Maybe Cohle is aware of Nietzsche, but is a true believer in Schopenhauer. Of course, you can always find ways to work this out within the fictional reality of the show. How can one person subscribe to both visions? Nietzsche was life-affirming Schopenhauer was life-negating. Neither believed in an afterlife, but Schopenhauer believed that death was followed by nothingness Nietzsche didn't believe in that escape. For example, Schopenhauer was a tremendous influence on Nietzsche, but the two had incompatible ideas. Something funny is that the people who are most knowledgeable about True Detective's philosophical influences (and, there's a whole book on this subject) can be a bit oversensitive to the way it blends its sources. What we perceive as a sphere, is actually only a three-dimensional "slice" of a four-dimensional shape. Now, imagine a fourth-dimensional being perceiving us the same way. If a sphere passed through their plane of existence, they'd perceive only a two-dimensional slice of it: a flat circle. One common way of helping people to imagine what a fourth physical dimension would be like is to ask them to imagine a being that lived in only a two-dimensional slice of our three-dimensional reality. While the existence of 11 dimensions is supported by math (somehow) it can only be understood through analogy. One of the precepts of m-theory is that, beyond the three physical dimensions that humans can perceive, and the one dimension of time, there are another seven space-time dimensions that we can't experience, for a total of 11. Many of these ideas are so out there, they can only be understood through abstractions. It's the currently leading "theory of everything," behind which there is much consensus, about the best way to describe the aspects of our physical reality that are not only well beyond our ability to observe, but are at the furthest frontier of what we are capable of comprehending. M-theory comes out of theoretical physics. "Someone once told me that 'time is a flat circle.' Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again." To Cohle, eternal recurrence is a horrifying concept, because it means that the children who were victims of Reggie Ledoux will be forced to relive those events repeatedly, for eternity. But it segues quickly into a genuine consideration of eternal recurrence. The monologue begins as a regret that systemic problems never go away. "This is a world where nothing is solved," he begins. When he speaks the words, he's sitting in an interrogation room in 2012, looking at pictures of a recent murder that looks just as horrific as the one he supposedly solved in 1995. But it's not that far off from Rust Cohle's intention. Not all that different from "history repeats itself" or even just "whoa, deja vu."Ĭlearly, its meaning as an idiom has strayed far from the way Nietzsche meant it. If you do a quick search for "time is a flat circle" on Twitter, you'll see that it's an expression in daily rotation, as something you say when a recent event is similar to something that happened in the past. Zarathustra, lecturing the masses, lays out the choices explicitly: break through to a higher plane, or become "the last men," who have given up on transcendence because they have "discovered happiness." But they misunderstand him completely, and call back, "make us into these last men!" It's one of many setbacks Zarathustra experiences. To him, eternal recurrence suggested that one should instead aspire to a higher state of being, and seek meaning through conflict and struggle. The idea is that eternal recurrence is great news, as long as you make your life into something you want to relive an infinite number of times.Ī natural reaction to this might be that, OK, if eternal recurrence is real, let's all make sure that our lives are joyful and pleasant, with plenty of pillows. He saw it as the "highest of all possible formulae of a yea-saying philosophy." The best reason you should be happy to exist, even if you've given up the belief in a spiritual afterlife. But, for Nietzsche, the idea of eternal recurrence was a cause for celebration.
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