True Detective Season 1, Episode 2

In as much as we are "thrown" into the circumstances of our existence, as Heidegger famously put it, we don't seem to have a lot of choice in the matter, or in the facticity of our determinate being. Yet, according to "Death of God" theologian Paul Tillich, it takes a certain amount of "courage to be." For Tillich this courage counts as freely chosen even though the rest of being has already been determined by the situation into which we have been thrown. Meaninglessness and death seem to follow more obviously from our unnatural awareness of the evil state of affairs in which conscious being finds itself. Rust Cole famously asserts along with Sophocles that, "It would have been better not to have been born." Nietzsche's famous counter argument is contained in his "Doctrine of the Eternal Return," which is read pessimistically in True Detective as the "Flat Circle." Nietzsche taught like Tillich that our freedom is found in the choice of whether or not to embrace the determinations of our given being or to passively fall into nihilism. For these thinkers being required an active, creative resist to meaningless, which is why "to-be" was an act of intense courage. Cole's "Antinatalism" holds that life is not good, and so the promise of the flat circle is the torture of an eternal return of what is essentially evil.

https://youtu.be/XgU1RmNNsZg

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