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Contents 1 Indian religions 2 Classical antiquity 3 Renaissance 4 Friedrich Nietzsche 5 Poincaré recurrence theorem 6 Proofs against eternal return 7 References in culture 8 See also 9 Notes 10 References

Eternal return (also known as "eternal recurrence") is a concept which posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur in the exact same self-similar form an incomprehensible and unfathomable number of times. The concept has roots 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, though Friedrich Nietzsche briefly resurrected it.

In addition, the philosophical concept of eternal recurrence was addressed by Arthur Schopenhauer. It is a purely physical concept, involving no "reincarnation," but the return of beings in the same bodies. Time is viewed as being not linear but cyclical.

The basic premise is that the universe is limited in extent and contains a finite amount of matter, while time is viewed as being infinite. The universe has no starting or ending state, while the matter comprising it is constantly changing its state. The number of possible changes is finite, and so sooner or later the same state will recur.

Physicists such as Stephen Hawking and J. Richard Gott have proposed models by which the (or a) universe could undergo time travel, provided the balance between mass and energy created the appropriate cosmological geometry. More philosophical concepts from physics, such as Hawking's "arrow of time," for example, discuss cosmology as proceeding up to a certain point, whereafter it undergoes a time reversal (which, as a consequence of T-symmetry, is thought to bring about a chaotic state due to thermodynamic entropy).

The Oscillatory universe model in physics could be provided as an example of how the universe cycles through the same events infinitely.

The concept of cyclical patterns is very prominent in Indian religions, including Hinduism 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.^[1]

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 Bible appears to make reference to the idea of recurrence in Ecclesiastes 1:9: That which has been is that which will be, And that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun.

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 Stoicism.

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; an attempt to describe eternal recurrence was made by the physician-philosopher Sir Thomas Browne in his Religio Medici of 1643:

And in this sense, I say, the world was before the Creation, and at an end before it had a beginning; and thus was I dead before I was alive, though my grave be England, my dying place was Paradise, and Eve miscarried of me before she conceived of Cain. (R.M.Part 1:59)

Heinrich Heine wrote the following passage which is said to have been where Friedrich Nietzsche first encountered the idea:

For time is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies are finite.... Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations that have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again.... And thus it will happen one day that a man will be born again, just like me, and a woman will be born, just like Mary.

The thought of eternal recurrence is central to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. As Heidegger pointed out, Nietzsche never speaks about the reality of "eternal recurrence" itself, but about the "thought of eternal recurrence." Nietzsche conceived of the idea as a simple "hypothesis", which, like the idea of Hell in Christianity, did not need to be true in order to have real effects. The thought of eternal recurrence appears in a few parts of his works, in particular §125 and §341 of The Gay Science and then in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It is also noted for the first time in his posthumous fragment of 1881 (11 [143]). The experience of this thought is dated by Nietzsche himself, in the posthumous fragments, to August 1881, at Sils-Maria. In Ecce Homo (1888), he wrote that the thought of the Eternal Return was the "fundamental conception" of Thus Spoke Zarathustra ^[2].

Several authors have pointed out other occurrences of this hypothesis in contemporary thought. Thus, the anthroposophist 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 Dühring's Courses on philosophy (1875), which Nietzsche readily criticized. Lou Andreas-Salomé pointed out that Nietzsche referred to Ancient cyclical conceptions of time, in particular by the Pythagoreans, in the Inactual Considerations. 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'éternité par les astres (1872) and Gustave Le Bon, L'homme et les sociétés (1881). However, Gustave Le Bon is not quoted anywhere in Nietzsche's manuscripts; and Auguste Blanqui was named only in 1883. But Vogt's work, on the other hand, was read by Nietzsche precisely during this summer of 1881 in Sils-Maria ^[3]. Blanqui is mentioned by Albert Lange in his Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism), a book closely read by Nietzsche ^[4].

Despite his reading of Vogt, Nietzsche's conception of the eternal recurrence of all things differs from other seemingly similar hypotheses, insofar as it is intrinsically related to Zarathustra's announcement of the Übermensch and the ethical imperative of overcoming nihilism ^[5] On a few occasions in his notebooks, Nietzsche discusses the possibility of eternal recurrence as cosmological truth, but in the works he prepared for publication it is treated as the ultimate method of affirmation. According to Nietzsche, it would require a sincere amor fati (Love of Fate) not simply to endure, but to wish for, the eternal recurrence of all events exactly as they occurred — all the pain and joy, the embarrassment and glory.

Nietzsche calls the idea "horrifying and paralyzing," and says that its burden is the "heaviest weight" ("das schwerste Gewicht") imaginable. The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation 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]

As described by Nietzsche, the thought of eternal return is more than merely an intellectual concept or challenge; it is akin to a koan, or psychological device that occupies one's entire consciousness, stimulating a transformation of consciousness known as metanoia.^{[citation needed]}

In Nietzsche scholarship, the cosmological hypothesis of eternal recurrence is of extreme interest, being a crucial axiom of his philosophy. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part III, chap. 2, #2, "Of the Vision and the Riddle" (German; also called "The Vision and the Enigma," part XLVI in the Dover Thrift Translation) Nietzsche confronts his aforementioned inner demon and proves to him the reality of eternal recurrence, and this leads to a self-awakening in which the demon is exorcised. Nietzsche also described himself as "the bringer of eternal recurrence" in Twilight of the Idols. Much effort is still expended in attempts to understand Nietzsche's notebooks' fragmentary mentions of eternal recurrence.

