(Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence — INTRODUCTION, aph. 4)

The most ambitious intention of this book is not to point to new moments or aspects that would render the thought of Eternal Return rationally more comprehensible. This can scarcely be achieved under conditions in which science constructs its fundamental image of the world on the concepts of linear time, the “Big Bang,” and the “heat death of the universe.” By contrast, indications of the plausibility of Eternal Return are found in a specific—and to this day largely unacknowledged—mode of thinking about the ultimate possibilities of the universe, about Reality as a whole, or even about God himself, the “creator of heaven and earth”—if he is, at all, “in play.”

It is precisely owing to this specific eschatological and cosmogonic mode of thinking that, at a certain moment, we unshakably arrive at the conviction that all of us—humans, animals, trees, and stones—are limited manifestations of a single impersonal and formless, perhaps even spaceless and timeless protosubstance: Aristotle’s hylē, Anaximander’s apeiron, or God’s primordial “clay.” Of it we know nothing—and of it, most likely, we shall never know anything—except that all the forms and/or states it has attained, on an aeonic scale of time, it returns, or, crudely put, repeats, by necessity of its finite “nature.” From this it follows that we too return, that we “repeat” ourselves—whether as selves or as states of consciousness, it makes no difference—within the “eternal circle” of return.

Accordingly, we hold that the thought of Eternal Return may be considered outside every historical, metaphysical, anthropological, psychological, and social context; that is, it may be thought beyond any affiliation with a particular historical epoch, culture, or philosophical school—as (perhaps) the single thought of a predicate—of all predicates—in the sense of an action, a verb, rather than a property, through which we may attain some kind of insight into what we call reality. This means that other relations—such as motion, change, becoming, or differentiation—are to be conceived as concrete instances of a more grandiose predicate of returning, within which every action and every process is already included in advance; yet the objectivity of this predicate does not rest directly in itself, but is confirmed precisely through the objectivity of its individual instances, which, on limited “small” scales, bear witness to its reality.

The only thing we can know with absolute certainty in this world is this—that we return, and nothing more. Beyond the deconstructivist practice of French post-structuralist theory, which insists that reality is never immediate but always mediated; beyond the uncompromising stance of American pragmatists on the impossibility of thinking without initial—and, by all appearances, unfounded—assumptions; and beyond the lethal thought of the German “morphological” philosopher of history Oswald Spengler, according to which every thought is transient—we nevertheless think otherwise. The sole thought of a predicate that provides us with a final, if modest, “objective knowledge” of the world, we maintain, is the thought of Eternal Return. And it is the only thought that can be thought in every age.

And why do we believe we are permitted to think in this way? Among other reasons, because the knowledge on which it rests—and which enables us to “capitalize our experience”—does not depend on insight into the nature of things as they are, but on the correct determination of relations—of relations, that is, of predicates—between incessantly becoming and changing “things.” In other words, for the same reason that, at every step, we can convince ourselves that we succeed in “capitalizing our experience” on the basis of our capacity to know relations among things, rather than the things themselves, we can also attest that the primordial predicate—the primordial relation—is precisely returning, precisely Eternal Return.

“The world exists; it is not something that becomes, not something that passes away. Or rather: it becomes, it passes away, but it has never begun to become and has never ceased from passing away—it maintains itself in both.” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power)