Introductory Reflections

This altogether extraordinary, almost ectoplasmic event in Nietzsche’s life, connected first with premonition and formation, then with illumination and complete obsession, and finally with the fading and near-total abandonment of the thought of Eternal Return, can be discerned above all from the records of Nietzsche’s literary estate, as is often the case with the legacies of other great thinkers, and to a far lesser extent from what Nietzsche himself published during his lifetime. Only in three places in his books — The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Beyond Good and Evil — and there in a rather enigmatic-mystical tone, does Nietzsche explicitly refer to the idea of Eternal Return, which, let us recall, came to his mind in the summer of 1881. Admittedly, in the late work Ecce Homo, he nevertheless somewhat clarifies how this thought “came” to him — or, more precisely, occurred to him.

Here, however, we must point out that, contrary to the prevailing interpretations, we hold that Nietzsche intended to expound the doctrine of Eternal Return in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but ultimately abandoned that idea during the very process of writing the book. That unusual, still today for many incomprehensible and enigmatic work seems somehow to have remained unfinished in spirit. It truly appears as though something great was begun within it, only to be left incomplete. In our view, the book contains numerous allusions to the thought of Eternal Return, yet they are expressed through such a dense network of metaphors and symbols that they cannot be interpreted unambiguously. At the same time, it cannot escape our notice that in certain places Zarathustra is explicitly proclaimed — or at least treated — as the Teacher of Eternal Return, which lends further support to our interpretation of this book.

On the other hand, many interpreters of Nietzsche have recounted the genealogy of this, for us the most important of Nietzsche’s thoughts, in their own distinctive ways within their writings; and they too will assist us in achieving the aim of this chapter, already indicated in its title. In this respect, the most exhaustive and, to us, the most interesting approach appears to be that of Martin Heidegger. The second volume of Heidegger’s four-volume work devoted to Nietzsche’s philosophy is entirely dedicated to the thought of Eternal Return. For this reason, Martin Heidegger deserves credit for being among the first to emphasize the decisive importance of this thought within the philosophy of the German thinker.

Alongside Heidegger, it is also worth mentioning here other authors whom Nietzsche’s thought of Eternal Return inspired to write books of their own, such as Karl Löwith (1935), Pierre Klossowski (1969), Joan Stambaugh (1972), Bernd Magnus (1978), Lawrence Hatab (2005), and finally Bevis E. McNeil (2021), to name those presently known to us. In this context, we must not forget the modest and most likely pseudonymous George Fraser, whose small books on Nietzsche’s philosophy — among which The Eternal Return stands out in particular — offer entirely unique insights. All of these authors found their own reasons for contemplating the idea of Eternal Return, writing books from their own specific perspectives, and their works deserve mention in this book — a kind of relative to their own works. We shall discuss their views on the “idea,” thought, doctrine, or teaching of Eternal Return in greater detail in the sixth chapter. Here, however, we shall focus primarily on those parts of their texts that help illuminate the genealogy of the thought of Eternal Return in Nietzsche’s philosophizing.

But for now, let us return to Heidegger and, through him, begin our journey into the genealogy of the thought of Eternal Return in Nietzsche’s thinking. How, then, could such a thought ever have occurred to him?

From “The Ring Surrounding Man” to the Eschatological Chapter “On First and Last Things”

It is significant that Martin Heidegger, after a meticulous study of Nietzsche’s literary remains — that precious “mine” of his entire philosophy — chose, at the beginning of the second volume of Nietzsche I, devoted entirely to the idea of Eternal Return, to mention an intriguing remark by the young nineteen-year-old Nietzsche as a possible first “nugget” of the thought of Eternal Return within Nietzsche’s “river of thought,” which was already, even at that time, swelling with unusual ideas. The passage in question comes from a youthful diary entry written in 1863 and discovered only in 1936:

“And thus the human being grows beyond everything that once surrounded him. He need not break his chains: unexpectedly, when God calls him, they fall away. And where is the ring that ultimately surrounds him? Is it the world? Is it God?” (Mein Leben. Autobiographische Skizze des jungen Nietzsche. Frankfurt am Main: Diesterweg, 1936.)

To be fair in our approach, Heidegger himself understood that the young Nietzsche was still merely searching for a final answer, a final truth about the world, and that the aforementioned “ring” was only a metaphor for that answer. Yet he advocated for Nietzsche’s archive to publish this “autobiographical sketch” in a special edition as an inspiration for young Germans.

