Friedrich Nietzsche
Eternal return

"Eternal return" (also known as "eternal recurrence") is a hypothetical concept that posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, for an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. It is a purely physical concept, involving no supernatural reincarnation, but the return of beings in the same bodies. Nietzsche first proposed the idea of eternal return in a parable in Section 341 of The Gay Science, and also in the chapter "Of the Vision and the Riddle" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, among other places. Nietzsche considered it as potentially "horrifying and paralyzing", and said that its burden is the "heaviest weight" imaginable (" das schwerste Gewicht "). The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life, a reaction to Schopenhauer 's praise of denying the will-to-live. To comprehend eternal recurrence, and to not only come to peace with it but to embrace it, requires amor fati, "love of fate". As Heidegger pointed out in his lectures on Nietzsche, Nietzsche's first mention of eternal recurrence presents this concept as a hypothetical question rather than stating it as fact. According to Heidegger, it is the burden imposed by the question of eternal recurrence – the mere possibility of it, and the reality of speculating on that possibility – which is so significant in modern thought: "The way Nietzsche here patterns the first communication of the thought of the 'greatest burden' makes it clear that this 'thought of thoughts' is at the same time 'the most burdensome thought.'"

Alexander Nehamas writes in Nietzsche: Life as Literature of three ways of seeing the eternal recurrence:

Nehamas concluded that, if individuals constitute themselves through their actions, they can only maintain themselves in their current state by living in a recurrence of past actions (Nehamas, 153). Nietzsche's thought is the negation of the idea of a history of salvation.
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