Zarathustra, the Moment, and Eternal Recurrence of

the Same: Nietzsche’s Ontology of Time

by Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen

Nietzsche’s overt references to and estimations of science in the body of

his published and unpublished works constitute a system of reflecting and interlocking

echoes, a playing back and forth of confronting and opposing implications that seem to

argue his essential position on the matter to a point of nullified stasis. In the views of

many commentators on Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s position on pure science is fundamentally

inconsistent, sufficiently at odds with itself that they find it fair to say he has no position

at all. On the one hand, Nietzsche periodically attacks science as the mechanistic

interpretation of the world, as postulating substance—the hard materiality that consists in

entities that are discrete and that persist without intrinsic change through time, that persist

unless acted upon from without—as the foundation of the world, as the essence of the

real. On the other hand, Nietzsche, in the famous passage from The Will to Power,

heralds the principle of eternal recurrence of the same as “the most scientific of all
1
possible hypotheses,” as if the commendation were without implicit qualification.

It is the position of this paper that Nietzsche committed himself to the

development of a coherent theory of ontology, one which finds much of its inspiration in

1
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J.

Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968) section 55.

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the mid-nineteenth century ideas of natural science and in Naturphilosophie. In the

ongoing development of heat theory and particularly the emerging proposition of heat as

a form of energy, Nietzsche observed a shift in the orientation of natural science from an

essentially mechanistic vision of the universe to a conception that espoused a radical

Becoming over the primacy of Being that was inherent in the atomism of mechanistic

science. That transition to a new model was found in the debates over tenable

propositions for the science of thermodynamics and energetics, as well as various

conceptions in Naturphilosophie that contribute to the idea, as labeled by one theorist, of

2
a Perpetuum Mobile . Further, the very transition Nietzsche found in science away from a

mechanistic atomism to an energeticist model of Becoming provides the operational

paradigm for the full argument of eternal recurrence, an argument that Nietzsche never

completely committed to paper but that may be reconstructed from the total range of

statements he did make and which arrives at a proposition of neither recurrence nor

eternity, one that finally eliminates the ontology of normative time.

On the basis of numerous entries in the Nachlaß, it can be said that

Nietzsche as an ontologist makes a clear commitment to the primacy of Becoming over

Being. His view of the generally and historically assumed primacy of Being is that it is a

falsification of the reality of Becoming, a “primordial belief,” in his own words, that the

world is One and “at rest,” and that it is a falsification for the purpose of survival—a form

of pragmatic thinking that we as a species must commit but that does not correspond in

2
G. W. Muncke, “Perpetuum Mobile,” in Johann Samuel Traugott Gehlers Physikalisches

Wörterbuch, ed. W. Brandes et al. (Leipzig, 1825-45) 408-423.

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3
literal terms to the reality of the world. It follows that any science or philosophy oriented

on the “truth” of Being must be a continuation of the falsification. Yet, he found that, in

much of contemporary scientific theorizing regarding heat as a form of energy, reality

reveals itself as a dynamical process, leaving the philosophical and scientific approaches

to the world in terms of Being—of permanence, of numerically and temporally identical

things, such as the atoms of Newtonian physics—a useful fiction. For Nietzsche, the

conception of the world in terms of Becoming is the hypothesis from which philosophy

must start if it is to be compatible with the paradigmatic shift in science from an

4
atomistic-mechanistic perspective to a dynamistic-processual one.

Heat theory eventually settled out into the science of thermodynamics, and

the first two laws of thermodynamics constituted, for a thinker like Nietzsche and

certainly not for him alone, a potential logical, ontological contradiction. The first law

asserted the conservation of energy—that the total amount of energy can never be altered,

that energy can never be created or destroyed. The second law, the law of entropy, if

viewed as applicable to the universe as a whole, implied the final anti-energeticist

triumph of Being in demanding a completion of history in the teleology of the heat death

of the universe—a fate of ultimate and permanent stasis and the end to all change, all

Becoming.

3
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1986), Preface, section 4.

4
Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Preface, section 5.
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Nietzsche’s necessary recourse and solution was to accept the first law of

the conservation of energy and deny the applicability of the second law of entropy to the

universe as a whole by adopting an a-teleological position. The universe must have no

end, in his view, for to reach an end is to achieve the finality of Being. He saw a universe
5
that “plays its game in infinitum,” a posture that overtly denies the ending in

unstructuredness, in no-thing-ness, in the thermodynamic heat death of everything.

It is with his rejection of the second law and his upholding of the first law

of thermodynamics that Nietzsche aligns himself with the science of dynamism-

energetics of the mid-nineteenth century and with a range of views of Naturphilosophie

that can be grouped under the rubric of Perpetuum Mobile and that take the universe as

without any rest either at a beginning or an end. For Nietzsche, “the world may be

thought of as a certain definite quantity of force and as a certain definite number of

6
centers of force” with no possibility of a final dissipation. The finite and a-teleological

aspect of the world as energy manifests itself as a cyclicality in which the disorganized or

degraded energy formations become the material for reprocessing or recycling, making
7
the universe what he saw as a “monster of energy” that sustains itself as a Perpetuum
8
Mobile that “lives on itself: its excrements are its food.” The element of cyclicality

contributes the foundation for Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence, for eternal

5
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1066.
6
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1066.
7
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1067.
8
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1066.
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recurrence was what Nietzsche would make of the Perpetuum Mobile as he altered the

concept to suit and support his own distinctive ontological philosophy.

