ABSTRACT
Section 341 of The Gay Science (GS 341) is the most famous passage in all of Nietzsche’s writings. In this chapter, I will argue that scholars have misunderstood the pivotal sentence where readers are asked whether they have ever experienced a special moment when they would have ecstatically welcomed their lives’ eternal repetition. According to the standard reading, Nietzsche characterizes this special moment as ‘ungeheuren’ in order to suggest an extremely positive evaluation of those features of the moment that elicit such a welcoming response. However, looking closely at the context of this sentence and some closely related passages from Nietzsche’s expanded treatment in his next book, I will offer evidence to show that he is actually using the word ‘ungeheuren’ to refer to his new idea of a temporal moment that contains its own infinite repetition. Thus, in this key sentence readers are actually being asked whether they have ever experienced such a colossal moment and, along with it, an elating amplification of the pleasure they were feeling during this moment. In the preceding sentence, and in a parallel fashion, readers are being asked whether they might not experience a crushing amplification of the pain they are feeling during such a colossal moment. This is an important correction because it shows that Ivan Soll, and other influential scholars following his lead, have been wrong to suppose that GS 341 is proposing a psychologically impossible experience that should elicit nothing but complete indifference. According to my alternative reading, GS 341 introduces Nietzsche’s idea of a lived, embodied, and veridical experience of the colossal moment as the epistemic basis of his discovery of cosmological eternal recurrence and as the psychological motivation for life-affirmation.
