Henri Poincaré proved his “recurrence theorem” in 1890: in a mechanical system with bound orbits (particles can’t just run off to infinity), any state through which the system passes will be approached (to arbitrary accuracy) an infinite number of times in the future. That was eight years after Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, asked us to imagine exactly such a scenario, in his notion of eternal return:
What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you in 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; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!”
This is the kind of thing you come across when you’re writing a book about time. Nietzsche wanted to suggest that a well-lived life was one you wouldn’t mind knowing would recur throughout eternity, while the prospect would cause gnashing of teeth for most of us. Poincaré’s concerns were somewhat different.
While looking up this passage, I stumbled across one of my favorite Nietzsche quotes, just a few aphorisms prior:
Yes, my friends, regarding all the moral chatter of some about others it is time to feel nauseous! Sitting in moral judgment should offend our taste! Let us leave such chatter and such bad taste to those who have nothing else to do but drag the past a few steps further through time and who never live in the present,—which is to say the many, the great majority! We, however, want to become who we are,—the new, unique, incomparable ones, who give themselves their own laws, who create themselves! And to that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be able to be creators in this sense,—while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics or were constructed so as to contradict it. Therefore: long live physics! And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics,—our honesty!
A quote which engenders, as you might imagine, swift elaborations on the part of Nietzsche scholars that he certainly wasn’t talking about what we ordinarily mean by “physics.” But I’m not so sure. The substance of physics (experimental results, theoretical understandings) is of no help whatsoever in leading a moral life. But the method of physics — open-minded hypothesis testing and scrupulous honesty in confronting what Nature has to tell us — is a pretty good model for other aspects of our lives.
Not that physicists are, as a matter of empirical fact, any better at being good human beings on average than anyone else. Even we physicists could learn to be better physicists.
This is a rather timely post (pun intended), considering that the 2nd of February was groundhog’s day, and that Nietzche’s idea of eternal return is an underpinning of the movie titled Groundhog’s Day, in which Bill Murray’s character is doomed to repeat his day until he finally transforms into a genuinely selfless and caring person.
Returning (eternally?) to the narrow question of Nietzsche’s early beliefs: the poem Interested (aka Bella) quotes is certainly relevant. I probably read it before at some point; but, if so, I had forgotten it, probably because the expression of routine evangelical sentiments by an 18-year old pastor’s son didn’t seem any more noteworthy than the tone of vague and somewhat hackneyed idealism he sometimes fell into in his early years at Basel. I apparently forgave him his adolescence in the hope of absolution from my own. But I’m not sure that Nietzsche’s overcoming of his own faith, if that’s what it was, amounts to very much or needs a complicated explanation. Young people try on outlooks like shirts and often change their wardrobe entirely when they change schools. In particular, I don’t think that one can ascribe the young Nietzsche’s dismissal of traditional religious ideas to some sort of scientism on his part. After he wrote the Birth of Tragedy and left Basel, Nietzsche did go through a period of reaction to Wagner, Schopenhauer, and heavy breathing that can be described, with some accuracy, as positivist; but he had noticed the bankruptcy of received religion long before that. And the Birth of Tragedy is not exactly an ode to scientific objectivity!
A fine post, Sean. I appreciated the Poincaire/Nietzsche tandem ideas. You imply, correctly I believe, that physics, mathematics, engineering and philosophy are inextricably linked in a correct cosmology. You really KNOW Einstein! That which is cosmologically correct is emperically verifiable. We may not like what we learn about the universe, but whether we find the universe is to our liking or not (as we confirm it emperically to exist) in no way changes what is.
Best Wishes, Sam Cox
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I have obviously come across this thread a little late. However I hope that maybe somebody my pick up my addition to what has been a fascinating series of comments.
I am an author based in the UK and I think that I am right in saying that I am one of the few, if any, writers, who have attempted to update Nietzsche’s “eternal reccurence” in the light (pun unintended) of modern particle physics, neurology, psychiatry and consciousness studies.
In my two books I have suggested that the concept of the etenal return may have a basis in science. Without going into great detail my theory (called “Cheating The Ferryman”) proposes that at the moment of death the subject re-lives their life in a literal moment-by-moment recreation of that life from birth to the final second of their (second) life. I term this hallucinatory existence the “Bohmian IMAX” (referencing the influence of the great philosopher-scientist David Bohm on my theory). Indeed I suggest that an underlying weltgeist is taking place as this philosophy is a curiously popular theme in many modern movies such as “The Matrix”, “Vanilla Sky” and “Jacob’s Ladder”. Indeed the opening and final sequences of “American Beauty” reiterate this concept…and of course the ultimate eternal return movie, “Groundhog Day” cannot be left out of the discussion.
And just as the central character of “Groundhog Day”, Phil Conners, lives the same day over and over again so it is that the dying person, in the final seconds of their second life, goes back and does it again , and again!!
Sounds really crazy doesn’t it? But the science presented in my books seems to work – and en-route it also suggests a possible explaination for deja vu and precognition!!
Indeed if anybody is interested I will be discussing the eternal return and time perception with particle physicist Professor Jeff Forshaw at The National Theatre in London at 1830 on July 23rd 2009. This will be before a performance of “Time And The Conways” written by J.B. Priestley.
This has particular relevance to “Eternal Reccurence” because Priestley was influenced by that other great writer on the subject, Russian philosopher Peter Ouspensky. One of Priestley’s other ‘time plays’, is entitled “I Have Been Here Before”, an amazing exposition of Ouspensky’s ideas. Indeed it can be argued that Ouspensky wrote the ultimate novel on the subject – “The Curious Life of Ivan Osokin”.
But please remember …. my idea is simply that; a theory!
Best Wishes
Anthony Peake
this is from nietzsches notes “will to power”.
has anyone understood the universe any better? the universe is plasma and field. forget the bigbang and other stupidities and you are left with this. a man well beyond his time..perhaps beyond any time.
And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a sphere that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself–do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?– This world is the will to power–and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power–and nothing besides!