Eternal Return

Hāfström – The Eternal Return (Photo credit: Julian Stallabrass)

The eternal return is an idea that the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed in, as did the Stoics with their belief in ‘conflagration.’

Basically, the eternal return is the belief in an eternal cycle of cosmic destruction followed by identical recreation of what previously existed. Since all elements cyclically repeat just as they were for all eternity, Nietzsche believed our universe (and all life contained in it) forever disappears and then reappears exactly as in the previous cosmic cycle.

To this amelo14 adds:

I think that the point of Nietzsche is not so much a cosmological idea (he was not a scientist) but more a thought experiment which is done by Zarathustra. It involves thinking about living one’s life exactly as one has lived it and in the same vein affirming it so in the absence of any divine project to sustain its purpose.

BOOK IV of Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science” is crucial in this respect. » See in context

And P Will adds:

I believe N considered eternal return beyond just a simple thought experiment. It is useful to think of life as if you had already experienced it but what good what it really be if it were untrue in a cosmological sense? I believe N’s idea of eternal return has ground in Einsteins theory and i believe it makes sense with quantum mechanics. » See in context

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Epicurus

Epicurus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Epicurus (c.341-270 BCE) was a Greek materialist philosopher, born on the island of Samos who founded a school at Mitylene in 310 BCE. In 305 BCE he opened a school of philosophy in Athens, leading an exemplary life of simplicity and temperance.

From a few extant letters and fragments, we learn that Epicurus believed that happiness was the highest good and that life ended at the point of death. This was not the path of wanton hedonism, as some medieval Christian opponents suspected, but rather deliverance from pain and worry.

The Christian disdain for Epicurus, aside from his disbelief in the afterlife, was exacerbated by some of his followers who advocated sensual pleasure-seeking as the highest goal in life. While Epicurus did see pleasure and pain as standards against which to measure a successful or unsuccessful life, he also advocated restraint. And his understanding of pleasure was more akin to the notion of tranquility than a succession of ephemeral thrills.

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Epicurism

Epicurian Postcard / Epicure de Rappel (Photo credit: Pierre Metivier)

Today, epicurism usually means the pursuit of pleasure, as in fine cuisine, wine-tasting, etc. This everyday usage distorts the original doctrines of the philosophical school of Epicureanism.

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Epicureanism

Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, depicted in the Nuremberg Chronicle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Epicureanism is a school of philosophical thought founded by Epicurus in the 4th century BCE, continuing well into the 3rd century CE. Its central ethical doctrine places personal happiness as the supreme good, to include freedom from fear, worry and pain.

This is not the path of unbridled hedonism, as some of its medieval Christian opponents suspected (most likely due to developments among subsequent Epicurean followers combined with Epicurus’ disbelief in an afterlife).

Epicurean cosmology regarded the universe as an aggregate of atoms, indestructible and randomly patterning themselves throughout eternity in a void, not being directed by any kind of providence—i.e. without a “hand of God.” However, Epicurus believed in the existence of the gods, seeing them as composed of finer atoms than the stuff of the visible world. But he didn’t believe in the Platonic Forms nor, as mentioned, in an afterlife.

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Sigmund Freud

Entrance to Freuds consulting room (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was a Jew of Austrian parentage and the founder of psychoanalysis. He studied medicine in Vienna and then neurology and psychopathology. He was marginalized by the medical community for his interest in the idea of infant sexuality. Today he, perhaps ironically, is often frowned on as a reductionist.

Freud remains one of the great innovators of the modern age. He attempted to scientifically outline the idea of the unconscious which formerly had been represented in literature, philosophy and nineteenth-century occultism.

His psychoanalytic techniques of free association and abreaction were influenced by several other contemporaneous “doctors of the mind,” most notably Jean-Martin Charcot, but Freud made them uniquely his own.

His works were almost entirely destroyed by the occupying Nazis. In 1938 he reluctantly withdrew from Vienna to London, leaving behind several sisters, all of whom died in concentration camps.

A habitual cigar-smoker, his relationship with his daughter Anna became extremely close; she acted as secretary, friend and confidant. Freud eventually contracted jaw cancer but refused pain-killers because they dulled his mind and interfered with his work.

After Freud’s death Anna further elaborated on the idea of defense mechanisms, distinguishing herself as an important thinker in her own right.

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Forms

The School of Athens (detail). Fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the philosophy of Plato, the Forms are eternal, unchanging Ideas which, in themselves, are said to be true existence.

Plato believed that the world which we perceive with the senses is illusory. Our day to day reality is a world of becoming. Because our perceptible world is a prisoner of time and always changing, it’s not really real. This view has obvious connections with the Hindu concept of maya.

For Plato, only the eternal and unchanging world of “being” (the Forms) is truly real. Plato outlines his theory of the Forms in the Phaedo and illustrates them through a Cave Analogy in his classic, The Republic.

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Felix culpa

3rd quarter of 16th century via Wikipedia

In Christian theology felix culpa (Latin: happy fault) is a term referring to original sin. While sin is regarded as detestable, the belief that it compelled God to bring Jesus into the world for salvation makes it, for believing Christians, a happy fault. In like manner, the cross, once a symbol of horror and persecution in ancient Rome, now has a holy and magnificent meaning for believing Christians.

