Returning to The Eternal Return, Part II

As we have seen The Eternal Return is neither repetition without difference (the naivistic interpretation) nor the cyclical return which Nietzsche himself warns us against,

One should not as a false analogy use the cycles that arise and perish as for example in stars, or ebbs and flows, day and night, the seasons, as a characteristic of The Eternal Return.

In another note he comes closer to a definition,

To IMPRINT(my emphasis) upon the character of becoming as being – that is the highest form of the will to power.

That everything returns is the most extreme approximation of a world of becoming (eine Welt des Werdens) to a world of being (die des Seins) – the summit of reflection! (my translation).

Ontologically speaking The Eternal Return announces there is only one world, one reality = the one that IS (continuously changing) and that human beings must return to in order to avoid nihilism.

It is also a critique of the whole project of The Enlightenment (very apt for this blog) of viewing history as a series of progress and spreading light and celebrating, in Kant’s words, “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity”.

Nostalgia as well as utopianism are rejected by Nietzsche as illusionary. Man must be fully present in every single Moment of his existence. The Eternal Return is the ultimate affirmation of the Now, as the formula of the German "das Werden" = the continuous creation, the eternal becoming, the flowing dialectics of active and reactive forces.

The Eternal Return is Nietzsche’s call for the endless “repetition” or “return” of every single moment simultaneously fulfilling and renewing, ending and beginning in the fullness of The Moment. The return in the form of the eternal presence of the Now. Ever new.

In Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze writes,

From afar we can hardly see the summit. The eternal return is the being of becoming. But becoming is double: becoming-active and becoming-reactive, becoming-active of reactive forces and becoming-reactive of active forces. But only becoming-active has being; it would be contradictory for the being of becoming to be affirmed of a becoming-reactive, of a becoming that is itself nihilistic. The eternal return would become contradictory if it were the return of reactive forces. The eternal return teaches us that becoming-reactive has no being. Indeed, it also teaches us of the existence of becoming-active. It necessarily produces becoming-active by reproducing becoming (p. 71f.)