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Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same

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I've read many books about Nietzsche. This is by far the best. Unlike Heidegger, Lowith neither looks for nor finds himself in Nietzsche. Rather, he engages with Nietzsche's thought and really tries to understand what the latter understood by his "eternal recurrence of the same."

It's not an easy read, but it is well worth the effort. A marvelous work.

Lowith was a brilliant German-Jewish scholar whose work was published in Berlin at the onset of National Socialism. However, he could not teach due to the racial Laws of the regime. Lowith's book is clearly and beautifully written, and is a superb analysis of the centrality of the Eternal Recurrence and the Superman idea to Nietzsche studies. Highly recommended to advanced students of Nietzsche.

Americans have not been good at infiltratring any dynamic process. In my lifetime superpower thinking has attempted to shape global policies to serve a way of life that assumes insiders with power and a great number of victims of outmoded ways of thinking. Nietzsche's Zarathustra is described in Karl Lowith's book on Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same (1978, 1997) as a parable in which all knowledge is merely human creativity responding to new ways of dying. Quoting Nietzsche: "The sun of knowledge once again stands at noon; and the snake of eternity, curled up in rings, lies in the light of this sun." (p. 61).

Nietzsche teaches "the unity of this schism between the human will to a goal and the goalless revolving of the world." (p. 63). This is not likely to serve the aims of a group that has more power than Germans had in the European war from 1914 until 1917, when the United States of America declared war on Germany. Even Nietzsche wrote: "With this book I have entered a new `ring'--from now on in Germany I will probably be reckoned among the crazy." (p. 61).