The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:
“The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”
(Nietzsche, The Gay Science)
If you were given an opportunity to live your life over again exactly as it was, would you take it? What if you had to make this choice “innumerable times again”?
Nietzsche developed this terrifying thought experiment in order to interrogate what it means to truly value our own lives. In the moments when life is easy, or going well, it would not be difficult to choose them again. Many people would welcome the opportunity to relive their happiest memories. But what about the difficult ones?
Nietzsche’s basic idea was that we can’t pick and choose which parts of our lives we value and which parts we wish away. The two cannot be separated. To deny or reject any part of our lives is to devalue the whole. In order to truly say “yes” to our life, we must endorse it completely.
Nietzsche proposed this as a solution to the problem of human suffering. The existence of suffering can often lead us to wish our lives were different, or to wish that we didn’t exist at all. Nietzsche thought that if we can view suffering as an indispensable part of a larger whole, then we can prevent it from undermining our will to live.
Nietzsche’s solution is radical. But it is a radical solution to a radical problem. It is often hard to make sense of the existence of suffering. This may cause us to not only wish that our lives were different, but that the world was different. Nietzsche thought that the only way out of this state of mind was to live in such a way that we embrace suffering. We must embrace suffering because it presents us with an opportunity to overcome life’s difficulties and strengthen our will to live.