(Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence — Preface, aph. 2)

Our intention here is neither to devalue religious beliefs nor to contradict scientific insights — as our Teacher might have wished. Rather, our aim is to present them as special cases of a new perspective on reality, a perspective that would bring together the best of both: the religious sense that all of us — stars, trees, stones, living beings — are parts of one and the same, for us only intuited, ontological Whole, about which we know nothing ontically and probably never will; and the scientific insight into the way it functions as the eternal return of the same.

In the first case, this would mean a syncretic, and in its deepest nature pantheistic, religion — not seeking God outside the Whole nor within its parts, but recognizing the Whole itself as divine. In the second case, it would imply a radically new approach in science, if not a new science altogether: one capable of renouncing the old onto-epistemological aspirations to answer the question of what the world is “in itself,” and instead calmly accepting the fact that it can only discover how the world functions — precisely as Eternal Recurrence/Return of the Same — thereby finally granting the only possible meaning to its knowledge.

“Immortal is the moment in which I begot the return. For the sake of that moment I endure the return.” (Nietzsche)