Nietzsche himself could hardly have imagined that this metaphorical ring would one day return to him as an almost literal answer to his question — in the form of the thought of the “ring of Eternal Return.” It is therefore unsurprising that Nietzsche’s youthful path afterward no longer had much to do with that “idea.” Schopenhauer’s philosophy, Wagner’s music, and his professorship at the University of Basel came next; they led him toward other “rings of thought.” Still, in this context, we must not overlook his philological training and expertise in ancient Greek culture. Yet even when he writes about the Ancient Greeks, as in his youthful work The Birth of Tragedy, other motifs and archetypes dominate Nietzsche’s writing. They in no way suggest that Nietzsche was still searching for the “answer of all answers” — the “ring that ultimately surrounds man.”

Likewise, it should be noted that in this first phase of his thinking — during the period in which The Birth of Tragedy was written — Nietzsche was not particularly close to the later Greek philosophers – especially the Stoics, who are most often mentioned as the first inheritors of this “idea above all ideas.” Although some researchers into the genealogy of this thought, such as Lawrence Hatab, believe that it originates from the pre-Socratics Nietzsche admired far more — specifically Empedocles or even Pythagoras — Nietzsche himself never explicitly connected it with them.

And if we are to be fair in our approach, in that period Nietzsche was closest to the thinking of perhaps the boldest of all the pre-Socratics — Heraclitus of Ephesus. In the next book he wrote — though one he would never publish during his lifetime — Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche praises and elevates Heraclitus above all others, not only in relation to the post-Socratics and Socrates himself, but even in relation to the other pre-Socratics. And one gains the impression that he does so above all in opposition to Parmenides.

Unlike this Eleatic, who regarded the world as motionless and unchanging, with always the same “old sun,” the Ephesian maintained that the world is driven by the eternally new flame of an ancient fire. Thus, the river into which a man steps twice is never the same river, but always another one, just as the sun that rises each morning upon the horizon is never the same sun, but another, or a new one. And what could be further removed from belief in Eternal Return than the assertion that the river into which one steps is eternally new, and that the sun which illuminates him every morning is likewise ever-new…?

We should note, however, that there are interpretations which do not regard Heraclitus’ teaching as diametrically opposed to that of Parmenides, considering such an opposition overly simplified. Heraclitus’ statement “everything flows” (panta rhei) is not one of his literally preserved sayings, but rather a later summarizing formulation of his teaching. As such, it merely points to the fact that the world becomes, that it constitutes an ongoing happening or event. On the other hand, Parmenides’ statement that “Being is” (esti gar einai) may likewise be interpreted in terms of the world’s becoming — or, in Parmenides’ case, the becoming (or coming-to-presence) of Being itself.

But let us return to Nietzsche. Only after his break with Wagner and Schopenhauer, and after that depressive winter in Sorrento (1876–77), spent with Malwida von Meysenbug, during which he began work on Human, All Too Human — and in which, for the first time, an eschatological chapter appears, On First and Last Things, placed at the very beginning of the work — can we say that Nietzsche became seized by a mood that would ultimately lead him toward thoughts resembling those he had recorded in his youthful years. In a certain sense, we might say that he once again began the search for the ancient “ring that ultimately surrounds man…”

Deeply disappointed in humanity, Nietzsche began to look differently upon nature and the world around him. He reflected more and more upon his health and upon the almost miraculous effect of changing climates in accordance with the seasons, something he increasingly practiced in order to regenerate himself. At the same time, his entire thinking seemed to undergo a regeneration as well…

Morgenröte, or At the Dawn of a New Life…

At last, in 1880, Nietzsche writes a work that is, in many respects, a turning point—a book that reflects his new state of mind. The title Morgenröte (Dawn or Daybreak) was not chosen by accident. Nietzsche awakens into a new morning after a long sleep; he emerges to the surface after having spent a long time underground (like a mole digging tunnels, as he himself wrote in the opening aphorism). He stands at the dawn of a new life, and within his mind entirely new thoughts are quite literally beginning to break.

Approximately a year before the thought of Eternal Recurrence occurred to him, while writing Morgenröte, Nietzsche was seized by a strange and universal feeling of primordial solitude. He did not associate it with himself as an individual, but with nature as a whole, with the primordial solitude of everything that is. A testimony to this feeling—which we regard as yet another precursor to the thought of Eternal Recurrence—can be found in an aphorism at the beginning of the fifth and final part of the book. It contains one of the most beautiful poetic images in prose that the philosopher ever wrote, dedicating it to nature, the sea, and the evening twilight, while only dimly sensing the secret they conceal:

In the great silence.  Here is the sea, here we can forget the city. The bells are noisily ringing the angelus it is the time for that sad and foolish yet sweet noise, sounded at the crossroads of day and night but it will last only for a minute! Now all is still! The sea lies there pale and glittering, it cannot speak. The sky plays its everlasting silent evening game with red and yellow and green, it cannot speak. The little cliffs and ribbons of rock that run down into the sea as if to find the place where it is most solitary, none of them can speak. This tremendous muteness which suddenly overcomes us is lovely and dreadful, the heart swells at it. Oh the hypocrisy of this silent beauty! How well it could speak, and how evilly too, if it wished! Its tied tongue and its expression of sorrowing happiness is a deception: it wants to mock at your sympathy!  So be it! I am not ashamed of being mocked by such powers. But I pity you, nature, that you have to be silent, even though it is only your malice which ties your tongue; yes, I pity you on account of your malice!  Ah, it is growing yet more still, my heart swells again: it is startled by a new truth, it too cannot speak, it too mocks when the mouth calls something into this beauty, it too enjoys its sweet silent malice. I begin to hate speech, to hate even thinking; for do I not hear behind every word the laughter of error, of imagination, of the spirit of delusion? Must I not mock at my pity? Mock at my mockery?  O sea, O evening! You are evil instructors! You teach man to cease to be man! Shall he surrender to you? Shall he become as you now are, pale, glittering, mute, tremendous, reposing above himself? Exalted above himself? (Nietzsche, Friedrich. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, Aphorism 423, trans. J. M. Kennedy. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911. Reproduced at: http://nietzsche.holtof.com/reader/friedrich-nietzsche/daybreak/aphorism-423-quote_f8b93657d.html)

Reflecting upon this image, it should become clearer why we believe that new thoughts do not simply emerge out of nowhere. They truly have a history of their own. The thought of Eternal Recurrence must already have been circling through Nietzsche’s mind, if only in the form of a vague premonition or the faintest of intimations, not only during the writing of Morgenröte, but even earlier, during the period of the youthful diary mentioned by Heidegger. Yet in the case of this aphorism, the feeling, the premonition—or perhaps both together—are stronger than ever before…

The Birth of Eternal Recurrence

At last, something strange began to happen in Nietzsche’s life in August 1881. That year, he stayed for the first time in Sils-Maria, an enchanting village in the Swiss Alps near the Italian border—and he was captivated by it. The transformation of his soul was already complete. The dawn glow of his new thoughts, expressed in the book of the same name, had spilled over into his own life and taken possession of his personal horizon.

In a letter to Peter Gast dated August 14, 1881, Nietzsche wrote excitedly:

“Now, my dear and good friend! The August sun shines over our heads, the year is fugitive, it grows quieter and more peaceful on the mountains and in the woods. Thoughts have been looming on my horizon the like of which I have never seen — I don’t want to say a word about them, I want to preserve an unruffled calm in myself. It seems I shall have to live several years longer. (Letter to Heinrich Köselitz [Peter Gast], August 14, 1881)

Could it be that during those very August days the most powerful thought ever to enter Nietzsche’s mind—the thought of Eternal Recurrence—first occurred to him?

We have little doubt that it happened during one of his walks around the enchanting Lake Silvaplana, surrounded by equally enchanting mountain peaks. Nietzsche’s biographers generally agree that this is indeed what happened, and they even identify the precise location: a particular rock near Surlej on the shore of the lake. Such an almost fairy-tale scenario is suggested by Nietzsche himself in his somewhat self-aggrandizing autobiographical work Ecce Homo, written during the last year of his conscious life (1888).

At the beginning of the chapter devoted to the genesis of Thus Spoke Zarathustra—that “book for all and none”—he writes:

“I now wish to relate the history of Zarathustra. The fundamental idea of the work, the Eternal Recurrence, the highest formula of a Yea-saying to life that can ever be attained, was first conceived in the month of August 1881. I made a note of the idea on a sheet of paper, with the postscript: “Six thousand feet beyond man and time.” That day I happened to be wandering through the woods alongside of the Lake of Silvaplana, and I halted not far from Surlei, beside a huge rock that towered aloft like a pyramid. It was then that[Pg 97] the thought struck me.” (Ecce Homo, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” §1, 1911. Available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52190/52190-h/52190-h.htm)

The page in question is dated August 6, 1881—only eight days before the letter itself. [1] Rüdiger Safranski, perhaps Nietzsche’s most distinguished biographer, writes that until that day in August 1881 Nietzsche had only vaguely sensed what his task was, whereas now he had finally found it.