The contributions of the Perpetuum Mobile to Nietzsche’s ontology are

derived from a number of scientists and philosophers. The key figure in science whom, as
9
Alwin Mittasch has pointed out, Nietzsche read extensively and who directly asserted

the indestructibility of energy was Robert Mayer, one of the principal contributors to the
10
development of the theory of heat as a form of energy. Mayer, in an essay from 1862,
11
speaks of “the discovery of the law of the indestructibility of force.” In an essay from

1870, Mayer uses Hermann von Helmholtz’s phrase, “the law of the conservation of
12
force.” And in 1845, Mayer gives a clear account of the essence of the conservation of

energy: “In all physical and chemical processes the given force remains a constant
13
quantity.”

9
Alwin Mittasch, “Friedrich Nietzsches Naturbeflissenheit,” in Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger

Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1950-52 (Heidelberg, 1950) 22.

10
Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concepts to Relativity

and Quanta (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966) 48.

11
Robert Julius Mayer, “Über das Fieber. Ein iatromechanischer Versuch,” 1862, in Die Mechanik

der Wärme in gesammelten Schriften, 3rd edition, ed. Jacob J. Weyrauch (Stuttgart, 1893) 324-336.
12
Mayer, “Über die Bedeutung der unveränderlichen Grössen,” 1870, in Die Mechanik der Wärme

in gesammelten Schriften, 381-393.

13
Mayer, “Die organische Bewegung in ihrem Zusammenhange mit dem Stoffwechsel. Ein

Beitrag zur Naturkunde,” 1845, in Die Mechanik der Wärme in gesammelten Schriften, 45-128.
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A variety of writers developed the idea of energy as flowing in cyclical or

circular patterns, a concept that serves as a foundation for the core assertion of

Nietzsche’s initial conception of eternal recurrence, as presented in the passage included

in The Will to Power. The scientist Georg Wilhelm Muncke viewed the first law of

thermodynamics in terms of circular processing and reprocessing. Muncke uses the

phrase “perpetuum mobile physicum” in the context of the world as a “circular course of
14
things . . . which ever endures and uninterruptedly renews itself . . .” In a similar vein,

Karl Wilhelm Gottlieb Kastner refers to “curvilinear motions that proceeding from a
15
point, return to it, and thus endlessly renew themselves. . .” Jakob Friedrich Fries writes

of the natural disposition toward “a certain circular course [Kreislauf] of the same
16
recurring phenomena.”

Central to Nietzsche’s ontological worldview is the principle of a motive

force that unceasingly generates and regenerates energy formations, maintaining a

perpetual dynamism. Beginning with his Birth of Tragedy and Philosophy in the Tragic

Age of the Greeks and extending all the way to his late notes, Nietzsche sees an “inner
17
will,” —which he claims is what is missing from mechanistic science—in terms of a

Heraclitean strife of opposites that brings about the creation-destruction of the universe

14
Muncke, 408-423.
15
Karl Wilhelm Gottlieb Kastner, Grundzüge der Physik und Chemie, 2nd edition (Nuremberg,

1832-33) 66.
16
Jacob Friedrich Fries, “Experimentalphysik” in Lehrbuch der Naturlehre (Jena, 1826) 125-126.
17
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 619.
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ad infinitum. It is this motive force as oppositional strife to which Nietzsche gives the
18
name “will to power,” defining it as “pathos,” that is, a suffering from the contradiction
19
or Ineinander (entanglement) of opposite forces, which “relieves” itself via an

autogenerative overflow and re-flow, an eternal world creation-destruction.

Here again, Nietzsche found support in the science of energetics as well in

the Naturphilosophie that embraced the new scientific paradigms. The scientist Johann

Heinrich Ferdinand Autenrieth speaks of polarities that are never in complete equilibrium

as “a continuing source of all motion. . .” This source “most likely. . .explains the

continuation of the motion of all the stars, the sun and our earth. . .” Autenrieth identifies

this source as the “vital force,” calling its “perpetual internal change a not further

explicable basis [Grund] that sustains such continual disturbance between the essentially

interrelated antitheses and does not allow them to come to equilibrium.” He refers to this

“far from equilibrium” situation by the term Indifferenzpunkt out of which comes creation
20
via destruction/de-differentiation.

Ultimately, it is the Naturphilosophie of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von

Schelling that had the most extensive influence over Nietzsche’s thought, and particularly

his will to power as pathos. Like Nietzsche, Schelling posits the autogenerative source of

the world in terms of the “dynamic indifference” or “dynamic unity” of opposing yet

18
Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich, 1956) vol. 3, p. 778.
19
Nietzsche, KSA 7: 7[196], (7.111).
20
Johann Heinrich Ferdinand Autenrieth, Ansicht über Natur- und Seelenleben. ed. Hermann

Friedrich Autenrieth (Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1836) 36-37, 295, 383-384, 391.
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interlaced originary forces [Urkräfte], such as attractive and repulsive forces. For

Schelling, as for Nietzsche, there is no force in nature that is not counteracted by an

opposing force; the two constitute a paired polarity and are in a continuous conflict.

