As something of a Rawlsian about public discourse, I have no problem with religious people arguing in government for application of ideals that they personally discovered through their religion or their sacred texts, their religious institutions, etc. as long as they respect the need to give reasons that are publicly accessible, reasons that do not cite religious authority as though it were binding upon all rational people to take into account. As long as your religiously derived view is also defensible in terms of reason, you should feel free to argue for it.

This principle is what prevents us from having laws rooted in religious intuitions that are purely arbitrary and incapable of rational justification. If anyone can just “feel” God’s voice telling them that God wants x or God wants y and if they are able to persuade others that they had this insight straight from God, then there are no limits on theological claims made by the fiat of “Scriptural” authors or contemporaries who claim prophetic abilities that can be made into laws. There is no limit to stop those who think God indicates to them that slavery is okay or that God demands a genocide (as the Bible claims he has repeatedly before for example) from making such insistences in arguments about public policy and law. We could wind up with arguments that all Americans must be baptized for the good of their souls, that there should be no separation from church and state, etc. Any argument must be considered when it needs no further justification when it is rooted in premises chosen to be believed purely by groundless “faith.”

And that’s why Obama is extremely right in his manner of trying to explain to his fellow Christians how they should conceive of their incorporation of their religious beliefs (if they must) into their public policy suggestions. And it’s why Dobson is extremely upsetting:

Dobson reserved some of his harshest criticism for Obama’s argument that the religiously motivated must frame debates over issues like abortion not just in their own religion’s terms but in arguments accessible to all people.

He said Obama, who supports abortion rights, is trying to govern by the “lowest common denominator of morality,” labeling it “a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution.”

“Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies?” Dobson said. “What he’s trying to say here is unless everybody agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe.”

Dobson’s either obtuse or a liar to interpret Obama as saying that “unless everybody agrees” he has no right to fight for his beliefs. What Obama is saying is that your arguments must be of the type that could persuade those that disagree with you on the common terms of rational debate that we all share: appeals to logic, history, repeatable or universally had types of experiences, science, anecdotal evidence, etc. Obama’s not saying the ridiculous thing that unless everyone already agrees with you you cannot make an argument. He’s saying you cannot make an argument from premises that are simply idiosyncratic to you and your dogmatic faith tradition with its bald assertions that subject themselves to no thorough rational questioning but instead insist on “faith” to make up a key role in their assenting.

Unless Dobson really (and rather stupefyingly) thinks that he has no reasons to argue against abortion that do not come from the claims of “special revelation” from God, what in the world is wrong with demanding he use arguments that do not appeal to leaps of faith but actually are persuasive to “reason alone?” And if he thinks abortion is only refutable for religious reasons, because of his self-conscious, rationally uncompelled choice to believe (which is what faith is, a choice to believe) , then how dare he insist others who do not make a similarly rationally uncompelled choice to believe as a matter of law? How dare he derive laws from those beliefs he knows he chose even though they weren’t nearly conclusively proven to him? How does he not see the arbitrariness, unfairness, and theocracy in that? Is he just that unwilling to view things from the perspective of others who disagree with him? Does he have that little respect for them?

The irony of Dobson’s anger and contempt for Obama is that he goes right ahead and in defense of his right to argue on religious terms makes an explicit appeal that is accessible to all people after all—-he appeals to “what is right with regard to the lives of tiny babies.” One does not have to be religious to have an interest in the well being of “tiny babies.” That he thinks you must is just religious arrogance. That’s not to say of course that all irreligious people accept his views on what is or is not a “tiny baby” or what is right or wrong with regard to them. But neither do all religious people agree with him. The issue can be debated among reasonable people on rational and reasonable terms without appeals to religious authority and without the assumption that only religious people can have the most robust senses of goodness possible.

It is Dobson’s pure arrogance that his religion makes his moral intuitions and moral insights superior and that arrogance translates in an unflinching willingness to theocratically impose his moral intuitions on people by appeal to reasons they could not even theoretically assent to as long as they are not adherents to his theology.

That’s obnoxious, that’s authoritarian, that’s anti-rational, and that’s flat-out regressive.

