(Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence — Preface, aph. 5)

Another question is this: how is it possible that such a thought — one so distant from today’s “social reality,” from the “noise of everyday life” — could even occur to someone? How could anyone seriously contemplate it in this age, which we might rightfully call the media age, or the technological age — or perhaps the media-technological one — an age marked by a flood of half-beliefs, half-truths, and half-information (or post-truths) of every kind; by the emptiness of a consumerist and exhibitionist way of life; by the omnipresence of daily politicking and criticism; and by the general commodification of cultural values — and still believe that such a thought could interest anyone at all? Indeed, it is quite another question how to awaken in any free spirit of this time even the slightest interest in it — how to persuade them to take it in earnest. These are questions to which the author of this book has no answer.

For that reason, it may also seem to him that he is condemned to the same kind of ignorance to which Nietzsche himself was once condemned. Perhaps this book will be read only among the ruins of this world — a world whose downfall, without doubt, has already been scheduled. When it will occur — that is hard to predict… That is why it is being written within the author of these lines, in the stillness of his inner time, which is, in its own peculiar way — timeless. As for the author, this book could have been written two thousand years ago, or two thousand years from now; in both a practical and spiritual sense, it has nothing to do with this time.

For that reason, dear reader, it may strike you as a kind of speculative science-fiction essay — a piece sui generis — something that might momentarily amuse you between two business meetings or during a corporate retreat at some spa resort… After a few pages, you will return to your usual corporate routines, managing human and other resources within some serious “business entity,” striving to keep it within the bounds of its “sacred profitability.” Perhaps those few pages you stumbled upon in the wilderness of the internet you will recount, laughing, to a friend or a colleague, saying: “Imagine — that everything returns! That’s impossible! How could anyone ever come up with such a thought!” — and then move on to tracking the next rise or fall of stock prices.

Of course, the author of these lines can hardly hold that against you. It is quite possible that the sheer abundance of technical possibilities with which this age overflows diverts your attention from approaching this book in the way it asks to be approached. It is also possible that all these astonishing promises of artificial intelligence and algorithms, the chatter about uploading one’s mind to a machine or about “eternal life within this life,” draw you away from it. And it may well be that what turns you from the ideas written in this book is your faith in yourself — in your “self” — a faith fortified by the “indisputable fact” that you exist in this world, backed by your best counsellor: common sense. But even there, the author can do nothing… he cannot persuade you otherwise.

Many will therefore simply pass over this book; for in this age of general secularisation and egoisation of society, there truly is something that prevents you from taking it more deeply and seriously. Be that as it may, it is not for the author of these lines to ponder what influence this book might ultimately have — or fail to have. That is the essence of every thinker: his only duty is to let his spirit speak — and nothing more.

The most spiritual human beings, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness toward themselves and others, in experiment.”
(Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §44)