, Seneca addresses a joyous state of mind as peacefully oscillating between satisfaction and dissatisfaction with one’s possessions, between desire for public and private life, and between the high and low literary styles.  He calls this “a great, noble, and godlike thing; not to be shaken,” a phrase Seneca traces to Democritus.  This was euthymia, what for Cicero and Horace was aecuus animus or a calm and balanced mind.  Aristotle called this athanatizein: deathlessness/godliness.

Boredom was a subject which concerned the ancient Greeks, indeed, Socrates suffered the indignity of being criticized by some for repetition and monotony (Kuhn, 1976). The word ‘acedia’ was used at this time, which is closer to what we would describe as tedium. Plato defended his protagonist by asserting the need for consistency. He compared the constancy of the stars with man’s own erratic and disorderly thoughts, and believed that people should aspire to the regularity of the heavenly bodies (Healy, 1984). The early Christians also aspired to this same ideal, with St Thomas Aquinas writing of the soul entering a state of uniformity (Kuhn, 1976).

Regarding Aristotle and athanatizein, for many years now the interpretation of the Nicomachean Ethics has been beset with controversy concerning its penultimate chapters, where it clearly emerges that Aristotle endorses as the best life a career devoted as much as humanly possible to theoria or intellectual contemplation. When we reach the final act of this ethical drama, we have a veritable “divine intervention” in the form of an appeal to the energeia (activity) of divine theoria (contemplation), an activity analogized to that of our own nous (intellect, understanding, thinking faculty), whose proper employment will constitute complete, perfect (teleia) eudaimonia (happiness, well-being?) for us humans (1177b24-5). Furthermore, we are immediately informed, somewhat surprisingly, that such a life would be superior to the human level. For someone will live it not insofar as he is a human being, but insofar as he has some divine element in him (theion ti en hauto). And the activity of this divine element is as much superior to the activity in accord with the rest of virtue (ten allen areten) as this element is superior to the compound (tou sunthetou).  This is surprising that Aristotle who championed our social nature nonetheless considered Theoria the best life.

Hence, if understanding (ho nous) is something divine in comparison with a human being, so also will life in accord with understanding be divine in comparison with human life. We ought not to follow the makers of proverbs and ‘Think human, since you are human’, or ‘Think mortal, since you are mortal’. Rather, as far as we can (eph’ hoson endechetai), we ought to be godly (athanatizein), and go to all lengths to live a life in accord with our supreme element (zen kata to kratiston ton en auto); for, however much this element may lack in bulk, by much more it surpasses everything in power and value.  (1177b26-1178a2, tr. Irwin).  

When we do go to Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda 9, we are presented there with a picture of God’s thought as focused obsessively on Itself as a “sort of heavenly Narcissus” who finds nothing better to opine than Its own perfect Self, settling “into a posture of permanent self-admiration” (Norman, p. 63 [93]).  The godly relates to Being, not beings, like the thinker contemplates not gossip and rumor, but ethics and ontology.

To understand this, remember the ancient Greeks generally abhorred aging as it represented a decline from highly prized youth and vigor. Ambrosia feasting gods differed from mortals in that they were eternally in the bloom of youth.  However older warriors, elder philosophers and statesmen were typically well treated.  The youthfulness of youth, compared with the depressed, cynical retiree waiting to die, is in encountering the vibrant, which means being directed at themselves.  Why?  This was the godliness of the gods, forever young, the wonder years in perpetuity.  Aristotle speaks of the athanatizein of the thinker directed at the eternal of the world.

Euthymia (Greek: εὐθυμία, “gladness, good mood, serenity”, literally “good thumos”) is a term used by Democritus to refer to one of the root aspects of human life’s goal.  Diogenes Laërtius records Democritus’ position as “The chief good he asserts to be cheerfulness (euthymia); which, however, he does not consider the same as pleasure; as some people, who have misunderstood him, have fancied that he meant; but he understands by cheerfulness, a condition according to which the soul lives calmly and steadily, being disturbed by no fear, or superstition, or other passion.”  In Seneca’s essay on tranquility, he uses the Greek word euthymia, which he defines as “believing in yourself and trusting that you are on the right path, and not being in doubt by following the myriad footpaths of those wandering in every direction.”

Nietzsche picks up on the boredom issue in the Genealogy of Morals 2.24 and 3.14, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra where Kaufmann and Holingdale say the great nausea is a central concept.  Like Nietzsche’s caged bird in The Gay Science, simply through confinement, a battery hen will go through listlessness, then anger and self directed violence, finally repetitive and self destructive motor acts and eventually death.  

Foucault points out the description of Stagirius suffering an attack of boredom is startling. Stagirius’ symptoms were “twisted hands, rolling eyes, a distorted voice, tremors, senselessness, and an awful dream at night—a wild, muddy boar rushed violently to accost him.”  St. John’s description compares the attack suffered by Stagirius to those suffered by individuals living delicate in in the world: “Many, while they live in a debauched fashion, are taken by this plague. But after a little time they are freed from the illness, and regain perfect health and many, and have many children, and enjoy all the benefits of this  life” (PG 47. 425).  Foucault also notices that the trope of vacare continues to appear in the early monastic tradition.

In his treatment of subjectivity Foucault acknowledged his debt to Pierre Hadot who had demonstrated that the Stoics, among others, had insisted that philosophy was not a question of learning a set of abstract principles or even the exegesis of texts, but a therapeutic exercise that causes us to be more fully, and makes us better.  For Foucault this amounts to a transformation (epistrophē) which changes the life of those who go through it (Hadot 1987).  It is a process and as such takes time.  Indeed, a lifetime. Spiritual exercises amount to a regular daily programme that make possible a gradual transformation of the self.  Foucault makes the point that the retreat within oneself that constitutes epimeleia is not a ‘rest cure’ but implies a labour, a set of activities, including conversations with a ‘guide or director’, and reading (Foucault 1990b: 50-51).  While the former makes spiritual exercises a social practice, the latter recalls Evagrius’ description of the way akēdia impacts on the ascetic’s ability to sustain reading and the central place reading had within askēsis (Allouch 2014).

