Eternal Return - Wikipedia

Eternal return - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
22/07/2016 00:45
Eternal return
For other uses of the term, see Eternal return (disambiguation).
Eternal return (also known as "eternal recurrence") is a concept that the universe and
all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar
form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. The concept is found in
Indian philosophy and in ancient Egypt and was subsequently taken up by the
Pythagoreans and Stoics. With the decline of antiquity and the spread of Christianity,
the concept fell into disuse in the Western world, with the exception of Friedrich
Nietzsche, who connected the thought to many of his other concepts, including amor
fati.
In addition, the philosophical concept of eternal recurrence was addressed by Arthur
Schopenhauer. It is a purely physical concept, involving no supernatural reincarnation,
but the return of beings in the same bodies. Time is viewed as being not linear but
cyclical.[citation needed]
Premise
The basic premise proceeds from the assumption that the probability of a world coming
into existence exactly like our own is greater than zero (we know this because our world
exists). If space and time are infinite, then logic follows that our existence must recur an
infinite number of times.
In 1871 Louis Auguste Blanqui, assuming a Newtonian cosmology where time and
space are infinite, claimed to have demonstrated eternal recurrence as a mathematical
certainty. In the post-Einstein period researchers cast doubts on the idea that time or
space was in fact infinite, but many models[citation needed] provided the notion of spatial
or temporal infinity required by the eternal-return hypothesis.
The oscillatory universe model in physics oers an example of how the universe may
cycle through the same events infinitely. Arthur Eddington's concept "arrow of time", for
example, discusses cosmology as proceeding up to a certain point, after which it
undergoes a time reversal (which, as a consequence of T-symmetry, is thought to bring
about a chaotic state due to entropy).[citation needed] Stephen Hawking and J. Richard
Gott have also proposed models by which a universe could undergo time travel,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return
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provided the balance between mass and energy created the appropriate cosmological
geometry.[citation needed]
Multiverse hypotheses in physics describe models where space or time is infinite,
although local universes with their own big bangs could be finite space-time bubbles.
[citation needed]
Classical antiquity
In ancient Egypt, the scarab (or dung beetle) was
viewed as a sign of eternal renewal and reemergence
of life, a reminder of the life to come. (See also "Atum"
and "Ma'at.")
The ancient Mayans and Aztecs also took a cyclical
view of time.
In ancient Greece, the concept of eternal return was
connected with Empedocles, Zeno of Citium, and most
notably in Stoicism (see ekpyrosis).
Indian religions
The concept of cyclical patterns is very prominent in Indian religions, such as Jainism,
Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism among others. The wheel of life represents an
endless cycle of birth, life, and death from which one seeks liberation. In Tantric
Buddhism, a wheel of time concept known as the Kalachakra expresses the idea of an
endless cycle of existence and knowledge.
While explaining the "true self" (Atma or "Me"), lord Krishna describes the "repeating
nature of universe" as a backdrop in few verses:
Bhagavad Gita
8.17 - Knowing that thousand eras constitute a day of Brahman, [and] thousand eras
complete a night, are the people who know day, [and] night.
8.18 - On arrival of day, all manifestations originate from "Unmanifest"; On arrival of
night they annihilate into [what is] known as "Unmanifest" only.
8.19 - This [same] elementary world only happens again & again; Annihilates
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upon arrival of night, [and] originates upon arrival of day.
Judaism
See also: Gilgul Neshamot
Judaism posits a creation narrative "In the beginning"
and a redeemed Olam Haba at the end, which means
Judaism has a linear, not a cyclical concept of time, at
least regarding the physical world. However, as the
Creator is eternal and without beginning or end, things
in time attain some form of eternal-ity through a
relationship with Him. Additionally, the Midrash posits
that historical events in the history of the Jewish
people repeat themselves. There is a spiritual
repetition, too, and the influence is transmitted year
Jacob's Ladder by William Blake (c.
