In the previous series I looked at Derrida’s critique of example thinking.  When we look at rhetoric and the use of examples, analogies etc., competing lenses are not “proven” with examples, exemplars and analogies but rather illustrated by them.  In this regard, examples or analogies may illustrate a conservative point of view and try to sneak in the post script that the liberal alternative is illegitimate.  This is why the same political event can be a striking illustration of both conservative and liberal perspectives even if the two perspectives are at odds.

Similarly, when last time I talked about a stance toward death being carpe diem on the left side of the spectrum and memento mori on the right side, but this doesn’t mean examples and analogies of carpe diem add weight against a memento mori perspective. They are just different lenses to interpret the phenomena.  (Compare Derrida, Sauf le nom, 76;84)  Similarly, when we give students debate topics such as school uniforms or abortion, it’s not that one side is inherently right and so the student hopes to be assigned the right side (since among other things it would be easier to argue).  A case can be built for the implementation of school uniforms without the case being true or false.  The whole legal profession is predicate on lawyers being able to argue opposing sides without plaintiff/defendant; prosecution/defense being an inherently easier side to argue.  It’s like a board game where no side is at an inherent disadvantage.  The example I gave previously was doing a translation of Paul’s letters which aims at transmitting Paul, but also sets a spectrum of how Paul can be read and how Paul ought not to be read.  For an extreme example, the translator may omit the passage in 1 Thessalonians that suggests Jesus was killed by the Jews as an interpolation, though many now build cases for including it.

Let’s take a related historical example.  New Testament historians like Bart Ehrman and Dale Allison see the apocalyptic prophet model as the best for understanding the historical Jesus as opposed to a host of other models like cynic sage model which focus on and emphasize different data.  Ehrman and Allison thus project a spectrum of apocalyptics on which we can place the historical Jesus in our own readings, and argue we ought not give primacy to the cynic sage or other models. 

There are degrees to which Jesus can be interpreted as an apocalyptic thinker from one pole as having minor apocalyptic tendencies to the other pole having apocalypticism as defining his mission and message.  Scholarly interpretations of the historical Jesus place him on a spectrum regarding apocalypticism—a worldview emphasizing an imminent divine intervention to end the current age of evil and usher in God’s kingdom. This debate stems from analyzing the New Testament sources (e.g., the Synoptic Gospels, Q source, Gospel of Thomas) and first-century Jewish apocalyptic traditions. At one pole, Jesus is seen as having only minor or metaphorical apocalyptic tendencies, with his core identity as a wisdom teacher or social reformer. At the other, apocalypticism is viewed as the defining framework of his mission and message, portraying him as an eschatological prophet announcing the kingdom’s imminent arrival. Below, I’ll outline the key positions, supported by major scholars, and explain the evidence and reasoning behind them.

Scholars disagree based on how they prioritize sources, stratify traditions (e.g., distinguishing early “authentic” sayings from later additions), and interpret apocalyptic language (literal end-times vs. symbolic social critique). Here’s a breakdown:

1. Minimal Apocalyptic Tendencies (Wisdom Sage Pole):
   • Description: Jesus is primarily a teacher of subversive wisdom, using parables, aphorisms, and riddles to challenge social norms, promote equality, and encourage ethical living in the present. Apocalyptic elements (e.g., references to the “Son of Man” or kingdom judgments) are seen as later accretions by early Christians, not central to his message. His teachings emphasize “realized eschatology”—the kingdom as an internal or social reality here and now, not a future cataclysm.
   • Key Scholars and Views:
     • Marcus Borg: Views Jesus as a “Wisdom Jesus,” a mystic and sage whose parables subvert conventional wisdom, focusing on compassion and non-violent resistance rather than end-times prophecy.  Borg argues apocalyptic language is metaphorical for cultural transformation.
     • John Dominic Crossan: Portrays Jesus as a Mediterranean Jewish peasant and cynic philosopher promoting social radicalism (e.g., rejecting purity laws, class divisions). He stratifies sources like Q, assigning wisdom sayings to the earliest layer (Q1) and apocalyptic ones to later additions (Q2), thus downplaying eschatology.

1. Burton Mack and the Jesus Seminar: Emphasize Jesus as a sapiential (wisdom-oriented) figure in a “wisdom school” tradition, drawing from the Gospel of Thomas and Q1, which lack strong apocalyptic themes. They argue the kingdom is about enlightenment and passive resistance, not divine intervention.

1. Stephen J. Patterson: Sees Jesus as an itinerant sage with a message of poverty as blessing and radical kindness, aligning with wisdom genres rather than prophetic doom.
2. Evidence and Reasoning: Relies on non-canonical texts like Thomas (no apocalyptic references) and early Q strata. Apocalyptic sayings are deemed inauthentic or symbolic, added post-resurrection to explain his death. This view often appeals to those seeking a “modern” Jesus detached from supernatural end-times.
3. Moderate Apocalyptic Tendencies:
   • Description: Jesus incorporates apocalyptic imagery but reinterprets it subversively—e.g., as “good news” of liberation rather than doom, or as a mix of wisdom and prophecy. The kingdom is partly present (through his actions) and partly future, with apocalyptic language blending literal expectation and social critique.
   • Key Scholars and Views:
     • N.T. Wright: Argues for a “consistent eschatology” where Jesus is an eschatological prophet, but apocalyptic means God’s climactic action within history (e.g., ending Israel’s exile), not the world’s literal end. Wisdom and apocalyptic reinforce each other: Jesus’ teachings recognize the kingdom’s arrival in his ministry.
     • Bultmann: Accepts Jesus as apocalyptic but demythologizes it—stripping supernatural elements to reveal existential truths about human decision-making in the present.

