Nietzsche's Life Sentence

Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence as a transformative cosmological teaching

“…In this section, I will focus on Later Richard Schacht (1998) Lawrence Hatab (2005). Unlike his earlier book, where Schacht undermined the importance of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche 2006b) as a work of serious philosophy that could be at par with Nietzsche's other works, here he takes this work more seriously, as an educational device that uses eternal recurrence and other related concepts as means to certain ends.…”

“…I will first discuss Robin Small's interpretation of eternal recurrence, who takes it as an "ontological concept" (Small 1983), which he thinks is open to all other interpretations, including the cosmological one. Next, I will focus on Lawrence Hatab's interpretation of eternal recurrence, in which he takes eternal recurrence in a "literal sense" (Hatab 2005). His stand is an interesting one since, on the one hand, he disagrees with the cosmological interpretation while, on the other hand, he argues for taking the doctrine literally, not merely as a metaphor for something else.…”

“…Pace Magnus, for whom "literal" was a blanket term representing a range of concepts from cosmological to empirical to descriptive, Hatab's use of the term is very different than that of Magnus'. Arguing for reading eternal recurrence "literally but not factually", Hatab explains that his literal account of the doctrine stands somewhere "between the existential and factual sense of eternal recurrence" (Hatab 2005).…”

“…He traces this mimetic literality to the orality of the Greek tragic period, during which the poets were considered to be divinely inspired to communicate truth or wisdom and the audiences were seen as their enchanted recipients. When the actors reenacted the tragedy of Oedipus, it was not presented merely as fiction or myth, but rather "literally" "in the sense of being irreducible or immediately expressive without further analysis" (Hatab 2005).…”

“…In this chapter, I will, first of all, provide an account of the different approaches of Nietzsche scholars towards Nietzsche's poetic style in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche 2006b), and will divide them into three groups: those who think the literary style of this work hampers its philosophical merit and therefore undermines this work (Clark 1990;Schacht 1985); those who think this work does not propound philosophical truths but is nonetheless important as an as-if story and conceptual myth (Hatab 2005); and those who interpret it as Nietzsche's most important when it comes to understanding eternal recurrence as a cosmological truth, and hence advocate taking it seriously despite its poetic style. (Loeb 2010) Afterward, I will present my argument for taking Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche 2006b) seriously and insisting that literary style and philosophical truths are not mutually exclusive, and to support my argument I will draw an analogy of this work (Nietzsche 2006b) with that of Plato's Timaeus (Plato 1997).…”