Eternal Recurrence and The Cay Science 237would even more frequendy go astray and commit "errors" (3,382; GS§
11) than is now the case if the much older "group of instincts" failed to
act as a "regulator." We should not overestimate the power of con-
sciousness and overlook the fact that it is still in the process of devel-
opment and growth. For the time being, consciousness is not fully
prepared to "incorporate" the enormous reality and its cyclical flow,
which is devoid of any purpose, substance, or meaning. Nietzsche was
taking up the notion of incorporation once again here, as he had in 1881
in a series of extended notebook entries. What does "incorporation"
mean? We know, for example, that we live on a planet that races through
outer space around the sun. We also know that we owe all of life to the
sun. It will one day burn out, and mankind as a whole will come to an
end even if a recurring cosmic age performs the entire theater of life
once again. All of this is knowledge in our heads, but it is not incorpo-
rated. We see the sun go up as we always have and fail to notice that we
are living on a shifting foundation. We do not absorb the end and the
new beginnings into our sense of life. We construct an imaginary hori-
zon of time around ourselves, which is not the actual one, but it allows
us to remain convinced of our own importance. Although we may have
a Copernican worldview—and in our era an Einsteinian one—when it
comes to incorporation, we are still Ptolemaists. Nietzsche wrote that
we need to understand "that as of now only our errors have been incor-
porated into us and that all of our consciousness is based on errors!"
(3,383; GS § 11).
Assuming that the dynamics of the growth of consciousness entail
both organic and cultural development, Nietzsche imagined what would
happen if expanding cerebral knowledge actually took over and trans-
formed one's entire body and soul and full range of emotions—in other
words, if this ominous incorporation really took place. Might it not sig-
nal the destruction of the life of the mind and the demise of man under
the burden of consciousness? What if the creature of consciousness
turned out to be the drifter of evolution? And what if consciousness
were an excrescence that never should have been?