Williams, Nietzsche, and the

Meaninglessness of Immortality

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A. W. Moore

Abstract: In this essay I consider the argument that Bernard Williams advances in
‘The Makropolus Case’ for the meaninglessness of immortality. I also consider vari-
ous counter-arguments. I suggest that the more clearly these counter-arguments are
targeted at the spirit of Williams’s argument, rather than at its letter, the less clearly
they pose a threat to it. I then turn to Nietzsche, whose views about the eternal re-
currence might appear to make him an opponent of Williams. I argue that, properly
interpreted, these views in fact make him an ally.

1. Williams
1.1 Williams’s argument for the meaninglessness of immortality
Bernard Williams’s untimely death, in 2003, added poignancy to one of
his most forceful and most challenging essays, ‘The Makropolus Case’.1
In this essay Williams had argued that a life without death would be
meaningless; and, as his subtitle ‘Reflections on the Tedium of Immor-
tality’ indicates, that it would be meaningless because it would eventu-
ally become tedious to the point of unendurability. Mortality, on
Williams’s view, is something to be celebrated. His own death certainly
posed a challenge to this view. Coming at a time when he had so much
still to offer, it seemed to stand in defiant mockery of the idea that mor-
tality is something to be celebrated and served rather as a stark
reminder of what an evil death is.
In fact, however, Williams had never denied that death is an evil. He
makes clear from the very beginning of his essay that it is not his pur-
pose to deny any such thing. Though he believes that all meaning and
purpose must eventually drain away from life, and though he urges, in
line with this, that death can come too late, he also concedes, what he
says ‘many … need no reminding,’ (p. 100) that death can come too
early. And, at least as things currently stand, the latter is the norm.
Given that death’s coming too early is a matter of its depriving both the
1
‘Makropolus’: all unaccompanied page references are to this essay.

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312 A. W. Moore

person who dies and others of goods, this furnishes a simple sense in
which death is, at least normally, an evil.
But there is a deeper structural point too. Williams distinguishes
carefully (though he does not himself put it in these terms) between the
idea that mortality is to be celebrated and the idea that death is to be
celebrated. The idea that mortality is to be celebrated is the idea encap-
sulated in the very last sentence of his essay, that we are ‘lucky in having
the chance to die.’ Williams believes this because he believes that the
alternative would be so much worse—indeed, to use an adverb whose

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use for once seems more than an organ of hyperbole, infinitely worse. If
the alternative would furthermore be meaningless, as Williams insists it
would be, and if life does in fact have some meaning, then we can even
say that mortality is to be celebrated as a precondition of life’s having
whatever meaning it has. But this is quite different from the idea that
death is to be celebrated. Death, when it comes, can still deprive both
the person who dies and others of basic opportunities to create and dis-
cover whatever meaning life might have. There is no logical conflict in
death’s being a destroyer of meaning in life and mortality’s being a pre-
condition of life’s having the very meaning that death destroys. There is
no logical conflict, though there are undoubtedly conflicts of other
kinds, and one of the many merits of Williams’s essay is how brilliantly
he draws some of these out.
Let us, however, stay with the logical point. It is a subtle point. Cer-
tainly there are many acute thinkers who have failed to grasp it, and in
due course I shall cite Thomas Nagel as an example. The point emerges in
Williams’s essay as follows. He explores the various ways in which death is
an evil, or a ‘misfortune’ as he more frequently puts it, emphasizing that
this is ‘other things being equal.’2 He then considers an apparent conse-
quence, namely that ‘it would be not only always better to live, but better
to live always, that is, never to die,’ (p. 89). In as much as death is an evil,
he says, ‘we seem committed to wanting to be immortal,’ (ibid.). What is
crucial here is the word ‘seem’: we seem committed to wanting to be

2
I am not sure that, strictly speaking, this is what he means. The use of the phrase ‘other things
being equal’ in this context, if taken strictly, suggests that we can somehow treat death as a variable
to be evaluated while other factors remain constant— as though there could be two situations
whose only relevant difference was that one involved a death that the other did not—whereas Wil-
liams’s point is surely the point already adverted to, that death is an evil in circumstances which, at
least as things currently stand, count as normal relative to its evaluation. This excludes, for in-
stance, circumstances in which death brings longed-for relief from suffering that cannot be allevi-
ated in any other way, circumstances which, as things currently stand, are comparatively rare. Still,
granted that this is Williams’s point, then it would be cavilling to object to what he says: on a more
colloquial use, the phrase ‘other things being equal’ is precisely what is required here, and I myself
shall adopt that use in what follows.

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 Williams, Nietzsche, and the Meaninglessness of Immortality 313

immortal. The logical point to which I am referring emerges in Wil-

liams’s deliberate caution. This is echoed in the previous quotation by his
use of the phrase ‘not only … but …’: it would be not only always better
to live, but better to live always. The point is this: there is a logical gap
between our always wanting something to be so, or its always being
appropriate for us to want something to be so, and our wanting, or its
being appropriate for us to want, this same thing always to be so.
Put like that, the point sounds like a not very subtle point about a
scope distinction. But the distinction is easy to miss, and Nagel for one

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misses it. In The View From Nowhere, published thirteen years after
Williams’s essay, Nagel writes:
Given the simple choice between living for another week and dying in five
minutes I would always choose to live for another week; and by a version of
mathematical induction I conclude that I would be glad to live forever.
(Nagel 1986, p. 224)
But that does not follow, either by a version of mathematical induction
or by any other means. For one thing, the premise is concerned with
choices I would make, whereas the conclusion is concerned with what I
would be glad to do, which is a different matter. But also, more perti-
nently, the most that follows from the premise, as Nagel’s own reference
to mathematical induction should have made clear, is that if, starting
now, I were given a weekly choice between living for another week and
dying in five minutes, then (since I would always choose to live for
another week) my repeated choices would keep me alive for ever. This is
not to say that I would ever actually choose to live for ever. I might have
a clear preference not to live for ever, indeed I might be appalled at the
prospect of living for ever, yet still never want these to be my last five
minutes. I might never want to die, without wanting never to die.3
Now I have laboured this point partly just because of its intrinsic
interest. It is not, however, Williams’s main point. Williams’s main
point concerns the qualification that other things be equal, which is
required even for Nagel’s premise to be true. Other things might of
course not be equal. I might choose to die in five minutes because there
was no other way of putting an end to some agony that I was suffering
and that I would otherwise continue to suffer indefinitely.4 Williams’s

