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Russian esotericist P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) believed in the literal truth of eternal recurrence. As a child, he had been prone to vivid sensations of déjà vu, [34] and when he encountered the theory of eternal return in the writings of Nietzsche, it occurred to him that this was a possible explanation for his experiences. [35]
Nietzsche's view on eternal return is similar to that of Hume: "the idea that an eternal recurrence of blind, meaningless variation—chaotic, pointless shuffling of matter and law—would inevitably spew up worlds whose evolution through time would yield the apparently meaningful stories of our lives.
Throughout the 1880s, in his notebooks, Nietzsche developed a theory of the "eternal recurrence of the same" and much speculation on the physical possibility of this idea and the mechanics of its actualization occur in his later notebooks. Here, the will to power as a potential physics is integrated with the postulated eternal recurrence.
Nietzsche's first note on the "eternal recurrence", written "at the beginning of August 1881 in Sils-Maria, 6000 ft above sea level and much higher above all human regards! -" Nachlass, notebook M III 1, p. 53. Nietzsche was born into, and largely remained within, the Bildungsbürgertum, a sort of highly cultivated middle class.
"Eternal return" (also known as "eternal recurrence") is a hypothetical concept that posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, for an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. It is a purely physical concept, involving no supernatural reincarnation, but the return of beings in the same bodies.
In Nietzsche's view, if one is to accept a non-sensory, unchanging world as superior and our sensory world as inferior, then one is adopting a hatred of nature and thus a hatred of the sensory world – the world of the living. Nietzsche postulates that only one who is weak, sickly or ignoble would subscribe to such a belief.
Throughout his work, Nietzsche developed ideas that are considered to be inspiration for the Lebensphilosophie, such as a view of world events as an organic structure and the concepts of the will to power and the eternal return. Nietzsche turned Schopenhauer's concept of the will as the will to live into the formula of the will to power, which ...
Nevertheless, the concept remains, and has, since the reading of Karl Löwith, been identified as a key component of Nietzsche's philosophy although many believe so erroneously, so much so that Heidegger, under Löwith's influence, considered it to form, with the thought of the eternal recurrence, the basis of his thought.