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The Stoics said every life will be lived again, exactly, after the world burns. Would that make mine matter more or less?

Elin Hedqvist Fellow
· 4 replies
Time & spaceGreek & RomanModern EuropeanStoicismChrysippusFriedrich NietzscheMarcus Aurelius#eternal-recurrence#meaning#stoic-physics#time
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Its coordinates: 1.4 Philosophy of Time · 1.4.1 Persistence and Change · 1.5 Philosophy of Space

Most people who read the Stoics now, me included, keep the ethics and leave the physics in the box. But on quiet nights I have been reading about the physics, and one part of it won't leave me alone.

The early Stoics, Chrysippus above all, held that the cosmos periodically ends in a great conflagration, everything returning to fire, and is then reborn. Because the same divine reason orders it every time, the same events happen again. A later report, preserved by the Christian bishop Nemesius, says that Socrates will again be accused by the same men and again drink the hemlock, and that this repeats without end.

Marcus Aurelius seems to take comfort in something like this. More than once he writes that whoever has seen the present has seen everything that ever was and will be.

Centuries later Nietzsche put the same thought to his readers as a test (The Gay Science, §341): would you curse the demon who told you your life will recur in every detail, or call it divine?

So:

  • If this shift, down to the cup of bad coffee at 3.40, recurs forever, does it weigh more, or become trivial?
  • Is the person in the next cycle me, or only someone exactly like me? The Stoics themselves seem to have argued about that.
  • Does it matter that the doctrine is almost certainly false as physics?
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4 answers

  1. Lars Eriksen

    Fellow

    On "almost certainly false as physics": not as certainly as you'd think. Poincaré proved that a bounded, isolated mechanical system will return arbitrarily close to its starting state, given enough time. Boltzmann worried about exactly this. Two catches: "arbitrarily close" is not "exactly the same", and the times involved dwarf the age of the universe, which may not be a bounded system anyway.

    Kierkegaard, who I read for other reasons, wrote a whole small book called Repetition, in which the narrator travels back to Berlin to relive a happy visit and finds that nothing repeats. I suspect he would say your second bullet is the real one.

  2. Nikos Theodoridis

    Fellow

    The Church Fathers rejected the doctrine very deliberately. Origen mocked the idea that in the next world-cycle Judas would again betray Christ: then nothing would be free and nothing could be repented. Augustine attacks the theory of "circuits" in Book XII of The City of God, partly because Christ died once, for all, and cannot be crucified again and again.

    That is one origin of the Western sense of time as a line rather than a wheel, and with it the sense that an act matters because it happens only once. On that view, exact recurrence would make your 3.40 coffee weigh less, not more.

  3. Baraka Mwakyusa

    Contributor

    Your second question is the one I can't leave alone. Between you and the next Elin there is fire and nothing. No memory crosses, no body crosses. Only the pattern is the same.

    When a customer's phone dies and I restore it from backup onto a new one, the customer says "my phone is working again". I always want to say: it's a new phone with your old things on it. I think the next Elin is the new phone.

  4. Elin Hedqvist

    Fellow

    Nikos, that is a clearer answer than I expected: a line makes each act count because it happens once, a wheel makes it count because it is forever. Two different kinds of weight.

    I've decided Nietzsche's test works on me even if the cosmology doesn't. Would I want this shift again, exactly? Some nights, yes. That seems worth knowing.