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Zarathustra, the Moment, and Eternal Recurrence of
the Same: Nietzsche’s Ontology of Time
by Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen
Nietzsche’s overt references to and estimations of science in the body of
his published and unpublished works constitute a system of reflecting and interlocking
echoes, a playing back and forth of confronting and opposing implications that seem to
argue his essential position on the matter to a point of nullified stasis. In the views of
many commentators on Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s position on pure science is fundamentally
inconsistent, sufficiently at odds with itself that they find it fair to say he has no position
at all. On the one hand, Nietzsche periodically attacks science as the mechanistic
interpretation of the world, as postulating substance—the hard materiality that consists in
entities that are discrete and that persist without intrinsic change through time, that persist
unless acted upon from without—as the foundation of the world, as the essence of the
real. On the other hand, Nietzsche, in the famous passage from The Will to Power,
heralds the principle of eternal recurrence of the same as “the most scientific of all
possible hypotheses,” as if the commendation were without implicit qualification. 1
It is the position of this paper that Nietzsche committed himself to the
development of a coherent theory of ontology, one which finds much of its inspiration in
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. 1
Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968) section 55.
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the mid-nineteenth century ideas of natural science and in Naturphilosophie. In the
ongoing development of heat theory and particularly the emerging proposition of heat as
a form of energy, Nietzsche observed a shift in the orientation of natural science from an
essentially mechanistic vision of the universe to a conception that espoused a radical
Becoming over the primacy of Being that was inherent in the atomism of mechanistic
science. That transition to a new model was found in the debates over tenable
propositions for the science of thermodynamics and energetics, as well as various
conceptions in Naturphilosophie that contribute to the idea, as labeled by one theorist, of
a Perpetuum Mobile . Further, the very transition Nietzsche found in science away from a 2
mechanistic atomism to an energeticist model of Becoming provides the operational
paradigm for the full argument of eternal recurrence, an argument that Nietzsche never
completely committed to paper but that may be reconstructed from the total range of
statements he did make and which arrives at a proposition of neither recurrence nor
eternity, one that finally eliminates the ontology of normative time.
On the basis of numerous entries in the Nachlaß, it can be said that
Nietzsche as an ontologist makes a clear commitment to the primacy of Becoming over
Being. His view of the generally and historically assumed primacy of Being is that it is a
falsification of the reality of Becoming, a “primordial belief,” in his own words, that the
world is One and “at rest,” and that it is a falsification for the purpose of survival—a form
of pragmatic thinking that we as a species must commit but that does not correspond in
G. W. Muncke, “Perpetuum Mobile,” in Johann Samuel Traugott Gehlers Physikalisches 2
Wörterbuch, ed. W. Brandes et al. (Leipzig, 1825-45) 408-423.
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literal terms to the reality of the world. It follows that any science or philosophy oriented 3
on the “truth” of Being must be a continuation of the falsification. Yet, he found that, in
much of contemporary scientific theorizing regarding heat as a form of energy, reality
reveals itself as a dynamical process, leaving the philosophical and scientific approaches
to the world in terms of Being—of permanence, of numerically and temporally identical
things, such as the atoms of Newtonian physics—a useful fiction. For Nietzsche, the
conception of the world in terms of Becoming is the hypothesis from which philosophy
must start if it is to be compatible with the paradigmatic shift in science from an
atomistic-mechanistic perspective to a dynamistic-processual one. 4
Heat theory eventually settled out into the science of thermodynamics, and
the first two laws of thermodynamics constituted, for a thinker like Nietzsche and
certainly not for him alone, a potential logical, ontological contradiction. The first law
asserted the conservation of energy—that the total amount of energy can never be altered,
that energy can never be created or destroyed. The second law, the law of entropy, if
viewed as applicable to the universe as a whole, implied the final anti-energeticist
triumph of Being in demanding a completion of history in the teleology of the heat death
of the universe—a fate of ultimate and permanent stasis and the end to all change, all
Becoming.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University 3
Press, 1986), Preface, section 4.
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Preface, section 5. 4
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Nietzsche’s necessary recourse and solution was to accept the first law of
the conservation of energy and deny the applicability of the second law of entropy to the
universe as a whole by adopting an a-teleological position. The universe must have no
end, in his view, for to reach an end is to achieve the finality of Being. He saw a universe
that “plays its game in infinitum,” a posture that overtly denies the ending in 5
unstructuredness, in no-thing-ness, in the thermodynamic heat death of everything.
It is with his rejection of the second law and his upholding of the first law
of thermodynamics that Nietzsche aligns himself with the science of dynamism-
energetics of the mid-nineteenth century and with a range of views of Naturphilosophie
that can be grouped under the rubric of Perpetuum Mobile and that take the universe as
without any rest either at a beginning or an end. For Nietzsche, “the world may be
thought of as a certain definite quantity of force and as a certain definite number of
centers of force” with no possibility of a final dissipation. The finite and a-teleological 6
aspect of the world as energy manifests itself as a cyclicality in which the disorganized or
degraded energy formations become the material for reprocessing or recycling, making
the universe what he saw as a “monster of energy” that sustains itself as a Perpetuum 7
Mobile that “lives on itself: its excrements are its food.” The element of cyclicality 8
contributes the foundation for Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence, for eternal
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1066. 5
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1066. 6
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1067. 7
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1066. 8
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recurrence was what Nietzsche would make of the Perpetuum Mobile as he altered the
concept to suit and support his own distinctive ontological philosophy.