Again as with Nietzsche, this continuous conflict is ontologically more basic than the

manifest universe, with the latter reduced to a generation based on the strife of the
21
Urkräfte. Schelling asserts the primacy of the polarities by conjoining the “dynamic
22
unity” of opposing Urkräfte that he calls “the common soul of nature” and the principle
23
of life with a repeated “rekindling” that continually sustains the conflict of opposites.

Schelling refers to this principle as a system of “mutual determination of receptivity and

24
activity, comprised within one concept. . .” He, too, argues that an unending cyclicality

arises out of the opposing forces, with one acting centrifugally, the other counteracting
25
centripetally.

A final contribution to Nietzsche’s thinking—and, as will be seen, particularly to

eternal recurrence—comes from Friedrich Zöllner, a physicist whom Nietzsche read

carefully and remarked upon. Zöllner was one of the first physicists to employ Georg

21
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (Leipzig, 1797)

111.
22
Schelling, Von der Weltseele; eine Hypothese der höheren Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen

Organismus (Hamburg, 1798) 567-569.

23
Schelling, Von der Weltseele, 568.
24
Schelling, Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (Jena and Leipzig, 1799) 90.
25
Schelling, Von der Weltseele, 381.
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Friedrich Bernhard Riemann’s non-Euclidean geometry to space, rendering space finite

but unbounded. Zöllner wrote detailed discussions of non-Euclidean geometry in relation

to time, space, and force. He argued that the total amount of force in the universe is finite

and that finite force and infinite time are compatible with non-Euclidean geometry. Most

important to Nietzsche was Zöllner’s idea that time and space curve back into

themselves, extending the cyclical pattern of energy flow that Nietzsche found in
26
Naturphilosophie to the very structure of the universe.

These observations suggest that there was a concept developing in

Naturphilosophie as it was influenced by the science of heat as energy in the mid-

nineteenth century, one which we have termed Perpetuum Mobile—employing Muncke’s

language—and which was composed of the following propositions: the conservation of

force as a constant quantity, the cyclical flow of energy, the continuing presence of energy

established in paired and opposing polarities that remain perpetually in a condition of

dynamical disequilibrium, the rejection of the principle of entropy in application to the

universe as a single closed system, and the arrangement of cosmic space in accordance

with a non-Euclidean geometry. It is possible that the Perpetuum Mobile provided

Nietzsche—through his reading of, at minimum, several of these philosophers as well as

contemporaneous scientists—with a serious scientific foundation for his vision of an

26
Johann Carl Friedrich Zöllner, Über die Natur des Cometen. Beiträge zur Geschichte und

Theorie der Erkenntnis (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1872). Nietzsche commented favorably on this book
in several letters, as Günther Abel and Alistair Moles, among others, point out. [Abel, Nietzsche: Die
Dynamik des Willens zur Macht und die ewige Wiederkehr (Berlin, 1984)] There is thus a likelihood that

Nietzsche adopted in eternal recurrence the idea of Riemannian (non-Euclidean) space and time to which

Zöllner alludes.
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energeticist universe, and thus the primacy of Becoming over Being. However, although

the constituent parts of the Perpetuum Mobile gave him the elements for the first version

of eternal recurrence, as presented in The Will to Power, it left Nietzsche with the

problem of a pointless eternity—with the meaninglessness that comes when there is

simply no end to things. What he needed to accomplish was a scientifically founded

disproving of normative time—he required an elimination of the meaningless eternity he

27
identified with what he called “Turkish Fatalism.” This is precisely what he

accomplished with the concept of eternal recurrence, evident when one follows through

the logic of the argument and finds the concept transformed from an engine of endless

energy to something that breaks the very fatalism of time—that breaks an intrinsically

cyclical Becoming away from normative, linear time.

There has been a general difficulty in reading the argument for eternal

recurrence, due in part to the fact that, as is well recognized by now, the idea is presented

in essentially two forms. In the last sections of The Will to Power, it is developed as an

intended scientific principle that is supposed to follow logically and inevitably from our

observations of the universe as science reveals it to us, or did in Nietzsche’s time, and

particularly from the law of the conservation of energy. The argument, as it is presented

in section 1066 of The Will to Power, is familiar and readily summarized: The number of

centers of force is finite, therefore the available combinations of such centers are finite,

and in infinite time, it must follow that the variety of combinations and sequences of

27
Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II, Zweite Abtheilung: Der Wanderer und sein

Schatten, 61. (translation by the authors)

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combinations of centers of force will be exhausted, and the overall sequence of sequences

will have to begin again. Such repetition, which touches everything that happens,

including every event in every life, has already occurred an infinite number of times and

will recur endlessly into an infinite future.

