107. The “So-Called” Return of the Same by Nietzsche

A continuation of my reply to E. Horneffer's essay "A defense of the so-called ‘Wiederkunff des Gleichen’ von Nietzsche”

Ernst Horneffer makes the following claim with regard to my refutation of his pamphlet "Nietzsche's Doctrine of the Eternal Return and its Publication to Date" printed in No. 6 of this journal: "The entire structure of Steiner's refutation is flawed. If you want to refute me, you have to refute my reconstruction of the sketch or draft that Koegel bases his book on". I do not believe that I have such an obligation to uphold the objections I have raised against Hornefler. For these objections do not refer to Hornefler's reconstruction, but to his false interpretation of individual Nietzschean aphorisms. And anyone who misunderstands Nietzsche as Horneffer does does not really need to worry about his reconstruction of the "return of the same". If I have now linked individual thoughts to this reconstruction, it is because the creation of fairy tales is one of the means of the "Nietzsche Archive", and it does not seem appropriate to me to add to the many other fairy tales the one about my capitulation to Horneffer's reconstruction.

Whoever wants to understand Nietzsche's thought of the eternal return of all things and its connection with the "Draft" "The Return of the Same" printed in the ı2nd volume of the Complete Edition, p. 5, must know the source of this thought. For there is no doubt that the essay that was planned with this draft is to be understood as follows: that the idea of the return of the same formed the occasion for it, and that everything else was added to this idea in order to support it.

How did Nietzsche arrive at the idea of the eternal return of all things? I have repeatedly pointed out the source of this idea in conversations with Mrs. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and with Dr. Koegel in 1896. I still hold the conviction I expressed then today: that Nietzsche conceived the idea on the occasion of reading Eugen Dühring's "Kursus der Philosophie als streng wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung" (Leipzig 1875), and under the influence of this book. On p. 84 of this work this idea is expressed quite clearly; only there it is fought against just as vigorously as Nietzsche defends it. The book is in Nietzsche's library. As numerous pencil marks in the margins show, Nietzsche read it avidly. Incidentally, even without this we know that Nietzsche was an avid reader of Dühring. Dühring says: "The deeper logical ground of all conscious life therefore demands, in the strictest sense of the word, an infinity of entities. Is this infinity, by virtue of which ever new forms are driven forth, possible in itself? The mere number of material parts and elements of force would in itself exclude the infinite accumulation of combinations if the continuous medium of space and time did not guarantee an infinity of variations. From that which is countable, only an exhaustible number of combinations can follow. But from that which by its nature cannot be conceived as something countable without contradiction, the unlimited multiplicity of positions and relations must also be able to emerge. This unlimitedness, which we claim for the fate of the formations of the universe, is now compatible with every change and even with the occurrence of an interval of approximate persistence or complete self-sameness, but not with the cessation of all change. Those who wish to cultivate the idea of a being that corresponds to the original state should remember that temporal development has only one real direction, and that causality is also in accordance with this direction. It is easier to blur the differences than to retain them, and it therefore costs little effort to imagine the end by analogy with the beginning, ignoring the gap. Let us, however, beware of such superficial hastiness; for the existence of the universe, once given, is not an indifferent episode between two states of the night, but the only firm and clear ground from which we make our inferences and anticipations." As a mathematically trained mind, Dühring must fight the idea of an eternal repetition of the same world states. For only if the number of combinations were limited would the first one have to recur after all possibilities have been exhausted. Now, in the continuous space, not a