Doctrine Of Eternal Recurrence Research Articles

Nietzsche’s Heraclitean Doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

Abstract There is a long and successful scholarly tradition of commenting on Nietzsche’s deep affinity for the philosophy of Heraclitus. But scholars remain puzzled as to why he suggested at the end of his career, in Ecce Homo, that the doctrine he valued most, the eternal recurrence of the same, might also have been taught by Heraclitus. This essay aims to answer this question through a close examination of Nietzsche’s allusions to Heraclitus in his first published mention of eternal recurrence in The Joyful Science and in a related set of notes from the period when he was formulating and defending his doctrine of eternal recurrence while writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The key to answering this question, it is argued, is that Nietzsche came to believe that the doctrine of eternal recurrence, when properly understood as requiring identical repetition, has to presuppose a Heraclitean reality of eternal, absolute, and universal flux.

Nietzsche’s Heraclitean Doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

AbstractThere is a long and successful scholarly tradition of commenting on Nietzsche’s deep affinity for the philosophy of Heraclitus. But scholars remain puzzled as to why he suggested at the end of his career, inEcce Homo, that the doctrine he valued most, the eternal recurrence of the same, might also have been taught by Heraclitus. This essay aims to answer this question through a close examination of Nietzsche’s allusions to Heraclitus in his first published mention of eternal recurrence inThe Joyful Scienceand in a related set of notes from the period when he was formulating and defending his doctrine of eternal recurrence while writingThus Spoke Zarathustra. The key to answering this question, it is argued, is that Nietzsche came to believe that the doctrine of eternal recurrence, when properly understood as requiring identical repetition, has to presuppose a Heraclitean reality of eternal, absolute, and universal flux.

The pessimistic origin of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence

ABSTRACTIn this article I argue that we should understand Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence as the ideal of life affirmation opposed to philosophical pessimism, the view that life is not worth living. I first articulate Nietzsche’s psychological account of pessimism as a vengeful focus on the past and an aversion to time understood as transience. I then consider the question of why a person with the opposite psychological orientation – a creative relation to the future and an endorsement of time – would will the eternal recurrence of all things. My answer appeals to Nietzsche’s notions of will to power and the redemption of the past from its senselessness. The interpretation of eternal recurrence that emerges from this approach takes Nietzsche’s vision of a great, world-redeeming individual to be integral to his doctrine of eternal recurrence. This is just one way in which it differs from common interpretations of eternal recurrence as a cosmological theory or thought experiment.

On Debt and Redemption: Friedrich Nietzsche's Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence

AbstractIn this essay, I argue that the notion of monetary debt does not displace but merely conceals our deeper, ontological debt to the sources of our being and way of life. I suggest that first Christianity and then modern science attempted to find a means of redemption that could free us from debt, but that both were unable to reconcile the ideas of freedom and indebtedness. I then examine the way in which Friedrich Nietzsche tried to resolve the apparent contradiction of our debt to the past and our freedom to shape the future by developing a new form of redemption rooted in his doctrine of the eternal recurrence.

Valuation and the Will to Power: Nietzsche's Ethics with Ontology

ABSTRACT Nietzsche's texts invite perplexing questions about the justification and objectivity of his ethical views. According to the interpretation suggested here, Nietzsche does not advance a substantive (first-order) normative ethics, but proposes, based on his ontological idea of will to power, an instrumentalist theory of (second-order) value. He is not a realist about value—according to him, nothing is intrinsically valuable. However, things, actions, beliefs, and values can be evaluated with reference to their capacities in serving our fundamental quest for power. The central advantage of this interpretation against competing readings is that it attempts to make sense of how an “objective” (r)evaluation fits together with antirealism or nihilism about value, including how the “ethics” of will to power is to be understood alongside the metaphysical and ethical doctrine of eternal recurrence.

