The eternal return or eternal recurrence is a philosophical concept mentioned in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a book for all and none, and quite popularized since then: “Behold, we know what you teach: that all things recur eternally and we ourselves along with them and that we have already been here times eternal and all things along with us. You teach that there is a Great Year of becoming, a monster of a Great Year; like an hourglass, it must turn itself over anew, again and again, so that it runs down and runs out anew… I myself belong to the causes of eternal recurrence.” The Great Year refers to the length of a cosmic cycle, which for Heraclitus was equal to 10,800 years and it measured the period separating two successive conflagrations in which an old world perishes and a new one is reborn.
So in fact, it is a concept as old as philosophy itself. The Pythagoreans believed that "Everything will eventually return in the self-same numerical order, and I shall converse with you, staff in hand, and you will sit as you are sitting now, and so it will be in everything else, and it is reasonable to assume that time too will be the same". Of course, Pythagoreans believed in reincarnation which is, if I may say, the perfect kind of eternal return.
Aristotle in his Problemata states: "Just as the course of the firmament and each of the stars is a circle, why should not also the coming into being and the decay of perishable things be of such a kind that the same things again come into being and decay?". But he was disinclined to accept the ultimate outcome of the idea of cyclical becoming: "To demand that those who are coming into being should always be numerically identical, is foolish". But, his very quotation “Every acorn wants to be a holm tree”, which explains his act and potency theory, doesn't it contain somehow some form of eternal recurrence?
And we could almost say that almost every philosopher has expressed him or herself in favor or against the eternal return or the irreversibility of time as an absolute. But for the sake of debating and taking into account all these pros and cons, I would divide the possibility of eternal return into three categories:
SOCIAL OR POLITICAL ETERNAL RETURN: It seems that crises, wars, or boom periods take place in cycles. Or political systems seem to flow in and out like tides. For instance, for Plato, his five regimes are a consequence of a previous one: Aristocracy degenerates into Timocracy when the ruling class includes citizens of inferior nature who value power, honors, and privileges obtained by forceful rather than intellectual means. Timocracy degenerates into Oligarchy when money is prized over virtue and the rich give way to laws that accommodate the materialist lust of the citizens and allow the rich to rule “comfortably” over the poor. Oligarchy turns into Democracy when the poor become the winners and the majority feels that they can do what they want, whenever they want, and they use terms like equality to actually obtain personal gain. Plato was not too keen on Democracy, which he thought would eventually transform into Tyranny when polarization and chaos take over and there is no way to agree on anything. So then, there appears the tyrant to establish law and order in his or her lawless way.
We can’t say that this degeneration has taken place throughout history in a mathematical or timely way, but we all know (or should know) how, when, and why a regime has degenerated or turned into one or another type. So, is this caused by some physical law of eternal return or is it a lack of morality or education that allows for the eternal return to come back and haunt us? If so, could we then prevent it somehow?
PSYCHOLOGICAL ETERNAL RETURN: We’ve all heard or experienced that feeling of falling into the same patterns of odd behavior, animosity, failure, fiascos, whereby it seems like history repeats itself and we have the impression of always making the same mistakes. So, do our personal or professional relationships break up because of some flaw in our character which allows for the eternal recurrence to occur again, again and again? Does being successful in some of these aspects mean that we have finally overcome the eternal return?
PHYSICAL ETERNAL RETURN: The philosopher Walter Kaufmann rebutted the theory with an example and a formula: “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/π of the speed of the first, the initial line-up would never recur.” Isaac Newton considered time as absolute, as essentially irreversible, regardless of its content. Even a full restoration of the content of the past moment would not make that moment itself present. Jewish and Christian religions solve the mystery easily: there is no such thing as an eternal return. History is tied to two unique events: the beginning (Creation) and the end (Last Judgment).
But in spite of all this, why do many of us feel like there is some kind of eternal return working around us? Is there such a thing or is it just our imagination comparing and contrasting similar occurrences? Is eternal return in social and psychological events linked to some kind of lack of morality or a flaw in our character? Could a good education foresee and prevent some forms of the eternal return or are we destined to suffer it eternally? These and many more questions will be discussed in our next debate.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra, a book for all and none. Translated by Adrian del Caro, 2006
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