limited but an infinite number of combinations is possible. New states can therefore enter into the infinite. Dühring also finds that a perpetual repetition of states has no appeal for life: "Now it goes without saying that the principles of the stimulus of life are not compatible with eternal repetition of the same forms." If we now accept the mathematically-logically impossible thought, if we make the assumption that a countable number of combinations are possible with the material parts and force elements, then we have Nietzsche's idea of the "eternal return of the same". We have nothing other than the defense of a counter-idea taken from Dühring's view in Aphorism 203 (Volume XII in Koegel's edition and Aph. 22 in Horneffer's writing: "Nietzsche's Doctrine of the Eternal Second Coming"): "The measure of the All-Power is determined, nothing "infinite: let us beware of such excesses of the concept! Consequently, the number of positions, changes, combinations and developments of this force is indeed immense and practically " immmeasurable", but in any case also determined and not infinite, that is: the force is eternally the same and eternally active: - up to this moment an infinity has already expired, that is, all possible developments must have already existed. Consequently, the momentary development must be a repetition and so that which gave birth to it and that which arises from it and so on forwards and backwards! Everything has been there countless times, insofar as the overall situation of all forces always returns ..." And Nietzsche's feeling towards this thought is exactly the opposite of that which Dühring has with him. For Nietzsche, this thought is the highest formula for the affirmation of life. Aphotism 43 (in Horneffer, 234 in Koegel's edition) reads: "the future history: more and more this thought will triumph, - and those who do not believe in it must by their nature finally die out! - Only those who consider their existence capable of eternal repetition remain: among such, however, a state is possible that no utopian has reached!" It is possible to prove that many of Nietzsche's thoughts arose in the same way as the idea of eternal return. Nietzsche formed the counter-idea to some existing idea. Ultimately, the same tendency led him to his main work: "Revaluation of all values."

In Dühring, one can see a thinker who consistently, if one-sidedly, represents the knowledge brought forth by Western intellectual development. Nietzsche could only be inspired by him in such a way that he contrasted his statements and values with the opposite ones. Anyone who compares Dühring's "Kursus der Philosophie" with Nietzsche's aphorisms on the "Wiederkunft" can also prove this in detail.

Dühring believes in the absolute validity of certain fundamental truths. "Just as one cannot ask of a mathematical truth how long it is or will be true, one cannot make the absolute necessities of the real dependent on a duration, but must, conversely, make the duration and its respective magnitude dependent on these themselves." From such irrefutable fundamental truths, Dühring deduces the impossibility of an eternal return of the same states. Nietzsche accepts this eternal return. He must therefore also deny the absolute validity of Dühring's fundamental truths. Why does Dühting profess these basic truths? Because they are simply true for him. For Nietzsche they cannot be true. Their truth cannot therefore be the reason why they are recognized by man. Man must need them, even though they are untrue. And he needs them in order to find his way in reality with them, to master it. What is recognized as true is not true, but it gives us power over reality. He who accepts the truth of knowledge needs no other reason to justify it; its truth in itself is reason enough. Whoever denies the truth must ask: why does man take these errors into himself, why does he assimilate them? Nietzsche wants to give the answer to these questions in the first four chapters of the work on the "Eternal Return".

I will now show how this work is to be understood from such points of view. I will also show why Nietzsche abandoned the plan to write it. In doing so, a hypothesis will emerge as to the reasons why the Nietzsche Archive views this publication with such a skeptical eye, why they speak of a "so-called" "return of the same". Hornefler's reconstruction will show what it is worth.

