Origin from 1882
Nietzsches doctrine that a persons exact life, joy and pain and every small thing, recurs endlessly in the same sequence, first stated as a thought experiment in The Gay Science (1882) and developed further in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 to 1885). He presented it chiefly as a test of whether a person affirms life completely enough to will its exact repetition. Unpublished notebooks he never prepared for print also attempt a cosmological argument for the idea from finite matter and infinite time, a case scholars still debate rather than accept as established.
Facts
Disputed
Principal CriticSince the sociologist Georg Simmels widely cited 1907 critique, commentators have challenged Nietzsches unpublished cosmological argument on the ground that a finite number of elements recombining across infinite time need not reproduce every earlier configuration exactly. 2 Whether Simmels objection actually refutes Nietzsches private notebook argument is itself unsettled among specialists: some read Nietzsches reasoning as strictly probabilistic and vulnerable to Simmels point, others argue Simmels own counter-thought-experiment does not address the version of the argument Nietzsche actually gives across his own notes. This atlas records the dispute rather than a verdict. Scholarly VerdictMost twentieth and twenty first century philosophers follow Kaufmann in treating the doctrine primarily as a psychological and ethical standard, tied to Nietzsches related idea of amor fati, the love of ones own fate, rather than as established physical cosmology. 2 The cosmological argument itself is widely judged incomplete or unproven rather than definitively refuted, since Nietzsche never published a finished version of it and the surviving notebook drafts are fragmentary. Scholars disagree about how much weight his private, unfinished reasoning should carry against the deliberately public, literary form the doctrine takes in the books he released himself. Point in DisputeWhether Nietzsche intended the eternal recurrence chiefly as an existential test of life affirmation, as his published books present it, or also as a serious claim about the actual structure of the physical cosmos, as his private notebooks attempt to argue. 2 Walter Kaufmanns influential reading treats the published ethical test as Nietzsches real philosophical weight and the unpublished cosmological notes as a secondary, unfinished experiment he chose not to put before readers himself. Other scholars, working directly from the Nachlass, argue the cosmological ambition was genuine and central to how Nietzsche understood his own thought, not a discarded draft; the two camps read the same unpublished pages to opposite conclusions. Origins
Origin Period Held ByNietzsches own philosophy and its later existentialist and continental reception; not a tenet of any organized religious tradition. 2 Origin Period Historical OriginNietzsche developed the idea further in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 to 1885), where Zarathustra and a dwarf confront a gateway inscribed Moment, at which two eternal paths, one running back and one running forward, meet, and Zarathustra reasons that everything capable of happening must already have happened along that path and must happen again. Unpublished notebook drafts from the same years, later gathered by his sister and editors into The Will to Power, attempt a further argument that a finite quantity of force acting through infinite time must eventually repeat every possible configuration exactly. 2 Position Profile
Earliest FormulationFirst published in The Gay Science, book four, aphorism 341, titled The Greatest Weight, 1882. 1 Key TextA demon tells the reader: this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more, and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh, and everything unutterably small or great in your life, will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence. Nietzsche calls the thought the greatest weight and asks whether it would crush the reader or be welcomed as confirmation of a life fully lived. 1 Principal Proponent Status
Doctrinal CategoryCosmology and World-Structure 2 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Zarathustra directly: "and developed further in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883 to 1885)."
Contrasts With
Eliades eternal return describes archaic ritual re-enactment abolishing ordinary history; Nietzsches doctrine is a modern ethical thought experiment about affirming ones own life, related to the older idea in name only, per Kaufmann and later commentators.
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