So, Akēdia needs to be understood in relation to care (kēdos) and specifically in relation to care for oneself.  Fundamentally, akēdia signifies a kind of carelessness with regard to the self.   Yet one of the essential meanings of akēdia in monastic literature in late antiquity is an indifference in regard to the care of the self—represented as a loathing of the place (horror loci) (Cass. inst. 10. 2) and consequent wandering from the monastic cell (e.g. Pall. h. Laus. XVI. 2; XXI. 1).  As well as being listed as one of the disordered thoughts (VG 36.2), in the Vita of Antony akēdia retains this sense of carelessness (VG 17.4; 19.1).  The impulse to leave the cell signifying a desire to be elsewhere (Apoph. Pat. Alph. Antony 1 = Syst. VII. 1; cf. Evag. Pr. 12); an inability, that is to say, to remain in the present moment.  As such, it was both an anticipation and mirror image of the more total abandonment of the practice spiritual exercises (askēsis).  This included neglecting attentiveness (prosochē) to one’s disordered and compulsive thoughts (logismoi) and dreams, an inability to concentrate or persevere with reading, and an abandonment of the practice of saying everything (parrhēsia) to one’s spiritual director.  This latter, possibly the most decisive, was significant because it indicated the way in which the subject articulated and enunciated himself in his being.  This dual characteristic of speech is indicative not only of free association but of an analysis itself.  Anxietas denotes a spectrum from minor or intermediate severity that could lead to severe depression, despair, and even suicide.  In the monastic period akēdia more commonly signified a pathological form of boredom at the milder end of this spectrum.  One that, nevertheless, was often accompanied by physical symptoms.

St. Thomas Aquinas writes about acedia in his Summa theologiae as “a sort of heavy sadness . . . that presses down on a man’s mind in such a way that no activity pleases him.” Evagrius of Pontus, a third-century Desert Father, writes that acedia is a kind of atonia or relaxation of the soul. St. Thomas tells us that the Noonday Devil wants to accomplish two things in us: first, sadness about spiritual good, and second, disgust with activity. All human action begins in the soul, which is where all our intentions and “will power” are derived. The enemy knows that if our souls can be broken, it will have far-reaching effects both spiritually and practically.

Like C.S. Lewis’ “Uncle Screwtape,” the Noonday Devil is an old, seasoned veteran of his dark art. In the Old Testament of the Bible, we are warned of the threat of acedia. Psalm 91, traditionally attributed to Moses as its composer, warns against “the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday” (Psalm 91:6).

But it was the desert monks of the early Church who really brought the spiritual threat of acedia into the limelight. Fourth-century Desert Father John Cassian, a contemporary of Evagrius, illustrates how acedia manifests in a monk’s cell:

He fancies that he will never be well while he stays in that place, unless he leaves his cell. . . . Then the fifth or sixth hour brings him such bodily weariness and longing for food that he seems to himself worn out and wearied. . . . Then besides this he looks about anxiously this way and that, and sighs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness, and makes him idle and useless for every spiritual work, so that he imagines that no cure for so terrible an attack can be found in anything except visiting some one of the brethren, or in the solace of sleep alone.

For such ascetics of the desert, midday was when the sun was most viciously beating down on them, their energy was waning, and their fasting stomachs were growling. It was well known among the monks that it was then that the merciless Noonday Devil would be most looking to strike. They understood that when they were at their weakest—when they were hungry, bored, tired, angry, frustrated, or whatever—they needed to be most ready to engage the enemy and defend themselves. When we are weak, we are easy targets. But when we are spiritually alive and empowered by divine grace, we are a force for any demon to reckon with. 

Boredom at everyday things, and in fact the height of everyday opinion, being wealthy, is outlined in Plato’s Symposium 173c where Apollodorus says the concerns of the rich are literally thinking and acting prattle, literally nothing:

“Anyway, whenever I talk myself on any philosophical subject or I listen to others talking, quite apart from thinking it is doing me good I enjoy it enormously. But when I listen to other kinds of discussion, especially from people like you, rich money-makers, I get bored on my own account and at the same time I feel sorry for you, my companions, because you think you are achieving something when you are achieving nothing.”

Heidegger pointed out Aristotle asked: 

Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament, and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile, as is said to have happened to Heracles among the heroes? (Problemata XXX.1 953a10-14) 

The Philosopher is not caught up in the everyday, like Thales falling in the ditch, but that distance from life, which brings melancholy, also grants perspective to see things other are too caught up in to notice.  And, as I said above, Heraclitus said the masses were like well fed cattle, the image being of a fat cow sating itself on a patch of grass, and when done, moving on to the next patch/distraction.  Heraclitus implied the average person should cultivate being content with the simple hearth, since they wouldn’t cultivate attunement to everlasting glory.

To reiterate, Heidegger says   

“Aristotle,  Plato’s disciple,  relates  at one place  (Nicomachean  Ethics, Z 7, 1141b 7ff.)  the basic conception determining the Greek  view on the  essence of the  thinker: ‘lt is said  they  (the  thinkers)  indeed know things that are excessive, and thus astounding, and thereby difficult, and hence in  general ‘demonic’-but also  useless,  for  they are  not seeking what is, according to straightforward popular opinion, good for man.” The Greeks, to whom we owe the essence and name of “philosophy” and of the  “philosopher,”  already knew quite  well  that thinkers  are not “close  to  life.”  But only  the  Greeks  concluded  from  this  lack  of closeness to life that the thinkers are then the most necessary-precisely in  view of the essential  misery of man. (Heidegger Parmenides 100).”

Gadamer in Heidegger ‘s Ways, explains this well in relation to the aei, “Heidegger made the ingenious observation that ‘always,’ aei, was not so much having to do with aetemitas [eternity], but must be thought along the lines of [what is at the time], of that which is present. This can be drawn from the usage of the language : Ho aei Basileuon, [the king at the time, not the eternal king].” (145) The masses are enamored with what is current, that is what “speaks to them,” such as gossip.  In ancient Greek mythology, the goddess associated with gossip and rumor is Pheme. Pheme was known as the personification of fame and rumor, spreading tales both true and false across the world. Her Roman counterpart is named Fama.