In the same letter Nietzsche continues:

“Oh, my friend sometimes the realization runs through my head that I am actually living a supremely dangerous life: for I belong among those machines that can explode! The intensities of my feeling make me shudder and laugh aloud — already on several occasions I was unable to leave my room for the ridiculous reason that my eyes were inflamed — from what? On each occasion I had been weeping excessively during my hikes the day before; no, not sentimental tears, but tears of exultation; during which I sang and muttered nonsense, filled to the brim with my new vision, which I am the first of all human beings to have.” (Letter to Heinrich Köselitz [Peter Gast], August 14, 1881., Available at: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/452786.html)

Regardless of whether Nietzsche’s “highest thought” first occurred to him beside a mighty rock under such sublime circumstances, we wish to emphasize the following: the thought of Eternal Recurrence does not choose the circumstances under which it enters a person’s mind and, in the very same instant, takes possession of his entire being. It is equally important to recognize that this unnecessary mythologization of Eternal Recurrence does no harm to the teaching itself. It remains untouched by what Nietzsche called the “human, all too human,” just as it remains unaffected by the more prosaic circumstances of its appearance, for example, in the life of the author of these lines. [2]

Herein lies the greatest strength of Eternal Recurrence: one may experience it at any moment of one’s life, regardless of circumstance. Nothing is too insignificant for Eternal Recurrence. Even the most banal thought and the most trivial situation are subject to the same primordial eternal law and thereby become sublime and primordial in their own right. In touching the ring of Eternal Recurrence, we ourselves become like it—pale, glittering, mute, tremendous… as Nietzsche himself suggests in that evocative aphorism from Daybreak that we mentioned earlier.

Eternal Recurrence in the Nachlass (Note 141)

One may now ask: what did Nietzsche actually write in his notebooks during those days, in the wake of his “enlightenment” through an extraordinary insight? Under note 141 in volume 11 of the German edition of Nietzsche’s complete works, edited by Colli and Montinari (as well as in volume 6 of the English edition used here), we read:

The Recurrence of the Same.
Draft

1. The incorporation of basic errors. [3]
2. The incorporation of passions.
3. The incorporation of knowing and of the knowing that renounces. (Passion of knowledge)
4. The innocent one. The individual as experiment. The alleviation of life, debasement, weakening – transition.
5. The new weight: the eternal recurrence of the same. Infinite importance of our knowing, erring, our habits, lifestyles for everything coming. What do we do with the rest of our life we who have. spent the greatest portion of it in the vastest ignorance? We teach the teaching- it is the strongest means of incorporating it into ourselves. Our kind of bliss, as teachers of the greatest teaching.

Beginning of August 1881 in Sils-Maria,
6000 feet above sea level and much higher above all
human affairs! –

For those who wish to follow the development of the thought firsthand, all of Nietzsche’s notes on Eternal Recurrence can be found here, arranged in chronological order.

This, then, is the famous first note found in Nietzsche’s notebooks that mentions the thought of Eternal Recurrence, and it is generally assumed that he wrote it immediately after the thought first occurred to him. Some sources – such as the small booklet about the Nietzsche-Haus, available for purchase in the house where he stayed in Sils-Maria – speculate that this happened sometime between 6 and 8 August 1881. Indeed, it is not difficult to imagine him jotting it down on a bench by the lake immediately after the experience, especially since it is well established that he carried these notebooks with him on his walks. Yet we have the impression that this may apply to the other notes, but not to the opening of this one. Why? Because it is remarkably measured and carefully composed. We suspect that several days must have passed between the moment of enlightenment and the writing of this note, for it already presents an astonishingly clear and comprehensive structure of what would become the very first draft of the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence of the Same. It is not merely a description of his immediate reaction, mood, or psychological state after the experience, as in his letter to Peter Gast, nor is it an account of the genesis of the thought itself, which he would later recount seven years afterwards in Ecce Homo. Rather, it is the first attempt at systematically shaping the outline of a serious doctrine capable of transforming humanity’s perspective on nature as a whole.

Yet after the thoughtful and carefully rounded opening of note 141, its continuation – particularly the elaboration of point four, as well as the notes that follow – seems to reveal Nietzsche thinking aloud about this illuminating experience. One gains the impression that even he himself was not entirely certain how he ought to relate to the thought. The sentences are ambivalent, obscure, and at times even contradictory. Nevertheless, we must bear in mind that these are merely notebook entries never intended to become part of a finished work. As a “conversation of the thinker with himself,” they deserve to remain just that – notes which, had it been left to the philosopher himself, would probably never have been published. Yet for those of us today who wish to penetrate the very foundations of the thought with which they are concerned, their importance is immeasurable. In a sense, they demonstrate that the ideas that came to Nietzsche during his exhausting walks around the lake were later worked out in writing – that he thought through his notebooks as well – before eventually incorporating them into the books he would later publish.

There is not the slightest trace in these early notes of the initial exhilaration we know from his letter to Paul Gast. Instead, the possible consequences of the insight immediately take centre stage; immediately Nietzsche begins to reflect on how the doctrine can be incorporated into oneself – by teaching it to others. How might such an insight – that the world unfolds within the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, which for Nietzsche at that moment appears to constitute the only truth – affect both the individual and humanity as a whole?

