Nietzsche's eternal recurrence as an eternal revaluation of values

The doctrine of The Eternal Recurrence of the Same is Nietzsche's response to the nihilism he perceived in the Western tradition. We find the aesthetic influence behind this response to be his discovery and interpretation of the role of myth in ancient Greek life. Nietzsche perceived the ancient Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus as two dominant mythical forces that unite to give birth to tragedy. In their struggle to give meaning to the awesome experience of life, the ancient Greeks considered these gods eternally at work in everything they experienced. Certainly Nietzsche's infatuation with Greek myth and the philosophical developments of the pre-Socratics, helped climax his ultimate experience, the epiphany of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy evinces the aesthetic core of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, a core which he returns to time and time again throughout his later writings.;Considering the eternal recurrence of the unity of Apollo and Dionysus in Greek culture a suitable alternative to the Western belief systems, Nietzsche suggests we ponder the beauty and joy of this recurrence as an eternal revaluation of values. To envision ourselves involved in a project of revaluation of values in a micro sense, however, misses the point Nietzsche desires to convey to us. It is through a macro, god's-eye view of things that Nietzsche asks us to perceive the eternal becoming of life. We may then sense the joy of the unconstrained eternality of the whole of existence, of which everything organic or inorganic is a part. In this manner, although Nietzsche does take on the task of revaluing and annihilating the values expressed by traditional morality, his ultimate doctrine asks us to approach life aesthetically and sense the joy that the thought of ever recurrence of life brings us. In this sense, Nietzsche does not point out to us what to value, but how to value: that is, aesthetically, with the love and joy of the eternal recurrence of existence and the world as an aesthetic phenomenon, as art.;In response to the ascetic attitude toward life, I show Nietzsche first demonstrating to us his perception of the nature of language and Western morality as nihilistic. I then cover his objections to the Kantian idealization of a moral end that transcends any aesthetic and existential appreciation of life and the world as an eternally recurring phenomenon. Overall I will show that Nietzsche's eternal recurrence promotes the idea that our search for the type of truth that we can consider independent of us is in vain. "The Greatest Weight" parable (GS 341) can be interpreted to mean we are all as artists portraying our own changing taste and style in the eternally recurring activity of creating our own truths, and as such we should evaluate all existence and life as a work of art that eternally changes. After the ethical and cosmological implications of eternal recurrence have been analyzed, we may finally conclude, as Nietzsche has done, that the ultimate aesthetic stimulation the "Greatest Weight" aphorism invokes in us is the beautiful sense of the permanence of the Moment: that regardless of all our interjections about time, life, and existence, "That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being:--the high point of meditation" ( WP 617).