The other form of the thought makes no direct mention in its passages of

the great cosmological repeating of all events. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra and in section

341 of The Gay Science, eternal recurrence appears as a proposition to be imagined—the

dream, or myth, of a life that is eternally repeated, without hope or possibility of

redaction or reprieve. It is a conception meant as a test of resolve, a concept to be seen as,

by the title of its section in The Gay Science, “the greatest weight,” threatening the

implication of the darkest Nihilism—the strongest sense of meaninglessness to things, of

the absence of any purpose or end goal, of pointless interminable continuance—and

carrying as well a moral lesson, open to endless interpretation, regarding the answer to

such despair.

The two modes of the thought have often been played off against each

other, the moral lesson employed to explain away the scientific concept, for by many

commentators on Nietzsche, eternal recurrence of the same has been estimated to make

little sense as a potential principle of science.

When specific counterarguments have been wielded against eternal

recurrence as a cosmological theory, they have arrived in two species. The first is the

rejection of the conclusion that a finite number of combinations of centers of force

necessarily follows from the proposition that there is a finite number of centers of force.

This complaint carries some weight, but it is the second species that is the more virulent.
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It asserts that the scientific argument leads to an absurd result, and most specifically, that

the idea of the eternal recurrence of the same constitutes an internal contradiction. If

precisely the same event, the same sequence of events, even the same life, occurs even a

second time, identical in every detail, then it is by definition not identical, for it comes

later in time—it has been displaced in the time sequence and is thus different by dint of

position. If it were truly the same—which is what, it appears, Nietzsche’s argument

requires—then the event, or each individual event in a sequence, would recur at the same

time or times as the previous occurrence or occurrences, and thus there would not be a

recurrence. The very phrase “eternal recurrence of the same” asserts that there is no

recurrence—since everything is always the same—at the same time, so to speak, as it

asserts that there is a recurrence. What is worse, since Nietzsche claims that the past is

also an eternity leading up to now—and that an infinite amount of time, and an infinite

number of recurrences of all events, has already passed—the eternal recurrence of the

same argues that not only has all we experience already happened an infinite number of

times, but it is also happening for the first time, or still happening for the first time.

In short, the difficulty is that Nietzsche’s argument demonstrates that the

infinite repetition of everything is both a logical inevitability and a logical impossibility

—that it is a paradox intrinsic to events.

Many commentators on Nietzsche take this internal contradiction as a

mark of the implausibility and thus the failure of the argument for eternal recurrence as a
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28
scientific principle. But the inference from logical failure to rhetorical failure is not so

easily drawn, for in Nietzsche’s ontological philosophy, the world is not logically

constituted. It is an explicit position of the philosopher that the categories of reason do

not apply to the world and thus are not arbiters of truth. Yet, the rigorous application of

the procedures of Aristotelian logic are consistently among the guiding principles of

Nietzsche’s practice, and when he engages in deductive reasoning, he is a precise

practitioner.

The implications of applying rigorously executed logic as a surgical probe

for the delving of an illogical world has yet to be fully explored, but for the moment, a

portion of the incisive potential of the procedure can be seen in one of Nietzsche’s

occasional methodologies—the following through of a line of argument until it reaches a

logical contradiction and thereby uncovers a flaw in our normative vision of the world. It

is a method of argumentation that Nietzsche describes in section 634 of The Will to

Power, in which he defines his conception of the atom: “I call it a quantum of ‘will to

power’: it expresses the characteristic that cannot be thought out of the mechanistic order
29
without thinking away this order itself.” The method can be considered comparable as a

28
Notable exceptions are Milic Capek in The New Aspects of Time: Its Continuity and Novelties

(Dortrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991) and Bergson and Modern Physics: A

Reinterpretation and Re-evaluation, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. VII, ed. Robert S.
Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (Dortrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1971); Alistair Moles in

Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Nature and Cosmology (New York: Peter Lang, 1990); and Babette E. Babich in

Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Ground of Art and Life (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1994).
29
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 634.
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logical procedure to the process of factoring out when working a differential equation in

calculus, a procedure by which factors of the equation are arranged to be paired and

negating—identical expressions with one positive and the matching one negative—so

that together they come to zero and can be dropped from the equation, thereby

simplifying it. Nietzsche’s method amounts to locating elements of the argument that

negate their own meanings and eliminating them in favor of factors that become implied

by the ways in which the previous factors reached negation.

The claim here is that the “scientific” argument for eternal recurrence as

presented in The Will to Power is the foundation of a larger argument that would disprove

the claim of infinite and exact recurrences, on the basis of their evident absurdity, and

assert an alternate ontological conception, one that Nietzsche was able to present in no

other fashion, by no other disquisition. That larger argument is adumbrated in the story of

Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Yet having been presented by Nietzsche more explicitly

nowhere else—presumably, he would have done so in a projected book, some of the notes

for which are included The Will to Power—it is difficult to extract. Nevertheless, if one

takes into account all Nietzschean texts referring to eternal recurrence, as well as many of

his ontological observations distributed in the Nachlaß, one can see the track of the

argument. It can be traced—for the notes constitute a chain of islands, individual summits

of thought, that mark the presence of a submerged mountain range, many of whose peaks

never broke the surface of the written page. One can see that eternal recurrence

constitutes one of the moments Nietzsche promised at the beginning of his public career

in The Birth of Tragedy, the moment at which science reaches its limits and, from that

“periphery,” men gaze “into what defies illumination,” and “when they see to their horror
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how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites its own tail—suddenly the new
30
form of insight breaks through, tragic insight. . .” Eternal recurrence is a tragic insight

—not merely a Nihilistic contemplation, but a breaking of ontological norms—a

Dionysian insight, which defies rational illumination but which may arrive at the

periphery of logic.