 A concept is supposedly what did not originate in time, and what will not pass away in time, has no future or past, but simply is, as though the concept is in a kind of extended now that never began and will never end.  Aristotle compares wisdom to a healthy individual: For instance, Circumspection (insight) is that which can restore a person to health. But what is even better is an individual that is already healthy, for he “is healthy without further ado, ie., he simply is what he is (PS, 1 17).” Wisdom is to be thought of in this way, it is the proper state of our spiritual being. Wisdom, as tarrying along with that which is everlasting, is considered by Aristotle to be the highest possibility of Dasein, and yet since man has all kinds of other needs and desires, he cannot perpetually exercise his highest possibility. Nonetheless, as wisdom is the pure onlooking upon that which never changes, then the looking itself bears no alteration, “the possibility of a pure tarrying, which has nothing of the unrest of seeking (Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 120).” For the Greek thinkers, according to the nature of their existence, it was the general unrest of life that was misery and so the opposite of it, the absence of unrest, was therefore the highest good. For the most part, the various comportments of man’s life (be them in concern of prudence, justice, etc.) imply a relation to others. Wisdom as the highest possibility of man, on the other hand, while it is often helpful to have others to discuss with, is entirely focused on the single individual because in the disclosing of beings no one can have your insights for you.  For the Greeks Philosophical Dasein, if it is maintained over the whole of one’s life by being understood as the proper one, is a kind of deathlessness, athanatizein, since the comportment that relates to and hence apprehends (the way in which the philosopher is-there with) the eternal, the unchanging, must itself be unchanging, must not stray but tarry with the unchanging, and hence in a sense is deathless (divine without cessation), since what is unchanging admits of no passing away, “[herein resides the peculiar tendency of the accommodation of the temporality of human Dasein to the eternity of the world … This is the extreme position to which the Greeks carried human Dasein.”(Heidegger Plato’s Sophist, 122).

The key distinction with the Greeks is between the forever youthful Gods and the mortals who go from the joy of youth to the listlessness of old age.  According to Philostratus the Elder, Hebe was youngest of the gods and responsible for keeping them eternally young, and thus was the most revered by them.  Her role of ensuring the eternal youth of the other gods is appropriate with her role of serving as cupbearer, as the word ambrosia has been linked to a possible Proto-Indo-European translation related to immortality, undying, and lifeforce.  For instance, in contrast, Xenophon said Socrates wanted to die so as to avoid the mental and emotional deterioration of old age.

Given this, Heraclitus identifies Being with the play of a child, referencing the absorption of a child in life, such as lost in a game of make believe with a box.  We all know a key difference between children and adults is that you can give a box to a child and they can become enraptured in it and make a game out of it.  This sparkle is missing from the old adult’s eye, but not the Thinker’s.  So, the name Hebe comes from the Greek word meaning “youth” or “prime of life”. Juventus likewise means “youth”, as can be seen in such derivatives as juvenile.

The idea that boredom and restlessness are simply a modern existentialist’s problem seems to completely misread the human condition.  In fact, in the 2nd century AD in one Roman official was memorialized with a public inscription for rescuing an entire town from boredom (the Latin taedia), though exactly how is lost to the ages. And the vast amount of ancient graffiti on Roman walls is a testament to the fact that teenagers in every era deface property because they have nothing else to do.

The prime of life as athanatizein or youthfulness of the thinker is contrasted with the condition of misery of the common man.  What is the philosopher as athanatizein?  The Greeks saw the death life of man in Hades as “forever,” but it was not a deathlessness or athanatizein in the sense of an “immortal” god.  So both gods and humans are immortal, but only immortals and thinkers are divine.  Aristotle points to an athanatizein gained through theoria as the highest human possibility.  We can see the nature of deathlessness contrasted with mortal in the character of dead half God Heracles who was somehow half subject to the being in Hades of a mortal, and half at the feast of the gods:  “Heracles— his ghost [eidōlon], I mean; the man himself delights in the grand feasts of the deathless gods on high, wed to Hebe. (Odyssey, Book 11, lines 90–93).”  The basic distinction is between humans and Gods.  The mortal-ness of the human does not consist in the cessation of their existence, since they live on forever, but rather when they are stripped of sensuous body and shimmering world that satiates them, what is left over is the fundamental monotony and restlessness as a shade. 

One researcher characterizes the ancients in the following way: 

“Imagine spending every day churning butter, or tending a field of crops, or weaving fabric — all by hand. Few people moved beyond their immediate surroundings; one historian estimates that 80% of medieval Europeans, for example, never traveled more than 20 miles from their homes.  Most people in the past did the same (often physically grueling) tasks day after day in the company of the same small group of people. Their options for entertainment were slim — most people could not read in these societies, and the same myths and stories were repeated over and over.”

To be attuned to the eternal overcomes restlessness in pure repose for the Greeks.  Heidegger points out that since Plato, anything that ‘is’ can be differentiated into two realms, the aistheton and the noeton, that which is apprehended by the senses and that which can be seen by nous, the mind’s eye. The noeton is that which truly is because it is not subject to the changeability of the things of the senses, and hence are constant. The particular house shows the essence, the essence presences through the particular, the essence being house as such, but only in a limited way, and hence is me on, not simply nothing, ouk on, but me on (hence Plato clarifies the ontological difference in the Sophist), deficient with respect to what truly is, the primary image, the paradeigma (cf Heidegger HHTI, 24)  The primary image does not come to be or pass away, but “is,” in contrast to the things of the senses.

Schematizing Being according to time as I talked about before where concepts neither comes to be or passes away, but “is,” needs to be thought in terms of what really lies behind the ontological difference with the Greeks.  It’s easy to see how something as “being-deficient-in-comparison” can come out of the ancient Greek culture because humans were seen in every way deficient when compared to the gods.  The goddess Beauty may presence “enargeis” through the beautiful woman, who is none the less still deficient in comparison to the full presence of the goddess, and the goddess presencing even to a less or deficient degree through the average looking woman.  Similarly, the exemplary beautiful mansion announces “Now this is a house,” while still only approximating the ideal, and the warn down shack doing so to much less of a degree. Within this we see the beginning of the shift from world to subject, since Homer say the gods don’t appear to everyone enargeis, making the point that Odysseus was experiencing the full presencing of the goddess in the beautiful woman, while those around him did not see her in that way.