Senator Coburn writes,

Compassionate conservatism’s starting point had merit. The essential argument that Republicans should orient policy around how our ideas will affect the poor, the widow, the orphan, the forgotten and the “other” is indisputable – particularly for those who claim, as I do, to submit to an authority higher than government. Yet conservatives are conservatives because our policies promote deliverance from poverty rather than dependence on government.

Compassionate conservatism’s next step – its implicit claim that charity or compassion translates into a particular style of activist government involving massive spending increases and entitlement expansion – was its undoing. Common sense and the Scriptures show that true giving and compassion require sacrifice by the giver. This is why Jesus told the rich young ruler to sell his possessions, not his neighbor’s possessions. Spending other people’s money is not compassionate.

That’s right folks, all that disgust with the George W. Bush and the Republican party these days is based on their being too compassionate. Shame on Mark Foley and his “compassion” towards his interns. Shame on the compassion of Jack Abramoff. Shame on the president for killing tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, thousands of American soldiers, and trillions of dollars out of his blind compassion.

And according to Coburn, politicians need to be governed by the principles given from “a higher authority,” a “Scriptural” Christian higher authority that should determine our legislation. And what is the message of this Christian Gospel? Apparently the sole Gospel truth that should be guiding our government is “Thou shalt not force thy rich neighbor to sacrifice for his fellow man.”

Now that’s what I call creative hermeneutics!

That this man gets to be one of the most powerful legislators in all the world, a freaking United States Senator, is shudder-inducing.

I used to consider myself a conservative. I have a whole lot of sympathies with libertarians like Ron Paul. On social matters I’m almost extremely libertarian. On fiscal matters, I’d be one if it weren’t that I thought markets are too capricious to be just or stable when unfettered and totally deregulated; if I didn’t believe that some government regulation is needed as a check and balance that prevents de facto oligarchies of undemocratically controlled multinational corporations that threaten liberty and safety in comparable ways to government’s threats to these things; and if I didn’t think that since health insurance arrangements are already by their nature socialistic arrangements, they’d might as well be run as a not-for-profit by a just government and include everyone. So, those caveats restrain my libertarianism. But at the core of classic libertarian conservative principles of small government, promotion of competition, and personal independence appeal to me.

But simply nothing about the present day Republican party appeals to me. Its combination of theocratic longings, pandering to ignorance, antipathy to science, homophobia, racism, contempt for civil and privacy rights, self-righteous hypocritical religiosity, materialism, arrogant jingoistic chest-thumping imperialism, and obscene corporate corruption make the party as repulsive as toxic waste.

And none of this has to do with the party’s “compassion!”

In response to a former student, frustrated with the labels of agnostic and atheist, I wrote the following. I thought it might be of interest to others, so figured I’d post it here in case it is.

Well, I’m not sure you have a good grasp on what agnosticism is. Thomas Huxley coined the word as a play on words. He was a philosopher who was irritated about the metaphysical presumptuousness of the philosophers around him who all seemed to know the secrets of the universe as though they had some special knowledge about things no one can really know about. He compared them, derisively, to the gnostics of the early Christian church. The gnostics were a sect of Christians who believed they were in on secrets that Jesus gave to a handful of his disciples but not the others. Gnostic in Greek is one of the words for “to know” and so the “gnostics” were those who thought they had “special knowledge.” It’s basically like “those in the know.”

SO, Huxley compared overly presumptuous metaphysical speculation and confidence to the gnostics, a sect believing it had secret knowledge. He contrasted himself to them by calling himself an “agnostic” (a “not gnostic”) who had no special knowledge about the secret metaphysical/theological truths of the universe.

So, the word agnostic has grown to mean a position of confessed not-knowing in almost any area of disputable beliefs. But primarily it applies to the theological position of declaring yourself as not knowing whether or not there is a God. Some Christians like to distinguish two types of agnostics: those who say THEY just don’t know if there’s a God and those who claim NO ONE can ever know whether there is a God. Clearly Huxley meant the latter. He meant to claim such matters were inaccessible to human knowledge and to have knowledge would require a preposterous “secret knowlege” that no one should feel entitled to claim themselves a right to.

Yet, there is still humility to agnosticism. It’s not audacious enough as to declare knowing that there’s not a God but it is saying that such questions are unanswerable and left alone. It’s not an opening for others to say they believe anyway. It’s not an outright claim there is no God. It’s a position that says we should ALL admit we know nothing about such things.