One thing, however, stands out before all else: the word “incorporation” appears no fewer than four times in this outline. In the first three points it appears as the very first word, in the form of a verbal noun, while in the fifth it acquires its full significance: the doctrine must be taught precisely so that the Teacher may incorporate it into himself.

This naturally raises another question: how long did it take Nietzsche to digest this thought? Much later he himself admitted that it took time. If so, perhaps this first note was not written on the very day of the experience. Perhaps he wrote it a week or two later—or even after his letter to Peter Gast. For it will become evident that the word “incorporation” is closely connected with the possibility of assimilating and accepting the truth of Eternal Recurrence. If we wished to summarize this first note on Eternal Recurrence, we might put it this way: Can a human being incorporate the truth of Eternal Recurrence into himself in the same way that he has already incorporated the fundamental errors about the world, the passions, and the passion for knowledge? Ultimately, can one renounce the passion for knowledge itself?

The first two points of the outline clearly suggest that throughout history humanity has treated errors as fundamental truths in order to survive (Nietzsche had already written about them in The Birth of Tragedy), and that it was driven to do so by instincts, later sublimated into passions. Let us not forget that, for Nietzsche, thinking itself is a process that arises from instincts, just like everything else.

Be that as it may, in this very first published notebook entry written after the enlightening insight into Eternal Recurrence, Nietzsche considers two ways of enduring it. The first is to become a Teacher of Eternal Recurrence, for this is “the strongest means of incorporating it into ourselves.” The second is more enigmatic: to continue living “only for the sake of knowledge.” No, he was not joking.

What remains for a human being, burdened by such a terrifying insight, is to discover to what extent he can incorporate it within himself. For in the same note, in the elaboration of point four – which is considerably longer than the concise outline – Nietzsche writes that one must “wait and see how far knowledge and truth can be incorporated,” and whether “such a thing is at all possible.” For this reason, in his first encounter with the thought of Eternal Recurrence as the ultimate truth of existence, Nietzsche advises us to preserve the “sources and powers of knowledge – the original errors and passions,” so that through them we may look upon the world “with as many eyes as possible,” surrender ourselves to life, and then once again “temporarily rest our gaze” (whatever exactly that may mean).

What follows in the remainder of the elaboration of point four may, in the briefest possible terms, be described as an awakening to the dark side of this “terrible insight.” Nietzsche suddenly begins invoking a “surplus of joy” in life, because otherwise all that remains is “the destruction of ourselves as humanity.” “Do we still wish to live?” he asks. If the truth we have finally discovered is unbearable, and compels us to answer that question in the negative… what then?

He then turns once more to indifference. In an entire section, three times longer than the original outline and entitled The Philosophy of Indifference, we read: “Indifference must deeply permeate us, together with the pleasure of observing.” But how? The situation remains unclear. At these dramatic moments, one gains the impression that Nietzsche is struggling with all his might to make this thought acceptable, yet somehow failing to do so.

Finally, at the end of note 141, like a light at the end of a tunnel, there appears something that might prove “saving”:

To consider: the various sublime states that I had, as foundations of the various chapters and their material – as the regulator of the expression, presentation, pathos reigning in each chapter – thus gaining an illustration of my ideal, as it were through addition. And then upward!

This doctrine somehow had to be endured, and for that purpose Nietzsche seems, at the last moment, to have conceived the idea of taking from life its very best moments – those sublime states that are worth reliving and because of which he might be able to endure this truth. With the thought that his most beautiful moments would return again and again, this truth might perhaps become more bearable. Yet we are still far from discovering the true way in which this thought could genuinely be incorporated into the human being. And even in the notes that follow, as we shall see, Nietzsche still seems to wander uncertainly. It appears that he still does not know what to do with this thought; contradictory observations continue to occur to him. All this points to just how delicate these moments were for Nietzsche’s thinking as a whole. It is as though we have entered a war zone: on one side stands the thought, on the other the thinker; on one side an incomprehensible, unwieldy, terrifying thought, and on the other a thinker desperately trying to make it acceptable and to incorporate it into himself.

Eternal Recurrence in the Nachlass (Notes 142–147)

During that fateful August of “war” – for the thinker as much as for the thought of Eternal Recurrence itself – Nietzsche wrote dozens of notes on the thought that had seized him by the rock near Surlej. From note 141 all the way to note 167, his writings are dominated by this thought and by what follows directly from it. We should not lose sight of the fact that this is the earliest view of the newly born thought of Eternal Recurrence. From note 168 onward, Nietzsche gradually returns to his usual themes, but they now seem as though coated with the patina of the “thought of thoughts.” It occasionally emerges in them, only to disappear again, as though it were a kind of mirage of the thinker’s mind.

