Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return wrapped its fingers around my skull and wouldn’t let go. While revisiting pieces I had written many years ago, I was surprised to see patterns that still resonate in my current life. Around this time, someone precious to me had turned my thoughts to Nietzsche’s writing.
“One does not read Nietzsche,“ an academic once told me. “One only reads about Nietzsche.“ This is not an overstatement. The writings of Nietche are apparently impenetrably dense and dizzying arcane. People say his writing is much easier to understand in its original German – not that I’ll ever be able to confirm that.
On a basic level, Eternal Return suggests that everything recurs infinitely. Every moment in time plays itself out in an eternal loop. Whether this concept is literally true is entirely irrelevant. The thought experiment’s importance lies in its implications for your own life. It tests one’s ability to accept the joy and suffering of one’s life.
That’s tantalizing bait for any Absurdist Existentialist.
Amor Fati (Love of Fate):
Phrases like “you only live once“ or “life is not a dress rehearsal“ have always impacted how I view the importance of each moment. But in this conceptualization of life, our pains and regrets can only sting once, and then they fade away as our consciousness fades away. There is some form of release, an end point.
But in Eternal Return, you are fated to repeat those moments forever. We all have those conversations where we regret what we said or didn’t say. Now, imagine finding yourself fated to have that conversation again an infinite number of times. How much more critical it suddenly becomes to be intentional and do the things you can live with for eternity.
How many small hells do we create for ourselves throughout a lifetime? How often do we experience a taste of paradise in a simple moment and are too preoccupied with nonsense to notice?
To view your life from the place of Eternal Return is to embrace every aspect of it and fully affirm your existence, including making peace with hardship and regret.
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Some further reading:
Eternal Recurrence: What Did Nietzsche Really Mean?
My Favourite Excerpts:
Offering his idea as a thought experiment, Nietzsche writes:
What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’
Nietzsche follows up this picture of endless repetition with a challenge:
The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
In other words, if you were to discover that every moment of your life, all its joys, all its pains, every rush of excitement and every long day of boredom, was to recur in sequence again and again, was to repeat for eternity — how would you react? Would you be pleased? Would you be crushed? Would it impact how you lived the rest of your life? Nietzsche questions:
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’
The point of the eternal recurrence on this view is that the entire thing, taken as a whole, is affirmed — not this instant or that, but the overall package. Like a brilliant film or novel, it will have its highs and lows, it will have its dramas and its slower-paced scenes — this balance is what makes it beautiful.
Nietzsche’s Eternal Return:
Why thinkers of every political persuasion keep finding inspiration in the philosopher.
Countless books on Nietzsche are published in dozens of languages each year, linking him to every imaginable zone of life and culture. (…) Nietzsche’s political thinking is also a trending topic, although his ideas are devilishly difficult to reconcile with modern conceptions of left and right. He raged against democracy and egalitarianism, but also against nationalism and anti-Semitism. Nietzsche is often quoted in the chat rooms of the far right, and he also surfaces regularly in leftist discussions about the future of democracy. (…) Walter Kaufmann, the German-American émigré whose translations of Nietzsche were long the standard versions in English, once declared that the philosopher’s writings are “easier to read but harder to understand than those of almost any other thinker.”
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The title comes from an unnerving passage in “Ecce Homo,” Nietzsche’s autobiographical book of 1888, which was completed a couple of months before he descended into insanity, at the age of forty-four:
I know my lot. One day my name will be linked to the memory of something monstrous [etwas Ungeheueres]—to a crisis like none there has been on earth, to the most profound collision of conscience, to a verdict invoked against everything that until then had been believed, demanded, held sacred. I am no man, I am dynamite.
(…) the philosopher’s style is one of “rhetorical questions, ellipses, fables, mini-dialogues, hints that much is left unsaid, and apparent praise for seeming to be other than you are.”
This cyclone of nuance goes missing when we reduce Nietzsche to maxims. Nor should we try to extract a system that can be summarized on a chalkboard. Ultimately, his writing is a mode of criticism, of übersubjective intellectual reportage, grounded in extreme self-awareness. Freud is said to have commented that Nietzsche “had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live.”