The plot of Thus Spoke Zarathustra indicates a shift occurring in the heart

of the argument, a transformation of implication that follows Zarathustra’s initial

realization of endlessly repeating, numerically infinite world histories—the

transformation of implication into a recognition that is never fully detailed in the text of

the book. In the middle of the text, at the end of Book 2, Zarathustra comes upon “The
31
Stillest Hour,” during which the clock of his life “drew a breath” and Zarathustra is
32
compelled to withdraw into solitude “by the force of his pain.” At the start of Book 3, in

the section titled “The Wanderer,” Zarathustra returns, having realized, as he says, “now I
33
must face my hardest path.” Immediately following, in the section “On the Vision and

the Riddle,” he meets the dwarf at the gateway between the past and the future and

realizes the conception of eternal recurrence as an endless repetition of world cycles, and

30
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann

(New York: The Modern Library, 1968) section 15.

31
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann

(New York: Penguin Books, 1977) “The Stillest Hour.”

32
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Stillest Hour.”
33
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Wanderer.”
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then confronts the nauseating vision of the shepherd with the snake in his mouth, the

serpent whose head the shepherd bites off, after which he rises up laughing. Later, in

“The Convalescent,” Zarathustra returns to the concept of the eternal recurrence, as well

as the vision of the serpent—which he now claims had crawled into his throat. He

returns, as well, to the nausea, which he attributes to the thought that “The small man
34
recurs eternally.” But his “disgust” is referred to in the past tense, and when his animals

detail eternal recurrence as an infinity of world cycles, he accuses them of being cruel and
35
making a “hurdy-gurdy song” of it.

Something in the concept has changed for Zarathustra. Later still, in “The

Other Dancing Song,” life charges Zarathustra with wanting to leave her soon. He
36
whispers something in her ear, to which she responds, “Nobody knows that.” Nothing

more is revealed of what he whispered, and if the thought he shares with life were one

that had already been enunciated in the text, there would be no reason for the narrator to

omit it. Clearly, something further has occurred to Zarathustra. It is equally clear that

Zarathustra’s disgust has left him by the close of the book, when he leaves his cave
37
“glowing and strong as a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains.” The reason

for that change of import is the heart of the significance of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but it

is a reason the character never openly reveals.

34
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Convalescent.”
35
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Convalescent.”
36
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Other Dancing Song.”
37
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Sign.”
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We are left to infer the secret that Zarathustra whispers. We must

reconstruct the argument that Nietzsche never deposited into a finished text, discover the

submerged chine of unexpressed intent, working through the logic of what he did write to

interpret and break through the rational contradiction that many commentators have

observed. To do so, one must proceed by recognized procedure. When confronting this

contradiction, we have to seek what inevitably must exist: a hidden, unexamined, and

faulty assumption, the assumption that is unwittingly accepted and that lies in opposition

to the bulk of the premises of the argument.

The unexamined assumption in the argument for eternal recurrence as it is

presented in The Will to Power—or more precisely, as that argument is generally read—is

that time runs infinitely in a straight line. This is a proposition that Nietzsche never

specifically asserts. It is merely the normative conception of time, and it is always

perilous to assume—when one has not been told explicitly one way or the other—that

Nietzsche is adopting the normative conception of anything. To be fair, in the argument

Nietzsche does specifically claim that time is infinite, but this is a claim that is made in

notes unpublished and unrevised at the time of his death and that is overtly revised in the

text of Zarathustra and thus may be taken as provisional in its exact phrasing. In
38
Zarathustra, we are told in “On the Vision and the Riddle” that “time itself is a circle,”
39
and, in “The Convalescent,” that “Bent is the path of eternity.”

38
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “On the Vision and the Riddle.”
39
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Convalescent.”
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The difference is a geometric one and is foundational to the proper reading

of eternal recurrence. It marks the reason for the profound emphasis Nietzsche gave to

the thought. The deepest and most far-reaching revolutions of thought are always those

that involve an alteration in the very geometry of thinking, for thinking does have a

geometry, a set of rules for the space in which it occurs and according to which one

thought follows upon another. Aristotelian logic occurs in a space of Euclidean geometry

—thoughts that imply each other follow one upon the next without evident inflection.

They constitute a straight line of logic—the further one follows out the line, the farther

one falls from the starting point of the argument. But such an uninflected intellectual,

imaginative space is not the only possibility.