In the last article (No. 16 column 401 ff. of this journal) I believe I proved that Nietzsche's doctrine of the "eternal return of all things" is the counter-idea to Dühring's position on this idea in his "Kursus der Philosophie". I would also like to point out that Nietzsche himself spoke out about such a formation of counter-ideas. On page 65 of the 11th volume of the complete edition of Nietzsche's works we read the following "aphorism": " What is the reaction of opinions? When an opinion ceases to be interesting, one tries to give it a charm by holding it to its counter-opinion. Usually, however, the opposing opinion seduces and now makes new supporters: it has become more interesting in the meantime." I would like to mention a few more things that prove that Nietzsche understood this idea of the "eternal return" in no other way than natural science. Mrs. Lou Andreas-Salomé first made a statement in the journal "Freie Bühne", May 1892, and then in her book "Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken" (Friedrich Nietzsche in his Works), which is interesting for clarifying the facts, even though the entire book by this woman, who was in contact with Nietzsche for several months in 1882, gives a completely skewed view of his teaching. Mrs. Lou Salomé claims: "Even a superficial study soon showed Nietzsche that the scientific foundation of the idea of reincarnation on the basis of the atomistic theory was not feasible; he thus found his fear that the disastrous idea would be irrefutably proven to be correct not confirmed and thus seemed to be freed from the task of his proclamation, from this fate awaited with horror. But now something peculiar occurred: far from feeling redeemed by the insight he had gained, Nietzsche behaved in exactly the opposite way; from the moment the dreaded doom seemed to recede from him, he resolutely took it upon himself and carried his doctrine among the people; the moment his fearful assumption became unprovable and untenable, it hardened for him, as if by a magic spell, into an irrefutable conviction. What should become scientifically proven truth takes on the character of a mystical revelation, and henceforth Nietzsche gives his philosophy in general as the final foundation, instead of the scientific basis, the inner inspiration - his own personal inspiration." Nietzsche's friend of many years, Peter Gast, opposes this view of Lou Andreas-Salomé, that in Nietzsche's mind an initially scientific idea has been transformed into a mystical inspiration, in his truly excellent, profound introduction, which he wrote a few years ago to "Menschliches, Allzumenschliches". He condemns any overplaying of Nietzsche's views into the mystical and says that the doctrine of the Second Coming is a "purely mechanistic doctrine of the exhaustibility, i.e. repetition, of cosmic molecular combinations". Mrs. Lou Salomé thus admits for the first times in which Nietzsche represented the idea of the Second Coming that it was conceived "on the basis of the atomistic theory"; Peter Gast accepts the mechanical conception with the exclusion of all mysticism, through which Mrs. Lou Salomé then confuses the matter. The mechanical conception, however, is the counter-idea to Dühring's, and we must therefore assume that Nietzsche conceived the "Eternal Return" in this mechanical version in 1881. As soon as I received his copies of the manuscript of the Second Coming through Dr. Koegel in the summer of 1896, I was a staunch advocate of Peter Gast's view. I had to fight against some people who at that time professed a mystical view. But this mechanical idea of Nietzsche's does not fit in with the rest of our mechanical science. Anyone who thinks in terms of rational mechanics must, like Dühring, fight against the "eternal return". If Nietzsche wanted to defend it, he could not do so for this one mechanical conception alone, but he had to set up the counter-opinion for the whole mechanical view of nature. He had to show that this whole mechanical conception was not as irrefutable as it was held by people like Dühring. From there he arrived at the question of the value of truth. Why are generally recognized truths believed as such? That became his question. Dühring and others would have answered simply: because they are true, because they correspond to reality. Nietzsche said to himself that this is not the case at all. Where do any of our concepts correspond to reality? Nowhere. "Our assumption that there are bodies, surfaces, lines, forms, is only the consequence of our assumption that there are substances and things, persistent things. As certain as our concepts are fictions, so are the shapes of mathematics. There is no such thing; we can no more realize a surface, a circle, a line, than a concept." (Aph. 18 p.17 of the ı2nd volume of Koegel's edition.) But these concepts, these fictions are the things with which the sciences operate. So there can be no question of the absoluteness of scientific truths. Why do we accept them after all? Because we need them in order to orient ourselves in reality. There is no circle anywhere, no surface anywhere; but we use such fiction to orient ourselves within reality. It is not the truth, but the usefulness