Nietzsche’s Life Sentence
By Lawrence J. Hatab
Reviewed by Horst Hutter
Hatab's new book on Nietzsche is a brilliant treatment of this seminal thinker's key idea of the eternal recurrence of the same. It is the fruit of a long engagement with the philosophy of Nietzsche, not merely in a propositional manner, but also in the form of an existential commitment. It argues that Nietzsche's texts call for a mimetic enactment of the images conveyed; textual artifices call for a performative reception. Nietzsche's language is a poetic-mythological structure of concepts and images that aims to dance, … "off the page into the reader's life." It is hence insufficient, although not completely wrong, to read Nietzsche's books as merely conveying "doctrines." Nietzsche practiced philosophy as a mode of action, a radically agonistic, interpretative, addressive practice. It does not indulge the fantasy of achieving a fixed warrant for a foundational governance of culture by providing propositions that impartially examine philosophical "problems". Philosophy for Nietzsche was more than the professional of "doctrines" on such as, for example, truth, the good, knowledge and time, albeit in an imaginative and provocative manner.
Hatab suggests that, given Nietzsche's lived, personal engagement with philosophy, Ecce Homo may be his most philosophical book. In addition, Hatab not only preaches about
Nietzsche's existential engagements with his ideas, but he also practices himself philosophy as a way of life. He admits that the idea of
eternal recurrence has not only been a conceptual formula for Nietzsche's life sentence, but also has animated his own quest for meanings in his
own existential commitments. He avows a long meditative practice of the thought of eternal recurrence, thus integrating it as a challenge in his own mode of life.
Despite his focus on a non-propositional approach to the study of Nietzsche, Hatab nonetheless fulfills all the requirements of a purely doctrinal discussion of interpretations of Nietzsche. He exhaustively and succinctly reviews the standard interpretations of eternal recurrence, both those that see it as an internally contradictory notion, and those that see sense in it as an ontological, cosmological or temporal thesis. Most of these approaches miss the essential connection of eternal recurrence with life-affirmation and life-enhancement. This idea thus becomes a means for a global affirmation of all conditions of life, including those that run counter to one's own interests. Even nihilism and Christian world denial are welcomed as life-enhancing denials of traditional constructs, which enable a transition to new revaluations.
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