Eternal Recurrence and Dionysus

While Nietzsche presents the affirmation of Eternal Recurrence as his overcoming of Schopenhauer, the germ of this repudiation appears earlier, at the outset of his first work, in fact. Schopenhauer's Pessimism is based on the thesis that individual happiness is impossible, because the primordial universal Will is indifferent to individual interests. Now, at the outset of Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche does articulate agreement that any individuality is ultimately at the mercy of universal Will, which he calls 'Dionysus', and that such subjection entails the ultimately vanity of any self-interest. However, in the same context, he immediately departs from Schopenhauer, with the observation that the dissolution of the self is an occasion of not misery, but of ecstatic intoxication, in which the individual experiences itself as a cosmic artistic creation. In such passages, inspired by his participation in Wagnerian productions, Nietzsche seems closer to the rhapsodizing of the early Rousseau about his Festival experiences, than to Schopenhauer. Likewise, when a Dionysian first encounters Schopenhauer's notion, appearing in World as Will and as Representation, of the prospect of living one's life over exactly as is, as Nietzsche must have done, it has to be an ecstatic occasion, from which the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence is a joyful elaboration.