Eternal Recurrence and Milan Kundera (4/4)

This is Part 4 in a series examining Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence through film and literature. Expect spoilers.

If popular culture can employ Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence (or eternal return) to meaningful effect, then certainly high culture can do the same. Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a stunning example. It begins with an unconventional take on eternal recurrence that is the novel’s central theme.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes belief in eternal recurrence as “the heaviest burden,” for the thought of endless repetition would give weight to every thought and every action. Kundera reverses the idea:

 

Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.

 

As the characters of the novel make the decisions that determine the course of their lives--in matters both historical (the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) and personal (numerous romantic rendezvous)--they are frequently gripped by a feeling of lightness, like Franz is after he tells his wife about his lover Sabina:

 

A while later he met Sabina at the airport. As the plane gained altitude, he felt lighter and lighter. At last, he said to himself, after nine months he was living in truth.

Unfortunately for Franz, the spice of the affair for Sabina came from its secrecy. Once it becomes public, she soon shuts out Franz, leaving him without wife or lover. The unpredictability of life and the knowledge that there are no do-overs can induce a light-headed, dizzy feeling familiar to anyone who has fallen in love, started a new job, or taken a principled stand despite the threat of negative consequences.

Confronted with Nietzsche’s and Kundera’s views of life, we need not choose one over the other, for Nietzsche’s is merely a thought experiment and Kundera’s merely a playful reversal of it. Neither is intended as fact. Eternal recurrence is undoubtedly a strange idea, so the lightness of being that comes with non-recurrence may seem more familiar to our customary ways of viewing the world, but surely we are also familiar with the weightiness of existence. Precisely because our decisions incur irrevocable consequences, being is often unbearably heavy whether it repeats or not.

Either way, we are all just atoms swerving through the void (to paraphrase Roman poet Lucretius in De reum natura), and do we not swerve in search of greater well-being? Nietzsche chose to invest every moment of his life with the weight of endless repetition so that he would awaken to life’s preciousness. By contrast, Kundera uses the transitory and finite nature of life to highlight its beauty. As there is little difference between the two in effect, it seems to me that we may adopt whichever works--or both or neither as we deem appropriate for our own circumstances.

 

Previous posts in this series:

Eternal Recurrence and Nietzsche (1/4)
Eternal Recurrence and Edge of Tomorrow (2/4)
Eternal Recurrence and Groundhog Day (3/4)

Eternal Recurrence and Groundhog Day (3/4)

This is Part 3 in a series examining Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence through film and literature. Expect spoilers.

Edge of Tomorrow was a good movie, but I felt like its charm began to wear off during the final act. A movie whose charm never wears off is the romantic comedy Groundhog Day (1993), in which Bill Murray’s character Phil finds himself repeating the same day over and over until he wins the love of Rita, played by Andie McDowell.

 

Much like Major Cage in Edge of Tomorrow, Phil learns to be a better person--not tougher, but kinder and happier. In his old, bitter life, he was a cynic, a life-denier, a negater of the hustle and bustle around him. In Freudian terms, he had a strong death drive urging him toward destructive and self-destructive behavior. This reaches its most morbid point when he repeatedly attempts suicide.

Again, Nietzsche’s ideas clump, for eternal recurrence is closely related to his concept of amor fati. This phrase literally means the love of fate, but it is also the love of all (previous post). For Nietzsche, everything is “anew, everything eternal, everything chained, entwined together, everything in love” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), so that to want the good in life, you must also want the bad. Once you can do that, you have something akin to what John Coltrane called a love supreme, only no god necessary.

Then you are an affirmer of life, as indeed Nietzsche tried to be. In The Gay Science, he states his New Year’s resolution:

 

Amor fati: may that be my love from now on! I want to wage no war against the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. May looking away be my only form of negation! And, all in all: I want to be at all times hereafter only an affirmer!

Reviewing Nietzsche recently, I was surprised at how many selections by translator R. J. Hollingdale in A Nietzsche Reader focus on joy. One of my favorites, from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is fine enough in English but must be even better in the original German:

All joy wants the eternity of all things, wants honey, wants dregs, wants intoxicated midnight, wants graves, wants the consolation of graveside tears, wants gilded sunsets, what does joy not want!

In Groundhog Day, joy is precisely what Phil finds. After dreading what promises to be a dull eternity in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, he begins to help people, make friends, and have a little fun. He learns to play a mean piano, masters 19th-Century French poetry, and perfects the art of ice sculpture. After finally winning Rita’s heart, Phil’s recurrence proves--like Ebenezer Scrooge’s similar experience in A Christmas Carol--to have been temporary but life-changing, and he finally moves from February 2 to February 3, a gayer spirit with a new lust for life.