Heidegger comments in his Nietzsche book that for the vehicle of presencing in Platonism 

“What is most longed for in eros, and therefore the  Idea that is brought into fundamental relation, is what at the same time appears and radiates most brilliantly.  The erasmiotaton, which at the same time is ekphanestaton, proves to be the idea tou kalou, the Idea of the beautiful, beauty (Heidegger, 1991, 167).”…  Thus, Plato calls the beautiful, kala/ekphanestaton, “that which, as most of all and most purely shining from itself, shows the visible form and thus is unhidden” (Heidegger, 1998c [PA], Vol. 1, p. 78; also at 1979 [Nl], p. 80). Referring to Plato’s Phaedrus, Heidegger says that beauty is “what is most radiant and sparkling in the sensuous realm, in a way that, as such brilliance, it lets Being scintillate at the same time” (Heidegger, 1979 [Nl], p. 197). 

For example, as I said, in a Greek sense, a woman might be perceived “as though” she was an avatar of Beauty itself, as though Beauty was presencing through her.  What Plato primarily has in mind is beauty of what is perceived by the mind’s eye, like the way Justice shines through language as avatar, personified in words, when truth is attained by being brought to word regarding Justice.  We do not invent the meaning of justice, but rather uncover or recollect what it always was and will be.  When the marriage laws were rewritten because they did violence to LGBTQ rights, we say this was done in accordance with the principle of justice that human life is lived in accordance with, and the revision process was the very definition of Justice, which is hardly to see directly (phusis kryptesthai philei), but is phenomenalized when transgressed.

Counterposed to the unhomely, to restlessness, dwelling is to be at peace, and Heidegger says “in what does the nature of dwelling consist? … The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothic wunian, like the old word bauen, mean to remain, to stay in place. But the Gothic wunian says more distinctly how this remaining is experienced. Wunian means: to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace (PLT, BDT, 148-9).” The Greeks called the parestios, the counter concept of apolis/deinon.  However, the unhomeliness of mortal man, as opposed to the divine, consists precisely in his restless lack of ability to remain at home, “The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell (Heidegger, PLT, BDT, 161).”

As I said above, given this, Heraclitus identifies Being with the play of a child.  We all know a key difference between children and adults is that you can give a box to a child and they can become enraptured in it and make a game out of it.  This sparkle is missing from the adult’s eye, but not the Thinker’s.  The formal structure of the Greek understanding of Being seems to be the “para.”  For instance with the piece of chalk materiality is always para, “co-present.”  The universal presences through the individua, Parousia.  Heidegger is able to connect Heraclitus’ fire with the lustrous radiance of the gold of Pindar, “[t]he hearth is the site of being-homely … Latin vesta is the Roman name for the goddess of the hearth fire … para: alongside – beside, or more precisely, in the sphere of the same presence; parestios, the one who is present within the sphere of protection and intimacy belonging to the homestead and who belongs to the radiance and warmth and glow of this fire (Heidegger’s HHTI, 106,). ” This is what Heidegger hears when he uses the term Presence for the Greeks.

From a modern point of view, this “para” is evidenced, for instance, when we look at boredom.  The boringness of the TV show is certainly experienced as “other,” as a characteristic of the show, even though it also isn’t since the next person need not experience the boringness of the same show.  It is a way the mind/body auto-affects itself.  Boredom is not part of the essence of the show, but “para” the show.  Similarly, Dreyfus says we have a sharp distinction between Heidegger and Searle, since, for instance, Heidegger would say the “equipmentality” of the hammer isn’t as Searle would say an attached “function predicate” to the hammer, but rather equipmentality both does and doesn’t formally belong to the hammer, since a rock can also be used as a hammer, but we don’t experience the rock “as” equipment.  

Heidegger thus makes a distinction between Self/Other Philosophy like Descartes and Husserl, and his Being-in-the world framework.  For instance, Heidegger says when we have a head or stomach ache, our physiological condition changes the way we experience beings, and so for instance the tv show I am watching when a headache comes on starts to presence in an irritating manner, and I just want to close my eyes and go to bed and be left alone.  Heidegger comments: 

“When our stomachs are ‘out of sorts’ they cast a pall over all things. What would otherwise seem indifferent to us suddenly becomes irritating and disturbing; what we usually take in stride now impedes us … [F]eeling is not something that runs its course in our inner lives! It is rather that basic nature of our Dasein by force of which and in advance with which we are already lifted beyond ourselves into beings as a whole, which in this or that way matters to us or does not matter to us. Mood is never merely a way of being determined in our inner being for ourselves. It is above all a way of being attuned, in this or that way of mood. Mood is precisely the basic way in which we are outside ourselves. But that is the way we are essentially and constantly (Heidegger Nietzsche vol 1, 99)

Heidegger says the thinkers in every essential epoch recognize their (the age’s) particular incarnation of boring Same, but are not a prisoner to it, do not have being-addicted as their principle.  To be a thinker is to stand apart from the masses and their being-addicted that has boredom as their principle, the thinker arriving because they have something joyous as their principle, such as Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same difference analyzed above, in contrast to the tragic eternal return of the masses:

“But because human beings now concern themselves, for various reasons, with the continually new and up-to-date, whatever exhausts itself in always and only being the same is completely boring to them.  It is precisely in order to ensure that this absolute (i.e., the boring same) will not be forgotten through the course of the history of a people that a thinker occasionally arrives.  Admittedly, this is perhaps not the sole reason, and certainly not the true reason, that the thinker arrives (Heidegger, Heraclitus 1943, 2018, 32-33).”

Heidegger writes that the most profound boredom consists in the fact that nothing concerns or oppresses us absolutely, , 

“[t]he deepest, essential need in Dasein is not that a particular actual need oppresses us, but that an essential oppressiveness refuses itself, that we scarcely apprehend and are scarcely able to apprehend this telling refusal of any oppressiveness as a whole.” (from Heidegger, FCM, 163-165)

Because since man is so essentially run through by this subtle boredom, a demand is made on man to be there,

 ”Dasein as such is demanded of man, that it is given to him – to be there. (From FCM, 163-5)

So, Heidegger distinguishes things (that which intimately concerns us) from objects, and says regarding things and love it is here we truly see a unity where the other is transformed and we find ourselves (auto affection), just as the other transforms me:

“The Roman word res designates that which concerns somebody, … that which is pertinent, which has a bearing … In Enghsh ‘thing’ has still preserved the full semantic power ofthe Roman word: ‘He knows his things,’ he understands the matters that have a bearing on him … The Roman word res denotes what pertains to man, concerns him and his interests in any way or manner. That which concerns man is what is real in res … Thus Meister Eckhart says, adopting an expression of Dionysius the Areopagite: love is of such a nature that it changes man into the things he loves (PLT, T, 175-6).”

