#1297 Neil Sinhababu: Nietzsche on the Eternal Recurrence

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lops, and today I'm joined by Dr. Neil Sinnababu. He's an associate professor in the department of philosophy at the National University of Singapore, and today we're talking about his book, Nietzsche on the Eternal Recurrence. So Neil, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to everyone.

00:23 Neil Sinhababu: Uh, THANK you for having me. Hello, viewers.

00:27 Ricardo Lopes: So,

00:28 Neil Sinhababu: first,

00:29 Ricardo Lopes: uh, to start off with, what is really the idea of the eternal return or the eternal recurrence? I mean, could you explain it to us?

00:38 Neil Sinhababu: Uh, YES, the idea is that, uh, the universe will go in a sort of cyclical fashion where, uh, everything that happened, uh, uh, before, well, uh, uh, it's, uh, will, will have, uh, these lives that we have right now. We have them, we've had them many times. BEFORE we will have them many times again. All the events that proceed from the present will sort of loop back to the present, and the future will be a series of sort of loops of the same thing happening over and over again just as the past was. So the course of time through eternity proceeds in a circle with the same events happening over and over.

01:22 Ricardo Lopes: And does this have anything to do with the nature of the universe itself?

01:28 Neil Sinhababu: Indeed, it is a distinctly cosmological hypothesis. It's a claim that the universe will take this kind of course, uh, looping back on itself with the same events over and over.

01:39 Ricardo Lopes: So what are then the cosmological arguments for the eternal recurrence?

01:46 Neil Sinhababu: Yes, so there are two premises of the argument for the eternal recurrence. Uh, FIRST, uh, time is infinite. Uh, AND second, that the number of configurations of matter in space are finite. So the way these come together is if you have infinite time and a finite number of configurations of matter in space, uh, in that case, to fill up infinite time, you have to repeat some configurations. So that will give you some kind of eternal recurrence where the same state has to be returned to. A third assumption that puts everything into very orderly cycles of recurrence, where everything loops and that's all you get is determinism, because then if you return to a previous state, you get the state that followed that and the state that followed that, and if you have one loop, you just keep on. Getting loops through that deterministic, uh, process. Uh, SO, Nietzsche accepted all three of those assumptions. You just need the first two to get, uh, the present state will occur, but with all three, you get, uh, the structure of, uh, time and space organized into neat recurring loops.

03:02 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. And is this, uh, idea, the uh Nietzsche's idea of the eternal recurrence of scientific hypo hypothesis in any way.

03:12 Neil Sinhababu: He certainly thought so, and he attempted to demonstrate it from scientific premises that were reasonable to accept at the time, infinite time and some of the things that would get us to a nonfinite set of configurations, for example, an eternally expanding universe, those things we believe in now. Uh, PERHAPS an eternally expanding universe. I believe that's sort of what the cosmologists who study the universe are telling us, but that was not something known in Nietzsche's time in the 1880s when he was working on this. So he worked for the science of his day, which also included determinism, at least that was a widely accepted view, and he just put things together that were reasonable to believe from science at his time and got to this conclusion.

04:05 Ricardo Lopes: So what early statements about the eternal return can be found in gay science, and is that the work where we can first find the idea of the eternal recurrence mentioned in any way?

04:22 Neil Sinhababu: Yes, that is his first published work in which it appears. Uh, HE, he has some unpublished notes in which it appears, but as far as sort of a, uh, meant for public consumption, uh, uh, uh, description of the eternal recurrence, yes, that's, uh, that's the place he would go. Uh, SO why don't I, uh, uh, uh, if you'd like, I could, I could read out the, uh, first appearance of the. Internal recurrence in his published works. Yeah, this is the first, uh, clear, uh, thing he says. It occurs involving a conversation, uh, uh, sort of, it's very hypothetical involves, uh, what if a demon spoke to you? Here's how it goes, here's how it goes. What if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, This life as you now live it and have lived it. You will have to live once more and innumerable times more, and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you in the same succession and sequence, even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it speck of dust. So that expresses the idea of, uh, you know, everything coming back again and again, and then from there, uh, Nietzsche considers how would we respond to this. He asks, would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus, or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him? You are a god, and nothing, never have I heard anything more divine. Um, SO, uh, N Nietzsche presents that cosmological hypothesis, which he takes to be scientific, and he says, well, what if, you know, hypothetically a demon were to tell you that this is the way it's going to be? Uh, WELL, would you, uh, be, uh, uh, horrified by this? Would this be, uh, something terrible to you, or would you think this is the most wonderful thing, and I'm very happy, demon, for getting this news? Uh, THAT'S sort of the question that he's putting there.