The contributions of the Perpetuum Mobile to Nietzsche’s ontology are
derived from a number of scientists and philosophers. The key figure in science whom, as
Alwin Mittasch has pointed out, Nietzsche read extensively and who directly asserted 9
the indestructibility of energy was Robert Mayer, one of the principal contributors to the
development of the theory of heat as a form of energy. Mayer, in an essay from 1862, 10
speaks of “the discovery of the law of the indestructibility of force.” In an essay from 11
1870, Mayer uses Hermann von Helmholtz’s phrase, “the law of the conservation of
force.” And in 1845, Mayer gives a clear account of the essence of the conservation of 12
energy: “In all physical and chemical processes the given force remains a constant
quantity.” 13
Alwin Mittasch, “Friedrich Nietzsches Naturbeflissenheit,” in Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger 9
Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1950-52 (Heidelberg, 1950) 22.
Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concepts to Relativity 10
and Quanta (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966) 48.
Robert Julius Mayer, “Über das Fieber. Ein iatromechanischer Versuch,” 1862, in Die Mechanik 11
der Wärme in gesammelten Schriften, 3rd edition, ed. Jacob J. Weyrauch (Stuttgart, 1893) 324-336.
Mayer, “Über die Bedeutung der unveränderlichen Grössen,” 1870, in Die Mechanik der Wärme 12
in gesammelten Schriften, 381-393.
Mayer, “Die organische Bewegung in ihrem Zusammenhange mit dem Stoffwechsel. Ein 13
Beitrag zur Naturkunde,” 1845, in Die Mechanik der Wärme in gesammelten Schriften, 45-128.
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A variety of writers developed the idea of energy as flowing in cyclical or
circular patterns, a concept that serves as a foundation for the core assertion of
Nietzsche’s initial conception of eternal recurrence, as presented in the passage included
in The Will to Power. The scientist Georg Wilhelm Muncke viewed the first law of
thermodynamics in terms of circular processing and reprocessing. Muncke uses the
phrase “perpetuum mobile physicum” in the context of the world as a “circular course of
things . . . which ever endures and uninterruptedly renews itself . . .” In a similar vein, 14
Karl Wilhelm Gottlieb Kastner refers to “curvilinear motions that proceeding from a
point, return to it, and thus endlessly renew themselves. . .” Jakob Friedrich Fries writes 15
of the natural disposition toward “a certain circular course [Kreislauf] of the same
recurring phenomena.” 16
Central to Nietzsche’s ontological worldview is the principle of a motive
force that unceasingly generates and regenerates energy formations, maintaining a
perpetual dynamism. Beginning with his Birth of Tragedy and Philosophy in the Tragic
Age of the Greeks and extending all the way to his late notes, Nietzsche sees an “inner
will,” —which he claims is what is missing from mechanistic science—in terms of a 17
Heraclitean strife of opposites that brings about the creation-destruction of the universe
Muncke, 408-423. 14
Karl Wilhelm Gottlieb Kastner, Grundzüge der Physik und Chemie, 2nd edition (Nuremberg, 15
1832-33) 66.
Jacob Friedrich Fries, “Experimentalphysik” in Lehrbuch der Naturlehre (Jena, 1826) 125-126. 16
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 619. 17
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ad infinitum. It is this motive force as oppositional strife to which Nietzsche gives the
name “will to power,” defining it as “pathos,” that is, a suffering from the contradiction 18
or Ineinander (entanglement) of opposite forces, which “relieves” itself via an 19
autogenerative overflow and re-flow, an eternal world creation-destruction.
Here again, Nietzsche found support in the science of energetics as well in
the Naturphilosophie that embraced the new scientific paradigms. The scientist Johann
Heinrich Ferdinand Autenrieth speaks of polarities that are never in complete equilibrium
as “a continuing source of all motion. . .” This source “most likely. . .explains the
continuation of the motion of all the stars, the sun and our earth. . .” Autenrieth identifies
this source as the “vital force,” calling its “perpetual internal change a not further
explicable basis [Grund] that sustains such continual disturbance between the essentially
interrelated antitheses and does not allow them to come to equilibrium.” He refers to this
“far from equilibrium” situation by the term Indifferenzpunkt out of which comes creation
via destruction/de-differentiation. 20
Ultimately, it is the Naturphilosophie of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von
Schelling that had the most extensive influence over Nietzsche’s thought, and particularly
his will to power as pathos. Like Nietzsche, Schelling posits the autogenerative source of
the world in terms of the “dynamic indifference” or “dynamic unity” of opposing yet
Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich, 1956) vol. 3, p. 778. 18
Nietzsche, KSA 7: 7[196], (7.111). 19
Johann Heinrich Ferdinand Autenrieth, Ansicht über Natur- und Seelenleben. ed. Hermann 20
Friedrich Autenrieth (Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1836) 36-37, 295, 383-384, 391.
