This was the provocative challenge posed by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche at the end of the 19th Century, who asked us to imagine a universe that eventually repeats itself in every detail, over and over again. He called this the eternal return.

In his autobiography, Nietzsche recounts the momentous day the idea came to him. In the late summer of 1881 he was walking beside the beautiful Swiss alpine Lake Silvaplana. He paused beside a huge pyramidal rock and the idea first struck him. It would become the central idea of his poetic–philosophical masterpiece Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which he’d begin two years later. But he would first present it in the penultimate aphorism of his 1882 book The Gay Science, under the title ‘The Greatest Weight’:

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, all 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!”

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 never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

Along with his matchless style, you can hear in this just how transformational the idea was for him. For Nietzsche, eternal return was the ultimate triumph of immanent reality over a posited transcendence. As he suggests in Beyond Good and Evil, it was the fruit of his attempt “to think pessimism through to its depths and to liberate it” from the lingering religious sense that it’s bad that God is dead and there’s no salvation beyond this world.

While powerful as a thought experiment, it’s unclear how seriously Nietzsche took the idea as a theory of how the cosmos actually works. Though somewhat plausible in the physics of his day, later scientific developments effectively rule it out. And yet, in an ironic twist, modern science lends strong support to its central insight that everything is eternal—not through endless repetition, but by existing in four-dimensional spacetime.

The Physics of Eternal Return

In his published works, Nietzsche never directly argues for the literal truth of eternal return, either presenting it as an existential thought experiment (as in the passage above) or distancing himself from it by literary means. The closest he comes is in the fictional Zarathustra, in which the title character argues for it, in a vision, against the personification of rational seriousness! Later, the doctrine is explicated by his talking animals, while he gently mocks and eventually ignores them. And yet the book is indisputably centered on Zarathustra’s successful attempt to will the eternal return of all things. From this it would seem Nietzsche was skeptical about the literal truth of the idea while insisting on its existential import.

However, his private notebooks tell a different story. From the time the idea came to him in 1881 until right before his final collapse in 1889, his notes suggest he took it quite seriously as a scientific theory. The final note contains his most developed proof for it: if time is infinite, the universe composed of a finite quantity of force-centers and force, and each new combination of these is fully determined by the previous, then the universe must go through the exact same series of combinations an infinite number of times.

So Nietzsche's reluctance to present eternal return as a serious theory in his public work may not have been because its reality didn't matter; rather, he may have been biding his time until it could be rigorously demonstrated by science. And it already made a good deal of sense given the physics of his day. Ironically, less than three weeks after Nietzsche’s collapse, the physicist Henri Poincaré revealed his recurrence theorem demonstrating that certain closed systems confined to a finite space will inevitably return to a state arbitrarily close to their initial state. If the universe were such a system, it would recur eternally.

Unfortunately, it appears that it isn’t. Given Nietzsche’s antagonism to Christianity, it’s fitting that a Catholic priest would render his theory unsound. In 1927, just under four decades since his collapse and three since his death, Fr. Georges Lemaître argued the universe was expanding. And in 1931 he proposed the entire universe expanded from a single primeval ‘atom.’ In subsequent years, evidence for this accumulated and it became known as the Big Bang theory, after that primordial ‘explosion.’ Today it’s the scientific consensus.

There’s three ways the Big Bang undermines eternal return as conceived by Nietzsche:

Firstly, it means that time is not beginningless: it began at the Big Bang, so there cannot have been an infinite number of past cycles.

Secondly, it means that space is expanding. There are ever new regions for matter and energy to move into, undermining the recurrence of past states. This is not the kind of system Poincaré recurrence could apply to.

Finally, it implies an utterly unproductive final state of the universe. As per the second law of thermodynamics, entropy increases over time: the energy in a system becomes less organized, more dispersed, less usable. Things fall apart. Unless there’s enough gravity in the universe to reverse its expansion (and current evidence doesn’t support this), it will end in heat death, with all energy evenly spread out. Nietzsche knew the second law but didn’t consider it a threat: in beginningless time, if heat death were possible it would have already happened. Not so in a universe only 13.8 billion years old.

The Relativity Revolution

There was an even more fundamental revolution in physics, however. In 1905, just five years after Nietzsche’s death, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity. Prior to this, physicists has been stumped by a curious paradox: the same speed of light was measured by all observers, regardless of their own velocity. How could this be?

If you’re driving at 100 km/h, a car coming toward you at 80 km/h will seem to be racing toward you at 180 km/h. If you’re both going the same direction, it’s moving backward at 20 km/h, from your perspective. We knew that light was an electromagnetic wave, and it should make a difference if we’re moving into or away from the wave when we measure it. Like waves in water and sound waves in air, it was believed light waves traveled through a medium—the ‘luminiferous ether.’ Only if you were stationary relative to the ether would you measure the true speed of light.

The decisive experiment was conducted by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in 1887. Since the Earth is hurtling around the Sun at over 100,000 km/h, we’d expect to detect a relative difference in the speed of light. But regardless of how their instruments were oriented, Michelson and Morley couldn’t find the predicted effect. Regardless of the observer, light is always measured as traveling 299,792,458 meters per second in empty space.

Einstein solved this paradox in his special theory of relativity: throwing out the ether hypothesis, he realized that if the speed of light was absolute, time and space must be relative.

