Nietzsche's Eternal Return?

Question

please explain nietzsche's conception of eternal return (discussed in gay science page 101-102) I have to write a paragraph on it for philosophy and i'm not doing to well right now.

Answer 1

It should be mentioned that Nietzsche is not the only guy to think of this one. I still see people come up with it and not know that anyone else has thought of it before them. These latest manifestations usually take this form:

"If you could live your whole life over again, but not change a thing, would you?"

Variants of that question have been asked at least a dozen times around here. I always find the answers surprising, but I suppose Nietzsche wouldn't. Almost nobody wants to.

To Nietzsche, eternal return was both the perfect punishment and perfect reward. After all, what better reward could a person receive for living a glorious life than to re-live that glory? And what greater punishment could there be for the morally weak than to never be freed from their weakness?

I'm sure it appealed to him because it was in many ways the exact opposite of the promise of Christianity. The Bible says that the meek will inherit the Earth. Turn the other cheek now and get massive rewards later. Nietzsche reviled this as a 'philosophy of death' - if you deny yourself everything from this life expecting a balance in the next, then in many senses you were never really alive in the first place.

Hope that helps. Good luck with your paragraph.

Answer 2

Nietzsche's notion of eternal return is the idea that life on earth has always and will always occur right as it is happening. This is an idea that forces people to essentially accept the world as it is with no hope of otherworldly, heavenly reward. It is conceiving of the earth as a totally self-sustaining, self-enclosed system that repeats itself over and over again through eternity.

Answer 3

Look this up in Wikipedia, there are a couple of paragraphs. The concept of the eternal return, or endless repetition of life, is ancient, a form of it having been propounded in Mycenaean Greek mythology, another form of it being at the heart of Buddhist and Hindu thought. All that was, is, forever, and will be again. We live the same lives, over and over.

Nietzsche neither propounded or opposed this idea - he evaluated it for its consequences on human thought, action, and history, assuming for the sake of argument that it is true. The basis of Nietzschean philosophy is that all philosophy before him was seriously flawed in some way or another, that the challenge of human existence remains unmet, and that the consequences of not dealing effectively with the challenge include horrendous wars, mass poverty, and tremendous misery. The immediate response, apparently rational, of nihilism, namely, that nothing really matters after all, must be resisted. The apparent futility of life, the struggle against death, disease, and human wickedness must be embraced in all its glory and tragedy, one must accept, even celebrate, the inevitability of individual failure to overcome the repetition of the same glory and horror in every generation. One must not, however, cease struggling. One cannot take one's morality from the herd (Freudian superego), for the true philosopher (Ubermensch) derives his own, from the sum total of human knowledge and experience. Although there are things we perhaps cannot know (Kantian veil), we cannot allow that uncertainty, or the reliance on an unprovable Deity (God is dead, we have killed him ourselves), to keep us from exercising our own moral judgment and taking responsibility for our own actions and inactions.

In effect, Nietzsche gave his mind and his life to the struggle, since, as a Swiss, he need have never gone to war, but he went anyway on moral grounds, served as a noncombatant medic, contracted syphilis somehow from exposure to contaminated blood, and lost, first his mind, then his life, all the time knowing he was dying. Having been a brilliant student of philosophy before the war, he continued to critique prior works and attempt to synthesize a new vision even as he slowly went mad.

Answer 4

The text book answer centers around the idea that one should will his or her life to action as if each instant was to return eternally, play on endless loop forever.

Milan Kundera makes an interesting point that eternal return is a marker of how we conceptualize difference: a Robespierre that chops of heads once is differenct from one that chops of heads eternally.

Recent interpritations center around the idea that once utopia is achieved, there is no need or drive to advancement, and the same circulates infinitely detached from the real: integral reality.

Answer 5

You're askin' for help with a paragraph.....a Paragraph, A PARAGRAPH!
As Stan, Kyle, Kenny or Eric would say, "How gay."