Nietzsche on the Diachronic Will and the Problem of Morality

In this paper I offer an innovative interpretation of Nietzsche's metaethical theory of value which shows him to be a kind of constitutivist. For Nietzsche, I argue, valuing is a conative attitude which institutes values, rather than tracking what is independently of value. What is characteristic of those acts of willing which institute values is that they are owned or authored. Nietzsche makes this point using the vocabulary of self-mastery. One crucial feature of those who have achieved this feat, and have consequently become agents, is that they possess a diachronic or long will and are consequently capable of the rational governance of future behaviour. The possession of a will of this sort is crucial because it is a necessary condition for engaging in temporally unified activities which are a requisite of authorship. Nietzsche, I argue, makes these points in his doctrine of eternal recurrence which provides a test that acts of will must pass to count as laws. In the final section of the paper I argue for the superiority of this interpretation over some of its competitors.

The Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence and its significance with respect to On the Genealogy of Morals

Reading the writings of Nietzsche is somewhat like putting together a large and complex jigsaw puzzle. In this paper I aim to show how two pieces of Nietzsche’s puzzle fit together: the first piece being the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence; and the second piece being On the Genealogy of Morals. In order to see how these two pieces lock in to one another we must understand that Nietzsche’s great love of fate - his ‘Amor Fati’ - is what he calls the “formula for greatness in a human being” (BGE 1 :6).2 In this paper I will address the question of how we are to reconcile Nietzsche’s amorfati, understood as a brand of determinism, with Nietzsche’s own understanding of the Doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence as the ultimate test for the highest affirmation of life. Through an investigation of how Nietzsche thinks we should react to the thought of the application of the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence to our own lives - namely, the psychological implications of the doctrine - I aim to show that by proposing the Doctrine as the ultimate test for the highest affirmation of life, Nietzsche also provides part of what he takes to be the solution to the threat of both the impending nihilism and the inhibiting current morality of his age as he discusses them in the Genealogy.

Nietzsche, the Kantian Self, and Eternal Recurrence

Nietzsche's concept of the self grows out of Kant-and then attempts to subvert Kant. Nietzsche agrees that a unified subject is a necessary presupposition for ordered experience to be possible. But instead of a Kantian unified self, Nietzsche develops a conception of the self of the sort that we have come to call postmodern. He posits a composite bundle of drives that become unified only through organization. This subject is unified, it is just that its unity is forged, constructed, brought about by domination. But if the self is a bundle of struggling and shifting drives, how could it remain unified over time? Nietzsche's concept of the self requires his doctrine of eternal recurrence, which promises that I will remain the same, exactly and precisely the same, without the slightest change, not merely throughout this life, but for an eternity of lives.

Suffering, Transience and Immortal Longings

This essay explores Lou Salomé’s intellectual friendships with Nietzsche and Freud, with particular respect to the psychological implications of Nietzsche’s doctrine of Eternal Recurrence and Freud’s quite different acceptance of transience. The essay conjectures that it is Salomé who serves as a significant mediation between the later phase of Nietzsche’s philosophy and Freud’s development of a metapsychology reliant on the hypothesis of a death drive.

Nietzsche Contra Heraclitus

s Michel Foucault says, Nietzsche's philosophy is a struggle with lan xXguage. What was the result of that struggle (if there could be any) or? better?what did that struggle express? The following is an attempt partially to answer that basic question. The tide might be seen as provocative since the kinship between Nietzsche and Heraclitus is widely acknowledged (Heidegger, his Nietzsche, is the exception here) and frequently confirmed by Nietzsche himself. Among the most famous declaration of that brotherhood comes from Ecce Homo, where he writes about Heraclitus in whose proximity I feel altogether warmer and better than anywhere else. The affirmation of passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy; saying Yes to oppo sition and war; becoming, along with a radical repudiation of the very con cept of being?all this is clearly more closely related to me than anything else thought to date (EH GT 3). Further, he writes that the Zaratustrian doc trine of eternal recurrence could have also been taught by Heraclitus. The kinship between Heraclitus and Nietzsche consists the problem they con front. Their kinship could be called thematic, but despite Nietzsche's dec laration, this is not the kinship of the way of thinking. If two philosophers deal with the same problem, it is not obvious that they think similarly. In such a case the similarity could be only superficial, covering a deeper level of divergence. My thesis is that Nietzsche is faithful not to Heraclitus himself but to his interpretation of Heraclitus from Philosophy the Tragic Age of the Greeks. He is faithful to his way of interpreting the Greek philosopher, and it is this way that marks his own way of thinking. The question of relationship between