Imagine you’re standing beside a railroad on which a train is traveling close to the speed of light. You see two simultaneous flashes of light: one right in front of the train and one right behind it. What would you see if you were standing in the middle of the train? Because you’d be racing toward the front flash and away from the other, the light of the front flash would reach you first. And because you’d measure the same speed of light from both directions, you’d conclude the two flashes were not simultaneous! To the passenger on the train, the person standing by the tracks is actually racing backward, toward the rear and away from the front flash, which is why they see the two flashes at the same time. Whether two events are simultaneous or not is a matter of perspective, and in relativity there is no privileged perspective.

This is known as the relativity of simultaneity, and it leads to two other extraordinary phenomena: length contraction and time dilation. Because to measure something you need to locate each end of it at the same time, observers will differ about the length of objects approaching the speed of light. Someone beside the tracks will measure a significantly shorter train than one of its passengers. And observers will also disagree about the flow of time: someone looking into the train will see its clocks running slow and everyone moving in slow motion. But from the passengers’ perspective, since the outside world is racing backward, it will be contracted and evolve in slow motion.

Together these principles solve the problem that Einstein faced. Speed is distance over time, and because distance and time vary in just the right ways, the speed of light remains constant. In other words, if time dilates and length contracts, light has more time to go a shorter distance.

Time and Eternalism

Einstein’s theory of relativity would have delighted the perspectivist Nietzsche, who once remarked, “there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing.’” But it would also have given him a new way to understand eternal return.

We can distinguish two main views about time: presentism and eternalism. Presentism holds that nothing exists outside of the present: the past has ceased to exist and the future does not yet exist. On the other hand, eternalism holds that everything—past, present, future—equally exists. The universe is one vast ‘block’ of space and time: things are located in both.

The special theory of relativity strongly implies an eternalist view of time. As the physicist Roger Penrose highlighted with his Andromeda paradox, the relativity of simultaneity means that two people walking toward each other on the street may inhabit very different ‘presents.’ For one of them, an invasion fleet from the distant Andromeda galaxy is on its way to Earth; for the other, the Andromedans haven’t even decided to invade yet. But how could this be, unless these events just exist in spacetime, all along? And if we consider all the possible presents of all possible observers, there remains no region of spacetime that wouldn’t be present or past to someone.

So far we’ve focused on special relativity, but in 1915 Einstein presented his general theory of relativity, which broadened the theory to account for gravity. Gravity was no longer a force but the shape of spacetime itself, which curves around massive objects. Near them time stretches out (gravitational time dilation). Clocks move slower the closer they are to the surface of the Earth (we constantly correct for this for GPS satellites to work).

In special relativity, spacetime is smooth. Though observers have different ‘presents,’ each has only one, which extends throughout the universe. But in general relativity, an observer’s ‘present’ depends not only on their velocity but also on the distribution and mass of matter. How we define a universal ‘present’ for a given observer depends on how we choose to slice up spacetime, which is ultimately somewhat arbitrary, and time is not only relative but radically local. This seems like a deathblow for presentism.

The block universe seems far from our commonsense view, in which time flows. If everything already exists within it, wouldn’t it be static? This was an assumption behind the most famous paper in the philosophy of time: J. M. E. McTaggart’s The Unreality of Time, published in 1908 (if we assume time’s reality). The paper is valuable because it shows how the commonsense presentist view is incoherent while illustrating a basic mistake about eternalism.

For McTaggart, time implies both an ‘A series’ and a ‘B series’: in an A series, events are ordered from future to present to past; in a B series, events are ordered as earlier or later than each other. Time requires change, and because the relations between events (the B series) are unchanging, this must come from their relation to the A series: an event is first future, then present, then past. In other words, change occurs because an event changes its position in the A series; change is used to explain change—a vicious circle! And if the first level of change requires an A series, the second level must also, and so on, in a vicious infinite regress. Therefore, concludes McTaggart, time is unreal.

But what if all you need is the B series? McTaggart’s rejection of eternalism depends on the fallacy that time itself flows: the A series and B series move past each other. But time doesn’t flow; time is flow. Change is already inherent in the B series as the ordered sequence of events that make up a changing object. An event is a momentary instance of change; it doesn’t change! Eternalist spacetime (the B series updated for relativity) isn’t static just because everything exists within it.

But at this point another objection arises: how can eternalism account for the experienced present? Even if there’s no absolute present, it certainly seems I’m living my life from a particular point within it, which continuously sweeps forward in time. If my whole life exists in block time, why is there any subjective present at all?

An eternalist would respond that we experience our life from every point in it, though to a being in time what this looks like is exactly what we get. One moment flows into the next in the temporal order; when we experience our life, we experience this flow. Just like a being in space, a being in time has to experience from somewhere, and so each of us experiences our whole life, but from the moments within it.

To better grasp this, we could represent it a couple of different ways—though both are deficient to the extent that they implicitly place time within time. We could picture ourselves as ‘forever’ living every moment of our lives, simultaneously. I am always experiencing myself now, when I was 10, and when I will be 70, and in each of these moments I feel: this moment is the present, and I was just in the moment before. Or we could picture it as a cycle, like the eternal return: I subjectively live my life all the way through then return to the beginning and live it through again. The point is that all of my life exists, and all of it is a life—animated, experienced, lived.

