STELIO DE CARVALHO NETO

We tried to verify the hypothesis that the nietzschean doctrine of the eternal recurrence, as presented in “The heaviest weight”, from The Gay Science, serves an apologetic function, instead of a diagnostical one, as proposed by many interpretations of Nietzsche’s writings. We came to this hypothesis by the end of our master’s research as we were inquiring which are the conditions for the “sick selfishness” to become a “healthy selfishness” – that is, the conditions for convalescence – in the nietzschean psychophysiology. We verified that in this psychophysiology, convalescence is a prerogative of the “fundamentally healthy” – predestined to health – bodies. Then we came to the analogy between the notion of convalescence in the nietzschean psychophysiology and the notion of convertion in the Augustinian doctrine of grace. To establish this analogy, we chose Blaise Pascal’s developments over the Augustinian doctrine of grace. We might justify this choice by the fact the Nietzsche was, expressly, a Pascal reader, mentioning the french thinker in several passages of his work. If we read the two thinkers together, we may suspect that the mind game proposed in “The heaviest weight” has, in the eternal recurrence doctrine, the same function as Pascal’s wager has in his apologetics of christianity. In the nietzschean doctrine, this function is the promotion of the convalescence of the fundamentally healthy décadent; in Pascal’s doctrine, it is the conversion of the libertin. In both cases, the apologetical rethoric only has relevance because it is not possible to know beforehand who are the predestined to damnation or sickness, and who are the predestined to salvation and health. Because he wrote “to everyone and none”, as declared in Zaratustra’s subtitle, Nietzsche was able to write an apologetics of amor fati as the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same.