The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra (review)

Reviewed by: The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra Kathleen Marie Higgins The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, by Stanley Rosen; 286 pp. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, $18.95 paper. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche remarks that he wants to be read the way good old philologists read Horace. Stanley Rosen has fullled this Nietzschean wish. His Mask of the Enlightenment interprets Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra with astute attention, and it delivers on Rosen’s stated aim of avoiding both the obscurantism of postmoderns and the selective attention of analytic philosophers. It is philological in the best sense, balancing its consideration of detail with a sense of the book’s larger context, as well as the context of textual predecessors to whom Nietzsche refers and responds. Rosen reads Nietzsche as a fundamentally political thinker, who seeks to transform humanity’s collective circumstances. The ultimate goal of this effort [End Page 193] is “to breed a new race of mankind” that would supersede the decadent existing race (p. 56). This positive aim, however, requires the destruction of the existing race to make room for the new one. Zarathustra, according to Rosen, is an artistic statement of these aspirations and a tactic for achieving them. From the beginning, Zarathustra calls for the appearance of the superman and the destruction of contemporary European culture. Aware of how far his contemporaries are from the superman, Zarathustra utilizes a double rhetoric, concealing his real intent from all but the select few. Zarathustra addresses noble lies to the crowd, which make his doctrines appear to be afrmative and salvational, but try to seduce the majority to their own self-destruction. Preaching the coming of the superman and the doctrine of eternal recurrence (the view that time recurs cyclically), Zarathustra’s real purpose is to accelerate nihilism and hasten the destruction of current European culture. This aim, however, is concealed by the seemingly afrmative character of these doctrines. Zarathustra’s esoteric message rests on Nietzsche’s materialistic reductionism, according to Rosen. Nietzsche understands reality, fundamentally, to be nothing but chaotic uctuations among accumulating points of force. Even the expression “will to power” suggests a more coherent ontological structure than reality exhibits. The doctrine of “will to power” is an exoteric idea that conceals Nietzsche’s belief that the world is a chaos of uctuating points of force. Will, subjectivity, and physics are all illusions that disguise a cruel and uncaring world. The doctrine of eternal recurrence, in its esoteric sense, reects this vision. Claiming that the sequence of temporal events recurs endlessly, the doctrine is an image for the universe’s spontaneous being, which has no inherent value. This vision is nihilistic, for it implies the illusory status of our subjective selves, any sense of progress, and even our scientic theories. If reality is ultimately chaos, our lives are meaningless. So understood, the doctrine of eternal recurrence is not obviously compatible with Zarathustra’s call for the superman. The superman project is doomed to fail, since eternal recurrence implies that the condition of decadence will recur, even if a superman is generated at some point. Eternal recurrence is also incompatible with amor fati, the love of fate that Zarathustra preaches. Eternal recurrence is an image of chance, of the random happening of force-points, while amor fati is a deterministic vision. Chance and necessity are the same in their human signicance. Both deny human freedom. Chance means that our behavior arises from the un-ordered movements of force points. One of the achievements of Rosen’s book is its mapping of such tensions within Zarathustra, tensions that motivate the drama of the book. These tensions are numerous. Zarathustra preaches the superman to those he seeks as followers, but followers are inherently incapable of the superman’s creative [End Page 194] spontaneity. Zarathustra’s bombast, used to attract attention, is in tension with the subtlety of his actual message. The activism implied by Zarathustra’s preaching is at odds with the fatalism of amor fati. The rank-ordering of human types, a feature of Zarathustra’s elitism, is incompatible with his inner doctrine that the world is chaos. Rosen concludes that some of these tensions...