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interlaced originary forces [Urkräfte], such as attractive and repulsive forces. For
Schelling, as for Nietzsche, there is no force in nature that is not counteracted by an
opposing force; the two constitute a paired polarity and are in a continuous conflict.
Again as with Nietzsche, this continuous conflict is ontologically more basic than the
manifest universe, with the latter reduced to a generation based on the strife of the
Urkräfte. Schelling asserts the primacy of the polarities by conjoining the “dynamic 21
unity” of opposing Urkräfte that he calls “the common soul of nature” and the principle 22
of life with a repeated “rekindling” that continually sustains the conflict of opposites. 23
Schelling refers to this principle as a system of “mutual determination of receptivity and
activity, comprised within one concept. . .” He, too, argues that an unending cyclicality 24
arises out of the opposing forces, with one acting centrifugally, the other counteracting
centripetally. 25
A final contribution to Nietzsche’s thinking—and, as will be seen, particularly to
eternal recurrence—comes from Friedrich Zöllner, a physicist whom Nietzsche read
carefully and remarked upon. Zöllner was one of the first physicists to employ Georg
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Leipzig, 1797) 21
111.
Schelling, Von der Weltseele; eine Hypothese der höheren Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen 22
Organismus (Hamburg, 1798) 567-569.
Schelling, Von der Weltseele, 568. 23
Schelling, Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (Jena and Leipzig, 1799) 90. 24
Schelling, Von der Weltseele, 381. 25
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Friedrich Bernhard Riemann’s non-Euclidean geometry to space, rendering space finite
but unbounded. Zöllner wrote detailed discussions of non-Euclidean geometry in relation
to time, space, and force. He argued that the total amount of force in the universe is finite
and that finite force and infinite time are compatible with non-Euclidean geometry. Most
important to Nietzsche was Zöllner’s idea that time and space curve back into
themselves, extending the cyclical pattern of energy flow that Nietzsche found in
Naturphilosophie to the very structure of the universe. 26
These observations suggest that there was a concept developing in
Naturphilosophie as it was influenced by the science of heat as energy in the mid-
nineteenth century, one which we have termed Perpetuum Mobile—employing Muncke’s
language—and which was composed of the following propositions: the conservation of
force as a constant quantity, the cyclical flow of energy, the continuing presence of energy
established in paired and opposing polarities that remain perpetually in a condition of
dynamical disequilibrium, the rejection of the principle of entropy in application to the
universe as a single closed system, and the arrangement of cosmic space in accordance
with a non-Euclidean geometry. It is possible that the Perpetuum Mobile provided
Nietzsche—through his reading of, at minimum, several of these philosophers as well as
contemporaneous scientists—with a serious scientific foundation for his vision of an
Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner, Über die Natur des Cometen. Beiträge zur Geschichte und 26
Theorie der Erkenntnis (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1872). Nietzsche commented favorably on this book
in several letters, as Günther Abel and Alistair Moles, among others, point out. [Abel, Nietzsche: Die
Dynamik des Willens zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr (Berlin, 1984)] There is thus a likelihood that
Nietzsche adopted in eternal recurrence the idea of Riemannian (non-Euclidean) space and time to which
Zöllner alludes.
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energeticist universe, and thus the primacy of Becoming over Being. However, although
the constituent parts of the Perpetuum Mobile gave him the elements for the first version
of eternal recurrence, as presented in The Will to Power, it left Nietzsche with the
problem of a pointless eternity—with the meaninglessness that comes when there is
simply no end to things. What he needed to accomplish was a scientifically founded
disproving of normative time—he required an elimination of the meaningless eternity he
identified with what he called “Turkish Fatalism.” This is precisely what he 27
accomplished with the concept of eternal recurrence, evident when one follows through
the logic of the argument and finds the concept transformed from an engine of endless
energy to something that breaks the very fatalism of time—that breaks an intrinsically
cyclical Becoming away from normative, linear time.
There has been a general difficulty in reading the argument for eternal
recurrence, due in part to the fact that, as is well recognized by now, the idea is presented
in essentially two forms. In the last sections of The Will to Power, it is developed as an
intended scientific principle that is supposed to follow logically and inevitably from our
observations of the universe as science reveals it to us, or did in Nietzsche’s time, and
particularly from the law of the conservation of energy. The argument, as it is presented
in section 1066 of The Will to Power, is familiar and readily summarized: The number of
centers of force is finite, therefore the available combinations of such centers are finite,
and in infinite time, it must follow that the variety of combinations and sequences of
Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II, Zweite Abtheilung: Der Wanderer und sein 27
Schatten, 61. (translation by the authors)
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combinations of centers of force will be exhausted, and the overall sequence of sequences
will have to begin again. Such repetition, which touches everything that happens,
including every event in every life, has already occurred an infinite number of times and
will recur endlessly into an infinite future.
