The Magic of Creation vs The Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence

What it is to be a Substance? and What it is to Exist? We need to establish knowledge about the man and the world on a firm basis and the information it provides must be tested for its accuracy and consistency with an external reality. We have to make the fundamental distinction between the living and the non-living matter. The scientific advances of the 19th and 20th centuries reinforced the materialistic position concerning the basic similarity of organic living and inorganic physical matter. The man is viewed as a product of natural evolution and is thought to be subject to the same laws of Physics and Chemistry or mechanistic principles.

We need a methodology to study philosophy and to understand philosophical statements. Logical Positivism, also known as Scientific Empiricism aims to clarify concepts in both everyday and scientific language. It describes analysis of language as the function of philosophy. This analysis of language and of concepts is important to understand questions of belief and ideology which affect what we think we ought to do individually and socially. I would use this method of ‘Applied Philosophy’ to analyze the concept of Spiritual Optics, the Spiritual Connection between Energy and Life. The Laws of Thermodynamics are important unifying principles of Biology. The First Law of Thermodynamics, also known as the Law of Conservation of Energy, states that Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Spiritual Optics accounts for the capacity of photoreception and the term Spiritual Light refers to the creation of Light by God to begin the designing of Matter described by Physics and Chemistry. I may not be able to discover the Purpose in my Life if I exist in Spiritual Darkness.

WHOLE DUDE-WHOLE DESIGNER-THE DOCTRINE OF ETERNAL RECURRENCE:

The eternal recurrence is a central notion of Nietzsche’s thought. It supposes that you’d have to experience the same life, with the same events and same experiences, repeated for eternity.

Nietzsche in his most celebrated book ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ introduced the concepts of the Superman or Superior Man and the Will to Power. The basic conception of  Thus Spoke Zarathustra asks the question: “How well disposed would a person have to become to himself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than the infinite repetition without alternation, of each and every moment?” Nietzsche says, the person who could accept recurrence without self-deception or evasion would be a super human being or “UBERMENSCH”, a Superman whose distance from the ordinary man is greater than the distance between man and ape. This Superior Man would not be a product of long evolution; rather, he would emerge when any man with superior potential completely masters himself and strikes off conventional Christian “Herd Mentality” to create his own values, which are completely rooted in life on this Earth. Nietzsche attacked Christianity and Democracy as moralities for the “Weak Herd”. He argued for the “Natural Aristocracy” of the Superman who driven by the ‘Will to Power’ celebrates life on Earth rather than sanctifying it for some heavenly reward. Such a heroic man of merit has the courage to live “dangerously” and thus rise above the masses, developing his natural capacity for the creative use of passion. Nietzsche’s goal was a “Caesar with Christ’s Soul.”

George Bernard Shaw popularized the term “Superman” by his play ‘Man and Superman'(1903).

WHOLE DUDE- WHOLE DESIGNER-THE CONCEPT OF BHAVANAJAGAT:

Nietzsche’s concept of Superman, Superior Man, or “UBERMENSCH” is based on his doctrine of Eternal Recurrence. He visualizes the possibility of the infinite repetition without alteration of each and every moment. In my concept of “BHAVANAJAGAT”, the term ‘JAGAT’ refers to planet Earth which exists in a state of constant motion and hence each instant always occurs as a new instant and there is no going backwards or forwards to the instant called present. The man exists in a world without the possibility of the infinite repetition. The Magic of Creation enforces the alteration of each and every moment and no man is born with the same genome that existed in the past or may exist in the future. The man’s thoughts, ideas, and the power of imagination have no effect on the reality of planet Earth and its nature of existence. Earth churns each future moment into a past moment without ever giving the man the opportunity to know the existence of any present moment. Each moment in the life of planet Earth is a new moment and there is no infinite repetition of any given or recognized moment. Man has to recognize the basic reality about Earth where there can never be two identical moments. “BHAVANAJAGAT” uses the term ‘BHAVANA’ to describe the Unchanging Principle that establishes the human existence in a constantly changing world. For man has no power to experience the repetition of any single moment during his entire period of physical existence, there is no possibility of man evolving into a Superman, Superior Man, or “UBERMENSCH”. Nietzsche’s concept is fundamentally flawed; his doctrine of Eternal Recurrence is a simple product of his mental imagination and it has no correspondence with an external reality. In fact, the man has no physical or mental power to establish his own existence on Earth. The man has no intrinsic superior potential to master himself. The man is designed to exist in a constantly changing world without any potential to govern or rule the functions of the independent cells that constitute his body.