 

Previous posts in this series:
Eternal Recurrence and Nietzsche (1/4)
Eternal Recurrence and Edge of Tomorrow (2/4)

Eternal Recurrence and Edge of Tomorrow (2/4)

This is Part 2 in a series examining Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence through film and literature. Expect spoilers.

“Live. Die. Repeat.” –Edge of Tomorrow tagline

The recent science fiction movie Edge of Tomorrow (2014) provides an excellent example of recurrence as a plot device. The film, based on the novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, stars Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt as soldiers fighting an invasion by aliens called gitai, and it has more Nietzsche in it than just eternal recurrence.

 

The device of repeating the same day over and over functions similarly to Nietzsche’s thought experiment of eternal recurrence. We see how Cruise’s character, Major Cage, changes when faced with repeating the same events, many of them horrifying, on endless repeat. He’s scared witless at first but then embraces his situation and uses it to improve himself. This from the novel (translation mine):

 

I can take something with me. I will take the best of this world with me to the next day. I’ll narrowly dodge enemy bullets and kill gitai with one blow. Rita Vrataski gained overwhelming combat skill, and I will use infinite time to do the same. That's all I can do.

Cage, known as Keiji in the novel, begins improving himself as a soldier and eventually masters the large blade that hitherto was Rita Vrataski’s signature weapon. She too was once stuck in time and used the successive loops to polish her combat skills. Eventually, she became the hero and legend known as the Full Metal Bitch. Both Cage/Keiji and Rita turn a life of suffering and death into an occasion to shed their old selves in favor of new ones.

Nietzsche may not have been a systematic philosopher, but his ideas have a way of grouping up. With Edge of Tomorrow as a lens for viewing his philosophy, the close relationship between eternal recurrence and the Übermensch, or Overman (previous post), comes into focus.

The Overman has often been portrayed as a concept elevating some individuals over others--indeed Nazi intellectuals mined Nietzsche for quotes to justify their idea of a master race, and works by Nietzsche tend to show up in the libraries of America’s mass shooters, whose psychoses seek an authority elevating them above others--but Nietzsche only meant something akin to what in today’s common parlance we would call self-realization or personal growth. The Overman is master at overcoming his or her own individual limitations so that yesterday’s horizons give way to new ones. The person who needs to lord it over others would--like Brandon and Phillip in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, which explicitly refers to Nietzsche--be a poor example of the Übermensch indeed.

Eternal recurrence as formulated by Nietzsche would not allow for any such overcoming from one cycle to the next, for everything repeats in exactly the same way, but the thought in this cycle that you will live the same wretched existence in the next cycle could--as it does for Cage in Edge of Tomorrow--inspire reform this time around:

 

Live. Overcome. Live better.

Previous posts in this series:

Eternal Recurrence and Nietzsche (1/4)

 

 

Eternal Recurrence and Nietzsche (1/4)

Eternal recurrence is one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s more far-fetched concepts and thus one that philosophers have long looked at askance. And yet it remains an attractive concept and has a powerful effect in works of fiction--usually in corrupt but nonetheless enlightening forms.

The nut of Nietzsche’s idea isn’t hard to understand. Here is an explanation from The Gay Science:

What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your loneliest solitude and said to you: ‘This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence.

The basis for the idea is that in the vast expanse of infinite time a finite number of matter particles rearranging themselves in finite space will at some point fall into the same forms and repeat everything in exactly the same way. According to William Kaufmann in Nietzsche, scientists have shown this is not necessarily true, but Nietzsche was less concerned with whether eternal recurrence actually happens than he was with what it would mean to someone to believe it were true:

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine!’ If this thought gained power over you it would, as you are now, transform and perhaps crush you.

I wrote about this before in my post “Amor Fati and the Birth of a Child,” in which I discussed how the birth of my son and his continuing presence in my life causes me to accept everything that has happened in my past, both good and bad. He is my “tremendous moment,” and a demon whispering in my ear that I must repeat my life with all its sufferings over again would be a god to me for he would also be giving me the chance to re-experience all those precious moments with my son.