Atheism is just the firmer claim there is no God. I wish it wasn’t so closely linked to the attitude you described being wary of whereby someone claims that all knowledge is scientific knowledge. That’s scientism. That’s the (naive) belief that science can answer every question. I (and Nietzsche incidentally) completely reject that way of thinking. I think science is our most powerful and compelling mode of knowing and I think that it is a model for its insistence on method and experience and verifiability and falsifiability as tests for knowledge.

But, ultimately, science cannot answer many metaphysical questions that I think we can formulate relatively defensible beliefs about. Neither can science say very much at all about values and ethics. And again, I think there is much to say. Essentially, there are many topics for philosophy and for the social sciences that require modes of inquiry that are messier than science for being less quantifiable, but nonetheless are valuable forms of inquiry.

Just theology is not one of them.

So, you can be an atheist like me and Nietzsche without adopting scientism.

I’m technically an agnostic. I believe we cannot know the source of eternity in the universe. All we know is that in some way something must just exist. Whether that’s an eternal character to the stuff of our universe or whether it’s a seperate being is an unsettlable question. I’d rather not answer it therefore. But, if pressed to give an answer, I would say it’s a simpler and therefore less presumptuous answer, to simply say there’s something eternal about the world we do know rather than make the huge unwarranted leap to posit an entire other being that we can not know.

Ultimately, I call myself an atheist because due to my agnosticism, I de facto live like an atheist and I have enoough antipathy towards religion and monotheism that I like to express it in the least compromising title available. It is also a matter of importance to me that we deliberately accept a godless universe and pursue reframing our values in light of that apparent situation. The term atheism is more consistent with such an insistence on such an attitude.

Whenever I cover the topic of abortion in my ethics classes, I go to great pains to stress to my students the value of a dispassionate inquiry on the subject. I discourage use of values charged, question begging language of “pro-choice” and “pro-life” and encourage more descriptive language of “pro-abortion rights” or “anti-abortion rights” as a way to stress that even though the issue of abortion is in many way a question of competing priorities of the values of choice and life in this one area, nonetheless in the larger scheme of things people on both sides of the issue do believe in rights to life and rights to choice in general. The issue of abortion is morally about abortion and politically about abortion rights, not life itself or choice itself. That said, resolving the political and legal issue of abortion for many who are morally opposed to abortion but legally supportive of rights to abortion, the conflict really does come down to a decision about what priorities must dominate in a free society—-life in all cases or life in most cases but sometimes choice in the hard cases. And so while it is less divisive and less partisan to gut our language of discussion of value loaded words wherever possible, this is just one of the ways in which the attempt to be objective by trying to find a values neutral or non-partisan language in which to speak proves limited and possibly even distortive of the complexity of the issue at hand. It is deceptive to whitewash the fact that values are conflicting.

Nonetheless, my effort in my class discussions is to try to discipline my students to clarify their understanding of the facts and of the actual value choices at hand systematically, one aspect of the issue at a time, in order to clarify where the rightness or the wrongness, the permissibility or the impermissibility, or the advisibility or the inadvisibility of abortion lie exactly. I want them to figure out as specifically as they can where they think the lines need to be drawn and to work that out both morally and, separately, politically. I also stress so much objectivity because I want my students to practice fairness towards the multiple sides of morally contestable matters and I want them to be able to hear and understand each other and the differing philosophers we read in studying the issue. And I’m extremely proud of nearly all of my students I have had these class discussions with for displaying incredible openmindedness and even temperedness with such volatile matters. I know my own thoughts on the issue have deepened from those thoughtful and probing discussions we’ve had together.

Lake of Fire is quite an admirable film for going a further step towards effective illumination of the issue of abortion by not banning the heat and volatile passions that most of us feel when confronted with various aspects of the issues related to abortion. Nietzsche stresses repeatedly and profoundly the importance of finding the truth best not through greater and greater extents of dispassionate thinking but through the ability to feel through more and more affects. Correlately, he stresses that the truth is not to be understood from the right perspective but from through the ability to multiple perspectives, from seeing through a thousand eyes and gaining a fuller picture that way. On these terms, I think Tony Kaye’s film about abortion is an enriching experience worth having. Kaye represents a number of ways of seeing, a number of ways of feeling and through uncensored documentary imagery offers the viewer the chance to see a thousand striking images and feel struck by a thousand emotions. What I appreciate is that for all the vitriol and passion of many of the participants in the film, that feeling of fairness and perspective undergirds the film under Kaye’s direction and editing and I think manages the sort of enrichening of dialogue I would aim at through detachment.

