Nietzsche’s manner of justifying the ways of the cosmos to humanity—his cosmodicy, so to speak—is to put forth his doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same, in which we are challenged to live and think in such a way that we can desire that everything repeat over in identically the same sequence forever, as a sign of how deeply we affirm this world in all its hurly-burly recalcitrance to our comforting illusions. As his mouthpiece Zarathustra says: “But all joy wants eternity…wants deep, wants deep eternity.”[1] Why does joy want eternity, and what does that mean? According to Nietzsche, no healthy person can want eternity to mean the mummified stasis he takes to define Platonism as well as “Platonism for the masses” (Christianity):…

+Read more