2. Evidence and Reasoning: Balances Synoptic apocalyptic passages (e.g., Mark 13) with wisdom sayings, seeing them as integrated. This middle ground avoids extremes by viewing apocalyptic as symbolic revolution.
3. Strong Apocalyptic Tendencies (Defining Mission Pole):
   • Description: Apocalypticism is the core lens: Jesus proclaims the kingdom’s imminent, divine arrival, with judgment on evil forces and a new age. His mission (healings, exorcisms, parables) announces this end-of-age event, expecting it within his generation.
   • Key Scholars and Views:
     • Albert Schweitzer: Pioneered the view of Jesus as a failed apocalyptic visionary whose ethics were “interim” (temporary rules before the end).

3. Bart D. Ehrman: Argues Jesus was thoroughly apocalyptic, predicting God’s intervention via the “Son of Man.” Earliest sources (Q, Mark) consistently show this, with later Gospels muting it (e.g., Luke, John).

3. E.P. Sanders: Sees Jesus as a Jewish restoration eschatologist, cohering with first-century apocalyptic Judaism (e.g., Dead Sea Scrolls).

3. John P. Meier: Portrays Jesus as an Elijah-like prophet announcing the kingdom’s end to the present world.

3. Evidence and Reasoning: Draws from earliest Synoptic traditions (e.g., Mark’s “little apocalypse,” baptism by John the Baptist—an apocalyptic figure). This is often called the academic consensus, as apocalypticism fits Jesus’ Jewish context.

Summary Table of Key Positions

Position on Spectrum	Key Characteristics	Representative Scholars	Primary Sources Emphasized
Minimal (Wisdom Sage)	Apocalyptic as later addition; focus on present ethics and social change	Borg, Crossan, Mack, Patterson, Jesus Seminar	Q1, Gospel of Thomas, parables as subversive wisdom
Moderate (Integrated)	Apocalyptic as symbolic or historical climax; blended with wisdom	Wright, Bultmann	Synoptics balanced; apocalyptic as revolutionary language
Strong (Apocalyptic Prophet)	Apocalyptic as central; imminent divine kingdom	Schweitzer, Ehrman, Sanders, Meier	Full Q, Mark, M/L specials; Jewish apocalyptic context

This spectrum reflects ongoing debates in historical Jesus research, influenced by methodology (e.g., criteria of authenticity) and biases (e.g., theological preferences).  No single view is universally accepted, but the apocalyptic prophet interpretation remains dominant among critical scholars, while wisdom-focused views gain traction in progressive circles. 

In general, Scholars involved in the third and next quests for the historical Jesus have constructed a variety of portraits and profiles for Jesus.  However, there is little scholarly agreement on the portraits, or the methods used in constructing them.  The portraits of Jesus that have been constructed in the quest for the historical Jesus have often differed from each other, and from the image portrayed in the gospel accounts.  These portraits include that of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, charismatic healer, Cynic philosopher, Jewish Messiah and prophet of social change.  It’s a question of the ear, as Heidegger might say, the way you select texts to emphasize and prioritize according to what “speaks to you,” “resonates with you.”  It’s like one of those hidden gestalt images the appearance of which varies depending on who looks at it, or putting together a jigsaw puzzle where you don’t know what the picture on the box looks like and it’s actually a trick puzzle that can be put together in more than one way.  We will look at puzzles more deeply below, such as Nietzsche on the riddle.

Heidegger addresses the ear and hearing (Hören) in several key works, often emphasizing hearing not as a mere sensory function but as a primordial mode of understanding, attunement to the world, and relation to Being. This contrasts with a purely physiological or representational view, where hearing reveals Dasein’s (the human condition’s) openness to meaning, language, and the call of conscience.

Heidegger reverses the common causal assumption about sensory organs. Rather than possessing ears that enable hearing, he argues that hearing is fundamental, and ears exist because of this capacity. In The Principle of Reason (1955–56), he states: “We do not hear because we have ears. We have ears because we hear.” He gives the example of hearing a living thing at your feet in the forest only to look down and see you “mis-took” rustling dead leaves in the wind “as” a living thing.

This underscores that hearing is an existential structure prior to anatomy—it’s how beings disclose themselves to us, unified with meaning rather than separate from it. Sound and sense are not divided; what we hear is not raw data but the world speaking in its intelligibility.

Hearing in Being and Time (1927): In his magnum opus, hearing is central to Dasein’s being-in-the-world, particularly in discourse (Rede) and the “call” of conscience (Ruf des Gewissens). Heidegger links hearing to comprehension. “Dasein hears because it understands.” It’s not passive reception but an attuned listening that reveals our thrownness into existence. We hear the “voice” of others, the world, or conscience not as acoustic signals but as meaningful appeals. For instance, even unintelligible speech is heard as words, not mere tones, showing hearing’s interpretive nature.  The Call of Conscience in Division II has the call is a silent summons to authenticity, heard in anxiety or attunement (Stimmung). This “hearing” pulls Dasein back from inauthentic “they-self” (das Man) to its ownmost potential. It’s acoustic in metaphor but ontological in essence—lending an ear to Being’s withdrawal.

