A Stockbroker's Philosophy

[Brian Roberts]

I have a small stock portfolio, created during 40 odd years as a librarian.  I get a weekly email from the man who manages the stocks, who quotes some super-stockbroker who manages the entire company.

This week's email began:  "Time is a flat circle. Nothing happened this week that hasn’t happened before."  I researched it, and apparently he is paraphrasiing (without attribution) Matthew McConnaghy's character in True Detective: "Time is a flat circle. Everything we have done or will do we will do over and over and over again—forever".  Which apparently is a paraphrase of Nietzsche's "doctine of eternal recurrence."

And Nietzsche wept.......

I'd really be more comfortable if they used Tarot, or the I-Ching to manage my stocks.  Anyway I found this email both bizarre and funny because of its origins.

Tqb,

I love the reference to Nietzsche's "Eternal Recurrence." I love his gnomist, aphoristic style in many of his works. I feel he is quite misunderstood.........I realize Sartre coined the term, "Existentialism," but retroactively appointed Nietzsche as a janissary thereof. Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Camus, Beckett and others fall under this appellation as well.
You had requested texts on phenomenology- Sartre's Nausea would be a seminal work, albeit fiction. It predates Being and Nothingness but I have learned that if you want to 
isolate a philosopher's presuppositions, query his fiction. Hope it helps......