Eternal Return.

[Ishraqiyun]

Is there any credible reason to believe that all happenings may repeat themselves in exactly the same manner over and over in an eternal loop of sorts? Like an eons long version of the movie Groundhogs Day except with no variations between the cycles? I remember first coming across this idea in a few of Nietzsches writings shortly after I graduated high school. Just thinking about it at the time kind of blew my mind. Honestly it scared me for sure. I started pondering it again recently when I saw the same theory attributed to Pythagoras.

Any merit to the idea ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return#Friedrich_Nietzsche

 

[Ishraqiyun]

Here is Aristotle attributing the idea to "the Pythagoreans"

"If one may believe the Pythagoreans, the same things will recur exactly, and I shall be holding my pointer and talking to you as you sit there, and everything else will be exactly as it is now..." (Phys fr. 27=DK 58b34)

Porphyry also attributed this view to Pythagoras:

"He held, that past events repeat themselves in a cyclic process and nothing is new in any absolute sense." (Life of Pythagoras)

 

[Ishraqiyun]

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]

 

[Eudaimonist]

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]

Nietszche's thought is divine indeed.

However, I did have a more divine thought. What if your life were to repeat, and yet you "remember" something of your past mistakes in a kind of intuition every time you repeat your life. It would give you a chance to do things better each time around, similar to the movie Groundhog's Day. With some effort, you would asymptotically approach your optimal existence.


eudaimonia,

Mark

 

[quatona]

Is there any credible reason to believe that all happenings may repeat themselves in exactly the same manner over and over in an eternal loop of sorts?

Right from the top of my head I can´t think of any.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

Nietszche's thought is divine indeed.

However, I did have a more divine thought. What if your life were to repeat, and yet you "remember" something of your past mistakes in a kind of intuition every time you repeat your life. It would give you a chance to do things better each time around, similar to the movie Groundhog's Day. With some effort, you would asymptotically approach your optimal existence.


eudaimonia,

Mark

I have not read it but I think that the sci-fi/fantasy novel "Replay" explores that idea. Also I once read a rabbi's web page where he said that the idea of the afterlife was one where God showed us what we could have done and where we went wrong. There would be no hell but instead the regret that one took the wrong decisions.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

As for eternal return I have heard of Leibniz's Law which I think postulates the indiscernibility of identicles IIRC. My point is there would be no was to discern a single life from an infinitely recurring one if they were exactly the same, so I suppose whichever attitude we take it fits with experience. Maybe only Occams Razor would indicate that the more simple ontology of one life is preferable.

 

[Received]

Nietzsche's thought is brilliant, but most people don't think of how screwy its repercussions can be. First of all, if the eternal recurrence means we repeat every atom and combination of atoms in every possible way, this means that we don't merely repeat the exact lives we're living right now, but an infinite number of modes of our current lives as we understand them. I'm not just the recurred John the shrink with a love for good books, writing, and guitar, but also the recurred John the child psychologist with a love for good books, writing, and guitar; and then John the child psychologist with a love for mediocre books, writing, piano; etc. The point is that the claimed value of the eternal recurrence -- that we will repeat our lives endlessly, and so much develop a sense of embracing these possibilities -- negates itself because we're not just repeating the lives we know right now, but also an infinite number of possible modes whose identities could be related to our identity now.

Second, even if it were exclusively the case that we repeated this life and this life only, saying we should embrace this possibility -- amor fati, as Nietzsche would say, "love your fate" -- doesn't really mean anything, given that when we do recur ourselves for a second, third, infinite number of times, we're always doing so with a blank slate, ignorant of our previous (or future) lives. The claim that we should embrace these future lives because they recur doesn't mean anything, given that saying they will recur has no relevance to our consciousness, given that with each recurring we will have no knowledge of our past recurrings -- and if we did, our life technically wouldn't be recurring, given that this knowledge of a past recurring would have resulted in a different way of looking at and interacting with our world. Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day isn't a fair comparison given that he knows of his recurring days.

