Sometimes
when I’m driving, I find myself noticing women drivers whom I find attractive
or even beautiful. Any woman under 70 is lovely to me. However, when I was engaged
in this distraction recently, I was pulled over by a policeman--who gave me a
citation for erotic driving.
One
joke leads to another: A werewolf says to another werewolf, “Let’s go and
get a burgher.”
Now to
proceed to a new perspective (for me) on Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal
recurrence,” which I
believe I misunderstood even though I read Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return. I had mistakenly interpreted Nietzsche’s
idea with the Hindu notion of reincarnation repeating itself in exactly identical
cycles interrupted by pralaya, which
might be seen as “the ending of all,” before a new “creation” in which all is
repeated. Nietzsche doesn’t subscribe to any belief in God, reincarnation, or
afterlife. Instead, he upholds a notion of “eternal recurrence” in which the
life one is living is to be repeated endlessly, for which he says he has proofs
but which I do not comprehend or would accept if I did. His aphorism is “amor
fati,” or “love your fate,” which is to say, “choose you fate” as opposed to
being at the mercy of it, or “live your life rather than having your life live
you.” I believe that Nietzsche is speaking metaphorically in order to provoke
the reader to come to terms and live his or her life as it is, rather than as
it is not. In other words, BE WHO YOU ARE, which is the Socratic dictum, “To
know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” Take the plunge and start where you
are, rather than pretending you are somewhere else or better. Such
philosophizing becomes trite very quickly, but my point is that I’m glad I now
have a better understanding of the notion of eternal recurrence and what it
actually is meant to lead us to. This whole process of “being who you are” is,
in my estimation, learning who you are not, piece by piece, until finally you
realize “you” are not who you think you are and never will be. There is an
absolute irony and one must learn to hold that reality of “being and not being”
at the same time, which is right now. And my thought about that is: TOO MUCH
IRONY MAKES ONE OVERWROUGHT.
I arrived at this point of view
regarding Nietzsche’s notion of eternal
recurrence after reading a rather interesting “psychoanalytic” book, When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession
by Yalom.
Here’re
a few brief quotes:
“To
live forever with the sense that I
have not lived, have not tasted freedom—the idea fills me
with horror.” Then … live in such a way that you love the idea.” (252)
“… we
must live as though we were free.
Even though we can’t escape fate, we must still butt our heads against it—we
must will our destiny to happen. We
must love our fate.” (274)
Nietzsche emphasized the idea of “will
to power,” which I “understood” but didn’t really understand. It is quite
subtle and rather dark and untrusting, such as, when someone says “something nice”
to someone else, it is a ploy to attain power over that person. Nietzsche
sounds pretty paranoid and with am “inferiority complex” to me, though his
understanding and analysis of our shadow
aspect is spot on. He exhorts us to “live” so strongly, I think, because he was
utterly afraid and alone. He noted that in order to live, one had to first die,
and to be able to tell the truth required devastation of oneself first. I don’t
mean to just touch on this and then stop but I will take up aspects of it in
due time.
This blog is called “fragments” and so
it is.
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