Eternal Return

                During Tuesday’s class, we spent a significant amount of time discussing Nietzsche’s conception of eternal return.  In this thought experiment, one posits that every life being lived has already been lived and will continue to be lived in precisely the same manner for all of eternity.  In this sense, all that happens has occurred already and could not have (and won’t in the infinite loop of recurrence) occur any other way.  It can be said, therefore, that all experience and circumstance is determined (although not predetermined, as we must differentiate between what simply must happen and what is designed to happen).  Nietzsche concludes that this thought experiment, whether it is a reflection of actuality or not, is tremendously frightening to most people who, at the thought of reliving every preceding experience in precisely the same manner, are dissatisfied at in two related ways.  Firstly, dissatisfaction arises from knowing that every non-pleasurable experience must be experienced again without hope of a different outcome.  Secondly, the knowledge that all of existence can, does, has, and will unfold in a singular way causes a feeling of entrapment, as it is easy to feel that agency is stripped from the individual when one considers that his/her ‘choices’ do not coexist with popular conceptions of freedom and will. 

                It must also be considered, however, that the eternal return scenario enables a variety of freedom unique not experienced by most people.  This freedom, I believe, is rooted in a kind of relieved meaninglessness.  If one accepts that his/her actions are not the product of individual will and agency but instead of immutable determinism, he/she is free to experience for the sake of experience alone.  In other words, despite the invisibility of the ‘future’ (which, in this thought experiment, doesn’t exist in relation to typical understanding), one can find solace in realizing that prior notions of moral and ethical obligations are not owned or enacted with purely independent agency by specific people.  Instead, one is free to simply enjoy the experience of living with the comforting knowledge that all which happens is entirely unchangeable. 

                In order to reach this point of acceptance, however, one must be at least satisfied enough with the experience of experiencing to justify the continuation of living.  If presented with this thought experiment as truth, it would be irrational for the predominantly dissatisfied alive person to continue living. 

                Given the implied meaninglessness in this philosophy, I am curious about the relationship of the eternal return scenario with epicureanism, hedonism, and nihilism.