Unbearable lightness of being : first two chapters in part 1
PART ONE
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious
one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think
that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence
itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?
Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal
return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not
return, 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 of a war between two African
kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny
of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating
torment.
Will the war between two African kingdoms in
the fourteenth century itself be altered if it recurs again and again, in
eternal return?
It will: it will become a solid mass,
permanently protuberant, its inanity irreparable.
If the French Revolution were to recur
eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because
they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the
Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become
lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference
between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who
eternally returns, chopping off French heads.
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? In the sunset of
dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the
guillotine.
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 in 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.
If every second of our lives recurs an
infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed
to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the
weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is
why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens(das
schwerste Gewicht).
If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens,
then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.
But is heaviness truly deplorable and
lightness splendid?
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink
beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the
woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is
therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfilment. The
heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and
truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden
causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the
earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free
as they are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or
lightness?
Parmenides posed this very question in the
sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites:
light/darkness, fineness/coarseness,
warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive
(light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this
division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one
difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?
Parmenides responded: lightness is positive,
weight negative. Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty
is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of
all.