“Time is a flat circle.” Five words that remind of a bright common cultural memory. 1 season True detective. Matthew McConaughey, playing Rust Cole, a former homicide detective turned alcoholic, now hazy-eyed with paranoia and desperation. Colors instantly appear on your mental TV screen. The wood paneling of the interrogation room where Cole reopens old wounds from his unfinished business. Red and white Lone Star beer cans that he sucks dry and turns into visual aids. The sentence itself stands for everything that fascinated us about this character. Not just the feeling that Cole saw to the center of reality and tragically survived, but the certainty that, as strange as it sounds, his description of the truths he saw is accurate, and we should try to understand him.
But do the words - time - a flat circle mean anything? If yes, then? And if not, does it matter?
Friedrich Nietzsche and the Eternal Return
The phrase is spoken in episode 5. The show is set in 2012 but mostly consists of flashbacks to 1995 when Cole and his former partner Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) seem to have solved the murder of Dora Lange. The man they thought was the killer, a drugged meth occultist named Reggie LeDoux, was the first to say those words after they tracked him down to his hideout in the Louisiana Outback. “I know what will happen next… you will do it again. Time is a flat circle.”
“What is this, Nietzsche?! Shut up, Cole says. Shortly thereafter, Hart discovers two children being held captive on Ledoux’s property and decides to execute him. So it turns out those were his last words.
Cole is right that Ledoux is paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19th-century German philosopher whose work Ledoux clearly came across. They are taken from Nietzsche’s book Thus spoke Zarathustra, which is one of several places where he wrote about the concept of “eternal repetition”. Eternal return is the idea that since time is infinite, everything will eventually repeat itself, and therefore your life will repeat itself an infinite number of times, each time in exactly the same way.
Thus spoke Zarathustra the work is in fact a work of fiction, although it is structured as a series of lectures delivered by Zarathustra, a sage who is generally believed to be saying what Nietzsche himself believed. Zarathustra is a bit like Rasta Cole; he tends to monologue and reacts to frustration by disappearing for years to be alone. And, as in True detectivehe first hears the words “time is a circle” from the antagonist, a rival hermit with whom he quarrels on a mountain plateau.
But for Nietzsche, the idea of eternal return was a cause for celebration. He saw in it “the highest of all possible formulas of a yes-saying philosophy.” The best reason why you should be happy to exist even if you have given up believing in a spiritual afterlife. The idea is that eternal return is great news if you turn your life into something you need. want experience an infinite number of times.
The natural reaction to this might be: “Well, if the eternal return is real, let’s all make sure that our life is joyful and pleasant, with plenty of pillows.” Nietzsche was not about that. For him, the eternal return suggested that instead one should strive for a higher state of being and seek meaning in conflict and struggle. Zarathustra, lecturing to the masses, directly puts the choice: to break through to the highest plane or to become the “last people” who renounced transcendence, because they “have found happiness.” But they do not understand him at all and shout back: “Make us these last people!” This is one of the many failures that Zarathustra experiences.
For a more sophisticated and perhaps more accurate interpretation of Nietzsche’s ideas, you can start with Lawrence Khatab’s essay Time Is a Flat Circle: Nietzsche’s Concept of Eternal Return, which is available to read online.
“Time is a flat circle” in popular usage
If you do a quick search for “time is a flat circle” on Twitter, you’ll see that it’s an expression in daily rotation, like what you say when a recent event is similar to something that happened in the past. Not so different from “history repeats itself” or even just “wow, deja vu”.
It is clear that its meaning as an idiom has deviated far from what Nietzsche had in mind. But it’s not that far from Rust Cole’s intentions. As he says these words, he is sitting in an interrogation room in 2012 looking at photographs of a recent murder that looks just as gruesome as the one he supposedly solved in 1995. “This is a world where nothing is revealed,” he begins. The monologue begins with regret that systemic problems will never disappear. But it quickly turns into a sincere consideration of the eternal return. “Someone once told me that “time is a flat circle”. Everything we have ever done or will do, we will do again and again.” For Cole, the eternal return is a terrifying concept, because it means that the children who are victims of Reggie Ledoux will be forced to relive these events over and over again, for eternity.
