Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence as a transformative cosmological teaching

Abstract

<p>According to Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, everything that happens now must have already happened an infinite number of times and will happen an infinite number of times again. How one reacts to such an idea is a measure of how life-affirming or life-denying one’s attitude is vis-à-vis a world bereft of transcendent value or meaning. The debates about how to interpret this idea have centered around two broad options: some interpret eternal recurrence as a psychological test, others think Nietzsche presented it as a cosmological hypothesis. I present a more unified account than either of these two interpretations by arguing (a) that Nietzsche presents eternal recurrence as transformative teaching and (b) that the transformation it is supposed to induce cannot take place unless the idea is believed to be factually true. On my interpretation, then, eternal recurrence’s cosmological import is central to its projected transformative psychological power.</p>