I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
Today I’m thinking about Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence: can you so thoroughly affirm your life that you would wish it to repeat again and again, exactly the same way, into eternity?
With this (and his other key ideas), Nietzsche was rebelling against what he thought of as nihilistic religions and philosophies, which located meaning outside one’s life — in God, in progress, in some final purpose rather than in actual lived experience.
How to make sense of this theory, and Nietzsche’s other ideas?
life as literature
In his 2003 book Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Alexander Nehamas suggests that Nietzsche’s ideas all make sense in terms of textuality and literature — life as narrative, as being subject to many interpretations some of which are better than others, as being lived best if lived as art.
From the description of the Nehamas’ book:
More than eighty years after his death, Nietzsche’s writings and his career remain disquieting, disturbing, obscure. His most famous views―the will to power, the eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, the master morality―often seem incomprehensible or, worse, repugnant. Yet he remains a thinker of singular importance, a great opponent of Hegel and Kant, and the source of much that is powerful in figures as diverse as Wittgenstein, Derrida, Heidegger, and many recent American philosophers.
Alexander Nehamas provides the best possible guide for the perplexed. He reveals the single thread running through Nietzsche’s views: his thinking of the world on the model of a literary text, of people as if they were literary characters, and of knowledge and science as if they were literary interpretation. Beyond this, he advances the clarity of the concept of textuality, making explicit some of the forces that hold texts together and so hold us together.
This idea of textuality says that Nietzsche is asking us to think of both our selves and our lives as texts — things whose meaning is not given in advance but emerges through interpretation.
Like a great novel, our lives contain many events, characters, and tensions. They may contain contradictions and ambiguities. In a great novel, there is no one thesis promoted, no one proposition that the novel sets out to prove. A novel expresses meaning, often very complex, through how its parts fit together. There is not a hidden essence waiting to be discovered. What a novel, and a life, expresses emerges from the interaction of all ite elements, and from the interpretation a reader produces based on those.
Nietzsche was a philologist; what is philology anyway?
Every time I come back to Nietzsche I have to remind myself what philology is. That wasn’t a major available to me when I was in college. Nietzsche was a classical philologist before becoming a philosopher. At age 24, he became a professor at the University of Basel, largely on the strength of his work in Greek philology.
In the 19th century, philology (the study of language in historical and literary sources) involved the interpretation of fragmentary texts, reconstructing meaning from incomplete evidence, and understanding how a work’s parts fit together.
Nehamas suggests that Nietzsche never really stopped being a philologist. He simply turned his tools of textual interpretation onto culture, morality, and, later, the self.
To Nietzsche, proposes Nehamas, a life resembles a text. It doesn’t have a fixed meaning independent of interpretation. It contains tensions and contradictions. It can only be understood retrospectively. And it acquires significance through the relation among all its parts.
This doesn’t imply that life is fictional. It means that the meaning of a life is not immediately expressed or obvious or sitting there waiting to be extracted.
While the events of your, and my, life are real, what they amount to requires interpretation, and attention to every element and their interactions.
Furthermore, by thinking of your life as a text, as a novel, as a work of art, you are better prepared to make it something meaningful, terrible, and wonderful.
a narrative of the self
The textual perspective of Nietzsche’s ideas asks: Can you make your life into something that can be read as a coherent, distinctive, and affirmable whole?
Can you make it like a great novel? Both through your interpretations of the past, and the actions you take to shape the life that is still being written?
Can you make yourself into a heroine, or hero, who lives like a great literary character? By showing a distinct style and personality, by developing complexity yet displaying a unity of character?
By not avoiding suffering or struggle, but by incorporating it into some meaningful narrative arc?
Can you make your life resemble a successful work of literary art?
Why I’m thinking about this today
I’m having a wonderful time learning options trading and at the same time I’m having a terrible time. While I’ve been successful so far in showing profits, what I’ve achieved is far less than what I could have achieved simply by following conventional investing wisdom: buy and hold a diversified set of low-cost index funds. In the last nine weeks or so the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ 100 have seen an incredible run up, largely on the basis of a semiconductor stock rally. While I captured some of these gains via short puts on Micron and Taiwan Semiconductor, for the most part I missed out. And I kept up with my energy positions even as they have lagged while everyone gave up on higher crude oil prices.
If I approach life not with the idea that I must optimize (or maximize) my outcomes — the most happiness, the most stability, the best house, the highest stock market returns — but instead as a complicated story with myself as the complicated heroine at the center, my struggles make much more sense. They become a crucial and necessary part of the story.
No one would want to read a story of someone whose life had no struggle, no grief, no suffering.
Would I want to live such a life?
Nietzsche would say that I should not want to live such a life. Imagining a life without suffering negates the reality of human life — every human life. It is nihilistic.
Instead, he exhorts me to affirm my life in its wonderfulness and terribleness.
Art needs contrast, and if my life is to be a work of art, then there must be grief and pain and struggle and missteps.