Recently R has been reading one of my favourite books, Milan Kundera’s (pictured) Unbearable Lightness of Being
I’ve been thinking a lot about Nietzsche’s eternal return. Most particularly just how fanciful an idea it is and whether the concept of every second of our lives recurring an infinite number of times is actually “the heaviest burden” and whether simply being is “splendidly light”.
Nietzsche summarised his fears in The Gay Science with the following proposition:
The greatest weight. — 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 live 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 I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change, you as you are or perhaps crush you.
. Therein lies Nietzsche’s fear. Subtly that there is no mechanistic governance or law with the universe and that “every power draws its ultimate consequence at every moment.” This is philosophy at critical odds with current scientific understanding. It suggests that even posulating on scientific laws is a pointless act as in the grander scheme of things, and there will always be grander schemes, these laws hve no meaning. Equilibria and predictions are illusory and life is generally what we make of it. It contrasts nicely with scientific theories such as Feynmann’s sum over histories. One of the postulates that this theory builds upon states:
- Events in nature are probabilistic with predictable probabilities (P).
This predictability has been experimentally proven and the sum over histories approach links classical newtonian mechanistics with the quantum variety. While it is not at odds and even compliments Nietsches assumption of discrete consequences, it also hints at formal universal governance. So, I guess the question is, why the hell does nature appear to have an order if it’s entirely chaotic? Why does it flatter so much to deceive? The answer would appear to be that it doesn’t. Much like Kant’s inappropriate separation of space and time in his paralogism of pure reason, Nietzsche makes an inappropriate separation of the event from the time and space that it occupies. The uniqueness of the latter defines the uniqueness of the former and the eternal return becomes a moot point. The old jehovah (as Einstein described himself) pointed out that heaviness in the gravitational sense was relative and so it is with eternal recurrence. So even if a rose would smell just as sweet if it wasn’t a rose, is “being” heavier if eternal recurrence is confined to room 101? It’s all relative I guess. Experience is what it is and it’s weight is situational and generally retrospective.
I’ll end with a quote from Kundera himself, illustrating that Kavanagh’s “difference that sends an old phrase burning” defines the moment whereby a new character is conceived, the climax of the eternal return.
“And once more I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel,” Mr. Kundera says of one of the characters, who is described standing at a window and staring across a courtyard at a blank wall. “This is the image from which he was born. . . . Characters are not born, like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor, containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility . . . the characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them and equally horrified by them. . . . But enough. Let us return to Tomas.”