Eternal Recurrence: Fanciful or Factual?
In this essay, I will put forward my contention that Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence is best seen through the metaphorical framework of the thought experiment, both from a logical and meaningful perspective. In order to do so, I will begin with a brief analysis of the idea of cyclical reality before offering an overview of the dichotomic interpretations of it. This will lead me to logically undermine Nietzsche’s few arguments for cosmological recurrence; and instead, to develop my own reasoning for taking eternal recurrence seriously in another light. This light being, the manner in which I believe Nietzsche intended this grandiose idea to be dealt; that through our perpetual fear of reliving our lives over and over, an answer for overcoming the mundane drudgery of life is unveiled.
Before its significance can be uncovered the concept, itself must be elucidated. Nietzsche proposes eternal recurrence can be thought of as the ‘hourglass of existence [being] turned over again and again’. He provokes you, with his quintessential rhetoric, to imagine ‘a demon [was] to steal into your loneliest loneliness’ and convince you that you were to live ‘life as you now live it and have lived it […] innumerable times again’. Not in a reincarnated manner, but with both an ignorance of its occurrence and a repetition of the most exact of details. Every brick in every house, every leaf on every tree, every atom and every feeling exactly the same. In stereotypical fashion, Nietzsche probes our intuitions by offering binary responses his dual categories of people would experience when they ‘really looked […] down at the most world-negating of all possible ways of thinking’. The weak, those who live in ‘ressentiment’, abiding by universal moral principles and not questioning the value of said morals, would ‘throw [themselves] down and gnash [their] teeth and curse’. In light of Nietzsche’s denunciation of Christian morality, they are simply waiting for salvation from the God they are eternally indebted to; however, with the ever-returning cycle of existence this salvation becomes unattainable. Considering the ‘European form of Buddhism’ — nihilism — Nietzsche would suggest the eternal recurrence is the greatest fear. For life, when synonymous with suffering, is most painful when it is endless, for the suffering, too, is endless.
Conversely, the man of ‘free spirit’ — ‘the overman’ — would ‘long for nothing more fervently’ than the ‘ultimate eternal confirmation and seal’, the eternal recurrence. For, in the affirmation of the individual moment, the ‘new philosopher’ not only accepts but ‘insatiably [shouts] da capo’ or ‘from the beginning’! If one can simply stand at the ‘gateway Moment’, not worried about reliving it forever, one is truly content. This will be treated further as the most philosophically meaningful component of the eternal recurrence. However, even for the freest of Nietzschean spirits — Zarathustra — there is reason for deeply despairing at the thought of the endlessly recurring life. For, as Zarathustra’s ‘tired […] and drunk to death sadness’ reminds us, ‘the human of whom [he is] weary, the small human being’ also returns eternally. In summary, Nietzsche connects the two types of people as seen in the master and slave morality distinction with the eternal recurrence by arguing ‘the races that cannot bear it stand condemned; those who find it the greatest benefit are chosen to rule’.
Unlike the aforementioned arguments, Nietzsche elsewhere suggests that eternal recurrence is not merely a fictitious tale, told by some pesky fictitious dwarf, to rattle the life-affirming or life-denying beliefs we hold. Instead, in his posthumously collectivised corpus of unpublished aphorisms The Will to Power Notebooks, Nietzsche’s mystical ouroboros becomes a physical phenomenon. His argument for its metaphysical necessity has two parts, the first of which runs as follows:
P1. If there was a final end — a goal — to the universe, it would have already been reached
P2. When something reaches its final end, it becomes fixed and stops changing
P3. The world is always ‘becoming’, is still in the ‘spirit’ of changing and is never simply ‘being’
C. There can be no final state the universe is heading towards
Having apparently concluded successfully that the world has no final state, Nietzsche denunciates the argument that nature takes on the burden of divine providence by being a sort of consciously autonomous self-governing entity. Instead, with the help of some sketchy fin de siecle theoretical physics, he must have been privy to, Nietzsche ultimately concludes that the universe ‘lacks the capacity for eternal novelty’. The argument runs as follows:
P1. The universe is dictated by forces
P2. Forces cannot be thought of as infinite
C. The universe is not infinite
So, if the universe did not come into existence with any purpose, or ‘[avoid] any repetition’, then ‘the law of the conservation of energy demands eternal recurrence’. In short, the universe has two essential properties: to always change, and to always have the same amount of finite force and possibility. Ergo, the universe is infinitely in flux, but can only manifest itself in a finite amount of ways. Infinite repetition, through this argument, becomes inevitable…
The question any philosopher worth their salt must ask themselves is whether or not we should accept Nietzsche’s argumentation regarding eternal recurrence. My answer to this question has already been illuminated, the eternal recurrence in the form of the thought experiment is philosophically pertinent to the concept of meaning; while the arguments for its metaphysical certainty are logically insufficient. To begin to favour Nietzsche’s unliteral conception of eternal recurrence I will offer two refutations for eternal recurrence in reality. Thereafter, I will return to it as a thought experiment and offer reasons for its philosophical importance.
