Monday, July 12, 2004
(10:10 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Eternal Return
Let's imagine I give you a mix CD. I have custom-made it, just for you, and the track listing is identical to an album already extant. Is there a situation in which such a mix CD would be plausible as a mix CD? Can I choose, really and sincerely choose, every song on a particular album, in that order? I don't want to get bogged down in the contingencies of whether I could come to that point with the particular albums I know -- for a time, I could have almost done it with Kid A, even moreso with the Dandy Warhols' 13 Tales -- but whether it is even possible for me to affirm completely someone else's choices.And is it even possible for me to affirm my own choices? I've made a couple mix CDs in my day, each with a particular audience in mind. They were pretty good mixes, and the people in question enjoyed them. I have the Winamp playlists saved still, and sometimes I go back through those mixes, on which I spent hours, wondering vaguely whether I should have done something different. What if I could go back and redo the mix? Maybe I didn't pick the best possible song to represent a particular artist -- does one really get the right impression of Pavement from just "Spit on a Stranger" and "Grave Architecture"? -- or maybe some unconscious message I was trying to send became all too clear. Would I leave out "True Love Waits," for example, since it became the basis of a painful conversation later?
Regular readers know that the time-travel situation is central to my thought -- I'm not even going to track down links at this point. I have a lot of things I would change, but sometimes the thought occurs to me: What would it mean to travel back in time and do everything over, exactly the same? I don't think that it would be possible to do that for merely contingent reasons, simply because I had lived a charmed life where everything went right. Even the best life includes some regret. But what would it mean not to regret?
I've thought about Heidegger lately, not his philosophy per se, but his choice of Nazism. There was a time when I wanted him to have apologized for that. But when exactly do I want him to have made that choice? When did it become too far? What if he waited too long to repent of Nazism? There are timing issues involved. If someone were to repent of his support for the war in Iraq right now, for instance, it would be too late, even if in his heart he made that choice for the right reasons (i.e., not just because the war is going poorly and when he supported the idea of the Iraq war, he was thinking more along the lines of a successful war). Do we want him to have repented when he heard about the concentration camps? But then why shouldn't he have seen that coming from the start? Do we want him to have repented once the tide turned, or once Hitler's military decisions were no longer tenable? Or how about years later, when it no longer mattered, when everyone had effectively either unchosen Nazism or decided to be quiet about it -- what would repentance mean in, say, 1968? I have never been tempted with something like Nazism, so I don't know -- but it was apparently a possible choice at the time, and even after it became clear that it was a mistake, apparently Heidegger decided that it was the mistake he wanted to have made. "Inner truth and greatness." I can't imagine.
Heidegger may not end up having to go back and repeat. I will likely not be faced with that choice, either. According to some accounts, however, there was a person who had to do that: in his resurrection, Jesus concretely faced the eternal return. The person resurrected was the fulness of the person Jesus had become through the course of his earthly life, including the person who had been brutally murdered by the Romans. (He still bears the scars!) That life -- is God. That life -- is eternity. Imagine.
I wonder if he had any say in the matter. Of course not, since he was dead -- but I wonder. How would it be possible to have died young, thoroughly rejected by the world, and to agree that that life, that failed life would be eternity? I speak as a Catholic here -- how could he have possibly stood for the idea of his life being eternally re-presented to the Father, every day, in the celebration of the eucharist, in the fellowship of the church, in the lives of saints? Every moment of every day -- repeated.
And then, horror of horrors: his resurrection presages ours! Can we bear the thought? Finally, it's over at least, and then we are pulled up with him (or a subset of us, at least, depending on who you ask) -- how could we possibly assent to that? We'll still bear the scars, too. People live and die for the hope of eternity, of "heaven" -- but resurrection? I think there must have been some kind of misunderstanding! If it's a resurrection, then it means that I will not be perfect. It means that I will still get my hands dirty. It means that I will still want to hang out with the guys and have breakfast by the beach. It means that I will be no easier to understand than I was before, that I will fit in no better than I did before -- that I will not be perfect. I'll look back at my stupid little life (which, in the final reckoning, is what we all get), and somehow I'll be able to say, This is the mistake I want to have made, for all eternity.
Who could believe it? Who could credit it?