This may seem to imply we have no free will: we’re thrown into our already-made lives and fated to live them out. But that’s not the case. Firstly, because eternalism doesn’t require causal determinism: it just says whatever happens exists, regardless of how it comes about. Human free will is just as compatible with eternalism as a universe fully determined by physical laws. And secondly, if free will exists then whenever I do something I freely do it. From the perspective of this moment, if I choose something in the future it’s not that I can’t do otherwise, simply that I don’t do otherwise. And if free will doesn’t exist, we’re no worse off than under presentism.

An Eternalist Life

We’ve now seen how modern physics makes a literal interpretation of eternal return untenable even as it establishes a new conception of time. Nietzsche’s idea returns with greater force in eternalist guise: we’ll call this the eternalist return.

I remember, as a teenager, being struck by a passage I read in Overqualified by Joey Comeau:

Everything that has happened or will happen exists together. Just at different times. People die, but that isn’t any different from the edge of a table. The table is still there. It just doesn’t stretch that far.

This is a purer conception than Nietzsche’s, which requires objective recurrence. Recurrence would only beg the question: are the other iterations of me really me? An eternalist return escapes this: I am exactly who I am, my every contour in spacetime.

So, if true, what does it mean for us, practically?

Firstly, it forces us to evaluate our life as a whole, rather than as something continually falling into nonbeing. If we know we live our whole life eternally, our attitude toward it becomes far more significant. How do we feel about it, and why? Have we spent our time being petty, reactive and resentful, or noble, active and generous?

Secondly, it requires us to deal with the negative aspects of our past. No one’s ever lived without guilt or suffering, but events only take on their full meaning within a whole life. What we do with them matters, and the misfortune from which much good flows may truly be fortunate. In this way we actively incorporate them into a life we affirm. At the same time, some events could genuinely be exceptions—but we have to make them so by letting them go (if we were wronged, we forgive; if we did wrong, we don’t repeat it). As Alexander Nehamas notes in his book on Nietzsche, whether one actively incorporates them or genuinely lets them go, one has no reason for resentment.

Thirdly, it means we live all our most powerful, joyful, loving moments eternally. There’s no need to anxiously cling to experience. The passing moment is already eternal, and you open yourself to its richness most fully when you let it flow. The poet William Blake’s brief meditation on eternity captures this perfectly:

He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Finally, it challenges us to create a beautiful future. If the question, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” drives me, I want my very next act to matter. And this doesn’t just mean self-cultivation: if eternalism is true then everyone’s life is as eternal as mine. Each brief good moment you give another is eternal, too. At the same time, it prompts us to become as excellent and strong as we can be, that we may truly affirm the eternal lives we’re living.

And yet, real tragedy exists. However eternal, our lives may end at any time, and there may be things we can never incorporate or render exceptions. These, too, are eternal. This is the dark side of eternalism. Though we can’t evade this, we may better deal with it. We may consider how goodness and tragedy are intertwined (the same physical laws that allow our bodies to move and grow allow for their torment and destruction); we may observe how the threat of tragedy fuels the preciousness of what we have; if we can, we may savor tragic beauty, which makes tragedies some of the finest examples of human art. And finally, we may face the tragic conditions of existence forthrightly, even when we cannot affirm them—the last, noblest stand of the human being.

Nietzsche spent the final decade of his life insane. For him, this would have been a fate worse than death. And yet, he knew it was a possibility: for most of his life he suffered from similar symptoms as his father, who died of a brain disease. I often wonder if there was a moment, at his strongest, when he would have affirmed his whole life—even with this.

Epilogue

While the theory of relativity strongly implies eternalism, this doesn’t hold for all of physics. The popular Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics seems to require an absolute present, in which the possible becomes actual. Relativity and quantum mechanics are the best theories we have for explaining the largest and smallest structures of our universe, respectively, but physicists have struggled for decades to unite them. Assuming a union is possible, we don’t know whether this will reduce quantum presentism to relativity’s eternalism, or vice versa. Suffice it to say, we haven’t heard the last word on time. So while the essential insight of Nietzsche’s eternal return is extremely plausible given modern physics, it remains one perspective among others. And both of these facts may well have pleased Nietzsche.

The Nietzsche Stone on the shore of Lake Silvaplana. Photo by Armin Kübelbeck, Wikimedia Commons (license).

To explore these questions, we first need to discard those forms of eternal life that are obviously bad. We want to consider only the best and strongest examples, because we want to see whether there is any coherent notion of eternal life we could hope for. If there is not, this suggests eternal life is inherently undesirable—at least for beings like us. So we must exclude from the outset the kinds of life a person clearly wouldn’t want to have. We are not considering eternal hell, for instance. Similarly, we are not considering a situation where someone lives forever while the physical aging process continues as normal, rendering them decrepit beyond recognition. Instead, we will assume eternal youth (or any age you wish) and consider lives that range from that of a normal human being of moderate happiness (many who lead such lives claim they would want to live forever) through to the best life we can possibly imagine.

But what do we mean by ‘eternal life’? ‘Eternal’ can signify either infinite temporal duration or a mode of being that transcends time as we now experience it. I will refer to these as the temporal and atemporal interpretations of eternal life, respectively. As the temporal interpretation is easier to imagine and represents what is most commonly hoped for, I will begin with this, before proceeding to atemporal interpretations. Finally, by ‘life’ we must mean our own lives—for each of us: my life, not someone else’s. This criterion may seem straightforward now, but will become less clear and more crucial as the argument progresses.