3
I have borrowed material in this paragraph from Moore 2001, pp. xviii and 227. Note: it might
be said in defence of Nagel that my two criticisms cancel each other out; that the reason why his
conclusion states what I would be glad to do, rather than what I would choose to do, is precisely
that it adverts to an indefinite series of choices that I would make and not to a once-for-all choice.
But the full context in which his argument occurs seems to me to belie any such interpretation.
4
See above, footnote 2.

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314 A. W. Moore

point is that other things would eventually, and necessarily, not be

equal. I would eventually, and necessarily, choose to die—never mind
that I might in any case, independently, choose to be mortal rather than
immortal.
Williams’s reason for thinking this is that my life must eventually
become, as I put it earlier, tedious to the point of unendurability. The
kernel of his argument for this grim view is that the conditions that
must be satisfied for my life to continue to count as mine militate
against the conditions that must be satisfied for it to continue to be a

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life worth living. Conditions of the former kind demand a constancy,
and conditions of the latter kind a variety, that cannot be reconciled.
Towards the beginning of his essay Williams writes:
There is perhaps some profound temperamental difference between those
who find consolation for the fact of death in the hope that it is only the start
of another life, and those who equally find comfort in the conviction that it
is the end of the only life there is. (p. 83)
Indeed. And it is surely just such a matter of temperament, as much as
the forces of reason, that leads philosophers to disagree so trenchantly
about the issues raised in Williams’s essay. Nagel, in the context from
which I have already quoted, writes:
Perhaps I shall eventually tire of life, but at the moment I can’t imagine it,
nor can I understand those many distinguished and otherwise reasonable
persons who sincerely assert that they don’t regard their own mortality as a
misfortune. (Nagel 1986, p. 224)
He then adds a footnote reference to Williams’s essay in which he asks,
‘Can it be that he is more easily bored than I?’ I dare say it can.
Still, even those who find themselves on the Nagelian side of this
temperamental divide can hardly fail to acknowledge the suasive and
rhetorical power of Williams’s remarkable essay. Nagel says that he can-
not imagine tiring of life. But Williams certainly shows that living
indefinitely without tiring of life places heavy demands on the imagina-
tion too. (It would not be inconsistent, in fact, to claim that both things
are unimaginable. For the precondition of both, namely living long
enough for there to be an issue, might itself be unimaginable. It is
worth noting in this connection that Williams’s conclusion is not in
fact that immortality, conceived thus and so, would be meaningless, but
rather that immortality, to the extent that it can be conceived, would be
meaningless.) The question is, can imagination meet the heavy
demands that Williams shows it to be under?

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 Williams, Nietzsche, and the Meaninglessness of Immortality 315

2.2 Counter-arguments to Williams’s argument

Well, yes, in various ways it can—though not, as we shall see, in ways
that address Williams’s real concerns. There are imaginable scenarios in
which living for ever would be subjectively indistinguishable from liv-
ing for just eighty years, say. I could for instance live for ever and, at the
age of eighty, suffer a permanent loss of consciousness. Now clearly that
fails to address Williams’s concerns. Williams could quite reasonably
say that such a loss of consciousness would be tantamount to death,
and treat it as such. Or he could equally reasonably say that such a loss

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of consciousness would itself render my life thereafter meaningless. But
there are subtler variations on the same theme, and, although these are
likewise targeted at the letter of Williams’s argument rather than at its
spirit, they cannot be dismissed in quite the same way.
Consider, for example, the following case.
The Decelerating Life: Both I and everything in my local environ-
ment periodically start to function more slowly, and time
accordingly seems to me to pass more quickly, in such a way that,
whereas the first forty years of my life seem like forty years, the next
forty seem like twenty, the next forty seem like ten, and so on ad
infinitum.
That is a scenario in which my endless life seems to me like a life of
eighty years.
Or consider this case.
The Staccato Life: I live normally for forty years, and these are fol-
lowed by a trillion years of unconsciousness at the end of which
everything reverts to the state that it was in at the beginning of that
trillion-year period. I then live normally for twenty years, and these
are followed a similarly undetectable trillion-year period of uncon-
sciousness. I then live normally for ten years, and these in turn are
followed by the same thing. And so on ad infinitum.
Again, my endless life seems to me like a life of eighty years.
In both these cases there are, at any point in my life, periods of sub-
jectively normal life left for me.5 That is why neither of them can be dis-
missed in quite the same way as the case in which I suffer a permanent
loss of consciousness. The fact remains that, precisely because the end-
less lives in both these cases are indistinguishable to me from an eighty-

5
I am assuming that there is not a minimal period of consciousness.

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316 A. W. Moore

year life, they are as far removed from Williams’s real concerns as the
case in which I do permanently lose consciousness.6
Here is a case whose relevance to Williams’s concerns is less clear.
The Repeating Life: I live normally for eighty years, then lose con-
sciousness. While I am unconscious I regress, both physically and
psychologically, to the state that I was in when I was born and every-
thing in my local environment reverts to the state that it was in at
that time. I then regain consciousness and repeat the eighty years in