But let us proceed in order. In the very next note (142), Nietzsche tries to “bring the ball back down to earth,” to temper his initial exhilaration over the “most powerful insight,” and to dispel from the outset any thought that what has occurred is the birth of a new religion:

Do I speak like someone who has had a revelation? Then despise me and do not listen to me. (11[142])

And then, in the following note (143), we come perhaps to the hardest aspect of this thought to accept if it is to become embodied in a human being. Nietzsche begins his reflection with the sentence:

“But if everything is necessary, what control do I have over my actions?” This thought and belief is a weight that presses on you along with all other weights, and more than them.” (11[143])

Indeed, if everything has already “happened once” and will continue to happen with the same necessity – “what control do I have over my actions?” The answer the thought itself gives him is terrifying: none. Why, then, make any effort at all if everything has already been determined in advance? Anyone who has become conscious of this dreadful aspect of the thought of Eternal Recurrence would rather flee from it. And that is precisely what people do – they flee headlong from the thought of Eternal Recurrence! Nietzsche, however, does not. Although he had already seen what a burden his thought had placed upon the human being, in the notes that follow he seems to try to recoil from the experience of bearing it. He continued to wrestle with the thought, attempting somehow, almost miraculously, to tame it. In note 143, we find him taking another direction:

You say nourishment location air society transform and condition you? Well, your opinions do it even more, for they condition you to this nourishment location air society. If you incorporate the thought of thoughts, then it will transform you. (11[143])

The final sentence unmistakably reveals Nietzsche’s main intention and the “war tactic” by which he sought to win this ectoplasmic battle. Yet we must be very careful with this sentence. “If you incorporate the thought of thoughts, then it will transform you” – what did Nietzsche mean when he wrote this? How can the thought of Eternal Recurrence transform us if everything has already been determined in advance?

…..in sum wait to see how extensively knowing and truth can be incorporated- and to what extent a transformation of the human being ensues, once he finally lives only for the sake of knowing. (11[141])

Nietzsche had already written this in the first note. The German einverleiben, rendered here as “incorporate,” carries the stronger sense of embodying or making something part of oneself. If we now think the thought of Eternal Recurrence through to its ultimate consequences, it may or may not become embodied in us – but what matters is to recognise that we are not the ones who decide this. It is as though the thought itself chooses in whom it will become embodied and in whom it will not. Perhaps, then, the only thing we can do is learn to accept it? Not even that – the thought itself tells us, once we think it through to its ultimate depth. For even our acceptance or rejection of it is already “built into” us – and that, too, is part of its embodiment. At the very moment when we think we are deciding whether to accept the thought or flee from it, we are in fact merely reading the already written text of our own life.

This means only that the thought of Eternal Recurrence compels us, in a terrifying way, to relinquish the illusion of control and simply observe our life, which is as it is because it could not have been otherwise. Our consciousness of this is nothing but an organon of knowledge, and it now becomes clearer why, in the preceding note, Nietzsche connected transformation through this thought with living “only for the sake of knowing.” If nothing else, we no longer need to torment ourselves over the bad decisions we have made in life, nor take pride in the good ones; if nothing else, we can enjoy the “image of our own ideal” created by the “exalted states we have experienced” – and nothing more.

Yet this note of Nietzsche’s reveals something else as well—the necessary dependence of the moments from which the Ring of Eternal Recurrence is woven upon one another. This dependence allows us to understand not only why we are what we are, but perhaps also how recurrence itself is possible in the first place. If “nourishment, location, air, and society transform and condition you,” then the thought of Eternal Recurrence that occurred to you at a particular moment changes and shapes you as well. And since the Ring of Recurrence is one, each of its moments is conditioned by the moments that preceded it, just as it in turn conditions the emergence of the moment that follows. Somewhere, in the end, this unbroken chain of moments joins itself and closes the Ring. The impression arises that everything happens only once—as, from the perspective of our consciousness, it indeed does—because we can never become aware of recurrence itself. The impression of free will that we have may be nothing other than our awareness that the present moment shapes the next. More will be said about this aspect of the thought of Eternal Recurrence in the third chapter.

In the concluding part of the same note, carried away by the idea of the transformation a thought can bring about in an individual, Nietzsche asks: “is it such that I want to do it countless times?” If this is a kind of test of whether the thought of Eternal Recurrence can become embodied in us, the question makes sense. But if it means that from now on we should conduct our lives in such a way that we consciously do only what we would wish to do “countless times,” then this moral imperative, as we shall show later, makes little sense. Nevertheless, the ethical interpretation of Eternal Recurrence as a kind of moral imperative remains one of its most influential contemporary interpretations, and in various forms it can be found in Walter Kaufmann, Alexander Nehamas, Maudemarie Clark, Bernard Reginster, and others.

