Abstract

Dawn, noon, and dusk: this is the course of one day in Nietzschean optics.1 Beginning with daybreak, two paths will lead out of two caves: one will begin with the Platonist prisoner exiting his den of darkness, and the other will follow Zarathustra as he first descends into and then emerges from his cave atop the mountain. As the newly enlightened Platonist slave undertakes an “up-going,” arising up from the depths of his shadowy cave toward the sun, Zarathustra begins a “down-going.” Along the diverging paths of these two different travelers, there will be a pause at the moment when the sun is at the peak of its path along the arc of the sky. This still hour, when the sun is directly overhead, when light is shed on all things and all sides, is not, however, the absolute erasure of shadows. This is the noontide: the time of Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism. Interpreting this inversion through light and shadows will allow us to approach the different gestures of Nietzschean and Platonist optics. Finally, naturally, the path of this wandering will end with the descent of the sun, when the light goes away and leaves a cloud of darkness upon all things. It is then, while the shadows grow in relation to the sun’s descent, that Nietzsche’s “highest thought,” the thought of eternal recurrence, will occur to Zarathustra. Eternal recurrence, amongst other things, will convey not a clear and distinct truth, but the trust in shadows that embody the movement of nothingness. This twilight hour will then be the conclusion of this short study in Nietzschean optics. Upon reaching the end of this path, a new day will break, and this new day will no longer take the movement of the sun as the beacon of truth, but will, instead, trust in the movement of nothingness as its orienting gesture.