(Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence — Preface, aph. 8)

Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests? (Kaufmann & Hollingdale, The Will to Power, Book I §1)

Since we have already touched upon nihilism — “the uncanniest of all guests” standing before our door, as our Teacher once described it — we cannot but mention it as yet another, perhaps even the main reason for writing this book. That unwelcome guest has long since entered our house. Whether we admit it or not, we live in an age of the most intense and most manifest nihilism, an age in which we have uprooted almost everything we once believed in. The tree of meaning, which we had once cultivated and tended with care, we have finally cut down ourselves. Around it now grows only the weed of nihilism — individuals turned inward to their own gain and pleasure, within the frightening “unbearable lightness of being.”

Yet such a life can only temporarily protect man from the all-encompassing meaninglessness that has settled over his existence after the death of God — a death that took place within himself. Let us recall that it was our Teacher who first drew attention to this decisive event. Everything that unfolds today on the world stage — political, economic, and social — is but the consequence of a centuries-long struggle within Western civilization between religion and the Enlightenment for the right to truth. In the end, that very Truth became an abyss to both contenders: it cast them into the chasm of nihilism. Their passion for truth — religion’s desire to find it in the teaching of Christ, and science’s in the cold laws of an indifferent universe — became their own shackles, for that truth, absolute and whole, neither could ever prove. (The Gay Science, §344)

Though there will always be ruthless individuals with a strong will to power, those who wish to remain in this state — for whom nihilism poses no problem, since they can profit from it — we must not forget that, in the long run, it is nihilism itself that corrodes and destroys every community, society as a whole, and ultimately every culture and civilization.

Be that as it may, today, in our honest judgment, there are far more people who — consciously or unconsciously — no longer know what they live for; those for whom meaninglessness, that dreadful companion of nihilism, has wrapped itself around their necks like a noose they scarcely attempt to remove.

And to every individual who feels that meaninglessness tightening around his neck, yet still strives to find a way out of that condition — this book is dedicated. To him, philosophy reveals itself as “the balm for all wounds” (The Birth of Tragedy, §7), for only within works of philosophical reflection can he find both solace and a path toward deliverance from his hopeless condition. He is called to become a philosopher — perhaps even a Teacher of Eternal Return. For it is precisely the Eternal Return that represents Nietzsche’s exclusive solution to the problem of nihilism (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). And for that reason, we no longer approach this thought out of will or desire, but out of sheer necessity.