Heidegger plays on the German “hören” (to hear) and “gehören” (to belong), suggesting hearing involves belonging to Being.  Critics note a “visual bias” in Being and Time that somewhat suppresses this auditory emphasis, prioritizing sight (e.g., “clearing” or “unconcealment”), but hearing shapes the text’s acoustic ontology, influencing concepts like mood and resonance.

In later works in postwar writings like On the Way to Language (1959) and The Origin of the Work of Art (1935–36), hearing evolves into listening to language’s essence and poetry’s call. Language “speaks” to us, and we must “lend an ear” to its originary saying (Sage). Philosophy corresponds (Entsprechen) to Being by hearing its voice, beyond propositional statements.  This is inconspicuous but becomes manifest when we see a plurality of interpretations where one speaks to us with no real reason for preferring our pet interpretation over competing ones as in the above historical Jesus and apocalyptic example.  This is tied to thinking as a harmonious attunement, where words resonate acoustically to hold meanings together.  To think is to wait on and listen to the muse when suddenly “it comes to me.” In “What is Metaphysics?” (1929), Heidegger explores hearing silence as perceiving “nothing”—not absence but the ground of beings. Silence is heard directly, revealing metaphysics’ scope beyond physics

English Language and Literature studies do the same thing but wouldn’t say a feminist reading is better than a psychoanalytic or Marxist reading, since they are just different ways of bringing out and emphasizing elements of the text.  The literary story is like a zoo of magical creatures living below the surface of a lake and when the interpreter blows the psychoanalytic horn, psychoanalytic creatures surface.  Derrida stresses the opaque-ities in language, which is over-shouted by the revelatory nature of ordinary language use but is shown in listening to a new language we haven’t begun to decode and so all we hear is noise.

When you first encounter a foreign language (e.g., hearing Mandarin if you’re an English speaker), the sounds, words, and grammar appear as a puzzle, unstructured signals without inherent meaning to you. This is akin to receiving encoded data (ciphertext) that seems random or noisy.

Learning/decoding the language involves mapping those signals back to concepts, ideas, or actions. You acquire vocabulary (deciphering words), grammar rules (understanding structure), and context (cultural nuances) to extract meaning. This is similar to cryptographic decoding, where you use a “key” (like dictionaries, immersion, or lessons) to reverse-engineer the original intent.

Neurolinguistics supports this—your brain builds neural pathways to “decode” phonemes and syntax, turning noise into comprehension. It’s not literal decoding (no fixed algorithm like in ciphers), but it’s a process of interpretation and pattern recognition, much like cracking a code in The Da Vinci Code puzzles.

Inventing a language (e.g., Tolkien’s Elvish or constructed languages like Esperanto) starts with raw ideas or meanings and transforms them into a systematic form: phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, and writing systems. This is encoding—packaging abstract thoughts into a transmittable format.  You define rules (e.g., how sounds represent concepts) and create symbols or structures to convey information efficiently and consistently. It’s like designing a cipher: you encode meanings into a new “code” that others can learn to decode.  Linguists or conlang creators encode for specific purposes, like simplicity (Esperanto) or aesthetics (Klingon). In computing, this mirrors creating programming languages, where human ideas are encoded into syntax that machines can execute.

One important characteristic of human life is language, and so Aristotle indicated the defining feature of humanity is logon zoon echon, the living thing with speech, exemplified in apophansis or “taking something ‘as’ something else,” eg., the dog “as” brown, the dog “as” it is in itself, etc.  I encounter the dog “as” not me, for instance.  This stresses the disclosing or uncovering nature of language.  This seems to be part of a larger question of the fantastic ability and disposition of humans to decode and encode.  And, even our mother tongue is mere noise to us when we first encounter it and so infants naturally go into a dynamic decoding and encoding process to learn it.  Children do the same learning mathematics as a language.  This is a fundamental feature of life and so other living things encode/decode.

Other living things encode and decode information in diverse ways, though these processes often differ in complexity and scope from human language. While Aristotle’s emphasis on logos highlights humanity’s unique capacity for symbolic, propositional speech—where we disclose or “uncover” aspects of the world through predication (e.g., encountering the dog “as” brown or “as” not-me)—many organisms engage in forms of communication that involve transmitting and interpreting signals. These can be seen as something like encoding (packaging information into a transmittable form) and decoding (interpreting that information to influence behavior or response). This isn’t always “language” in the human sense, with arbitrary symbols and grammar, but it demonstrates a fundamental ability to handle information dynamically, much like the opacity-to-clarity process I described in learning a new tongue or math.

Animals frequently use signals to convey information about threats, food, mating, or social status, which receivers then decode to adjust their actions. For instance, Honeybees perform a “waggle dance” to encode the direction, distance, and quality of food sources relative to the sun’s position; hive mates decode this through tactile and visual cues to locate the resource.

Vervet monkeys produce distinct alarm calls for different predators (e.g., eagles vs. leopards), encoding the type of danger; listeners decode these and respond appropriately, such as climbing trees or hiding in bushes.

Cetaceans like sperm whales and dolphins use complex click patterns and whistles that form a “phonetic alphabet,” encoding identity, social status, or contextual information; recent AI analyses have revealed these as structured systems capable of conveying nuanced meanings.  Dolphins, for example, may combine sounds in ways that suggest shared, context-specific meanings, adding layers of complexity.

