Thoughts on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.
If the world had a goal it must have been reached — Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche posited the eternal recurrence, the will to relive every moment of a life, exactly as it has been lived, over and over again.
Did Nietzsche mean that what eternally returns is exactly the same every time?
What returns is pure difference, becoming. Being is static, an image, complete. Becoming is a never-ending return of the new, the open.
There is no world goal, no perfect state of being. Nietzsche urges us to open our lives to that which is the genesis of life itself: a process of evolving to something new, over and over again.
What must return in us is the will to pure difference — transformation of what exists, what was, into the creation of something that has never existed before.
For life is the affirmation of the new, or nothing.
Evolution, diversity, change, are the one sure roll of the dice. Play the game, roll the dice, explore the open. Let the dice fall how they may. But roll again!
Live this every moment, pure creativity, over and over, and you will grasp what Nietzsche truly meant by the will to power.
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Thanks for reading!
Tomas
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Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2021 by Tomas Byrne.
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