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Christa Davis Acampora writes, “A popular view of Nietzsche regards him as an advocate of bald expressions of power, but he is better understood as someone who investigates—rather than celebrates—power.”
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When power is no longer divinely ordained, the right to govern is contested. In “Human, All Too Human,” Nietzsche predicted that, as the democratic state secularized itself, there would be a surge of religious fanaticism resistant to centralized government. On the other side, he anticipated a zealous adherence to the state on the part of nonbelievers. Religious forces might seize control again, engendering new forms of enlightened despotism—“perhaps less enlightened and more fearful than before.” These struggles could go on for a while, Nietzsche writes. In one long paragraph, he prophesies the history of the twentieth century, from fascism to theocracy.
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Behind Nietzsche’s array of extreme positions is a much less alarming belief: that the only healthy state for humanity is one in which rival perspectives vie with one another, with none gaining the upper hand. The same attitude governs his fundamental epistemological position about the nature of truth. Each competitor in the agon is expected to stake his or her claims on truth; Nietzsche advanced his own opinions with utmost vehemence. The ultimate truth is that no claim should achieve dominion over all others. As Richard Rorty maintained, Nietzsche can be understood as a particularly flamboyant kind of pragmatist. We don’t think of William James as a “dangerous mind,” and yet he, too, said, “Damn the Absolute!”
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The contradictions in Nietzsche’s writings cohere, Nehamas writes, if we look at him as a literary figure who worked within a philosophical context, and who crafted a persona that functions as a literary character of novelistic complexity.
The disparity between the living Nietzsche and the written one was indeed drastic. He was a fragile, sensitive, gentle person with elegant manners, constantly striving to mask his inner turmoil and physical distress. He let his personal anguish be reflected in a universal predicament: how can we hold to our convictions in the face of chaos, conflict, decay, and death? The idea of the eternal return—the prospect of having to live one’s life over and over, every detail repeated, every pain alongside every joy—becomes all the more potent when one thinks about having to relive that life, to its terrible end.
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the most openhearted and unproblematic passage in all of his writings—the closing aphorism of “Dawn,” perhaps his most beautiful book:
All these bold birds who fly out into the wide, widest open—it is true! At some point they will not be able to fly any farther and will squat down on some pylon or sparse crag—and very grateful for this miserable accommodation to boot! But who would want to conclude from this that there was no longer a vast and prodigious trajectory ahead of them, that they had flown as far and wide as one could fly! All our great mentors and precursors have finally come to a stop, and it is hardly the noblest and most graceful of gestures with which fatigue comes to a stop: it will also happen to you and me! Of what concern, however, is that to you and me! Other birds will fly farther!
Nietzsche and the Stoics on Eternal Return
Favourite Excerpts:
In around 200 CE, the philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias wrote: “[Chrysippus and the Stoics] hold that after the conflagration all the same things come to be again in the world numerically, so that even the same peculiarly qualified individual as before exists and comes to be again in the world…”
In his Letters, the Roman Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) tells Lucilius: “Things that vanish from our sight are merely stored away in the natural world: they cease to be, but they do not perish… the day will come again that will return us to the light. It is a day that many would refuse, except that we forget everything before returning.”
This concept of eternal recurrence, or eternal return, is even echoed in the Bible:
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after (Ecclesiastes 1:9-11).
In the City of God Against the Pagans (426 CE), St. Augustine seeks to deny that these and other such verses refer to eternal return. If “the wicked walk in a circle,” says Augustine, “this is not because their life is to recur by means of these circles, which these philosophers imagine, but because the path in which their false doctrine now runs is circuitous.”
In the chapter of Ecce Homo (1908) entitled, Why I Am so Clever, Nietzsche says, “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati [love of fate]: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.”
In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Albert Camus compares the human condition to the plight of Sisyphus, the mythical king of Ephyra who was punished for defying the gods by being made to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again. Camus concludes, “The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
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