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exact detail, as does everything in my local environment, after which
the same thing happens again. And so on ad infinitum.
Here I live for ever, continually repeating my eighty-year life and never
tiring of it (presuming, of course, that I do not tire of it the first time
round).
‘The Repeating Life’ is somewhat reminiscent of ancient myths of an
eternal recurrence in which there is a continually recurring cosmic
cycle whereby I live out my life in exact detail again and again.7 There
are, however, some potentially crucial differences. Two worries that
arise about the very coherence of these ancient myths might be fore-
stalled in the case of ‘The Repeating Life’.
One of these is the worry about whether it makes sense to posit qual-
itatively indiscernible but numerically distinct cycles. It is clear why this
worry arises in the case of the ancient myths, with their cosmic cycle.
What might forestall the worry in the case of ‘The Repeating Life’, with
its merely local cycle, is the possibility of non-recurrent developments
elsewhere in the cosmos allowing numerically distinct cycles to be dis-
tinguished from one another in relational terms.
The second worry is about whether it makes sense to identify the
main actor in subsequent performances of this eighty-year drama with
me. This worry, which actually tugs in the opposite direction to the first,
in as much as it presupposes that there will be subsequent performances
6
These two scenarios are adapted from two stories that I tell in Moore 2001, p. 228. For further
discussion see Sorensen 2005. Concerning ‘The Staccato Life’, it is interesting to note that the cru-
cial thing about the trillion-year bouts of unconsciousness is that they do not sum to a finite pe-
riod. The story could just as well have been told, curiously enough, with intervals of a nanosecond;
or, come to that, with a first interval of a nanosecond, a second and third interval of half a nano-
second each, a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh interval of a quarter of a nanosecond each, and so
on; or indeed, for those who like the mathematical icing on their paradoxical cakes particularly
thick, with a first interval of half a nanosecond, a second interval of a third of a nanosecond, a
third interval of a fifth of a nanosecond, and so on through the reciprocals of the primes.
7
See , for example, Simplicius’s ascription of this view to the Pythagoreans, quoted in Barnes
1987, p. 88.

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 Williams, Nietzsche, and the Meaninglessness of Immortality 317

of the drama,8 arises in the case of the ancient myths for reasons that
Williams himself has famously made graphic.9 How can anything make
me identical to an atom-for-atom duplicate who is separated from me in
time, granted that nothing can make me identical to an atom-for-atom
duplicate who is separated from me merely in space? In the case of ‘The
Repeating Life’, on the other hand, since there is bodily continuity
between me and my Doppelgänger, there might not be any such worry.
There might not be. We would certainly need to hear more, and to think
more, about the processes whereby I regress to babyhood before we

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could rest content on this point.10 If we wanted to vary the story in a way
that made this worry look less severe, we could try letting the regress
after my loss of consciousness take me back only as far as, say, my seven-
tieth birthday, whereafter I keep repeating just the last decade of my life.
However, if we did think that this made the worry look less severe, then
it would be a real question, why. The idea, presumably, would be that the
processes of rejuvenation required to take me from the state that I am in
when I am eighty to the state that I was in when I was seventy are not
radical enough to threaten the presumption that I retain my identity
through them. But, as any Parfitian reductionist would be quick to point
out, the relevant differences between these processes and the processes
that take me all the way back to babyhood are differences of degree, not
differences of kind: it is not at all clear why some quintessence of mine
should be preserved through the former but not through the latter.11
Be any of that as it may, ‘The Repeating Life’ is not as immediately
vulnerable to the charge of connecting only with the letter of Williams’s
argument as either ‘The Decelerating Life’ or ‘The Staccato Life’. Does
not a repeated eighty-year life afford more than whatever a one-off
affords of whatever a one-off affords?
This is a genuine question. There are those who would say that it
obviously does. But there are others, in what may ultimately be another
example of a deep temperamental divide, whose intuition is diametri-
cally opposed and who would say that these recurring cycles are really
only further testimony to the fact that living for ever can be subjectively
8
The two worries accordingly reinforce each other: whatever appeases the one exacerbates the other.
9
See e.g. ‘Bodily Continuity’.
10
Cf. another of Williams’s classic essays on these themes, ‘Personal Identity’, p. 1.
11
See Parfit 1984, Pt. 3, passim.

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318 A. W. Moore

indistinguishable from living for eighty years.12 A possible retort to

those in the latter camp would be to posit cycles that are not exact
repeats. Thus suppose that I keep playing out my eighty-year life except
that I finish it differently each time: living that life would certainly not
be subjectively indistinguishable from living the life that comprises just
its first eighty years. The problem with this retort, at least in the present
context, is akin to the problem with the variant on ‘The Repeating Life’
just considered. How much of my life is supposed to vary each time?
Just the last decade? The point is this. However much is supposed to

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vary, there are surely nothing but differences of degree, where my iden-
tity is concerned, between this case and the case in which virtually the
entire eighty-year period varies; and this in turn is pretty much the
same as a case that Williams himself considers in his essay—a case in
which there is a series of psychologically disjoint lives, and concerning
which Williams, sceptical about whether personal identity is preserved
through these lives, asks the following highly pertinent question:
‘[Could] this series of psychologically disjoint lives … be an object of
hope to one who did not want to die [?]’ (p. 92).13 The fact remains that
the more clearly an imagined scenario connects with what is of real
concern to Williams, the less clearly it poses a threat to his argument.14

2. Nietzsche
The cosmic cycle will put many in mind of Nietzsche. Nietzsche
assigned very great significance to the idea of eternal recurrence: he
described it as the ‘highest formula of affirmation that is at all attaina-
ble’ (EH, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
Sect. 1).15
Now it seems clear from Nietzsche’s copious references to this idea
that he saw in the eternal recurrence—the apparent countermeasure of
all transience and irreversible loss—something to be greeted with joy.
12
Cf. Tanner 1994, p. 54. Sorensen (2005) argues that what matters to me in these various imag-
ined scenarios is my ‘personal time’; but one of the problems, in the case of ‘The Repeating Life’,
lies precisely in deciding whether or not my ‘personal time’ is the same as it would be if I lived for
only eighty years.
13
See further pp. 93–4.
14
That is in fact as far as I shall go towards defending Williams in this essay. I have not ruled out
the possibility of an imagined scenario in which the balance is suitably struck. One type of case
worth considering is that in which there is an upper limit to how far back my memory stretches at
any given moment—rather as if I were a goldfish with a three-second memory span, perpetually
circling a goldfish bowl and taking fresh delight in the castle each time it comes into view.
15
Cf. TI, ‘What I Owe to the Ancients’, Sect. 5.