Temporal Eternity: A Life Like This

Under the temporal interpretation, eternal life flows just like this life except that instead of ending it flows on and ever on for an infinite duration. There is no fundamental change to our experience of or relation to time, except that now our life goes on forever. At first sight, this prospect is attractive. If we like our lives and want them to continue, if we fear death and the harm it would do by cutting us off from all the good things we have, surely more life is better—infinite life, best of all.

But there’s a problem here that Bernard Williams highlighted in his classic essay, The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality. The title is taken from a play by Karel Čapek, in which a woman (EM; most recent alias Elina Makropulos) takes an elixir that extends her life by 300 years. In those 300 years, however, she has become bored, cold, and indifferent; her unending life has become joyless. She refuses to take the elixir again, and dies. In his essay, Williams argues that the tedium that consumes EM would always result from an endless life. For she is a particular person with particular desires; she has a relatively fixed character. On a long enough timeline, all those desires will be satisfied; all the things she could do or experience as the particular person that she is would be exhausted. If they nevertheless continued, in a repetitive fashion, they would become unbearably tedious. Alternatively, if she deliberately varied her experiences:

“Then the problem shifts, to the relation between these varied experiences, and the fixed character: how can it remain fixed, through an endless series of very various experiences? The experiences must surely happen to her without affecting her; she must be, as EM is, detached and withdrawn.” (p. 8)

So whether she repeats the same things or deliberately does different things, a similar emotional outcome of inner deadening occurs.

One objection that has been raised (e.g. by Fischer) is that although some pleasant experiences can be exhausted, there are also ‘repeatable pleasures’ that one can experience any number of times without them losing their savor. Fischer gives the examples of sex, eating fine meals, drinking fine wines, seeing great art, and listening to beautiful music. Judiciously spaced, we can go on enjoying these forever, without ever getting tired of them. But that doesn’t seem quite right; that we can imagine going on enjoying these for an exceedingly long time doesn’t in itself mean that we could enjoy them forever. That the first of such experiences tend to be the most powerful, that we tire of specific instances of them, that they require spacing at all, suggests that our capacity for them is indeed limited. That there is a lasting freshness about many things in life, even if repeated innumerable times, is perhaps due to the sheer brevity of life: so much novelty slips into each experience, so much inexperience remains in us. The distinction between repeatable and unrepeatable pleasures appears to be a relative rather than an absolute one, a distinction nullified by infinity.

Variation of Character

In his essay, Williams discusses a couple of attempts to get around the problem of eternal tedium. First, he explores the possibilities of a series of disconnected ‘lives,’ in each of which the person has a different character and thus different interests and desires. But, he explains, this attempt fails: the person could not bring his future ‘lives’ into a meaningful relation with his present life, so as to be able to judge their value—to hope for them or otherwise. Because his character in each ‘life’ is different, the standards of judgment will be different. He could not, therefore, meaningfully desire eternal life under this model.

The second attempt Williams mentions is similar, but allows for connection between ‘lives’ via memory. Put slightly differently, we keep living the same life but our character continually changes. He calls this the Teiresias model, after the mythical long-lived prophet who lived radically different lives, and he dispenses with it quickly, considering that it ignores:

… the connexion, both as cause and as consequence, between having one range of experiences rather than another, wishing to engage in one sort of thing rather than another, and having a character. Teiresias cannot have a character, either continuously through these proceedings, or cumulatively at the end (if there were to be an end) of them: he is not, eventually, a person but a phenomenon. (p. 12)

But I think he dispenses with this proposal too hastily, because it seems that even within the span of a normal human life, one’s character can change considerably. Concerning the Makropulos case, we might well ask: why doesn’t EM just evolve with her experiences, as we seem to do in actual life? Although I am the same self I was 20 years ago, I am also, nevertheless, different: I have a different understanding of the world and myself, different abilities, different loves and desires, a somewhat different character, have been shaped in different ways by the people I have known and the events I have experienced. Each of these transformations seems meaningfully related to me, and each opens me up to new areas of experience, new desires, new potential forms of fulfillment. I expect the same will be true in 20 years’ time—why not even more so in 200?

The problem is with the length of time we’re contemplating: namely, an infinite length. While it’s true we change or evolve in many important ways through the course of a human lifetime, it’s also true that we remain very much the same. If I consider how different I was 20 years ago, I can still easily recognize the same basic character, the same principal or overarching interests and desires, and I can clearly see how who I am now emerged from who I was then. This may also hold true for the next 200 years—two or three lifetimes isn’t all that long. But—20,000 years, two million years, 200 trillion years…?

Assuming continual change of character to allow for new interests and desires, would there be any meaningful connection between my 100-trillion-year-old self and my 200-trillion-year-old self? Considered together, these would appear to be completely different selves. It’s not clear that my awareness of their connection via a long series of memories or causal events is sufficient to unite them as my life in a way that matters to me.

There are a couple of ways to think about this. If character is constitutive of personal identity, then my eternal life would fragment into countless selves, no longer being my eternal life in any sense at all. While if the self is an underlying substance or some continuous chain, even though I could say that objectively it is my own life that continues forever, subjectively it might not matter enough for me to want it. Though such an ever-evolving life would avoid the problem of tedium, it would obliterate my particular character.

A thought experiment (for those who like their lives): if you were offered the opportunity to live another 100 years but only as a subjectively completely different person, though your memories of your present life were preserved, would you take it? Perhaps people’s intuitions will vary on this, but I’d be inclined to refuse the offer. Likewise, I’d refuse the prospect of a madness that entailed a mental split between myself and another personality—even if this other personality was really great and only helpful. (At the end of the essay I’ll discuss a key qualification to these points, which may account for different intuitive responses.)