An echo of this sentence can be found two years later in Zarathustra, where Nietzsche makes an almost impossible demand of his own will: that, through gritted teeth, it should gloriously proclaim of everything that has happened: “But thus I willed it, thus shall I will it!” This imperative was meant to become the wedding ring uniting two of the most fiercely opposed thoughts in Nietzsche’s thinking—the Will to Power and Eternal Recurrence. Yet here a problem arises, one already identified by Karl Löwith when he showed that one cannot will what has already happened (Löwith, 1935). To that extent, the call to embody the thought of Eternal Recurrence so that it might transform us becomes deeply problematic. With all due respect to Nietzsche’s intentions, on this point we must concede that this thinker, who was hardly sympathetic to Nietzsche, was right. This possible interpretation will be discussed further in the third chapter of the book.

For now, let us repeat only this: if Eternal Recurrence were the truth of this world, we could not will what has already happened, nor could we now freely determine how our life is to unfold, as some of these interpretations suggest. We can only live out our life and gradually discover why we are what we are. The aforementioned moral imperative – “act in such a way that you would wish to act eternally” – would make literal sense only if we were living this life for the first time and only afterward began to live through its infinite recurrences. But then we would no longer be speaking of Eternal Recurrence in its strict sense. Accordingly, we can only imitate that desire, that imperative.

As though momentarily sobered from these groundless hopes, in the next note, 144, Nietzsche writes a thought that points in precisely this direction:

“If the thought of the eternal recurrence of all things does not overwhelm you, then it is not a fault: and it is no merit if it does.” (11[144])

In the notes that follow, it is as though he once again climbs onto a rock from which the thought of Eternal Recurrence offers a more optimistic vista: he speaks of a new education (11[145]), an inclination towards the new (11[146]), and of the first followers of the teaching, whom he sees as “weaker emptier sicklier needier”, believing that the new teaching will find its finest representatives only at the end (11[147]).

Nietzsche presents his famous “cosmological argument,” well known from discussions of Eternal Recurrence, in the following fragment (11[148])—and with it we shall begin the next chapter…

Eternal Recurrence in the Nachlass (Note 148, or the “Cosmological Argument”)

The “cosmological argument” by which Nietzsche sought to prove the certainty of Eternal Recurrence deserves to be quoted in full. And that is what we shall do, though piece by piece, since each part deserves a separate commentary of its own. Although contested and judged insufficient in its attempt to elevate the thought of Eternal Recurrence to the status of a scientific hypothesis, we shall show that it is not quite so harmless or innocuous to certain assumptions about the workings of the universe as a whole. This is how it begins:

The world of forces sustains no decrease: for otherwise it would have become weak and perished over infinite time. The world of forces sustains no standstill: for otherwise it would have been reached, and the clock of existence would stand still. (11[148])

It is as though a third sentence were missing: the world of forces sustains no increase either: for if it did…? Well… what would happen “if it did”? Presumably, we would then be able to create a new quantity of force (energy) out of nothing, thereby opening up the possibility of a perpetuum mobile of the first kind. But that does not happen: what we witness is merely the transformation of energy from one form into another.

It should be stressed that by the middle of the nineteenth century, within thermodynamics, nearly all the fundamental principles concerning heat and energy had already taken shape, and Nietzsche must have been at least superficially familiar with them. From his letter to Köselitz (Peter Gast) of 16 April 1881, we know that he already had in his possession the physician Julius Robert Mayer’s Die Mechanik der Wärme in gesammelten Schriften, and that in the letter he singled out the essay Über Auslösung – in any case, several months before his illumination by the rock at Surlej. One serious study [Riedel, Manfred. Vorspiele zur ewigen Wiederkunft: Nietzsches Grundlehre, 2012, pp. 53–54] goes so far as to reconstruct Note 11[148] directly as an echo of Nietzsche’s reading of Mayer. It is nevertheless curious that, despite his familiarity with the thermodynamic laws of the time, Nietzsche frames his argument in the terminology of a “world of forces” rather than in terms of energy.

According to a later testimony by Lou Andreas-Salomé, Nietzsche would even come to entertain a plan to study the natural sciences, with the evident intention of supporting his “cosmological argument” with appropriate physical theories. This, as we know, never happened; but, as we shall see in Chapter Three, he would nevertheless begin to make regular use of the term Law of Conservation of Energy (for the First Law of Thermodynamics), as Mayer does in his book. We can only imagine the delight with which he regarded the fact that the Law of Conservation of Energy states, in dry scientific terms, what he employs in philosophical form to support the certainty of his own view of reality through the thought of Eternal Recurrence:

Therefore the world of forces never arrives at an equilibrium, it never has a moment of rest, its force and its motion are equally great at any time. (11[148])