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 Williams, Nietzsche, and the Meaninglessness of Immortality 319

This makes him look like an enemy of Williams—at least if we bracket

the various reservations that we have just been considering about the
extent to which recurring cycles could really yield the kind of endless
existence that Williams is concerned to depreciate. But we must pro-
ceed cautiously. How exactly Nietzsche understood this idea, and what
use he made of it, are by no means obvious. I shall suggest that, prop-
erly understood, Nietzsche can in fact be seen as a significant ally of
Williams, even without the bracketing.
Let us first of all lay to rest any notion that Nietzsche wants to defend

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the idea of a recurring cosmic cycle as a theory about the actual nature
of the universe. There are passages, to be sure, in which he toys with
arguments concerning the play of finite resources in infinite time, argu-
ments whose upshot seems to be that all of the finitely many states that
the universe can be in it will be in, and will be in again, infinitely many
times. They are unconvincing arguments, easily rebutted.16 But there
are issues about what exactly Nietzsche is doing with these arguments.
And in any case, the passages in question occur in The Will to Power,17
about which Williams himself reminds us that it ‘is not a book by
Nietzsche at all, but a selection from [his unpublished] notes tenden-
tiously put together by his sister’ (‘Introduction’, p. 319).18
If Nietzsche is concerned with the idea of a recurring cosmic cycle at
all, then he is surely concerned with it as a thought-experiment,
designed as a guide to living. Many people have interpreted Nietzsche
in just this way.19 So interpreted, Nietzsche is exhorting us to act out
our lives as if there were such a cycle; to try to live in such a way that we
could bear the infinite repetition. What might this involve? One thing
that it might involve is striving to redeem our own pasts — not in a
spirit of regret or remorse, but by living in such a way as to make sense
of our pasts, as an integral part of our continuing biographies. Another
thing that it might involve is striving to redeem the world’s past (to
whatever extent it is the prerogative of any individual to do that). Wil-
liams, who himself interprets Nietzsche in this way, puts as follows
what he takes Nietzsche’s exhortation to be: to confront, honestly and
truthfully, all the horrors and all the suffering in the world; to acknowl-
edge these as inextricably bound up with whatever we value (Williams
16
Cf. Schacht 1983, pp. 263 ff.
17
E.g. WP, Sects. 1062 and 1066.
18
Note: I myself shall frequently refer to WP in subsequent footnotes; whenever I do, Williams’s
caveat should obviously be borne in mind.
19
I have: see Moore 2001, Ch. 7, Sect. 5. I try to explain below why I no longer accept such an in-
terpretation.

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320 A. W. Moore

makes memorable reference at one point to all the ‘dreadful [happen-

ings] that [have] been necessary to create Venice’ (‘Introduction’,
p. 319)); to reject a Leibnizian cost–benefit analysis, or a Hegelian his-
torical metaphysics, whereby it is all worth it; to reject, equally, a Scho-
penhauerian pessimism, whereby it is not all worth it; and, as the only
way of sustaining both these rejections, without being crushed or
choked by all the horrors and all the suffering, to refuse to assess the
world at all, but rather to affirm it, and to mean the affirmation, that is
to will the infinite repetition.20

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This interpretation finds support in Nietzsche’s claim that there can-
not be any redemption of the past unless ‘It was’, which he describes as
‘the will’s teeth-gnashing and most lonely affliction’, is transformed into
‘Thus I willed it’ (TSZ, Pt. Two, ‘Of Redemption’). It also finds support
in Nietzsche’s frequent insistence that what is important about the eter-
nal recurrence is, indeed, whether we can bear it.21 But what is not clear,
as Williams himself points out, is why, on this interpretation, the idea
of the eternal recurrence should be the idea of an eternal recurrence. A
thought-experiment involving just one repetition of the cycle would do
the job as effectively as a thought-experiment involving infinitely many.
As Williams puts it, ‘If you could overcome the “nausea” … of the pros-
pect that [the past] … will come round again even once, and say “yes” to
it, you would have taken the essential step: could willing all those fur-
ther recurrences cost you very much more?’ (‘Introduction’, p. 319, his
emphasis).22

20
‘Introduction’, pp. 317–9. Cf. ‘The Women’, pp. 52–4.
21
GS, Sects. 285 and 341; TSZ, Pt. 3, ‘Of the Vision and the Riddle’, Sect. 2; TSZ, Pt. 3, ‘The Seven
Seals’; TSZ, Pt. 4, ‘The Intoxicated Song’; EH, ‘Why I am So Clever’, final paragraph; WP, Sects.
1053–9.
22
We might wonder about the force of the rhetorical question at the end of this quotation.
Prima facie, if willing one recurrence could cost you anything, then willing all those further recur-
rences could cost you very much more. But we must not forget that what is at issue here is the cost
of willing the recurrences, not the cost of enduring them. In order to will even one recurrence, you
would already have to think in as much vivid detail as possible of all the horrors and all the suffer-
ing: it would already cost you as much as that. Could willing all those further recurrences cost you
very much more? ‘Very well,’ an opponent might say, ‘but if enduring infinitely many recurrences
could cost you very much more than enduring only one, then is that not itself a reason why, on this
interpretation, the eternity of the eternal recurrence matters?’ No. This is not, as we might think,
because the costs in each case would have compensating benefits—indeed equivalently compen-
sating benefits, so that determining whether the costs in one case would be outweighed by the
benefits is tantamount to determining whether the costs in the other case would be. It is rather be-
cause, on this interpretation, affirming the world is not a matter of balancing costs against benefits
at all. On the contrary, it is a matter of ‘[becoming]… well [enough] disposed… to life’ (GS,
Sect. 341) for its costs no longer even to constitute a weight. I am grateful to Robert Stern for a
discussion that forced me to clarify my thinking about this matter. I am also grateful, incidentally,

