The Thought-Drama of Eternal Recurrence

Abstract

In Ecce Homo (EH Z1), Nietzsche explains that he conceived eternal recurrence as the Grundconception or Grundgedanke of his best and most important work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nevertheless, as Robert Gooding-Williams notes in Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (ZDM), contemporary scholars usually explicate eternal recurrence as a thesis that Nietzsche merely happens to illustrate by means of Z and which can therefore be understood without reference to Z. In his original and decisive break from this interpretive practice, GoodingWilliams asserts the following: [T]he thought of eternal recurrence is (1) principally Zarathustra’s thought and (2) a thought that Zarathustra defines and develops (forms and transforms) with reference, in essence, to circumstances occurring in Zarathustra. As a Grundconception revealed by Zarathustra’s thoughts and actions, the thought of eternal recurrence is best interpreted within its dramatic context. . . . Qua Grundconception, the thought of eternal recurrence is inextricably bound up with that drama. It is essentially a dramatic thought, a thought-in-the-mode-ofdrama that I shall call the “thought-drama” of eternal recurrence. (ZDM 185–86; emphasis in original) Although other scholars have emphasized the dramatic aspects of Z, GoodingWilliams is the first to emphasize the dramatic aspects of the thought of eternal recurrence. His interpretive justification for this reading is sophisticated, erudite, and brilliantly imaginative in its blend of philosophical and literary analysis. For this reason alone (and there are many others), Gooding-Williams’s book is the most significant commentary on Z since Laurence Lampert’s defining