Nietzsche's Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence -- Excerpt

Excerpt from Nietzsche's Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence by Lawrence J. Hatab

 

Introduction p. 1 -2

 

"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."
 
                       --- Friedrich Nietzsche   The Gay Science, section 341

 

What is your response to this sentence Nietzsche hands down to us?  I find it hard to take.  I suppose I could abide repeating many of the good things in my life, but everything?  Even high school?  I know it's a small thing, but I remember being shaken for weeks after I had accidentally let a friend's puppy out the door on a city street.  The little creature pranced around in delight, playing with my frantic attempts to grab him.  He darted into the street and was hit squarely by a car.  I watched as he twitched, oozed blood, stared at me blankly, and died.  My friend ran out to the scene and I fell apart.  Even now grief hasn't disappeared when I recall this day.  I don't think I want to go through that again.

 

Why not?  There is no mystery about it.  Life as we have it give much that is good and satisfying, yet no one escapes loss, deprivation, failure, suffering, and death.  All these things and more come with life too, inevitably.  And  Nietzsche's sentence likely prompts us to think first of these negative elements in considering a repeat performance.  This, too, is for good reason.  Who would deny that life as we have it is in the end tragic, that there are essential limits on our aspirations, that destruction and loss are the last word?

 

Philosophers would describe the tragic abstractly in terms of the finitude of the life world, its intrinsic temporal nature, always subject to forces of becoming, change, variation, conflict, negation, and ruin.  Life is tragic in the manner of the self-consuming themes of Greek tragedy.  Life both bears and destroys its offspring, and does so in terms of the very life process itself (for example, life forms must feed on on other life forms to survive).  The tragic is also indicated in the absence of human sovereignty, in the sense of self-mastery, self-determination, and control over the world.  We are thrown into life (no self-origination), limited by life (no self-sufficiency), and destroyed by life (no self-constancy or immortality).  Indigenous limits on the self are also shown in the nature of time.  We cannot control the past because it is irreversible, or the future because it is uncertain, and the present is experience as this precarious excess eluding our control.

 

Such a discussion remains unduly abstract, however.  The force Nietzsche's sentence about the repetition of life is found in its personal address, to me and to you, to our lives as we live it in the concrete, with all its details.  Here Nietzsche is putting the perennial question of the meaning of life in the most frantic and acute form imaginable.  It poses the meaning question in terms of whether one will say Yes or No to life as actually lived, with no alternative.  The potential impact is enormous, it could "change or crush you" (GS341) I confess to having been deeply challenged by this thought of eternal recurrence, even obsessed by it (one reason why I have continued to write about it).  I don't think I can measure up to saying Yes, but somehow I think that I should.  At least my reaction is in keeping with the personal address essential to the existential import of Nietzsche's powerful idea.  Yet Nietzsche was also a philosopher.  He saw eternal recurrence and its implications challenging the Western intellectual tradition as well.  So eternal recurrence is meant to prompt a response to the following question:  What is our existential and intellectual disposition toward natural life as we have it, toward a world ineluctably constituted by time, becoming, and limits?

 

For Nietzsche, any recoil at the prospect of recurrence suggests a kind of chronophobia, an aversion to time and becoming.  And he claims that existential, psychological aversion is the basis for an intellectual chronophobia at the heart of the Western philosophical tradition--which, however, generally expressed its aversion to time on the more impersonal level of the search for truth and foundations of knowledge.  Philosophers have long recognized that the sheer flux of temporality gives no stable reference point for knowledge claims, where "knowing" something would call for an explanation secured by claims, where "knowing" something would call for an explanation secured by methods and principles that are immune to doubt, contingency, and change.

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