Refuting the eternal recurrence

Nietzsche proposes an eternal recurrence. The idea has a fatal flaw:

Nietzsche’s labyrinthine walk repeats itself, either 1) by its circularity or because 2) the labyrinth itself repeats. Neither of these alternatives work.

There can be no multiplicity of objects that are identical unless by being in the company of others “they” are made a plurality of distinguishable instances. The labyrinth, by Nietzschean definition, is fixed and the objects within it are distinguishable. However, there is no spatial, distinguishing marks between the parts of one labyrinth and the parts of another, identical, labyrinth; nor, similiarly, are there temporally evidenced distinguishing marks between recurrences of objects within the labyrinth. There is no possibility of their “recurrence”.

DISCUSSION
This refutation depends on an idea that objects are in actuality neither multiple nor singular. This certainly does not make them relative, except in the manner of their arising. but the manner of their arising is utterly empty or as Kant would have it “mere appearances” regarding the object itself of which we can say nothing at all.

Multiplicities and their single objects arise as relationships, i.e. differences between objects. Nietzsche’s idea presents the limit case of this standard ontology where differences are not in evidence. Such Platonicaly real, Nietzschean objects carry their distinguishing marks with them. Such entities, as also populate standard mathematics for example, are deemd to be, as Strawson might put it, reidentifiable. They are countable, as “one” if need be.

But it is difficult to consider the reidentifiability and the naturalistically real nature, of “one object” if that object is alone. “One object”, I argue, is not an “object”, and if we so construe it then it is because the single object is mistakenly taken to be “one” when we cast it in the default case of it being among others that can identify it. Now we must walk a tightrope, between those two, destructive, competing interpretations that have plagued non-Platonic Kantian and Wittgensteinian philosophies; philosophies which seemed to show a struggle, an awareness of the limitations of parts in expressing the whole. Strawson and other “ontological” interpreters of Kant argue that if an object is not reidentifiable then it is simply an incoherence. Granted, but only in consideration of the case of single objects that are countable by being among others. In the limit case, where an object is alone then, against Strawson, it would seem more rationale, more intuitive, more naturalistic, to regard such an object as uncountable and not reidentifiable.

Strawson’s other, mistaken, interpretation is that Kant was an idealist. That, even if we cannot reidentify an object then if it is a bona fide object it, nevertheless, can be so reidentified. Our psychological difficulties regarding identification of single objects, of monads, should not, so the Strawsonian argument must go (an argument echoed in Fregean arithmetical realism) prevent us from seeing all bona fide objects as being “in themselves” reidentifiable and real.

But the ontology I argue for - the ontology of the indistinguishability of the monad, or the realism of the uncountable object “alone”, is not a relativism nor is it a Strawsonian-warped interpretation of Kantian ontology corrupted by a Stawsonian-engineered, physical, thing-in-itself; nor yet is it an idealism crippled by skeptical doubt and the limits of sensory, psychological interpretation. The new “ontology” I describe can only be suggested, by Wittgensteinian elucidation if need be, but that is the nature of the transcendentally ideal, object-manifesting framework. There really is something new out there.

Analytical philosophers make me droopy in the wrongest of all places.

I hear that.

Here as an example of a non-analytical approach to eternal return:

Milan Kundera from The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

[b][Nietzsche’s] idea of eternal return is a mysterious one…to think that
everything recurs as we once experienced it and that recurrence itself recurs ad
infinitum!

Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal returns states that a life which
dissappears once and for all…is like a shadow, without weight, dead in
advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful or sublime, its horror,
sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.We need take no more note of it than a war
between two African kingdoms in the 14th century, a war that altered nothing in
the destiny of the world, even if a 100,000 blacks perished in excruciating
torment…

Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective
from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the
mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance
prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is
ephemeral, in transit…?

Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible sensation. Leafing
through a book on Hitler, I was touched by some of his portraits: they reminded
me of my childhood. I grew up during the war; several members of my family
perished in Hitler’s concentration camps; but what were their deaths compared
with the memories of a lost period of my life, a period that would never return?

This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a
world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world
everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.[/b]

To refute this idea of Nietzsche’s, you need to refute it as a guide to life (of the kind that Nietzsche valued)–not as a cosmology, since the idea wasn’t intended as such.

I think Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return was formulated as the only ultimate way to say yes to life, particularly if that life was one of continual, exruciating suffering. It would then be like the only possible contradiction to suicide for one so afflicted yet enamored with idea of surpassing oneself and one’s ordinary fellows as the Ubermensch who could withstand anything even to the point of wishing to recur eternally. Sadly, this was just a crazed delusion as Nietzsche succumbed to his own mental aberration and went insane.

Nietzsche’s insanity doesn’t prove that any particular one of his ideas was a crazed delusion, or that eternal recurrence is a bad guide to life. I was agreeing with you, until the last line.

Well, at least it’s a nice contradiction to the idea that suicide is a mortal sin. All I can say is, were there such a thing as the ER, I’m so glad that I wouldn’t have to come back as Nietzsche. But really, I just see it as a bit of aristocratic shirtfronting or posturing, like another excuse to call up the Ubermensch. I suppose it was something of a feat for Nietzsche to live a sort of functional life for as long as he did in the face of the extreme physical and emotional torture he endured. I’ve thought about the very real possibility that not many people could have endured it, but then I have no idea if there might have been some mitigating factors that made it possible for him to soldier on.

Nietzsche was an Untermensch and so are his Nazi wannabe followers.

Some of the neonazi, not so intelligent groupies do seem to represent the worst kinds of symbols for something that transmogrified and became writ way too large after Nietzsche’s sad demise. But that says nothing about Nietzsche himself, who was truly just a mensch for all that, doing the best he could with a very difficult life. Yes, I hate his misogyny and some of his aristocratic pretensions on race and class, but in some ways he did grow as a person, particularly in resisting anti-Semitism and the pernicious influence of Wagner. Also, he was a magnificent aesthete; art was his be all and end all, to the point that he apotheosed it. I love art and aesthetics myself, so that aspect of his life and writing I find very appealing and very much worthwhile. He also shows great glimmers of mysticism which reached great heights in his take on Dionysos and the Dionysian mysteries of ancient Greece. I consider it a great tragedy that he was raised in the suffocating and de-mysticized middle-class Protestantism which could not give him the history and guidance he needed to fulfill his mystical and spiritual potential; but his study and take on the Greeks did give him some outlet for that energy. But as we learn from Jung, once he turned totally against Christianity and declared that God is dead, his natural religious energy took a different turn as he took on the archetype of the wise old man with all its attendant ways of expression as we see in his writings as Zarathustra. If you have been able to maintain a healthy psyche with a strong and healthy balance of its attendant energies, then you will be able to appreciate Nietzsche’s stylistic and creative energy without succumbing to the temptation to consider his work on a par with divine revelation and dogma but rather as the interesting expressions of a man consumed with energies that took him over and he had to find an outlet for.

‘Every landscape has its own vocabulary’ [quetz] by this you never get any reoccurrence whatsoever, if you visit the same place twice you will experience it differently even where the place is as it was. I suppose that all places [landscapes] change anyway, and each places environment changes [as do other places surrounding it] so you would never get any reoccurrence.

This for me is the most wondrous aspect of it all.

You could ‘experience’ the same place twice [even if it is not actually the same]; I think it was keats who visited a beach when young, with love in his heart and the beginnings of life’s adult journey all before him wrote a poem to suite. Then upon visiting what he perceived as ‘the same place’ in old age, the language and meaning [vocabulary] had changed dramatically, his wife had died and he had a lifetime’s worth of experience before him, needless to say the poem he now wrote was completely different.

Agreed, quetz, and expressed beauteously.

