Eternal Recurrence

How did Nietzsche arrive at the thought?

In his autobiography Ecce Homo (1888) Nietzsche recalled the day. The "basic conception" of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "the thought of eternal recurrence, the highest formula of affirmation that can ever be attained", belongs to August 1881. "It was jotted down on a sheet of paper, signed '6000 feet beyond man and time'. That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana; by a mighty pyramidal block of rock not far from Surlej I stopped. Then this thought came to me." Sils-Maria in the Swiss Engadine became Nietzsche's summer home from then on.

er ist auf ein Blatt hingeworfen, mit der Unterschrift: »6000 Fuß jenseits von Mensch und Zeit«. Ich ging an jenem Tage am See von Silvaplana durch die Wälder; bei einem mächtigen pyramidal aufgetürmten Block unweit Surlei machte ich halt.

Nietzsche first put the thought in print at the end of the fourth book of The Gay Science (1882), in section 341, titled "The Greatest Weight". The very next section, 342, ends with Zarathustra's entrance, so the thought stands on the threshold of Zarathustra.

What does "The Greatest Weight" ask?

Section 341 opens with a supposition: "What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.'" The demon adds: "The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"

Dieses Leben, wie du es jetzt lebst und gelebt hast, wirst du noch einmal und noch unzählige Male leben müssen

Would you throw yourself down, Nietzsche asks, gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus, or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would answer, "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine"? If this thought gained power over you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you; the question in each and every thing, "Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?", would lie on your actions as the greatest weight. Here eternal recurrence is less a claim that the world really repeats itself than a test of whether one can affirm one's whole life enough to want it again exactly as it was. Nietzsche called this attitude amor fati, love of fate.

In "The Convalescent", in Part Three of Zarathustra, Zarathustra's animals call him "the teacher of the eternal recurrence" and sing: "Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being." Yet the thought first fills Zarathustra with nausea, because it means that even the smallest man, the meanest thing, returns eternally. Accepting the thought is itself portrayed as a process of overcoming.

Eternal recurrence before and after Nietzsche

The idea that everything repeats is very old. It was current among the Pythagoreans by the fourth century BC, and the Stoics taught that the universe is periodically consumed in a great conflagration and reborn, with exactly the same events repeated in every cycle. In the nineteenth century the debate over the laws of thermodynamics and the final state of the universe revived it. Eugen Dühring rejected the hypothesis as pessimistic, and the French revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui, arrested just before the Paris Commune of 1871, argued in L'Éternité par les astres (Eternity by the Stars, 1872), written in prison, that in an infinite universe every possible combination repeats itself eternally across time and space.

Nietzsche attempted cosmological proofs several times in his notebooks but never published them. The place of the thought in the history of Nietzsche interpretation has been sharply contested. Alfred Baeumler, who led the Nazi reading of Nietzsche, declared it incompatible with the will to power and his Germanic Übermensch and dropped it from Nietzsche's philosophy. Martin Heidegger and Karl Löwith, by contrast, saw it as the centre of Nietzsche's thought, and Gilles Deleuze, in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), reread eternal recurrence not as the repetition of the same but as the selection of difference.

How can Marxism view the thought?

In the very years when eternal recurrence came to Nietzsche, Marxist philosophy of nature wrestled with the same question. In the introduction to Dialectics of Nature, written in 1875–1876, Friedrich Engels set the eternal motion of matter against the "heat death" of the universe predicted by thermodynamics: "It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves." In that cycle every finite form of existence passes away, but, Engels wrote, "matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations", and with the same iron necessity with which it will again exterminate its highest flower on earth, the thinking mind, "it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it".

Es ist ein ewiger Kreislauf, in dem die Materie sich bewegt

Engels's cycle and Nietzsche's recurrence look alike but mean different things. Engels spoke not of the repetition of the same life but of matter endlessly developing into new forms and perishing, and his aim was to defend scientific materialism against theological creation and apocalypse. For Nietzsche eternal recurrence was an ethical test of whether an individual can affirm his life. Eugen Dühring, whom Engels criticised in Anti-Dühring, was also one of those who rejected the hypothesis. In his Arcades Project of the 1930s Walter Benjamin set Blanqui's and Nietzsche's eternal recurrence side by side, reading them as images of the experience of time in commodity society, where novelties pour out endlessly while the same thing is always repeated.