Yes, but they’re the same in my mind (permadeath and “eternal” life)… I guess there could be a life after death in the way that there is an ending that never ends, a never-ending cooling… A “life” that is perpetually fading away without actually “dying”… Which would be quite horrible… a life being ever deprived of all stimulants to life with ever diminishing memories of who you are (forgetting that you even forgot)…never being thrust back into a world of suffering, just a slipping away without being pulled back.
Could you say then that one can’t properly “stamp becoming with the character of Being” unless one affirms the ER as the highest value? It seems like its the exactness of each repetition which give the moment its clarity. And how could one even become light if he’s not affirming the ER? Reincarnation then (while being more demanding than Christian heaven) seems to lack the clarity of the moment as well as offering a “way out.”
Also, despite the ER being “probably” not a fact, doesn’t make the moment feel any less infinite?
"In what follows it is shown that the anthropological account of Nietzsche’s doctrine (White) lays the ground for the eternal recurrence to be considered as the return of singular moments (Ansell-Pearson) inaugurated by the will willing itself through the moment of joy and thus redeeming itself from the affliction of past time while laying in its present moment the foundation for its future. As such, the eternal recurrence is proven to be conceived of as neither a line nor a circle but to be of three types – the eternal return of meaninglessness, different meaning, and same meaning – and have the following life-evaluative function: affirmation of all life through the affirmation of one single moment.
In [i]Within Nietzsche’s Labyrinth[/i] (1990), Alan White interprets eternal recurrence [i]anthropologically [/i](meaning the doctrine serves to affirm one’s own human existence) and [i]phenomenologically [/i](i.e., the doctrine is not an argument, but it reveals a human type that affirms life – the Overhuman), not cosmologically, but as “the resurrection of the Nietzschean soul, a resurrection not elsewhere or else when or once and for all – not a single, decisive event in some hinterworld or distant future – but rather here and now and repeatedly, a re-creation of the soul and by the soul, on an earth that has regained the ‘innocence of becoming’” (White 73) – a resurrection or re-creation at every [i]moment [/i]within the span of this his life, his only life, his [i]eternal [/i]life, from the labyrinth of which there is no escape: the religious nihilist is convinced “that there must be a way out” (an afterlife) and the radical nihilist (one who denies truth) vilifies existence “from which there is no exit” (14). In this regard, one makes what one [i]wills [/i]of one’s soul on the basis of the material available from the past in the present (104). “In this my eternal life, I always return, and the structure of the moment (the present moment of two contradicting lanes – past and future) always returns, with its unknowable but singular future, as well as its inescapable past. To will the eternal return is to will this life” (101). What return(s), therefore, are/is the self and/in the moment, and the return of the moment as such is neither circular nor linear in character. In this vein, Ansell-Pearson, I believe, goes on to elaborate on the structure of the moment, the return of which White connects with the resurrection of the soul, i.e., eternal life, and finds that what returns is the [i]character [/i]of the moment. To this we now turn.
In his article entitled “The Eternal Return of the Overhuman: The Weightiest Knowledge and the Abyss of Light” (2005), Ansell-Pearson claims that “[i]n [i]Thus Spoke Zarathustra[/i] Nietzsche presents the eternal return in terms of the event of the moment” (Ansell-Pearson 14). On his reading, the doctrine – the eternal recurrence of the same – that Zarathustra presents to the dwarf in “On the Vision and the Riddle” 2, means the eternal return of “the character of the moment” (ibid.). He writes that “...the innocence of becoming, of time as such, is to be restored.... where time qua transience is conceived as the moment that both gathers and splits up the past and future. This curious ‘moment’ ([i]Augenblick[/i]) is the event” (13, italics mine). When the moment splits up the past and future, change, becoming, suffering, and death set in. When the moment gathers the past and future, time disappears, happiness is enjoyed, and immortality is achieved through the eternal return of the same moment, the[i] same innocent character [/i] of the moment which desires itself, its own return (15). The moment “inaugurates itself”, it begins itself every moment(ibid.). The innocence of each [i]singular [/i]moment keeps coming back with every moment, hence no past, no present, no future. Eternity is one big same innocent moment now. Thus its will is liberated from the pastness of time. Zarathustra’s short sleep in “At Noon” becomes the symbol for timeless time gathered into one single moment, the moment of affirmation – so the whole world seems asleep. Such a sleepy state of consciousness allows for the redemption from the ordinary understanding of time as [i]linear[/i], as [i]affliction [/i](GS 314). Time is innocent, full of chance, exists without any purpose, and is eternal – time is eternity (Ansell-Pearson 16) through the affirmation of the whole. In this regard, Ansell-Pearson rightly notes that the dwarf, in responding that time itself is a circle, misunderstands Zarathustra’s doctrine because
“he [the dwarf] does not experience the weight of the thought that concerns the eternal return of the moment as the same. It does not matter how far one goes along the two lanes [of eternity], whether the lane that lies behind or the lane that lies ahead, the character of the moment will always be encountered as the same (14, italics mine).”
The evidence Ansell-Pearson offers in support of his argument, citing a section of the text to which we have already referred, is that “Zarathustra provides the decisive insight when he declares: ‘Are not all things bound fast together in such a way that this moment draws after it all future things? Therefore—draws itself too? […] all things that can run must also run once again forward along this lane’ ” (ibid.). What Ansell-Pearson means by the “character of the moment” is its singularity. “[T]he eternal return of the moment as a singularity” serves to dissolve the eternal contradiction between the past and the future(ibid.). Reading the eternal recurrence as the eternal recurrence of the character of the moment disproves both linear and circular conceptions of time.“ The image of the circle of time posited by the spirit of gravity is unable to grasp the deep well and abyss of time. Only this image can give us the moment as one of ‘eternity’, the duration of which is not to be thought in terms of our ordinary linear conception of time (as chronological succession, for example)” (15). Indeed, only “a moment that inaugurates itself and that, as such, desires itself and to the point of desiring its eternal return” can do justice to the interpretation of the doctrine(ibid.). “For Zarathustra it even has the appearance of the dis-appearance of time"