ABSTRACT
This chapter examines two of Nietzsche’s most important and controversial concepts: the ‘Overman’ (represented by the figure of Zarathustra) and the theory of the eternal recurrence. Nietzsche underlines the significance of these ideas to his work in his ‘autobiography’, Ecce Homo, first published in German in 1908. ‘Within my writings my Zarathustra stands by itself ’, he recounts; ‘I have with this book given mankind the greatest gift that has ever been given it’ (1992: 5). The ‘basic conception’ behind the Overman, he continues, is ‘the idea of the eternal recurrence, the highest formula of affirmation that can possibly be attained’ (p. 69). The importance Nietzsche attached to these ideas is only rivalled, it seems, by the degree to which they have become misunderstood in the hundred years since his death. For Nietzsche’s ‘gift’ of the Overman was quickly transformed into the nightmare vision of a fascistic ‘Superman’ who foreshadowed an inhuman and totalitarian world of rapacity and violence. Meanwhile the ‘eternal recurrence’ has long been caricatured as a weird cosmological doctrine preaching an empty fatalism – the theory that all moments of historical time recur continually in exactly the same order throughout eternity – that presents history as both endlessly dynamic and hopelessly static. The question therefore becomes: What did Nietzsche actually mean these ideas to represent and why did he envisage them as the culmination of a new vision for humanity?