for life that is the reason for our belief in so-called truths. In order to become aware of this usefulness, however, we must experience the applicability of our conceptual fictions in our own bodies. We have to implore these fictions and try to live with them. Until now, mankind has only believed their so-called truths because it has incorporated them and found that it is possible to live with them. If one now wants to penetrate deeper into the structure of the world's being, one cannot stop at simply going along with this incorporation as it has happened so far. It could very well be that one could also live with completely different opinions. A proof against the "eternal return" only has the meaning that it shows that one cannot unite this idea with the fictions of which one has so far found that one can live with their incorporation. But if one wants to find out whether the "eternal return" has a possibility of life, then one must try to live with the counter-opinions of the previous ideas. One must return to the state of innocence, in which no opinions have yet been incorporated; one must make oneself an " experiment" in order to see how one can live with other ideas than the previous ones. Only in this way can we really test life to see whether it is worth living in its deepest depths. When we have cast off the heaviness that we feel in ourselves through the belief in absolute truths, when we "face up like children to what used to be the seriousness of life", then we can try out how we can live with opinion and counter-opinion. (Aph. 148 in volume ı2 5.89 in Koegel's edition.) The people of the past were burdened with the confidence that it was only possible to live with the incorporated fictions. One throws off this confidence; one casts off all belief in certain opinions; one experiments with all drives and passions and waits to see how far they can be incorporated, i.e. how far one can live with them. One must lighten one's life from all the incorporated heresies. At first, however, this will result in a degradation, attenuation of life. For we are equipped to live with the armor we have accumulated so far. If we discard it, we initially weaken ourselves. But it is precisely this that enables us to try the "new heavyweight" with the "eternal return" in contrast to the old heavyweight. Once again, as "individuals", we want to take up the struggle for life on a broader basis than with the fictions we have absorbed so far. " A play of children, on which the eye of the wise looks, have power over this and that state" (Aph. 148 in Koegel's edition). What must come out of such a trying life if life is to seem worth living to us, if we do not prefer to choose annihilation? "An absolute surplus must be demonstrated, otherwise the annihilation of ourselves with regard to humanity is to be chosen as the means of the annihilation of humanity". (In the same aphorism.) We have thus gained a standard for the incorporation of a new doctrine. So far we have only ever lived with the opposite doctrine; now we want to see whether the "doctrine of the Second Coming" gives a surplus of pleasure. "This establishes the connection between point 4 of the draft" of the "Eternal Return" and point 5. The first is called: "The innocent. The individual as experiment. The easing of life, humiliation, attenuation, transition." The last is: "The new emphasis: the eternal return of the same, etc." - These last two chapters would therefore have had to describe the task Nietzsche had in mind if he wanted to create a "new center of gravity". In contrast, the first three chapters should show how humanity has developed so far. It has fought its way through life with the help of errors (incorporation of basic errors). The erroneous beliefs were believed because they proved to be useful. But not only the beliefs by which we orient ourselves in reality are incorporated errors: instincts and passions, pleasure and displeasure are also such errors. What I experience as pain is not really pain. It is only a completely indifferent stimulus, initially without pleasure or displeasure. Only when I interpret it with the help of my brain does it become pain or pleasure. " Without intellect there is no pain, but the lowest form of intellect comes to light, that of "matter, of "atoms. - There is a way of being surprised by an injury (like the one who got a shotgun pellet through the cheek while sitting on the cherry tree) that one does not feel the pain at all. The pain is a brain product." (Aph. 47 in Koegel's edition). By evaluating life according to the impressions of pleasure and pain, we are therefore not moving in a realm of reality at all, but in a sphere of our interpretation. What matters in life is not how a stimulus affects us, but how we believe that it affects us. This belief is as much an inherited one as the belief in fundamental errors. Just as these are inherited, so are the assessments, the interpretations of the stimuli. "Without imagination and memory there would be no pleasure and no pain. The affects aroused in the process immediately have at their disposal past similar cases and the bad possibilities, they interpret, they interpret. Therefore, a pain is generally quite out