Nietzsche was a man of many ideas. I previously mentioned Amor Fati; his idea that we should love our fate, and now I’ve just come across another concept of his that I feel worth butchering in my simplicity – eternal recurrence. Eternal recurrence is the idea that we are destined to repeat our lives over and over again for eternity. Now why he believed this is unclear, and it seems like something completely impossible to prove as anything other than theoretical. We would need to somehow step out of our understanding of time itself to do so. Saying that if we were to do this and view time not as linear but in a way I am unable to fully comprehend then this idea of our lives moving from beginning to end would be inaccurate and every moment would be existing always. I think I’ve heard it described as that in the past and if true would potentially make eternal recurrence true, just not as we would have previously understood it. If it were true though, and importantly we knew it to be true, would it make us view or live our life differently.
This could become a, are you happy with your life and would you change it moment, but that seems to simplify everything a little too much. For the sake of this though, no I don’t think I would change it and what has gone before as any outcome of any change is completely unknown and I don’t lack that much contentment with my life. Saying that it does make me feel I’m settling somehow and should strive for more or better but surely that misses the point somehow.
Assuming I live until seventy, I would be half way through my life now. There are things in the first half – which is all of it so far – that I cringe about and wouldn’t want to repeat, but then they accumulatively caused this moment now. And in the second half, in the knowledge that we will have to live it over and again for eternity do we start making the most of our life. If we decide upon that then does that mean we haven’t made the most of it so far and if we don’t have to repeat forever, would we somehow be content with this lack of value, if that’s the best way of putting it. Would this be an indictment of the way we live our lives, perhaps giving us the type of kick up the arse that makes us do something with our lives. An awful phrase and unnecessarily pressurised concept if ever there had been one.
But saying that it does allow us to see what value we put on our attempts at existing so far if we do play the hypothetical game. Perhaps that’s the whole point. It could be that Nietzsche never meant it in any actual sense but merely as a tool to see how much we love our life or our fate, if there is such a thing. But then he thought there was so we have no control anyway. If everything is eternally recurring then this has already happened, you have already read these words and you will read them again and again for eternity anyway. And if time isn’t linear, this moment is always happening. Sorry about that.
Observations and Misunderstandings 