What is eternal recurrence?

Friedrich Nietzsche, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Friedrich Nietzsche answers

The thought came to me as a weight — not a comfort, not a metaphysical decoration, but something I myself found nearly unendurable.1 The question it poses is simple and annihilating: what if this life, every moment of it, every agony and every small joy, recurs eternally, in identical sequence, without variation? Not as metaphor. As the most scientific hypothesis available once you have stripped away God, creation, infinite energy, any absolute beginning.2

I take it for the most scientific of all possible hypotheses precisely because it follows from those denials.3 Strip the universe of a creator and you are left with finite energy moving through infinite time — the combinations must repeat. The Pythagoreans glimpsed it: when the heavenly bodies reach the same constellation, the same Stoic will form an alliance with the same Epicurean and murder the same Caesar.4

I had dismissed this once. Then I could not dismiss it. My primary reaction was that no idea could be more gruesome.5 I wrote to Gast in January 1882 that one of the elemental ideas I was approaching required millennia to become something, and asked: from where am I to take the courage to pronounce it?6 That is not the rhetoric of a man who found his doctrine consoling.

In a moment of despair, working on Zarathustra, I wrote in a note: I do not want life again. How did I endure it? Creating.7 And yet — this is the turn that matters — the idea can serve as what I called the greatest weight precisely against nihilism.8 The modern disease is weightlessness: the creeping sense that whatever one does is of hardly any consequence, that existence has lost its meaning.

The eternal recurrence is the cure that does not lie. If everything I do now I shall do again, eternally, then nothing is trivial. The weight returns — not from God, not from morality, but from the structure of time itself. To endure the recurrence, however, one needs more than intellectual acceptance. One needs freedom from morality, new means against pain, the enjoyment of uncertainty and experimentalism as a counterweight to extreme fatalism, and — above all — the abolition of the concept of necessity as something imposed from outside.9

The recurrence, properly inhabited, transforms: no longer cause and effect but the continually creative; no longer will to preservation but to power; no longer the humble confession that everything is merely subjective, but the proud declaration — it is also our work.10 The unhealthiest type will experience the belief as a curse.11 Those who are strong enough — those who do not require extreme articles of faith, who can love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense, who are not made small by a considerable reduction of man's metaphysical value — they are the ones who can ask what the eternal recurrence truly means, and live inside the question without being destroyed by it.12

Sources

  1. his primary reaction is that no idea could be more gruesome.
    The Gay Science, pp. 30–31
  2. he takes it for 'the most scientific of all possible hypotheses' and feels that any refusal to accept it because it is such a terrifying notion would be a sign of weakness.
    The Gay Science, pp. 30–31
  3. Nietzsche considered this doctrine more scientific than other hypotheses because he thought that it followed from the denial of any absolute beginning, any creation, any infinite energy—any god.
    The Gay Science, pp. 30–31
  4. when the heavenly bodies are in the same constellation, the same events must also be repeated on earth, down to every small particular—so that every time the stars stand in a certain relation to each other, a Stoic will form an alliance with an Epicurean and murder Caesar.
    The Gay Science, pp. 31–32
  5. Nietzsche's associations with this doctrine are complex, but they cannot be understood unless one realizes that (1) his primary reaction is that no idea could be more gruesome.
    The Gay Science, pp. 30–31
  6. 'From where am I to take the courage to pronounce it!' (Letter to Gast).
    The Gay Science, pp. 31–32
  7. I do not want life again. How did I endure it? Creating. What makes me stand the sight of it? The vision of the overman who affirms life. I have tried to affirm it myself—alas!
    The Gay Science, pp. 31–32
  8. it occurs to Nietzsche that the belief that whatever I do now I shall do again and again, eternally, may cure this weightlessness by becoming 'the greatest weight.'
    The Gay Science, pp. 30–31
  9. To endure the idea of the recurrence one needs: freedom from morality; new means against the fact of pain... the enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty, experimentalism, as a counterweight to this extreme fatalism; abolition of the concept of necessity; abolition of the 'will'; abolition of 'knowledge-in-itself.'
    The Will to Power, pp. 545–546
  10. No longer joy in certainty but in uncertainty; no longer 'cause and effect' but the continually creative; no longer will to preservation but to power... 'it is also our work!—Let us be proud of it!'
    The Will to Power, pp. 545–546
  11. they will experience the belief in the eternal recurrence as a curse, struck by which one no longer shrinks from any action.
    The Will to Power, pp. 38–39
  12. The most moderate; those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak on that account.
    The Will to Power, pp. 38–39