What If Groundhog Day Is the Best Explanation of Nietzsche Anyone Has Ever Produced, Including Nietzsche?

A serious philosophical argument that happens to involve Bill Murray, a groundhog, and a man who went mad in Turin

Friedrich Nietzsche spent a significant portion of his adult life trying to explain one of the most demanding ideas in the history of philosophy. He wrote about it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He wrote about it in The Gay Science. He filled notebooks with attempts to work out what it meant and whether he could actually bear it himself. He suffered chronic migraines while doing so, which seems relevant.

In 1993, Harold Ramis made a film about a weatherman trapped in a time loop in a small town in Pennsylvania, and explained the whole thing in ninety-six minutes.

Nietzsche did not live to see it. This was probably for the best. It would have been a lot to process.

A beautiful little groundhog making the most of his day

The Idea, Which Is Either Liberating or Absolutely Terrifying

The Eternal Recurrence is this: what if every moment of your life - every single one, in exact sequence, with all the same details, including the ones you would rather forget - recurs infinitely? Not as metaphor. Not as a thought experiment you can pat on the head and put down. As the actual structure of existence.

Nietzsche first presented it as a question. Imagine, he said, a demon appearing to you in your loneliest moment and telling you that you will live your life again, and again, and again, exactly as you have lived it, with no escape and no revision. Would that thought crush you, he asked? Or would you throw yourself at the demon's feet and call it divine?

That is the test. Not what you believe about eternity in the abstract. What you actually feel, in your body, when you imagine having to do it all again.

Most people, if they're honest, feel something in the vicinity of mild horror. Nietzsche thought this was extremely useful information about the quality of your life.

The point is not whether the recurrence is literally true. The point is what your reaction to it tells you. If the thought of living your life forever fills you with despair, Nietzsche would like a quiet word about the choices you have been making.

Enter Bill Murray

Phil Connors, the character Bill Murray plays in 'Groundhog Day', is not a philosopher. He is a cynical, self-absorbed Pittsburgh weatherman who is sent to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to cover the annual groundhog ceremony, which he considers beneath him. He is not, at the start of the film, a person whose life you would particularly want to recur.

And then it does. February 2nd. Over and over. Identical in every detail. The same alarm clock. The same song. The same groundhog.

What Ramis understood, and what makes the film quietly extraordinary beneath its comic surface, is that the time loop is not the punishment. The time loop is the condition. What Phil does with it is the question.

His first response is to use the repetition for selfish ends. He learns what women want to hear. He robs an armoured car. He eats whatever he likes with no consequences. He pursues his producer Rita with the calculated patience of someone who has unlimited attempts and no ethical qualms about any of them.

This is, roughly, the nihilist response to eternity. If nothing matters and nothing sticks, do what you want.

Nietzsche would have found this deeply unimaginative.

The Phase Nobody Talks About

There is a section of 'Groundhog Day' that tends to get glossed over in casual retellings, which is the part where Phil tries to die.

Having exhausted hedonism and found it hollow, he attempts suicide. Repeatedly. In a variety of increasingly creative ways. He drives off a cliff. He electrocutes himself with a toaster. He steps in front of a truck. He wakes up each time to Sonny and Cher at six in the morning, unchanged and unharmed, which is either a profound metaphor or an extremely good joke, and is, in fact, both.

This is the nihilist endgame: if nothing can be changed and nothing matters, why continue? It is the response Nietzsche most feared - not wickedness, but the paralysis of meaninglessness. The will that turns against itself because it cannot find anything worth willing.

Nietzsche called this passive nihilism. The giving up. The lying down. The toaster in the bath. He considered it the greatest danger facing modern humanity, which gives 'Groundhog Day' a somewhat darker subtext than most people remember.

What Nietzsche Actually Wanted

Here is where the film becomes, if you will forgive me, genuinely philosophical.

Phil does not stay in the toaster-in-the-bath phase. Something shifts. Slowly, awkwardly, without any single dramatic moment of conversion, he begins to use the repetition differently. He learns to play the piano. Not to impress Rita. Not because it will lead anywhere. Because the playing itself is worth doing. He learns the names of the townspeople. He learns where the boy falls out of the tree and catches him before he hits the ground. He learns to be present to a day he has lived hundreds of times as though it is the only day there is.

This is, almost precisely, what Nietzsche meant by the Eternal Recurrence as a positive idea rather than a terrifying one. Not the grim endurance of repetition. The transformation of your relationship to the moment you are actually in. The decision, and it is a decision, to live in such a way that you would be willing to live it forever.

Nietzsche called the person capable of this the Übermensch, which gets translated as Superman and immediately conjures the wrong image entirely. He did not mean a person of extraordinary power. He meant a person who has stopped waiting for life to become meaningful somewhere else, at some other time, under better circumstances and has decided to make it meaningful here, with what is actually available, which is only ever now.

Phil Connors, by the end of the film, is living as though February 2nd in Punxsutawney is worth living forever. And it turns out, when he gets there, that it is.

The Detail That Makes It Personal

There is a footnote to all of this that I find quietly devastating.

Nietzsche, when he first conceived of the Eternal Recurrence, was walking near a lake in Switzerland. He described it as the most powerful thought that had ever occurred to him. He spent years trying to work out whether he personally could affirm it - whether his own life, with its migraines and its loneliness and the woman who turned him down twice and the university that quietly stopped inviting him back and the years of near-blindness and the growing sense that nobody understood what he was trying to say - whether all of that was worth a yes.

In January 1889, in Turin, he saw a horse being flogged in the street. He ran to the horse, threw his arms around its neck, and collapsed. He never recovered his mind. He lived another eleven years, cared for by his mother and then by his sister, who proceeded to edit his work in ways that would have appalled him. He died in 1900.

Whether Nietzsche managed, in the end, to affirm his own life, to say yes to the recurrence of everything that happened to him, is a question nobody can answer.

Bill Murray managed it in Punxsutawney. Nietzsche, who invented the idea, may not have managed it in Turin. Philosophy is full of these small ironies.

What This Means for a Tuesday in March

The Eternal Recurrence is not, in the end, a cosmological claim. It is a practical one. It is asking you, right now, about the day you are currently living.

Not whether the day is extraordinary. Not whether it is going well. Whether you are living it in such a way that - if you had to - you could say yes to it. Yes to this. Yes again. Yes forever.

Most of us, most of the time, are living in a kind of provisional relationship with our own lives. As though the real thing is coming. As though once certain conditions are met, such as the job, the relationship, the move, the resolution of the thing that has been unresolved for three years, then we will begin. Then it will be worth affirming.

Nietzsche thought this was the fundamental error. 'Groundhog Day' demonstrates it with considerably more entertainment value.

The alarm goes off. Sonny and Cher start singing. It is February 2nd, again, and it is the only day there is, and the question - the only question, really - is what you are going to do with it this time.

I'm Kathy Postelle Rixon, researcher at Cambridge, Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and shamanic practitioner. I think about time, recurrence, and what it means to actually say yes to a life rather than wait for a better one with some regularity. If this sparked something, I'd love to hear from you at kathy@magicinharmony.com or at www.magicinharmony.com.

If your day repeated forever, would you change how you're living it? I'd genuinely love to know.