Abstract
Nietzsche's thought of the Eternal Recurrence of the Equal emerged in early August 1881 and remained unpublished up until the publication of his book The Gay Science in 1882 (KSA 3). The research of all preserved manuscripts from that period (contained in vol. 11 of Nietzsche's Collected Works, ed. by G.
Colli and M. Montinari) will demonstrate different layers of Nietzsche's struggle with this unusual thought and its consequences.
Especially the ethical and epistemological (and religious) implications of this thought kick off a new perspective in Nietzsche's criticism of culture, morality, religion and philosophy which he first presented in the aforementioned book The Gay Science followed later by Thus Spoke Zarathustra (KSA 4), where there is in its third part the most famous formulation of the thought of the Eternal Recurrence of the Equal. The focus of the proposed project will be on the unpublished notes from Nietzsche's Nachlaß, for it needs to be time and again discussed in the Nietzsche-scholarship and is therefor highly desirable.