The other form of the thought makes no direct mention in its passages of
the great cosmological repeating of all events. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra and in section
341 of The Gay Science, eternal recurrence appears as a proposition to be imagined—the
dream, or myth, of a life that is eternally repeated, without hope or possibility of
redaction or reprieve. It is a conception meant as a test of resolve, a concept to be seen as,
by the title of its section in The Gay Science, “the greatest weight,” threatening the
implication of the darkest Nihilism—the strongest sense of meaninglessness to things, of
the absence of any purpose or end goal, of pointless interminable continuance—and
carrying as well a moral lesson, open to endless interpretation, regarding the answer to
such despair.
The two modes of the thought have often been played off against each
other, the moral lesson employed to explain away the scientific concept, for by many
commentators on Nietzsche, eternal recurrence of the same has been estimated to make
little sense as a potential principle of science.
When specific counterarguments have been wielded against eternal
recurrence as a cosmological theory, they have arrived in two species. The first is the
rejection of the conclusion that a finite number of combinations of centers of force
necessarily follows from the proposition that there is a finite number of centers of force.
This complaint carries some weight, but it is the second species that is the more virulent.
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It asserts that the scientific argument leads to an absurd result, and most specifically, that
the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same constitutes an internal contradiction. If
precisely the same event, the same sequence of events, even the same life, occurs even a
second time, identical in every detail, then it is by definition not identical, for it comes
later in time—it has been displaced in the time sequence and is thus different by dint of
position. If it were truly the same—which is what, it appears, Nietzsche’s argument
requires—then the event, or each individual event in a sequence, would recur at the same
time or times as the previous occurrence or occurrences, and thus there would not be a
recurrence. The very phrase “eternal recurrence of the same” asserts that there is no
recurrence—since everything is always the same—at the same time, so to speak, as it
asserts that there is a recurrence. What is worse, since Nietzsche claims that the past is
also an eternity leading up to now—and that an infinite amount of time, and an infinite
number of recurrences of all events, has already passed—the eternal recurrence of the
same argues that not only has all we experience already happened an infinite number of
times, but it is also happening for the first time, or still happening for the first time.
In short, the difficulty is that Nietzsche’s argument demonstrates that the
infinite repetition of everything is both a logical inevitability and a logical impossibility
—that it is a paradox intrinsic to events.
Many commentators on Nietzsche take this internal contradiction as a
mark of the implausibility and thus the failure of the argument for eternal recurrence as a
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scientific principle. But the inference from logical failure to rhetorical failure is not so 28
easily drawn, for in Nietzsche’s ontological philosophy, the world is not logically
constituted. It is an explicit position of the philosopher that the categories of reason do
not apply to the world and thus are not arbiters of truth. Yet, the rigorous application of
the procedures of Aristotelian logic are consistently among the guiding principles of
Nietzsche’s practice, and when he engages in deductive reasoning, he is a precise
practitioner.
The implications of applying rigorously executed logic as a surgical probe
for the delving of an illogical world has yet to be fully explored, but for the moment, a
portion of the incisive potential of the procedure can be seen in one of Nietzsche’s
occasional methodologies—the following through of a line of argument until it reaches a
logical contradiction and thereby uncovers a flaw in our normative vision of the world. It
is a method of argumentation that Nietzsche describes in section 634 of The Will to
Power, in which he defines his conception of the atom: “I call it a quantum of ‘will to
power’: it expresses the characteristic that cannot be thought out of the mechanistic order
without thinking away this order itself.” The method can be considered comparable as a 29
Notable exceptions are Milic Capek in The New Aspects of Time: Its Continuity and Novelties 28
(Dortrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991) and Bergson and Modern Physics: A
Reinterpretation and Re-evaluation, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. VII, ed. Robert S.
Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (Dortrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1971); Alistair Moles in
Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology (New York: Peter Lang, 1990); and Babette E. Babich in
Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1994).
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 634. 29
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logical procedure to the process of factoring out when working a differential equation in
calculus, a procedure by which factors of the equation are arranged to be paired and
negating—identical expressions with one positive and the matching one negative—so
that together they come to zero and can be dropped from the equation, thereby
simplifying it. Nietzsche’s method amounts to locating elements of the argument that
negate their own meanings and eliminating them in favor of factors that become implied
by the ways in which the previous factors reached negation.
The claim here is that the “scientific” argument for eternal recurrence as
presented in The Will to Power is the foundation of a larger argument that would disprove
the claim of infinite and exact recurrences, on the basis of their evident absurdity, and
assert an alternate ontological conception, one that Nietzsche was able to present in no
other fashion, by no other disquisition. That larger argument is adumbrated in the story of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Yet having been presented by Nietzsche more explicitly
nowhere else—presumably, he would have done so in a projected book, some of the notes
for which are included The Will to Power—it is difficult to extract. Nevertheless, if one
takes into account all Nietzschean texts referring to eternal recurrence, as well as many of
his ontological observations distributed in the Nachlaß, one can see the track of the
argument. It can be traced—for the notes constitute a chain of islands, individual summits
of thought, that mark the presence of a submerged mountain range, many of whose peaks
never broke the surface of the written page. One can see that eternal recurrence
constitutes one of the moments Nietzsche promised at the beginning of his public career
in The Birth of Tragedy, the moment at which science reaches its limits and, from that
“periphery,” men gaze “into what defies illumination,” and “when they see to their horror
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how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites its own tail—suddenly the new
form of insight breaks through, tragic insight. . .” Eternal recurrence is a tragic insight30
—not merely a Nihilistic contemplation, but a breaking of ontological norms—a
Dionysian insight, which defies rational illumination but which may arrive at the
periphery of logic.
