Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Philosophy Then

Back to the Future

Peter Adamson looks back at ideas of eternal repetition.

In these uncertain times marked by disease and political upheaval, we naturally wonder about the future and whether the past as we’ve known it is irrevocably lost. At such a moment, the idea that the future actually is the past, and that the past is the future, might seem reassuring: these events have all happened before, and are now repeating, as they have repeated an infinite number of times. Each of us has lived our life before, and will live it again: “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.”

Those words were written – at least once if not an infinite number of times – by the most famous exponent of this doctrine of eternal recurrence, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in The Gay Science (341). Scholars disagree about whether he took it seriously as a cosmological theory.

…