Eternal Recurrence and The Cay Science 227Nietzsche tried out different formulations. He underlined, crossed
out, inserted several exclamation points and question marks in the mid-
dle of sentences, stopped and started up again, deleted some words and
abbreviated others. There were abrupt switches between distractedness
and decisiveness. He passionately railed at passion for its obfuscation.
He carried on an emotional tirade against emotions for their misinter-
pretation of reality.
With strong feeling, he went into raptures describing lack of feeling
as a condition that brings us closer to being. Feelings are worthless; they
are nothing but an "oversight of existence" (9,468). Surely it ought to be
possible to correct this oversight? What had happened to the phenom-
enologist of Daybreak, who wanted to direct attention to things and the
wodd and initiate an altogether different type of festivity that would
engage all of our senses and contribute to the epiphany of a world that
triumphs over the deadening force of reduction? How is this cold "fes-
tivity" of the transition "from this wodd into the 'dead world' " to pro-
ceed? Perhaps the answer lies in man's venture into the dimension in
which everything is "countable and measurable" (9,468). The only
things that would count are things that could be counted. The measure
of all things is measurement "Once," Nietzsche wrote, "the incalcula-
ble world (of the spirits and of the spirit) had dignity; it inspired more
fear. We, however, see eternal power elsewhere altogether" (9,468f.).
Nietzsche embarked on several physiological excurses in which intel-
lectual movements and emotional stimuli are portrayed as symptoms of
fundamental bodily processes. All of this is merely hinted at, since at this
point he was evidendy concerned only with conveying the living and
sentient as close as possible to the zone of the dead and mechanical,
those devoid of spirit Nietzsche happily engaged in expunging the
mind from the field of being. He ultimately derived a formula for this
procedure: "My task is the dehumanization of nature and then the nat-
uralization of humanity once it has attained the pure concept of
'nature' " (9,525).
This sentence was penned after Nietzsche's great moment of inspira-