Last time I said:

If we can think back to a notion of boredom not yet encased in a hermetically sealed “I” but as a feature of the world, this helps us overcome Hume’s challenge when we see causality is a category of the understanding and a feature of the world. We can then see this structure in other phenomena, like how the world appears to the schizophrenic as conspiracy saturated, or the world appears as holy to the religious person.

Have you ever wondered why a favorite gospel song can be experienced as overwhelming and holy for one person in church, bland for the person next to them, and can go from holy to irritating simply by being played 15 times in a row? Here are some thoughts from the history of theology and philosophy.

Against the currently popular argument that eternal return for Nietzsche most fundamentally means infinite cosmological repetition of nature, either in fact or as a visualization, we can point to numerous historical analogies (Ecclesiastes, Stoics, Schopenhauer) that would suggest instead that it refers to existentia, the way beings appear:

(1)  Ecclesiastes in the bible makes the point about the tedium and pointlessness of life because there is just a circular bad repetition ad nauseam ad infinitum of “the same” with the consequence that there is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:8-9), that life becomes inherently meaningless in the face of eternal recurrence.  Ecclesiastes says:

All things are wearisome;

    more than one can express;

the eye is not satisfied with seeing,

    or the ear filled with hearing.

9 What has been is what will be,

    and what has been done is what will be done;

    there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes’s answer for this problem is to find satiety in God, and as for the big idea of Ecclesiastes, Greidanus contends that the goal is to encourage readers to, “Fear God in order to turn a vain, empty life into a meaningful life which will enjoy God’s gifts” (22).”  But, Nietzsche posed a solution for a godless world.  Nietzsche said  “People to whom their daily life appears too empty and monotonous easily grow religious; this is comprehensible and excusable, only they have no right to demand religious sentiments from those whose daily life is not empty and monotonous ( HH: Part One, 115. To BE RELIGIOUS WITH ADVANTAGE).” For Nietzsche the higher types are distinguished from the lower types in terms of two different kinds of love/desire, because the higher types do not need to find value in the world, or in God like Ecclesiastes, “eros” of the lower types, but rather bestow a healthy meaning onto the world, godless “agape.” 

Much in Nietzsche seems to allude to Ecclesiastes, and so Nietzsche is appropriating and responding to Ecclesiastes.  In Ecclesiastes, we read “I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind” (Eccl 2:17) since “What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise?” And I said in my heart that this also is vanity” (Eccl 2:15) and “I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind” (Eccl 1:14).  Similarly, Nietzsche has Zarathustra say in section 3:

“What is the greatest thing that you can experience? It is the hour of your great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness turns to nausea and likewise your reason and your virtue.The hour in which you say: ‘What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth, and a pitiful contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself!’  The hour in which you say: ‘What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge like the lion its food? It is poverty and filth and a pitiful contentment!’  The hour in which you say: ‘What matters my virtue? It has not yet made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! That is all poverty and filth and a pitiful contentment!” (Z, 3)

It is only when we fully encounter the force of the eternal return of the same do we come to see the darkness of Nietzsche’s vision: a meaningless, Ecclesiastes’ world, but without God to fall back on for meaning, purpose and joy.  In face of such desolation, only the creative agapeic type can have a spirit of amor fati and joyfully dances in his chains. 

(2)   Are there other thinkers we can reference whose ideas seem to be historical analogies for Nietzsche’s eternal return?  Yes, we see another possible historical analogy to the idea interpreting life as this tragic repetition of the same (which is not guessing about cosmological repetition) with Seneca who says

26.  Some people suffer from a surfeit of doing and seeing the same things. Theirs is not contempt for life but boredom with it, a feeling we sink into when influenced by the sort of philosophy which makes us say, ‘How long the same old things? I shall wake up and go to sleep, I shall eat and be hungry, I shall be cold and hot. There’s no end to anything, but all things are in a fixed cycle, fleeing and pursuing each other. Night follows day and day night; summer passes into autumn, hard on autumn follows winter, and that in turn is checked by spring. All things pass on only to return. Nothing I do or see is new: sometimes one gets sick even of this.’ There are many who think that life is not harsh but superfluous. (Seneca ep. mor. 24. 26)

 In this Epistle 24, Seneca says boredom/agitation can be such a problem that it leads to suicide.  Life is seen not as bitter but superfluous, and one is prone to the libido moriendi or death drive.

Regarding this inherent restlessness of human life, Plutarch in Pyrrhus 13 talks of a nauseous boredom (alus nautiodes), like what eros driven Achilles felt when there was ease (no quests to conquer).  Nietzsche picks up on the boredom issue in the genealogy of morals 2.24 and 3.14, and in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Kaufmann and Holingdale say the great nausea is a central concept. 