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 Williams, Nietzsche, and the Meaninglessness of Immortality 321

For this reason, among others, I do not myself accept this

interpretation — although I do think that Williams has captured very
well many of Nietzsche’s true concerns. In particular he helps to high-
light something that is unquestionably in Nietzsche: the idea that
everything is knotted together in such a way that the recurrence of
one thing is the recurrence of all things, the affirmation of one the
affirmation of all.23 That this idea is unquestionably in Nietzsche is
also, I think, a key to the correct interpretation of him. This is an
interpretation whereby he wants neither to defend the idea of a cos-

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mic cycle as a cosmological theory about how things actually are nor
to use it as a heuristic thought-experiment: he is not concerned with
it at all.24
Nietzsche says at one point in his notebooks, ‘It is simply a matter of
experience that change never ceases’ (WP, Sect. 688). What the knotting
together of things means is that the ceaseless change is a ceaseless
change in everything, including everything that has been and every-
thing that will be. The whole of the past and the whole of the future
come together in each moment of change. This is the eternal recur-
rence: the eternal recurrence of all things, but ever different.25 Here is
Nietzsche again, in the words of Zarathustra:
Behold this gateway … it has two aspects. Two paths come together here: no
one has ever reached their end.
This long lane behind us: it goes on for an eternity. And that long lane
ahead of us—that is another eternity.

to Tom Stern for the following additional pair of suggestions about why, on this interpretation,
the eternity of the eternal recurrence matters: first, it is an expression of the inextricability of all
things; and second, it precludes our eventual escape from the cycle, whether into an existence of
some other kind or into non-existence. Each of the observations is well taken in its own right,
but neither seems to me to block Williams’s thought that, if you could will even one recurrence,
you would have taken the essential step. The first is not really relevant to it; the second is still too
closely tied to considerations of compensation.
23
HAH, Bk. I, Sect. 208; GS, Sect. 54; TSZ, Pt. 3, ‘Of the Vision and the Riddle’, Sect. 2; TSZ, Pt.
Four, ‘The Intoxicated Song’, Sect. 10; and WP, Sects. 293, 331, and 1032. Cf. Nehamas 1985, pp. 6–7.
(Note: Nehamas is someone else who accepts an interpretation of the kind I now reject. For a par-
ticularly powerful expression of his interpretation, see ibid., pp. 167–8.)
24
I claim no originality for this interpretation. I am indebted to Deleuze 1983, esp. Chs. 2 and 5;
and to Turetzky 1998, Ch. VIII, Sects. 2–3. (I have also been greatly helped by discussions with
Philip Turetzky, to whom I am extremely grateful.) That said, I am acutely aware of diverging in
substantial ways from each of these texts. There is much in what follows that is quite out of accord
with the interpretation that either Deleuze or Turetzky offers.
25
In what ways the past and the future are ever different will, I hope, emerge in due course.

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322 A. W. Moore

They are in opposition to one another, these paths; they abut on one an-
other: and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the
gateway is written above it: ‘Moment’.
… From this gateway Moment a long, eternal lane runs back: an eternity
lies behind us.
Must not all things that can run have already run along this lane? Must not
all things that can happen have already happened, been done, run past?
And if all things have been here before: what do you think of this
moment … ? Must not this gateway, too, have been here—before?

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And are not all things bound fast together in such a way that this moment
draws after it all future things? Therefore—draws itself too?
For all things that can run must also run once again forward along this long
lane.
… must we not return and run down that other lane out before us, down
that long, terrible lane—must we not return eternally? (TSZ, Pt. 3, ‘Of the
Vision and the Riddle’, Sect. 2, his emphasis throughout)26
What I am suggesting is that for all things that can happen to have
already happened, and to return again, is for everything to be, as
Nietzsche elsewhere puts it, ‘chained and entwined together’ (TSZ,
Pt. 4, ‘The Intoxicated Song’, Sect. 10). What happens at any moment,
on this interpretation, happens at every moment — albeit at some
moments as future, at some moments as present, and at some moments
as past.
There are various more or less remote analogues of this in other
thinkers. For example, in the Stoics there is the idea of Aion, or ‘incor-
poreal’ time, resulting from the continuous division of the ever-present
Chronos, or ‘corporeal’ time, into past and future;27 and in McTaggart
there is the idea of an ever-changing A-series, in which events are
ordered as past, present, or future, in accord with the series’s continu-
ous movement along a constant B-series, in which events are ordered as
earlier or later than one another.28 But one analogue that I find particu-
larly interesting — in spite of some obvious limitations, not least of
which is the fact that it is non-temporal—is that of Leibniz’s idea of a
universe of monads, each affording its own different perspective on the
whole, so that, in Leibniz’s own words, ‘it is as if there were as many dif-
ferent universes’ (Leibniz 1973, Sect. 57).29 Nietzsche likewise sees each
moment as affording its own different perspective on the whole, its own
26
See also GS, Sect. 109; and WP, Sect. 617.
27
For discussion and references see Turetzky 1998, Ch. III, Sect. 4.
28
See McTaggart 1927.
29
See also ibid., Sects. 56 and 60.

