The Time Concept in the Philosophies of Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Milan Kundera (original) (raw)

This paper aims, in a perspectivist attitude, to interrogate Nietzsche's concept of "eternal recurrence" and its denial in the novel of Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." As a starting point, Heidegger's challenge in "Being and Time" with the traditional philosophy which comprehends the eternity and time, as features of the ideal and phenomenal world will be prevailed to highlight how the interpretation of time as a moveable image of eternity is to be mistaken; to him, time apart from "Dasein"'s original temporality is nothing, it does not find its meaning in eternity, but in death. Further, his suggestion that this traditional perception of time to be a linear series of "now" points that can be measured according to the modification of present was merely a desire to overcome time and indeed mortality will be clarified. For such a claim, Heidegger's adherence to Kant's "Copernican Turn" will be examined. Turning back to Nietzsche's contest to this Western tradition in his book "Thus spoke Zarathustra" ignoring the linearity of time, and forwarding the circularity that stresses on an eternal repetition of occurrences which foreshadows the concept of life after death ad infinitum results in the very "existence" to be "the heaviest of burdens" is to be discussed. The challenge back by Milan Kundera in his "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" with his suggestion that human time is indeed linear, and human existed only once, therefore must be free of any burden will be compared to Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" to clarify Kundera's concept of "lightness."