A key virtue of the film too is that among the viewpoints represented are some of the “detached,” philosophical ones usually given short schrift (if any schrift at all) in the public debate. That said, the film does have some limitations that could have easily been remedied within the seemingly endless 154 minute runtime. For one thing, the informedly philosophical discussions could be more frequent and more involved than some of the multiplications of extremist voices and I think some of the issues of broader political nature that distract from the strict ethics of the practice might not be allowed to dominate so much of the screentime. A lot of valuable, helpful, possibly crucial philosophical and legal distinctions are conspicuously absent. Most egregiously absent are non-religiously based (or unexclusively religiously based) arguments against abortion, more thorough treatments of pro-abortion rights positions that concede the humanity of the unborn such as Judith Jarvis Thomson’s very famous “unconscious violinist” argument, the constitutional controversies involved in appealing to “penumbras,” etc., etc.

That said, while ultimately incomplete, the film does an eye opening and laudable job in general of bringing home the urgency of the political context to the evaluation of the morality of abortion but to the morality of those involved in the debate. There is a strong temptation for me, as a fetishizer of detachment, to want to only address the morality of abortion in a vacuum separated from the contingent political practices associated with the debate since those are theoretically periphery to the relative rightness or wrongness of the practice in abstraction. This film brought home to me some of the arbitrariness of drawing neat lines between abortion in abstraction and abortion in concrete political contexts. As much as being able to abstract the practice or aspects of the practice from surrounding context helps to simplify the issue in theory, it also obscures the interrelated consequences of one’s ethical and political decisions given actual conditions.

I felt like everyone was treated rather fairly. I don’t know how the hardline partisans would feel, whether they would all feel like they were treated fairly or whether they would feel like their side was caricatured worse than the other. I think the visual documentation of actual abortions made a strong visual, visceral case against the practice while the detailed documentation of the extent of theocratic and vigilante tendencies of members of the anti-abortion movement made a strong case against casting one’s lot with such authoritarian scoundrels. I think also the extensive discussion of the consequences of abortions performed illegally brought to life viscerally the real dangers of “coathanger” abortions and most of the philosophers included served to make a powerful case about the moral ambiguity and open door for tolerance of choice in the law with respect to abortion.

In sum, I think both sides make visceral visual cases. It may be unique to my temperment but I found the visceral case against abortion stronger but the abstract case in favor of abortion rights far stronger. The degree to which that is a function of the relative humanity and largeness of perspective of the advocates for abortion rights compared to the authoritarian, theocratic zeal of the proponents of restriction of abortion rights is hard to gauge.

Overall, there is much to learn and many, many important things to see and feel in this film even for those of us who have already learned, seen, and felt a great deal about the topic already. Abortion is an issue that I feel epitomizes Nietzsche’s intuition about the necessity of multiplying the eyes, the angles, and affects with which one looks at something if one is to truly understand it. This film is a far cry from a final word on the issue. But it is an effective and valuable aid in multiplying one’s perspectives and one’s feelings.

B+

Andrew Sullivan posts an e-mail from one of his readers:

I live in SD and I am a candidate for the State House. I was out walking my district last month and spoke to a woman about the primary. She has a statue of the Virgin Mary in her front yard and was wearing several crosses around her neck. Here is our conversation:

Woman: “I don’t know about that Obama guy.”

Me: “I’m an Obama supporter, do you mind if I ask what you’re unsure about.”

Woman: “He’s a muslim and there is a biblical prophecy that a muslim will take over our country and destroy the world.”

Me: “You’re aware he is not a Muslim.”

Woman: “He can say anything he wants.”

A prophecy in the Christian Bible about a Muslim? And it mentions America? And she thinks that she can prevent a prophecy from happening by voting against it?

Has this woman ever read the Bible? She can say anything she wants.