1800, British Museum, London). Jewish time is linear, has an end
and goes up towards spiritual
heaven. To step spiritually higher
each cyclic year or festive event is
well illustrated by this painting,
depicting a spiral ladder up.
after year, no matter the "distance" from the original

event. As a result, the actions in a person's life directly
aect their life in the next world, or after death, and are
direct manifestations of the spiritual influences of what
they did in this world (see the Kabbalah of the Ariza'l).
There is also a perspective that time is composed of
seven cycles, which repeat every seven thousand years
(a view rejected by Isaac Luria). These concepts give
human choices to do good deeds in Olam HaZeh "this world" - some of what
Nietzsche called the eternal recurrence's "infinite weight".
Renaissance
The symbol of the Ouroboros, the snake or dragon devouring its own tail, is the
alchemical symbol par excellence of eternal recurrence. The alchemist-physicians of the
Renaissance and Reformation were aware of the idea of eternal recurrence; the
physician-philosopher Sir Thomas Browne in his A Letter to a Friend c. 1657 linked the
Uroboros symbol with the idea of eternal return thus that the first day should make the last, that the Tail of the Snake should return into its
Mouth precisely at that time, and they should wind up upon the day of their Nativity, is
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indeed a remarkable Coincidence, which tho Astrology

hath taken witty pains to salve, yet hath it been very
wary in making Predictions of it.
An allusion to eternal recurrence also occurs at the
conclusion of Browne's The Garden of CyrusAll things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall
they begin again.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The concept of "eternal recurrence", the idea that with infinite time and a finite number
of events, events will recur again and again infinitely, is central to the writings of
Friedrich Nietzsche. As Heidegger points out in his lectures on Nietzsche, Nietzsche's
first mention of eternal recurrence, in aphorism 341 of The Gay Science (cited below),
presents this concept as a hypothetical question rather than postulating it as a fact.
According to Heidegger, it is the burden imposed by the question of eternal recurrence
whether or not such a thing could possibly be truethat is so significant in modern
thought: "The way Nietzsche here patterns the first communication of the thought of the
'greatest burden' [of eternal recurrence] makes it clear that this 'thought of thoughts' is
at the same time 'the most burdensome thought.' "
The thought of eternal recurrence appears in a few of his works, in particular 285 and
341 of The Gay Science and then in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The most complete
treatment of the subject appears in the work entitled Notes on the Eternal Recurrence, a
work which was published in 2007 alongside Sren Kierkegaard's own version of
eternal return, which he calls 'repetition'. Nietzsche sums up his thought most
succinctly when he addresses the reader with: "Everything has returned. Sirius, and the
spider, and thy thoughts at this moment, and this last thought of thine that all things will
return". However, he also expresses his thought at greater length when he says to his
reader:
"Whoever thou mayest be, beloved stranger, whom I meet here for the first time,
avail thyself of this happy hour and of the stillness around us, and above us, and let
me tell thee something of the thought which has suddenly risen before me like a star
which would fain shed down its rays upon thee and every one, as befits the nature
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of light. - Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and
will ever run out again, - a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions
out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. And then
you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every
hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and
the whole fabric of things which make up your life. This ring in which you are but a
grain will glitter afresh forever. And in every one of these cycles of human life there
will be one hour where, for the first time one man, and then many, will perceive the
mighty thought of the eternal recurrence of all things:- and for mankind this is
always the hour of Noon".
This thought is indeed also noted in a posthumous fragment. The origin of this thought
is dated by Nietzsche himself, via posthumous fragments, to August 1881, at Sils-Maria.