These systems are often innate rather than learned like a child’s acquisition of grammar, but they can adapt—prairie dogs, for one, encode details about a predator’s size, color, and speed in their calls.  

AI is accelerating our understanding by decoding vast datasets of vocalizations, revealing overlaps with human language structures without implying equivalence.

Plants lack nervous systems or vocalizations, but they encode and decode information through chemical, electrical, and mechanical signals, often in response to environmental stresses or interactions. This can be opaque at first glance, akin to an unfamiliar language, but it’s a dynamic process.

When attacked by herbivores, plants like wild tobacco release volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that encode warnings; neighboring plants decode these chemicals, ramping up their own defenses (e.g., producing toxins) even without direct contact.  Roots communicate via mycorrhizal fungi networks (the “wood wide web”), encoding nutrient availability or threats through chemical exchanges; recipients decode and adjust growth or resource allocation.

Internally, plants use calcium ion waves to encode signals about light, drought, or wounds, which are decoded by cellular machinery to trigger responses like stomatal closure.

 AI models are now decoding plant RNA sequences and regulatory elements, treating them like a “language” to predict gene functions and behaviors.

This isn’t “speech,” but it’s a form of disclosure—uncovering environmental realities through encoded cues. In Microbes (e.g., Bacteria), even single-celled organisms exhibit encoding/decoding, often for collective behavior, blurring the line between individual and group “intelligence.”  Bacteria use quorum sensing: they encode population density by releasing autoinducer molecules; when concentrations reach a threshold, cells decode this to coordinate actions like forming biofilms, glowing (in bioluminescent species), or launching virulence factors in pathogens.

Some bacteria encode “hidden” genes outside their main genome, using reverse transcriptases to create transient DNA from RNA templates, which can be decoded for survival advantages like evading immune systems.

Genetic inversions allow bacteria to flip DNA segments within genes, recoding them to produce different proteins or alter functions—essentially rewriting their own instructions on the fly.

These microbial systems are highly efficient and adaptive, often responding to “noise” (low signals) by ramping up coordination, much like an infant tuning into language patterns.

In essence, encoding and decoding are widespread across life, from genetic information in DNA (universal to all organisms) to sophisticated signaling networks. Human language stands out for its recursive, creative potential—allowing us to “take something as something else” in abstract ways—but it builds on evolutionary precursors seen in other species. If we broaden “language” to include any system that discloses information, then yes, it’s not uniquely human. Ongoing AI-driven research is uncovering more parallels, potentially reshaping how we view intelligence and communication in the biosphere.

Could this be framed as the potential and disposition of living things to solve and create puzzles?  Yes, the encoding and decoding processes in living things can indeed be framed as an inherent potential and disposition to solve and create puzzles. This perspective aligns well with evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and systems theory, where life is seen as a continuous interplay of problem-solving and innovation in response to environmental challenges. At its core, encoding involves “creating puzzles” by packaging information into compact, transmittable forms (like signals or genetic sequences) that obscure their full meaning until interpreted. Decoding, conversely, is “solving puzzles” by unpacking those forms to reveal actionable insights, often requiring trial-and-error, adaptation, or collective effort. This isn’t just metaphorical—it’s a functional description of how organisms navigate uncertainty, much like humans do with riddles or codes, but scaled across biological complexity.

Consider this reframing in the context of the examples from our above discussion:

In Animals: Animals often create “puzzles” through signals that are intentionally ambiguous or context-dependent, requiring receivers to solve them based on prior knowledge or environmental cues. This disposition enhances survival by testing and refining social or predatory dynamics.  Honeybees’ waggle dance encodes a multi-variable puzzle (direction + distance + quality), which foragers must solve using solar orientation and flight calculations. It’s not rote; bees adjust dances to create new puzzles for changing conditions, and solvers integrate it with their own sensory data.

Vervet monkeys’ alarm calls create predator-specific puzzles that listeners decode by cross-referencing with visual scans or group behavior. Young monkeys learn this through exposure, much like children puzzling out language grammar—failing initially but building proficiency.

Dolphins and whales craft acoustic puzzles with combinatorial clicks, where the “solution” (e.g., identifying a kin or threat) emerges from pattern recognition. AI studies show these as proto-languages, suggesting a disposition for puzzle innovation that evolves culturally within pods.

This frames animal communication as a puzzle ecosystem: signals are puzzles created to convey just enough information without giving away too much (e.g., to avoid eavesdroppers like predators), and decoding solves them to unlock behaviors like evasion or cooperation.

In Plants: Plants exhibit a subtler but no less puzzle-oriented disposition, using biochemical “codes” that must be interpreted amid noise (e.g., varying soil conditions or weather). This is puzzle-creation for resilience, where the “puzzle” is the signal’s integration into a larger ecological web.  VOC emissions from stressed plants create airborne puzzles for neighbors, who must decode the chemical mix to infer the threat type (e.g., herbivore vs. drought) and respond with defenses. It’s dispositional: plants evolve to fine-tune these signals, making them more “puzzling” (specific) over generations.

Mycorrhizal networks turn resource sharing into a distributed puzzle, where fungi encode nutrient gradients that plants decode to allocate growth. If a plant “solves” it wrong (e.g., misinterpreting a signal), it risks inefficiency; successful decoding creates new puzzles for the network, like rerouting resources during famine.

