Nietzsche’s ideas concerning the eternal recurrence (or eternal return) were far from unique. But his own interpretation of the thought that life repeats itself eternally formed the foundation of so much of his own philosophy. Did he mean for us to take it literally or metaphorically, and either way, what implications does it have for his wider thought and our response to it? However, we interpret this remarkable idea; its possibility is an interesting, perhaps even disturbing, one to ponder.
The Demon’s Question: Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence
“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… must return to you — all in the same succession and sequence,” writes Nietzsche in his 1882 work The Gay Science. It was the idea he called “the greatest weight,” and whether we are to take it literally or metaphorically, its implications are extraordinary.
An Original Thought?
As a philologist and scholar of the pre-Socratics, Nietzsche was well-versed in the thought of early philosophers such as Heraclitus, who believed in the possibility of a cyclical repetition of all things. He was also familiar with the myth of Sisyphus, in which Sisyphus is forced to roll a boulder up to the top of the same hill, only for it to roll back again in an endlessly repeating cycle. By Nietzsche’s time, in the West, at least, such ideas had fallen out of favor, owing to the influence of Christianity and its linear understanding of time. However, ideas of a cyclical model of the world would have also been familiar to Nietzsche through his reading of Arthur Schopenhauer, an expert in Eastern, esoteric religion. In the East, a cyclical view of time prevailed, and Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence would not have seemed so far-fetched in a different philosophical context.
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterTherefore, while Nietzsche was not particularly original in his inclusion of such an idea in his own work, its centrality to his thought demands closer consideration. In particular, when we look at what Nietzsche said in one of his most famous works, Thus Spake Zarathustra: “‘Now I die and vanish,’ you would say, ‘and in an instant I am a nothing. Souls are as mortal as bodies. But the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs,— it will create me again! I myself belong to the causes of eternal recurrence. I come again, with this sun, with this earth.’”
A Literal Thought?
Do our lives repeat eternally? This is a cosmological question that arises as we encounter Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence for the first time. Is it true to say that our lives are endlessly repeating themselves over and over again without any form of deviation? The life I am living now is the same life I have lived eternally, over and over again. Whilst several of the world’s major religions—Buddhism, for example—argue for a cyclical view of time and the recurrence of life in one way or another, Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence proposes something different. There is no alteration, deviation, or possibility of change—this is not reincarnation into something better or worse. It is exactly the same. The eternally recurring life is one that repeats itself without any difference from what we have experienced already.
Imagine the thought for yourself. Think back to moments of supreme happiness you have enjoyed—your first kiss, the memory of a happy vacation, holding your newborn child for the first time. These are all moments we might gladly repeat. But what of their opposites? No human life is devoid of suffering in some form—the loss of loved ones, the failure of our own hopes and dreams, physical ailments, and so on. In the eternal recurrence, such things would repeat into infinity—the good and the bad.
Nietzsche famously said “God is dead,” and that rejection of religion necessitates a rejection of the afterlife. It seems unlikely that Nietzsche replaced thousands of years of theological speculation with his own theory plucked from ancient Greek philosophy and Eastern religions. There is no evidence to suggest Nietzsche took the eternal recurrence literally as a cosmological theory of how the universe operates, and any suggestion of its literal meaning would be scorned by current scientific thinking. Nevertheless, Nietzsche is sympathetic toward cyclical views of time and wanted to explore the eternal recurrence seriously. He writes:
“Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, — a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. And then you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and the whole fabric of things which make up your life. This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh forever.”
Some argue that Nietzsche sought to study science to explore the eternal recurrence further, but scholarly consensus suggests such intentions were abandoned. The eternal recurrence was an idea he wanted to take seriously as a thought experiment, even as it had no literal basis. What, then, is its purpose?
Nietzsche’s Life Affirmation
To think the thought of “the greatest weight,” to imagine our lives repeating themselves over and over again is, for Nietzsche, an affirmation and acceptance of who we are and what it means to exist. He uses a French term to describe the ideal reaction to the thought of repetition: “amor fati” or “love of fate.” The eternal recurrence, rather than a cosmological idea, becomes an ethical one, an emotional one, a life-affirming one. To consider one’s life as a whole—to date, or even at the end of life—is to look back on a landscape of both good, fertile land and rough, rocky soil. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, where the thought of the eternal recurrence is partly developed, the central character, the prophet Zarathustra, exists in an alpine landscape of high mountains and low-lying verdant pastures, forests, and lakes. It is as though the landscape itself represents the life over which we are asked to look back on. To do so is both a joy and a burden, depending on the kind of life we have lived. It is a challenge to each of us, and there can be no denying that when faced with the thought in Nietzsche’s prose, we readily undertake his challenge to think of that very possibility.
In a collection of his notes known as The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes: “The first question is by no means whether we are satisfied with ourselves; but whether we are satisfied with anything at all. Granting that we should say yea to any single moment, we have then affirmed not only ourselves, but the whole of existence. For nothing stands by itself, either in us or in other things: and if our soul has vibrated and rung with happiness, like a chord, once only and only once, then all eternity was necessary in order to bring about that one event,—and all eternity, in this single moment of our affirmation, was called good, was saved, justified, and blessed.”
“Whether we are satisfied with anything at all.” This is the question Nietzsche asks us to consider. His intention is a difficult one to stomach. He tells us that a truly joyful moment is one that is worth enduring much suffering to realize. Such a thought may be impossible for some, and we may rightly ask how such a thought tallies with, say, the horrors of the Holocaust or other life-changing events. But for Nietzsche, the point stands. The eternal recurrence is the means by which we come to affirm—or not—our lives as they are.
If we can look back and will that life again, accepting our sorrows as the price for our joys, then we can, according to Nietzsche, come to an acceptance of our present situation and see our lives not as a series of detached episodes, but as a process we are caught up in, one we can affirm. This act of life affirmation—“Bejahung” in German—is an essential aspect of Nietzsche’s thought. In contrast, he suggests Christianity is life-denying, given its focus on the life to come rather than the moment in which we live now.
It is that moment that matters most to Nietzsche—a moment in which a person can say with confidence they affirm what has brought them to that moment through a love of faith. Nietzsche’s own biography was hardly short of suffering—the death of his father at an early age, his poor and ever-worsening physical health, and the failure of others to recognize his brilliance during his lifetime.
How Nietzsche viewed his own life is surely bound up with his account of the eternal recurrence, and he must often have asked himself the very question the demon asks, too. For Nietzsche, the eternal recurrence is both “the greatest weight” and also that which has the power to set us free from what is past—to accept everything in our lives as bringing us to the moment in which we exist now, to embrace “amor fati” and the love of fate. “My philosophy brings the triumphant idea of which all other modes of thought will ultimately perish. It is the great cultivating idea: the races that cannot bear it stand condemned; those who find it the greatest benefit are chosen to rule…” Eternal recurrence, for Nietzsche, is nothing short of life affirmation itself.
