Nietzsche’s Early and Late Conceptions of Time and Eternal Recurrence

Joshua Rayman

Friedrich Nietzsche’s late notions of time and eternal recurrence are semiotically concentrated concepts, tacitly freighted by their history. What we think they mean on their face is other than their history testifies. Examination of Nietzsche’s early writings reveals multiple branching possibilities within his mature conceptions of time and eternal recurrence. His key early texts on time, space, and history—the apparently anomalous, five-page early-1873 fragment known as the Zeitatomenlehre (or “Time-Atom Theory”), On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks—described concepts ranging from time atom theory and eternal recurrence to monumental, critical, and antiquarian history, and the unhistorical, historical, and superhistorical. By determining which of these concepts he privileged in his early work, we can better judge whether the privileged time moment in Thus Spoke Zarathustra refers to a pure fiction, a discrete set of experiential, yet unhistorical time atoms, a continuous temporal spectrum, or a single superhistorical moment encompassing all time. Similarly, examination of Nietzsche’s early treatments of eternal recurrence in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks can help us determine his favored sense of eternal recurrence in the 1880s. This is not to reduce the late to the early work but rather to show just how he came to accept time and eternal recurrence as a plurality of overlapping, connected, recurrent, intratemporal phenomenological moments.

Image: Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche (1882), by Gustav Schultze, from Wikimedia Commons