Renewal: Independence, I Return

Photo by Kadri Karmo on Unsplash

This is the second part of a three-part series on the theme of renewal. It follows last week’s post which laid outlined the perceptions of time which can make renewal possible. In the next two posts, we cover the posture we must take in order for this renewal to be an experiential reality.

Whether we would like to admit it or not, we in the west value our autonomy above all things. We take pride in being independent, self-made, self-driven and self-creating. We want to take charge of our own destinies. Most of all, we want to ensure that we are not put in a position of being subject to others. We might accept the help of others, but rarely do we relish being subordinate to others, lest our capabilities or achievements become overshadowed.

Running alongside this desire for autonomy is another, less pleasant, experience. It comes in a number of forms, but what is common to them all is the experience of repeating old patterns. These repetitions can come in the forms of individual or corporate behaviour, replication of patters of relating to others, a constant refrain of audio, visual or mental messaging, or returning to our default stance of relating to the world as the only way we can rightly relate to the world.

As much as we desire the novel, we often find ourselves coming face to face with the limits of our abilities to create or even enjoy new circumstances when they are presented to us. What began as a seachange can start to feel like the life we left behind; what we intended as a transformation of the self ends up as the re-presentation of the dregs of the old self, warmed up; and our plans for introducing new ways of thinking may suffer the onslaught of misfortune, convincing us that the more familiar pattern of cynicism might have been closer to the truth of things after all.

This experience of repetition may not sound related to our drive for autonomy, there are actually deep philosophical and theological connections. Philosophically, our meeting up of repetition is our meeting up with our finitude. It is a visceral experience of the limitations we face, bound as we are by history, geography, time and embodiment. This was something that Friedrich Nietzsche cottoned onto when we wrote about the theme of eternal return in The Gay Science. While modernity had long championed autonomy, it was Nietzsche who was the most eloquent champion of self-creation in an era where tradition and community were long abandoned. For Nietzsche, self-creation and repetition were two parts of a couplet. In an essay entitled “The Greatest Weight”, Nietzsche presented us with a thought experiment:

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!’

Faced with this suggestion that reality is but a neverending series of repetitions, we face two choices, we can either “gnash our teeth and curse the demon” or we can accept this as the great moment of revelation, “one that would change you as you are or perhaps crush you”. Far from being tragic, Nietzsche treated the realisation of eternal recurrence as the occasion of joyful celebration, for then I see things as they really are, and also come to test our mettle in our self-regard and to life as it really is.

While we might agree with Nietzsche’s observation of the eternal return, many of us do not share Nietzsche’s joyful celebration of it. We long for things to be different. The reason for this is that this desire for things to not concede things to eternal repetition is a desire informed by Christian tradition. This tradition paradoxically champions renewal, while also eschewing autonomy.

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