I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
From Nietzsche’s Eternal Return by Alex Ross in The New Yorker:
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.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1944 – 1900) suffered from myopia, seizures, migraines, and severe indigestion. He never married, but was said to have proposed to Lou von Salomé at least three times. After studying classical philology, he became a professor at the University of Basel. But in his mid-thirties in 1879, he had to resign that position because of his worsening physical state. For nine years after that, he worked as an independent philosopher and writer, supported by a pension and by aid from friends. He produced his most important works during this period, including Thus Spoke Zarathustra. From 1889 until his death in 1900, he suffered from mental illness and at least two strokes. That he could suggest the idea of eternal return as a way of affirming life is indeed striking, given the extremely difficult life he led, one which ended at age 55.
You might ask, “how could you wish to live such a life again and again, over and over into eternity?” He proposed that because his philosophy was one of affirmation, in response to the pessimism of Schopenhauer and of Christianity. He refused to give into nihilism, the belief that there is no meaning in the world or that if there is meaning it is elsewhere (perhaps in the divine), and he refused as well a pure pessimism.
Nietzsche has been claimed by many as supportive of their views: Nazis, libertarian tech billionaires, French deconstructionists, misogynists. And there are arguments to be made that indeed he promoted views consistent with all those factions (especially the misogynists). I’m not going to address that though. I’m interested in how to take his idea of eternal return, also known as eternal recurrence, and use it to craft a perspective on life that is neither optimistic or pessimistic but celebrates life as it truly is: a mix of the good and the bad, the grievous and the tragic and the joyous, and also the neutral, the meaningless, the meaningful. All of it.
Optimism and pessimism
Is Nietzsche an optimist or a pessimist? At one point he suggested getting rid of both terms, and both ways of approaching the world:
Away with the disgustingly over-used words optimism and pessimism! For the occasion for using them grows daily less; only drivelers now find them indispensably necessary…. Apart from all theology and its antagonism, it is manifest that the world is neither good nor bad, (to say nothing about its being the best or the worst) and that these ideas of “good” and “bad” have significance only in relation to men, indeed, are without significance at all, in view of the sense in which they are usually employed.
But he also found a kind of pessimism that could be worthwhile:
Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, malformation, of tired and debilitated instincts—as was the case among the Indians and appears to be the case amongst us ‘modern men’ and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual preference for the hard, gruesome, malevolent and problematic aspects of existence which comes from a feeling of well-being, from overflowing health, from an abundance of existence? Is there perhaps such a thing as suffering from superabundance itself? Is there a tempting bravery in the sharpest eye which demands the terrifying as its foe, as a worthy foe against which it can test its strength and from which it intends to learn the meaning of fear?
This pessimism of strength counters the Schopenhauer-style pessimism of weakness and suffering and renunciation. It is based in a Dionysian approach to life, from the Greek God Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, theater, fertility, and ritual madness.
In his work The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche proposed that the Greeks triumphed over suffering through theatric tragedy which brought together the Apollonian perspective of order, reason, and individuality with the Dionysian of chaos, instinct, and intoxication. This fusion allows one to experience at once the beauty of order and the terrifying reality of existence.
Welcoming everything that happens
Nietzsche’s ideas of eternal return and amor fati — love of fate — do express a kind of pessimism, the pessimism that says there is evil in the world, bad things happen, there are no guarantees that things will be okay in the end. But it provides a third way not pessimistic nor optimistic and I wouldn’t call it realistic either, because part of the way he approached life was with a kind of awe and passion not captured by the term “realistic.”
The reason I’m pondering this is that I’m trying to come up with a way of understanding the scar tissue on my left eye’s retina that may mean I undergo risky and uncomfortable surgery. Should I feel negative about this, that my already-poor vision has now taken a step function change for the worse? Should I feel positive, that I live in a society where opthalmologists can do delicate surgery on a retina? Should I just feel some sense of terrible awe? At being able to see, at not being able to see? I don’t know.
Can I wish that this would happen to me again and again into eternity, not feeling regret but rather feeling some sense of the terrible and the wonderful at the same time?