06:33 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and I guess that will also go through how we then deal, uh, how he then reacts to his own what we would now call thought experiment in the spoke Zarathustra, but, uh, in the book, you also compare the idea of the eternal recurrence to Juan Care's uh theorem. So what, how do you compare it there?

06:58 Neil Sinhababu: Ah yes, so I'm guided here by the work of the physicist Stephen Brush, who describes Nietzsche's idea of the eternal recurrence as a qualitative anticipation of Paul and Care's theorem. So the two essential premises that time is infinite and there are a finite number of configurations, things pretty close to that come up in Poin-Cre's theorem. To describe a couple of differences, Poincare is working with an indeterminis, indeterministic system, so he will get a sort of jagged recurrence where Things don't work in neat loops, but things will eventually come back to each configuration. You won't get the same stories over and over again until an enormous amount of time passes, and then by randomness you might get something that's the same, at least for human purposes. The other thing that Poincare assumes it's a little bit different from Nietzsche is he doesn't have things going exactly back to the same positions. But he does have them getting so close that from the human point of view we might not be able to see any differences, and if we get that for the purpose of human life, it just looks like recurrence, and I don't know if Nietzsche would draw any differences there because from the human point of view, everything is just exactly the same.

08:25 Ricardo Lopes: By the way, as a scientific hypothesis, as the eternal recurrence been validated, is it something that physicists, for example, expect to happen or not?

08:38 Neil Sinhababu: No, not in our current understanding of the universe, because of things like, for one thing, the expanding universe. For a second thing, I mean, the deterministic assumption does not accord with the foundations of quantum mechanics as we understand them. So there's a bunch of little ways in which things are going differently from the way that Nietzsche thought they would go and the way that a late 1800s physic. Is thought they would go. Here Nietzsche is working within the science of his times, and he was actually very knowledgeable about science as it was in his times. Despite being trained in classical philology rather than the natural sciences. He did try to understand scientific results. He was familiar, for example, with the 2nd law of thermodynamics as expressed by Lord Kelvin. Or William Thompson. So those kinds of things he did know about, but that is not the science of today. The expanding universe is sort of the big thing that I talk about in the book as a clear way of showing that the eternal recurrence doesn't accord with contemporary science, because things are just getting bigger and bigger. You don't go back to the same small state before. So unfortunately that can block it. Yeah,

09:54 Ricardo Lopes: so tell us about attitudinal and normative interpretations of the eternal recurrence.