Internal signaling (e.g., calcium waves) puzzles out environmental stressors, with cells decoding patterns to trigger gene expression. This is akin to solving a cryptogram: the wave’s frequency and amplitude hide the “message” until processed.

Here, the puzzle frame highlights life’s bias toward complexity—plants don’t just react; they create interdependent enigmas that foster symbiotic problem-solving.

In Microbes: Bacteria and other microbes arguably exemplify this at the most fundamental level, where genetic and chemical puzzles drive rapid evolution and collective intelligence. Their disposition is for high-stakes, fast-paced puzzle creation/solving in volatile environments.

Quorum sensing creates density-based puzzles: autoinducers build a “code” that only solves (triggers coordination) at critical thresholds. Microbes “create” these by varying molecule types, forcing communities to decode amid interference from antibiotics or competitors.

Genetic mechanisms like phase variation (randomly flipping DNA switches) generate self-created puzzles, where the organism solves its own code to express adaptive traits (e.g., evading immunity). This is dispositional creativity: bacteria evolve tools to puzzle themselves into diversity.

Horizontal gene transfer turns DNA snippets into shareable puzzles, decoded by recipients to gain new abilities (e.g., antibiotic resistance). It’s a living crossword—fragments must fit into the host genome correctly, or the solver perishes.

Across microbes, this puzzle lens reveals life as an optimizer: encoding creates variability (puzzles) to explore solution spaces, while decoding selects winners, echoing algorithmic search in computer science.

Tying back to Aristotle’s logon zoon echon, human language elevates this to abstract puzzle mastery—we create and solve not just for survival but for disclosure, philosophy, or art (e.g., metaphors as puzzles of “as-if” relations). Yet, this is an extension of life’s universal disposition: all organisms “puzzle” to uncover hidden affordances in their world, much like decoding an opaque language. Evolution itself is the grand puzzle-creator, disposing species toward solvers that innovate new enigmas.

This framing isn’t anthropomorphic; it’s supported by fields like biosemiotics, which views life as sign-processing systems. If we see puzzles as compressed problems requiring interpretation, then yes—living things are puzzle engines, dynamically encoding challenges and decoding paths forward. It underscores why AI, in decoding animal vocalizations or plant genomes, often treats them as cryptographic puzzles: life’s codes are meant to be cracked and recrafted.

Derrida is important because he moves beyond the language of dis-closing from Aristotle to Heidegger with the problem of decoding and encoding which restores the puzzle to thinking where every revelation seems to turn back on itself or point further challenges, never becoming fixed and present.  There are numerous examples across literature, philosophy, mathematics, and science of “perpetual puzzles”—concepts or systems where apparent solutions only reveal deeper layers of complexity, ensuring the quest remains ongoing.

These often embody the idea of infinity, self-reference, or inherent limitations in understanding, much like the encoding/decoding dynamics we’ve discussed, where resolving one puzzle spawns new ones.

In Literature, with Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel,” Borges’ 1941 short story portrays the universe as an infinite library of hexagonal rooms, each filled with books containing every possible combination of 25 orthographic symbols (22 letters, space, comma, and period). This results in a vast collection that includes all conceivable texts: every book ever written, all future histories, biographies of every person, and translations in every language—but overwhelmingly dominated by gibberish and near-meaningful distortions. Inhabitants search endlessly for meaningful volumes, forming cults like the Purifiers who destroy “nonsensical” books or seekers pursuing mythical indices or a “Man of the Book” who has comprehended it all. Every rare discovery of coherence (e.g., a valid sentence) only amplifies the mystery, as it hints at order amid chaos, yet the library’s totality ensures that for every truth found, infinite variations and errors exist, rendering ultimate comprehension elusive. The narrator clings to faith in a divine structure, but the pursuit itself is perpetual, with revelations breeding more enigmas about reality, knowledge, and existence. This mirrors a fractal-like puzzle: zoom in on one “solution,” and endless new challenges unfold.

In Mathematics and Logic, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, we see Kurt Gödel’s 1931 theorems demonstrate fundamental limits in formal systems, creating an eternal cascade of undecidability. The first theorem states that in any consistent, effectively generated formal system capable of expressing basic arithmetic (like Peano axioms), there will always be true statements that cannot be proven within that system—undecidable propositions that are true but unprovable. The second theorem adds that such a system cannot prove its own consistency; attempting to do so leads to inconsistency. Resolving this by expanding to a stronger system (e.g., adding new axioms) merely shifts the problem: the new system will have its own undecidables, requiring yet another layer, ad infinitum. This isn’t a flaw but an inherent property, often described as a “paradox at the heart of mathematics” where proving everything is impossible, and efforts to complete the system generate perpetual new puzzles about truth, provability, and the foundations of logic.

What does that mean?  Imagine you’re playing a super fun game called “Math World,” where the goal is to figure out all the true facts about numbers, like addition, multiplication, and puzzles with them. The game has a big rule book that tells you how to prove if something is true or false, step by step, without any mistakes. It’s like a recipe book for baking math truths—follow the instructions, and you get a correct answer.  Kurt Gödel was a smart thinker who looked at this game in 1931 and discovered something surprising: No matter how awesome and complete your rule book is (as long as it’s consistent, meaning it doesn’t say something is both true and false at the same time), there will always be some true facts about numbers that the rule book can’t prove. It’s like the rule book has blind spots—it knows a lot, but not everything.