of proportion to its significance for life - it is inexpedient. But where an injury is not perceived by the eye or touch, it is much less painful; there the imagination is untrained." (Aph. 50 in Koegel's edition). I will now give an example to show how profound Dühring's influence was on Nietzsche's thoughts in 1881. Dühring says in his "Kursus der Philosophie": if "sensations and feelings were simple, they would have to be decided by direct axiomatic judgment in a similar way as a mathematical principle"... "The kind of applause or attunement that a completely simple excitement would bring with it would also be a fact that could not be misunderstood and would have to be just as valid in its field as a geometric or physical necessity." (Kursus der Philosophie, page 165.) As you can see, Dühring claims that a stimulus can only have one consequence, i.e. that it is pleasurable or painful in itself. Here, too, Nietzsche contrasts Dühring's opinion with the counter-opinion: "Why does a cut finger hurt? In itself it does not hurt (whether it already experiences "stimuli"), he whose brain is chloroformed has no "pain" in his finger". (Aph. 48 in Koegel's edition.) The moral drives and passions are also based on an interpretation of reality, not on a true state of affairs, but on one that is believed to be true. "If we translate the qualities of the lowest animate being into our "reason", they become " moral" drives." (Aph. 64 in Koegel's edition.) "In the desire to please is refined lust for possession, refined lust for sex, refined exuberance of the secure, etc." (Aph. 95 in Koegel.) In our actions we do not have reality in mind: the lust for possession, the refined lust for sex, but the passion of benevolence incorporated into us, which is, however, only an interpretation of reality. We see how people arrive at "truths" and "passions". They interpret reality and assimilate the interpretations. The moment people realize that they do not possess reality, but rather their interpretations of reality, they begin to doubt these interpretations. Whereas up to now people have assimilated as true that which was conducive to life, regardless of whether it was true or false, they now question the truth as such. The life-promoting has been called "true". This gave "the true" a certain prestige, a value. People began to strive for "the true". But there was nothing else to do but to make a selection among the basic errors. For there was nothing else but these. A particularly select genre of fundamental errors was called "truths". There was even nothing but errors to establish what truth is. Where can such a striving come from? Only from the belief that truth enhances life (passion of knowledge).

This may well have been the ideas that went through Nietzsche's mind when he wrote the "Draft" of the "Return of the Same" in Sils-Maria in 1881. At least this was my impression of the situation when Dr. Koegel gave me his compilation of the individual aphorisms in the summer of 1896. Anyone who now reads the volume ı2 (which Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche had withdrawn from the book trade) will gain the impression that the aphorisms arranged under the individual chapters more or less elaborate and clarify the main train of thought in individual points. There is no doubt that Nietzsche wrote these individual aphorisms in an unconstrained order. It will therefore never be possible to find an absolutely correct principle for their arrangement. Even the question of whether one or the other aphorism could be left out or not will be answered one way by one editor and differently by another. Dr. Horneffer claims that only the 44 aphorisms listed by him in his brochure "Nietzsche's Doctrine of the Eternal Second Coming" are entitled to be included in the draft. I ask myself in vain why he omits the aphorism in this way (from Koegel's edition), the content of which is in line with the aphorisms that Koegel prints as 49 and 51 and which Horneffer himself recognizes as legitimate. I do not understand why aphorism ı19 should not fall under the draft, since it clearly speaks of incorporated errors. "The great things in nature, all sensations of the high, noble, graceful, beautiful, kind, austere, powerful, enchanting, which we have in nature and in man and history, are not immediate feelings, but the after-effects of countless errors that have been incorporated into us.... " Compare this aphorism with the 51st, which Dr. Horneffer again gives a place in the " Wiederkunft": "...Likewise, the measure of pleasure is not in proportion to our present knowledge, -- but it is to the "knowledge" of the most primitive and longest pre-period of humanity and animality. We are under the law of the past, that is, its assumptions and estimations." But why argue about the individual, since it is in the nature of these aphorisms that one person can arrange them one way and another another. What matters much more is this: I believe I have shown through my explanations that Nietzsche's idea of the "Eternal Return" is correctly what Peter Gast describes it as: "The purely mechanically understandable doctrine of the exhaustibility, i.e. repetition, of cosmic molecular combinations", and