What if you had to live your life again?
Imagine this. Tonight a daemon appears at your bedside.
The daemon tells you that every moment of your life—every joy, every disappointment, every triumph, every humiliation, every love, every regret—must be lived again, exactly as it has been, over and over, for all eternity.
Would you despair?
Or would you rejoice?
Most people associate this thought experiment with Nietzsche. It is, in fact, much older. Long before Nietzsche, the Stoics imagined a universe in which everything returns.
Under the influence of Plato, who was himself influenced by Pythagoras, who was himself influenced by India, the Stoics held that the universe undergoes cycles, being periodically destroyed in a great conflagration (ekpyrosis, ‘blow-out’) and then reborn, ad infinitum.
Because God, being perfectly rational, is bound to make the same choices, each cosmic cycle unfolds as the last. Thus, the world as we know it, with us in it, existed before and will exist again. In around 200 CE, the Peripatetic (Aristotelian) philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias wrote, ‘[Chrysippus and the Stoics] hold that after the conflagration all the same things come to be again in the world numerically, so that even the same qualified individual as before exists and comes to be again in the world…’
Maybe, in ten trillion years, I will once again be sitting at this desk, writing these words, with the same cat asleep on my lap.
The Roman Stoic Seneca hints at the same idea when, in his famous Letters, he writes to Lucilius:
Things that vanish from our sight are merely stored away in the natural world: they cease to be, but they do not perish… the day will come again that will return us to the light. It is a day that many would refuse, except that we forget everything before returning.
Whether the Stoics thought of eternal return as literal cosmology or as a philosophical exercise scarcely matters. Its enduring power lies in the challenge that it poses.
Nietzsche’s Challenge to Us
In July 1881, Nietzsche discovered his arcadia in Sils-Maria, a place of ‘splendid isolation’. For one Swiss franc a day, he took an upstairs room in the house of Gian Durisch, the mayor of the village. The following month, along the shores of Lake Silvaplana, he stopped before a mighty pyramidal block of stone, where he had the ‘abysmal thought’ of eternal return (or eternal recurrence).
In The Gay Science (1882), he adapted this flash of inspiration into one of philosophy’s greatest personal challenges. In Aphorism 341, he asks how you would feel if a demon crept into your loneliest loneliness and informed you that you would have to live your life exactly as it is, has been, and will be, over and over again. ‘Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth, and curse the demon that so spoke? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him: “You are a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!”’
For Nietzsche, how we respond to the demon is the acid test of life-affirmation.
In Ecce Homo (1888), he says, ‘My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati [love of fate]: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it … but love it.’
Whereas the Stoics asked us to accept our fate, Nietzsche challenged us to love it.
For it is not enough merely to endure. Instead, we must embrace every joy and every sorrow so completely as to be willing to relive them for evermore.
Even Nietzsche himself struggled to meet the standard he had set himself: ‘I confess that the deepest objection to the Eternal Recurrence… is always my mother and my sister.’ After Nietzsche’s mental collapse, his sister Elisabeth deleted the remark from Ecce Homo.
Sisyphus
Albert Camus, who kept a photograph of Nietzsche in his office, took the idea one step further.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, he compares the human condition to the plight of Sisyphus, the mythical king of Ephyra who was punished for daring to defy the gods by being made to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it roll back down again.
Yet Camus reaches one of the most startling conclusions in all philosophy:
‘The struggle to the top is itself enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’
Even in a state of utter hopelessness, Sisyphus can still be happy. Indeed, he is happy precisely because he is in a state of utter hopelessness, because in recognising and accepting the hopelessness of his condition, and embracing it, he at the same time transcends it.
Or, in those wonderful words of Virgil,
Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem.
The only hope for the doomed is no hope at all.
Continue Exploring
This article draws on themes explored at greater length in Stoic Stories, my overview of Stoic philosophy, and The German Greeks, my history of German philosophy from Leibniz to Nietzsche.
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