In Ecce Homo (1888), he wrote that he thought of the eternal return as the "fundamental
conception" of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Several authors have pointed out other occurrences of this hypothesis in contemporary
thought. Rudolf Steiner, who revised the first catalogue of Nietzsche's personal library
in January 1896, pointed out that Nietzsche would have read something similar in Eugen
Dhring's Courses on philosophy (1875), which Nietzsche readily criticized. Lou
Andreas-Salom pointed out that Nietzsche referred to ancient cyclical conceptions of
time, in particular by the Pythagoreans, in the Untimely Meditations. Henri Lichtenberger
and Charles Andler have pinpointed three works contemporary to Nietzsche which
carried on the same hypothesis: J.G. Vogt, Die Kraft. Eine real-monistische
Weltanschauung (1878), Auguste Blanqui, L'ternit par les astres (1872) and Gustave Le
Bon, L'homme et les socits (1881). Walter Benjamin juxtaposes Blanqui and
Nietzsche's discussion of eternal recurrence in his unfinished, monumental work The
Arcades Project. However, Gustave Le Bon is not quoted anywhere in Nietzsche's
manuscripts; and Auguste Blanqui was named only in 1883. Vogt's work, on the other
hand, was read by Nietzsche during this summer of 1881 in Sils-Maria. Blanqui is
mentioned by Albert Lange in his Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism),
a book closely read by Nietzsche. The eternal recurrence is also mentioned in passing
by the Devil in Part Four, Book XI, Chapter 9 of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov,
which is another possible source that Nietzsche may have been drawing upon.
Walter Kaufmann suggests that Nietzsche may have encountered this idea in the works
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of Heinrich Heine, who once wrote:

[T]ime is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies, are finite. They may
indeed disperse into the smallest particles; but these particles, the atoms, have their
determinate numbers, and the numbers of the configurations which, all of
themselves, are formed out of them is also determinate. Now, however long a time
may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal
play of repetition, all configurations which have previously existed on this earth must
yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again...
Nietzsche calls the idea "horrifying and paralyzing",[citation needed] referring to it as a
burden of the "heaviest weight" ("das schwerste Gewicht") imaginable. He professes
that the wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate armation of
life:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest
loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have
to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself
down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you
once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You
are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' [The Gay Science, 341]
To comprehend eternal recurrence in his thought, and to not merely come to peace with
it but to embrace it, requires amor fati, "love of fate":
My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants to have nothing
dierent, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear the
necessary, still less to conceal itall idealism is mendaciousness before the
necessarybut to love it.
In Carl Jung's seminar on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Jung claims that the dwarf states the
idea of the Eternal Return before Zarathustra finishes his argument of the Eternal Return
when the dwarf says, "'Everything straight lies,' murmured the dwarf disdainfully. 'All
truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.'" However, Zarathustra rebus the dwarf in the
following paragraph, warning him against over-simplifications.
A late 1880s comment by Nietzsche, "In an infinite period of time, every possible
combination would at some time be attained," has been cited to argue that Nietzsche
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dropped his plans to try to scientifically prove the theory because he realized that if he
would have to eventually repeat life as it is, his presumption of infinite time means "he"
would also have to "repeat" life dierently, since every configuration of atoms and
events will occur. Instead, according to this interpretation of Nietzsche, he continued to
propound the doctrine for its psychological and philosophical import. Though section
1063 of his posthumous notebooks "The Will To Power" states, The law of
conservation of energy demands eternal recurrence."
Poincar recurrence theorem

Related to the concept of eternal return is the Poincar recurrence theorem in
mathematics. It states that a system whose dynamics are volume-preserving and which
is confined to a finite spatial volume will, after a suciently long time, return to an
arbitrarily small neighborhood of its initial state. "A suciently long time" could be much
longer than the predicted lifetime of the observable universe (see 1 E19 s and more).
The philosopher and writer Albert Camus explores the notion of "eternal return" in his
essay on "The Myth of Sisyphus," in which the repetitive nature of existence comes to
represent life's absurdity, something the hero seeks to withstand through manifesting
what Paul Tillich called, "The Courage to Be." Though the task of rolling the stone
repeatedly up the hill without end is inherently meaningless, the challenge faced by
Sisyphus is to refrain from despair. Hence Camus famously concludes that, "one must
imagine Sisyphus happy."