that Nietzsche, in order to keep this idea in contrast to Dühring, wanted to provide a kind of new theory of knowledge in the first four chapters. This should show that the way in which the previous "truths" have come about is no obstacle to opposing them with counter-opinions. If Dr. Koegel were really quite wrong and only the 44 aphorisms cited by Horneffer belonged to the "Eternal Return", then this idea would still remain, because nothing else follows from these 44 aphorisms either. So we are dealing with a doctrine to be understood mechanically and not with a "religious idea", as Dr. Horneffer believes. And it was precisely Mrs. Lou Andreas' mistake that she allowed the transparent clarity of this idea to be drowned in a mystical fog. Rather, this Nietzschean idea is conceived in such a way that we will only incorporate it if we find, in the "experiment" we conduct with it, that we can orient ourselves with it within the whole of nature in the same way as with the previous theory of nature. And when Horneffer asks: "How could he have had the idea of invoking physics and the natural sciences in general to support it?", the answer is: "He would have had to do so if he had wanted to implement the idea in the same way in which he had conceived it. Not, however, to prove the idea, but to show that it can be incorporated. The whole of natural science would have had to take on a different face under the influence of this idea. For feeling would never have tolerated that natural science should continue to operate in the old way and that religious feeling should resign itself to an idea that contradicted the knowledge of nature. Rather, a new competition of opinions should have been fought through. The "new emphasis" can only assert itself if it proves to be more life-promoting than the old scientific truths. Dr. E. Horneffer says on p. 26 of his book: "Nietzsche's Doctrine of the Eternal Second Coming": "I would like to mention that I do not believe that Nietzsche wanted to give his doctrine of the eternal second coming a broader, scientific basis. I doubt that he ever intended to prove it in more detail through empirical knowledge. ... For why the detailed proof that we need ideas that go beyond demonstrable experience, that we need errors if they have a favorable effect on life? Why the further proof that the eternal return is an idea which, whether true or false, must have a very favorable effect on life? Does this way of recommending philosophical ideas not presuppose the assumption that they cannot be proven empirically at all?" No, certainly, it does not presuppose this proof. But it does demand to decide by incorporation whether the new opinion has a more favorable effect on life than the old scientific opinions. Nietzsche could not and was not allowed to prove his "new emphasis" with the old scientific methods, but with this new emphasis he had to defeat the old methods themselves; he had to prove the greater strength of the new idea through experiment. And because he saw himself incapable of such proof, he initially dropped the new idea; that is why an idea increasingly came to the fore in his mind that was not directed against the old scientific truths, but which lay in their direction, the idea of the superman. For the superman is an idea that is entirely compatible with all other modern scientific ideas. Read "Zarathustra": "Man is a rope knotted between animal and superman. ... I love him who works and invents, that he may build the house of the superman and prepare for him earth, animal, plant: for thus he wills his downfall." These words are spoken entirely in harmony with the great modern developmental idea of natural science. "All beings up to now have created something beyond themselves: and you want to be the ebb tide of this great flood and would rather go back to the animal than overcome man? You have made the journey from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is more ape than any ape." These words of Zarathustra were spoken by a man who was made a poet prophet not by the "Eternal Return", but by the great developmental idea of modern natural science. The fact that the plan for a work on the "Eternal Return" developed into that for "Zarathustra" has no other reason than that Nietzsche at that moment did not consider the "Eternal Return" but the idea of the superman to be more life-promoting. If the idea of the "Eternal Return" then reappears later, if we find it sporadically in the "Joyful Science", in "Zarathustra" itself, if he even presents it as the crowning glory, as the last positive thought, of his otherwise completely negative work "Revaluation of all Values", there can be no other reason for this than that the preparatory illness blunted his sense of how little life-enhancing this thought is, how little it can assert itself in the battle of opinions, and that Nietzsche had a certain weakness for the thought once it had emerged in him. I am not afraid of the scurrilous accusation that I am not a true Nietzsche admirer because I express my above conviction. I know how difficult it has become for me, this conviction that the preliminary stages of the illness play into the last phase of Nietzsche's philosophizing yet.

