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2 results

Nietzsche on the Eternal Recurrence

Nietzsche on the Eternal Recurrence
  • Neil Sinhababu
  • Published online:
    13 December 2024
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • The idea of the eternal recurrence is that we will live the exact same lives again an infinite number of times. Nietzsche appreciates that this would multiply the value of a single life by infinity, justifying intense emotional responses. His unpublished notes provide a cosmological argument for the eternal recurrence that anticipates Poincaré's recurrence theorem. Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra describes its hero discovering this idea and struggling to accept the recurrence of all bad things. He eventually comes to love the eternal recurrence because it will bring back all the joys of his life, and teaches this idea to others.

  • Chapter 7 - Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

  • Edited by Robert Pippin, University of Chicago
  • Book:
    Introductions to Nietzsche
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    09 February 2012, pp 152-177

  • Summary

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra (TSZ) is often reported to be Friedrich Nietzsche's popular and most read book, but the fact that the book is so unusual and often hermetic has made for wildly different sorts of reception. In traditional philosophical terms, Nietzsche stresses that one can start going wrong when they become captured by the picture of revealing reality, the truth, beneath appearances, in mere opinions. Zarathustra leaves his cave to revisit the human world because he wants both to prophesy and help hasten the advent of something like a new attempt on the part of mankind, a post beyond or over the human aspiration. TSZ is somehow to be addressed to the source of whatever longing, striving, desire gives life a direction, inspires sacrifice and dedication. Zarathustra stresses that good and evil, any life-orienting normative distinctions, are hardly everlasting; rather they must overcome themselves out of themselves again and again.