Yesterday I talked to the local convenience store owner with whom I’ve long been friendly. He’s from Kosovo and he’s so anti-Muslim that as far as he’s concerned Obama is a Muslim because “it’s in his blood.” Last night in order to emphasize how anti-Obama he is, he explained that, “I hate work. I hate it. But if you told me, if I vote for Obama, I never have to work again, I still won’t vote for him.”

We’ve already seeing the beginning of 6 months-8 years worth of pushing away the giant rock of public political correctness to see the slime and maggots that normally hide in the dark.

Well, now it turns out that anyone that Barack Obama endorses is magically endorsed by Jeremiah Wright. By November’s time it is the Republican party’s wish that not only Barack Obama is equated with any one he’s ever been associated with in any capacity but that pretty much every Democrat who aligns him or herself with Obama or whom Obama aligns himself with is magically converted into a member of Jeremiah Wright’s fold.

By November, the Republicans are going to want Jeremiah Wright to be perceived as the pope of Democrats essentially.

Thankfully, this hilarious ad with all its baseless character assassination and insult to intelligence failed and Childers was elected. The Republican party is horrified.

What follows are a couple of replies to questions sent to me by a student this semester about Nietzsche’s views on politics and religion. While not definitive or thoroughly sourced discussions of Nietzsche’s thoughts on politics and religion, I think the sketches of Nietzsche’s positions as I formulated them in these replies have some promise.

I would eagerly welcome replies as to the tenability of the positions spelled out both for their justice to Nietzsche’s texts and for their general philosophical merit. With no further ado, here are the questions I was sent followed by my replies:

Does Nietszche want everyone to embrace the noble mindset? He says the individual must always re-affirm himself, act spontaneously and free, without restrictions of some sort of authority/moral over him. But since humans do co-exist in societies, there needs to be some sort of order/law, no? Does he propose societies without leaders, that each person is his own sovereign? Or does he think the noble people will rise above the inevitable masses that will continue with the slave mentality?

Your questions are superb ones without simple answers. They are exactly the kinds of things I’m still trying to sort out. Firstly, Nietzsche acknowledges in a more fatalistic sort of way that not every one will be of noble mind and he is suspicious of philosophies that try to ignore the ways that people really are. The common person will always be the common person. He does, I think, talk about whole ages where a whole people might be more noble but in general there will be these contrasts in mindset and internal constitution between the herd and the more noble types.

So, to an extent, Nietzsche can be read as making his appeals to those fewer ones who will be receptive to the nobler calling to a nobler way of life that he is making. He can, to a greater extent than most philosophers, admit that there can be different codes of life good for the herd than for the nobles. Herd morality does serve the herd’s interests and so is genuinely valuable for them. Nietzsche does not so much want to upset their stability as free the “nobles” to do the sort of value creation that is possible for them as people with greater internal resources.

At minimum, we can say that these nobler individuals can transform a culture in a way that takes the whole people to another level for its having the influence of their greatness. The importance of great artists is of great significance for Nietzsche as exemplary figures who effect this kind of move within a culture. Now, whether or not the masses will be able to incorporate the profundities of these transformative cultural figures in such a way that makes them embody all his virtues and be as great in themselves is hard to say. It’s likely they won’t, but they will nonetheless be better off for the contributions to their culture.

Now the question of laws and ethical precepts are a couple whole other balls of wax. I think Nietzsche tends to focus on creating the conditions for the excellent to emerge and to be the cultural leaders. He totally mistrusts statism because he thinks that state apparatuses are woeful substitutes for genuine culture when it comes to genuinely uniting a people. Also, while he is not an individualist, he is protective of the values-innovators who state and religion will vilify as evil. The problem that Nietzsche sees the values-innovator as facing is that when (s)he questions the dominant values, he is inevitably going to be deemed evil according to the dominant values because he is a threat to them themselves. How can you question your values when your values are the judge of what’s a good answer? So, Nietzsche’s concern with morality is this conservative dimension to it, by which it shuts off the questioning that goes against it. So, he is concerned to break the hold of laws that would enshrine the values of the present. Whether he wants laws created by the coming values-innovators who will replace the Christian values or whether he wants them only to be cultural influences who don’t get into the business of actually turning their new values into actual laws, is a difficult question that I can’t really definitively answer yet.

I am starting to write my paper and I am a little confused about Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.

