ABSTRACT
Nietzsche’s commitment to the doctrine of becoming is expressed in many places in his writings, from his early lecture courses to his last notebook entries. He often uses expressions such as ‘eternal flow’ and ‘absolute flow’ to signal the concept he has in mind.1 An eternal flow is one that has neither a beginning nor an end but extends throughout infinite time, both in the past and the future. An absolute flow is one that allows no exception to the rule of constant change. It cannot contain within itself any pause of the sort that an enduring substance, however brief its duration, would imply. Nietzsche is willing to assert infinite divisibility, not just for time, but in a very general way. In his lectures on early Greek thought, he says: ‘Nature is just as infinite inwardly as outwardly: we now get as far as the cell and the parts of the cell: but there is no limit at which one could say that here is the last point inwards: becoming never ceases, into the infinitely small.’2 Ten years later, in the poetic ‘prelude’ to The Gay Science, he repeats the assertion: ‘Infinite is the smallest piece of the world!’3 The case of time is different in one respect for Nietzsche, since he is prepared to allow that it is infinitely great as well as infinitely divisible. Apart from that, he takes the world to be finite in all its features, and even asserts the finitude of space.4 In the case of time, he also asserts on several occasions that ‘time is infinitely divisible’.5 Finally, he refers to ‘the absolute momentariness of the will to power’.6
