2019-03-16
22 分钟For more information and full transcripts of the podcast, check out philosophisethis.org.
For updates about new episodes, check out Instagram at philosophisethispodcast, all one word, on X at I am Stephen West.
Be well, and I hope you love the show today.
So we ended last episode with a passage from Nietzsche,
and I kind of want to reread it for anybody that may not be listening to parts four and five back to back.
Nietzsche asked us to consider how we might view our lives differently if this was the case.
Quote, What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in 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.
And there will be nothing new in it,
but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you.
All in the same succession and sequence,
even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself,
the eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it speck of dust.
Would you not throw yourself down and nash 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?
Now, this passage was the first time Nietzsche ever talked about the eternal return or the eternal recurrence.
This was in his book The Gay Science that came out in 1882,
and it was just one year later in 1883
that he expands on the concept some more when he releases one of the most revolutionary books in the history of the world,