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 Williams, Nietzsche, and the Meaninglessness of Immortality 323

different vantage point from which to interpret the whole.30 In his note-
books, he writes that ‘the world … has a differing aspect from every
point; its being is essentially different from every point’ (WP, Sect.
568).31
This presents a vision of the eternal recurrence very different from
that in each of the two interpretations that I have rejected. It has in
common with one that it is a vision of a real feature of the universe. It
has in common with the other—for reasons and in ways that I shall try
to clarify—that it is a vision of something about which the most funda-

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mental question, for us, is whether we can bear it. But it differs from
each in excluding altogether the idea of a recurring cosmic cycle.32
The real importance of the eternal recurrence, for Nietzsche, lies in
its relation to nihilism, which he defines as the conviction that there is
no meaning in this ceaseless change: there is no transcendent atemporal
structure by which it can be justified nor any telos towards which it is
striving.33 This, coupled with a refusal to forget all the suffering in the
world, a refusal whose importance to Nietzsche Williams emphasizes,
makes all the suffering seem unbearable. (Suffering with a purpose is
one thing. Meaningless suffering is something else entirely.34) And this
in turn results in condemnation of the world, condemnation of this
grievous senseless ceaseless change.
30
In Nietzsche there is the added twist that there is nothing to the whole beyond how it is inter-
preted: see e.g. WP, Sects. 477, 481, and 567. Cf. also GS, Sect. 374; BGE, Sects. 14 and 16; and GM,
Essay III, Sect. 12.
31
It is worth noting in this connection the use of the phrase ‘continual recurrence’ in ibid., Sect.
569, Sub-sect. 2. Another interesting comparison, incidentally—especially in light of how I shall
develop this interpretation—is with the idea expressed by Wittgenstein in Wittgenstein 1961, 6.43:
‘If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world,
not the facts … In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must,
so to speak, wax or wane as a whole. The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the
unhappy man.’
32
Nietzsche rejects the idea of a recurring cosmic cycle in, e.g., UM, ‘Schopenhauer as Educa-
tor’, Sect. 1. Cf. also Zarathustra’s admonishment of the dwarf in TSZ, Pt. 3, ‘Of the Vision and the
Riddle’, Sect. 2; and his admonishment of the animals in TSZ, Pt. 3, ‘The Convalescent’, Sect. 2. It is
true that Zarathustra sees recurrence as a ring (TSZ, Pt. 3, ‘The Seven Seals’; cf. his description of
himself as the advocate of the circle in TSZ, Pt. 3, ‘The Convalescent’, Sect. 1). But he sees it as the
ring of what Nietzsche elsewhere calls ‘the eternal hourglass of existence [which] is turned over
again and again’ (GS, Sect. 341).
33
See WP, Bk. 1, Sect. I. That there is no such transcendent atemporal structure is due largely to
the fact that we ourselves have destroyed it: we have killed God (GS, Sect. 125). That there is no
such telos is indicated by the very passage of time. For if there were such a telos, then the universe
ought already to have reached it; there would be, as it were, no point to time (WP, Sects. 55, 708,
and 1067).
34
See e.g. GM, Essay II, Sect. 7; and GM, Essay III, Sect. 28. For a fascinating discussion by Wil-
liams see ‘Suffering’.

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324 A. W. Moore

Nietzsche’s question is how such nihilism can be overcome. How can

we see all the suffering in the world as meaningless and not be broken
by it? We might think that one way would be to accept everything, in a
spirit of resignation, in other words to say ‘yes’ to everything. But
Nietzsche is adamant that such passive and indiscriminate acquiescence
would itself be meaningless and would leave nihilism entirely unde-
feated.35
As Williams indicates, for nihilism to be overcome, the world must
be affirmed. But affirming the world does not consist in saying ‘yes’ to

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everything. It consists in creatively and actively making sense of
things—creatively and actively, because, granted nihilism, there is no
sense or meaning already there to be discovered. (To overcome nihilism
is not to refute it.) Making sense of things involves saying both ‘yes’ and
‘no’, ‘yes’ to some things and ‘no’ to others. This prevents the ‘yes’ of
sense-making from being the meaningless ‘yes’ of acquiescence. The
‘yes’ of sense-making is a ‘yes’ as opposed to … In particular, of course,
it is a ‘yes’ as opposed to the ‘no’ that is directed at nihilism itself.
Affirming the world does not mean saying ‘yes’ to everything, but it
does mean saying ‘yes’ to the eternal recurrence of everything. There is
a sense, as Nietzsche urges in his notebooks, in which the eternal recur-
rence presents the spectre of meaninglessness in its most extreme and
most terrifying form, a form in which meaninglessness recurs and
recurs and recurs, ad infinitum.36 And yet this eternal recurrence is the
very condition of sense-making. In its continual generation of new per-
spectives it allows for the continual generation of new interpretations
and new evaluations. Through these the past can be continually trans-
formed, so that, although it keeps returning, it keeps returning differ-
ently. The past can be continually lived, continually developed,
continually cultivated. That is to say, sense can be continually made of
it. This is how it is prevented from overcoming us. But the eternity of
the eternal recurrence is vital. Nihilism can never be overcome once
and for all. If ever the process were to cease, it would meet with an
unanswerable ‘So what?’, and nihilism would stand undefeated.37

35
TSZ, Pt. 4, ‘The Awakening’.
36
WP, Sect. 55. This is marvellously captured in Kundera 1984, Pt. 1, Sects. 1 and 2.
37
For the material in the last two paragraphs, see: GS, Sect. 373 and Appendix, ‘Towards New
Seas’; BGE, Sect. 56; GM, Essay III, Sect. 12; TI, ‘What I Owe to the Ancients’, Sect. 5; EH, ‘Why I
Write Such Good Books’, The Birth of Tragedy, Sect. 3; and WP, Sects. 12–13, 567, 616, and 1067. Cf.
Nehamas 1985, pp. 163–4.

