Holistic enchantment and eternal recurrence

This chapter argues that, for Nietzsche, the world is both disenchanted and enchanted. From a transcendental perspective (associated with Judeo-Christianity), the world is disenchanted; it is ‘the work of a suffering and tormented God’. Yet from an immanent perspective, the world is in fact enchanted — or potentially so, and the means by which Nietzsche proposes to re-enchant (or rediscover the primordial enchantment of) the world is the doctrine of eternal recurrence. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his animals proclaim Zarathustra to be ‘the teacher of the eternal recurrence’, and this passage has caught the attention of numerous commentators, including Heidegger and Deleuze. Another critic of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence is Ludwig Klages, himself deeply invested in the challenges of disenchantment and re-enchantment. Central to Klages’s philosophy is his doctrine of the ‘reality of images’ and his related notion of ‘elementary similarity’. Elementary similarity informs the kind of perception he associates with die Seele, that is, with the soul or the psyche, and which he regards as essentially symbolic. Can the concepts of identity, similarity, dissimilarity, and difference, Paul Bishop asks, help us to relate and coordinate the thought of Klages, Jung, and Deleuze — and not just in relation to Nietzsche?