However, Nietzsche critically and successfully engages with historical arguments for temporal eternal recurrence, where we experience being “as though” we’ve experienced them countless times before like a worn out recording of a favorite song, arguing it isn’t inherently tragic because when it wipes value away from beings, the positive vanishes, but also the negative, and so leaves things neither inherently positive nor negative, and because of this completely open to interpretation.  It is precisely because of this that creative types can lead a joyous existence of will to power. The deciding factor is whether we have an approach to life of love as eros, or love as agape. 

For Nietzsche, the higher types are distinguished from the lower types in terms of two different kinds of love/desire, because the higher types do not need to find value in the world, such as in God, “eros,” like the lower types like Ecclesiastes, but rather bestow a healthy meaning onto the world, “agape.” For Nietzsche, godless agape allows for a glass half-full amor fati and dancing in your chains.  In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount Jesus redefines love saying “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love (agapēseis) your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love (agapāte) your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”  Nietzsche said, “‘I have never desecrated the holy name of love’ (1888, LN1 [286]),”  Eros as filling a “lack” nurses on the luster of its object, whereas agape transfigure its object to be loveable.

Nietzsche knew well the difference between living a tragic life of eternal return of the same where everything is experienced “as though” it had been experienced an infinite number of times, like a worn out recording of a favorite song, and a creative life of eternal return of the same difference where everything is joyous and new.  Nietzsche said in a particularly illustrative letter to Overbeck that his creative energies being poured into creating his Third Untimely Meditation left him invulnerable to the agitated boring eternal return as cabin fever that was affecting all the people around him at a rainy cottage.  Nietzsche’s insight was not merely to see through to the heart of the horror loci, but to see it was completely perspectival. (Nietzsche, 1975,: 11.3 382).  It is precisely in creatively transfiguring widow, orphan, stranger and enemy into being lovable and dedicating your life to serving them is the core of Jesus’ love/agape message as an answer to Ecclesiastes tragedy and tedium of Eternal Return nothing new under the sun.  It is not a life of being locked up in oneself but in loving service to an Other that is needed, be it service to the needy, or to the Muse, or whatever is born a life of creativity and affirmation, what Nietzsche called saying yes and Amen to all existence no matter how tragic it presences at first.  The successful lawyer can be a miserable alcoholic just as a prisoner can dance in her chains. Nietzsche says: “From the military school of life: that which does not kill me makes me stronger.”

In a life of active and creative transfiguring the Other: “Not ‘to know’ but to schematize, to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require WTP 515 (March-June 1888).” Heidegger gives the example of not simply “recognizing” or encountering or abstracting to the category of “living thing,” but imposing it, such as is negatively  phenomenalized when we hear a “living thing” in the forest, only to look down to see we “mis-took” rustling dead leaves in the wind at our feet to be a “living thing.”  In life we are in the business of imposing structure on the chaos, “taking as,” as is phenomenalized when we “mis-take:” When will to power fails to usefully stamp becoming with Being (the rustling leaf example), we explicitly see that the default human condition is living as will to power in the schematizing or bringing order to chaos, like a sculptor with his clay.  Similarly, the sexual and romantic qualities of something reflects the way we impose form, as is clear in the case of objectophilia with romantic and sexual attraction to objects such as towers and bridges.  Heidegger quotes Nietzsche that “To stamp Becoming with the character of Being – that is the supreme will to power” (WM 617, 1888).   Heidegger says “for Nietzsche art is the essential way in which beings are made to be beings … the creative, legislative, form-grounding aspect of art (Heidegger, 1991, 131).”  Nietzsche argues the true artist doesn’t imitate Nature but gives form to the chaos: “A man in this state transforms things until they mirror his power–until they are reflections of his perfection. (TI, SKIRMISHES OF AN UNTIMELY MAN, 8-9).” 

(3)  Like the historical analogy with Ecclesiastes and The Stoics, Nietzsche seems to very much have Schopenhauer in mind with eternal tragic temporal repetition. Schopenhauer said in On the Sufferings of the World: 

“Boredom is a form of suffering unknown to brutes, at any rate in their natural state; it is only the very cleverest of them who show faint traces of it when they are domesticated; whereas in the case of man it has become a downright scourge. The crowd of miserable wretches whose one aim in life is to fill their purses but never to put anything into their heads, offers a singular instance of this torment of boredom. Their wealth becomes a punishment by delivering them up to misery of having nothing to do; for, to escape it, they will rush about in all directions, traveling here, there and everywhere. No sooner do they arrive in a place than they are anxious to know what amusements it affords; just as though they were beggars asking where they could receive a dole! Of a truth, need and boredom are the two poles of human life… [And in his essays on Pessimism Schopenhauer summarizes] “He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.”