In his Nietzsche book, Heidegger says in love (as in hate), we see a paradigmatic case of an object of concern being encountered as lovable or hated (though the next person need not and probably doesn’t experience my beloved or hated in this way), which correspondingly transforms who I am and how it is for me to be in the world (see Heidegger Nietzsche vol 1, 49). When someone/thing so concerns us so, either in love or hate, we say in English that she’s the ‘thing’ or it’s the thing, it/she is what matters to us in a pre-eminent sense, it gathers our existence together in the sense that our whole life obtains meaning from and revolves around it/her.  Just remember being in “puppy love!”

One other point is that Heidegger says Sophocles in the Antigone brings this Greek framework to its fullest expression, with the opposition between parestios [being at home in the warmth of the hearth fire] on one hand, and apolis/deinon [homelessness] on the other as encapsulating what the human condition meant for the tragic Greeks: Tragic in the sense that like Greek literary tragedy, human life begins with the joyous liveliness of youth, and proceeds as a down-going.

Heidegger says there is an interesting line of interpretation of the Greeks with Bockh, then developed by Burckhardt, and most fully explored with Nietzsche that the Greeks were more unhappy than most people realize (see Heidegger, Parmenides lecture course, 90; Basic Questions of Philosophy, 40)  The current situation is that the current age is a natural culmination of an Oak tree born out of the tragic Greek inception acorn: becoming further and further withdrawn from nearness to life.  

I would say that just as there is the joyous aspect of the “child at play” in Heraclitus, we can’t ignore the tragic element, such as in “Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking. Logic. Heraclitus’ Teaching of the Logos” where Heidegger points to “the dreadful non-essence of all beings (Heidegger, 2018: 11).”  We have the Greek  image of Odysseus stuck on the island of Calypso for seven years, the deine theos, pining for home.  She even offered Odysseus godhood!  So we have the image of the hero who should be sated in the presence of the goddess, none the less riddled by lack.  I think that’s a powerful image of the human condition.  It’s like Heraclitus being warmed by the simple hearth, and the idea that Odysseus went out questing but what he really wanted was at home.  This is reminiscent of Nietzsche before he discovered eternal recurrence when he said:

“Being Satisfied: That maturity of understanding is reached when one no longer goes to where the rarest roses of knowledge grow amidst the thorniest hedgerows, but is satisfied with the field and the meadow, in the understanding that life is too short for the rare and extraordinary (Nietzsche, Human all too Human, 399).”

What does this mean? Let us briefly RECAPITULATE Heidegger argues the polis I analyzed above is where things appear as they are, pelei. But the polis is also the home of the counter essence of the abode, polla ta deina … pelei, manifold is the uncanny (Antigone 332, cited at P, 90 by Heidegger).” Jacob Burckhardt understood this as the essential tragedy of the Greek polis, “the frightfulness, the horribleness, the atrociousness of the Greek Polis (P, 90).” Burckhardt, adopting the insight of his teacher Bockh structured his teaching of the Greeks around the ground that 

“the Hellenes were more unhappy than most people think (P, 90; also cf. BQP, 40).” 

Heidegger says A young Nietzsche attained an auditors transcript of this lecture and, as Heidegger says, “cherished the manuscript as his most precious treasure (90).”

Burckhardt, however, since he did not approach the Greeks in terms of the essential homelessness of man, was unable to understand why the Polis was understood as a place of disorder and disaster, since the polis is not so much an actual place as the historical abode of man. The polis as the abode did not simply bear within itself the horrific as the uncanny, as was said above, polla ta deina, but also the deinon of the human himself, the essential unhomeliness, restlessness of man. Bemasconi, in his analysis of deinon, fails to bring out this essential element when he says “Heidegger understands Sophocles’ word “to deinon’ in terms of the relation between know-how as the violence of human know-how and dike as the overpowering junction (Justice, 85).” Deinon does not so much concern this, but rather the essential restlessness, not-being-at-peace of man. McNeil is better here, prefacing an essay on the deinon with the following key passage from FCM, “Man is that inability to remain and is yet unable to leave his place (Scarcely, 169). Characterizing the deinon, McNeill says the following, “Heidegger’s translation of to deinon, ‘the decisive word,’ as das Unheimliche – intends this word to be understood in the sense of das Unheimische, that which is ‘unhomely,’ something ‘not at home’ that nevertheless belongs, in an everequivocal manner, to the worldly dwelling of human beings (Scarcely, 183).” In precise note, McNeill adds that for Heidegger “to deinon is “the fundamental word … of Greek tragedy in general, and thereby the fundamental word of Greek antiquity, (cited from Heidegger, Scarcely, 188n.47).” Heidegger comments, referring to another place in Sophocles, that “[s]uch is the rise and the fall of man in his historical abode of essence – hupsipolis – apolis – far exceeding abodes, homeless, as Sophocles calls man.”  Even the seeming escape of thoughtful inquiry is subject to this.  In the 1943 lecture course on Heraclitus, Heidegger talks about the inquiry into Being that the ancient Greeks delighted in now in modern times that causes boredom and annoyance because it seems like beating around the bush that doesn’t result in anything.   When Aristotle says that the life of theoria [contemplation], which exceeds phronesis [practical wisdom], is a kind of godly life, an athanatizein [to be immortal] (whereby athanatizein is formed like hellenizein [to be Greek]), that implies that in theoria we comport ourselves like immortals, to be godly. In theoria mortals reach up to the way of being of the gods, unlike poor Odysseus on the island of Calypso the deine theos, but could find no satiety in the radiant goddess.

 When a child is naughty, we put them in time-out.  When an adult breaks the law, we put them in time out.  As Leonard Cohen says, we sentence them to boredom.  Blaise Pascal, from his Pensees, or Thoughts—particularly the section on Diversion, admits, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”  Acedia tempts you to leave your station. It tempts you to sleep or disengage. It tempts you to fill your life with noise—whether that’s TV, or social media.  It’s the opposite of mindful fulfilling of your responsibility, come what may. It leads to restlessness and instability.