And it is not the one Nietzsche asserts in the Zarathustra text, where time

itself is claimed to be a circle. A different set of inferences follows from there, different

from the inferences that come of assuming that time is straight whereas events, or

configurations of centers of force, repeat in a vast circle. If time is straight, then events

must necessarily slip their time slots in instance after instance of their occurrence,

producing the time displacement, the occurrence at a later point on the time line, that

makes a logical contradiction and an absurdity of the claim they are the same. They

cannot be the same if one occurrence of an event is later than the one that preceded it. It

is as if the circle of events were a wheel rolling down the road of infinite time, and each

spot on that wheel hits the ground in each instance at another spot from that of the last

instance, a spot further down that road.

But no such displacement occurs if time itself is also a circle. Like a tire

and a rim, the circle of events and the circle of time are locked together—each event is
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permanently, and in a sense perpetually, localized in its moment. Think also of time as a

strip of film, of definite length, in which the two ends have been spliced together. Time is

then not infinite but finite and unbounded. It is limited in its extension, there is a total

amount of it, but it has no edge—one never can reach the end of it. It is simply that any

moment one might postulate as the end of time would be followed by the moment that

then would constitute the beginning of time. But in this geometric conception, the terms

“end” and “beginning” are arbitrary and meaningless—there is no more an end or

beginning of circular time than there is an end point and beginning point of a circle: the

line of the circle simply is continuous, and of definite and measurable extension. So too,

the terms “past” and “future” are arbitrary and, finally, meaningless. What constitutes the

past and future depends upon where—or when—on the circle of time one is “standing,”

and, theoretically, the past would eventually follow the future, and the future ultimately

precede the past, for as Zarathustra tells us, “And are not all things knotted together so
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firmly that this moment draws after it all that is to come? Therefore—itself too?” But

the word “theoretically” is inexact, because, by necessary implication and by Nietzsche’s

own argument, no recurrence ever occurs, not even theoretically, no more than any one

point on a circle is ever repeated on the same circle, no more than any frame appears

twice in the same film.

Which is also to say that time possesses a Riemannian geometry, or more

exactly, the extension that is time has a positive curvature, as it is conceived by

Riemannian geometry, meaning that time curves back upon itself. We, as occurrences of

40
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “On the Vision and the Riddle.”
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time ourselves, our lives occupying sections of the loop of time, are incapable of noticing

the curvature. We experience time simply as proceeding, or ourselves as proceeding

through time. Only by having an overview of time could one notice that it is finite,

although it never comes to an end. But, for Nietzsche—who subscribed to a position of

thorough perspectivism—there is no overview, there is no outside, no other world from

which to observe this one. This is the only world, all reality is only what appears to the

observer from the observer’s viewpoint, and this curved time is the only time.

Which is why there is no recurrence. It is not merely that recurrence is

inherently unobservable, but that it does not in fact occur. Every event comes once only
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—Nietzsche himself asserts “there is no ‘second time’ ” — no event initiated time or

will close time, and whether an event is a part of the past or of the future is purely a

matter of viewpoint. Time, too, is a matter of perspective, a matter of judgmental

terminology within a frame of positive curvature.

Nietzsche’s use of Riemannian geometry—the same geometry that applies

to space in Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity—is not simple conjecture or

interpretive imposition. Not only does Nietzsche assert specifically that time is a circle,

but also that space is spherical and that “The shape of space must be the cause of eternal
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movement,” which makes his space Einsteinian. It is hardly a matter of unfounded

conjecture to consider that Nietzsche may well have understood the mathematical

implications of these assertions, particularly if such an interpretation makes eternal

41
Nietzsche, KSA 12: 1[119], (12.38). (translation by the authors)
42
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1064.
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recurrence a fully reasonable idea, eliminating the internal contradiction so many have

found in it. Both Capek and particularly Moles have noticed the usefulness of this

approach, and as noted above, Nietzsche was aware of the pertinence of Riemannian

geometry to cosmology from his reading of Friedrich Zöllner. The positive curvature of

time is an evident mark of Zöllner’s impression.

Hence, we have in eternal recurrence a structure of time that is not eternal

and in which nothing recurs. What we do have, other than the logically inevitable

conclusion Nietzsche discovered bereft of its logical contradiction, is a finite time that

will never come to a conclusion or reach a goal that offers an external justification of the

world. And we have something more.

Neither Capek nor Moles sees anything more in the thought of eternal

recurrence than a circular, finite, and unbounded time—an interpretation that Capek

strangely criticizes for leading to stasis. But if one follows through the same logic that led

to the recognition of the positive curvature of time, one finds there are further

implications.

Under Nietzsche’s perspectivism, the concept of overall time, of time per

se, is meaningful as a logical extrapolation from the observable facts of experience, it is

meaningful conceptually, but it is meaningless as an experiential reality. There is no

perspective, no point of view, from which the conceptual totality of time—whether finite

or infinite—can be experienced, not even over the course of the conceptual totality of

time. The totality of the world’s time is thus, in Nietzsche’s ontology, not a fact. It is

merely a result of logical analysis. From the point of view of any event, any center of

force, or even the constituencies of any combination of forces, from the point of view of
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any interacting system of centers of force, even if splayed over time—meaning any

apparent object throughout its existence, or a human life, our own existence—there can

only be as much time as the object, life, center of force, or system experiences. Within a

perspectival structure, there is no outside to any system, and thus no time can pertain to,

can exist for, the system other than the time that is experienced from the perspective of

the system. Within a perspectival system, time is functionally an attribute of the system,

and it follows that when the system does not exist, its attributes cannot exist—time

cannot in fact, and as a fact, transpire. Hence, every moment of the termination of any

discrete and persisting system is followed, from the viewpoint of the system, by the

moment of its beginning. More personally, the moment of death for every human being is

followed by the moment of birth—and not for the second time, but for the first time, for

there is no second time. Every life is itself a circular time span.