 To which (3 above) Nietzsche responds to Schopenhauer regarding the performance from the point of view of the creative and artistic individual:

“56. Anyone like me, who has tried for a long time and with some enigmatic desire, to think pessimism through to its depths and to deliver it from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness and naivete with which it has finally presented itself to this century, namely in the form of the Schopenhauerian philosophy; anyone who has ever really looked with an Asiatic and supra-Asiatic eye into and down at the most world-negating of all possible ways of thinking – beyond good and evil, and no longer, like Schopenhauer and the Buddha, under the spell and delusion of morality –; anyone who has done these things (and perhaps precisely by doing these things) will have inadvertently opened his eyes to the inverse ideal: to the ideal of the most high-spirited, vital, world-affirming individual, who has learned not just to accept and go along with what was and what is, but who wants it again just as it was and is through all eternity, insatiably shouting da capo not just to himself but to the whole play and performance, and not just to a performance, but rather, fundamentally, to the one who needs precisely this performance – and makes it necessary: because again and again he needs himself – and makes himself necessary. – – What? and that wouldn’t be –circulus vitiosus deus? (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil)

Eternal return wipes away meaningfulness from beings, and so this is tragic for the eros of the sick and weakly like Achilles, but an opportunity for creation for the transfiguring godless agape of the artistic and healthy.  Hence, Heidegger quotes Nietzsche twice: “To stamp becoming with Being, that is the highest form of will to power.”

Nihilism is a problem when we have an “eros/erotic” approach to beings like glory seeking Achilles (eg I love her because she is beautiful), Achilles who was devastated by the tedious, boring and meaninglessness in the Greek interpretation of the afterlife (Achilles needed his obstacles to be overcome in the name of glory) – but rather we need an approach akin to a godless kind of Christian transfiguring agape (eg I have a transfiguring spirit of loving, regardless of whether the other be widow, orphan, stranger, or enemy).  That higher type is what Nietzsche calls “Caesar with a soul of Christ – the overman (KGW VII 2:289).” It is a Christ-like Caesar, conquering not with might but rather love, a transfiguring, glass half-full approach to life.

Nietzsche went so far to say that even the gods struggle against boredom in vain, (TI, Chapter 48) and that the usual approach to life is to avoid boredom any way possible. (GS, First Book, 42. Work and Boredom)  A well known Science Fiction example of this is the Star Trek Voyager episode where the Q continuum Philosopher Quinn (a god-like being) wants to commit suicide because he has been devastated by the boredom of having been everything and done everything countless times.   This God not only died, but wanted to die (there is a similar theme in a play by Karel Čapek).  This TV episode may have been a response to Nietzsche’s call to depict the boredom of God after creation had been finished  (HH: The Wanderer and His Shadow, 56. INTELLECT AND BOREDOM).Heidegger comments regarding twofold eternal recurrence, “Everything is nought, indifferent, so that nothing is worthwhile – it is all alike.  And on the other side: Everything recurs, it depends on each moment, everything matters – it is all alike … The smallest gap, the rainbow bridge of the phrase it is all alike, conceals two things that are quite distinct: everything is indifferent and nothing is indifferent (Heidegger, 1991 vol 2, 182).”

On the other hand, Nietzsche comments that, far from being inherently crippling, the energy of Langeweile boredom can be understood as the greatest elixir in life against the tedious, or agitating, stretching out of time: “He who fortifies himself completely against boredom fortifies himself against himself too. He will never drink the most powerful elixir from his own innermost spring.   (HH: The Wanderer and His Shadow, 200. THE SOLITARY SPEAKS).”  Therefore, this shows the twofold tragic/joyous temporality of eternal recurrence is not an objective characteristic of Time as a thing in Nature, is not cosmological guesswork, but is completely perspectival as how we auto affect ourselves, and so interpreting it out of a place of creativity, strength and health, the surplus of energy is a blessing as auto-affecting oneself with eternal return of the same difference rather than just eternal return of the same.  Gilles Deleuze interpreted Nietzsche’s eternal return as a radical understanding of the nature of time. For him this is not a ‘flat circle’ or cyclical understanding of time, but a description of the empty form of future time. It is the ever-generated new time that allows us to continually act in new ways, that allows the creation of novelty. 

Nietzsche would argue that for those coming from a place of eros, sickness and weakness like Ecclesiastes relying on God for Joy, the stretching out of time in Langeweile boredom is experienced as a tragic curse, encountering beings “as though” they have been encountered numberless times before, and so augmenting depression, irritability and agitation:  This was Nietzsche’s Dwarf in Zarathustra: “‘Everything straight lies,’ murmured the dwarf disdainfully. ‘All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.’” Elsewhere, Heidegger characterizes this by saying “[s]uch is the rise and the fall of man in his historical abode of essence – hupsipolis -apolis – far exceeding abodes, homeless, as Sophocles (Antigone) calls man (Parmenides lecture course 1943, 90).”