QuestionsDoes life have a meaning?"The greatest weight": would you want to live your life again?
Does life have a meaning?A meaning to create

"The greatest weight": would you want to live your life again?

The eternal recurrence, amor fati (Nietzsche)

Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 · 1900God is dead: new values must be created.
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What it claims

Meaning is not given: it is created, by saying yes to one's life as it is (amor fati), to the point of being able to want its return. One must live so as to want this return.

Why

A meaning we create is worth something only if it survives living our life again exactly: we curse it, or love it enough to want it back.

In short

""The greatest weight": would you want to live your life again?" is an argument by Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science, §341 and §276 (1882); Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885)) on the question "Does life have a meaning?" (answer: a meaning to create). Its claim: Meaning is not given: it is created, by saying yes to one's life as it is (amor fati), to the point of being able to want its return. One must live so as to want this return. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Gay Science, §341 and §276 (1882); Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885)
Valid with an implicit premise

A demon tells you: this life, exactly as you have lived it, with every pain and every joy, you will have to live again an endless number of times. Would you throw yourself down and curse him, or answer: "You are a god"? For Nietzsche, no meaning is given to us from above: man is the one who puts values into things. The real question is therefore whether your own meaning holds up against this test. One must live so as to be able to want the return of one's life: this is amor fati, the love of what is necessary. Nietzsche knows the test can crush: his Zarathustra himself is seized by disgust at the thought of the return. People still debate whether the recurrence is a claim about the world or only a thought experiment.

P1Meaning is not a given of the world: it is man who puts values into things and who creates the meaning of things, a human meaning.
P2A created meaning is worth something for a life only if it stands the test of the recurrence: if one must live this life again, identical in everything, one either curses it (so its meaning was false) or blesses it, and one must then love life enough to desire nothing more than this eternal confirmation.
P3 · implicit premiseA life whose return one can want has a real meaning: the yes one says to it is not a consolation or an illusion, it is what gives it its value.
Therefore meaning is not given: it is created, by saying yes to one's life as it is (amor fati), to the point of being able to want its return. One must live so as to want this return.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3, the computer finds a world where no meaning is given, where someone wants the return of their life, and yet that life has no meaning: the yes is then only a passing feeling.
Valid with P3. P1 rules out given meaning. P2 says that wanting the return amounts to a total yes to one's life. P3 says a total yes is a real meaning. Without P3, one can grant that someone says yes to their life and hold that this yes is only a mood, not a meaning. This is the most debated point. Another fragile point: the conclusion is a conditional (if you can want the return, then you have created a meaning), not a promise that everyone succeeds. The text does not hide it: the test may also "crush".
Analogy. Think of a song you love so much that you would play it on a loop without ever tiring of it. No one told you it was worth anything: your wish to hear it again shows it. Nietzsche asks the same question about your whole life, including the bad stretches, which you cannot skip.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Schopenhauer 1819 · attacks premise 2

Schopenhauer answers the demon's question in advance: near the end of his life, a man who is both thoughtful and sincere would perhaps not wish to live it again, and would much rather prefer nothingness. For him every life is a series of great and small misfortunes. If that is true, the great majority would curse the demon, and the meaning Nietzsche wants to create would rest on a yes that almost nobody can honestly say.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Nietzsche in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Nietzsche does not answer this passage here. He read Schopenhauer, but we have no text in which he answers this sentence. His own texts concede part of the objection: the demon can crush, and Zarathustra himself is seized by disgust at the idea that even the smallest man will return. The basic disagreement remains: for Schopenhauer, the fact that life is not desirable is an observation about the world; for Nietzsche, the task of life is precisely to become affirmable, through amor fati. See also the argument "The pendulum: from suffering to boredom" (schopenhauer-pendule).
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus 1942 · attacks premise 3

Camus goes as far as Nietzsche in the yes, but he refuses the word "meaning". He writes that life "will be lived all the better if it has no meaning". For him Sisyphus's yes creates nothing: it is the lucidity of someone who looks at his rock without hope and does not turn away. Calling this yes a "meaning" is taking back with one hand what was removed with the other.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1942, after the author's death (1900).
The debate goes on (our summary) Nietzsche died in 1900 and cannot answer Camus. The two share a lot: a world with no given meaning, a yes to a repeated life, and even a close formula ("He too concludes that all is well" says Camus of Sisyphus). The difference is one of vocabulary as much as substance: Camus keeps the face-off with the absurd, Nietzsche speaks of the creation of values. See the argument "Living without appeal" (camus-absurde-refus-suicide).
R
R. Lanier Anderson (summary of the cosmological reading) 2017 · attacks premise 2

Is the recurrence a thought experiment or a claim about the world? According to the Stanford Encyclopedia, the early readers saw it mostly as a cosmological hypothesis about the structure of time or fate, whereas many recent readers see it as a practical test of whether one has lived well. If the recurrence is a fact, the argument changes: the question is no longer what one would want, but how to be reconciled with what returns anyway.

Nietzsche replies
Z
Zarathustra (his animals' words) A text pointing toward the cosmological reading
In "The Convalescent", Zarathustra's animals tell him he will return eternally to this same life, identical in the great and in the small. This passage speaks of a real return of the same life, not a mere question put to someone.
The debate goes on (our summary) It is the animals who speak, not Zarathustra, who lies with his eyes closed and then answers them that they have already made "a barrel-organ tune" of it. Defenders of the "thought experiment" reading rely on this detail and on the text of §341, which is a question ("What if…?"). Defenders of the cosmological reading answer that the Convalescent text does assert the return. The debate remains open. The argument holds either way for premise P2: even if the return is a fact, how one receives it (cursing or blessing it) is still what gives or denies meaning.