A 2014 article published in Science magazine presents findings from 11 studies, that subjects would rather administer mild electric shocks to themselves rather than sit alone in an empty room for just 15 minutes!  Think about the ways in which our consumption habits and daily practices imply that we all demand to be entertained, almost constantly. Aldous Huxley once wrote a short essay on acedia, and thinks of it as a quintessential modern vice:

 “Other epochs have witnessed disasters, have had to suffer disillusionment; but in no century have the disillusionments followed on one another’s heels with such unintermitted rapidity as in the twentieth, for the good reason that in no century has change been so rapid and so profound.  The mal du siècle [that means “world-weariness” or in French, literally, the sickness of the century] was an inevitable evil; indeed, we can claim with a certain pride that we have a right to our [or, acedia] accidie. With us it is not a sin or a disease of the hypochondrias; it is a state of mind which fate has forced upon us.”  

In many ways we are still stuck with boredom or ennui as the ultimate form of despair. To be alone with our thoughts and face to face with our selves is far too frightening.  Matthew Smith, a professor of literature at Azusa Pacific University, pointed out this spot-on expression of acedia by the French poet Charles Beaudelaire, a decadent poet of the 19th century post-Romantic period. Here’s Matt reading the final stanzas of “To the Reader” from Baudelaire’s volume, “The Flowers of Evil:”

In each man’s foul menagerie of sin — There’s one more damned than all. He never gambols, Nor crawls, nor roars, but, from the rest withdrawn, Gladly of this whole earth would make a shambles. And swallow up existence with a yawn… Boredom! He smokes his hookah, while he dreams.  Of gibbets, weeping tears he cannot smother. You know this dainty monster, too, it seems — Hypocrite reader! — You! — My twin! — My brother!

There is a depiction of a boredom that overcomes the soul and its purpose so completely—a vice “more damned than all”—that it would rather see the world in shambles than lift a finger. To “swallow up existence with a yawn…” The subversion is slow and quiet, a sleepy and yet total destruction. That’s modern indifference.  But overcoming it can be a key stage in personal development

The joyous life of the higher type of individual is what Nietzsche calls “Caesar with a soul of Christ – the overman (KGW VII 2:289).” It is a Christ-like Caesar, conquering not with might but rather love, not a seeking desire of eros, but a will to power transfiguring desire, a glass half-full approach to life. Not the Peace through victory of the Romans but peace through love. The key is whether one lives a life of love determined by eros or “lack,” like honor and glory seeking Achilles, esteeming beings because they seem beautiful/worthy, or whether to live a life of godless will to power agape where your “surplus” of love transfigure beings (widow, orphan, stranger and enemy in the gospel of Matthew) into becoming worthy – agape as amor fati and dancing in your chains.  A key to this is how Jesus will overcome the tedium of Ecclesiastes.

Ad nauseam / Ad Infinitum express the boringness of something that has repeated or that has continued to the point of nausea. We also see this in an argument from “repetition.” For example, Nietzsche writes that Zarathustra fasts for seven days and when he resumes speaking he mentions again the “nausea” that the thought of the Eternal Return occasioned.    It here is referring to something that has been done or repeated so often that it has become boringly annoying or tiresome.  Regarding the potential horror of this infinite, Nietzsche says of a once free bird that has become so agitated with cabin fever in the confines of its cage that it is banging its head:

“But times will come when you wilt feel that it is infinite, and that there is nothing more frightful/wonder-inspiring than infinity.  Oh, the poor bird that felt itself free, and now strikes against the walls of this cage!  Alas, if home sickness for the land should attack thee, as if there had been more freedom there, and there is no “land” any longer! (GS, 124)”  

Regarding this homelessness/homesickness for the land that has vanished for the bird, Heidegger says of Nietzsche’s position that Nietzsche talks about ‘this most uncanny of all guests’ (Nietzsche, The will to power, Outline. Werke, vol. XV, p. 141). It is called the ‘most uncanny’ [unheimlichste] because, as the unconditional will to will, it wills homelessness [Heimatlosigkeit] as such. This is why it is of no avail to show it the door, because it has long since been roaming invisibly inside the house (Heidegger, 1998, 292; also cf Heidegger, 1998, 257).  Heidegger says due to its instantiated nature, “[h]omelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world (Heidegger, 1998, 258).”  The ancients called this horror loci, revulsion at one’s place and state of being.   So, analogously, as an explanation of what Nietzsche’s once free, now caged bird was going through, we can consider that simply through confinement, a battery hen will go through listlessness, then anger and self directed violence, finally repetitive and self destructive motor acts and eventually death.   We see similar things from killer whales in captivity.  

Against the currently popular argument that eternal return for Nietzsche most fundamentally means infinite cosmological repetition of nature, either in fact or as a visualization, we can point to numerous historical analogies (Ecclesiastes, Stoics, Schopenhauer) that would suggest instead that it refers to existentia, the way beings appear:

(1)  Ecclesiastes in the bible makes the point about the tedium and pointlessness of life because there is just a circular bad repetition ad nauseam ad infinitum of “the same” with the consequence that there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:8-9), that life becomes inherently meaningless in the face of eternal recurrence.  Ecclesiastes says:

All things are wearisome;

    more than one can express;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

    or the ear filled with hearing.

9 What has been is what will be,

    and what has been done is what will be done;

    there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes’s answer for this problem is to find satiety in God, and as for the big idea of Ecclesiastes, Greidanus contends that the goal is to encourage readers to, “Fear God in order to turn a vain, empty life into a meaningful life which will enjoy God’s gifts” (22).”  But, Nietzsche posed a solution for a godless world.  Nietzsche said  “People to whom their daily life appears too empty and monotonous easily grow religious; this is comprehensible and excusable, only they have no right to demand religious sentiments from those whose daily life is not empty and monotonous ( HH: Part One, 115. To BE RELIGIOUS WITH ADVANTAGE).” For Nietzsche the higher types are distinguished from the lower types in terms of two different kinds of love/desire, because the higher types do not need to find value in the world, or in God like Ecclesiastes, “eros” of the lower types, but rather bestow a healthy meaning onto the world, godless “agape.” 