10:01 Neil Sinhababu: Yes, these are the popular interpretations, or at least in the scholarly literature for the last couple decades. So, Stephen Brush, the physicist who is connecting Nietzsche to Poincare, wrote in the 1970s, but Nietzsche scholars over the last several decades have not been picking up on that very much. There's a long tradition. Equally significant in this tradition is Alexander Nehemas. There's many philosophers who have followed him who say N Nietzsche's point wasn't to present this as a cosmological hypothesis. The attitudinal, attitudinal and normative interpretations basically have ways of using this for certain kinds of broadly evaluative purposes. So an attitudinal. Interpretation would say, uh, this is a test of how good your attitudes are. Like, what kind of person are you? Are you sort of, uh, uh, disposed well towards the world? Well, then you'll have a positive attitude towards this. Then you'll be so well disposed towards life that you will say, uh, you know, I want to live life again and again. And Nietzsche sees that as a very healthy way to look at the world. Um, BUT suppose you don't like life. Suppose you're unhappy with this world, and you're like, Oh, no, I'm condemned to live again and again. How terrible. Well, Nietzsche thinks that your system of attitudes then has a problem. You're just not loving life enough. Um, AND so, the attitudinal interpretation looks at this in terms of sort of, does, what does this say about your attitudes and you? Are you loving life sufficiently? So that's the attitudinal one, and the normative interpretation is kind of similar in that it sort of gives evaluations of what you're doing. It says, uh, Really, you should try to live your life so that you would want everything to happen over and over again. And there is something kind of like that, uh, that Nietzsche may have, you know, thought of and thought, OK, that'd be a pretty healthy way to live, where I'd want all of these things to go on over and over again. There are things to suggest that he, uh, thought favorably of that. Um, uh, SO I think those, uh, Interpretations are, you know, to some extent correct. They're describing real things in the text. The problem is if they try to claim that they are totally complete and that they're giving you everything in the text and they exclude the cosmological interpretation, I think there's a mistake there. This is not being presented in a merely hypothetical way as something that Nietzsche thinks, oh, that's never going. To happen, but it's a good test. It's something that I think N Nietzsche thought was a legitimate scientific hypothesis. I don't think he was certain of it because the assumptions are just so heavy and so difficult that Nietzsche, not being a scientist, I think he was aware that he couldn't prove these things, but it was a scientific hypothesis that had strong support from the science Nietzsche knew. And he wasn't, you know, mistaken in thinking that Poincare's theorem kind of shows how close he got. Poincare, the sad story is Poincare did get his, uh, got the King Oscar of Sweden Prize in 1889 for. Uh, PROVING this theorem, he got out on January in the 20th of January in 1889. Unfortunately, N Nietzsche had gone insane in Turin on January 3rd or 4th, January 3rd, 1 of those days. So he had he had gotten insane just within the month. If he had just been able to sort of keep his sanity for a few more weeks, for another month, we could have had Nietzsche discovering that a scientific discovery that proceeded from his premises had been sort of validated by the scientific authorities of his day, and what he would have written then, what he would have thought then would have been beautiful to see. So looking back at Stephen Brush's work, which likens these two discoveries to each other. That really got me to think, well, um, We need to show the people who are using merely attitudinal and merely normative interpretations of the eternal recurrence that there's really more there and that there's a big story to be told about N Nietzsche tracking the science of his time and then finding something. It was at least a reasonable speculation.

14:20 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. Yeah, that's very interesting. And what kinds of psychological effects does the idea of the eternal recurrence have on people? I mean, are they the ones predicted by Nietzsche in that quote you read from Gay Science, or are they different?

14:38 Neil Sinhababu: Well, people have all kinds of, uh, different reactions to it. Uh, uh, SO, uh, uh, I've talked to people who find it horrifying. I personally, uh, I'm very happy with, uh, my life, uh, philosophy. It's very fun to do and, uh, is a wonderful thing. And if I were to live again and again, I think, uh, despite bad things that happen in my life, uh, as bad things happen in all our lives, I think I would be quite happy, uh, uh, with the eternal recurrence. I might be very unhappy on behalf of other people because I know many people have lived very miserable lives, and for them I would feel very bad for them to be trapped in this repeated terrible existence. Uh, SO that's really the downside of it, just how much misery other people would be locked into. For myself, I would be pretty happy for, you know, all sentient beings in creation as a whole. How do I, how should I feel for them? Well, I guess that depends on how sentient creation. AS a whole goes, you know, how the, you know, everything that exists, uh, how I, you know, everything in the universe. Should I believe that, uh, I guess if one cycle is good, many cycles would be infinitely good, uh, if that's how it turns out, if one cycle is net good, that's how things score for infinity. Of course, if one cycle is net bad, uh, we get a hellish negative score over the course of infinity of, you know, infinite negative value, infinite badness, um. So a lot will depend on how your life is, on how you see the prospects for the lives of others. If you are an altruistic or empathic kind of person. All those things will come together to determine how you feel. There is also an opinion held by many Nietzsche scholars that this shouldn't make too much of a difference. Difference. Um, SOME people have expressed this in thinking, OK, well, if it's just the same life over and over again, and it's going to happen over and over again, why should I really care? I can't do anything about it. I think that's actually a mistaken response. Uh, YOU should care for the same reason that you would care about an eternal afterlife, either in heaven or hell. That you could not do anything about. For example, if I came to know that there was nothing I could do and I would be uh tormented forever with eternal damnation, uh, if I discovered that if the demon whispered that to me, I would be rather horrified and I would, I suppose, try to enjoy my remaining time on Earth and make the most of it, but I would have something really terrible to fear afterwards that would go on forever. So that would be a, a, a terrible thing to discover. And if, uh, uh, on the other hand, I had heavenly bliss going on for forever, uh, I would be delighted, uh, if there were a god that would give such a thing to be. I would, of course, be overjoyed with that god. Sadly, I do not believe that, uh, uh, uh, there is such a God, but fortunately, I don't think there was a devil that will torment me in eternal hell either. Um, SO, uh, You know, for the reasons that an eternal heaven is wonderful and an eternal hell is terrible, even if you can't do anything about them, uh, the same way, an eternity of this life over and over again could be wonderful or terrible, uh, depending on how this life is.

