Eternal Recurrence and The Cay Science 239ply vanished? Did the will to knowledge manage at the last moment to
break free of the "dehumanization of nature" (9,525)? If that were the
case, the dualism between life and knowledge would be surmounted,
and the life-affirming impulse for knowledge would have triumphed
over the life-denying affects that obviously exist and that can also
accompany the will to knowledge. Even in his state of euphoria,
Nietzsche remained clearheaded. He explained that even when we are
experiencing happiness and ecstasy, we ought to remain conscientious
"interpreters" of ourselves. The "founders of religions" might be lack-
ing in "honesty," but he was determined to be a "person who thirsts for
reason" and hence to "scrutinize as scrupulously as in a scientific exper-
iment" (3,551; GS § 319). And what emerged from this sort of analysis?
Nietzsche recognized the essential fortuity of feelings. Knowledge,
for example, is dependent on coincidental circumstances of the weather
and its influence on physiological and other dispositions. In a letter of
January 20, 1883, when Nietzsche reflected back on The Gay Science, he
declared that this work was "only an effusive way of celebrating the fact
that there had been a c/ear sky above for an entire month" (B 6,318). It
may have been dictated in part by the weather, but other sorts of physi-
ological circumstances were also potentially significant, since an instinc-
tual basis is always involved. There is an infinite variety of instinctual
bases that provide our insights with motives, energy, direction, and
atmospheric tone. They give rise to both fundamental and secondary
feelings and facilitate, inhibit, or prevent incorporation.
If the instinctual basis of the will remains at hand in knowledge in
this way, will and truth can never be separated. And thus the potential
conflict between life and knowledge would be a mere drama on the level
of instinctual behavior itself. In the notebooks of 1881, Nietzsche
wrote: "Here too we discover a night and a day as a condition of life for
us: The desire for knowledge and the desire for desultory wandering are
the ebb and flow. If one of them assumes complete control, it spells
man's demise" (9,504).
This remark does not state unequivocally whether the urge to know