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Introduction

There is much in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche that perplexes his interpreters. The
thought of the eternal return is perhaps the riddle that disturbs and confuses
commentators most intensely. Matters are complicated when one considers the eternal
return in the history of philosophy, and Nietzsches knowledge about the appearance of
the eternal return in the various moments of Western thought. The eternal return is, after
all, a notion that figures in the philosophy Heraclitus. Karl Lwith also observes that the
doctrine of the eternal return was familiar to scholars from Plato and Aristotle to Hume,
Fichte and Schelling. Yet what is of primary significance here is the thought of the eternal
return appeared, contra Nietzsche the anti-Christian, in the ruminations of Aristotelian
theologians, and no less a writer than Dante imagined the Trinity as three revolving
circles into which the image of man had to be fitted miraculously. Superseding the
absolute beginning and end of the Christian drama of creation and consummation, man is
finally redeemed by co-revolving with the love inspired universe! 1 And the eternal
return, or the infinite repetition of events, to speak in a more scientific manner, continues
to be an object of thought in modern mathematics and physics of Henri Poincar2,
perhaps as a consequence of Platonic Judeao-Christian will to truth, and nothing less than
the most extreme form of nihilism. (WP 55)
Once we draw our gaze away from the history of philosophy, directing our attention to
the relationship between the eternal return and the greater portion of Nietzsches thought,
one is left with an endless number of irresolvable contradictions. How does one begin to
fathom a will that wills the eternal return of the same events? What kind of will could
will the eternal return, the bermensch? What would it mean for the will to will the
eternal return? Here we return to the orbit of the history of Western thought. The
Nietzsche interpreter merely attempts to demonstrate the scientific objectivity of the
eternal return of all things. The meaning of the eternal return, grounded upon its scientific
factuality, is gleaned from Nietzsches absolute concept of the will,3 through which the
1

Lwith, Karl. Meaning in History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (1949), pp. 219-20, n. 23.
Small, Robin. Nietzsche in Context. Aldershot: Ashgate. (2001), pp. 128-32.
3
Lwith, Karl. Meaning in History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (1949), p. 221.
2

eternal return serves as an ethical imperative, amor fati. By following this route, we stray
beyond the context in which Nietzsche thought about the eternal return, foundering on
contradictions. Assuming that Nietzsche holds an absolute concept of the will such a
will amounts to nada if course of the universe endlessly repeats itself without the
intervention of willing. As Lwith argues, the eternal return breaks asunder in two
irreconcilable pieces.4 The subjectivity of Nietzsches absolute concept of the will
does not fit into the assertion of the eternal cycle of the natural world. 5 However, the
will conceived of from this perspective begs the question, what did Nietzsche mean by
willing?
Contrary to appearances an analysis of the will is, in the manner that Nietzsche writes and
thinks about it, that is, the will to power, a fruitful place to begin investigating the eternal
return. The will to power is as far as possible from an absolute concept of the will. This
is precisely the mistake that interpreters of Nietzsche make when they attempt to
comprehend what he means by the eternal return. Both the will to power and the eternal
return figure prominently in Nietzsche criticism of the tradition of Western philosophy.
Without this context, one will never do justice to Nietzsches thought of the eternal return.
It is from this perspective that the eternal return will be investigated in this paper.
The point of departure for this analysis of the eternal return is the chapter entitled On
Redemption in Also Sprach Zarathustra. It represents a fulcrum in Nietzsches
explication of a philosophy of affirmation, the place of the overcoming the spirit of
revenge and metaphysics. At this juncture the critical and affirmative significance of the
doctrine of the will to power and the eternal return is elicited in their confrontation with
one another, in the confrontation between the will, which is the will to power, and time
and its it was. (Z II 20) The critical function of the will to power and the eternal that
will be disclosed in this paper devolves upon the various species of the will to power that
have evolved and left their trace in the memory of the will: history, society and culture.
Thus chapter One seeks to analyse the will to power in its multifariousness, structure and
dynamics, extricate the various meanings of the will to power in Nietzsches genealogies.
4
5

Ibid., p. 222.
Ibid.

In one respect, there is no context, or boundary to the will to power, which can be
expressed in the infinite scale of a Mandelbrot set. Nietzsche never tires of using different
metaphors for the will to power: physics, biology, politics, art and semiotics.
This is how one interprets the will to power, its expression in existence, the relationship
between wills to power, from the will to power of Christianity to the will to power of Art,
in a word, as an event.
Critically speaking, these manifestations of the will to power are evaluated according to
their negation or affirmation of life. This is the subject of chapter Two. As a result of the
analysis of the dynamics of wills to power, and with reference to the negation or
affirmation of life, it will be argued that the revenge and Spirit of Revenge, which is
discussed in On Redemption, is a will to power suffering from an acute sickness. Of
primary importance is the significance of revenge the wills ill will with time and its it
was. (Z II 20) This sickness is culture against life, [this] instinct of revenge has so
mastered mankind in the course of millennia that the whole of metaphysics, psychology,
conception of history, but above all morality, is impregnated with it. (WP 765) A long
history of utterly false inferences follows from this instinct of revenge and the
interiorisation of revenge, ressentiment, this affront against existence, against the whole
unstable sensibility of interacting wills to power. Morality is the will to power that seeks
to eliminate that which offends it, the diversity of singularity, which Nietzsche argues is
expressed in physics and metaphysics: unity, identity, permanence, substance, cause,
thinghood [and] being (TI Reason in Philosophy 5). This together with responsibility,
bad conscience, guilt, justice and punishment, conceived by a will to power poisoned
by revenge and ressentiment constitutes the hatred of existence. Thus, according to the
above, morality, physics and metaphysics, hitherto, has been sustained by the spirit of
revenge, and continues to be sustained by the spirit of revenge even at the stage when
metaphysics devaluates itself: nihilism.
How then, do we comprehend the eternal return from this perspective? This is the theme
of chapter Three. Contrary, to the interpretations of the eternal return and the will to
power by the likes of Lwith and Martin Heidegger, who argues that the will to power is

for Nietzsche the essence of Being, thus thrusting Nietzsches thought back into the
tradition of metaphysics that he was so passionately critical of 6, it will be argued that the
eternal return is an essential part of Nietzsches criticisms of metaphysics, from which
develops an affirmative philosophy. The eternal return, it will be shown, is a thought
critical of the category of identity that reveals the exigency of a time without presenta
mode of affirming that is totally other.7

Blanchot, Maurice. The Exigency of Return (1969) trans. Susan Hanson, in Michael Holland (ed.) The
Blanchot Reader Oxford: Blackwell. (1995), p. 281.
7
Blanchot, Maurice. The Exigency of Return (1970) trans. Susan Hanson, in Michael Holland (ed.) The
Blanchot Reader Oxford: Blackwell. (1995), p. 295.

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