Our particularity is an important part of our identity. Who I am now, the unified character I have now, across my natural lifespan—this seems crucial; and given infinite time, the transformation of character would become replacement of character, endless times over. The prospect of infinite connected changes in character thus fares no better than the the prospect of infinite disconnected ‘lives.’

The fact is, we depend on the finitude of our lives for our particularity: it means we cannot do or be all things. But given an infinite lifespan, we must either be a particular self overcome with the tedium of sameness, or an endlessly varying self. And if endlessly varying, I might as well start anywhere, and can never end up anywhere. In a religious context this aspect of the problem of eternal life becomes even more acute: what relation does my 200-trillion-year-old self have to the self I was in this human life, supposed to be all-important in determining my eternal destiny?

Preciousness of Life

As finitude supports the particular identity of my life, it also supports the value that I find in this life. We’ve already seen this in the fact that endless life would lead to tedium if one’s character remained the same: that this doesn’t happen in actual life (except in limited and transient ways) is because our desires and interests cannot be exhausted within the limited time assigned to us. We can thus be deeply and genuinely engaged in our lives; their finitude guarantees the inexhaustibility of their interest to us in relation to our fairly fixed characters.

But finitude also guarantees the preciousness of our lives, to ourselves and each other, and of the things within our lives. As Borges put it in his story The Immortal, another fictional treatment of the problems of immortality:

Death (or reference to death) makes men precious and pathetic; their ghostliness is touching; any act they perform may be their last; there is no face that is not on the verge of blurring and fading away like the faces in a dream. Everything in the world of mortals has the value of the irrecoverable and contingent.

Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, and the faithful presage of others that will repeat it in the future, advertiginem. There is nothing that is not as though lost between indefatigable mirrors. Nothing can occur but once, nothing is preciously in peril of being lost. (p. 15)

I would amend that slightly, though I believe the thought is consonant with Borges’: instead of mortal men’s ‘ghostliness’ I would put their ‘tangibility.’ In everlasting life nothing would be lost and so the felt distinction between ‘here’ and ‘gone’ would largely dissolve. In our finite lives, viewed with an awareness of death, it is as though everything that is cries, ‘Here I am! Here I am!’ against a backdrop of beginningless and endless silence. The intensity of that cry is its reality, its presence. In everlasting life there would be no such silence and cry: no such contrast, and so no such significance; everything would recede, would become ghostly, would be like a dream.

Virtue

A further way that finitude fills our lives with value: it seems necessary for virtue. At the very least, the virtue of courage seems importantly related to the real prospect of death. If I cannot die, I can never be courageous in the face of death. Perhaps one could be courageous in other ways (especially if we admit certain kinds of suffering or misfortune into eternal life); but courage in regard to one’s own death does seem very important. It has certainly been the most lauded throughout human history. And I think there is good reason for this: there is a kind of self-transcendence, a stepping completely beyond oneself, in bravely facing (and embracing) one’s own finitude; this power of stepping completely beyond oneself is rightly felt as more admirable than the power of enduring sufferings and misfortunes that leave our self and the possibility for future good intact.

Though courage is the most obvious example, I suspect the other virtues also depend on finitude. What would patience or prudence be in a life of infinite duration? What would compassion or love be were human lives no longer precious through their fragility? And underlying all virtues is the urgency of virtue: acquiring and practicing virtue is something we must do now; we have limited time to do it, and the lives that we affect are also of limited duration. It is notable that the Western monotheistic religions make so much of this urgency in this life yet obviate it in the next.

Aesthetics

Finally, just as the ethical life of immortal beings would be impoverished, so would their aesthetic life. Borges alludes to it in the passage quoted above. The sentence that follows: “The elegiac, the somber, the ceremonial are not modes the Immortals hold in reverence.” One wonders how much of an aesthetic life there could be in eternity at all. Would any story (of however happy an ending) resonate as it does for us mortals without any real threat of irrevocable loss? Gone completely would be the art form and the sense of tragedy, that focuses directly on the phenomena of finitude and death. This may strike the reader as a questionable thing to regret the loss of. I will grant that it is ambivalent. Yet it is beautiful in its ambivalence, in a way that everlasting life is not. In focusing on these dark realities and treating them as such, it seems to me that tragic art can somehow, strangely, make them luminous.

Temporal Eternity: A Life Transfigured

So far we’ve been considering lives that are more or less like what we live now, but extended for an infinite duration. We’ve found that retaining the same character will render this life unbearably dull, as we will eventually exhaust all our particular interests and desires. We’ve also found that allowing for infinite changes in character over time won’t help us, as this would either destroy the self that we are or fracture the self to such an extent that such an endless existence would not be desirable. We might therefore imagine lives that are more radically different than those we live now. It may be that everlasting life is only good if one is immersed in a very specific activity or set of activities.

Pleasure

One simple possibility is that pure pleasure or bliss would justify living forever. It would always remain enjoyable, and so life would always be good, however long it goes on. There are at least a couple of problems with this. First, if in this scenario I am not self-aware, it is questionable whether this is my life, in the way that matters, or just a bare life drowned in bliss. And this would hardly be a human life, but more the condition of an animal. But if I am self-aware, how could I not inwardly rebel against this subhuman condition or at least tire of it? The self-reflective nature of humans would ensure that, even if it continued, the pleasure would become merely a thin surface over a deeper dissatisfaction.

