This has always been one of my most favorite aspects of Nietzsche’s work, and I wonder if it might actually be a psychological truth:
Is it possible for two men to have the same psychological frame-work without living the same lives? If a man is born today, is it possible that he thinks in precisely the same terms as, say, Caesar, or Nietzsche himself?
I know it’s a bit vague, but it should be fun to entertain the thought.
Similar, yes. ‘Precisely the same’, no.
I would think not, as the same ‘psychological framework’ is essentially saying the same consciousness; and technically, the same consciousness would have to result from the same brain at least.
Well, one of my favorite writers, Mr. John Searle would say that such a person would be considered a zombie of sorts. Say the similarily minded individual came face to face with their alter self. The ‘other’ in any instance would be seen as a odd type of body which moves and speaks, but one which seems illogical to be conceived of as being ‘conscious’ as that consciousness is the one you have. The one that supposedly sets you apart, unique. Upon this realization, the first person party would start to doubt their entire notion of self and identity. Which is real? Who is making the decisions? Either way though, they would be the same decisions.
So I would say no, there is no way they could lead different lives, even if the body was the different, which technically it couldn’t be under the causal psychological framework.
Eternal recurrence is a fascinating idea. The movie “Groundhog Day” was an expression of eternal recurrence.
I believe I found reference to it in Ecclesiastes 3:
One conception I have for time is the repetition of a moment. For me, a moment in time repeats. This is how existence is maintained. This repetition is the fourth dimension. A person’s life does not just have one moment but a great many, all repeating, and when repeating moments are strung together, They exist in the fifth dimension of eternity. So a person normally exists in the fifth dimension. However, there are many possible eternities and they can actualize in the sixth dimension that includes all possible eternities.
But if our life eternally recurrs in eternity as repeating moments means that both yesterday and tomorrow are existing and we are just one point in this continuum. I see this idea in the above quote from Ecclesiastes.
I can see why some believe that a change in eternities is only possible through consciousness. There is no choice without it and everything just repeats and continues happening in accordance with universal laws.
It is possible in some ways, however, due to many factors like environment, different standards and norms etc, these thoughts might contain the same idea, although they’d be more applicable to our situation nowadays.
What I’m trying to say is, let’s take for instance the bible. The stories in the bible are ancient, but it depends on the interpretation. If you extract the moral, you’ll see that it can be used in many situations, even in our modern era.
I think Neitzsche was talking more in a sense of eternal striving and all that other shit.
Yeah, I don’t think he meant that ER was literally the truth or anything like that, at least not at the point in which he expressed ER. He did do some work into ‘proving’ ER in a somewhat scientific way (he talks about energy packets and combinations thereof in his notebooks), but rejected this approach later.
What you’re describing sounds like the infamous nature/nurture controversy that surrounds nearly every aspect of Psychology. From a physiological standpoint, it would make sense to say that, hypothetically speaking, someone born with a certain body would have the same psychological structure as someone else with an exactly duplicated body (brain, hormones, genes, etc.). When placed into differing situations, however, experiences change people. Though they may have been identical at one instance, unless undergoing identical experiences, they will change differently if even in subtle ways.
If I’m not mistaken, the philosophical concept of Tabula Rasa would imply that we are all born with identical psychological frameworks.
the eternal recurence for nietzsche was something else completely. it was an ethical standard (even after he destroyed ethical systems) which amounted to saying one should do only that which one would be comfortable with doing again and again for eternity.
it wasn’t a cosmic rebirth or anything metaphysical like that.
-Imp
Hmm…
Can you back that up Imp?
I don’t know about Imp, but I can.
Hmm… that definitely is a way Nietzsche looked at it, but I think he also considered, in the back of his mind at least, it to be an actual thing.
I especially got this sense from Zarathustra, but that might of just come from the whole estatic nature of the book…
If he thought that it was an actual thing, why did he present it as a thought experiment? If he thought that it was an actual state of affairs later on (as he once did), why did he abandon his metaphysical proofs of it?
He gave up proving it, and I’m not trying to prove it either, but I’m just saying that the idea that it exsisted is obviously something that stayed with him and probably had a hand in the craziness that hit him later on…
The thing is though, I don’t think that he did believe it was an actual state of affairs when he penned The Gay Science. But I think what’s so good about Nietzsche is that it doesn’t matter that he’s not describing reality, so much as imploring us to live our lives to the full. Eternal Recurrence as an actual metaphysical theory would strike me as nonsense, yet as a thought experiment and an impetus for self-actualisation, it’s brilliant. It definitely had a huge effect on him - one might say that along with the Will to Power, ER marked a turning point in his thought, but to have a huge effect doesn’t necessitate a proposed state of affairs.