Eternal Return, Repetition, Difference, and Becoming: Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Bergson

by Gustave Doré

“Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again — a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process… This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh forever.”

Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence asks us to imagine that our life, down to every smallest joy and humiliation, would repeat itself endlessly in an infinite cycle. To grasp this is to feel what he calls “the greatest weight.” It demands that we confront the whole of existence — nothing we do is ever erased, that our choices echo forever.

Yet for Nietzsche, the highest human response is not despair but amor fati — the love of one’s fate. To embrace eternal recurrence is to affirm life so completely that we would choose it again and again, with all its pain, boredom, and frustration intact. It is a radical act of acceptance, freeing us from resentment toward the past and binding us more faithfully to the earth. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the prophet declares: “I come back eternally to this same, selfsame life… to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things.” The one who can welcome recurrence without resentment, who transforms necessity into joy, is the Übermensch — the figure who remains “faithful to the earth” and lives without appealing to another world beyond this one

Deleuze inherits Nietzsche’s thought but shifts his focus onto what is truly “returning.” The eternal return, for him, is not the return of the Same but the return of difference. In Difference and Repetition, he challenges the scientific notion of repetition as the exact reproduction of identical conditions. In the controlled environments of laboratories — vacuum chambers, isolated variables — repetition appears as sameness because the setup enforces it. But the living world is an open system, a weave of infinite interactions. Here, repetition is never exact; it is a rhythm that produces variation, each iteration emerging in a new constellation of time, space, and relations. “True” repetition is the capacity of an event to be repeated without ever being identical to itself. In this sense, becoming is the ongoing process by which reality generates difference, not toward a fixed goal or essence, but as a continual unfolding. Repetition is the pulse of becoming, and becoming is the movement by which the past returns transformed.

Bergson, too, resists the mechanistic view of recurrence. For him, life is animated by the élan vital — a creative impulse that drives evolution forward in unpredictable ways. This vital force is not bound by pre-set laws or pre-determined ends; it is characterized by novelty, by the emergence of new forms that cannot be reduced to prior states. Where Nietzsche demands we affirm the recurrence of life, and Deleuze insists that such recurrence always carries difference, Bergson locates in life itself the source of that difference: an irrepressible creativity that resists the closure of identical repetition. His concept of durée — lived time as a continuous flow — dissolves the distinction between past and present, making each moment a unique creation even as it grows out of the whole history of life.

Together, these three thinkers map a progression. Nietzsche confronts us with the existential challenge of recurrence, demanding that we affirm life in its totality. Deleuze radicalizes this into a metaphysics of difference, where recurrence is not a static loop but the generative return of variation. Bergson grounds this in a philosophy of life, where the very movement of time — durée—is a ceaseless act of creation. In this shared vision, repetition is not the enemy of change but its vehicle; eternal return is not a prison of the same but the stage upon which difference performs; and becoming is life’s way of renewing itself at every instant. To live under this vision is not simply to endure the recurrence of events, but to welcome each return as the birth of something unrepeatably new.