Eternal recurrence features heavily in Irvin D. Yalom’s When Nietzsche Wept, a novel that tells the story of what might have happened had Josef Breuer, one of the first psychoanalysts, applied his “talking cure” to a despairing Nietzsche. As the two meet and discuss life, Breuer at times becomes the analysand and Nietzsche the analyst. When the philosopher suggests his “thought experiment” of eternal recurrence, Breuer is horrified. He cannot bear the thought of revisiting all of life’s indignities (career angst, marital infidelity, etc.), but the idea has a therapeutic effect on Nietzsche.

 

Recurrence both eternal and temporary, sometimes bound with reincarnation, is a common theme in fiction. Eternal recurrence serves as the cosmological backdrop to Robert Jordan’s series of fantasy novels The Wheel of Time and I recently ran across an example of temporary recurrence in the Farscape episode “Back and Back and Back to the Future.” In this series of posts, I will discuss the recent movie Edge of Tomorrow, the classic romantic comedy Groundhog Day, and the concept’s unusual treatment by Milan Kundera in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

 

 

Human, All Too Human: Man of Steel

“Meditating on things human, all too human . . . is one of the means by which man can ease life's burden.” --Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

 

To my mind, if director Zack Snyder has a film that approaches the elegance of Watchmen, it is Man of Steel (trailer), his reboot of the Superman movies. Watching it recently, I started thinking about the nature of Superman, human nature and freewill.

Man of Steel begins on the planet Krypton at the time of Kal-el’s birth. His parents send him to Earth to save him from the planet’s impending doom due to overharvesting of the planet core. Later, we are treated to a portrait of the superhero as a young man named Clark Kent working odd jobs and trying to keep his powers secret. When prison escapee and surviving Kryptonian General Zod shows up and threatens to destroy Earth unless Kal-el turn himself over, Clark must decide where his loyalties lie: Krypton or Earth?

This is the quintessential Superman dilemma. Like most superheroes, he is a walking identity crisis, but unlike other superheroes, he is not merely torn between two personal identities, but between two races light years apart. The movie points out through Jonathan Kent, Clark’s father on Earth, that Kal-el/Clark is both Kryptonian and human. That’s fine, but it seems more appropriate to me to say that he is neither. After all, Superman is defined by his super powers, which neither humans on Earth nor Kryptonians on Krypton have. Either way, his situation is an unsettled one.

And in this, he is essentially human in the broader existential, as opposed to racial, sense. He finds himself in an exaggerated form of the human situation, asking all those questions we humans must: Who am I? Where am I going? Why am I here? German philosopher Martin Heidegger would have said that he--like all Dasein, the only being that questions itself--is uncanny, never finding himself quite at home in the world.

Like the rest of us, Superman must exercise his free will in determining his place. At least as best he can.

For the most part, that isn’t particularly new or insightful, but it occurred to me while watching the film that Zod, while he is Superman’s enemy, is merely the other side of the human coin. Whereas Superman is able to choose who he will be and what he will do (and has been blessed with two sets of parents who went to great lengths to save that privilege for him), Zod possesses no free will. Like all other Kryptonians save Supes, Zod was genetically engineered and grown for a specific purpose in life. In the words of the general himself:

“We could have rebuilt Krypton on this planet, but you chose the humans over us. I exist only to protect Krypton. That is the sole purpose for which I was born. And every action I take, no matter how violent or how cruel, is for the greater good of my people. And now, I have no people. My soul, that is what you have taken from me!”

This, too, is the human situation. Far from being free, we are limited by current circumstances, our background, our genes, and much, much more. The history of science and ideas since the Industrial Revolution has introduced a string of determinisms that have steadily chipped at free will until there is little room left for it at all. The curtain has been drawn back to reveal not a man working a machine, but just a machine carrying out its functions.

It isn’t a very flattering way to think of ourselves, but it is part of who we are as human beings.

If there is an inhuman character in Man of Steel, it isn’t Zod but his steely sidekick Faora. Zod elicits some sympathy because he is, after all, trying to save his people, but not so Faora. She is less intent on saving the Kryptonian race than she is on destroying the human one:

“You are weak, Son of El, unsure of yourself. The fact that you possess a sense of morality, and we do not, gives us an evolutionary advantage. And if history has proven anything, it is that evolution always wins.”

This is another kind of determinism, but an evil one. Her philosophy has less to do with biological evolution than social Darwinism and the eugenics of Nazi Germany. These are, admittedly, human philosophies, but ones that we can only describe as inhuman.

Just as we are all Batman (blog), so are we all, by virtue of our human quandary, Superman. And that should come as no surprise, because they were created by us to express our human, all too human concerns.