Modern cosmology
While the big bang theory in the framework of relativistic cosmology seems to be at
odds with eternal return, there are now many dierent speculative big bang scenarios in
quantum cosmology which actually imply eternal return - although based on other
assumptions than Nietzsche's. So there are competing models and hypotheses with a
temporal, spatial or spatio-temporal eternal return of everything in all variations as
Nietzsche has envisaged.
The oscillating universe theorythat the universe will end in a collapse or 'big crunch'
followed by another big bang, and so ondates from 1930. Cosmologists such as
professor Alexander Vilenkin from Tufts University and Massachusetts Institute of
Technology professor Max Tegmark suggest that if space is suciently large and
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uniform, or infinite as some theories suggest, and if quantum theory is true such that
there is only a finite number of configurations within a finite volume possible, due to
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, then identical instances of the history of Earth's
entire Hubble volume occur every so often, simply by chance. Tegmark calculates that
115
our nearest so-called doppelgnger, is 1010

meters away from us (a double
exponential function larger than a googolplex). In principle, it would be impossible to
scientifically verify an identical Hubble volume. However, it does follow as a fairly
straightforward consequence from otherwise unrelated scientific observations and
theories. Tegmark suggests that statistical analyses exploiting the anthropic principle
provide an opportunity to test multiverse theories in some cases. Generally, science
would consider a multiverse theory that posits neither a common point of causation, nor
the possibility of interaction between universes, to be an ideal speculation. However, it
is a fundamental assumption of cosmology that the universe continues to exist beyond
the scope of the observable universe, and that the distribution of matter is everywhere
the same at such a large scale (see cosmological principle).
Opposing argument
Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann has described an argument originally put forward by
Georg Simmel, which rebuts the claim that a finite number of states must repeat within
an infinite amount of time:
Even if there were exceedingly few things in a finite space in an infinite time, they
would not have to repeat in the same configurations. Suppose there were three
wheels of equal size, rotating on the same axis, one point marked on the
circumference of each wheel, and these three points lined up in one straight line. If
the second wheel rotated twice as fast as the first, and if the speed of the third
wheel was 1/ of the speed of the first, the initial line-up would never recur.
Thus a system could have an infinite number of distinct physical configurations that
never recur. However the example presupposes the possibility of perfect continuity: for
instance, if the universe proves to have a quantum foam nature, then the exact quantity
of an irrational number cannot be expressed by any physical object.
In popular culture
Popular statements of the eternal return typically miss the central point of an absence of
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a sense of repetition.
The modern adaption of the Eternal Returns concept has proven its way to metal
music. An Indian metal band named Eternal Returns adapts the concepts of
eternal return to its music, lyrical concepts and composition.
An American melodic death metal band named Darkest Hour named their Sixth
album The Eternal Return.
In the 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera uses Friedrich
Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return to illustrate lightness. In the novel
existence is declared weighty because according to the theory it stands fixed in an
infinite cycle. This weightiness is the heaviest of burdens, for if every second of
our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus
Christ was nailed to the cross. The inverse of this concept is Kundera's
unbearable lightness of being.
In the 2002 science fiction novel Permanence Karl Schroeder recycles Nietzsche's
myth of the eternal return to critique all organized religion with a plot device he
describes as the Supreme Meme. The philosophic question asked is whether or
not the subject would choose to relive the same life over again "exactly as it was,
no detail spared?"
See also
Notes
1. ^ Tegmark M., "Parallel universes". Sci Am. 2003 May; 288(5):4051.
2. ^ Jean-Pierre Luminet (2008-03-28). "The Wraparound Universe". AK Peters, Ltd.
