The “second wave” of the pandemic is here – so how can we cope with a repeat of the dreadful scenario that unfolded earlier this year? This is how Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard might answer.

We had been talking about it for so long, it felt like it was never going to happen... Yet here it is: the famous “second wave” of Covid-19. What kind of emotions does this repetition trigger in us? Fear, probably – of not being strong enough to face it. Healthcare workers are exhausted from the springtime pandemic; young people aren't their usual selves either; not to mention the first concerned: the elderly. Will we manage to rise to the challenge? What makes it so much worse is that the same phenomenon is now repeating itself mechanically, to ridiculous, almost humiliating effect. We've already been through the anxiety, the restrictions, the fatigue, the confinement... Must we really endure it all again? The reoccurrence of events is a great philosophical question, and for pessimists like Schopenhauer, it proves our life has no meaning. We never move forward; we just fall back down. Nietzsche, on the other hand, finds heroic meaning in repetition. To accept the return of something, again and again, is to say a big “yes” to life. As for Danish philosopher Søren Kierekaard, he ascribes aesthetic meaning to repetition, which can be willed, chosen, and explored... How about you? How do you feel about repetition?


A tragic reoccurrence

What do philosophers think about these gloomy paradoxes? Some see it as confirmation of the idea that life – apart from the fact that it always ends badly – really is without hope. We might feel like we're making progress, changing, discovering new beings and territories, but in reality, we only ever fall back on the same old routines and worries. You think your second partner will bring you the joy your first partner didn't? Within a few years of your second marriage you find out just how wrong you were. You think your career change will solve the problem of alienation at work? You soon find out that running a bed and breakfast or an NGO is no sinecure.


The clock of human life is wound up anew, to repeat the same old piece it has played innumerable times before […], with insignificant variations’

Arthur Schopenhauer


Arthur Schopenhauer, the most pessimistic of modern philosophers, would be the spiritual leader of all those doomsdayers who spent the last several months predicting a second wave, just as deadly as the first. “Because the nature of all things is at bottom one”, he writes, “all knowledge of them is necessarily tautological. If now this nature once becomes comprehended, as by those most perfect intelligences it soon would be comprehended, what would then remain but the wearisomeness of mere repetition through an infinite time?” (The World as Will and Idea) Even when we desire something pleasant, we suffer from our inability to obtain it; and when our desire is fulfilled, we fall back into boredom. “Thus life swings like a pe…

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