Here’s a simple analogy: Picture a magic mirror that can answer yes or no to any question about itself, but only using its own reflections (rules). Gödel found a way to ask the mirror: “Are there questions about yourself that you can’t answer correctly?” If the mirror says “no” (meaning it can answer everything), but then it turns out there’s a tricky question it can’t handle, it’s wrong. If it says “yes,” then it admits it has limits. Gödel showed that in math’s mirror, there are always these tricky, true questions it can’t answer—like a sentence that says, “This sentence can’t be proven true by the rule book.” If the rule book could prove it, it’d be lying (a contradiction). So it must be true, but unprovable! Boom—blind spot.

He also showed a second big idea: The rule book can’t even prove that it’s totally mistake-free (consistent). It’s like the rule book saying, “Trust me, I never mess up,” but you can’t use the book itself to check if that’s true— you’d need a bigger book, and then that one has the same problem.  This creates an “eternal cascade” like a never-ending waterfall: You might try to fix it by making a bigger, better rule book, but the new one will have its own unprovable truths and can’t prove its own trustworthiness. It’s why math is an endless adventure—always more puzzles popping up, even when you think you’ve solved them all!

In modern philosophy since Kant the antinomy of space was resurrected with the learning of the big bang which made the Universe finite, which makes sense because an infinite universe is unthinkable.  The problem arises that if we think of the universe as a giant finite container, it is also unthinkable because a container can only be thought of by thinking something outside of it, and then something outside of that, on to infinity. 

It’s like a mathematical Russian doll: open one, and another unprovable core awaits.  In Philosophy and Cognitive Science: The Hard Problem of Consciousness coined by David Chalmers in 1995, refers to the challenge of explaining why physical brain processes (e.g., neurons firing, synaptic connections) give rise to subjective experience—or “what it’s like” to see red, feel pain, or have thoughts—rather than just functional behaviors without inner qualia. While “easy problems” like perception, attention, or reportability can be addressed mechanistically (e.g., via neuroscience), the hard problem persists: even complete mappings of brain functions leave unanswered why these yield phenomenal awareness instead of “zombie-like” automation. Attempts to solve it—through dualism, panpsychism, or physicalist reductions—often reveal deeper issues, such as the “explanatory gap” between objective mechanisms and subjective feels, or epistemic dilemmas about verifying others’ consciousness. This creates an endless puzzle, as progress in one area (e.g., correlating neural states with experiences) exposes new layers, like the limits of science itself or the need for paradigm shifts, without ever bridging the gap fully.

Some argue it’s a chimera born of conflicting intuitions (e.g., one neural network favoring mechanistic views, another empathetic/subjective ones), perpetuating debate without resolution.

Reality is often framed as a jigsaw without a complete picture, where science solves pieces (e.g., Big Bang evidence or life’s origins) but uncovers more mysteries, like quantum gravity or the universe’s ultimate fate. Limits in knowledge—echoing Gödel—ensure perpetual unfolding, as each theory’s validation reveals gaps demanding new frameworks.

In philosophy, puzzles like Meno’s Paradox of Inquiry question how we gain knowledge of the unknown, leading to dynamic cycles where learning one thing exposes further unknowns, resisting closure.

These examples illustrate life’s disposition toward perpetual puzzles, where “solving” is provisional, always birthing new challenges in an infinite game of disclosure.  Heidegger explicitly interprets Heraclitus’ Fragment 52 to mean that the “destiny of being” (Geschick des Seins) is a child playing draughts.  He argues that Being “plays” because it is “without a why”. Just as a child plays for the sake of the game itself rather than for a secondary purpose, Being grounds all things without itself having a ground.  Heidegger connects this play to the concept of the “abyss” (Abgrund), suggesting that Being’s play is what passes reason and ground to humans.  This connects to our previous discussion of Khora and Angelus Silesius with the notion that the rose is without a why: It blooms because it blooms, in contrast to Leibniz’s principle that “’To Be’ is another way of saying ’standing in relation to a ground’.”

We’ve been talking about decoding and encoding, in the sense of solving and making puzzles.  This is reflected here in Heraclitus on Being as the child playing draughts, as all games are puzzles, solving the game.  For example, we say the hockey team failed to “solve” the opposing goalie if they get shut out in a game. Draughts was an exemplary case of a puzzle solving game, like modern chess or checkers.  Regarding Heidegger and the Geschick of Being translating Heraclitus here, in everyday German, “Geschick” mentioned above carries multiple meanings, including being a proficient gamer, having “skill,” “aptitude,” or “dexterity” (as in being geschickt, or clever/handy).  It also relates to fate or destiny as in Holderlin’s Hyperion’s song of Destiny/Fate where humans are fated to go from the blissful absorption of youth to the listless monotony of old age, or on the contrary willing the destiny of being of eternally youthful gods even in old age as thinkers (Aristotle’s athanatizein) enjoying their puzzles.  Philosophy was a form of entertainment in Socrates’ time.

