(Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence — INTRODUCTION, aph. 1)

According to its most general formulation, the Doctrine of Eternal Return holds that everything that has ever “existed” or will “exist,” everything that has unfolded or will unfold as a “process,” in the most diverse modes of cohabitation with other “things” and “processes,” will — “once” and “somewhere” — necessarily return, repeat itself….. [1]

And yet, let us be realistic: from today’s scientific standpoint, who is truly prepared to believe in such a doctrine…? It suffices to think of any segment of our everyday experience for the doctrine of the Eternal Return of the Same to appear immediately implausible. Consider the following example: how are we to accept a teaching that claims that a bird, from that (over there) rooftop, will, in every ring of Return, perform the same semicircular flight, land again on that (same) rooftop, and continue to glance about itself in an apparently unpredictable manner — exactly as it is doing now, while I, “at the same time,” observe it from the safety of my balcony…? How are we to accept a doctrine that explicitly asserts that this has already happened countless times, and that it will continue to happen countless times, always in one and the same way…?
Because of such aleatory insights drawn from our everyday experience, many of us will never come to believe in the Eternal Return, and nothing can be done about that. From within the niche of a spatio-temporal perspective on reality, it is simply not rationally graspable. We cannot explain its mechanism — and perhaps we never will. Something in all of this will always remain incomprehensible, and we must come to terms with that from the outset. Our experience begins from the middle [2], and however much we may strive, we may never reach its possible ends…..

[1] In the literature, Nietzsche’s thought of the Eternal Return, or the Return of the Same — which in German reads Die Ewige Wiederkunft des Gleichen — appears under various names. The most common are Eternal Return and Eternal Return of the Same. Taking into account loanwords from English usage, the Eternal Return (or Eternal Returning) may also be referred to as Eternal Recurrence. In this book, contrary to common practice, all variants of this concept’s name will be used.

[2] Cf. Derrida’s thesis on the mediated character of beginnings and the derived nature of immediacy: “Immediacy is derived. That all begins through the intermediary is what is indeed ‘inconceivable [to reason].’” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976/1997, p. 157.