Moreover, Nietzsche's claims verge into physics. If you're down with a big crunch view, presumably you'd be a good fit for an endless universe. But if you think the universe had a beginning, even if it was 14-16 billion years ago, you're significantly limiting the possibility of an eternal recurrence of all things. Briefly, an eternal recurrence presupposes an eternal universe.

Miguel de Unamuno was on to something when he said that the eternal recurrence was Nietzsche's way of gaining eternal life. It all comes back to psychology, it seems.

 

[bricklayer]

Is there any credible reason to believe that all happenings may repeat themselves in exactly the same manner over and over in an eternal loop of sorts? Like an eons long version of the movie Groundhogs Day except with no variations between the cycles? I remember first coming across this idea in a few of Nietzsches writings shortly after I graduated high school. Just thinking about it at the time kind of blew my mind. Honestly it scared me for sure. I started pondering it again recently when I saw the same theory attributed to Pythagoras.

Any merit to the idea ?

Eternal return - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Increasing entropy seems to make such a thing as impossible as is the popular belief in the spontaneous increase in complexity.

 

[Ishraqiyun]

However, I did have a more divine thought. What if your life were to repeat, and yet you "remember" something of your past mistakes in a kind of intuition every time you repeat your life. It would give you a chance to do things better each time around, similar to the movie Groundhog's Day. With some effort, you would asymptotically approach your optimal existence.

I read a book that looked at it from that point of view. Very powerful book but the author was literally a nazi** so I have trouble recommending it for that reason. It was NOS Book the Resurrection by Miguel Serrano. He was a friend of both Jung and Herman Hesse and an accomplished poet of sorts himself which turned me on to the book but unfortunately he is also a nazi which can spoil the whole book at times. He did have an encyclopedic knowledge of many Eastern "esoteric" (Samhkya, Yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, etc..) teachings and a grounding in modern philosophy (espc. Nietzsche) and psychology ( espc. Jung) though which made the book interesting though.

**When I say Nazi I mean it literally too. He thought that Lucifer was the divine guide of the Aryan race and that Hitler was on par with a divine incarnation like Krishna. So take that as a warning before you decide to buy the book lol.

 

[Ishraqiyun]

I found this about a scientist (cosmologist?) who connected the idea of eternal return to the theories of repeated big crunchs and big bangs.

"Peter Lynds has recently put forward a new cosmology model in which time is cyclic. In his theory our Universe will eventually stop expanding and then contract. Before becoming a singularity, as one would expect from Hawking's black hole theory, the Universe would bounce. Lynds claims that a singularity would violate the second law of thermodynamics and this stops the Universe from being bounded by singularities. The Big Crunch would be avoided with a new Big Bang. Lynds suggests the exact history of the Universe would be repeated in each cycle in an eternal recurrence. Some critics argue that while the Universe may be cyclic, the histories would all be variants."

and

"Lynds has recently put forward a new cosmology model in which time is cyclic and the universe repeats exactly an infinite number of times. Because it is exactly the same cycle that repeats, however, it can also be interpreted as happening just once in relation to time. Lynds argues that this resolves a number of thorny issues in cosmology.[6][7"

both from wikipedia

 

[GrowingSmaller]

It is funny how it seems that certain secularists identify the secular life with positive attitudes towards existence, and religion with denial of life in favour of some distant ideal heaven (this was neitzche's idea of the nihilistic nature of religion). I was not having a good day yesterday, but the high point must have been the solemn mass I went to. I do not often say "yes" to the prospect of eternal return, but I most certainly did during that experience at least.

 

[Received]

Nietzsche actually has had some positive words toward religion. In Human, All Too Human he speaks of how religion can enhance the life of one person while limiting the life of another. To me these earlier times were more fitting with a reasonable interpretation of religion. It was later when he identified Christianity as a whole with weakness that he went astray. You get a real touch of the New Atheist hasty generalization thinking in his later writings.