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Does Eternal Recurrence Imply a New Morality?

Not as I see it.

You could say eternal recurrence implies a new "natural morality" or a "practical morality" or a "personal morality" but the word "morality" is just too saturated with social fantasies, too linked with the feeling of being "saved" from death. It's better to just dump the word.

What eternal recurrence does imply is a new "health", which follows from an awakening from the social dream to the world around us.

This world around us of course includes our body, which contains great wisdom and intelligence, subtle and not-so-subtle messages, a "will to power" and a "will to laughter".

In his last years Nietzsche at times thought the idea of eternal recurrence implied a new moral outlook, what he called a "revaluation of values". To me, he was still stuck in the 40,000 year project of social fantasies to save us from death. He never quite freed himself from the curse of university verbiage production. The following passage from Ecce Homo indicates this conflict within him:

The last thing I should promise would be to "improve" mankind. No new idols are erected by me; . . . One has deprived reality of its value, its meaning, its truthfulness, to precisely the extent to which one has mendaciously invented an ideal world ... The "true world" and the "apparent world" - in plain language: the mendaciously invented world and reality ... The lie of the ideal has so far been the curse on reality, on account of which mankind itself has become mendacious and false down to its most fundamental instincts to the point of worshipping the opposite values of those which alone would guarantee its health, its future, the lofty right to its future.

The ideal world, the "true world", is invented. The world that appears, the "apparent world", is reality. Nietzsche had a fleeting call to wake up from the dream, to silence and looking, before being pulled back into the verbiage machine.

At its center, morality implies cheating life of its death. The moral head dance can provide great low-level entertainment but it will forever miss the sparkling, crystaline, raw vitality of existence.

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