I believe this (Nietzsches) quote is highly metaphorical. By reading your arguement I fall in the conception that your view on this quote is literal. I think in this quote Nietzsche argues that we must act as if we will live this life repeadetly forever thus we have to make it worthwhile. In the original quote the Nietzsche asks us either if we would damn the demon (because we are not happy with our 'fate') or consider him a saint (because we are happy with our 'fate'). And also whether we would want to live this life again and again repeadtly throughout eternity. Nietzsche suggest that our answer should be an ultimate 'YES'. I believe the moral in this story is that if we are not able to answer this question with a strong yes, we should reconsider our life and make some radical changes.'What if some day or night a demon were to steal after your loneliest loneliness and say to you that this life as you now live it you will have to live once more and innumerable times more.' In other words, our particular individual lives are lived over and over again in exact detail. In he suggested, 'Everything becomes and recurs eternally_ escape is impossible.' — Jack Cummins
Your idea that if you would not want to live this life over and over again is a sign that it needs changing is one which I had not considered in relation to the idea of eternal recurrence. — Jack Cummins
I would also say that your view of the essential underlying truth of the principle seems based on the importance of satisfaction. I am just wondering to what extent would this be about satisfying it, or of relinquishing it?I am inclined to believe that we are left with this conundrum because it is not easy to overcome desires, and do we really desire to overcome all of our desires? — Jack Cummins
I think that if one reads his writings he does have a lot to say that is worthwhile. — Jack Cummins
↪Nikolas
The way you are viewing eternal recurrence in the movie based on repeated patterns until one becomes less egoist sounds similar to the idea of karma. Do you think that the underlying truth of the two principles is the same? — Jack Cummins
It is perhaps when we learn certain things from them, that changes and new circumstances occur. I am not thinking that this occurs through some divine hand of fate, but from within the depths of our own consciousness and being, which brings forth shifts in our circumstances. — Jack Cummins
If the world had a goal, it must have been reached. If there were for it some unintended final state, this also must have been reached. If it were in any way capable of "being", then all becoming would long since have come to an end, along with all thinking, all "spirit." The fact of "spirit" as a form of becoming proves that the world has no goal, no final state, and is incapable of being.
The old habit, however of associating a goal with every event and a guiding, creative God with the world, is so powerful that it requires an effort for a thinker not to fall into thinking of the very aimlessness of the world as intended. This notion--that the world intentionally avoids a goal and even knows artifices for keeping itself from entering a circular course--must occur to all those who would like to force on the world the ability for eternal novelty, i.e., on a finite, definite, unchangeable force of constant size, such as the world is, the miraculous power of infinite novelty in its form and states. The world, even if it is no longer a god, is still supposed to be capable of the divine power of creation, the power of infinite transformations; it is supposed to consciously prevent itself from returning to any of its old forms; it is supposed to possess not only the intention but the means of avoiding any repetition; to that end it is supposed to control every one of its movements at every moment so as to escape goals, final states, repetitions--and whatever else may follow from such an unforgivably insane way of thinking and desiring. It is still the old religious way of thinking and desiring, a kind of longing to believe in some way the world is after all like the old beloved, infinite, boundlessly creative God--that in some way "the old God still lives"--that loning of Spinoza which was expressed in the words "deus sive natura" (he even felt "natura sive deus").
What, then, is the law and belief with which the decisive change, the recently attained preponderance of the scientific spirit over the religious, God-inventing spirit, is most clearly formulated? Is it not: the world , as force, may not be thought of as unlimited, for it cannot be so thought of; we forbid ourselves the concept of infinite force as incompatible with the concept "force." Thus--the world also lacks the capacity for eternal novelty. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Will To Power, section 1062
Everything becomes and recurs eternally_ escape is impossible.' — Jack Cummins
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