Intellectual Activity

So let’s explore the other extreme. What about a life of the purest intellectual activity? This is the condition to which the Immortals of Borges’ story commit themselves after centuries of immortality. In his essay, Williams notes the apparent merits of eternal intellectual inquiry:

The activity is engrossing, self-justifying, affords, as it may appear, endless new perspectives, and by being engrossing enables one to lose oneself. It is that last feature that supposedly makes boredom unthinkable, by providing something that is [...] at every moment totally absorbing. (p. 13–14)

The problem then becomes, once again, relating this to me. Williams comments:

If [these intellectual activities] are genuinely fulfilling, and do not operate (as they can) merely as a compulsive diversion, then the ground and shape of the satisfactions that the intellectual enquiry offers [the person], will relate to him, and not just to the enquiry. The Platonic introjection, seeing the satisfactions of studying what is timeless and impersonal as being themselves timeless and impersonal, may be a deep illusion, but it is certainly an illusion. (p. 14)

In other words, intellectual inquiries, embodying particular interests and desires of a particular individual, are dependent on a particular character; they must either change or the character must change, but as noted before, neither of these seems satisfactory. And we’re faced with a further difficulty, because even if the ‘Platonic introjection’ were true and intellectual activity could really be pure, timeless and impersonal, grounded in itself rather than the particularity of any thinking being—in that case, again, what is it to me? As Williams remarks, this “could be as well realised in the existence of Aristotle’s prime mover” as any particular man (p. 15).

Vision of God

This brings me to the next possibility, which, in fairness, is the most sophisticated position advanced by the Western monotheistic traditions: the details vary but we may summarize the overall idea as ‘life with God’ or the beatific vision. In these conceptions, eternal life isn’t just about living the present kind of life forever, or even about pure intellectual activity, but principally about the nearness to and apprehension of God—the vision of God, to use the most common metaphor. As God is infinite, how could this activity ever get boring? As he is the ultimate good, grounding all other goods, how could it ever become unsatisfying?

This may well be the most compelling approach to eternal life. Still, there are problems. First, it depends entirely on the concept of God—but is there such a reality, and can we really conceive of it? The questions are famously and perhaps interminably debatable. This very fact suggests (and many believers will agree with this) that such a being or reality escapes our understanding—whether due to his sheer ontological transcendence or simply to the incoherence of the concept. To wish for eternal life based on the beatific vision, then, is to exercise faith in a God that will ground and justify that life, making it not only bearable but supremely desirable, in a way we cannot understand. It is, in other words, to have a faith that eternal life is good. Faith in God is prior to it; it is not prior to a faith in God.

Granting that the vision of God may not be comprehensible to the human mind ahead of time, the images we have of it do not seem very helpful. Would it be absolute and absorbing bliss? Then we seem to have the first example we dealt with in this section: too much of this is depersonalizing and characterizes a life less than human. Would it be more like intellectual activity, then? (And by yoking this with a pure intellectual bliss we perhaps escape the problem of the subhuman.) But then we have the problem that brings: it does not seem to be us absorbed in the contemplation; this too is depersonalizing.

Is it, then, best described as a limitless adoration or love, forever fulfilled or reciprocated? Regarding love I’ll only note the following: if God is essentially personal he must have a character; and if God is eternal, that character must have a relation with eternal life—which is the very problem we’ve been wrestling with! Add to that the fact that the loves we know in this life are conditioned by finitude: the finitude of particularity and the preciousness afforded by the finitude of time. What is it to love an infinite being? What is it to be both personal and infinite? But here, I fear, we go too far; we must proceed no further and remain silent.

Descending a little, I want to point out that in the Western monotheistic religions, the beatific vision occurs alongside the resurrection of the body. So it is not just that one will be absorbed in divine contemplation; one will be a living bodily human being, at the same time. There is a sense then that one will live one’s eternal life not lost in the divine vision, but inspired or informed by it. Regarding the more ordinary activities of life, one could argue that the love, joy, or vitality infused in us by the vision of the infinite God will sustain any activity we do, preventing it from ever becoming boring. In actual life, when we feel inherently joyful, vital, and full of love it often seems we can do anything, any number of times, even those things that would typically be tedious or uninteresting. G. K. Chesterton once remarked on this propensity in children:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. (Orthodoxy, Ch. IV)

I will close this section, then, with this thought: that eternal life may be a life like ours but grounded in the vision or infused with the power of God. However, though it may be that such a life preserves our identity in a meaningful way while being truly worth living forever, this hinges on a premise we cannot understand: namely, God. It may be rational to hope for it if one has faith in God, but I am still not sure I want it. Perhaps I am stubborn, but something still seems lost. I’m not sure if I want—either myself or any child—to actually be able to exult in monotony forever. I’m not sure it would be better than a world where the child says, “Do it again!” and the grown-up groans and everything has its place and time.

Atemporal Eternity

I will turn now to the second interpretation of eternity: eternity as transcending time as we now experience it. Consider a mathematical object—the number 2, for instance. It doesn’t seem right to say that it exists everlastingly, as though it exists at or in every possible moment. This would suggest it is somehow contained by or subordinate to time. Rather, it seems more appropriate to say that it exists (if it exists as an independent reality at all) outside of time, atemporally.

