Eternal Recurrence and Life

Nietzsche's earlier essay, 'On the Use and Abuse of History for Life' touches on some of the main ingredients of the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence: to emulate past greatness entails an exact repetition of all the circumstantial details surrounding the exemplar; the measure of one's power is the degree to which one can incorporate the past into one's present activity; affirmative and negative judgements of the past are selections and rejections, respectively, of material to be put to use; and, regarding the past as complete is a precondition of any subsequent action. Framing all these in this essay is the notion of 'Life', which Nietzsche defines there as 'creative activity', and which closely resembles what he eventually calls 'Will to Power'. So, to interpret the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence in terms of this essay is to attribute to it the same ulterior purpose, i. e. as a promotion of creative activity, which is to subordinate it to Will to Power in his System. In particular, on this reading, Recurrence, qua temporal theory, is primarily a characteristic of retrospection, and, an affirmative judgement is required to reactivate any cycle, which would explain why Nietzsche, in his contemporaneous Untimely Meditation on Schopenhauer, attributes to the affirming of Existence the 'liberating' of Life. Tending to validate this interpretation of the doctrine is Nietzsche's frequent characterization of it as 'life-affirming', and, the prominence in the first post-doctrine work, Beyond Good and Evil, of his exhortation to Philosophers to become creators.