Incommensurability and Recurrence: From Oresme to Simmel

The doctrine of eternal recurrence, which asserts that every state of affairs must come into being again on infinitely many other occasions, has attracted few supporters and many opponents. The arguments deployed against it have also been many and varied. The present discussion aims at throwing new light on just one of these arguments, by revealing a historical dimension which has until now gone unnoticed. The argument is to be found in Georg Simmel's lecture series, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, first published in 1907.1 In discussing Nietzsche's attempts to construct a proof of the doctrine of eternal recurrence, Simmel raises an objection which takes the form of a particular counter-example. He describes a system of three wheels which move with incommensurable speeds, in such a way that their initial position will never again be reached, even if their motions continue for an infinite time. Simmel's counterexample has given rise to much discussion, especially in recent years.2

Eternal Recurrence

The doctrine of eternal recurrence, the claim that everytning that occurs does so not only once but infinitely many times, figures in the writings of Nietzsche in several forms, and it can be understood in different ways. Here I shall show that one of these approaches allows us to see the doctrine as a philosophical theory about the nature of reality: that is, as an ontological doctrine. The interpretation is worth exploring because it allows us not only to see what Nietzsche's arguments really are, but also to bring to light problems and objections that go unnoticed in most accounts of the idea.

Three Interpretations of Eternal Recurrence

It is commonly agreed that Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence is hard to understand. The difficulty lies not so much in any great complexity or highly technical character as in uncertainty over what kind of doctrine it is intended to be. Without knowing this we are in no position to agree upon the guidelines for assessing its validity or invalidity. In this discussion I intend to suggest an approach to the problem which will help us to answer these questions—and to avoid some of the difficulties encountered by previous interpretations.

Facets of Megarian Fatalism: Aristotelian Criticisms and the Stoic Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence

The Megarians, as well as their Stoic heirs, are known to have been fatalists or logical determinists in the following, very broad sense of these terms: with respect to at least certain classes or kinds of nontautologous propositions, they held that the mere truth of a proposition entails its necessity. This paper explores, in a very tentative fashion, the relation between several versions of logical determinism and two passages in the Aristotelian corpus, one of which is specifically directed against Megarian doctrine and the other of which is an argument purporting to establish a thesis concerning the necessity of future events which Aristotle wished to reject but which the Megarian logician Diodorus Cronus apparently accepted.

Differance in the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

AbstractThe doctrine of eternal recurrence in Nietzsche is an essentially ecstatic doctrine. It is also strangely incommunicable. Here the ecstasy that reveals singularizes. The essential revelation closes the one to whom it is given in his own singularity; only a singularity opens to the abysses and the Dionysian truth. Heidegger could then see in it an ontological doctrine. And an authentifying-singularizing-doctrine. Not, though, the same as his own. For Heidegger could suggest that the time horizon in which this doctrine conceives Being in its Becoming-the "deep eternity"-is in fact not a deep structure of time, but the linear time of an eternity of instants. Eternity is not deep. In addition the subject of the Nietzschean ecstasy-which longs for eternity- cannot appropriate itself, cannot become a whole, cannot really achieve singular existence. Are these Heideggerian thoughts criticisms of the Nietzschean experience? Is the deep ontological truth to be then sought elsewhere? Is the wholeness of one's own life- the essence of this existence- to be then sought in another experience of the time-horizon of Being? Or else do these Heideggerian observations not rather point to another structure of the thought involved-something like a surface thought? And to another structure of the one smitten by this thought-a singularity that exists only in a circle of continuous metamorphoses? Some deconstructive work by Derrida encourages us to look in this direction.

Nietzsche's Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence

Nietzsche's Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence