It is important to understand that since Georg Simmel famously rejected Nietzsche’s central teaching in 1907, commentators on Nietzsche have generally followed suit and widely dismissed the eternal recurrence of the same as incoherent and indefensible, as just a little, or a lot, crazy. When they are feeling more generous, they read eternal recurrence as an “idea” to which the philosopher reasoned and that we can now play with and “think” in our heads, as if it were nothing more than a cognitive act of neurons and education, or some moral experiment designed to get us to accept the
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