ISBN 978-1-56881-309-7
3. ^ August Thalheimer: Introduction to Dialectical Materialism from Google Cache
4. ^ citations in Rabbi Joseph Hayim, Da'at U'Tevunah, p. 90,
http://www.hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=20123&st=&pgnum=90 ,
translated in Zev Golan, "God, Man and Nietzsche: A Startling Dialogue between
Judaism and Modern Philosophers", iUniverse, 2007, p 5
5. ^ Zev Golan, "God, Man and Nietzsche: A Startling Dialogue between Judaism
and Modern Philosophers", iUniverse, 2007, pp4-14
6. ^ http://myweb.lmu.edu/tshanahan/Nietzsche-Eternal_Recurrence.html
7. ^ See Heidegger Nietzsche. Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same trans.
David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. 25.
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8. ^ Notes on the Eternal Recurrence - Vol. 16 of Oscar Levy Edition of Nietzsche's

Complete Works (in English)
9. ^ 1881 (11 [143])
10. ^ Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, "Why I Write Such Good Books", "Thus Spoke
Zarathustra", 1
11. ^ Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard, 2002. See chapter D, "Boredom
Eternal Return," pp. 101-119.
12. ^ "?". Archived from the original on November 16, 2006. and "revision of previous
catalogues". on the cole Normale Suprieure's website)
13. ^ Alfred Fouille, "Note sur Nietzsche et Lange: le "retour ternel", in Revue
philosophique de la France et de l'tranger. An. 34. Paris 1909. T. 67, S. 519-525
(French)
14. ^ Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche; Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. 1959, page
376.
15. ^ Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 1999, page 5.
16. ^ a b Dudley, Will. Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom. 2002, page
201.
17. ^ Golan, God, Man and Nietzsche, pp2-3
18. ^ Rdiger Vaas: "Ewig rollt das Rad des Seins": Der 'Ewige-Wiederkunfts-Gedanke'
und seine Aktualitt in der modernen physikalischen Kosmologie. In: Helmut Heit,
Gnter Abel, Marco Brusotti (eds.): Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie. de
Gruyter: Berlin, New York 2012, S. 371-390. ISBN 9783110259377 content
19. ^ Alex Vilenkin: Many Worlds in One. New York: Hill and Wang 2006
20. ^ "Parallel universes. Not just a staple of science fiction, other universes are a
direct implication of cosmological observations.", Tegmark M., Sci Am. 2003
May;288(5):40-51.
21. ^ Max Tegmark (2003). "Parallel Universes". In "Science and Ultimate Reality: from
Quantum to Cosmos", honoring John Wheeler's 90th birthday. J. D. Barrow, P.C.W.
Davies, & C.L. Harper eds. Cambridge University Press (2003). arXiv:astroph/0302131. Bibcode:2003astro.ph..2131T.
22. ^ Tegmark, Max (May 2003). "Parallel Universes". Scientific American: 41.
23. ^ Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. (Fourth
Edition) Princeton University Press, 1974. p327
24. ^ The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television. ISBN 978https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return
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1137430311. Retrieved 5 July 2016.
References
Louis-Auguste Blanqui, Eternity by the Stars, tr. with an intro by Frank Chouraqui
(New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2013).
Paolo D'Iorio, "The Eternal Return: Genesis and Interpretation", in The Agonist,
vol. III, issue I, spring 2011.
Hatab, Lawrence J. (2005). Nietzsche's Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal
Recurrence. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-96758-9.
Lorenzen, Michael (2006). "The Ideal Academic Library as Envisioned through
Nietzsche's Vision of the Eternal Return". MLA Forum 5, no. 1.
Lukacher, Ned (1998). Time-Fetishes: The Secret History of Eternal Recurrence.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-2253-6.
Magnus, Bernd (1978). ISBN 0-253-34062-4. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Jung, Carl (1988). Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934 1939 (2 Volume Set). Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-09953-8.
Mircea Eliade (1954) Myth of the Eternal Return Bollingen Foundation Princeton
University Press ISBN 978-0691-01777-8
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