Sometimes the most dangerous and
confusing word in the whole lexicon of philosophy is I. What the I
and the individual both mean was no small topic to contemplate for
the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's approach to
personal identity was influenced by the thought of his predecessor,
Arthur Schopenhauer. Drawing on the Kantian notion of space and time
as being properties that were only subjectively perceived by human
beings but not inherent features present in the universe itself,
Schopenhauer nullified the validity of the individual. Individuals
derive their individuality and difference from others in that the
progression of their lives takes place within a certain period of
time and covers a specific trajectory in space. Space and time are
the determinants of the unique biography of each person; a baby born
in the 14th century in a nomadic tribe of herdsmen and one
in the 19th century in a booming industrial metropolis can
share no common biography, no common life. The time and place of
their birth will set them upon dramatically different life paths.
(Even in the extreme case of unseparated conjoined twins, they will
be subjected to at least slightly different influences and their
lives will still differ)
Schopenhauer, in conceiving of a plane
of existence beyond space and time, sees that all these individuals
with different biographies are metaphysically unified and not after
all individual. In a domain free of human perceptions, the striving,
desiring internal self behind the actions of all these different
individuals is one and the same. However, for the denizens of the
temporal and the finite, this one “internal self” of the will
splits into an infinite number of separate wills, all scattered
across the reaches of space and time and leading different lives.
Schopenhauer's philosophy deals with
the question of how individuals can transcend the illusion of separation in the realm of semblance and perceive themselves as part
of the one and unified will that is metaphysically real. Nietzsche
adopts Schopenhauer's framework of the reality of oneness (the Dionysian principle) vs the
illusion of the self (the Apollonian principle1), but does not privilege the identity-destroying
domain of existence. Although in his earliest major work, The Birth
of Tragedy, he delves into how the Greek Dionysian rites allowed
individuals to lose their sense of self and accede to oneness via
trance-inducing rituals such as drinking, dancing, raw displays of
violence and unbridled sexual behavior, Nietzsche is more concerned
in grounding the individual and not in dissolving him. In a later
work, Human All Too Human, Nietzsche derides the metaphysical world
of oneness as inaccessible and incomprehensible.
And yet what is comprehensible of the
individual within the world of space and time is that he is subject
to the causality of external forces; even the internal life of
reflection and thought is nothing but the act of processing the
person's biography, social relations, and progression through life.
The internal self, conditioned by the external world, is always
referring to the forces that shaped him even within his mental space.
At no point can he withdraw from the impact of history; hence he is
just a conditioned self, with no transcendent personality or character that is transferable to any other point in time. This
interpretation destabilizes the I because it makes it seem like the
individual itself does not do or decide anything. History acts and
metes out various roles to individuals who merely act out the script.
Nietzsche, however, does not like the
idea of an individual who cannot have any relevance outside of his
own time and place; he prefers to confer an infinite status to the
individual. He accomplishes this in a way that reaches back to the
Schopenhauerean origins of his thought. Whereas Schopenhauer
conceived of the spacio-temporal domain as a mere world of appearance
where the one will was constantly reconfigured into different
individuals relating to each other in different ways, Nietzsche
decided that in this constant game of rearrangement, the metaphysical
domain of oneness would eventually return again and again to
producing the same states. It's like conceiving of the universe as a
single kaleidoscope infinitely rearranging its colors and coming back
to the same color arrangements over and over again. Or, to use an
alternate metaphor, you might imagine an mp3 player in shuffle mode.
It always has the same tracks that do not change, but offers to its
listener, who can only listen to one track at a time, an endless set
of playlists, with each of the playlists inescapably repeating after
a while.
In this way, an individual exists
infinitely, because his historical circumstances are bound to exactly
repeat again and again and so are his actions. So while the
individual is nothing but a product of his time, the places, the
people, the events that surrounded him, all of them and he as well
will recur in an infinite loop. (It's important to note that unlike
the metaphors of songs and colors which can be featured in various
combinations, each individual can only appear as part of a single
combination in a particular historical period and his existence
cannot occur outside of that context.)
This doctrine of eternal recurrence
means a person can look back on his life and not see his unique and
individual experiences forever vanish much
like decaying flesh. Instead, he may consider his destiny to be
forever enshrined into the annals of being, to be reincarnated anew
with every fresh spin of the wheel of time.
1. Apollo is used by Nietzsche to symbolize the individual because he is a god of intellectual pursuits and the sun. His intellectual interests foster self-awareness and self-reflection while his light metaphorically reveals the world of space and time, otherwise obscured by Dionysus the god of intoxication. The revelers devoted to the cult of Dionysus relinquish the intellectual perception of self, time, and space and abandon themselves to dark, blind, and unconscious passion. The reference to both gods was unique to Nietzsche and did not appear in Schopenhauer's work.
References:
Nabais, Nuno. “The Individual and
Individuality in Nietzsche.” A Companion to Nietzsche. Ed:
Pearson, Keith Ansell. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy. Oxford,
UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Note:
For these insights I am deeply indebted to the source above and can
only wholeheartedly recommend it for further reading.