17:53 Ricardo Lopes: Right, so let's talk about the spoke Zarathustra and what we can find there about the eternal recurrence. So what can we find there exactly? What is the story there?

18:05 Neil Sinhababu: Yes, so the story begins roughly halfway through the text. So, uh, the prologue and section one are Zarathustra expressing a whole bunch of views that give you his general philosophy on a number of different topics. Uh, THEN late in section two of part two of this book, Zarathustra, sorry, part two, I should say, we have, um, In a section called the soothsayer, there is a soothsayer who talks to Zarathustra and expresses this sort of dark prophecy of what the future will be like, what the soothsayer is. Saying to everybody in his uh uh Doc prophecy is, and I saw a great sadness descend upon mankind. The best grew wary of their works. A doctrine appeared accompanied by a faith. All is empty. All is the same. All has been. So that's a way of saying something that the eternal recurrence would make true. All is empty. All is the same. All has been. Well, everything that we're doing has happened many times before. Now he adds the all is empty because he sees that as empty of value. We're just trapped in a valueless existence over and over and over, and he describes sort of poetically what people are saying about this. People are very unhappy in the soothsayer's vision. Uh, THEY are saying things like, Alas, where is there still a sea in which one might drown? Thus we are wailing across shallow swamps. Verily, we have become too wary even to die. We are still waking and living on in tombs. So this is sort of the dark future that Zarathustra sees if the eternal recurrence is widely accepted and known by people. You know, Zarathustra himself doesn't really internalize immediately at that point that the soothsayer is suggesting the eternal occurrence. What actually happens there is Zarathustra hears the soothsayer's words. It disturbs. These words disturb him, and then he goes into this deep sleep and has a dream. He has a dream. About being a night watchman and a guardian of tombs upon the lonely mountain castle of death. These tombs have life that had been overcome. The castle has the odor of dusty eternities, and all this stuff, you know, Nietzsche scholars have not always looked at this section as being about the eternal recurrence, but this mountain castle of death where Nietzsche dreams about being for dusty eternities after hearing the all is wary, all the same, all has been prophecy. That, you know, on, I guess my second reading of the book, uh, pretty quickly, looked like the eternal recurrence to me. The first time it's hard to see because you don't know about the eternal recurrence when you hit that, but, uh, that really looked very eternal recurrency, and then when I looked at the science of it and all that, I was like, OK, the lonely mountain castle of death he's describing, he's sort of imagining seeing the world. IN all the dark parts where there are no living beings and everything is sort of on its way back to where the living beings will be and thrive. So that's how I understood this passage that the soothsayer in giving this prophecy has sort of planted the seed of the idea in Zarathustra's mind. It emerges in a dream. Now Zarathustra doesn't even understand his dream. Uh, WHEN he wakes up, uh, he wakes up basically because the dream ends with the roaring wind blowing one of the coffins open and crazy things fly out of the coffin. They are uh uh butterflies and owls and uh. Just all kinds of crazy things. Everything's flying out of the coffin. That frightens him and he wakes up. He asks his disciples, what was my dream about? Please try to interpret it. A disciple gives an interpretation that's obviously wrong. Zarathustra shakes his head, but the they have dinner with the soothsayer. That's basically what happens there. So Zarathustra doesn't even understand it, and the way this goes in the book is for the next couple sections, he increasingly just begins to realize what it was he saw in his vision. He gets the idea of the eternal recurrence, and it horrifies him. It horrifies him because if everything is coming back again and again, the first thing that strikes him is that the bad things will come back again and again, and then he will have infinite badness over the course of all the time there is with all the bad things eternally recurring. Uh, SO that's sort of the initial sort of struggle he has with it.

23:05 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, but, but, so how exactly does he deal with the idea of all bad events in life repeating themselves and the resulting infinite negative value?

