Eternal return
In ancient Greece, the concept of eternal return was most prominently associated with Empedocles and with Stoicism, the school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium.
Nietzsche's ideas were subsequently taken up and re-interpreted by other writers, such as Russian esotericist P. D. Ouspensky, who argued that it was possible to break the cycle of return.
[12] Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) objected to the fact that salvation was not possible in the Stoic scheme, arguing that even if a temporary happiness was attained, a soul could not be truly blessed if it was doomed to return again to misery.
The discovery of the laws of thermodynamics in the 19th century restarted the debate among scientists and philosophers about the ultimate fate of the universe, which brought in its train many questions about the nature of time.
[16] Johann Gustav Vogt [de], on the other hand, argued in favour of a cyclical system, additionally positing the spatial co-existence of an infinite number of identical worlds.
[17] Louis Auguste Blanqui similarly claimed that in an infinite universe, every possible combination of forms must repeat itself eternally across both time and space.
He had studied Pythagorean and Stoic philosophy,[20] was familiar with the works of contemporary philosophers such as Dühring and Vogt,[21] and may have encountered references to Blanqui in a book by Friedrich Albert Lange.
[19] The first published presentation of Nietzsche's version of the theory appears in The Gay Science, section 341, where it is proposed to the reader as a thought experiment.
"[23]Nietzsche expanded upon this concept in the philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, later writing that eternal return was "the fundamental idea of the work".
"[24] Martin Heidegger points out that Nietzsche's first mention of eternal recurrence in The Gay Science presents this concept as a hypothetical question rather than postulating it as a fact.
Many readings argue that Nietzsche was not attempting to make a cosmological or theoretical claim i.e. saying that eternal recurrence is a true statement about how the world works.
[29] However, scholars such as Neil Sinhababu and Kuong Un Teng have suggested that the reason this material remained unpublished was because Nietzsche himself was unconvinced that his argument would hold up to scrutiny.
[33] Once again, however, the objection is raised that no such ethical imperative appears in any of Nietzsche's published writings,[31] and this interpretation is therefore rejected by most modern scholars.
As a child, he had been prone to vivid sensations of déjà vu,[34] and when he encountered the theory of eternal return in the writings of Nietzsche, it occurred to him that this was a possible explanation for his experiences.
[37] The revolution in Ouspensky's thoughts on recurrence – the idea that change is possible – took place after he became a disciple of the mystic George Gurdjieff, who taught that a person could achieve a higher state of consciousness through a system of strict self-discipline.
In A New Model of the Universe, he argued against Nietzsche's proof of the mathematical necessity of eternal repetition, claiming that a large enough quantity of matter would be capable of an infinite number of possible combinations.
[40][42] Philosopher Michael Huemer has argued that if this is so, then reincarnation can be proved by a person's current existence, using Bayesian probability theory.
