What does the expression “Time is a flat circle” mean?
The circular nature of the phrase is self-evident. In perspective, time can be either an ascending line or a descending line, and this phrase suggests that they are the same thing. From a scientific perspective, it is not possible to travel into one’s own past but only down memory lane which obscures one’s future (relative time). From a spiritual perspective this idea could represent reincarnation as eventuality eventually everyone will live every life.
The expression “time is a flat circle” refers to Nietzsche principle of eternal recurrence and concludes that an eternal return can be conceptualized as happening on a flat plane. This leads him to ask what underlying mechanism makes such cycles return in such manner rather than shuffling randomly.
It is the echo of a conscious being’s understanding that all moments of time share an unbounded beginning and end, and that periods to “destiny” or “fate” are illusory.
The analogy, “time is a circle,” refers to the cyclical nature of a ring. The outer edge, which represents our continuum in (what we call) physical space-time, has no beginning and no end. So what lies beyond that? Time as a finite entity only ends with death; so if it had been possible for him to have seen time as it really is then he should have perished long ago just from weariness at the sheer meaninglessness of life on Earth.
This expression is taken from a monologue given by the prisoner in season 1 of the popular American TV show, “Breaking Bad”.
The phrase is an allusion to one of Nietzsche’s most famous philosophical theories, known as eternal recurrence. As an atheist, Nietzsche didn’t believe in the Bible’s account of creation and that life ends with death and resurrection. Rather he believed that it repeated itself infinitely often-creating what he called “the great year”. Eternal recurrences would happen over and over again until they formed cycles or circles that represented time (hence the “flat circle”).
It is a quote from “True Detective” a neo-noir television drama series created by Nic Pizzolatto.
It’s an allusion to the philosophy of Nietzsche, who wrote “What you call time I call eternity.” An eternal circle has no beginning and it has no end, so that represents the idea of eternity.
Nietzsche’s argument for this was that if someone can look backwards, they could then see forwards also. So to accept his reasoning would be extrapolated as being equal parts backwardness & forwardsness which equals circularity (or flatness). He therefore constructs his thought experiment by asserting “Time is not linear,” and goes on to suggest there are many other dimensions of reality we cannot fully grasp.
It’s often said by people who like to talk in circles.
Time is a flat circle is a philosophical metaphor coined by the writer and director, Nic Pizzolatto, for his critically acclaimed HBO series, “True Detective.” The line was spoken in the first season. If you’ve spent much time pondering it’s meaning you may have come up with your own answer. And that might be the best answer anyone has yet (pun intended).
It means that time is cyclical and the future always morphs into the past.
The term “time is a flat circle” originates from Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous aphorism in Twilight of the Idols, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is – eternity.” His point was that if you don’t ask people who are outside of linear time what they think of it, their answer isn’t relevant. Nietzsche’s underlying concept was one drawn from Heraclitus, which states that everything changes and nothing remains still
Time is a flat circle means that in order to understand the present, you must look into the past. While literally any point in time can be seen as always being “now”, there are points of time which exhibit more relevance than others, depending on their distance from the present.
The phrase “time is a flat circle” was coined by author and philosopher Thomas Ligotti. It is based on the premise that history and significance emerge not from events themselves but through how we narrate them before moving to other topics. In this sense, rather than travelling endlessly forward in time, we are perpetually circling back due to our continual revisiting of past times.
The expression means that one will perpetually live through and relive the same events over and over again.
The idea is based on some of Nietzsche’s earlier thoughts with circular time, in which past recur as future, future presents itself as past but most often in a different context or variant for others to view. This is not to be taken literally because it does not match anything we know about scientific understanding of material reality; rather, it’s an abstraction from our intuition for connections between cause and effect based on fixed linear time (such direct consequences). Ironically he calls this “the heaviest weight.” Dude…consequences are always heavy!
Time is a flat circle – an analogy of simultaneity.
The expression can be read two ways: as a statement about the nature of time and as suggesting that actions cause consequences, which in turn cause those same actions. It’s circular time, for one big half-measure around the flagpole of life – in every moment from birth to death, what goes around comes around or what goes up must come down again.