Is the idea of eternal return really so strongly connected to the patterns of history and human behavior that we can observe as part of life? Maybe not too much, intellectually. But there is clearly a poetic association with the creator of the series. Nick Pizzolatto, and he relayed this association to Cole. And now, through a single line of dialogue, two concepts are connected.
What is M-theory?
You may remember that Cole exemplifies the “flat circle” concept by effectively crushing an empty beer can. If so, then the memory is false. Cole is holding a broken beer can as an example of what a circle looks like, but that moment comes in a later scene when he explains the concept of M-theory, or “M-brane theory” as he calls it.
M-theory comes from theoretical physics. It is the currently leading “theory of everything” based on consensus on the best way to describe aspects of our physical reality that are not only far beyond our ability to observe, but are at the furthest limit of who we are. capable of understanding. Many of these ideas are so far from reality that they can only be understood through abstractions. One of the precepts of m-theory is that in addition to the three physical dimensions that humans can perceive and one dimension of time, there are seven more space-time dimensions that we cannot experience, for a total of 11.
Although the existence of 11 dimensions is confirmed by mathematics (somehow), this can only be understood by analogy. One common way to help people imagine what a fourth physical dimension would be like is to ask them to imagine a being that only lived in a 2D slice of our 3D reality. If the sphere were to pass through their plane of existence, they would perceive only its two-dimensional part: a flat circle. Now imagine a 4D being perceiving us in the same way. What we perceive as a sphere is actually just a three-dimensional “slice” of a four-dimensional shape.
Cole, being himself a higher level being, empathizes with these theoretical 11 dimensional beings looking down on us. He further imagines that time, which is a temporal dimension to us, can be a physical dimension to them, and that they can simultaneously perceive every moment that has ever existed, as clearly as we can see every floor of a building from the street. He reverses the usual way of expressing this difference in perspective by saying that reality for us is a sphere, “but for them it is a circle.” This is consistent with the eternal return. If time, from some points of view, is a physical dimension, then all moments occur constantly. This is another way of saying that the past is more alive than it seems.
Coincidentally, if you want to see a further rendering of a 4D sphere or structure in which time is a physical dimension, there are few better places than Purefer NolanX interstellar, also featuring McConaughey.
Arthur Schopenhauer and anti-natalism
Rounding things off is another major overt philosophical influence on True detective, Arthur Schopenhauer. As Cole tells Hart when they first get to know each other, “I’m philosophically a pessimist.” He then delivers another iconic monologue about human consciousness as a tragic evolutionary mistake that humanity must correct by agreeing to stop having children in order to voluntarily die out. Hart, a more typical Louisiana detective, resents Cole’s nihilism.
It is widely known that this monologue is based on the reflections of Arthur Schopenhauer (through the novelist Thomas Ligotti). Schopenhauer, also considered a pessimist, believed that life is dominated by vain and insatiable desires, to which we helplessly submit. Like Cole, he thought it would be more worthy to ignore all our impulses, including the desire to reproduce.
It’s funny that the people who are most knowledgeable about True detectivePhilosophical influences (and there’s a whole book on the subject) can be a little oversensitive to how they mix their sources. For example, Schopenhauer had a huge influence on Nietzsche, but they had incompatible ideas. Neither believed in an afterlife, but Schopenhauer believed that death was followed by non-existence; Nietzsche did not believe in this escape. Nietzsche was life-affirming; Schopenhauer denied life. How can one person subscribe to both views?
Of course, you can always find ways to solve this problem within the fictional reality of the show. Maybe Cole knows about Nietzsche, but sincerely believes in Schopenhauer. Or perhaps between 1995 and 2012 he changed his mind. All of these arguments have been put forward, but the best explanation is that fiction has different rules than philosophy and consistency is less important. Detective Rust Cole is a theoretical construct very similar to the 11th dimension. The canonical true detective, the coolest. Too cool to be killed, too perceptive to misunderstand reality in any aspect of it. Such a character can only be expressed through analogy. They can’t just accept that Schopenhauer was right - that would make Schopenhauer a real sleuth. They must be able to synthesize all the greatest philosophers of history into one great truth. It will never be expressed, the audience just needs to understand that this over-understanding is part of Cole’s personal thoughts, which we will only get a glimpse of. Fiction is full of such superhuman characters. Cole is just a uniquely compelling version of one of them.
True detective returns with a fourth season in 2023. The exact date of its airing remains a mystery.
Source: Collider
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