TED CHIANG’S “STORY OF YOUR LIFE”

The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), is famous for his pronouncement that “God is dead.” What he meant was that in the mid-to-late nineteenth century most Europeans no longer believed in God, and he was questioning why, if that were so, they still adhered to a Christian code of ethics, which commanded people to be meek and humble in this life so they could reap the rewards of a blissful afterlife. If there is no God and hence no heaven, he argued, shouldn’t we be following, instead, a moral code that encourages us to take advantage of what THIS life has to offer, since, in the end, there is no other? To encourage a change in attitude in his fellow Europeans, he proposed a “transvaluation” (or reversal) of contemporary moral values, which would lead to a greater appreciation for the rewards of this life. To give people an idea of what this new (non-Christian) ethics would look like, he set forth his doctrine of eternal recurrence. He introduced this initially as a physical theory, but it is not clear whether he actually believed this or whether he thought that his contemporaries, who were only prepared to accept scientific evidence, would embrace the doctrine only if it were presented in the form of a physical theory. In this “theory,” Nietzsche asked his contemporaries to accept two physical laws as axiomatic: (1) that time is endless or eternal and (2) that the amount of matter and/or energy in the universe is finite. With infinite time and a finite amount of matter, Nietzsche argues, every event in our lives and in the lives of others is destined at some point to recurring: We are not living our lives for the first (and last) time, as it may appear to us now, but we have all been here before doing exactly what we are doing now, and we are destined to be doing it again at some point in the distant future. With the knowledge that all the decisions we make now are destined to be repeated endlessly, Nietzsche hopes that everything we do now will take on added – and even infinite – importance and that it will reinforce our resolve to make this one life – the only life we have – count. For Nietzsche, it would be a sign of a life well-led if, at the end of it, one could say that one would be willing to relive it all over again – the bad as well as the good.

What role do you think the idea of eternal recurrence plays in Ted Chiang’s tale, “Story of Your Life”? What do you think is the point or moral of this story? Based on what happens in the rest of the story, do you think that the protagonist, Dr. Louise Banks, knows why the heptapods finally left? Why or why not?