Walter Kaufmann, in his introduction to his translation of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science quotes a passage.
There’s a passage from Heinrich Heine which Walter Kaufmann cites in his introduction to his translation of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. He says it comes from a diary entry of Nietzsche’s and explains context around eternal recurrence. There’s a woman explaining to a man how they will forever find themselves again in this configuration, in this circumstance, explaining the circumstance they find themselves in, again and again. Of all the ways atoms and molecules could reconstitute over an infinite span of time we will find ourselves here, again.
It is a capital R Romantic read of probability. Of statistics. Of how we come to be in the world and where we’ll find ourselves. It is, in many ways, also gothic. With a capital H for Horror.
It ignores entropy. It is silent, of course, on the findings that would lay the foundation of quantum mechanics. Because that happens in the future. Where there are more possible states of existence. More possibilities. The future has more possibilities than the past.
Looking backward forecloses possibilities, calls to woe and anger and regret.. Casts us into liits of what greatness can be. Joy is forward. And newness. And options. And creativity.
And excitement.
EXCAVATION
Artemis II, the Integrity Crew in an Orion space craft powered by the Space Launch System going deeper into space than any humans have, ever.
Explorers reaching the furthest, fulfilling another step in a bold vision. On reaching the milestone of human exploration wishing for it to be quickly broken. For us to keep going. Keep going.
APPLICATION
The leaders or founders of many of the top wealth-generating public companies have all been inspired by space.
The argument here has a direct bearing on how leaders and decision makers orient themselves in time. The backward-looking posture that the Heine quote Kaufmann uses to frame eternal recurrence encode the sense that all configurations have been and will be again, is not merely a philosophical position. It is an emotional one, and it produces specific cognitive consequences. Leaders who orient primarily toward precedent, toward what has worked before, toward the patterns of the past, are operating from the same assumption Heine’s character makes: that the future is a reconfiguration of what already exists. That assumption systematically undervalues the genuinely new.
Quantum mechanics states this in fact, in physics and as a framework for thinking about possibility. The future contains more possible states than the past. This is not optimism. It is a structural feature of how time and probability work. Every decision made forward-facing has access to a wider option set than any decision made by looking backward. The Last Responsible Moment, the real options framework, the practice of emotional imagining, all of these tools are built on the same underlying insight: the future is genuinely open in a way the past is not. The capacity to remain oriented toward that openness is a competitive advantage.
Artemis II makes this concrete. The Integrity crew going deeper into space than any humans have gone is not a recurrence. It is a threshold. And the response to a threshold, the response the post identifies, is not to pause and reflect on how far we have come but to wish the milestone broken as quickly as possible. That is the disposition of the strategically patient leader who has genuinely internalized a stance where joy, optionality, and creative possibility all point in the same direction. Forward.
Of course, it is scarier and harder to lead there or even to sit comfortably with the unknown. That is the role of vision and being a great communicator.
Nietzsche’s greatest weight borrows Descartes’ demon and asks if we’d be pleased to know everything repeats. The Drunken Song affirms joy opposing optionality in a movement self surpassing.
EXCAVATION
Nietzsche: The Gay Science (aphorism 341), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (79)
Walter Kaufmann: Introduction to The Gay Science, on Eternal Recurrence
APPLICATION
Nietzsche’s greatest weight borrows Descartes’ demon not to induce doubt but to demand affirmation. The question is not whether you can be certain but whether you can bear repetition, whether your relationship to your own choices is one of genuine commitment or concealed endurance. That distinction is actionable for decision making in a way that most frameworks miss.
The standard case for optionality is that keeping choices open preserves flexibility and reduces regret. That case is sound for tame uncertainty, where the variables are knowable and the future is a matter of calculation. But Nietzsche’s Drunken Song points to something the optionality framework does not account for: the form of joy that only becomes available through full commitment, through the willingness to foreclose alternatives and inhabit a path so completely that self-surpassing becomes possible. You cannot surpass what you have not fully entered.
Not all foreclosure of options is the same move. There is foreclosure out of fear, where uncertainty is intolerable and the defined outcome feels safer than the open field. There is foreclosure out of calculation, where the expected value of commitment outweighs the value of remaining flexible. Or, where foreclosure is a failure in framing, of widening the aperture of vision, of denying the flexibility of reality. And there is a third kind, closer to what Nietzsche is describing: foreclosure out of conviction, where other variables compel a path that a pure optionality analysis would reject.
What is clear is Nietzsche’s connecting emotion to decision making, particularly around optionality. To paraphrase: Joy wants eternal recurrence. Woe wants options.
Hume’s induction problem stems from the Cartesian silo. Separating causality from experience, from operating in the world. Observation is not separate from perception.