As far as God is concerned, I thought Nietzsche doesn’t believe in God or an afterlife per se, just that you keep living your life over and over again, like reincarnation except its always the same. So in that sense its not really an afterlife(because an after life, in the Christian sense anyway, is some spiritual never ending life after a short period of temporal living), I think it would be more like some never ending circle of temporal life. You would really never die (because death is understood as your spirit separating from your body for another place). It would be sort of like a book with many chapters, each saying the same thing. Does Nietzsche believe that there is some infinite being causing this eternal recurrence? and how exactly does it work, because obviously time goes on, so you couldn’t keep living your successive lives on Earth, they would have to be on some other plane or dimension right? And since people are born and die at different times, how does that work out( say I die today, and start my eternal life, but my brother doesn’t die for another 50 years…how does he end up in my “new” eternal life?)

Also, Nietzsche doesn’t believe in any seperate infinite being or “other”, but rather the unity and oneness of the universe. So how are we all connected? Is there an interconnecting spirit or something?

thanks!

You’re basically on the right track. The only things that I would correct are as follows. There is no reference to a being beyond the universe such as an independently existing God. If he is to speak of a “divine” at all, it would be just the totality of the universe taken as a whole. What I mean by this is as follows: the question of “what is God?” is a question of what is the ultimate, eternal reality upon which all particular being depends for its existence. The metaphysical intuition that leads people to talk about the “divine” is that temporal beings as we know them require outside causes to come into existence—they can’t cause themselves. So, the divine has usually been interpreted by philosophers in some way or another as whatever that thing is that didn’t need a prior existing thing to create it.

Obviously particular material objects don’t seem fit for such an uncaused existence since they require causes outside of themselves. Where the monotheist posits a separate being, a God, who exists by his own power, uncaused by anything else, the atheist or the pantheist usually just posits that the universe itself has some sort of eternal dimension such that even though particular combinations of matter are created through causal interactions, there is some eternal dimension to the universe that itself is not caused to come into being or to go out of being.

This is a very rough way of spelling out Spinoza’s essential position and Spinoza was the thinker most fundamentally in the background of Schopenhauer—-who in turn deeply influenced Nietzsche. Nietzsche also speaks very highly of Spinoza. So, it’s fair to infer some common sympathies with Nietzsche and Spinoza and flesh him out in the Spinozistic terms I like to use. For Spinoza, the universe is “God:” it is the totality of everything that is and it is eternally existing. The particular beings that we are and that we experience are just modes of the universe—forms it takes within the greater unity of itself. For Spinoza, as I think for Nietzsche, the universe is not merely matter, nor merely mind but rather is both in every one of its modes. What I mean by that is that there is both a material and a mental dimension to all of existence. In other words, everything in existence has both a mental side and a material one to it.

God is neither the material nor the mental aspect of existence or things but just the entirety of the whole universe, he is the “substance” in which all the particular beings exist. An analogy I like to use is to take a human being. There is a material and a mental dimension to you. And you can express those yourself in all sorts of ways physically and mentally. You can take on different modes. Your body can be sitting or standing or walking or chewing, etc. and your mind can be thinking and feeling all sorts of thoughts. You are not separate from any of these things but expressed through all of them. You are more fundamental than any particular mode you take. You exist before and after all the particular thoughts you think and body positions you take, etc. But you also don’t exist without any body position or thoughts whatsoever. So, to apply this analogy to the world. “God” is like you in that scenario, he is the totality of everything but he only exists in the particular modes that his attributes (matter and mind) take. You and I are just the modes of God’s attributes. We’re just shapes his material and mental attributes twist themselves into. He doesn’t exist without expressing himself in his attributes, but he is the more fundamental being because we exist in him, rather than him in us. He doesn’t have an independent identity apart from all the modes of the universe. In other words, our thoughts are God thinking, he doesn’t think separately from that as though he were a distinct person from all of us. We are modes of God’s body, he doesn’t have a different body than the material universe itself. So God=the universe.