Simon Cyrene

I ask my readers to review the following article by Emrys Westacott, Professor of Philosophy, Alfred University.

Nietzsche’s Idea of Eternal Recurrence

By Emrys Westacott, Professor of Philosophy, Alfred University

Westacott, Emrys. “Nietzsche’s Idea of Eternal Recurrence.” ThoughtCo, Aug. 28, 2020, thoughtco.com/nietzsches-idea-of-the-eternal-recurrence-2670659.

The idea of eternal return or eternal recurrence has existed in various forms since antiquity. Put simply, it’s the theory that existence recurs in an infinite cycle as energy and matter transform over time. In ancient Greece, the Stoics believed that the universe went through repeating stages of transformation similar to those found in the “wheel of time” of Hinduism and Buddhism.

Such ideas of cyclical time later fell out of fashion, especially in the West, with the rise of Christianity. One notable exception is found in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), a 19th-century German thinker who was known for his unconventional approach to philosophy. One of Nietzsche’s most famous ideas is that of eternal recurrence, which appears in the penultimate section of his book The Gay Science.

Eternal Recurrence

The Gay Science is one of Nietzsche’s most personal works, collecting not only his philosophical reflections but also a number of poems, aphorisms, and songs. The idea of eternal recurrence—which Nietzsche presents as a sort of thought experiment—appears in Aphorism 341, “The Greatest Weight”:

“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; 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!’

“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.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?”

Nietzsche reported that this thought came to him suddenly one day in August 1881 while he was taking a walk along a lake in Switzerland. After introducing the idea at the end of The Gay Science, he made it one of the fundamental concepts of his next work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Zarathustra, the prophet-like figure who proclaims Nietzsche’s teachings in this volume, is at first reluctant to articulate the idea, even to himself. Eventually, though, he proclaims that eternal recurrence is a joyful truth, one that should be embraced by anyone who lives life to the fullest.

Oddly enough, eternal recurrence doesn’t figure too prominently into any of the works Nietzsche published after Thus Spoke Zarathustra. However, there is a section dedicated to the idea in The Will to Power, a collection of notes published by Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth in 1901. In the passage, Nietzsche seems to seriously entertain the possibility that the doctrine is literally true. It is significant, however, that the philosopher never insists on the idea’s literal truth in any of his other published writings. Rather, he presents eternal recurrence as a sort of thought experiment, a test of one’s attitude toward life.

Nietzsche’s Philosophy

Nietzsche’s philosophy is concerned with questions about freedom, action, and will. In presenting the idea of eternal recurrence, he asks us not to take the idea as truth but to ask ourselves what we would do if the idea were true. He assumes that our first reaction would be utter despair: the human condition is tragic; life contains much suffering; the thought that one must relive it all an infinite number of times seems terrible.

But then he imagines a different reaction. Suppose we could welcome the news, embrace it as something that we desire? That, says Nietzsche, would be the ultimate expression of a life-affirming attitude: to want this life, with all its pain and boredom and frustration, again and again. This thought connects with the dominant theme of Book IV of The Gay Science, which is the importance of being a “yea-sayer,” a life-affirmer, and of embracing amor fati (love of one’s fate).

This is also how the idea is presented in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Zarathustra’s being able to embrace eternal recurrence is the ultimate expression of his love for life and his desire to remain “faithful to the earth.” Perhaps this would be the response of the “Übermnesch” or “Overman” who Zarathustra anticipates as a higher kind of human being. The contrast here is with religions like Christianity, which see this world as inferior, this life as mere preparation for a better life in paradise. Eternal recurrence thus offers a notion of immortality counter to the one proposed by Christianity.