Eternal Recurrence as the Ouroboros in Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"

     The eternal recurrence is a concept which, on the most basic level, makes the claim that everything that has happened historically will repeat itself in the future. There is a sort of merger of past and present, where each extend indefinitely in their respective directions and somehow cycle back and become each other. “‘All that is straight lies,’ murmured the dwarf contemptuously. ‘All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle (p.125).’” This dwarf is a figurative representation of the ‘spirit of gravity’ (p. 124) which is used in various synonymous iterations (e.g. weight, heavy, etc.) as a contrast to words like ‘light’, ‘laughter’, ‘dancing’ and ‘drunkenness’. What we see in this introduction of the eternal recurrence is what could be considered a first phase of its evolution into the synthesis of autonomy and heteronomy through the Dionysian ethic and mindset.     The merger of the past and the present is at a hypothetical locus which is a “gateway…inscribed at the top: ‘Moment.’” 'Moment' is an intersection of the ‘long lane back’ and the ‘long lane outward’ (p. 125) that represent a connected continuum: “the ring of recurrence (p. 184-187).” The gateway of the moment conjures the image of the Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. Earlier in the book, Zarathustra says to the virtuous, “The ring’s thirst is in you; every ring struggles and turns to reach itself again (p. 72).” Here we can see early examples of the mechanics of the eternal recurrence beginning to form. As a general rule, things which are ‘rings’, or seem otherwise as cyclical, make it their business to reach back around on themselves.

     The interpolation of the Ouroboros is especially helpful here, because with it we can see the recurrence as being something which acts upon itself, is incapable of acting on anything other than itself, and where the direction of the action is both unchangeable and irrelevant to the effects of acting. Zarathustra acknowledges this last aspect of the recurrence by way of language in The Convalescent: “Oh my animals…just keep babbling and let one listen! It invigorates me so when you babble: where there is babbling the world indeed lies before me like a garden…aren’t words and sounds rainbows and illusory bridges between things eternally separated (p. 175)?” For Nietzsche, that we are concerned with labeling our actions or movements through life as toward or away, good or bad, past or future, is not important. What is more is that we must acknowledge that we cannot help but move, or act, and that we say “Yes” to that movement as a way of applying our will to an otherwise determined and inescapable process.

     In one of several lamentations about the smallness of human beings, Zarathustra cries, “Alas, human beings recur eternally! The small human beings recur eternally!” In general, until he has come to terms with his own understanding of the eternal recurrence he feels disgust and nausea for it through the idea that the weak are necessary. Later, as Zarathustra begins to see the world from his new vantage point as the “teacher of the eternal recurrence” (p. 177), we find him saying, “Have you ever said Yes to one joy? Oh my friends, then you also said Yes to all pain (p. 263).” The precipice of the Moment is where “All things are enchained, entwined, enamored” and so the Yes-saying or No-saying of one, and not the other, is a denial of the connection they must have by ‘eternity’.

     The weak-willed and small humans are the heteronomy (action that is influenced by forces outside of an individual) of human existence. It may serve interpretation well to consider the episode with the shepherd and the black snake -- where a snake crawls into the mouth of a sleeping shepherd and bites down in his throat, lodging itself in place -- as a transmutation of humanity from populus into symbol.  By interpreting the text in this fashion, we can condense the criticisms from the previous parts of the book into two basic components: agent and sickness. The first of these is autonomous, but the latter represents heteronomy in the ways it takes the form of shortcomings imposed on man by himself in large groups. Whenever Zarathustra encounters something which he criticizes in humanity, he tends to find them in places where people are in groups (On the Flies of the Marketplace p. 36-39; On Chastity p. 39-40; On the New Idol p. 34-36).

     Zarathustra first advised us to “flee into solitude (p. 37),” and to “Get out of the way of the bad smell (p. 36)!” To be around these people in these settings is like sitting in a room of vaporized diseases, breathing them into your body until you are too weary to overcome weakness. However, after establishing the eternal recurrence, he advises the shepherd to “Bite off the head [of the snake] (p. 127)!” because the shepherd cannot pull it out. This biting down – necessary, because all the attempts to pull the snake out or otherwise remove it whole failed – implies that the things which Zarathustra considered diseases and wretched are in fact a part of our nature that must be consumed before they can be rejected. Yes-saying to life is action which leads to acceptance of what is unchangeable in nature, further leading one to have “honey in [their] veins that makes [their] blood thicker and…soul calmer (p.191)” Said differently: “Pain is also a joy, a curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun,” and, “all joy wants eternity (p. 263)!” At this point in the text, we are well into the Dionysian principles, and “Zarathustra stood there like a drunken man (p. 259),” speaking from a very light and ecstatically intoxicated point of view, as though by coming to terms with and saying Yes to the bad as well as the good, and therefore the entire cycle of the eternal recurrence.

     It would seem that the eternal recurrence is a metaphysical principle relating to the nature of reality in terms of dualities and their interconnectedness. Referring back to the Ouroboros, because it does not matter which direction the movement or action takes place there is an even blending of values and concepts. The only concept of direction the Nietsche imposes is that of time, which he does by referencing the “great earth of noon (p. 178)” and later, midnight. That noon moves toward midnight and vice versa, and that time appears to be moving forward, is given since, taken out of the context of social normalcy, it does not matter to the sun nor the moon which direction the hands of a clock spin; noon and midnight will endlessly progress toward one another through the illusion of movement in time. In this way, the eternal recurrence is not oscillatory, but fixed. “It is not my manner to wake great-grandmothers from their sleep only to tell them – go back to sleep (p.174)!” The appearance is of an oscillation, that the two are different from each other and cycle back and forth, but he asks, “Do you not hear it? Do you not smell it? Just now my world became perfect, midnight is also noon (p. 263).”

     It is difficult to say for certain that anything in Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a dictum on human behavior and how we should act in our lives. Though it could be said that the eternal recurrence accomplishes this, it may be safer to say that it is not of specific people, events, or historical phenomena, but rather of values and types of events and people and phenomena. Further, because recurrence is fixed, these values and types are always present, though perhaps to greater or lesser degrees based on time. As a culmination of everything written up to its introduction, Nietzsche strays further from the path of dogma than metaphysics, avoiding language that would specifically dictate what a great person would or would not do in the world. Rather, he focuses his language on how they should approach the world and offers techniques for looking beyond the veil of human existence. As exemplified again by the episode of the black snake and the shepherd, Nietzsche does not present things in such a way that they can be interpreted in a straightforward manner, but must be examined by the individual to determine meaning.

“You higher men, it longs for you, does joy, the unruly, blissful one – for your pain, your failures! All eternal joy longs for failures. For all joy wants itself, and therefore it wants all misery too! Oh happiness, oh pain! Oh break, my heart! You higher men, learn this, joy wants eternity – Joy wants the eternity of all things, wants deep, wants deep eternity. (p. 263)

Joy, in the Dionysian sense, is the emotion one feels when they understand that weakness is a value that is cycled through existence, as well as strength, and only as a unified principle can they lead us to the world of the overman.