So it was a failed work, a work whose basic conception was untenable because it did not promote life. And Nietzsche felt that he could do nothing with this basic concept. That is why he did not complete the work. The editor of Nietzsche's estate could not produce anything other than an unsustainable work. Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche says in her introduction to Lichtenberger's book on "The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche": "The then editor Dr. Fritz Koegel, without taking note of the later still undeciphered manuscripts, brought the contents of a written notebook by my brother from the summer of 1881 under a disposition that did not belong to it. ... The manuscript compiled by Dr. Koegel instilled suspicion in me from the outset and I had requested the assistance of an expert editor to examine it before it was published. ... I myself was first prevented by my mother's fatal illness and then by my own illness from examining the matter more closely; but after various critics, for example in the "Zukunft" and in the "Frankfurter Zeitung", had expressed their astonishment and displeasure at this strange and meagre publication, which must have disappointed every sincere Nietzsche admirer, I felt compelled in the fall of 1898 to have the publishing company withdraw the XIIth volume from the book trade. Volume from the book trade." Now the "paucity" of the publication was not due to the publisher, but to the fact that the work itself was a misguided one. And no sincere Nietzsche admirer could be in any way impaired in his Nietzsche worship by the fact that he saw how Nietzsche carried on for a few weeks with the plan for an unrealizable work. And Horneffer's attack on Koegel cannot change the fact that this is the case in the slightest. The 44 aphorisms that Hornefler has now published after sifting through the manuscript also prove that Nietzsche's idea of the "Eternal Second Coming" in 1881 was a scientific-mechanistic counter-idea to Dühring's view and that as such it is untenable, mistaken. The admission of this fact has now been and is being countered by the Nietzsche Archive. The scientific character and the scientific implications of this idea are denied. But no matter how many mistakes Dr. Koegel may have made in the publication: this fact is correct and, whoever is unbiased, will find it confirmed precisely by Horneffer's attack on Koegel. And any edition of Friedrich Nietzsche's works that conceals this fact will be an objective forgery. Because the idea of the "Eternal Second Coming" is scientifically untenable: that is why the Nietzsche Archive wants Nietzsche to have never conceived it scientifically. That is why Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche, when its untenability was made clear to her, began to claim that this thought would not only have been conceived later, but also in 1881, in the same way as Mrs. Lou Andreas-Salomé claims that it was later conceived by Nietzsche: as a mystery. See what Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche wrote to me in September 1898: "If this shattering thought could not be proven splendidly, irrefutably, scientifically, then it was better and more pious (sic) to treat it as a mystery, as a mysterious idea that can have tremendous consequences." It is not the mistakes Koegel has made that form the starting point of the whole battle; no, it is the fact that he, as editor, has not made a " mystery" out of the "idea of return". Just look at Mrs. Lou Salomé's book p. 225: "What should become scientifically proven truth takes on the character of a mystical revelation". Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche is thus not only marching in perfect harmony with Mrs. Lou Salomé, whom she otherwise fiercely opposes; no, she even surpasses her with regard to the doctrine of the Second Coming. What Mrs. Salomé claims only for Nietzsche's last period; Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche applies it to Nietzsche from the moment he conceived the thought. It is amusing for me, as I have often had the opportunity to notice Mrs. Förster-Nietzsche's stormy opposition to Lou Salomé, to see how she leads Friedrich Nietzsche down the slippery slope - not of Eduard von Hartmann, but of Lou Andreas-Salomé. And Dr. Horneffer is in a position to lay a plan for the "Eternal Reappearance" work that also leads to these surreptitious paths of Mrs. Lou Salomé. After all, he says: "Nietzsche wanted to throw down his idea of the eternal return as a religious idea."