What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into 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 gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
This fragment is taken from Nietzsche's book "The Gay Science"
Before Nietzsche, Schopenauher also declared the absurdity of life by declaring it's endless repetition. For him, the ultimate nature of reality was the will, a blind assertive drive to live and satisfy desires.
In Schopenhauer’s philosophy, pessimism is a function of wisdom, it is not bound to mood or to great misfortune. Even if one does not experience deep trauma, that does not alter the global absurdity pointed by Schopenhauer.
Both of them agreed that the driving will generate constant conflict with no salvation or resolution ultimately.
In the popular series true detective this philosophy was called forth as the protagonist Rust Cohle says "Time is a flat circle. Everything we have done or will do we will do over and over and over again forever" as a statement of pessimism and absurdity implying all those terrible things that have happened to us humans will never end.
Each one of us is bound to experience them again and again throughout eternity.
In the end it all goes down to the question if life is worth even without some grandiose meaning attached to it.
The answer is different for everyone and (hopefully) his own privilage.
Thank you for your time.
Upvote & Follow: @theokritos
@theokritos