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.'"

The translation of Nietzsche's eternal return is from the German ewige Wiederkunft. The German word ewige also means perpetual. Though always translated as eternal it is worth noting this potential dual meaning.

Related to the concept of eternal return is the Poincaré recurrence theorem in mathematics. It states that a system having a finite amount of energy and confined to a finite spatial volume will, after a sufficiently long time, return to an arbitrarily small neighborhood of its initial state. It should be noted that "a sufficiently long time" could be much longer than the predicted lifetime of the universe (see 10^19 seconds).

Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann has described a proof originally put forward by Georg Simmel, which refutes 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/π of the speed of the first, the initial line-up would never recur. ^[6]

It can be argued that this proof is flawed. Even if a system contains an infinite number of states as considered from the perspective of classical mechanics, applying quantum mechanics reveals that the system will repeat after an arbitrarily long time due to discretization.^{[citation needed]} (Classical mechanics is only a rough approximation to the physics that goes on at the atomic scale.) However, not all quantum-mechanical operators have discrete spectra.

• James Joyce was influenced by Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), an Italian philosopher who proposed a theory of cyclical history in his major work, New Science. Joyce puns on his name many times in Finnegans Wake, including the "first" sentence: "by a commodius vicus of recirculation". Vico's theory involves the recurrence of three stages of history: the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of humans — after which the cycle repeats itself. Finnegans Wake begins in mid-sentence, with the continuation of the book's unfinished final sentence, creating a circle whereby the novel has no true beginning or end.^[7] See also Ages of Man and Greek mythology.
• At the end of the 2001 film K-PAX, the extraterrestrial named "prot" explains eternal return by scientific laws in the universe. Implying the big crunch will restart the big bang and every person and life will be lived out in exactly the same way each time this occurs.
• In the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, the polytheistic religion of the humans of the Twelve Colonies is centered on the belief of eternal recurrence, and the religious elements of the show frequently incorporate this idea. The in-show scripture describes the idea thusly: "All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again."^[8]
• The sci-fi television series Lexx makes frequent references to this concept, and it is a relatively important plot point throughout most of the early and mid-series, including the concept of "cycles of time", and the line, "Time begins and then time ends, and then time begins once again It is happening now, it has happened before, it will surely happen again..."^[9]
• The ending of Stephen King's epic magnum opus, the Dark Tower series, suggests the concept of eternal return by having the final, ultimate truth embodied at the absolute center of existence (the final door at the apex of the tower) be a trip back through time to start seeking ultimate truth (The Tower) again.
• The Rolling Stones reference the concept in their song "Sway" from the Sticky Fingers album: "Did you ever wake up to find / A day that broke up your mind / Destroyed your notion of circular time."^[10]
• Milan Kundera's seminal work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is rooted in the concept of eternal return, with the narration explicitly referring to and building on Nietzsche's interpretation.

• Cause and Effect (Star Trek)
• Poincaré recurrence theorem
• Cyclical pattern
• Dreamtime
• Eternal Return (Eliade)
• Historic recurrence
• Möbius strip
• Infinite loop
• Ourobouros

1. ^ August Thalheimer: Introduction to Dialectical Materialism from Google Cache
2. ^ Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, "Why I Write Such Good Books", "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", §1
3. ^ See Posthumous fragment, 11 [312] 1881; See also Mazzino Montinari, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1974 (German transl. De Gruyter, 1991, French translation PUF, 2001) and also Nietzsche's personal library (see also [1] and revision of previous catalogues on the École Normale Supérieure's website)
4. ^ Alfred Fouillée, "Note sur Nietzsche et Lange: le "retour éternel", in Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger. An. 34. Paris 1909. T. 67, S. 519-525 (French)
5. ^ See Martin Heidegger's 1930s courses on Nietzsche.
6. ^ Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. (Fourth Edition) Princeton University Press, 1974. p327
7. ^ erg.ucd.ie
8. ^ scifi.com
9. ^ http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Jardin/6009/trans218.html
10. ^ guitaretab.com

• 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, online at http://www.mlaforum.org/volumeV/issue1/article3.html.
• 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). Nietzsche's Existential Imperative. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, ISBN 0-253-34062-4.
• Jung, Carl. (1988). Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934 - 1939 (2 Volume Set). Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0691099538.

v • d • e Friedrich Nietzsche
Major works	The Birth of Tragedy · Human, All Too Human · The Gay Science · Thus Spoke Zarathustra · Beyond Good and Evil · On the Genealogy of Morality · The Case of Wagner · Twilight of the Idols · The Antichrist · Ecce Homo · Nietzsche contra Wagner
Philosophy	Apollonian and Dionysian · Eternal return · God is dead · Herd instinct · Last man · Master-slave morality · Nietzschean affirmation · Perspectivism · Ressentiment · Transvaluation of values · Tschandala · Übermensch · The Will to Power
Related	Works by Nietzsche · Works about Nietzsche · Comparison with Kierkegaard · Influence and reception of Nietzsche · Nietzsche-Archiv · Nietzsche Music Project