Christianity’s ability to turn negatives into positives is consistent with its overall theology, where evil is said to be permitted by God for a greater good. In Jungian depth psychology this is similar but not identical to the idea of enatiodromia ( “things turning into their opposite”), a dynamic implied by the surviving fragments of the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus.

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Fate

Fate by Tenkiki via Wikipedia

Fate is the Ancient Greek, Roman, Arabian and contemporary idea that an impersonal power or a consortium of spiritual beings determines events.

Christian theology generally prefers the idea of Providence, a term which gives precedence to God’s free will as opposed to some unavoidable patterning of events.

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Fatalism

choose determinism by alyceobvious via Flickr

Fatalism (also called determinism) is the philosophical and religious belief that life (and by implication history) is strictly predetermined or unalterable, governed by the laws of necessity. There’s no room for free will here. All apparent choices are perceived as resulting from past influences.

Some who believe in the illusion of free will argue that fatalism and the belief in free will are the same. The argument goes as follows:

Most theologians will tell you that you are free to choose but God knows in advance how you are going to choose. That means that you may believe you’re choosing but your’re really not. Why? Well, because God created you in the first place, knowing, all along, how you’d make your choices in life.

So where’s the free will? critics of the belief in free will will ask.

Defenders of the belief in free will usually reply as follows, appealing to ethics:

God made human beings free, otherwise they would be of no value. The presence of evil in the world enables us to learn why it’s good to choose the Good and shun the bad. If we didn’t have free will, we’d be no better than mindless machines.¹ And God, being Good, made us better than machines. That is, God made us free.

I might add to this debate that the fatalist critique about God creating us in the first place is an argument bound up in the human idea of linear time. The Swiss psychiatrist and thinker Carl Jung falls into this trap when talking about God in his Answer to Job. Jung is not strictly a fatalist but his many comments about God complicate his outlook. Sometimes he seems like an innovative Christian. Other times he comes off like a New Age pantheist. And when talking about being inconsistent, he simply asks, “who isn’t inconsistent?”

I mention Jung’s approach because it highlights the difference between those who have it all figured out by an official church teaching vs. those who want to figure things out for themselves. That is, Jung illustrates the difference between the passive acceptance of dogma² vs. individual investigation. Interestingly enough, each camp tends to demonize the other.

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¹ This argument is now complicated by the fact that some software can appear to learn and “choose” new routines. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning

² This in contrast to those who say they accept dogma after much thought and experience, all of which, they say, supports the dogma. An example here would be someone who believes they receive a revelation about the Christian Trinity. Also, some say that the belief in a dogma is a “divine gift” (without the need for a great revelation), so this debate can get complicated.

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Faith and Reason

Faith and Reason united, with St Thomas Aquinas teaching in the background. Painting by Ludwig Seitz (1844–1908), Galleria dei Candelabri, Vatican - Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen via Wikipedia

Many people see faith and reason as two approaches to life existing at opposite ends of the cognitive spectrum. It could be argued, however, that faith and reason are not always separate and (consciously or unconsciously) work together.

An example of faith and reason unconsciously working together could be found in those who make a god out of reason. These folks still come from a faith position, but their faith is placed in reason instead of God or some divine power.

On this point or, at least, on a similar point, the philosopher David Hume offered a now famous critique of causality.

Hume’s metaphysics, in particular his critique of the belief in cause and effect, remains an important challenge to our conventional way of seeing. All we can be sure of, says Hume, is that certain events occur one after another in a given region and for a certain duration.

In billiards, for instance, the white ball appears to cause the motion of other balls when impacting them on the billiard table. But here’s the radical part. Hume says that all we can truly know is that, in the past, the first ball impacted and the other balls moved. We cannot prove that the first ball’s impact will always be followed by movement of the other balls. And for Hume, there is no rational way to demonstrate a causal connection.¹

In most world religions, faith is said to be primary to reason. In Catholic theology faith is described as a supernatural virtue whereas reason is said to be a natural power. For Catholics or, indeed, anyone, both faith and reason are concerned with truth and need not conflict.

However, it seems that many insecure individuals who have been brainwashed by a cultic or even by some silly religious or scientific teaching desperately cling to a kind of misplaced faith by believing in things that are not true or, perhaps, egregiously facile.

Similarly, we find not a few self-professed thinkers who are hooked on their own faulty logic, colored by unconscious personal biases.

In their best form, faith and reason are potentially harmonious. We can live life by testing our pet hypotheses and by keeping our beliefs and theories open to revision. For many, however,  faith and reason are often imperfect and discordant.

Thinkers like the Hungarian-born Arthur Koestler (1905-83) believed that clunky linkages between our human cognitive faculties (such as faith and reason) result from conflicting evolutionary additions to the human brain, additions that happened by chance instead of through any kind of grand, intelligent design. But this approach is no more subject to empirical verification than one that accepts inconsistency and inner conflict as steps toward integration and its corollary, integrity.

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¹ http://earthpages.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/hume-david

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