Philosophers

How is Nietzsche's Will to Power related to his notion of Eternal Recurrence? Wikipedia suggests a connection, but does not elaborate. thanks PS: I am not a student and this is not a homework assignment.

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For a lot of people who study Nietzsche it’s not clear that a connection exists. Nietzsche himself considered these his two most important contributions to philosophy, although I’m not aware of any explicit attempt on his part to unite them. And you have to bear in mind that even though he thought these were his most important ideas, it doesn’t follow that they were. I find much deep and valuable philosophical thinking in Nietzsche’s works, but not always where he thought the best ideas were.

For instance, Nietzsche has an extremely high opinion of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, while he treats On the Genealogy of Morals as if it were a mere appendix to Beyond Good and Evil. Other readers may disagree with me (although plenty do not), but in my own opinion On the Genealogy of Morals is his greatest single work, one that yields up more insights on every reading; while Thus Spoke Zarathustra is uneven and at most a supplementary part of Nietzsche’s oeuvre.

But that’s just an example, by way of illustrating the point that Nietzsche’s readers do not always consider most important within his thought what he sees as most important. The Will to Power – which we all wish Nietzsche had said more about – is a remarkable effort to steer philosophical theories about human motivations away from simple theories of self-preservation, which before Nietzsche had been the furthest that “tough-minded” philosophers like Hobbes had gone in their analyses of human action. For Nietzsche, self-preservation is too limited. We act in order to achieve, to impose our wills on our surroundings. We desire not simply so that we can attain what we desire, but because we desire the act of desiring. (This is why, in “On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life,” Nietzsche refers to “life” – what he will later call the will to power – as “self-desiring.”) To have desires and satisfy them is what the Will to Power craves, not merely to be done with desiring.

The Freudian libido bears some resemblance to the Will to Power in its excessiveness, libido being the desire that does not aim in an accountable way merely for the continued existence of the desiring creature.

While the Will to Power is a new, modernist idea, the Eternal Return or Eternal Recurrence is almost an antiquity by comparison. It is a self-conscious reappropriation of Stoic and some pre-Socratic ideas about a universal cycle. Maybe Nietzsche uses the Eternal Return only as a test we apply to our lives – this is one interpretation of it – i.e. that life is worth living if and only if we are willing to have every moment of it return. Or maybe he literally believes that it is a true cosmic assertion. Either way it is an attempt to achieve some of the effects of immortality, like the thought of one’s continuing existence, without reference to an otherworldly afterlife. If Nietzsche puts the doctrine forward as literal truth, then he thinks we do have this form of immortality available to us. If he proposes it as a test for life, it brings some of the consolation of immortality to those rightly oriented toward their own lives.

On the reading of the Eternal Return as a test, it can be connected with the Will to Power, on some understandings of the Will to Power. Wanting this life in all its ups and downs to recur eternally is a sign that you are, as it were, expressing your Will to Power; not stopping it up. But I feel the need to say “as it were” in connection with such a sentence, because I don’t really think that Nietzsche believes the Will to Power can be stopped up. There’s no better or worse manifestation of the Will to Power; if there were, then it wouldn’t be the explanation of all actions in the way that Nietzsche thinks it is. But if all actions are Will to Power, then no test is going to differentiate between exhibitions of the Will to Power and repressions of it.

For my money, the Will to Power is irreplaceable. I read Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, at least one great insight on every page, and I can see it as an explanation (among other things) of how human actions have thus far been misdescribed, not to mention human ethics. I find that book fully consistent with the Will to Power although it’s not a book about that doctrine. The Eternal Return, by comparison, is not needed for understanding Nietzsche’s Genealogy and might even contradict its closing image of a decisive new human understanding about truth and values. And if one of the two doctrines lies at the heart of what I find Nietzsche’s greatest book, while the other is quite marginal to the book, I can’t in all consistency say the two are related doctrines.

One last word. While a lot of readers would agree with what I say, many would not. I’m offering this answer as a way to think about Nietzsche, but you should not take it as a decisive claim about what everyone believes about him. You asked a good question; which means, there is no one good answer to it.

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