This doctrine (whose most recent inventor called it the doctrine of the Eter nal Return) may be formulated in the following manner:
The number ofall the atoms that compose the world is immense butfinite, and as such only capable ofafinite (though also immense) number ofpermu tations. In an infinite stretch of time, the number of possible permutations must be run through, and the universe has to repeat itself Once again you will be born from a belly, once again your skeleton will grow, once again this same page will reach your identical hands, once again you willfollow the course of all the hours ofyour life until that ofyour incredible death. Such is the cus tomary order of this argument, from its insipid preliminaries to its enor mous and threatening outcome. It is commonly attributed to Nietzsche.
Before refuting it-an undertaking of which I do not know if I am capable-it may be advisable to conceive, even from afar, of the superhuman numbers it invokes. I shall begin with the atom. The diameter of a hydrogen atom has been calculated, with some margin of error, to be one hundred millionth of a centimeter. This dizzying tininess does not mean the atom is indivisible; on the contrary, Rutherford describes it with the image of a so lar system, made up of a central nucleus and a spinning electron, one hun dred thousand times smaller than the whole atom. Let us leave this nucleus and this electron aside, and conceive of a frugal universe composed of ten atoms. (This is obviously only a modest experimental universe; invisible, for even microscopes do not suspect it; imponderable, for no scale can place a value on it.) Let us postulate as well-still in accordance with Nietzsche's conjecture-that the number of possible changes in this universe is the number of ways in which the ten atoms can be arranged by varying the or der in which they are placed. How many different states can this world
know before an eternal return? The investigation is simple: it suffices to multiply1x2x3x4x5 x6x7 x8x9 x10,atediousoperationthat yields the figure of 3,628,8oo. If an almost infinitesimal particle of the universe is capable of such variety, we should lend little or no faith to any monotony in the cosmos. I have considered ten atoms; to obtain two grams of hydrogen, we would require more than a billion billion atoms. To make the computation of the possible changes in this couple of grams-in other words, to multiply a billion billion by each one of the whole numbers that precedes it-is already an operation that far surpasses my human patience.
I do not know if my reader is convinced; I am not. This chaste, painless squandering of enormous numbers undoubtedly yields the peculiar plea sure of all excesses, but the Recurrence remains more or less Eternal, though in the most remote terms. Nietzsche might reply: "Rutherford's spinning electrons are a novelty for me, as is the idea-scandalous to a philologist that an atom can be divided. However, I never denied that the vicissitudes of matter were copious; I said only that they were not infinite." This plau sible response from Friedrich Zarathustra obliges me to fall back on Georg Cantor and his heroic theory of sets.
Cantor destroys the foundation of Nietzsche's hypothesis. He asserts the perfect infinity of the number of points in the universe, and even in one meter of the universe, or a fraction of that meter. The operation of counting is, for him, nothing else than that of comparing two series. For example, if the first-born sons of all the houses of Egypt were killed by the Angel, ex cept for those who lived in a house that had a red mark on the door, it is clear that as many sons were saved as there were red marks, and an enumer ation of precisely how many of these there were does not matter. Here the quantity is indefinite; there are other groupings in which it is infinite. The set of natural numbers is infinite, but it is possible to demonstrate that, within it, there are as many odd numbers as even.
1 corresponds to 2
3 to4
5 to 6, etc.
This proof is as irreproachable as it is banal, and is no different from the following proof that there are as many multiples of 3018 as there are numbers-without excluding from the latter set the number 3018 and its multiples.
1 2 3 4
corresponds to 3018 to 6036 to 9054
to 12072, etc.
The same can be affirmed of its exponential powers, however rarefied they become as we progress.
corresponds to 2 to 3 to
3018
30182 which is 9,108,324
etc.
A jocose acceptance of these facts has inspired the formula that an infi nite collection-for example, the natural series ofwhole numbers-is a col lection whose members can in turn be broken down into infinite series. (Or rather, to avoid any ambiguity: an infinite whole is a whole that can be the equivalent of one of its subsets.) The part, in these elevated numerical lati tudes, is no less copious than the whole: the precise quantity of points in the universe is the same as the quantity of points in a meter, or a decimeter, or the deepest trajectory of a star. The series of natural numbers is very orderly, that is, the terms that form it are consecutive: 28 precedes 29 and follows 27. The series of points in space (or of instants in time) cannot be ordered in the same way: no number has a successor or an immediate pre decessor. It is like a series of fractions arranged in order of magnitude. What number will we count after Yo? Not 5Xoo, because 10Vooo is closer; not 10Vooo, be cause 20�oo is closer; not 20�oo, because . . . According to Cantor, the same thing happens with points. We can always interpose more of them, in infi nite number. Therefore we must try not to conceive of decreasing sizes. Each point is "already" the final degree of an infinite subdivision.
The clash between Cantor's lovely game and Zarathustra's lovely game is fatal to Zarathustra. If the universe consists of an infinite number of terms, it is rigorously capable of an infinite number of combinations-and the need for a Recurrence is done away with. There remains its mere possi bility, which can be calculated as zero.
II
Nietzsche writes, in the autumn of 1883: "This slow spider dragging itself towards the light of the moon and that same moonlight, and you and I
whispering at the gateway, whispering of eternal things, haven't we already coincided in the past? And won't we happen again on the long road, on this long tremulous road, won't we recur eternally? This was how I spoke, and in an ever lower voice, because my thoughts and what was beyond my thoughts made me afraid." Writes Eudemus, a paraphraser of Aris totle, three centuries or so before the Cross: "If the Pythagoreans are to be believed, the same things will return at precisely their time and you will be with me again and I will repeat this doctrine and my hand will play with this staff, and so on." In the Stoic cosmogony, "Zeus feeds on the world": the universe is cyclically consumed by the fire that engendered it, and resurges from annihilation to repeat an identical history. Once again the diverse seminal particles combine, once again they give form to stones, trees, and men-and even virtues and days, since for the Greeks a substantive number was impossible without some corporeality. Once again every sword and every hero, once again every minutious night of insomnia.
