the unbearable lightness of being?

Milan Kundera from The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

[b][Nietzsche’s] idea of eternal return is a mysterious one…to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it and that recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!

Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal returns states that a life which dissappears once and for all…is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.We need take no more note of it than a war between two African kingdoms in the 14th century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a 100,000 blacks perished in excruciating torment.

Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit…?

Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible sensation. Leafing through a book on Hitler, I was touched by some of his portraits: they reminded me of my childhood. I grew up during the war; several members of my family perished in Hitler’s concentration camps; but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost period of my life, a period that would never return?

This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted[/b].

Kundera speaks here of what many philosophers seek to obviate by subsumning “the meaning of life” in one or another rendition of The Word. They seek to weight down the essentially absurd and meaningless lives we live by rooting them in either philosophical realism or political idealism. Of course, if you can will yourself into believing this, that’s all it takes to make the lightness go away.

It’s that simple.

As a nihilist, though, it’s not that simple at all.

Someone once said there are few things more exasperating than having a philosophy of life you can’t talk yourself out of.

Things the same, like returns, are not countable. So there is no sense to the phrase “eternal recurrence”.

Kundera, like most philosophers, aren’t too bright when it comes to expressing the logic of their objects. Only Witt and Kant who adopted a fundamentally different perspective have a handle on it.

Sense? Since when is that not in the mind of the beholder? And, more often than not, a sleight of mind.

Wittgenstein eventually took a poker to language painting a picture. He came to understand it is only a tool used by dasein to unearth one or another precarious and problematic narrative. And Kant ended up lifting the entire weight of his own “world of words” and putting it squarely on God. A priorily, as it were.

You’ve got to love words, though. With them you can make practically anything you want true.

The passage reeks of a need for a god. Someone or something there, above and beyond the human race, to punish those who have done wrong. Although he did state that this was a “negative” idea of the eternal return. That the adjudicator of one’s life is removed from within his/herself into the outside world, the realm of the gods. Here too is where these other causes lie: politics, morality. Sacrifice your life for the greater good! A greater causes than yourself! Because ultimately you are meaningless but together! Together we can be gods! lolz.

There is no sense to the phrase “eternal occurrence” for, by the definition of occurences, there are no occurences, objects or experiences available that can identify a re-occurrence.

Your argument seems more like pedantry.

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

The idea seems to be one to encourage one to take control of one’s life. You only have to imagine the eternal recurrence - the fact or fiction of it is irrelevant.

Yes, that is one crucial reason Gods are invented. And there must be hundreds of them by now. Well, if you count all of sub-denominations of the main denominations. Or thousands, if you count all the various New Age quackeries. Does Shirley MacLaine believe in God?

The idea of eternal return is just one of many attempts to weight down human existence. Though Nietzsche proposed this only as a hypothetical—a thought experiment out of which one can, perhaps, contrast oblivion?

I wonder: Which is worse?

I believe the externalisation to be more damaging than the opposite. Like this guy said, he was offering a negative version, then that means there’s a positive. I view the externalisation as a negative because it seeks subjection before the gods whereas if one were to internalise it then one becomes god and thus powerful. But I prefer to think of it as a question of self-empowerment - do you have enough trust and commitment of yourself to be the adjudicator of your life?

Internal or external you take it with you when you topple over into the abyss.

And lightness doesn’t get any lighter than oblivion.

The tricky bit is self trust. How can you know if you are wise enough to trust? Probably most people believe they are sufficiently wise but they may well be deceived. I think one important ingredient is an awareness of personal conditioning and a thorough understanding of the often invisible (unconscious) role it plays in our lives. With this awareness conditioning becomes something that is taken into account in our deliberations. Without this understanding we are at the mercy of unconscious forces (unquestioned beliefs, preferences, assumptions, etc.) reacting mechanically to our circumstances.

You’ll have to explain to me: abyss and oblivion. Not via the dictionary of course .

HOW can I live my life again if it is exactly the same and indistinguishable from the one I now have? What could possibly be the criteria of living it “again”?

A little imagination please, a little life in that grey mass of yours. Think of A Christmas Carol, the three ghosts, that’s it as far as I’m concerned.