I begin the essay by distinguishing sensory apprehension, intellectual apprehension, and critical-intellectual apprehension as its basic framework, first examining the expressions of the image of the world as a whole (or the world as a whole) – expressions that do not properly belong to philosophy. What they stand for, however – namely the world of representations and the world of concepts – is essentially connected with philosophy. We cannot think the world as a whole as such, yet Nietzsche, through his critical philosophy, shows that the expression the world as a whole can be articulated by philosophical thought. He identified this connection in his idea of the eternal recurrence of the same, which he arrived at through a critical, distanced stance toward the world of sensory apprehension as well as toward the conceptual world of discursive reasoning – without rejecting logical thinking. By this idea, Nietzsche demonstrates that it is possible to think the sphere of a priori dialectical ideas, something Kant denied. \r\nOn the basis of the difference among three horizons of the world as a whole – thus of the formation of three forms of apprehension – I attempt to formulate a hypothesis drawn from Nietzsche’s pathos of distance, suggesting that these three horizons are not one single horizon extended successively. Their mutual relation cannot be interpreted as the logical derivation of one from another; rather, it is an art of transfiguration from one into an entirely different, mutually incommensurable horizon of viewing the world as a whole. I locate the difference among them in the breadth or distance of their mutually non-comparable perspectives, from which I always view and think the world as a whole differently. \r\nI take the most extreme distance or perspective on the world as a whole to be the perspective of the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same, which enables distance (not negation) even from the horizon of a world grounded in the idea of time’s movement into an ever-unfinished future, ergo a world of infinite openness.\r\nNietzsche also differentiated the world into a quantitative and a qualitative world, thereby showing that we perceive a quantitative world with senses, yet interpret it through concepts in a way that follows the trajectory of our intellectual apprehension, which is at the same time a value apprehension. This mode of differentiation (not opposition) also enabled Nietzsche to distinguish between the object-domain of the exact sciences and the object-domain of philosophy.

Keywords: sensory apprehension; intellectual apprehension; critical-intellectual apprehension; eternal recurrence of the same