The plot of Thus Spoke Zarathustra indicates a shift occurring in the heart
of the argument, a transformation of implication that follows Zarathustra’s initial
realization of endlessly repeating, numerically infinite world histories—the
transformation of implication into a recognition that is never fully detailed in the text of
the book. In the middle of the text, at the end of Book 2, Zarathustra comes upon “The
Stillest Hour,” during which the clock of his life “drew a breath” and Zarathustra is 31
compelled to withdraw into solitude “by the force of his pain.” At the start of Book 3, in 32
the section titled “The Wanderer,” Zarathustra returns, having realized, as he says, “now I
must face my hardest path.” Immediately following, in the section “On the Vision and 33
the Riddle,” he meets the dwarf at the gateway between the past and the future and
realizes the conception of eternal recurrence as an endless repetition of world cycles, and
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann 30
(New York: The Modern Library, 1968) section 15.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann 31
(New York: Penguin Books, 1977) “The Stillest Hour.”
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Stillest Hour.” 32
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Wanderer.” 33
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then confronts the nauseating vision of the shepherd with the snake in his mouth, the
serpent whose head the shepherd bites off, after which he rises up laughing. Later, in
“The Convalescent,” Zarathustra returns to the concept of the eternal recurrence, as well
as the vision of the serpent—which he now claims had crawled into his throat. He
returns, as well, to the nausea, which he attributes to the thought that “The small man
recurs eternally.” But his “disgust” is referred to in the past tense, and when his animals 34
detail eternal recurrence as an infinity of world cycles, he accuses them of being cruel and
making a “hurdy-gurdy song” of it. 35
Something in the concept has changed for Zarathustra. Later still, in “The
Other Dancing Song,” life charges Zarathustra with wanting to leave her soon. He
whispers something in her ear, to which she responds, “Nobody knows that.” Nothing 36
more is revealed of what he whispered, and if the thought he shares with life were one
that had already been enunciated in the text, there would be no reason for the narrator to
omit it. Clearly, something further has occurred to Zarathustra. It is equally clear that
Zarathustra’s disgust has left him by the close of the book, when he leaves his cave
“glowing and strong as a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains.” The reason 37
for that change of import is the heart of the significance of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but it
is a reason the character never openly reveals.
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Convalescent.” 34
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Convalescent.” 35
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Other Dancing Song.” 36
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Sign.” 37
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We are left to infer the secret that Zarathustra whispers. We must
reconstruct the argument that Nietzsche never deposited into a finished text, discover the
submerged chine of unexpressed intent, working through the logic of what he did write to
interpret and break through the rational contradiction that many commentators have
observed. To do so, one must proceed by recognized procedure. When confronting this
contradiction, we have to seek what inevitably must exist: a hidden, unexamined, and
faulty assumption, the assumption that is unwittingly accepted and that lies in opposition
to the bulk of the premises of the argument.
The unexamined assumption in the argument for eternal recurrence as it is
presented in The Will to Power—or more precisely, as that argument is generally read—is
that time runs infinitely in a straight line. This is a proposition that Nietzsche never
specifically asserts. It is merely the normative conception of time, and it is always
perilous to assume—when one has not been told explicitly one way or the other—that
Nietzsche is adopting the normative conception of anything. To be fair, in the argument
Nietzsche does specifically claim that time is infinite, but this is a claim that is made in
notes unpublished and unrevised at the time of his death and that is overtly revised in the
text of Zarathustra and thus may be taken as provisional in its exact phrasing. In
Zarathustra, we are told in “On the Vision and the Riddle” that “time itself is a circle,” 38
and, in “The Convalescent,” that “Bent is the path of eternity.” 39
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “On the Vision and the Riddle.” 38
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Convalescent.” 39
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The difference is a geometric one and is foundational to the proper reading
of eternal recurrence. It marks the reason for the profound emphasis Nietzsche gave to
the thought. The deepest and most far-reaching revolutions of thought are always those
that involve an alteration in the very geometry of thinking, for thinking does have a
geometry, a set of rules for the space in which it occurs and according to which one
thought follows upon another. Aristotelian logic occurs in a space of Euclidean geometry
—thoughts that imply each other follow one upon the next without evident inflection.
They constitute a straight line of logic—the further one follows out the line, the farther
one falls from the starting point of the argument. But such an uninflected intellectual,
imaginative space is not the only possibility.
