Why is eternal return, or eternal recurrence, largely associated with the philosopher Nietzsche, although eternal return appears widely in ancient Eastern and Greek thought?
The short answer is the context of the times: in the mid-nineteenth century, the West had just begun translating the classics of the East and reading them seriously, or at least airing them. Schopenhauer heard details about Buddhism, for example, enough to confirm his pessimism and to prompt comments on eternal return, but there is no direct evidence that Nietzsche had a similar interest. Instead, Nietzsche attributes eternal return to his fictional character Zarathustra. While Zoroastrianism did address eternal return, it was not as thorough-going as in India, not that Nietzsche had read documents of Zoroastrianism either. Nietzsche had identified Zarathustra as a prophet not dependent on Judeo-Christian tradition, and that was sufficient for Nietzsche, who saw himself as a prophet, and Zarathustra as a persona. To Nietzsche, eternal return was not a doctrine so much as a good thought-experiment appropriate to his aphoristic style, which would not have fit the style of the formal philosophy of his day.
Eternal return refers to the repetition of grand cyclical epochs of universal time from beginning to end -— and then starting again, more or less as before. Eternal return is part of the genre of mythic cataclysm or catastrophe in many world religions. In ancient Hindu thought, transmigration of the human soul is subordinate to this process, with human beings having no say in the cyclical process. The idea was pan-Indian, informing Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain thought. Cyclical catastrophe characterized ancient Babylonian thought as well. In ancient Greek thought several variations were presented by Hesiod, Empedocles, Heraclitus, the Stoics, and eventually Plato. [The best summary of the history of eternal return is still Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return (1954).
These speculations were all versions of cyclical returns. Universal cataclysm is an integral part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, wherein Christianity maintains the sequence of Anti-Christ, Armageddon, Second Coming, and ending. But in opposition to Asian religions presenting cyclical eschatologies, Christianity presents linear eschatologies, hence not returns.
As mentioned, Nietzsche’s original pessimism was drawn from Schopenhauer, who noted simply that no one in possession of his faculties could wish to go through cyclical return. Cyclical return would not alter events, persons, or circumstances, in the least. Sufferings, degradations, ills experienced in lifetimes would simply be repeated, all decisions, all minutiae, inevitably and irrevocably. To Schopenhauer, eternal return demonstrates the absence of free will, yet the drive of will lingers in human consciousness as a source of suffering. For Schopenhauer, eternal return may be a version of Buddhism in its perpetual revolutions in eons of time, manifesting eternal fatalism, eternal absence of succor. In any case, the notion captured Nietzsche’s imagination, but while accepting the return exactly in every respect, he makes exception for the will. Thus, return is not a repeat of mistakes but a test of one’s life at the moment, is not an eternal repetition of mistakes only but a chance to rectify will, perceptions, and meaning.
Nietzsche only mentions eternal return twice. In Gay Science (or Joyful Wisdom), he wonders how we might react to the notion of death initiating a cyclical return, and what we would think if a demon whispered into our ear that everything we are doing and thinking would be repeated infinitely. Would we not be aghast?
Thus Spoke Zarathrustra does not overthrow eternal return at all, for overthrowal would presumably liberate humanity from the misery and suffering of eternal return, but represent to Nietzsche a falsehood and a return to the myth of contemporary religious culture, including linear cataclysm with its illusion of joy and triumph. Rather, he accepts the inevitability and suffering of reality (eternal return) but insists that the person, the self, must change perception. This change of perception must address only oneself, for no other expectation or altered circumstance but only sheer will, insight, and perception, can give us a new ability to understand, tolerate, and transcend suffering. The present moment of existence must become the tablet on which to etch one’s aspirations, intentions, conclusions, directions, not change any external curcumstances but to see through everything, to live in its contradictions.
Eternal return is purgation of past weaknesses, failure, error, desire. The self must embrace not only the will to pursue a new self but what would be associated with Nietzsche as the will to power, meaning no more than the taking control of one’s self in life and destiny. Because this self-made destiny is the fruit of a personal struggle,the self must overcome much that is irrevocably external affecting the inner person. The will must transform the self not through attack but through transvaluation, the will overcoming obstacles, subjectivities, falsehoods, not reliant on society, culture, others, but forging one’s own path and system of thought and values. Who can achieve this state Nietzsche dubs the “overman” (übermensch), often misconstrued as the “superman.” The overman is not a powerful, grasping, obnoxious personality but thoughtful and collected one who rejects inherited assumptions of the world to discover what is real, if not what is true.
Talk of overman and transvaluation suggests bravado and arrogance, but Nietzsche was not such a person. He was reclsuive, solitary, with very few friends, living alone, eating abstemiously, always thinking, reading, writing, and walking alone in the mountains of Switzerland and northern Italy. He suffered intensely from the debilitating hereditary ilness CADASIL, which refers to constricted blood vessels to the brain, resulting in increasing strokes, migraine, vision pain, extreme light sensitivity, nausea, vomiting, deteriorating cognitive function and memory, and culminating in dementia, paralysis, and early death.
Nietzsche’s philosophical resources, too, predated psychology and sociology. Such tools were for the future, of course. The absence of many factors in his thinking is telling today — psychological, sociological, cultural, the unavailability or absence of intellectual and historical knowledge, plus the value of a keener awareness of the everyday factors in the material contexts of the daily lives of the masses and their effects.
But given the nineteenth-century context in the West, eternal return was bound to be unpopular even as a device, for there was not much in it that could be celebrated. Eternal return adds nothing particular to metaphysics or to our daily way of life, and may as well be non-return. But Nietzsche is using it to point to a modern theme: living in the moment and crafting a path for doing so. He correctly argues that our struggle to overcome self and context, to rise above it, is all that we can do, but also it is what we must do, and that in doing so is the only way that we can establish meaning. And what a thing if we can do it!