Chronologically arranged statements and passages from Nietzsche on Eternal Recurrence

This selection is ongoing and will be expanded over time.

1881

From The Joyful Science; Idylls from Messina; Unpublished Fragments from the Period of The Joyful Science (Spring 1881–Summer 1882)

11[141]

The Recurrence of the Same.
Draft

1. The incorporation of basic errors.
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! –

Re 4) Philosophy of indifference. What earlier stimulated most powerfully now has an entirely different effect, it is looked upon and allowed to pass as mere play (passions and works) on principle rejected as a life in untruth, but as form and charm aesthetically savored and cultivated, we position ourselves like children vis-à-vis what earlier constituted the seriousness of existence. But all our striving for seriousness has to be understood as becoming, denying oneself as an individual, looking into the world with as many eyes as possible, living in our drives and activities, in order to create eyes for oneself, temporarily entrusting oneself to life, in order then temporarily to let our eyes rest on it: to maintain the drives as the foundation of all knowing, but know where they become opponents of knowing: 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. – This is the consequence of the passion of knowledge: there are no other means for its existence than also to preserve the sources and powers of knowledge, errors and pas(sions), from their struggle it derives its sustaining force. – How will this life look with respect to its sum of well-being? The playing of children, gazed upon by the eye of the sage, having control over this and that state- and over death, if something like this is not possible. – Now, however, comes the hardest knowledge and makes all kinds of life terribly full of misgiving: an absolute excess of joy must be demonstrated, otherwise the choice is the annihilation of our self with respect to humankind as a means of annihilating humankind. Even this: we have to place the past, ours and that of all humankind, on the scale and also outweigh it – no! this (p. 351) piece of humankind’s history will and must eternally repeat, this we may exclude from the bottom line, on this we have no influence: though it immediately burdens our empathy and prejudices us against life generally. In order not to be toppled by this, our compassion must not be great. Indifference has deeply and also the pleasure of looking to have affected us on. Even the misery of future humankind should not be of concern to us. But whether we still want to live is the question: and how!

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!

11[142]

Do I speak like someone who has had a revelation? Then despise me and do not listen to me. – Are you the kind who need gods? Does your reason not yet become nauseous from letting itself be fed so cheaply and poorly?

11[143]

“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. 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. The question with everything that you want to do: “is it such that I want to do it countless times?” is the greatest weight.

11[144]

It would be appalling if we still believed in sin: instead, whatever we will do, in countless repetition, it is innocent. 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. We think more charitably of all our ancestors than they

themselves thought, we mourn for their incorporated errors, not for their evil.

1. The most powerful knowledge.

2. Opinions and errors transform human beings and provide them their drives-or: their incorporated errors.

3. Necessity and innocence.

4. The play of life.

11[145]

The new education will have to prevent humans from succumbing to a single exclusive impulse and becoming an organ, counter to the natural tendency toward division of labor. Ruling and surveying beings must be created, who view the play of life and play along, now here, now there, without all too impetuously being drawn in. Power must ultimately devolve to them, it will be entrusted to them because they will not make intense use of it exclusively for one goal. At first they will have control of the finances, for the purpose of education (the first educators must educate themselves!), then because the finances are most secure in their control (otherwise it will be used everywhere for overly intense one-sided tendencies). Thus a new governing caste is formed.

11[146]

Aversion to life is rare. We sustain ourselves in it and even at the end and in difficult circumstances we are on good terms with it, not out of fear of something worse, not out of hope for something better, not out of habit (which would be boredom) not on account of occasional pleasure – rather on account of variety and because at bottom nothing is a repetition, yet it reminds us of something experienced. The allure of what is new and yet echoes our old taste – like a piece of music with much ugly content.

11[147]

A new teaching reaches its best representatives last of all, those long-established and establishing natures, because in them, earlier thoughts have become intertwined, with the fertility of a primeval forest, and are impenetrable. The weaker emptier sicklier needier are the ones who take on the new infection – the early adherents prove nothing against a teaching. I believe the first Christians were the most insufferable people with their “virtues.”

11[148]

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. 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. Whatever state this world can ever reach, it must have reached and not once, but countless times. 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. 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. 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[149]

Even chemical qualities flow and change: even if the time span is tremendous before the current formula of a compound is refuted by its successor. For the time being the formulas are true: for they are crude; what after all is 9 parts oxygen to II parts hydrogen! This 9:11 is thoroughly impossible to make precise, there is always an error in its realisation, consequently a certain range within which the experiment succeeds. But likewise within the same range there is eternal change, the eternal flux of all things, in no moment is oxygen precisely the same as in the previous, but something new instead: even if this novelty is too fine for all measurements, indeed if the whole development of all the innovations during the duration of the human race is perhaps not yet great enough to refute the formula. – Forms exist no more than qualities.

11[150]

We cannot conceive of becoming as anything other than the transition from an enduring “dead” state into a different enduring “dead” state. Oh, we call what is “dead” motionless! As if some-
thing motionless existed! The living is no opposite of the dead, but a special case.

11 [151]

Our assumption that bodies planes lines forms exist is only the result of our assumption that substances and things, enduring things exist. As certain as our concepts are fictions, so too are the
formations of mathematics. Such things do not exist – we can no more realize a plane, a circle, a line than a concept. The whole infinity always lies as reality and obstacle between 2 points.

11[152]

If all possibilities in the order and relation of forces were not already exhausted, then no infinity could have yet gone by. But because this must be, there is no new possibility anymore and everything must have already existed, countless times.

11[153]

Our intellect is not equipped to comprehend becoming, it strives to prove universal rigidity, thanks to its lineage from images. All philosophers have had the goal of proving eternal duration, because in this the intellect feels its own form and effect.

11[154]

Nothing is congruent in reality, for no planes exist there.

11[155]

Our senses never show us simultaneity but always succession. Space and the human laws of space presuppose the reality of images forms substances and their longevity, i.e., our space amounts to an imaginary world. We know nothing of the space that belongs to the eternal flux of things.

[to be continued…]

*
* *

“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. 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.”

(From Nietzsche’s letter to Heinrich Köselitz [Peter Gast], August 14, 1881, Sils-Maria)

⁂

“The world of forces does not suffer any diminution: otherwise, in infinite time it would have become weak and perished. The world of forces does not suffer any standstill: otherwise it would have been reached and the clock of existence would stand still. The world of forces never comes to equilibrium; it has never had a moment of rest; its force and its motion are equally great for every time.

The state which this world can reach must have been reached; if it can be reached, it must be reached. And if it has not been reached, then it is not reachable. And if it is reachable, then it must already have been reached — and indeed infinitely often. Since the present moment is one that has already been infinitely often and recurs in the same way, so too the moment between every becoming and passing away has been infinitely often — and thus all becoming and passing away.

Fourth Book: dithyrambic, all-embracing: “Annulus aeternitatis.” The longing to experience all this once more and once more, for all eternity.

It is the most scientific of all possible hypotheses. We deny final purposes: if existence had one, it would have been reached already. One then understands that the circle of recurrence has no “goal,” nor anything resembling one; rather, conceived in its totality, it is the highest state one can imagine.” (Nachlass, Summer 1881, KSA 9, 11[141]).

1884

“Immortal is the moment in which I begot the return. For the sake of that moment I endure the return.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part III, “The Convalescent”.)

1888

“The fundamental idea of the work — the idea of eternal recurrence, the highest formula of affirmation that can ever be attained — belongs to August of the year 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 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 the thought struck me.” (Ecce Homo, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” 1888).

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