And it is not the one Nietzsche asserts in the Zarathustra text, where time
itself is claimed to be a circle. A different set of inferences follows from there, different
from the inferences that come of assuming that time is straight whereas events, or
configurations of centers of force, repeat in a vast circle. If time is straight, then events
must necessarily slip their time slots in instance after instance of their occurrence,
producing the time displacement, the occurrence at a later point on the time line, that
makes a logical contradiction and an absurdity of the claim they are the same. They
cannot be the same if one occurrence of an event is later than the one that preceded it. It
is as if the circle of events were a wheel rolling down the road of infinite time, and each
spot on that wheel hits the ground in each instance at another spot from that of the last
instance, a spot further down that road.
But no such displacement occurs if time itself is also a circle. Like a tire
and a rim, the circle of events and the circle of time are locked together—each event is
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permanently, and in a sense perpetually, localized in its moment. Think also of time as a
strip of film, of definite length, in which the two ends have been spliced together. Time is
then not infinite but finite and unbounded. It is limited in its extension, there is a total
amount of it, but it has no edge—one never can reach the end of it. It is simply that any
moment one might postulate as the end of time would be followed by the moment that
then would constitute the beginning of time. But in this geometric conception, the terms
“end” and “beginning” are arbitrary and meaningless—there is no more an end or
beginning of circular time than there is an end point and beginning point of a circle: the
line of the circle simply is continuous, and of definite and measurable extension. So too,
the terms “past” and “future” are arbitrary and, finally, meaningless. What constitutes the
past and future depends upon where—or when—on the circle of time one is “standing,”
and, theoretically, the past would eventually follow the future, and the future ultimately
precede the past, for as Zarathustra tells us, “And are not all things knotted together so
firmly that this moment draws after it all that is to come? Therefore—itself too?” But 40
the word “theoretically” is inexact, because, by necessary implication and by Nietzsche’s
own argument, no recurrence ever occurs, not even theoretically, no more than any one
point on a circle is ever repeated on the same circle, no more than any frame appears
twice in the same film.
Which is also to say that time possesses a Riemannian geometry, or more
exactly, the extension that is time has a positive curvature, as it is conceived by
Riemannian geometry, meaning that time curves back upon itself. We, as occurrences of
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “On the Vision and the Riddle.” 40
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time ourselves, our lives occupying sections of the loop of time, are incapable of noticing
the curvature. We experience time simply as proceeding, or ourselves as proceeding
through time. Only by having an overview of time could one notice that it is finite,
although it never comes to an end. But, for Nietzsche—who subscribed to a position of
thorough perspectivism—there is no overview, there is no outside, no other world from
which to observe this one. This is the only world, all reality is only what appears to the
observer from the observer’s viewpoint, and this curved time is the only time.
Which is why there is no recurrence. It is not merely that recurrence is
inherently unobservable, but that it does not in fact occur. Every event comes once only
—Nietzsche himself asserts “there is no ‘second time’ ” — no event initiated time or 41
will close time, and whether an event is a part of the past or of the future is purely a
matter of viewpoint. Time, too, is a matter of perspective, a matter of judgmental
terminology within a frame of positive curvature.
Nietzsche’s use of Riemannian geometry—the same geometry that applies
to space in Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity—is not simple conjecture or
interpretive imposition. Not only does Nietzsche assert specifically that time is a circle,
but also that space is spherical and that “The shape of space must be the cause of eternal
movement,” which makes his space Einsteinian. It is hardly a matter of unfounded 42
conjecture to consider that Nietzsche may well have understood the mathematical
implications of these assertions, particularly if such an interpretation makes eternal
Nietzsche, KSA 12: 1[119], (12.38). (translation by the authors) 41
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1064. 42
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recurrence a fully reasonable idea, eliminating the internal contradiction so many have
found in it. Both Capek and particularly Moles have noticed the usefulness of this
approach, and as noted above, Nietzsche was aware of the pertinence of Riemannian
geometry to cosmology from his reading of Friedrich Zöllner. The positive curvature of
time is an evident mark of Zöllner’s impression.
Hence, we have in eternal recurrence a structure of time that is not eternal
and in which nothing recurs. What we do have, other than the logically inevitable
conclusion Nietzsche discovered bereft of its logical contradiction, is a finite time that
will never come to a conclusion or reach a goal that offers an external justification of the
world. And we have something more.
Neither Capek nor Moles sees anything more in the thought of eternal
recurrence than a circular, finite, and unbounded time—an interpretation that Capek
strangely criticizes for leading to stasis. But if one follows through the same logic that led
to the recognition of the positive curvature of time, one finds there are further
implications.
Under Nietzsche’s perspectivism, the concept of overall time, of time per
se, is meaningful as a logical extrapolation from the observable facts of experience, it is
meaningful conceptually, but it is meaningless as an experiential reality. There is no
perspective, no point of view, from which the conceptual totality of time—whether finite
or infinite—can be experienced, not even over the course of the conceptual totality of
time. The totality of the world’s time is thus, in Nietzsche’s ontology, not a fact. It is
merely a result of logical analysis. From the point of view of any event, any center of
force, or even the constituencies of any combination of forces, from the point of view of
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any interacting system of centers of force, even if splayed over time—meaning any
apparent object throughout its existence, or a human life, our own existence—there can
only be as much time as the object, life, center of force, or system experiences. Within a
perspectival structure, there is no outside to any system, and thus no time can pertain to,
can exist for, the system other than the time that is experienced from the perspective of
the system. Within a perspectival system, time is functionally an attribute of the system,
and it follows that when the system does not exist, its attributes cannot exist—time
cannot in fact, and as a fact, transpire. Hence, every moment of the termination of any
discrete and persisting system is followed, from the viewpoint of the system, by the
moment of its beginning. More personally, the moment of death for every human being is
followed by the moment of birth—and not for the second time, but for the first time, for
there is no second time. Every life is itself a circular time span.