So, that’s in a nutshell, Spinozistic pantheism. The connection between all of us in such a scenario, as Nietzsche to some extent accepts, would be that we all boil down to the same fundamental being of the universe. Nietzsche never explicitly embraces pantheism and so that’s why I suggest in my review of Julian Young’s book Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Religion that we shy away from calling him a pantheist as Young does. What he does share with the pantheist though is that the universe itself is what is eternal and so if anything is to be called divine, that would be it. But I think he would reject ultimately reject the idea that the universe is indeed one substance since his major rejection of Schopenhauer is denying that the entire universe is a single will, in favor of interpreting it as made up of innumerable centers of will to power. In this way, Nietzsche is more Leibniz than Spinoza and less inclined to positing a notion of a fundamental unity to all the universe that we could call “God.”

Now, on Nietzsche’s thinking, how the eternal recurrence would happen is a little sketchy. But what he speculates is that with an infinite amount of time and a finite amount of matter following out fixed laws of nature, eventually all the combinations of matter would recur an infinite number of times. Since there are only a finite numbers of combinations among material in the universe and there’s an infinity to keep recombining the same combinations, following the same laws of nature, would recur an infinite number of times. This is roughly how Nietzsche sketched out the recurrence.

So to answer your question of how we can each recur in our own lives when we die while others continue their present lives—-the issue there I think is simply that it’s a matter of the universe recurring and our lives recurring when we are reconstituted in it. So, in other words, you don’t recur immediately but only when the universe gets back to reconstituting history to the point where you come into being again. There are others who think more in terms of dimensions similar to the one you theorized and argue that our infinite recurrences actually all happen simultaneously. I have to admit I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that idea since it’s hard for me to grasp what would distinguish all these infinite versions of the same existence. If they happen sequentially, then I can grasp that. But if they’re all happening simultaneously, how are they distinct?

I think the argument for the simultaneous recurrences is that eternal recurrence does not happen in time in the sort of manner I described earlier where the matter just keeps recombining sequentially in time. Rather than there being eternal recurrences in time, there would be the eternal recurrence of time itself. So, this would require different dimensions in which time and matter recurred separately from their instantiation in each other dimension.

Now, it is possible that none of these physical and metaphysical speculations are correct and it is also possible (though I don’t think likely) that Nietzsche didn’t think it important that they be correct. In such cases, the meaning of the eternal recurrence still stands as a test for affirmation. Is what we want most desperately to be eternal our own temporal lives in this temporal universe, recurring for all eternity? If it is, then we maximally affirm our lives—regardless of whether or not the universe honors our desire. This is at minimum our test. There are those (like Paul Loeb) who stress though that for Nietzsche it must also be that the universe does indeed recur for this to be such a crushing existential question to contend with. They argue that if the eternal recurrence is not real, we can just dismiss the question of its possibility as not at all the kind of thing that would lead us to the sort of turmoil that Nietzsche describes in the Gay Science 341.

In Nietzsche’s  Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, section 4 (Parkes translation, Oxford 2006)), we read:

Zealously and with much shouting they drove their herd over their bridge: as if to the future there were but one bridge! Verily, these herdsmen thesmelves still belonged among the sheep!

Little minds and capacious souls these shepherds had: but, my brothers, what little domains have even the most capacious souls been up to now!

Blood-signs they wrote on the way that they walked, and their folly taught that one proves the truth with blood.

But blood is the worst witness of truth; blood poisions the purest teaching, turning it into hearts’ delusion and hate.

And if one goes through the fire for one’s teaching—what does that prove! It is more, verily, if one’s own teaching comes out of one’s own blaze!

Sultry heart and cold head: where these come together there arises the roaring wind, the ‘Redeemer’.

Here Zarathustra challenges what Nietzsche in The Antichrist calls the “seduction” of the martyr, the false logic that if some one is willing to die for a belief that it therefore has some credibility. People can hold beliefs and be willing to die for them for all sorts of psychological and social reasons that have nothing to do with the love of truth first and foremost. A herdish, follower of a person can march off to the stake out of blind obedience, as can the suicidal, the delusional, or the foolish and easily persuaded.

In contrast, the ideal here, is not someone willing to die for a “teaching” but someone willing to make the pursuit of her perspective into a matter of fire and passion and intense internal struggle and experiment and risk. It’s the willingness to embrace Zarathustra’s insight earlier when he declares that ”one must still have chaos within, in order to give birth to a dancing star.” The embrace of this sort of passionate approach to life and personally developed knowledge as summed up by Nietzsche in these lines sum up the priorities and the spirit that motivate me.  It’s all about the sultry heart and the cold head.