Much in Nietzsche seems to allude to Ecclesiastes, and so Nietzsche is appropriating and responding to Ecclesiastes.  In Ecclesiastes, we read “I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind” (Eccl 2:17) since “What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise?” And I said in my heart that this also is vanity” (Eccl 2:15) and “I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind” (Eccl 1:14).  Similarly, Nietzsche has Zarathustra say in section 3:

“What is the greatest thing that you can experience? It is the hour of your great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness turns to nausea and likewise your reason and your virtue.The hour in which you say: ‘What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth, and a pitiful contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself!’  The hour in which you say: ‘What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge like the lion its food? It is poverty and filth and a pitiful contentment!’  The hour in which you say: ‘What matters my virtue? It has not yet made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! That is all poverty and filth and a pitiful contentment!” (Z, 3)

It is only when we fully encounter the force of the eternal return of the same do we come to see the darkness of Nietzsche’s vision: a meaningless, Ecclesiastes’ world, but without God to fall back on for meaning, purpose and joy.  In face of such desolation, only the creative agapeic type can have a spirit of amor fati and joyfully dances in his chains. 

(2)   Are there other thinkers we can reference whose ideas seem to be historical analogies for Nietzsche’s eternal return?  Yes, we see another possible historical analogy to the idea interpreting life as this tragic repetition of the same (which is not guessing about cosmological repetition) with Seneca who says

26.  Some people suffer from a surfeit of doing and seeing the same things. Theirs is not contempt for life but boredom with it, a feeling we sink into when influenced by the sort of philosophy which makes us say, ‘How long the same old things? I shall wake up and go to sleep, I shall eat and be hungry, I shall be cold and hot. There’s no end to anything, but all things are in a fixed cycle, fleeing and pursuing each other. Night follows day and day night; summer passes into autumn, hard on autumn follows winter, and that in turn is checked by spring. All things pass on only to return. Nothing I do or see is new: sometimes one gets sick even of this.’ There are many who think that life is not harsh but superfluous. (Seneca ep. mor. 24. 26)

 In this Epistle 24, Seneca says boredom/agitation can be such a problem that it leads to suicide.  Life is seen not as bitter but superfluous, and one is prone to the libido moriendi or death drive.

Regarding this inherent restlessness of human life, Plutarch in Pyrrhus 13 talks of a nauseous boredom (alus nautiodes), like what eros driven Achilles felt when there was ease (no quests to conquer).  Nietzsche picks up on the boredom issue in the genealogy of morals 2.24 and 3.14, and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Kaufmann and Holingdale say the great nausea is a central concept. 

However, Nietzsche critically and successfully engages with historical arguments for temporal eternal recurrence, where we experience being “as though” we’ve experienced them countless times before like a worn out recording of a favorite song, arguing it isn’t inherently tragic because when it wipes value away from beings, the positive vanishes, but also the negative, and so leaves things neither inherently positive nor negative, and because of this completely open to interpretation.  It is precisely because of this that creative types can lead a joyous existence of will to power. The deciding factor is whether we have an approach to life of love as eros, or love as agape. 

For Nietzsche, the higher types are distinguished from the lower types in terms of two different kinds of love/desire, because the higher types do not need to find value in the world, such as in God, “eros,” like the lower types like Ecclesiastes, but rather bestow a healthy meaning onto the world, “agape.” For Nietzsche, godless agape allows for a glass half-full amor fati and dancing in your chains.  In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount Jesus redefines love saying “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love (agapēseis) your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love (agapāte) your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”  Nietzsche said, “‘I have never desecrated the holy name of love’ (1888, LN1 [286]),”  Eros as filling a “lack” nurses on the luster of its object, whereas agape transfigure its object to be loveable.

Nietzsche knew well the difference between living a tragic life of eternal return of the same where everything is experienced “as though” it had been experienced an infinite number of times, like a worn out recording of a favorite song, and a creative life of eternal return of the same difference where everything is joyous and new.  Nietzsche said in a particularly illustrative letter to Overbeck that his creative energies being poured into creating his Third Untimely Meditation left him invulnerable to the agitated boring eternal return as cabin fever that was affecting all the people around him at a rainy cottage.  Nietzsche’s insight was not merely to see through to the heart of the horror loci, but to see it was completely perspectival. (Nietzsche, 1975,: 11.3 382).  It is precisely in creatively transfiguring widow, orphan, stranger and enemy into being lovable and dedicating your life to serving them is the core of Jesus’ love/agape message as an answer to Ecclesiastes tragedy and tedium of Eternal Return nothing new under the sun.  It is not a life of being locked up in oneself but in loving service to an Other that is needed, be it service to the needy, or to the Muse, or whatever is born a life of creativity and affirmation, what Nietzsche called saying yes and Amen to all existence no matter how tragic it presences at first.  The successful lawyer can be a miserable alcoholic just as a prisoner can dance in her chains. Nietzsche says: “From the military school of life: that which does not kill me makes me stronger.”

In a life of active and creative transfiguring the Other: “Not ‘to know’ but to schematize, to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require WTP 515 (March-June 1888).” Heidegger gives the example of not simply “recognizing” or encountering or abstracting to the category of “living thing,” but imposing it, such as is negatively  phenomenalized when we hear a “living thing” in the forest, only to look down to see we “mis-took” rustling dead leaves in the wind at our feet to be a “living thing.”  In life we are in the business of imposing structure on the chaos, “taking as,” as is phenomenalized when we “mis-take:” When will to power fails to usefully stamp becoming with Being (the rustling leaf example), we explicitly see that the default human condition is living as will to power in the schematizing or bringing order to chaos, like a sculptor with his clay.  Similarly, the sexual and romantic qualities of something reflects the way we impose form, as is clear in the case of objectophilia with romantic and sexual attraction to objects such as towers and bridges.  Heidegger quotes Nietzsche that “To stamp Becoming with the character of Being – that is the supreme will to power” (WM 617, 1888).   Heidegger says “for Nietzsche art is the essential way in which beings are made to be beings … the creative, legislative, form-grounding aspect of art (Heidegger, 1991, 131).”  Nietzsche argues the true artist doesn’t imitate Nature but gives form to the chaos: “A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power–until they are reflections of his perfection. (TI, SKIRMISHES OF AN UNTIMELY MAN, 8-9).” 