Without the silo, instrumentalism is sufficient reason, sufficient logic.
Hume’s problem can be restated as ” if you separate reason from existence, reason from being in the world, then the explanatory value of observation is only custom. … “
Or further “if you separate reason from existence, reason from being in the world, then induction makes no sense.” But, since induction works, the reverse is more accurate: it makes no sense to separate mind from body, observation from philosophical reasoning. It makes no sense to pretend we don’t live in the world.
That being said, there is clear emotional, intellectual and instrumentalist value in surfacing and exploring seemingly non-sensical paths to see what’s there. Optionality has value. Expanding our vistas has value. Pushing against norms has value. Especially in this reading: saying something as experientially fundamental as causality is a norm, a habit, a custom says too that all norms, habits and customs could be based on nothing, no logic, no reason. (Except, being in the world. Experience speaks to the force of custom.)
Circling back to Cartesian doubt. We can now see how skepticism, while setting the table for these explorations and expansions, can receive pushback. It can be seen as denying the validity of living / the lived, embodied experience. It privileges mind over mind in body, over mind and body. This can quickly become a dead end.
This same seemingly rational privileging is behind AI fears as well as the temptation to doom. Albeit calm doom.
And so the need to embrace the solidity of uncertainty beyond skepticism. Believe in the observed adaptability and Darwinian fitness we have exhibited for 10,000 years, particularly our co-adaptation with the tools and built environment we create.
Don’t let the emotional baggage of doom impair your decision making or worse, impair joyful imagining of the present and the possibilities of what comes next.
APPLICATION
For strategic decision making: The value of optionality, affective reason and knowing there’s always another move. Optimism overcomes negativity bias and creates new opportunities / stops available opportunities from being overlooked.
Feeling Wagner’s depths of passion, depth of thought and construction, in Tristan und Isolde, changes my understanding of -and of the force of -Nietzsche. What he strove to do, in thought, construction and will.
Experiencing Tristan und Isolde (and what an experience the Yuval Sharon production at the Met is) should be a prerequisite for reading Nietzsche – particularly the Gay Science (with a Prelude in Rhymes and Appendix of Song). One feels the literary and operatic power he was going for in Zarathustra.
It is mind (and spirit) opening to now have this experience.
I had no idea.
EXTENSION
Emotion frames intellectual understanding. Intellectual imagination drives a work of emotion. Even after many reads, intersection, particularly from a different medium, creates new depth, new perspectives.
The Bride reads Frankenstein as dispossession. The creature is dis possessed by Victor. Victor seeks to make that permanent. Victor’s story as a haunting and hunting. The creature seeks communion as possessed by a community. The creatures seeks possession of a companion to possess and be possessed. The creature haunts and is haunted (nee hunting for both).
Ida is possessed. Mary Shelley possesses to the brink of emptiness. Not the The Bride of anything. Not objec petit a. Not objec A. Self possessed.
The creature finds an initial path through a woman (the doctor, Penelope – ever raveling and unraveling the loom). The doctor speaks in anachronism. Time changes, can change. Or the time field collapses. Penelope Cruz resolves one plot line on the nose. The revolution of brain attack plot and also sub-plot, also subterfuge. Many scenes of Weimar club explosiveness. And dreams of what the Movies tell us: Revolting | Illusion.
Dada in its telling.
Perhaps, Dada in its message.
REFERENTS
Joker, Joker: Folie a Deux
Hildur Guðnadóttir
Mel Brooks
Young Frankenstein
Babylon Berlin
Dada Manifestos
The Hundred Headless Woman by Max Ernst?
Doom Patrol doing Dada
Gerard Way
Eraserhead | David Lynch
- An economy is not about how many people are employed. It is about how much those people can produce. AI is a productivity booster. Entrepreneurs (when allowed to) will find ways to leverage any and all resources to create marginal value, marginal advantage. If someone could foresee what an entire labor force or section of a labor force would be doing in 5-10 years, they’d probably be working on a way to make money off it and not prognosticating about it. People engaged with AI on a business level are already using it to create marginal value and thinking of ways to leverage it further.
- For most of human history, people were valued based on things like how much they could carry or build or serve. When commerce became more free, accessible, people were able to be valued by how much value they could produce, on the margin. With machines, from simple to more sophisticated, knowledge work became a reality. A thousand years ago how many rock movers imagined buildings full of software developers whose output is tooling to optimize advertising for electric toothbrushes? AI is a tool that unlocks new possibilities for what and how we can produce.
