The Role of Suffering and Higher Health in Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence. (original) (raw)

There is much literature on the Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence. The least appealing interpretation is the 'cosmological' or 'objective' interpretation, according to which the Eternal Recurrence is a property of the physical universe. That is, this interpretation holds that the Eternal Recurrence really means that the same sequence of events will keep recurring,and has already been recurring, infinitely through time. This interpretation is not all that interesting or convincing for a number of reasons, and mainly because there's no good reason to think it's true, and even if it were, it does not really tell us much about the one thing that will still interest us; namely, the sequence of events that keeps recurring. At the other extreme, we have the 'subjective,' or the 'ethical self-help interpretation', according to which the thought of the Eternal Recurrence is just a kind of ethical test according to which we should ask ourselves whether we would want to relive our entire lives, with everything just as it was and will be, in eternal repetition. This is the way the thought of the Eternal Recurrence is introduced for the first time in Nietzsche's philosophy, in the second to last section of The Gay Science. This interpretation is better, and it remains an important part of Nietzsche's thinking about the Eternal Recurrence, but it would be pretty weak if it were the whole meaning. In particular, it would be strange for Nietzsche to put so much emphasis on the rather mundane idea that we should try to live with no regret. A more complete picture comes with the idea that in more profound moments, or in the more profound aspects of our lives, or of human history, or what have you, the past returns in the sense of being reconsidered and revalued. Nietzsche says that with every great human being, the entire human past is revalued. In this paper, I intend to show a connection between ‘health’ and the Eternal Recurrence, and I will suggest that we must understand this thought experiment through the creative power of Nietzschean ‘Great Health’; that is, to seize on and transform the past. I will show that the return of the past is eternal because the highest conceivable health has the creative power to seek out and seize upon all that has been; the past is eternally a source of creativity for great health. Finally, my argument will be that any understanding that leaves this interpretation out is bound to be superficial.