Preliminary Considerations (or How Could Such a Thought Ever Occur?)

Let us first ask: how could such a thought ever have occurred to anyone? The idea that everything returns, in exactly the same way, and that there is, in fact, ‘nothing new under the sun’? And once it did arise in human consciousness—why so late, in the mind of a philosopher at the end of the nineteenth century? And why to him? Under what circumstances and by what paths did he arrive at it? Might it have existed, at least in germ, even earlier? If so—in which teachings can we discern its first outlines? These are the questions we shall attempt to answer in this chapter.

Immortal is the moment in which I gave birth to the Eternal Return. For that moment, I endure the Return. (Nietzsche)

At the outset, it is important to emphasize that the idea of cyclical time, believed in by the peoples of the ancient world, must not be confused with the idea of the Eternal Return of the Same. Archaic man required the possibility of redemption in a ‘new beginning.’ As we shall see, the idea of the conflagration of the universe (ekpyrosis) and the birth of a new cosmos serves precisely this purpose. So too do the ideas of the ‘Great’ and the ‘New Year,’ within which the cyclical history of the world unfolds. Both Hinduism and Buddhism recognize cyclical time, but in a different sense: in Hinduism, it is a return to a similar, yet never identical life, in order that, through karmic purification, liberation (moksha) may be attained; in Buddhism, by contrast, it is a continual rebirth in an entirely new form (samsara), which can be brought to an end only through the attainment of nirvana. Neither of these teachings of repeated life has anything in common with Nietzsche’s purely ‘mechanical’ possibility of how this universe functions: that, under the compulsion of a finite quantity of energy, the universe returns to the same states.

In this (second) chapter of the book, we first present a genealogy of the thought of the Eternal Return in Nietzsche’s published and unpublished aphorisms and fragments. We then follow its traces in the cultural traditions of the ancient world—from the Egyptian, through the Hindu and Buddhist, all the way to the Greek tradition. At a certain point, we shall also turn to passages from the Bible which, unusually for a Christian sacred text, allude to the Eternal Return, and which we find in the Book of Ecclesiastes. One of them—the one stating that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’—we have already touched upon at the beginning, and we will return to it throughout the book.