23:17 Neil Sinhababu: Yeah, so this is something that, uh, over the course of, uh, uh, part two and part three, so part two we see him descend into his like horror and depression about this, uh, part three begins with him, uh, uh, very, uh, uh, sad and depressed. At the end of part two, there is this sort of magical voice that speaks to him, his stillest hour that tells him to go off by himself into solitude, and the reason he's going off by himself into solitude, it's basically the place that he's going to be able to sort of come to terms with the idea of the eternal recurrence. So he has more sort of visions of this. The idea becomes clear to him. He thinks about it more. After, as time passes, the process by which he comes to terms with the eternal recurrence is, well, there's infinite negative value, and that initially shocks him and makes him horrified with the idea, but after that, he eventually becomes, you know, becomes aware of the infinite positive value that the eternal recurrence makes available as well, and it's sort of both things are playing on his desires, dispositions, feelings at the same time. Uh, SO all of that is sort of operating on him, and the story is that in the end, his dispositions and attitudes towards the positive value went out, uh, and that's why he comes to love the eternal recurrence.

24:46 Ricardo Lopes: But how is it that he comes to recognize infinite positive value then and how does he relate to life afterwards?

24:56 Neil Sinhababu: Yes, so, uh, uh, this, uh, within the story, it's, it's sort of a, uh, there's a period for which he thinks about it. There's periods for which he travels through human society. There's sort of a pause in the eternal recurrent story during part three where he considers a bunch of other matters, and then he goes up to his. Cave in the mountains. Zarathustra, being a a sort of a colorful sort of hero, has all these animal friends that include an eagle and a serpent, the eagle being the proudest and most courageous animal, the serpent being the wisest animal, and he goes up to his mountain cave with them. And at one point he decides, you know, OK, this is the time to confront my abysmal thought, the abysmal thought of all the bad things, including, particularly this is sort of a distinctive bad thing that Zarathustra is very focused on, the eternal recurrence of contemptible people coming back over and over again. And given that Zarathustra is sort of a fan of human excellence, having contemptible people eternally recur. IS something he's not very happy about. So it's sort of disgust with that, uh, that, uh, sort of, uh, uh, uh, is his abysmal thought. Now, for me, I, I'm kind of not too worried about contemptible people. I don't really think about, you know, that kind of problem too much, but, you know, human suffering and animal suffering, I do think about. So that's what it would be for me that I'd just be horrified by. But, you know, Zarathustra has his own reasons for horror. So he just sort of faces up to his thought. This cave, and it's sort of uh makes him fall unconscious and leaves him sort of a comatose, unable to move about for a whole week, uh, when even after he regains consciousness, he just lies there on the floor of his cave. And at the end of the week, he, uh, finally sort of wakes up and his animals have brought him, uh, they're very nice animals. They've brought him all kinds of foods, and he sort of, uh, uh, smells one of the rose apples and it's kind of nice, and his animals were like, Oh, you're back. OK, uh, uh, why don't you wake up and see all the wonderful things in the world? And what's happened over those seven days, I think, is that, uh, all his dispositions, the negative and the positive, he sort of, you know, had to sort of imagine eternity. And sort of All those dispositions in him, his negative and positive attitudes towards life, have sort of uh both sort of found their objects in eternity, and one has won out over the other as far as the preponderance of attitudes goes, and the positive attitudes in the end have won. The world on the whole eternally. Occurring looks beautiful enough to him that the infinite positive value suddenly is looking like, well, something much more beautiful than you could ever have in a single life. You see that infinite positive value, and he wants his life to eternally recur at this point. There's a wonderful romantic drama where Life, who has been Zarathustra's love interest throughout some of the most pretty sections of the book, sort of appears again. He goes through this wild dance with her that is a little bit violent that kind of expresses, I think, just like how life has its ups and downs, and life will sometimes slap you and life will. Uh, SOMETIMES kiss you and it'll do all these different things, and, uh, life has all these kind of effects on him and in the end he decides, or it's, it's sort of in him that he, you know, loves life and wants to, uh, in one of the nice metaphors at the end of part three, give, I think, life the ring of. Recurrence as a sort of a, a wedding ring, and I think the way that this goes in the, in the story of the book is, uh, life, once given the ring of recurrence, uh, uh, and married to Zarathustra, her married name is eternity because Zarathustra is, uh, well, together, uh, for, you know, he's living for eternity and life. Comes eternal life. Uh, THAT'S uh uh how Zarathustra is supposed to sort of get into a permanent, uh, forever relationship with life. Um, AND, uh, part three of Zarathustra ends with what most readers consider the climax of the book where, uh, Zarathustra is proclaiming, uh, uh. Uh, THE 7 things about his life, uh, that make it worth living again and again, and, uh, every one he ends with, for I love you, O eternity.