So, the first sense of atemporal eternity I want to explore is this pure one, in which one exists completely outside of time, with no inherent relation to it. The problem with applying this to eternal life is that lives are different from mathematical objects. Lives have contents that occur in a temporal sequence. Lives are lived—that is to say, they inherently involve the phenomenon of time. The idea of a life completely and simply beyond time is, I would say, a contradiction in terms; something simply inconceivable. An utterly timeless life would be utterly vacuous.

Spacetime

But this isn’t generally what is meant when an appeal to atemporal eternity is made to ground the desirability of eternal life. Instead, an intimate connection with this life we are living is supposed. To illustrate this, we can take the concept of spacetime in the scientific theory of relativity. In this, time can be considered the fourth dimension of space. Objectively, it is not essentially different from the three dimensions of space. The difference is subjective: while we experience the ability to move in any direction in space, we seem to move in only one direction in space—always from the ‘past’ into the ‘future.’ But in the worldview of relativity, everything that exists in spacetime—simply exists. There is no objective ‘now’ to move or pass through. As there is a subjective perspective within time in which we continually inhabit a present moving in one direction, perhaps we could also imagine an objective perspective outside of time to which our entire life is given simultaneously as one coherent object. In philosophy this view of time is known as eternalism: all times are equally real.

In a paper responding to the debate spurred by Williams, “The End of Immortality!” Eternal Life and the Makropulos Debate, Mikel Burley proposes an atemporal interpretation of eternal life that draws on modern theology and the philosophy of eternalism: one’s life is already eternal as part of the whole spacetime manifold that is eternally present to God, so it’s all the more important how we live this life. Stephen De Young recently sketched out a similar idea, wherein we will timelessly reinhabit the blessed moments in our lives (you can see my response to it here).

Burley isn’t explicit whether we will assume God’s perspective on our own lives, such that I will experience my life as a whole, altogether and simultaneously. Let’s say we won’t; that this is a capacity belonging to God alone. In this case, I could still say my life is ‘eternal’ in the eternalist sense, but I could only ever experience it subjectively from within, part-by-part, with the same flow of or through time that I currently experience. In other words, to me, my eternal life would be qualitatively identical to a strictly finite life (i.e. a life under a theory of time where the past genuinely ceases to exist). Nothing would be gained by having an eternal life; the only gain could come indirectly, through positive effects of knowing the fact of the atemporal eternity of my life.

Atemporal Perspective

But let’s assume that Burley means we will come to share in God’s eternal perspective, at least in regard to our own lives. Then a different problem arises: is this atemporal experience of a four-dimensional object really the experience of a life? It seems that the flow of time is intrinsic to life: living is something dynamic, immersive, a process, a movement into ever-new possibilities. From this atemporal perspective, how could my life be a real life rather than merely a devitalized image of a life?

But there is an even deeper question: who am I as atemporal experiencer of my life? Experience itself seems to inherently require the flow of time. When I represent myself (or God) contemplating the finished object of my life, I actually imagine this contemplation as an experience in time, because I have never had an experience outside of time and don’t know how to have one. All experience, all contemplation I have ever known is temporal: in states of absorption, the awareness of time may move from the foreground to the background of consciousness, but these states are still constituted by a flow of experience—first this, then that, then another.

It might be objected that in certain mystical states one transcends the flow of time altogether, but I think these must be an extreme example of the case of absorption. A true experience of atemporal eternity would have no duration, and therefore no real place in the flow of our experiences, no ‘substance’ by which to lodge in our memory. It would leave no trace. That states of apparent timelessness are remembered implies that they were lived through, which implies that they were not atemporal after all. If no experience can be atemporal, if the very nature of life and experience is to flow, then the concept of eternal life as an atemporal perspective on my life breaks down.

The prospect of atemporal eternity cannot be salvaged by suggesting we ‘inhabit’ our eternal life. This could mean that we live our lives atemporally—but as noted above, this notion seems self-contradictory, inconceivable. Or it could mean that we live our lives in time while maintaining an atemporal awareness of them—which not only suffers from the problem that atemporal experience seems just as inconceivable as atemporal life, but has the additional problem of how exactly this atemporal experience could be combined with temporal experience in the same individual.

Conclusions

I have tried to show how if we really think through the notion of eternal life, whether we take it in a temporal or atemporal sense, it is not desirable. If eternal life means endless duration, we are faced with the dilemma of unbearable tedium or endless changes of character—but given the first, I don’t want it, and given the second, it doesn’t concern me: it isn’t my life that will be eternal. If we posit God as an inexhaustible object of desire and source of vitality, we must first comprehend the notion of God—but this task is formidable, to say the least. On the other hand, if we take eternal life in an atemporal sense, it is either indistinguishable from the life we are living or else inconceivable: life and experience are inherently temporal.

Why, then, do so many of us think that we want eternal life? Well, because we don’t want to die. We could see this as a paradox of human existence: that we neither want to die nor want to live forever; we are faced with a choice between two evils (though, mercifully, the choice is made for us). Or it may not be a paradox at all. Instead, we could put our situation like this: life is good, but not forever—a finite life is good. It may be that the duration of a good life can be expanded far beyond the natural lifespan. It may vary with the type of person and the activities they engage in. But, in my view at least, it can’t be infinite.