Yet Nietzsche’s “cosmological argument” faces another, perhaps the greatest enemy of the “theory of Eternal Recurrence” – entropy. The Law of Conservation of Energy can no longer help him here: energy may be conserved while entropy nevertheless increases. The scenario of “heat death” therefore seems a particularly tough nut for Nietzsche’s “cosmological argument” to crack. Indeed, one gets the impression that Nietzsche rather casually “rules” that this scenario, too, must recur, and that the “world of forces” cannot remain forever even in a state of “heat death.” Although he does not explicitly mention “heat death,” such a conclusion can be read from the following sentence of the “cosmological argument”:

Whatever state this world can ever reach, it must have reached and not once, but countless times. (11[148])

After this “reckoning” – or perhaps merely “sweeping under the rug” whatever in the Second Law of Thermodynamics proves troublesome for the thought of Eternal Recurrence – we enter the realm of the hardest determinism, which suddenly clothes Nietzsche’s “cosmological argument”:

Likewise this moment: it was already here once and many times and it will likewise recur, all forces apportioned precisely as now: and likewise for the moment that bore this one and with the one that is the child of the current moment. (11[148])

No doubt, beautifully put; but the determinism that can be read from these undeniably harmonious and somewhat poetic words is not sufficiently explained. Why should this moment return precisely with “all forces apportioned precisely as now”? Because, Nietzsche answers, it is preceded by one precisely determined moment with its own distribution of forces. But why should one and the same distribution of forces necessarily always give rise to one and the same subsequent distribution of forces? Nietzsche unquestioningly binds the moments together so that one follows from another, but remains silent about the nature of their connection. A finite number of possible distributions of forces and infinite time might bring us to the “repetition” of some particular distribution – but not yet to the recurrence of an entire sequence of events identical down to the last detail. For that, one further assumption is required: that the same distribution of forces necessarily produces the same subsequent distribution of forces. Nietzsche, however, does not prove this here; he simply builds it tacitly into his argument. In this way, he hypostatises the most “hard-boiled” form of determinism – identical recurrence – precisely at the point where he ought first to have proved it. This is exactly why many regard his cosmological argument as insufficient.

The second part of the “cosmological argument” can hardly still be called cosmological, for it passes, we might say, into a poetic form in which it seems more intent on courting possible future disciples than convincing them by proof.

Human being! Your entire life is turned over again and again like an hourglass and will run out again and again with one prodigious minute of time in between, until all the conditions from which you have sprung, in the circuit of the world, come together again.

And then you rediscover every pain and every pleasure and every friend and enemy and every hope and every error and every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine, the entire coherence of all things.

This ring, in which you are a kernel, sparkles again and again. (11[148])

What are these inspired words seeking, if not disciples… disciples who, as we know, will in the end fail to appear… And then, to finish, the crescendo… The final paragraph of the “cosmological argument” is one of the most frequently quoted passages concerning the thought of Eternal Recurrence. Here the thought of Eternal Recurrence is put forward as a fateful moment for humanity, through which humanity reaches its noon, the zenith of its development.

And in every ring of human existence generally there (is) always one hour when the most powerful thought surfaces recurrence of all things first to one, then to many, then to all, the thought of the eternal each time for humankind it is the hour of noon. (11[148])

We do not doubt it; but the road from the “most powerful thought” to a scientific hypothesis still lies ahead of us…..

(To be continued…..)

[1] For the postmodern reader, it is difficult to dispel entirely the suspicion that Nietzsche subsequently mythologized the circumstances under which the thought of Eternal Recurrence first came to him. Yet we possess no evidence whatsoever for such a supposition.

[2] More specifically, in my own case, my own awakening to this thought occurred in the bathroom of my apartment. It happened in the evening, after a shower, while I was drying myself with a towel after stepping out of the bathtub. Before me there was no “mighty pyramidal rock,” but rather a cabinet filled with ordinary toiletries, greenish bathroom tiles, and two towels hanging on the wall. Yet I remember distinctly that my gaze was fixed upon two brown central-heating pipes when I experienced that peculiar expansion of the mind, prompted by the question: “And what after that?” During those days I often found myself asking this question, following in thought the chain of cosmic events all the way to its ultimate limit. If all possibilities must eventually be exhausted, I thought, then endless novelty cannot endure forever. Following this logic of ultimate consequences, I arrived at the conclusion that everything in this world must return, that nothing can remain eternally new. The only difference between my own insight and Nietzsche’s was that, for us in the twenty-first century, mythological embellishments are no longer required to lend greater persuasiveness or sublimity to the fundamental insights we attain about the world and about life.

[3] The German einverleiben, translated as “incorporate” in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, is often rendered here as “embody” in order to emphasize its bodily sense (Leib, body) and Nietzsche’s recurring idea of knowledge, truth, and ultimately the “thought of thoughts” becoming embodied in the human being.