Imagine if we are told that the moment we are done living this life, we will proceed to a movie theater as an immortal spirit and watch looping reruns of a film of our whole past life, every waking second of it relived as a third-person documentary style cinematic narrative, endlessly into perpetuity.
How might we live the life we have now, in light of this?
Eternal Recurrence is the idea that over any infinite period of time, everything recurs infinitely. From this, Friedrich Nietzsche developed the concept of Amor Fati, a Latin phrase that translates as “love of one’s fate”. Nietzsche is often associated with nihilism, a philosophy that dismisses all fundamental aspects of human existence such as truth, values, and morality, and thus holds life itself as meaningless. Yet, his finest idea was exactly the opposite of such a bleak rendering and rejection of life. Nietzsche wrestled with the enormity of Eternal Recurrence during his long walks along Alpine lakes, and concluded that if one is obliged to live exactly the same life over and over again, it then leads to a desire to be willing to live exactly the same life over and over for all eternity. Amor Fati thus describes an attitude in which in loving one’s fate, one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary.
Nietzsche’s formulation of Eternal Recurrence in Ecce Homo and Thus Spake Zarathustra is powerful, but not new. Ancient religions all postulate some form of recurrence as a bedrock concept. Our modern fact-based view of life tends to regard all scriptures as dealing with dry facts too, but a better way to think of them is that they present to us as a life philosophy. Recurrence and its what-if choice is a hypothetical question posed to us sentient beings on how we are to live. The significant point is the burden imposed by the question of Eternal Recurrence, regardless of whether or not such a thing be true.
Saṃsāra is Sanskrit for the world, and also the concept of “cyclicality of all life, matter, existence”. The word literally means “wandering through, flowing on, in an endless stream”. This cyclic nature of existence is a fundamental belief of Hinduism and of the Buddhism that followed. Saṃsāra can refer to cycles of death and rebirth in a strict reincarnation sense, where one alternates through heavenly and hellish realms depending on one’s actions in a karmic Wheel of Life. One can also take Saṃsāra as describing the nature of the eternal now, where every moment contains within it the past, present, and future. Either way, Saṃsāra, the world we experience, is nothing but Eternal Recurrence. Both neurology and theology talk of the continuity of our selves into the past and future as an illusion created by a mind living in the only reality that exists, the present. We die and we are reborn in every instant. One does not need to wait the decades for a physical death to find Eternal Recurrence. We can awaken every day, every second, if we choose to, to this reality, and decide how best to live one’s life.
Nietzsche didn’t have movie theaters around when he was walking up and down mountains and pondering the meaning of a life lived well. If he did, instead of talking about Eternal Recurrence as having to relive one’s life endlessly, he might have described it as having to watch reruns of the movie of one’s life endlessly. The effect might be the same, but perhaps the cinematic option might be ever more powerful in driving home the point. Imagine reliving the director’s cut edition, with commentary on all the salient scenes. All those magnificent moments when we want to jump up and cheer our past self along during the tough times for giving it our best, whether we failed or we succeeded. Or conversely, all those forgettable moments when we want to sink down into the seat and cringe with embarrassment over the things we did and the ways we lived that now haunt us again on a big screen.
Our life is ultimately a drama that we enact over every living moment. It is the greatest work of art that any artist will ever create in any medium. Art is beautiful even when it is painful, or perhaps precisely because it evokes pathos. It is rarely just a sickeningly sweet concoction of happy and bland. The script of the movie of our life thus need not be free of episodes of pain or suffering. Hardship by itself wouldn’t hurt us as we watch the rerun. What would matter the most would be our attitude. We might shed a tear in empathy but also feel pride if we struggled against those rough stretches, whether we endured or not. We might resonate with the character on screen when we were true to ourselves, with a minimum of self delusion. We might appreciate the deep moments of joy or sadness, whether shared or experienced solo, and find beauty in all of them. But it is those moments where we knowingly chose to ignore what we knew, when we deliberately harmed ourselves or others, or how we failed to claim responsibility for our own lives, which would spoil a good viewing. Wheel of Life or Reel of Life, the question posed and the burden of choice is the same. Why would we want to hear a story that involved no effort in writing it?
Wheel of Life or Reel of Life – the question posed and the burden of choice is the same
The concept of Eternal Recurrence is thus invoked to surface and straighten out the attitudes we hold regarding life. It isn’t meant to give rise to a diversionary debate about whether it could be true or not. Proof may not be available but that isn’t the point. It belongs to the realm of life-giving views, not lifeless facts. For instance, if one chooses a philosophical stance to live by, such as always being kind and gentle, that stance does not arise from or hinge upon proof of it being somehow logically consistent with some framework used to describe existence. One must choose the correct attitude for oneself, even if proof of recurrence never arrives. All Eastern philosophy is essentially the same as Western psychology in this regard.
Nietzsche described the choice we face every waking moment as follows. “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.”
If your life is going to be made into a movie, choose your story wisely.
