What if a demon crept up to you one day 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 - and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and this same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour glass of existence will be turned again and again - and you with it, you dust of dust!" - Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or have you experienced a a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him, "You are a God and never have I heard anything more divine!" If this thought gained power over you it would, as you are now, transform and perhaps crush you, the question in all and everything: "do you want this again and again, times without number?" would lie as the heaviest burden upon all your actions. Or how well would you have to be disposed towards yourself and towards life would you have to become to have no greater desire than this eternal sanction and seal?
The Gay Science, pg 341 Published in 1882, 2nd, expanded edition published in 1887.
Translated by R.J. Hollingdale in A Nietzsche Reader pg 250, first published 1977, Penguin Books. ISBN =0-14-044329-0
There is a metaphysical theory of Eternal Recurrence in Nietzsche's text but this is also a "thought experiment".
I think you're supposed to read The Heaviest Burden and really think about your life and how it stands. More than that, to focus on those small and large things which negatively and positively affect your life and happiness.
Of course, we've all experienced great joyous moments, then there are the times of absolute woe and ruin. These are as much a part of our growth as any of the "good" experiences.
Defining myself as an "artist", I believe in human meaning, the narrative of an individual life. I think the spirit crushing lows are a fundamental part of that narrative. They are what either break us or spur us to change, to self-overcoming. These are the whispering of the demon who stalks us. The demon is our mortalilty, and more besides: we ourselves give the demon substance.
I think "bad" events are what we make them. In overcoming we allow ourselves the future possibility of reflecting on our personal history. In doing so we can see how awful things, that once nearly crushed us, have been woven seamlessly, by time and our actions, into the fundamental meaning of our lives. Bad events provide context for ones we define as good. Often the margins become blurred.
Rather than being necessarily about an infinite number of lives, I think this passage is concerned with something much more significant: that we have but one life. That we have but one makes this life as significant as if we had an infinite number. It becomes a "duty to oneself" to make the most of this life. This is an existential philosophy.
This is a part of Nietzsche's anti-Christian philosophy. Not to live by someone else's code but to follow our own and express our own desires.
The moments in which we rejoice do not all have to great earth-shattering ones. It can be simple things like taking time to look at a landscape, the stars, the moon and the clouds. Maybe the enjoyment of some subtle magical truth that reaches our ears, some secret moment of symmetry. I try to enjoy as many small things as I can, and to notice that I enjoy them.
It might be possible to argue that we do return, with some demi-metaphysical theory about infinite time and a less than infinite array of human genes / DNA (I don't know the science), but I think that nurture and the random things that happen in our lives far outweigh the significance of any biological determinants.
I think we are free, to a large extent, and that freedom expresses itself as much in our perceptions as in the choices which are their consequence. In this way I see this theory integrates seamlessly with Nietzsche's perspectivism: we make our own demon and we can post-rationalise the narrative of our life blurring the margin between bad and good.
Thus, I think The Heaviest Burden is about performing a thought experiment and reflecting upon ourselves in a new or different way as a consequence. That we have but one opportunity to live and must make the most of it, even though it will inevitably be less than perfect, because of our frailties and those of others we can never hope to control.
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