Thank you attano. It may be time for me to read Zarathustra from the beginning again.
There is much to say on this set-in-stone idea of time and events - our phenomenological perspective depends on the perspective we take on - well, perspective. I choose, or have discovered that it is possible, to completely abandon the need for a birds eye view, and concentrate within the notion of perspective itself.
With the Eternal Return concept, Nietzsche tries to destroy a great enemy he sees for humanity, which is the “it was”. There is no God, no self, but this is not his conclusions but the enviroment that he had found (think of the madman). It is the nihilism of the time. But it relies on a conception of time as linear. It destroys confidence in the will, and existence of a self because of the “it was” that lies beyond our will. The person is an effect of time, is limited by a past it cannot affect.
But what Nietzsche proposes is circular time. The past affected by the future as much as the future is affected by the past. If so the crucial moment is…the moment, the moment of decision. This conception elevates the power of the will in both directions, even into the past, it’s own past. It isn’t about changing the past as it is to re-interpret the past.
What dies with nihilism was the static idea of God and the self as if they were total. Nietzsche sees instead a constant becoming, in Being as well as in self. We never are quite finished. Every moment of decision produces a new interpretation of our future and of our past. We never act in accordance with some natural cause, essense, in fact, but apply, with innocense, an interpretation of our past, what we are, and project it into our future, as if we will survive this moment.