This is a necessary implication of Nietzsche’s argument, and, with regard
to human life, an implication that he does, at one point, specifically announce. In the
Nachlaß, he wrote: “Between the last moment of consciousness and the first appearance
of new life lies ‘no time’—it passes by like a stroke of lightning, even if living creatures
measure it in terms of billions of years or could not measure it at all. Timelessness and
succession are compatible as soon as the intellect is gone.” 43
What results is a system of worlds within worlds, each discrete system that
persists through time persisting through its own finite but unbounded time. And the
overall, finite but unbounded time of the world as a whole, within which one would want
Nietzsche, KSA 9: 11[318], (9.564). (translation by the authors) 43
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to locate all these thereby subsystems of time, does not exist except as an intellectual
abstraction, unless one would wish to grant consciousness to the world as a whole, which
Nietzsche specifically does not do. This is a conception of the world order to which
Nietzsche does point when he has Zarathustra say, in “The Convalescent,” immediately
before condemning the animals for misunderstanding eternal recurrence: “To every soul
there belongs another world; for every soul, every other soul is an afterworld. . . .For me
—how should there be any outside—myself? There is no outside.” 44
However, the thought does not stop there. From the point of view of strict
perspectivism when applied to time—and it is clear Nietzsche believes it does apply—
each moment of time is also a system unto itself and possesses its own perspective,
certainly as much as a center of force can be said to possess a unique perspective—the
perceived “Now” constitutes a perspectival system. However, if a moment of time is a
perspective point and only that amount of time it addresses as fact is truly time from its
perspective, then each moment of time exists only during itself, within itself as a circular,
cyclical structure of time. The moment is its own time span. In simple language, this
inference positions the moment “Now” outside of continuous durational time and makes
the “Now” moment the only time that is real, that is a fact. This conception can readily be
viewed as the significance of the section “On the Vision and the Riddle” in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, in which Zarathustra meets the dwarf at the gateway between the past and
future. The dwarf tells him that the gateway is named “Moment” and claims that the lane
of the infinite past and the lane of the infinite future contradict each other. It is evident
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Convalescent.” 44
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from this text that the past and the future, in contradicting each other, do not make a
continuous line—they do not combine coherently. The Moment stands at their
intersection, and therefore apart from both, for at the point they meet, they do not join
together. In short, the passing moment does not pass; it is not in time.
The point is even clearer when the passage from Zarathustra is matched to
section 1066 of The Will to Power, to a portion of it that has been generally overlooked in
the specifications it applies to the infinity of the past. Nietzsche writes:
Nothing can prevent me from reckoning
backward from this moment and saying “I shall never reach
the end”; just as I can reckon forward from the same
moment into the infinite. Only if I made the mistake—I
shall guard against it—of equating this correct concept of a
regressus in infinitum with an utterly unrealizable concept
of a finite progressus up to this present, only if I suppose
that the direction (forward or backward) is logically a
matter of indifference, would I take the head—this moment
—for the tail. 45
The movement from the moment “Now” back through an infinity of the
past is legitimate. However, it is not the same as the incorrect translation, the
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1066. 45
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“unrealizable concept” of the progression of time forward through the past to the “Now”
moment. The direction is not a matter of indifference, and the movement forward through
the past is judged not credible. It is not the fact of the matter. If one attends carefully to
the text, this is precisely what the dwarf presented as a vision to Zarathustra. The
implication is the explanation of why the lanes of the past and future contradict each
other: they lead in opposite directions; the past does not flow into the future. They image
incompatible abstractions of time. And they flow out from and away from the present,
from “Now.” The past, as something that happened prior to now and that incrementally
led to it, is a fiction.
This removal of the Moment from the linear flow of time coordinates
precisely with Nietzsche’s observation in the Nachlaß concerning the importance of the
“infinitely small moment,” as well as the remark in Zarathustra: “The center is 46
everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.” Every moment is the center of time—a 47
conception distinctly close, again, to Einstein’s cosmology. Every Moment is the point
away from which the past and future stream. It is an entirety of time, for itself, and unto
itself, cut away from the flow of time as the head of the snake was bitten off by the
shepherd in Zarathustra’s vision, or by Zarathustra himself.