The ancient game of petteia (Heraclitus’ draughts) was a game of pure skill and strategy that required solving complex puzzles posed by the opponent, much like chess. The game involved intricate planning to trap the opponent’s pieces.  In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche echoes its spirit in aphorism 94: “Maturity in a man means having rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play.”  Plato mentions that the game involved long training to achieve skill, indicating a high level of strategic complexity and the need for foresight.  The core objective was to surround and capture enemy pieces by flanking them on two sides (custodial capture), or to maneuver the opponent into a position where they had no legal moves (stalemate). This is the essence of a tactical “puzzle” set by the opposing player.  Unlike modern checkers, captures were not mandatory in the classical rules of petteia, allowing players to voluntarily place a piece between two enemies without harm. This adds a layer of strategic depth, as a player could set a trap that the opponent could choose to avoid, forcing the player to adapt their plan.  The strategic nature of the game was well recognized. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates’ opponents are compared to “bad Petteia players” who are finally cornered and made unable to move by clever ones, highlighting the game’s use as a metaphor for tactical thinking and intellectual challenges.  The game was a game of pure skill, likely played without dice, which meant that the outcome relied entirely on the players’ ability to analyze the board, plan sequences of moves, and solve the tactical problems presented by their opponent.

Nietzsche says the two basic principles of life are will to power and eternal return.  By “life” he doesn’t mean just the realm of the biological, but like when we say “she is caught up in life” or by contrast “the philosopher is not close to life.”  Let’s consider the energy of boredom which is a striving to encounter puzzles driven by the roadblock that there is nothing new under the sun.

In thinking human nature as history, Toohey describes the Greeks initially didn’t have a word for boredom that maps onto ours, and so expressed it outwardly and metaphorically.

Aristophanes in the Archarnians has one character say: “I grown, I yawn, I stretch, I fart, I don’t know what to do.  I write, I pull at my hair, I figure things out as I look to the country, longing for peace.  (30-32).” Toohey points out:

He does not name that he is bored, but describes the symptoms.  Similarly, Euripides’ Medea describes men becoming fed up or bored, had enough of their families, and then acting unfairly (244-46), but again, boredom as an emotion is not named.

Apollodorus in Plato’s Symposium 173c says nothing gives him more pleasure than discussing philosophy, but listening to the idle conversations of the rich is boring because they prattle on about nothing and do nothing.  This shows us a clear view of how the thinkers looked down on the highest values of regular people (wealth), and agrees with Heraclitus’ point that the masses are like well fed cattle.

Pindar said too lengthy an exposition might lead to boredom, but again the symptoms are named, not boredom.  By contrast, Plutarch matter of factly talks about the boredom of soldiers due to apraxia, a lexical obvious term apparently missing from earlier Greek times.

Iliad 24. 403 and Euripides Iphigeneia in Aulis 804-8 seem to both demand a word for boredom.  The Greek for the condition of the soldiers in the Iliad passage suggests they were not merely bored, but vexed and disgusted at having to wait. 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.

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).”  Nietzsche in a letter to Overbeck his joyous writing in a rainy cottage while is companions suffered terrible cabin fever – our withdrawal symptoms without our distractions.  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.’”

The puzzle to be overcome by beings is eternal return.  Nietzsche connects eternal return with the puzzle:  In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), Nietzsche includes a chapter titled “Of the Vision and the Riddle,” where Zarathustra describes a dream-like vision involving a dwarf, a gateway symbolizing moments in time, and a shepherd who bites off the head of a serpent that has crawled into his throat. This riddle is often interpreted as an allegory for the doctrine of eternal recurrence, challenging the reader to confront the heaviest burdens of existence.  The chapter ends with the transfigured shepherd laughing triumphantly, emphasizing overcoming nihilism.

Derrida would say all writing is a kind of encoding which is exemplary in the way Derrida and Heidegger write in that it’s not obvious at all what they are arguing even if you are a native French or German speaker. Reading them then is a kind of decoding using strategies like keeping in mind concepts that have been introduced but not clarified as Heidegger for example introduces concepts but does not clarify them for hundreds of pages or even in different books, not to mention a reader needs to learn the history of philosophy to even begin to “translate (so to speak)” Heidegger or Derrida into something cognitively manageable such as for teaching purposes.

Derrida would likely endorse the idea that all writing is a form of encoding—though he’d complicate it further by emphasizing that it’s never a straightforward transmission of meaning, but a play of traces, differences, and deferrals (what he calls différance). This aligns perfectly with the encoding/decoding analogy we’ve been exploring, where philosophical texts like those of Derrida and Heidegger aren’t just “noisy” signals to outsiders but deliberately layered systems that demand active, iterative decoding.

Derrida’s Perspective: For Derrida, writing (écriture) isn’t a neutral vessel for ideas; it’s an encoding that inherently destabilizes presence and fixed meaning. In works like Of Grammatology (1967), he argues that all language is “writing” in a broad sense—marked by absence, repetition, and supplementation. The “code” here isn’t a simple cipher but a web of signifiers where meaning is perpetually deferred (differed and delayed). Even a native French speaker might struggle with Derrida because his prose encodes concepts through neologisms (e.g., différance, which plays on “difference” and “deferral” but isn’t fully definable), puns, and intertextual references that point elsewhere. It’s exemplary of his deconstruction: the text encodes oppositions (speech/writing, presence/absence) only to undermine them, making any “message” undecidable. So, yes, all writing encodes, but Derrida’s encodes in a way that reveals encoding’s instability—there’s no original “plaintext” to recover fully.