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 Williams, Nietzsche, and the Meaninglessness of Immortality 325

At one level, sense-making is the business of individuals, acting out

their own lives. But at the most fundamental level, sense-making is an
activity of the will to power, a productive principle manifest in all
change.38 There is an issue, then, about what sense can be made of
human life itself. More particularly, there is an issue about what sense
can be made of the eventual termination of each individual human life
in death. This is an issue which, in a Nietzschean context, is non-nego-
tiable. Death is simply there to be reckoned with, something that has to
be affirmed if nihilism is to be overcome. Wishing it away is not only

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pointless; it is a major obstacle to the defeat of nihilism. It is part of that
morbid inability to come to terms with who one is, and with how
things are, and with the meaninglessness of how things are—that mor-
bid inability to come to terms with nihilism— which Nietzsche calls
ressentiment.39 Little wonder, then, that Nietzsche’s texts abound with
affirmations of death.40
Does this make him an ally of Williams? In a way, it seems to take
him further than Williams; in a way, not so far.
It seems to take him further than Williams in that it involves the
affirmation of death, not just the affirmation of mortality. (This harks
back to the distinction that I drew in section 1.1 above.) In fact, how-
ever, it is not at all clear that Williams need balk at the affirmation of
death. True, he does not celebrate death, in the way in which he cele-
brates mortality. Indeed he is prepared to regard death as, at least typi-
cally, a misfortune. But affirmation is not the same as celebration. One
way to make sense of something is to make sense of it as, precisely, a
misfortune.
More interesting, for current purposes, is the way in which
Nietzsche’s affirmation of death seems not to take him as far as Wil-
liams. For it seems to leave open the question — the profoundly un-
Nietzschean question—‘Would immortality be preferable to mortal-
ity?’ The fact that this question is profoundly un-Nietzschean is of no
small moment of course: it relates back to the point that death is simply
there to be reckoned with. Even so, I want to close by suggesting that it

38
See e.g. WP, Sects. 643, 676, and 1067.
39
GM, Essay III, Sect. 14; and EH, ‘Why I am So Wise’, Sect. 6.
40
Here is a sample: GS, Sect. 365; TSZ, Prologue, Sect. 6; TSZ, Pt. 1, ‘Of Voluntary Death’
(whose opening sentence is, as we heard earlier, echoed in ‘Makropolus’: ‘Many die too late and
some die too early,’); TSZ, Pt. 2, ‘Of Self-Overcoming’; TSZ, Pt. 4, ‘The Intoxicated Song’, Sect. 11;
TI, ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’, Sect. 36; and GM, Appendix, ‘The Wanderer and His
Shadow’, Sect. 322.

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326 A. W. Moore

has a Nietzschean answer of sorts, and that this answer does indeed
make Nietzsche an ally of Williams.41
Central to this answer is the way in which that whose life is termi-
nated by any given death, the ‘subject’ of the death, is itself (or himself
or herself ) a creature of interpretation, something begotten of the
activity of sense-making. ‘The “subject”,’ writes Nietzsche, ‘is not some-
thing given, it is something added and invented and projected behind
what there is’ (WP, Sect. 481). This is an idea that he emphasizes time
and again.42 And it means that, even if there were natural processes that

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admitted of interpretation in terms of an immortal subject, ‘interpreta-
tion’ would be the operative word. There would still be an issue about
what was to be said in favour of such an interpretation.
In considering how this issue might be addressed, we should note
first that there are two ways in which interpretation could beget an
immortal subject, reminiscent of the scope distinction considered in
section 1.1 above. One way would be as follows: whenever the question
arose as to whether the subject’s life had ended, it was answered nega-
tively. Another way would be as follows: the question as to whether the
subject’s life would ever end was answered negatively in advance, so
that, thereafter, it never arose again.
It is the second of these that would more directly correspond to a
preference for immortality over mortality. And, in a Nietzschean con-
text, it would be something close to a disaster. It would not only hinder,
but positively oppose, the continual creation of new meanings and new
values needed to overcome nihilism — not just because there was a
question that it foreclosed, once and for all, but because the foreclosing
of that question had such a stifling effect on the addressing of subse-
quent questions. It would both prohibit radical novelty of various kinds
and remove even from what it did not prohibit that vital element of
uncertainty and limitation needed to ensure that what was being
41
There are, incidentally, various passages in Nietzsche that appear to indicate such an answer
but do not really do so. Thus in WP, Sect. 765, he writes, ‘Christianity has accustomed us to the su-
perstitious concept of the “soul,” the “immortal soul,” soul-monads that really are at home some-
where else and have only by chance fallen, as it were into this or that condition, into the “earthly”
and become “flesh” … With this idea, the individual is made transcendent; as a result, he can at-
tribute a senseless importance to himself.’ But this remark is exactly not targeted at the immortal-
ity of the ‘immanent’ individual, the immortality that concerns Williams (p. 96). Again, in WP,
Sect. 676, Nietzsche writes, ‘In the long run, it is not a question of man at all: he is to be overcome,’
(cf. TSZ, Prologue, Sects. 3–4; and TSZ, Pt. Four, ‘Of the Higher Man’, Sect. 3). But this too is an-
other matter: the correct interpretation of this passage, and of related passages, lies far beyond the
scope of the current essay.
42
The idea is especially prominent in his notebooks: see WP, Sects. 370–1, 481–92, and 631; cf.
also WP, Sects. 523–9, 546–50, and 715. See also BGE, Sects. 17 and 54; and TI, ‘“Reason” in Philoso-
phy’, Sect. 5.

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 Williams, Nietzsche, and the Meaninglessness of Immortality 327

invested, in the effort to make sense of things, was precious enough,

and its investment risky enough, to yield real sense in return. This
would be an interpretation to counter interpretation. For Nietzsche,
rather as for Heidegger, a life in which life itself was not always at issue,
that is to say a life in which death was not always a possibility, would be
a standing invitation for meaninglessness to reassert itself.43 Here, at
least, there would be some sort of convergence between Nietzsche and
Williams.
But would it not be just as bad, in its own different way, to interpret