The most overt of discrepancies in Nietzsche’s line of reasoning put forward in standard form prior is the assumption made regarding the infinite nature of temporality. This is my first point of challenge. The challenge being, that Nietzsche gives no reason to presume that ‘behind us lies an eternity’. The aptest metaphor given for the nature of time is in Zarathustra, where Nietzsche speaks of the ‘long lane back’, ‘long lane outward’ and the crossroads known as the ‘present’. If we imagine that spatio-temporal existence as it continues for consecutive, irreducible moments is measured as time, then it seems obligatory for physical reality to exist so long as time does. Herein lies a notable contradiction, to be returned to later, between Nietzsche’s metaphysical belief that the noumenal world does not exist and the notion that time must have objective reality to measure. Returning to the point at hand, if we accept contemporary theoretical physics as widely accepted fact, the closest paradigm to the truth, in a Popperian manner we are inadvertently accepting the singularity as bringing into existence extended matter. Thus, with the birth of the universe came physical reality and with-it time. Ergo, if we are under no obligation to agree that the past is eternal, and further that everything has already happened, then the possibility for a final end is still up for contention. This rebuttal is predicated on the notion that the something of existence came from nothing, so time becomes linear and eternal recurrence fails. Apart from its compatibility with scientific thought, this alternative is as presumptuous as Nietzsche’s; thus, we must give further adequate reasons.
Ironically, I turn to Augustinian conceptions of time to find said reasons. Saint Augustine, in Book XI of his Confessions, discusses time as the present; while the future and the past are merely memory and anticipation. Further, in a manner not too dissimilar to Nietzsche, Augustine speaks of ‘all past and future […] created and [issued] out of that which is forever present’. The eternal is ‘neither future nor past’ but ‘expresses itself in times that are future and past’. I suggest that Augustine is arguing that human subject only experiences time as the moment. In arguing the future and past are fabrications of the human consciousness, Nietzsche can escape the contradiction between his epistemic belief in illusory reality or his belief in the concept of time. As mentioned hitherto, if time gone by and time to come coexist dependently with the noumenal reality, then this realm has to exist. This also relates to Nietzsche’s position on knowledge as interpretation, and the medium for expressing it — language — as impudent. Thus, that which has happened and is going to happen are fictitious ideals and eternal recurrence becomes relevant only to the human experience.
So, if the eternal recurrence is only philosophically significant as a thought experiment, is there any possibility of gaining any inherent meaning from it? I argue there is, and my argument for it is closely connected to the notion of how Nietzsche deems the strong would react to infinite repetition. As has previously been stated, ‘the ring of being remains loyal to itself’, even in the minuteness of a singular atom. I take the extreme life-denying fear of the repetition to come not from the despair of living our suffering again, as Nietzsche claims the nihilist would, but in having to live all the moments that make our lives our own over and over again. For, in experiencing it infinitesimally the speciality, the originality and the authenticity of the moment are lost. Thus, not only are the mundane experiences of everyday life endlessly repeated, so too the birth of our children, our wedding days, our greatest achievements and our worst tribulations all recur. Life loses its most human aspect, its particularity, its uniqueness, the fact that it is ours and ours only once. But, flipping the coin, we must imagine Sisyphus happy, for in ignorance we await the salvation of death, in ignorance we see every moment as irrelevant, as the sum of a life doomed to end and never matter. But if we are shown our plight, as Sisyphus is, the eternally recurring, every moment is lived as an eternity. So, in every moment we are given the opportunity to govern how we wish that moment to be eternally, and in that decision, the recurring life becomes a spectacular gift, it becomes everything.
I have attempted, in this essay to portray Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence as metaphysically implausible. I have further contended that ultimately, the eternal recurrence instigates the greatest fear, as the totality of life becomes drudgery. But through this fear comes the possibility of transcending the normal, by actively pursuing the abnormal, by making life as close to how we would live it eternally as we can.
Cited
Augustine. Confessions. Edited by Albert C. Outler. Translated by Albert C. Outler. Dallas, 1955.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman. Translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Genealogy of Morality. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. Translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Edited by Bernard Williams. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. Translated by Walter Kauffman and Reginald Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Edited by Adrian del Caro and Robert Pippin. Translated by Adrian del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