This is a necessary implication of Nietzsche’s argument, and, with regard

to human life, an implication that he does, at one point, specifically announce. In the

Nachlaß, he wrote: “Between the last moment of consciousness and the first appearance

of new life lies ‘no time’—it passes by like a stroke of lightning, even if living creatures

measure it in terms of billions of years or could not measure it at all. Timelessness and
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succession are compatible as soon as the intellect is gone.”

What results is a system of worlds within worlds, each discrete system that

persists through time persisting through its own finite but unbounded time. And the

overall, finite but unbounded time of the world as a whole, within which one would want

43
Nietzsche, KSA 9: 11[318], (9.564). (translation by the authors)
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to locate all these thereby subsystems of time, does not exist except as an intellectual

abstraction, unless one would wish to grant consciousness to the world as a whole, which

Nietzsche specifically does not do. This is a conception of the world order to which

Nietzsche does point when he has Zarathustra say, in “The Convalescent,” immediately

before condemning the animals for misunderstanding eternal recurrence: “To every soul

there belongs another world; for every soul, every other soul is an afterworld. . . .For me
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—how should there be any outside—myself? There is no outside.”

However, the thought does not stop there. From the point of view of strict

perspectivism when applied to time—and it is clear Nietzsche believes it does apply—

each moment of time is also a system unto itself and possesses its own perspective,

certainly as much as a center of force can be said to possess a unique perspective—the

perceived “Now” constitutes a perspectival system. However, if a moment of time is a

perspective point and only that amount of time it addresses as fact is truly time from its

perspective, then each moment of time exists only during itself, within itself as a circular,

cyclical structure of time. The moment is its own time span. In simple language, this

inference positions the moment “Now” outside of continuous durational time and makes

the “Now” moment the only time that is real, that is a fact. This conception can readily be

viewed as the significance of the section “On the Vision and the Riddle” in Thus Spoke

Zarathustra, in which Zarathustra meets the dwarf at the gateway between the past and

future. The dwarf tells him that the gateway is named “Moment” and claims that the lane

of the infinite past and the lane of the infinite future contradict each other. It is evident

44
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Convalescent.”
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from this text that the past and the future, in contradicting each other, do not make a

continuous line—they do not combine coherently. The Moment stands at their

intersection, and therefore apart from both, for at the point they meet, they do not join

together. In short, the passing moment does not pass; it is not in time.

The point is even clearer when the passage from Zarathustra is matched to

section 1066 of The Will to Power, to a portion of it that has been generally overlooked in

the specifications it applies to the infinity of the past. Nietzsche writes:

Nothing can prevent me from reckoning

backward from this moment and saying “I shall never reach

the end”; just as I can reckon forward from the same

moment into the infinite. Only if I made the mistake—I

shall guard against it—of equating this correct concept of a

regressus in infinitum with an utterly unrealizable concept

of a finite progressus up to this present, only if I suppose

that the direction (forward or backward) is logically a

matter of indifference, would I take the head—this moment

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—for the tail.

The movement from the moment “Now” back through an infinity of the

past is legitimate. However, it is not the same as the incorrect translation, the

45
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 1066.
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“unrealizable concept” of the progression of time forward through the past to the “Now”

moment. The direction is not a matter of indifference, and the movement forward through

the past is judged not credible. It is not the fact of the matter. If one attends carefully to

the text, this is precisely what the dwarf presented as a vision to Zarathustra. The

implication is the explanation of why the lanes of the past and future contradict each

other: they lead in opposite directions; the past does not flow into the future. They image

incompatible abstractions of time. And they flow out from and away from the present,

from “Now.” The past, as something that happened prior to now and that incrementally

led to it, is a fiction.

This removal of the Moment from the linear flow of time coordinates

precisely with Nietzsche’s observation in the Nachlaß concerning the importance of the
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“infinitely small moment,” as well as the remark in Zarathustra: “The center is
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everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.” Every moment is the center of time—a

conception distinctly close, again, to Einstein’s cosmology. Every Moment is the point

away from which the past and future stream. It is an entirety of time, for itself, and unto

itself, cut away from the flow of time as the head of the snake was bitten off by the

shepherd in Zarathustra’s vision, or by Zarathustra himself.

