Willing the worst too
On the axis: Relation to the past · a life
Does consenting to one's life as it was mean willing its worst hours too, the loss, the humiliation, the wrong one did, or can one say yes to a life without saying yes to each of its moments?
This problem is brought out by the thought experiment The eternal return:
Imagine that one night, in your loneliest solitude, a demon slips beside you and says: « This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live once more and countless times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain, every pleasure, every thought, and this very moment, will return in the same order. » The hourglass of existence would be turned over endlessly, and you with it. does not ask whether this is true: he makes it a trial. For the question it raises reaches you today: would you want to live your days, as you fill them, over and over forever? is less a cosmology than a test: do you love your life enough to will it, identical, for all time?
Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882)
Would this thought crush you, or would you welcome it as good news? What you answer says a great deal about the time you are living.
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Justification
works as a test: if a demon told you that you will relive this very life, identically, infinitely, would you curse him, or would it be your greatest joy? To say yes to every instant is : not 's resignation, but the highest affirmation, to love the necessary so much that one wills its eternal return.
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.Ecce Homo, "Why I Am So Clever", §10
Ecce Homo, "Why I Am So Clever", §10 · The Gay Science, §276 and §341
Justification
Physics commands ethics: every event is a link in the rational chain of , ordered by . To rebel is therefore both futile and unreasonable, since one fights the very reason one shares in; the aligns his will with the course of things, not from passive resignation but because he recognises in it the work of the : the fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling.
Lead me, Zeus, and you too, Destiny, wherever you have appointed me: I shall follow unflinching. And should I refuse, turned coward, I shall follow none the less.Cleanthes, quoted in Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 107
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations · Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 107
The philosophers positioned on the axis “Relation to the past”, over time. Hover a dot to read its name.
This problem's anchors
Anchors: Nietzsche · the Stoics