Keats died of TB at the age of 26 and never married. Maybe you’re thinking of another poet? If you can remember who, I’d like to know who he was.

Keats is the poet of “negative capability” fame who understood the language of the non-rational, liminal, just beneath the consciousness aspects of life. His poetry shines a shimmering light through the fog of our daily existence, making us aware of other possibilities and ways of thinking and experiencing life.

Also, I think it is true that you cannot experience the same place twice, not only because the place cannot be exactly the same from one time to another, but also because you are not the same from one time to another. You bring a lifetime of lived moments with you which changes the way you see and experience things, even the same ones you saw and experienced the first time around.

However, all that being said and acknowledged, I believe that Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal recurrence was to affirm life so strongly that you would be willing to live it all over again, repeatedly, exactly the same. It’s rather a mind boggling concept, and I have to admit it has disturbing implications. I can appreciate the idea of a cyclic universe, as Penrose and some scientists are positing; but I like to think of each new universe outgrowth as different from the last, not exactly the same. Of course, if I do that, I also have to consider the very real possibility that no other universe will ever carry within it the possibility of life. This in turn sort of destroys my natural antipathy to the Anthropic Principle, though. I haven’t resolved that problem yet.

Hmm I may have been thinking of yeats [rather than keats] in his response to the original poem by Matthew Arnold, but over the years have re-translated it quite some ~ all the more reason to state that ‘every landscape has its own vocabulary’.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dover_Beach

Sounds really great, I tend to mix things up because I only take notice of meaning rather than the personages thereof. That way I can condense things into more a concise arrangement, it always annoys me when I read mags and books and have to wade through loads of introductions, naming and other references just to end up with a few lines of info of any use to me. …I will be sure to look him up though.

Absolutely, I remember visiting my childhood home with my own children some time ago, and even though nothing seamed to have changed the whole experience and perceived environment was very different. It wasn’t my home in any way, I remembered all the children playing football in the streets and it seamed so alive and vibrant at that time, now it is as if the whole area had moved on to old age.
I can see why the ancient Britons moved in circles [probably noticing something similar] such that when a generation had died their houses became wood or stone circles.

*Something of a sentiment! It really only matters what is rather than what we want life to be. Maybe there is room for reconciliation between my contrasting ideal with Nietzsche’s;
Even if each place, time and vocabulary changes, the fundamentals to wit they are composed do not…

Must there always be universes, and not night but always day,
would there not always be the same principles forever at play
always the stars, even if not the same,
Always the planets, a galaxy away.

Always an earth, a man, woman and child,
A lady, a gentleman, with manners mild,
The beast laying in wait, to take its prey,
A winner of the race to shout hooray.

Well you get the picture, essentially the fundamental things which make life and everything in our universe the way they are, would always be in the blend, …unless there is some way to destroy a principle or law? It seams to me that there is only one way to make a universe, we begin with 1 ~ singularity and so on and so forth, if there were another way then why didn’t this universe go by it!

My only alternative to a cyclic universe is where there can only be a single expression of all that makes things the way they are, after that you can only have something else which doesn’t have those ingredients. For me that something else must have difference right down to the fundamentals e.g. where this universe is finite it is eternal. If this is the case then the other kind of universe has always been as it shall be, its more an all time thing. This would explain how I have seen people I know and love from here over there, it is really the only explanation of how to have 1 person in two places at once as far as I can see.

How would it read if you reversed this statement?

It would read like Nazism, a sickness where the followers think they are superior. They would then read conspiracy into everything they don’t like because they simply don’t understand it, and go around killing everyone of said conspiracy etc etc. basically it’s a mental illness and complete stupidity on the most inane level.

There can’t be an eternal recureence. I explained why.
The reason is that there is no means, or reality, of making a count of identical objects. And recurrences are identical. That’s it. I sorted it.

.srewollof ebannaw izaN sih era os dna hcsnemretnU na saw ehcszteiN