29:45 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. So, but then what is his first public statement about the eternal recurrence?

29:53 Neil Sinhababu: Uh, SO, well, uh, as far as public statements about it go, uh, he makes some public statements initially, for example, in reporting his dream, that he doesn't even know about the eternal recurrence. Uh, HE'S just like, I had this dream, and people can't interpret exactly what it is, but it is about that. That's sort of what he's seeing in his vision. The second statement, and the clearest public statement is about a second vision he has, uh, in which he's carrying a dwarf up a mountain. And the dwarf is named the Spirit of gravity. Uh, THIS is sort of a, the dwarf is sort of weighing on his shoulders and weighing him down, uh, but he has to carry this heavy dwarf up the mountain. The dwarf is taunting him, uh, basically about how, uh, bad things are and uh trying to sort of uh uh uh depress him as the spirit of gravity would, and try to bring him down in a literal sense, uh. He basically describes this vision of the dwarf. At a certain point, he carries the dwarf up to this gateway that he finds up in the mountain, and he sees this path leading to the gateway. There is sort of a path leading beyond the gateway. He imagines sort of an infinite path and thinks, well, if we have this infinite path. Uh, THEN, you know, whatever is going on over there and whatever is behind, uh, if there is a finite number of configurations of matter, you will have to repeat things to fill a space on both sides of the infinite path, and that's sort of his. The clearest description of the eternal recurrence that includes the premises he shares with Poincare, the infinite time, the necessity of repetition along that infinite path. Now the interesting thing about the dwarf that was on his shoulders is as Zarathustra comes to terms with the eternal recurrence, comes to explicitly see it, comes to just state that this is going to happen, the dwarf seems to become lighter and lighter. On his shoulders and eventually vanishes and here we see, I think, the dwarf as a sort of projection of sort of Zarathustra's negative attitudes, the attitudes that would bring him down as the attitudes that uplift him become stronger than those as that balance towards the eternal recurrence slowly shifts, we see the dwarf start to diminish and vanish. Mhm.

32:33 Ricardo Lopes: So what goals did you have in mind with this book?