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the subject as having died, if such an interpretation were not manda-
tory? Would there not be a fundamental symmetry here, between fore-
closing the question of the subject’s mortality with one answer
(pronouncing the subject immortal) and foreclosing it with the oppo-
site answer (pronouncing the subject dead)? And would that not pro-
vide a Nietzschean rationale for interpreting the subject as immortal in
the first of the two ways indicated above, that is by never in fact pro-
nouncing the subject dead — which would set Nietzsche apart from
Williams after all?
I do not think so. I see an asymmetry here. (Or at least, I see an
asymmetry to the extent that I can prescind from the increasingly un-
Nietzschean character of this discussion: we must not lose sight of the
caveat entered above.) The asymmetry connects with the cardinal point
of ‘The Makropolus Case’, which I earlier put as follows: the conditions
of constancy that must be satisfied for a life to continue to count as
mine militate against the conditions of variety that must be satisfied for
it to continue to be worth living. There is, I suggest, a very similar ten-
sion here. It is due to what might be called the longeval law of dimin-
ishing returns. The preservation of the subject, beyond a certain point,
and at the expense (let us not forget) of new subjects, would be coun-
ter-productive. Where allowing the subject to die, in favour of those
other subjects, would open up new possibilities of narrative, new
opportunities for sense-making, and new ways of defying nihilism, pre-
serving the subject would impose restrictions and constraints on subse-
quent interpretation that would constitute an overall burden. To resist
the destruction of the subject in spite of that—perhaps through nostal-
gia, perhaps through pity, perhaps through fear, perhaps through some
craving for infinitude—would be of a piece with the nihilistic condem-
nation of change in favour of permanence, of becoming in favour of
43
See Heidegger 1962, Pt. 1, Div. 2, Sect. I. Cf. Williams’s claim, on p. 82, that ‘some existential-
ists … seem to have said that death was what gave meaning to life, if anything did, just because it
was the fear of death that gave meaning to life’.

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328 A. W. Moore

being.44 It would represent a kind of petrification which, much like the

cessation of all sense-making, would eventually meet with an unan-
swerable ‘So what?’ There is, I believe, an intimation of this line of
thought in the following quotation from Nietzsche:
Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life
rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types
… , that is what I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic po-
et. Not so as to get rid of pity and terror, … but, beyond pity and terror, to
realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming—the joy which also encom-

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passes joy in destruction … (TI, ‘What I Owe to the Ancients’, Sect. 5, his em-
phasis throughout.)
I conclude that, for Nietzsche, much as for Williams, immortality
would nullify the very resources needed to overcome the sense of life’s
meaninglessness.45

St Hugh’s College, a.w. moore

Oxford, OX2 6LE
adrian.moore@philosophy.oxford.ac.uk

References

(a) Works by Bernard Williams

‘Bodily Continuity’ = ‘Bodily Continuity and Personal Identity’, in his
Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 1973, pp. 19–25. Originally published as
‘Personal Identity and Bodily Continuity—A Reply’, Analysis, 21,
1960.
‘Introduction’ = ‘Introduction to The Gay Science’, reprinted in his The
Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy, ed. Myles Burn-
yeat. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006, pp. 311–24.
Originally published in Nietzsche GS.

44
WP, Sects. 12 and 617.
45
I presented an early draft of this essay as a lecture at the Central European University: I am
very grateful to members of the audience for their comments. I am also very grateful to the editor
of Mind for his comments on the same draft.

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 Williams, Nietzsche, and the Meaninglessness of Immortality 329

‘Makropolus’ = ‘The Makropolus Case: Reflections on the Tedium of

Immortality’, in his Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–
1972. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973, pp. 82–100.
‘Personal Identity’ = ‘Personal Identity and Individuation’, in his Prob-
lems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 1973, pp. 1–18. Originally published in
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 57, 1956–7.
‘Suffering’ = ‘Unbearable Suffering’, in The Sense of the Past: Essays in
the History of Philosophy, ed. Myles Burnyeat. Princeton: Princeton

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University Press 2006, pp. 331–7. Originally published in German as
‘Unerträgliches Leiden’, in Susan Neiman and Matthias Kroß (eds),
Zum Glück. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2004.
‘The Women’ = ‘The Women of Trachis: Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics’,
reprinted in The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy,
ed. Myles Burnyeat. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006,
pp. 49–59. Originally published in R.B. Louden and P. Schollmeier
(eds), The Greeks and Us: Essays in Honour of Arthur W.H. Adkins.
Chicago: Chicago University Press 1996.

(b) Works by Friedrich Nietzsche

BGE = Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,
trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1973.
EH = Ecce Homo, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, in On The Genealogy
of Morals and Ecce Homo. New York: Random House 1967.
GM = On The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J.
Hollingdale, in On The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. New
York: Random House 1967.
GS = The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams and trans. Josefine Nauck-
hoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001.
HAH = Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R.J. Hol-
lingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996.
TI = Twilight of the Idols, in Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ,
trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1990.
TSZ = Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book For Everyone and No One, trans.
R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1969.
UM = Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale and trans. R.J. Hol-
lingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997.
WP = The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann and trans. Walter
Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House 1967.

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330 A. W. Moore

(c) Works by Other Authors

Barnes, Jonathan 1987: Early Greek Philosophy. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Deleuze, Gilles 1983: Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson.
London: The Athlone Press.
Heidegger, Martin 1962: Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Kundera, Milan 1984: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael
Henry Heim. New York: Harper & Row.

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Leibniz, G.W. 1973: ‘Monadology’, in his Philosophical Writings, ed.
G.H.R. Parkinson and trans. Mary Morris and G.H.R. Parkinson.
London: Dent & Sons.
McTaggart, J.M.E. 1927: ‘The Unreality of Time’, reprinted in Robin le
Poidevin and Murray McBeath (eds), The Philosophy of Time.
Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993, pp. 23–34. Originally pub-
lished as Ch. 33 of his The Nature of Existence, Vol. ii. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 1927.
Moore, A.W. 2001: The Infinite, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
Nagel, Thomas 1986: The View From Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Nehamas, Alexander 1985: Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Parfit, Derek 1984: Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Schacht, Richard 1983: Nietzsche. London: Routledge.
Sorensen, Roy 2005: ‘The Cheated God: Death and Personal Time’, in
Analysis, 65, pp. 119–25.
Tanner, Michael 1994: Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Turetzky, Philip 1998: Time. London: Routledge.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1961: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F.
Pears and B.F. McGuiness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Mind, Vol. 115 . 458 . April 2006 © Moore 2006