It seems to me that notions of eternal life are abstractions from actual life. It is actual life that we love, if we love life: we expand this in our minds to eternity. But if we look closely at our actual life, we will see that it is constituted by time, death and finitude. In attempting to think eternal life we abstract our life from these integral factors and are left, upon closer inspection, with something that seems alien and undesirable.

Two Senses of ‘Life’

But, I confess, there is an certain ambiguity here: between life in the sense of life-force or act of living, and a life in the sense of ‘my life’ or ‘your life.’ I alluded to this ambiguity when entertaining the possibility of an eternal life in which one’s character was continually evolving and when posing the question of whether you would accept a complete replacement of character in exchange for 100 more years of life. Even staying close to the experience of actual life, there does seem to be something in me that would say “Yes!” to this proposal. This would seem to be life in the first sense, the force within me which is itself impersonal but which supports my personality.

This life that I most basically am may always want to continue—but this does not mean I want this particular self (this life) to continue forever. One way to put the relation between the two might be like this: life expresses itself as a life. By conflating the two senses of ‘life,’ eternal life conceived as eternal personal existence attempts to satisfy the demands of both: for the first (let us grant) wants to go on forever, but the second wants to be something particular, an integral whole. But because these contradict each other, the attempt necessarily fails.

A fruitful question then arises: beyond the thought experiments sketched out here, can the life-force in me already express itself as different lives? Does it, perhaps, express itself as many different lives in sequence? This would be reincarnation. Or is there only one life-force, expressing itself as every life? This would be a form of nondualism. Or—we needn’t think of this life-force as some unitary substance: rather than being the one universal self it may be that, at the fundamental level, I have no self at all, that ‘life’ refers to the phenomenon of life, the process of life, occurring wherever it occurs; that it is not the same ‘life’ that unites me to myself of 10 years or 5 minutes ago, no more than it is a different ‘life’ that animates you. This would be akin to the Buddhist view. The process of life strives for eternity, and in doing so coalesces these particular lives that we are, that are of such value.

Usefulness of Eternal Life

Is the hope for eternal life, in the personal sense, therefore useless? I don’t think so. In relieving one of the fear of death, it can open one up to living more fully, freely, lovingly, beautifully. Between the terror of death and the dread of eternal life, the former is by far the more powerful. As the virtue of courage is attained by aiming closer to foolhardiness than the opposite and more powerful vice of cowardice, the same is true here. Within life, in those times when we feel that the future is bright and assured and there is nothing to fear, we can be lavish in the meantime: generous with our time and attention, accepting or even affirming of all things; we have the vitality for it, and need not self-protectively cling to anything. At its best, I would suggest that belief in eternal life affords a good finite life. Everything is ambivalent, however: at its worst, it can afford a resentful denial of this life, a destructiveness that poisons every part of it, as Nietzsche so well described.

If I didn’t believe that a deeply good life could be embraced without a belief in eternal life, I’m not sure I would publish this essay. But that is not the case. Nietzsche may be helpful here too, as may a consideration of the two senses of ‘life’ described above.

I’ll end with a clip by Alan Watts that speaks to this. You could take it as being about the fundamental reality expressing itself as a particular human life in all its finitude, or about the movement from abstraction back to this same actual human life—or both.

Let's suppose you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years' worth of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have.

And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say, “Well, that was pretty great. But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be.” And you would dig that, and come out of that and say, “Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?”

Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream of the life that you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have, of playing that you weren't God.

Because the whole nature of the Godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he's not. The first thing that he says to himself is, “Man, get lost.” Because he gives himself away. The nature of love is self-abandonment, not clinging to oneself. Throwing yourself out, as in, for example, in basketball: you're always getting rid of the ball. And that keeps things moving. That's the nature of life.

So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you're all that; only, you're pretending you're not.

My series on the Odes of John Keats, following Helen Vendler’s interpretation (playlist here). Vendler believes Keats’ six great odes should be read in order as his, often meandering, journey toward a final affirmation of immanence and becoming—of life, nature, and existence as it is—Beauty and Truth finally united:

• The Ode on Indolence
• The Ode to Psyche
• The Ode to a Nightingale
• The Ode on a Grecian Urn
• The Ode on Melancholy
• The ode To Autumn

A video explaining Max Scheler’s Hierarchy of Values, including an introduction to material value ethics, how he applied the phenomenological approach to value, and a description of the ordered hierarchy of values that came from this.

A video on Justice and the Violence of Life. How do we reconcile our need for justice with the inherent violence of life? This is a development of this post on here. In the video, I explore various religious and philosophical approaches to the problem: Nietzsche's affirmation of violent life, the Christian idea of the fall of creation, the transhumanist desire to transform everything, the Hindu belief in the universe as God's play (lila), the self-sacrificial theology of Simone Weil, and the ethical thought of Max Scheler.

A conversation with Aron van Os, who wrote a thesis (The Pious Antichrist) on Nietzsche’s complicated and ambivalent relationship with Christianity. We discuss Nietzsche's inner conflict between the ideals of 'Dionysus' and 'the Crucified,' how this conflict eventually became one-sided and destructive, and how it could become harnessed as a productive and positive tension that embraces both this life and the transcendent.

A long and wide-ranging conversation with my friend ‘K.’, based upon my video on Justice and the Violence of Life. This was fascinating and, I think, incredibly fruitful. I can’t begin to summarize the topics we covered, but the timestamps are a good guide.

I hope to have some more videos up in the near future. I’d love to do some more interviews, and also hope to do another video on Scheler and a video (or series of videos) on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.