The doctrine is unquestionably Nietzsche’s most puzzling, and it has been interpreted in two distinguishable ways: as a cosmology or an ethical imperative. The cosmological basis of the doctrine can be found only in Nietzsche’s literary estate, the Nachlass, in notes not designated for publication. The normative import of the doctrine of eternal recurrence, on the other hand, finds articulation in virtually every work written by Nietzsche after 1881. It is of some importance to note in this connection that all (...) Nietzsche scholars have taken the cosmological formulation to be the clear one, mistakenly I believe, and have ignored the fact that Nietzsche himself suppressed it. (shrink)