“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate.” — Cobb, Inception
The dynamite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, unarguably one of the most important modern philosophers was once struck with such an idea. An idea that probably shook his core and invaded the complex universe of his thoughts, since the implications of it were not something he could just brush off like someone brushes off an annoying fly. He shares these reflections in his book The Joyous Science:
“What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over again — and you with it, speck of dust!”
Eternal recurrence
Let’s assume you encounter this monster and let’s also assume that this wasn’t a delusion and you’re convinced that the theory is true. What would be your immediate reaction?
Probably, if you’re a young adult like me, you’re first going to feel an immediate rush to do things that you’ve always wanted to do. You will want to achieve goals you’ve always had, target newer and grander aims, and set your eyes on these newly envisioned horizons.
You’re also probably going to recall your past, all the good and the bad, the joys and the sorrows, the exhilarating achievements and embarrassing moments — for each one of us has been a victim to such a moment where you feel so embarrassed that you want to morph into an insect and feel like hiding inside a crevice of a slightly cracked wall. Suddenly the feelings evoked by past memories will feel a lot more cumbersome, as you realize that you have to re-live them again and again like an endless ocean that has no shore; and that life is not like a finite line, but a circle which has no endpoint. Here the beginning is the end, and the end is the beginning. You die to only live again, and you live to only die again!
But here’s the twist: even if we assume that eternal recurrence is true, isn’t it true that each lifetime that we live feels like it’s our first-ever life since we have no memories of our past lives? Nobody knows where they were before they were born into this world since no one has any memory of any life lived previously. The words I’m typing right now; for me, it feels like I’m writing these words for the first time, and even if I did type these words before, it doesn’t matter to me because I cannot recall any such moment.
So here’s the point: it doesn’t matter whether life will repeat each detail, no matter how minute, over and over again. Whether it’s eternal or just one life, it’s always going to feel like our first life, since we will have no memories of the past. So why don’t we live as if life is eternal? Whether life recurs eternally or we only live once, it feels all the same! Right now at this very moment, control over this one life is all you have. Why do we then allow ourselves to make avoidable mistakes, deliberately dig a hole and fall into it, sabotage our progress with bad life choices, lie to ourselves, and keep ourselves in the dark? Why do we stay in our comfort zone and put up with people who are a venomous presence in our life? Why don’t we then live our lives in such a way as if every action we take goes into the registers of infinity, for them to repeat infinitely (since, one or eternal, it feels all the same!)? For if each one of us lives with this mindset, how much more careful are we going to be about our choices, how much more are we going to try to live a life that we don’t regret, not on our deathbed and not in any other lifetime to come.
Kant said it brilliantly:
“Whatever you will, will it in such a manner that you also will its eternal return”
Such a view of life has its drawbacks too, for if each moment is going to repeat eternally, you might wonder what is even the point of life then? Isn’t it like the myth of Sisyphus, where Sisyphus was punished by the gods to roll a rock up a mountain, only for it to roll back to the bottom, where Sisyphus has to start rolling the rock up again, and again, and again . . . right up until eternity.
To be honest, such aimless eternity does seem nihilistic to me. Albert Camus said: “You must imagine Sisyphus to be happy.” But no matter how I try to go about it, some existential angst still dwells within me. Fortunately, I do not have to live life in a nihilistic way, because I don’t believe that eternal recurrence is true, since we do not have any evidence of it whatsoever. But as F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” you do not have to necessarily agree or disagree with Nietzsche’s idea to use it as fuel to think about life from an unconventional angle.