32:38 Neil Sinhababu: Yeah, well. The biggest goal of mine was just to tell the story of the eternal recurrence. I, you know, Zarathustra, this book Zarathustra is Uh, uh, probably my favorite book. The other, uh, a contender would be The Fellowship of the Ring, which I read when I was, uh, in 8th grade. But yeah, as far as the books that made me, there's those two. AND, uh, when I was 19 years old, you know, as an undergraduate, these ideas of the eternal recurrence in Zarathustra sort of occurred to me, and I was fascinated with the story. Uh, YOU know, there's just so much about it that's amazing. Here we have a sort of secular proposal for it. Eternal life, you know, you don't have to have a God giving you heaven or threatening you with hell, you know, if this worked out here in the world, we would have sort of a system that gives you eternal life, and I was just obsessed with those books, Zarathustra. I loved this book. I would just read it again and again. My undergraduate friends knew me as completely crazy about it. So I saw this story then. I'd never had a proper opportunity to tell the story, and I just had that. Story and me ready to tell this Cambridge Elements series that the book is in is this nice series of short books that just fit the size of the story. I had to tell perfectly. So if any viewers want to see the story, this Cambridge Element Nietzsche and The Eternal Recurrence is just very, very easy to get online or if you want the paper copy, you can get that too. It's available in paper form as well, whatever you like. Yeah, uh, and so it was mostly to tell that story, and, you know, there's, there's, uh, things like, uh, the scholarly literature had, even, you know, these are Nietzsche scholars. This is our guy, you know, and if the physicists are telling us, you know, he had a really neat scientific idea that uh was this just really nice qualitative anticipation of an important scientific result for which one of the great scientists at the time won a prize that was being awarded for sort of the best discovery, you know, across all of Europe that anyone could find. OK, well, you know, we better know that. We better, you know, as Nietzsche scholars, give our guy some credit, and it's, you know, while I, you know, respect all the scholars who came before and did all the work to defend the attitudinal and, and, and normative interpretations, there's something they're getting at that is part of the picture. Well, if we're neglecting this huge thing that Nietzsche discovered. The physicists are telling us, you know, is so amazing. It was for me, it was a revelation looking at Stephen Brush's old book because Brush was writing this giant, like 800 page history of statistical mechanics and how laws about gasses and heat and all these things were developed, and three pages are on Nietzsche because N Nietzsche made this qualitative anticipation of Poincare's theorem. And, you know, that's something that the community of Nietzsche scholars really needs to appreciate, and we need to be able to boast about our man properly, you know, if he did this, we should be able to say it. Um, ALSO, uh, uh, there are physicists who sometimes these days, uh, go back to Nietzsche and see that. They're like, hey, look, this is, this is interesting. Uh, THE physicist Sean Carroll had a blog post, noting that, uh, yeah, this Nietzsche. Stuff looks a lot like Poincare, and the literature and philosophy hadn't really picked up on that. So, you know, I thought we've got to sort of like, yeah, tell the physicists that they're getting this right and make all of that clear, uh, make it clear just how much N Nietzsche was doing. We sort of owe that to our hero as Nietzsche scholars, you know, and, and just as scholars trying to get the, the truth about what happened back then out to everybody. So there's those kinds of things. There's also just the fact, and this just comes back to telling the story. I find the story, uh, once you see how it all fits together, just a really neat story about how one can come to love life with this amazing thing about infinity before one, and there are just these incredibly poignant moments in it. So this is a a moment from a Zarathustra and that late conversation with life. So, uh, what is going on right before he proclaims the eternal recurrence is there's this section where he and life are together and um Uh, uh Uh, life says to him, Oh, Zarathustra, you are not faithful enough to me. You do not love me nearly as much as you say. I know you are thinking of leaving me soon, and here I think Zarathustra, what she's realizing is Zarathustra is a mortal man. He's going to leave her, um, and yeah, that's we leave life when we die, um. And uh uh Zarathustra replies, yes, but you also know, and he whispers something in her ear. And there's some debate among scholars who, uh, uh, about what exactly he whispers to her because we don't know, but the, um, the, I think the, uh, uh, most standard interpretation and the one I accept is that he whispers something meaning. But I will return And that's what the eternal recurrence would say. Um, WE don't know exactly what he says. This isn't included in the text, so that's sort of an interpreter's mystery, but the, uh, uh, uh, reply that she gives, uh, to him is, you know that. O Zarathustra? But nobody knows that. And so what seems to be happening is life herself is telling Zarathustra about the uncertainty of the eternal recurrence, and this is the kind of thing that makes me think N Nietzsche himself was uncertain about it, realizing that he could not demonstrate that the scientific premises were true, but there was a conjecture that made sense given the scientific sciences of his times, given things that he was not in any position to prove. He didn't have Poincare's. Scientific abilities. He didn't have the mathematic abilities of Konstantin Kraheodori, who is the great mathematician who eventually basically gave the final version of the math for Poincare's theorem. He, you know, he can't do this, so he doesn't know for sure, and life is actually telling him that. But then the last line there after life says that to him is from Zarathustra saying or to himself just in his mind. But then life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was. And I think what Zarathustra himself is sort of saying back or he's sort of realizing is, you know, I want to live again because I love life so much, you know, and I said this confidently to life sort of out of a kind of wishful thinking because I just love life so much. I can't bear to be without life, you know, it means so much to me. I'm no longer in the situation where I'm horrified by the eternal occurrence. I wanted just to love because I love life and want to be with life forever. So he's expressing that kind of desire to be with life again and again, and it's so strong in him that even like his knowledge that this is uncertain. Yeah, that kind of fades away behind him, just the way that he just can't bear to think of it because he loves life so much. So that's just such a beautiful scene, and I want people to understand that scene and appreciate it. So writing this book so that people would be able to make sense of the story and make sense of all the beauty of the story, just doing that sort of so Nietzsche's message could come out so that he could, people could see this, people could see how all the symbols in the book and all this beautiful stuff are expressing this amazing message about loving life. That was the point, you know, and I hope people will be able to see the story and appreciate that.