- Our minds are more than efficient prediction machines. AI models responses and automates task based on prediction algorithms. So do many parts of our brain. But our brain does much more. It interprets and selects from a huge amount of sensory input every moment. It assigns significance or otherwise to the input, determining what to pay attention to and how. This is based on emotions, a deep swath of experience and memory which create patterns. It is also based on reasoning, when it gets to that part of the brain, after it is filtered through the signification heuristics of emotion, experience and pattern. These pre-reasoning elements, and even extreme reasoning elements, allow us to explore and experience the unknown, the unlanguaged, the inexperienced (even if it is only that it’s the first time we, as an individual, have experienced something). We can have mystical experiences, not in an exclusively religious sense. But in the sense of something that is different from reason or explainability. Our brains are part of us, embodied. We have senses. This entire organism of us, body and brain, is the foundation of our continued ability to adapt, discover, create new. This is turbocharged by communities or societies organized around and which value, adaptation, discovery, innovation.
The doomsday scenario is not AI. The doomsday scenario is stifling human creativity.
APPLICATION
The argument here maps directly onto how AI fits into the framework of strategic decision making. The greatest risk leaders face when adopting AI is not displacement but misapplication: treating AI as a prediction oracle rather than an imagination engine. The distinction matters practically. An AI that generates forecasts and recommends decisions narrows your option set to what its training data supports. An AI used to expand the range of scenarios you have considered, stress-test your assumptions, and surface possibilities you would not have imagined keeps your options open and your judgment engaged. The doomsday scenario is not AI replacing human creativity. It is leaders who outsource their judgment to AI and atrophy the cognitive and emotional capacities that make good decisions possible. Use AI the way you use any powerful tool: deliberately, with awareness of what it can and cannot do.
Suppressing hunger and appetite. Food becomes nauseas. Indistinct full and unfull.
Existential AI fears fall into the existential silo that we are separate from each other, our communities, our selves. Cartesian trap of (which spawns) nothingness
EXCAVATIONS
Maurice Merleau-Pony “Phenomenology of Perception”
Zepbound
Sartre “Being and Nothingness”
APPLICATION
Merleau-Ponty’s insight, that we do not have bodies but are bodies, has a direct bearing on how leaders make decisions under pressure. The Cartesian separation of mind from body that underlies much of traditional decision making theory produces a specific pathology: leaders who treat their physiological state as noise to be managed rather than signal to be read. When the amygdala narrows perception, when cortisol disconnects the prefrontal cortex from the heart, when heart rate variability drops, these are not interruptions of rational decision making. They are the decision making environment, operating at full force. The leader who can read their own physiological state in real time and recognize when the body is generating fear rather than insight has a material advantage. Pretending we are disembodied minds making calculations is a common and potentially costly error in high-stakes decision making.
There are higher tongues and stories to tell. Higher powers to wield.
The spoken word casting single stories resonant with each among multitudes. Lifting the speaker to a realm beyond accountable. Narratives goading loyalty and disappointment, power, reward, protection and control.
EXCAVATION
“Centering Oral Histories to Build Communities of Care in Troubling Times” by Stephanie Aubry and Elena Foulis in Journal of American Folklore 139 (551) p.77-81
Review of “Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England” by Katherine Storm Hindley. As reviewed by Lori Ann Garner in Journal of American Folklore 139 (2026) p.106
Review of “The Hay Archive of Coptic Spells on Leather: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to the Materiality of Magical Practice” The British Museum Research Publication 233, edited by Elisabeth R. O’Connell. As reviewed by Tamara L. Siuda in Journal of American Folklore 139 (2026) p.114
In some orders a project plan, a sprint board, a requirements doc, a contract, are held as boundary objects to a spirit world, a talisman offering favor or protection, an amulet passed from hand to hand, shared or sent.
There are templates for such spells; predictable outcomes for all such divinations.
EXCAVATION
Review of “Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England” by Katherine Storm Hindley. As reviewed by Lori Ann Garner in Journal of American Folklore 139 (2026) p.106
Review of “The Hay Archive of Coptic Spells on Leather: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to the Materiality of Magical Practice” The British Museum Research Publication 233, edited by Elisabeth R. O’Connell. As reviewed by Tamara L. Siuda in Journal of American Folklore 139 (2026) p.114
Like Ahab to the Sphinx, Bowman to HAL. Experience to human output, human output.
APPLICATION
Ahab and Bowman are both undone by the same error: the refusal to accept that the object of their pursuit has an existence and logic independent of their will. Ahab’s certainty about the whale and Bowman’s certainty about HAL both produce the same narrowing, a collapse of options down to a single obsessive path from which no deviation is thinkable. The strategic decision making failure here is premature commitment under conditions of genuine uncertainty. Both men had options. Both foreclosed them in favor of a narrative of inevitability. The question of where something lives, in the self, in the world, or in the interaction between the two, is not only philosophical. It is the question that determines whether a leader can still see the options that remain open, or whether they have already, like Ahab, lashed themselves to the thing that will take them under.
