Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography

CHAPTER 10

Eternal Recurrence

and The Gay Science

Thinking cosmically in Sils-Maria · Dehumanized nature

• Lofty reckonings · The doctrine of eternal recurrence ·
  The holy January in Genoa · Happy days, gay science ·
  Messina

V ψ HAT WAS GOING through Nietzsche's head as he was hatch-
ing his theory of the "recurrence of the same," the theory that would
uttedy transform him? Did it hit him all of a sudden, without warning?
We have no Yeason to doubt the details of his description of the
moment of inspiration. Still, it is very difficult to imagine that this
insight came to him so abrupdy, since there is evidence to indicate that
the idea was already quite familiar to him. The notion of time circling
within itself, playing through its limited repertoire over and over, is part
of a well-established philosophical and religious tradition found in Indie
myths, in the philosophy of the pre-Socratics and the Pythagoreans, and
in heretical undercurrents in the West. Nietzsche learned about them as
a schoolboy. His 1862 essay "Fate and History" contained allusions to
perpetual circles of time presented in the image of a cosmic clock:
"Does the eternal becoming never reach an end? ... Hour by hour, the
hand of the clock moves along, only to begin its passage all over again
after twelve; a new cosmic era dawns" (/2,56). However, the cosmic era

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