Just Another Inconsequential Atom
Are we doomed to relive the past, treading the footsteps we have already trodden while existing in an unknowing and uncaring universe? Having recently re-watched the first season of True Detective, this philosophical question of “eternal recurrence” has recurred to haunt me… again.
The concept of “eternal recurrence” (ewigen wiederkunft) was an idea espoused by Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882. It is the idea that the universe is forever recurring, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite space and time.
In the show, the Cohle character (who is revealed to be an antinatalism nihilist, echoing the philosophies of Ligotti and Cioran), attempts to explain to his colleagues how someone from the fourth dimension (could they attain it) would perceive our space time as a flatten circle outside of time, “Everything we’ve ever done or will do we’re gonna do over and over and over again…” but “When you can’t remember your lives, you can’t change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life. You’re trapped by that nightmare you keep waking up into.”
Lovecraft’s cosmicism on the other hand, which was engendered by his passion of astronomy and of science, is even more stark. Lovecraft gave up the notion of eternal recurrence for the more scientific theory of entropy… and although not fully embraced can be seen appearing in his writings with wording such as “cold suns with their hordes of frozen planets” and “the sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars.”
“With Nietzsche, I have been forced to confess that mankind as a whole has no goal or purpose whatsoever, but is a mere superfluous speck in the unfathomable vortices of infinity and eternity.” wrote Lovecraft in a letter to Reinhardt Kleiner on September 14, 1919.
So how do you cope with day to day life when bearing such a weighty philosophy?
Though Lovecraft’s philosophy of cosmicism appears deeply pessimistic, H.P. Lovecraft thought of himself as neither a pessimist or an optimist but rather a scientific indifferentist. In a letter to James F. Morton (1929), Lovecraft explains, “Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist — that is, I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of the natural forces surrounding and governing organic life will have any connexion with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process.”
This was not always the case of course, but gradually Lovecraft’s pessimism was completely “transmogrified”, as noted by S.T. Joshi in his book, H.P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West, into what has become his celebrated indifferentism as seen here, “I have thus been content to observe the phenomena about me with something like objective interest, and to feel a certain tranquillity which comes from perfect acceptance of my place as an inconsequential atom.”
About the Author
Andrew Migliore is author of Lurker in the Lobby: A Guide to the Cinema of H.P. Lovecraft and founder (and the original director for the first 15 years) of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival® and CthulhuCon™. During daylight hours he is VP of Engineering at a software startup.