And so in a very real sense, every Moment is the same Moment, for the

Moment is all the time there actually is. The Moment is all of time, in more than a

metaphoric, poetic sense, for the apotheosis of the Moment breaks all sequence. The fact

46
Nietzsche, KSA 9: 11[156], (9.500). (translation by the authors)
47
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Convalescent.”
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that each Moment provides itself with its only possible time frame—along with the

absence of any overall, universal time frame due to the impossibility of its having any

experiential perspective—destroys any possible site for a sequence. There is “nowhere”

and “no time” within which a sequence of moments may occur. Each Moment, and each

center of force in the Moment of its occurrence, must relate to and interact with all others

outside of any continuous temporal flow, by principles of interaction that are not

themselves temporal. It is as if they are superimposed—not spatially but by dint of the

impossibility of any possible displacement in time from each other, for there is no overall

field of time within which they can be distributed. That the center may be “everywhere”

renders all centers the same center.

This gives the Moment a sense of great depth, a quality of capaciousness,

a sense of possessing hidden recesses, and begins to explain Zarathustra’s numerous

observations towards the end of the book that eternity is deep—not long but deep—as

well as his feeling of the clock of his life drawing a breath, as if stopping for a moment,

as the thought of the eternal recurrence begins to dawn on him—and his sense in the

section “At Noon” that the sun had stood straight over his head throughout his dream of
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the world becoming perfect, and his question “Did time perhaps fly away?” —and his

questions at the very end of the book, “Where is time gone? Have I not sunk into deep
49 50
wells?” and his observation that “there is no time on earth for such things,” referring

48
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “At Noon.”
49
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Drunken Song.”
50
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Sign.”
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to the arrival of Zarathustra’s sign, of his answer finally arrived. And, as a self-contained,

discrete system that, simultaneously, passes out of itself and leads into itself, although it

transpires once only, the Moment out of durational time becomes the perfected image of

Nietzsche’s idea of Becoming.

The Moment is the culmination of eternal recurrence, and as its own

entirety of time that passes simultaneously out of itself and back into itself, it is

Becoming divorced from normative temporality. As its own entirety of time, the Moment

cannot pass away—from its perspective, which is its only reality, there is no further time

into which it can dissipate. Thus, the Moment is the image of Becoming that has been

permanentized. Here is the meaning of Nietzsche’s remark: “That everything recurs is the
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closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being.” In a sense, the

Moment, and with it all of time, is going nowhere. It passes, yet it does not pass away.

And as a simultaneous passing away and recommencement that never really passes away

and never really recommences, the Moment is the perfected image of Nietzsche’s

simultaneity of destruction and creation, of his internal contradiction in all things—of his

criticism of substance, which makes the Moment, and eternal recurrence, the culmination

of Nietzsche’s ontology.

Yet, from the human perspective, time will continue to pass, history will

appear a perceptible fact, and the logic of our situation will continue to suggest a

monumental recurrence of the cosmological chronology. But that is the human

perspective. It is an Apollinian vision, for the initial, Nihilistic version of eternal

51
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, section 617.
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recurrence was always a matter of the Apollinian viewpoint—it clearly adopts the

principium individuationis and acknowledges the slipping gradient of temporal extension.

But, when one thinks through the vision to acquire the riddle it harbors, one begins to

come upon a “tragic insight,” a Dionysian vision, a seemingly illogical but inescapable

inference—an inference that ultimately proves to be thoroughly consistent with an

advanced mathematical logic—hidden within. The Dionysian insight shines through the

Apollinian image and the Apollinian argument—what Nietzsche promised at the start of

his career.

Becoming that is divorced from normative temporality—Becoming that

culminates and passes away simultaneously with its commencement—Becoming that is

the entirety of its own time span regardless of the brevity of its extent. The Moment as

the final implication and the inevitable outcome of eternal recurrence resolves for

Nietzsche into another rendering of his attack on substance, of his recognition of the

illusoriness of self-sameness. Eternal recurrence delivers him again to his core point, but

with a difference. Nietzsche’s direct attack on substance—his claim that any unit is also

what it is not—is arrived at by a priori argument: He argues by fiat, propounds the truth

of what he approves and states the impossibility of what he dislikes. However, his

argument for eternal recurrence resulting in the Moment that both is and is not, that arises

as it passes away, is deduced—it is rooted in scientific observation and scientific

principles and is achieved through a rigorous deduction that reaches an inevitable

implication. It lays its foundation outside of Nietzsche’s intentions and beyond the

craning and stretch of his preferences. It argues a reason for its acceptance.
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Extending its roots into scientific principles of his time and devising itself

into a conception consistent with his ontology, eternal recurrence as well provides

Nietzsche with the fulfillment of the promise of the Perpetuum Mobile—it dispels the

nightmare of universal entropy and, thereby, achieves an eradication of the primacy of

Being. It grants an ontology of energy that does not degrade and, in so doing, incubates

an incandescent Dionysian vision that burns in opposition to the apparent, Apollinian,

mechanistic, atomistic reality of substance.

“Zarathustra, the Moment, and Eternal Recurrence of the Same: Nietzsche’s Ontology of Time”
was included in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Before Sunrise, published by Continuum,
September 2008. An earlier version of the paper was presented at The Friedrich Nietzsche
Society’s 11th Annual Conference, “Nietzsche and Science” at Cambridge University, Cambridge,
England, September 2001.