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 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.