So there’s been a lot of research lately on Nietzsche’s personal library and reading habits, but this is something else and, incidentally, the strangest thing I’ve read about Nietzsche for a while. From the conclusion of a Borgesian article earnestly entitled The Ideal Academic Library as Envisioned through Nietzsche’s Vision of the Eternal Return:
While Nietzsche’s ideal of the eternal return can not be perfectly applied to academic library management, it does fit well. The functional areas in a library organization have the look and feel of a big circle that endlessly flows from one area into the next. Events can and do repeat. Very little that is truly new appears. As such, looking at events as being reoccurrences, and planning accordingly for the future, from this perspective is helpful. This is particularly true if the leader takes Nietzsche’s advice and approaches all situations in a positive manner. This has many benefits for leadership that match many of the ideas in educational administration theory as well.
I think someone should write a response paper arguing that Library management is better modeled on Qoheleth’s “There is nothing new under the sun” (from Ecclesiastes) than on Nietzsche’s Eternal Return.
Just for the fun of it.