Like the other conjectures of the school of the Porch, that of a general repetition spread across time entered the Gospels (Acts of the Apostles 3:21), along with its technical name, apokatastasis, though with indetermi nate intent. Book XII of St. Augustine's Civitas Dei dedicates several chap ters to the refutation of so abominable a doctrine. Those chapters (which I have before me now) are far too intricate for summary, but their author's episcopal fury seems to fix upon two arguments: one, the gaudy futility of this wheel; the other, the ridiculousness of the Logos dying on the cross like an acrobat in an interminable sequence of performances. Farewells and sui cides lose their dignity if repeated too often; St. Augustine must have thought the same of the Crucifixion. Hence his scandalized rejection of the viewpoint of the Stoics and Pythagoreans, who argued that God's science cannot understand infinite things and that the eternal rotation of the world'" process serves to allow Ged to learn more and familiarize Himself with it. St. Augustine mocks their worthless revolutions and affirms that Je sus is the straight path that allows us to flee from the circular labyrinth of such deceptions.
In the chapter of his Logic that addresses the law of causality, John Stu art Mill maintains that a periodic repetition of history is conceivable-but not true-and cites Virgil's "Messianic eclogue":
Jam redit et virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna
[Now the Maiden returns, the reign of Saturn returns]
Can Nietzsche, the Hellenist, have been ignorant of these "precursors"? Was Nietzsche, author of the fragments on the pre-Socratics, perhaps un aware of a doctrine learned by the disciples of Pythagoras?' This is hard to believe-andfutile. True, Nietzsche has indicated, in a memorable page, the precise spot on which the idea of the Eternal Return visited him: a path in the woods of Silvaplana, near a vast pyramidal block, one midday in August 1881-"six thousand feet beyond men and time." True, this instant is one of Nietzsche's great distinctions. "Immortal the instant in which I engendered the eternal recurrence. For that instant I endure the Recurrence," were the words he would leave ( Unschuld des Werdens II, 1308). Yet, in my opinion, we need not postulate a startling ignorance, nor a human, all too human, confusion between inspiration and memory, nor a crime of vanity. My key to this mystery is grammatical, almost syntactical. Nietzsche knew that the Eternal Recourse is one of the fables, fears, diversions, that eternally recur, but he also knew that the most effective of the grammatical persons is the first. Indeed, we would be justified in saying that, for a prophet, the only grammatical person is the first. It was not possible for Zarathustra to derive his revelation from a philosophical compendium or from the Historia philosophiae graeco-romanae of the surrogate professors Ritter and Preller, for reasons of voice and anachronism, not to speak of typography. The prophetic style does not allow for the use of quotation marks nor the eru dite attestation of books and authors. . . .
If my human flesh can assimilate the brute flesh of a sheep, who can prevent the human mind from assimilating human mental states? Because he rethought it at great length, and endured it, the eternal recurrence of things is now Nietzsche's and does not belong to some dead man who is barely more than a Greek name. I will not insist; Miguel de Unamuno al ready has his page on the adoption of thoughts.
Nietzsche wanted men who were capable of enduring immortality. I say
this in words that appear in his personal notebooks, the Nachlass, where he
also inscribed these others: "If you envision a long peace before you are re
born, I swear to you that you are thinking wrongly. Between the final
instant of consciousness and the first gleam of a new life there is 'no time'
the lapse lasts as long as a bolt of lightning, though billions of years are in
sufficient to measure it. If a self is absent, infinity can be the equivalent of succession.
Before Nietzsche, personal immortality was no more than a blundering hope, a hazy plan. Nietzsche postulates it as a duty and gives it all the ghastly lucidity of insomnia. "Waking, by reason of their continual cares, fears, sorrows, dry brains," (I read in Robert Burton's antique treatise) "is a symptom that much crucifies melancholy men." We are told that Nietzsche endured this crucifixion and had to seek deliverance in the bitterness of chloral hydrate. Nietzsche wanted to be Walt Whitman; he wanted to fall minutely in love with his destiny. He adopted a heroic method: he disin terred the intolerable Greek hypothesis of eternal repetition, and he con trived to make this mental nightmare an occasion for jubilation. He sought out the most horrible idea in the universe and offered it up to mankind's delectation. The languid optimist often imagines himself to be a Nietz schean; Nietzsche confronts him with the circles of the eternal recurrence and spits him out of his mouth.
Nietzsche wrote: "Not to yearn for distant ventures and favors and blessings, but to live in such a way that we wish to come back and live again, and so on throughout eternity." Mauthner objects that to attribute the slightest moral, in other words practical, influence to the hypothesis of eter nal return is to negate the hypothesis-since it is comparable to imagining that something can happen in another way. Nietzsche would answer that the formulation of the eternal return and its extensive moral (in other words, practical) influence and Mauthner's cavils and his refutation of Mauthner's cavils are naught but a few more necessary moments in the his tory of the world, the work of atomic agitations. He could, with reason, re peat the words he had already written: "It suffices that the doctrine of circular repetition be probable or possible. The image of a mere possibility can shatter and remake us. How much has been accomplished by the possi bility of eternal damnation!" And in another passage: "The instant that this idea presents itself, all colors are different-and there is another history."
