Suddenly we get this long section about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, neither of whom I've read since college. With Kierkegaard, I actually read so little that I don't have much of anything to offer here. With Nietzsche, it's certainly been a while, but I adored him in college and actually wrote an entire undergraduate thesis on the fourth and final part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. And that's how I got into finance.
But seriously, the thing I most remember out of Nietzsche is his idea of the Eternal Return. As a metaphysical idea, I've always found it wonderfully bottomless and kinda dizzying. It provides a very concrete image that you can nevertheless feel dissolving under your feet the more you think about it. I think the idea has really stuck with me though less for its abstract content than for the "moral" way it asks you to examine your life.
Contemplate the idea that everything that has happened to you to bring you to this exact point right now is going to happen in exactly the same way again and again, repeated ad infinitum, to bring you back to this exact same moment. Put aside, for the moment, making logical sense of the idea, asking where the beginning was, or when it starts to repeat. Like I say, you can quickly feel like you're talking to Zeno. Instead, just think about the weight the idea gives to the moment. You entire life, all the big and small decisions, all the random twists and turns, all the sorrows and triumphs had to happen exactly like they did to bring you to this exact point here and now. Imagine that all of it will happen all over again in exactly the same way, down to the last detail, playing out your fate like it was a Greek tragi-comedy. Anything that had been different would have resulted in a different you than the one standing here contemplating this.
How does that idea make you feel? Probably it depends on how you are feeling about life right now. How does it feel to be you, and not someone else? If you are reconciled to life right now, if it feels like it, "all worked out in the end", you might approach the possibility of it all repeating itself the same way you would hearing your favorite piece of music again. Of course you want it to be exactly the same. Of course it has to have that minor key modulation before you approach the climax, which wouldn't be the same without it. If you feel like your life has somehow gone off the rails and you've made some decision you regret or you had some bad luck, it's going to be miserable to imagine the whole thing playing out exactly the same ad infinitum.
In fact, Nietzsche presents the Eternal Return as either a crushing weight or an immense lightness and joy, depending on how you look at it. It's a question of your attitude towards life (since by hypothesis you can't change what has already happened and is fated to always happen again). And of course, your attitude towards death. Because the core question here is what freedom you have to change the way you experience the inevitable. Death is our great symbol of mortal inevitability. But the Eternal Return forces us to think of every moment as inevitable. It transforms the pithy new age idea of "living every moment as if it were your last", and even the deeper buddhist wisdom of "staying in the present moment" into something more realistic -- live every moment as if it were exactly this moment, by imagining it repeated forever in its precision. This moment isn't the one special moment of your deathbed, but neither is it an entity unto itself, disconnected from all the other moments. This moment contains all those other moments, all your thoughts of the past and all your plans for the future, all those things that make you who you are right now. At the limit, this moment is everything, the world in a grain of sand, the monad. That's why it's impossible to tell how big the "circle" of Eternal Return is. Is the whole cosmos contained in this tiny moment, or do past and future stretch out so infinitely in both directions that time looks like a straight line to us?
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