Heidegger takes this to another level with his phenomenological ontology, where writing encodes the unfolding of Being (Sein) through language that resists quick comprehension. In Being and Time (1927) or later works like Contributions to Philosophy (1936–1938, published posthumously), he introduces terms like Dasein (being-there), Geworfenheit (thrownness), or Ereignis (event/appropriation) early on but lets their meanings accrue hermeneutically—through repetition, etymological digs into Greek or Old German roots, and cross-references across his corpus. This isn’t accidental obscurity; it’s an encoding strategy to mirror the hiddenness of Being itself. As I noted, clarification might come hundreds of pages later (or in another book, like shifting from early to later Heidegger), forcing the reader to hold concepts in suspension. Native German speakers aren’t immune because Heidegger bends language poetically, creating a “code” that demands dwelling in the text rather than extracting propositions.

In both cases, their writing exemplifies encoding as a process that embeds historical, linguistic, and conceptual strata, making it “non-obvious” not despite but because of the reader’s fluency. It’s like a cryptex from The Da Vinci Code—multi-layered, with tumblers that only align through persistent effort.

Reading them is indeed a decoding exercise, but one that’s recursive and contextual, akin to cracking a polyalphabetic cipher without a full key. Our strategies nail it:

• Tracking Deferred Concepts: Heidegger’s method requires a kind of mental buffering—holding undefined terms while the text builds their network. For instance, Dasein starts as a placeholder but decodes through sections on care (Sorge), authenticity, and time. Derrida does this with trace or supplement, where meaning emerges from what the text excludes or supplements elsewhere.
• Historical-Philosophical “Translation”: To make it cognitively manageable (e.g., for teaching), you need a decoder ring of philosophy’s history. Heidegger assumes familiarity with Aristotle, Kant, or Nietzsche; Derrida riffs on Saussure, Freud, and Heidegger himself. Without this, the text remains “noise.” Strategies include:
  • Intertextual Mapping: Cross-reference with precursors (e.g., Plato’s Phaedrus for Derrida’s speech/writing binary) or commentaries (e.g., Gayatri Spivak’s preface to Of Grammatology).
  • Hermeneutic Circling: Read iteratively—start with overviews (secondary sources like Hubert Dreyfus on Heidegger), then dive in, revisiting as concepts clarify.
  • Deconstructive Reading for Derrida: Look for binary oppositions and how the text subverts them, decoding the “margins” (footnotes, asides) where meaning hides.
  • Etymological and Linguistic Tools: For Heidegger, trace word roots (e.g., aletheia as unconcealment); for Derrida, attend to multilingual puns (French-English-German interplay).

This decoding isn’t linear; it’s more like machine learning a language model—training on patterns until coherence emerges.

CONCLUSION

Nietzsche said to stamp becoming with Being was the highest form of will to power.  The mansion may appear as houseness incarnate, houseness being merely present in the average house, and deficient in the delapidated shack, though the next person might find the mansion gawdy and the shack quaint, a logic of mixed opposites.  The essential nature of life is will to power, and the existential principle eternal return. 

As a kind of dealing with puzzles, we have phenomenology.  Heidegger’s interpretation of phenomenology: “Aletheia (un-hidden)” with the alpha privative = disclosing from hiddenness.  Heraclius say: “physis kryptesthai philei” (Being tends toward concealment)

Hegel, in his inaugural address, Heidelberg, 1816, says “The Being of the universe, at first hidden and concealed, has no power which can offer resistance to the search for knowledge; it has to lay itself open before the seeker — to set before his eyes and give for his enjoyment, its riches and its depths.” Heidegger said: “Both scientific and prescientific comportments are a knowing in the sense of uncovering what is previously concealed, of revealing what was previously covered up, of disclosing what so far was closed off.”

In order to understand, Heidegger says, one must see phenomenologically. He thus invites us to the first exercise of phenomenological “kindergarten.” To tear apart [zer-reissen] means: to tear into two parts, to separate: to make two out of one. If a sock is torn, then the sock is no longer present-at-hand—but note: precisely not as a sock. In fact, when I have it on my foot, I see the “intact” sock precisely not as a sock. On the contrary, if it is torn, then THE sock appears with more force through the “sock torn into pieces.” In other words, what is lacking in the torn sock is the UNITY of the sock. However, this lack is paradoxically the most positive, for this Unity in being-torn is present [gegenwärtig] as a lost unity.” (Heidegger, Martin. Four Seminars p. 11)  “Twice the audience laughed over the “torn sock” saying. At first Heidegger answered pedantically, “I do not know why you are laughing. You must learn to endure the scope of a sentence such as the one I have cited.” (Heidegger, Martin. Four Seminars  p. 100).

Life is in the puzzle business, like Heraclitus’ child absorbed in a skillful game of draughts.  Plato notes that when an aporia (literally a block in the path) is encountered, we experience wonder (thaumazein, the birthplace of Philosophy) and get to the business of circumventing it.  For example, when a growing root encounters a stone, it doesn’t stop but works to go around it. All life is driven by will to power which is a positive surplus of energy willing to overcome puzzles/challenges.  Without Batman, the Joker has no purpose, no cause, and vice versa.  Postmodernism notes 2 kinds of desire: desire as lack (eros, typified by glory seeking Achilles who was wrecked with boredom when there was nothing to do) and desire as surplus (agape transfiguring enemy to be more important than self – Jesus).  We strive to overcome because life appears as though we’ve seen it countless times before. Given this background, I’ll look at Derrida’s short book Aporias next time.