40:44 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so one final question then. What would you say is the current, the contemporary relevance of the idea of the eternal recurrence since as we talked about earlier, it has not been validated scientifically? I mean, what would you say about that?

41:04 Neil Sinhababu: Yeah, it's a good question. Uh, I mean, and this is, uh, I suppose, uh, maybe to be discovered to a large extent, you know, after my, you know, book comes out, we'll see what the literature does with it, what people develop out of it, uh, that remains to be seen. Um, AND I, I have been very happy with the initial sort of responses, uh, I mean, there's not much published because, uh, uh. Uh, YOU know, the book is just so new. It just came out this year. Um, uh, BUT, uh, you know, there's people like, uh, uh, Simon Goldstein at Hong Kong University who've taken interest in the eternal recurrence, you had some early mention of this kind of stuff, uh, who are not N Nietzsche scholars, but who are just like, OK, it's good to work out what happens in a circular time kind of framework and how infinities might arise. There's a lot of, uh, uh, uh, uh, philosophers, including many in my department, who are interested in issues of, uh, what. Happens in an infinite reality, you know, if, if things are infinite in some kind of way, well, what do we make of that for a bunch of ethical issues? And this is a contribution to that discussion. There's also, uh, so the eternal recurrence is sort of a story about, well, if the eternal recurrence is true, it's that reality in a temporal way ends up being very large, or sort of the reality that's like. Um, THE world humans live in ends up being in a certain sense, very large in its extension across time. Uh, THERE are other theories in physics that make, uh, the human-like reality very large as well, like multiverse theories, uh, in physics, uh, or even in philosophy if you have David Lewis's view. Um, THESE multiverse theories just say that there's a lot of human-like environments in reality. That's sort of the ethically significant point. So there are just many others out there somewhere, including maybe others that are very much like us. So there's this interesting question, sort of like from an ethical, personal point of view, uh, how should we regard in a very large reality, the many others, you know, they won't interact with us. There's nothing they can do to change our situation because they're just too far away or they're at different times. But it's sort of an interesting question. How should we feel about their presence, you know, well, the thing I think we should feel is, I think we should hope that all goes well for them. Uh, ALL these beings that might be somewhere out there. I, I mean, I can't affect anything about them, but I wish them well. I hope they are happy. Uh, I would be very sad if there were just hells out there somewhere in reality, and there is nothing that can be done and beings are in torment. I mean, we do have that in some unfortunate parts of the reality we know. Hopefully we can fix problems where people are suffering terribly or animals are suffering. Terribly and do that, but in the cases that are far away, there is nothing we can do. At least I think we should sort of hope that things go better. Yeah, there is nothing we can do to act, but our feelings are still appropriate about those faraway things. So just in sort of thinking through and understanding how to feel about a very large reality with many others who may be like us. In some ways, but we cannot affect. Uh, THE eternal recurrence is one of the ideas that sort of, uh, uh, sort of an early sort of, uh, idea that emerges from a certain kind of scientific picture that allows us to play around with that, to understand it. Maybe some of the lessons will be more broadly applicable, applicable to these other large reality theories if they are true.

44:44 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so the book is again Nietzsche on the eternal recurrence. I'm leaving a link to it in the description of the interview. And uh Neil, apart from the book, would you like to tell people where they can find your work on the internet?

44:59 Neil Sinhababu: Uh, YES, I have a Phil Papers page, Phil Papers, uh, being, I think, the best place for philosophers to host their research, as, uh, you know, if you put stuff there, people can download it for free, uh, and I want people to see all the cool ideas for free, you know, so, uh, yeah, please, uh, if you're interested in, uh, any of the topics I work on, I try to put everything up there. If there's something I've worked on. That's not up there, that's a publication, please let me know if you want it so that I make sure I put it up there and make it available. Uh, SO yeah, you can even get, uh, this book up there if, uh, if you'd like, uh, and download a PDF. Uh, PLEASE take a look and, uh, yeah, uh, see if you would like, uh, the, uh, uh, universe to eternally recur. I, I hope your life is going so well that, uh, you would like Zarathustra.

45:46 Ricardo Lopes: Great, so thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you.

45:52 Neil Sinhababu: Thank you so much for having me here.

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