ABSTRACT
To understand the doctrine of eternal recurrence as an ontology is to see it as a statement of a special kind. An ontological principle acts as the presupposition of all other theorizing about the world, whether cosmological or ethical or of any other kind. When a concept is used to make some very general claim about the nature of reality it gives rise to a philosophical doctrine. This happens most of all when the claim is that this and only this category is the right and proper one to use for understanding reality. That is essentially what Nietzsche is saying about the category of eternal recurrence. When Nietzsche describes the 'redemption' of the past, he speaks of the will 'to create and carry together into one what in man is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident.