And so in a very real sense, every Moment is the same Moment, for the
Moment is all the time there actually is. The Moment is all of time, in more than a
metaphoric, poetic sense, for the apotheosis of the Moment breaks all sequence. The fact
Nietzsche, KSA 9: 11[156], (9.500). (translation by the authors) 46
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Convalescent.” 47
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that each Moment provides itself with its only possible time frame—along with the
absence of any overall, universal time frame due to the impossibility of its having any
experiential perspective—destroys any possible site for a sequence. There is “nowhere”
and “no time” within which a sequence of moments may occur. Each Moment, and each
center of force in the Moment of its occurrence, must relate to and interact with all others
outside of any continuous temporal flow, by principles of interaction that are not
themselves temporal. It is as if they are superimposed—not spatially but by dint of the
impossibility of any possible displacement in time from each other, for there is no overall
field of time within which they can be distributed. That the center may be “everywhere”
renders all centers the same center.
This gives the Moment a sense of great depth, a quality of capaciousness,
a sense of possessing hidden recesses, and begins to explain Zarathustra’s numerous
observations towards the end of the book that eternity is deep—not long but deep—as
well as his feeling of the clock of his life drawing a breath, as if stopping for a moment,
as the thought of the eternal recurrence begins to dawn on him—and his sense in the
section “At Noon” that the sun had stood straight over his head throughout his dream of
the world becoming perfect, and his question “Did time perhaps fly away?” —and his 48
questions at the very end of the book, “Where is time gone? Have I not sunk into deep
wells?” and his observation that “there is no time on earth for such things,” referring 49 50
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “At Noon.” 48
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Drunken Song.” 49
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Sign.” 50
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to the arrival of Zarathustra’s sign, of his answer finally arrived. And, as a self-contained,
discrete system that, simultaneously, passes out of itself and leads into itself, although it
transpires once only, the Moment out of durational time becomes the perfected image of
Nietzsche’s idea of Becoming.
The Moment is the culmination of eternal recurrence, and as its own
entirety of time that passes simultaneously out of itself and back into itself, it is
Becoming divorced from normative temporality. As its own entirety of time, the Moment
cannot pass away—from its perspective, which is its only reality, there is no further time
into which it can dissipate. Thus, the Moment is the image of Becoming that has been
permanentized. Here is the meaning of Nietzsche’s remark: “That everything recurs is the
closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being.” In a sense, the 51
Moment, and with it all of time, is going nowhere. It passes, yet it does not pass away.
And as a simultaneous passing away and recommencement that never really passes away
and never really recommences, the Moment is the perfected image of Nietzsche’s
simultaneity of destruction and creation, of his internal contradiction in all things—of his
criticism of substance, which makes the Moment, and eternal recurrence, the culmination
of Nietzsche’s ontology.
Yet, from the human perspective, time will continue to pass, history will
appear a perceptible fact, and the logic of our situation will continue to suggest a
monumental recurrence of the cosmological chronology. But that is the human
perspective. It is an Apollinian vision, for the initial, Nihilistic version of eternal
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 617. 51
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recurrence was always a matter of the Apollinian viewpoint—it clearly adopts the
principium individuationis and acknowledges the slipping gradient of temporal extension.
But, when one thinks through the vision to acquire the riddle it harbors, one begins to
come upon a “tragic insight,” a Dionysian vision, a seemingly illogical but inescapable
inference—an inference that ultimately proves to be thoroughly consistent with an
advanced mathematical logic—hidden within. The Dionysian insight shines through the
Apollinian image and the Apollinian argument—what Nietzsche promised at the start of
his career.
Becoming that is divorced from normative temporality—Becoming that
culminates and passes away simultaneously with its commencement—Becoming that is
the entirety of its own time span regardless of the brevity of its extent. The Moment as
the final implication and the inevitable outcome of eternal recurrence resolves for
Nietzsche into another rendering of his attack on substance, of his recognition of the
illusoriness of self-sameness. Eternal recurrence delivers him again to his core point, but
with a difference. Nietzsche’s direct attack on substance—his claim that any unit is also
what it is not—is arrived at by a priori argument: He argues by fiat, propounds the truth
of what he approves and states the impossibility of what he dislikes. However, his
argument for eternal recurrence resulting in the Moment that both is and is not, that arises
as it passes away, is deduced—it is rooted in scientific observation and scientific
principles and is achieved through a rigorous deduction that reaches an inevitable
implication. It lays its foundation outside of Nietzsche’s intentions and beyond the
craning and stretch of his preferences. It argues a reason for its acceptance.
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Extending its roots into scientific principles of his time and devising itself
into a conception consistent with his ontology, eternal recurrence as well provides
Nietzsche with the fulfillment of the promise of the Perpetuum Mobile—it dispels the
nightmare of universal entropy and, thereby, achieves an eradication of the primacy of
Being. It grants an ontology of energy that does not degrade and, in so doing, incubates
an incandescent Dionysian vision that burns in opposition to the apparent, Apollinian,
mechanistic, atomistic reality of substance.
“Zarathustra, the Moment, and Eternal Recurrence of the Same: Nietzsche’s Ontology of Time”
was included in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Before Sunrise, published by Continuum,
September 2008. An earlier version of the paper was presented at The Friedrich Nietzsche
Society’s 11th Annual Conference, “Nietzsche and Science” at Cambridge University, Cambridge,
England, September 2001.