(3)  Like the historical analogy with Ecclesiastes and The Stoics, Nietzsche seems to very much have Schopenhauer in mind with eternal tragic temporal repetition. Schopenhauer said in On the Sufferings of the World: 

“Boredom is a form of suffering unknown to brutes, at any rate in their natural state; it is only the very cleverest of them who show faint traces of it when they are domesticated; whereas in the case of man it has become a downright scourge. The crowd of miserable wretches whose one aim in life is to fill their purses but never to put anything into their heads, offers a singular instance of this torment of boredom. Their wealth becomes a punishment by delivering them up to misery of having nothing to do; for, to escape it, they will rush about in all directions, traveling here, there and everywhere. No sooner do they arrive in a place than they are anxious to know what amusements it affords; just as though they were beggars asking where they could receive a dole! Of a truth, need and boredom are the two poles of human life… [And in his essays on Pessimism Schopenhauer summarizes] “He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.”

 To which (3 above) Nietzsche responds to Schopenhauer regarding the performance from the point of view of the creative and artistic individual:

“56. Anyone like me, who has tried for a long time and with some enigmatic desire, to think pessimism through to its depths and to deliver it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and naivete with which it has finally presented itself to this century, namely in the form of the Schopenhauerian philosophy; anyone who has ever really looked with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye into and down at the most world-negating of all possible ways of thinking – beyond good and evil, and no longer, like Schopenhauer and the Buddha, under the spell and delusion of morality –; anyone who has done these things (and perhaps precisely by doing these things) will have inadvertently opened his eyes to the inverse ideal: to the ideal of the most high-spirited, vital, world-affirming individual, who has learned not just to accept and go along with what was and what is, but who wants it again just as it was and is through all eternity, insatiably shouting da capo not just to himself but to the whole play and performance, and not just to a performance, but rather, fundamentally, to the one who needs precisely this performance – and makes it necessary: because again and again he needs himself – and makes himself necessary. – – What? and that wouldn’t be –circulus vitiosus deus? (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

Eternal return wipes away meaningfulness from beings, and so this is tragic for the eros of the sick and weakly like Achilles, but an opportunity for creation for the transfiguring godless agape of the artistic and healthy.  Hence, Heidegger quotes Nietzsche twice: “To stamp becoming with Being, that is the highest form of will to power.”

Nihilism is a problem when we have an “eros/erotic” approach to beings like glory seeking Achilles (eg I love her because she is beautiful), Achilles who was devastated by the tedious, boring and meaninglessness in the Greek interpretation of the afterlife (Achilles needed his obstacles to be overcome in the name of glory) – but rather we need an approach akin to a godless kind of Christian transfiguring agape (eg I have a transfiguring spirit of loving, regardless of whether the other be widow, orphan, stranger, or enemy).  That higher type is what Nietzsche calls “Caesar with a soul of Christ – the overman (KGW VII 2:289).” It is a Christ-like Caesar, conquering not with might but rather love, a transfiguring, glass half-full approach to life.

Nietzsche went so far to say that even the gods struggle against boredom in vain, (TI, Chapter 48) and that the usual approach to life is to avoid boredom any way possible. (GS, First Book, 42. Work and Boredom)  A well known Science Fiction example of this is the Star Trek Voyager episode where the Q continuum Philosopher Quinn (a god-like being) wants to commit suicide because he has been devastated by the boredom of having been everything and done everything countless times.   This God not only died, but wanted to die (there is a similar theme in a play by Karel Čapek).  This TV episode may have been a response to Nietzsche’s call to depict the boredom of God after creation had been finished  (HH: The Wanderer and His Shadow, 56. INTELLECT AND BOREDOM).Heidegger comments regarding twofold eternal recurrence, “Everything is nought, indifferent, so that nothing is worthwhile – it is all alike.  And on the other side: Everything recurs, it depends on each moment, everything matters – it is all alike … The smallest gap, the rainbow bridge of the phrase it is all alike, conceals two things that are quite distinct: everything is indifferent and nothing is indifferent (Heidegger, 1991 vol 2, 182).”

On the other hand, Nietzsche comments that, far from being inherently crippling, the energy of Langeweile boredom can be understood as the greatest elixir in life against the tedious, or agitating, stretching out of time: “He who fortifies himself completely against boredom fortifies himself against himself too. He will never drink the most powerful elixir from his own innermost spring.   (HH: The Wanderer and His Shadow, 200. THE SOLITARY SPEAKS).”  Therefore, this shows the twofold tragic/joyous temporality of eternal recurrence is not an objective characteristic of Time as a thing in Nature, is not cosmological guesswork, but is completely perspectival as how we auto affect ourselves, and so interpreting it out of a place of creativity, strength and health, the surplus of energy is a blessing as auto-affecting oneself with eternal return of the same difference rather than just eternal return of the same.  Gilles Deleuze interpreted Nietzsche’s eternal return as a radical understanding of the nature of time. For him this is not a ‘flat circle’ or cyclical understanding of time, but a description of the empty form of future time. It is the ever-generated new time that allows us to continually act in new ways, that allows the creation of novelty. 

Nietzsche would argue that for those coming from a place of eros, sickness and weakness like Ecclesiastes relying on God for Joy, the stretching out of time in Langeweile boredom is experienced as a tragic curse, encountering beings “as though” they have been encountered numberless times before, and so augmenting depression, irritability and agitation:  This was Nietzsche’s Dwarf in Zarathustra: “‘Everything straight lies,’ murmured the dwarf disdainfully. ‘All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.’”

Heidegger and Fink cite Holderlin’s Hyperion’s Song of Fate in the part where Holderlin contrasts the lives of the gods who are forever in bloom with mortals who are wretched by comparison.

Radiant the gods’ mild breezes/Gently play on you/As the girl artist’s fingers/On holy strings. – Fateless the Heavenly breathe/Like an unweaned infant asleep;/Chastely preserved/In modest bud/For even their minds/Are in flower/And their blissful eyes/Eternally tranquil gaze / Eternally clear. – But we are fated/to find no foothold, no rest,/ And suffering mortals/ Dwindle and fall/ Headlong from one/ Hour to the next/ Hurled like water/From ledge to ledge/Downward for years to the vague abyss. (HS, 101)

Heidegger and Fink, commenting on the meaning of the passage, says the following,

“the gods wander without destiny, their spirit eternally in bloom, while humans lead a restless life and fall into the cataract of time and disappear.” (HS, 101)

Elsewhere, Heidegger characterizes this by saying

“[s]uch is the rise and the fall of man in his historical abode of essence – hupsipolis -apolis – far exceeding abodes, homeless, as Sophocles (Antigone) calls man (Parmenides lecture course 1943, 90).”  

Next time we will proceed forward with Holderlin and “Germania.”