I have always held in this race that while of course we shouldn’t vote for a presidential candidate based on something as skin deep as skin color, that nonetheless all things being equal in terms of character, temperament, policy proposals, principles, and priorities, that there is a crucial psychological bonus to having a black president. It is simply of too inestimable a value to send the message to the youth of America and around the world about what kind of a country we live in.

This great article is about an early fruit of this impact:

As I’ve considered Sen. Obama’s accomplishment, I’ve determined the most profound impact he’s had — not considering the possibility of him becoming president and proving to be one of our better ones — is on our future more than our present or our history.

I didn’t grasp that until I took my 2-year-old to the doctor last week and he took a vision exam. It was through young Alexander’s eyes that I saw how important this moment in time could be.

The nurse administering the exam pointed to different shapes and images on a chart, asking Alexander to identify each. One of the recurring images was that of a flag. It wasn’t an American flag, but a flag just the same.

To a 2-year-old, a flag is a flag, right? Alexander is most familiar with the U.S. flag. When the nurse pointed to the flag, he answered confidently.

“Barack Obama,” he said, pronouncing it as best as a 2-year-old could.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“Barack Obama.”

As she went through the chart, she once again came to the flag.

“Barack Obama.”

“Do you know what he’s saying?” I asked her.

“No.”

“He’s saying Barack Obama.” Why? Because he was making an association. Most times when he’s seen Sen. Obama on TV, the Democratic nominee has been standing in front of the U.S. flag.

Whether Sen. Obama wins the presidency or not, he has had an untold effect on the future and psyche of America.

My son will live a lifetime in which he knows an African-American can ascend to the highest levels in this country. He won’t think it odd for a black man to seek to lead a nation. He as well as many white, Asian, Hispanic and other children, whether they like the candidate or not, won’t think it odd or a novelty to see a black man standing in front of the American flag — the ultimate display of patriotism, despite misguided and mean-spirited efforts to paint Sen. Obama as being otherwise — articulating his concerns and love for his country.

Because of Barack Obama, many of our children won’t grow up with as many of the psychological bruises those before them might have endured.

I grew up being told that I could one day be president. But much of what I saw and heard suggested otherwise. I saw and experienced the discrimination. Blacks only secured the right to vote in my lifetime. I saw many black kids in school being steered away from advanced courses and training that would have prepared them to shoot for higher goals.

Not only does Sen. Obama’s feat help shape a 2-year-old’s thoughts about himself and the world around him, but it affects so many others, from high-schoolers to college students to older folks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSpAWVa4Jak

From a New York Times profile on quotes Obama:

“I love when I’m shaking hands on a rope line and”— he mimes the motion, hand over hand — “I see little old white ladies and big burly black guys and Latino girls and all their hands are entwining. They’re feeding on each other as much as on me.”

He shrugs; it’s that distancing eye of the author.

“It’s like I’m just the excuse.”

regardless of whether it’s put-on humility—there’s something in there to meditate on a bit, I think.

Fascinatingly thorough and multiple treatments of the hard numbers about Obama and Clinton’s respective prospects against McCain. That and more important analysis that should go into superdelegate thinking about whom to support.

And all this info and analysis is on one page of multiple mathematical pleasures

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!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88REf0tjZHo

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.

As the Democratic primary season is winding down, Barack Obama has an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates.  Because of the nature of this lead the race is being declared over and done with in his favor.  It makes a lot of sense to think that if the superdelegates were to overturn a clear mandate for the first African American nominee they would devestatingly alienate the incredibly enthusiastic African American and youth voters who have been galvanized by Obama’s candidacy.  A figure that left wing idealists of many ethnicities and colors see as potentially embodying in his nomination a landmark of social progress cannot be denied such a nomination by the will of party bosses without causing deeply bitter feelings and accusations that the Democratic party thereby takes a deeply undemocratic turn.

Now, in this brief essay, I want to ask whether the superdelegates voting in a way contrary to the pledged delegates really would be an undemocratic gesture.  Why should the pledged delegate count be taken as the truest measure of the will of the people?  A couple of days ago there was an excellent profile in the politico  of the lawyer Obama’s employed to master the delegate rules and maximize his campaign’s delegate total. Delegates in the Democratic primaries do not exactly represent raw vote totals. Sometimes districts get disproportionately more delegates than neighboring districts in their own states because in those districts the Democrats have in the past turned voted more heavily Democratic in previous elections. Sometimes quirks of math make for uneven delegate distribution. For example, in a district with only 4 delegates, a 59%-41% margin in favor of one candidate over the other results not in 3 delegates for the winner but a tie in which both candidates get 2 delegates. I think in general proportional delegation is a far fairer and more representative way to allocate delegates than winner take all set ups like the electoral college because proportional delegation more accurately tracks the will of the people in a state. Why should a candidate who gets only 60% of a state’s votes get 100% of its delegates? The problem with our general presidential elections is not the use of the delegates in the electoral college—its that the electors in almost all the states do not proportion their delegates in a way representative of their outcomes. Lately Hillary Rodham Clinton has noted that with Republican rules, she would have already won this primary battle. That does not mean however that that would have been a fairer measure than proportional delegation is giving us now. I think it would be a worse one, frankly.

But, proportional delegation as presently set up comes with these quirks in which quite unfairly a 59-41% split in some districts yields a decidedly unrepresentative 2-2 tie in delegates. Now it is to Obama’s credit as a politician (or to his team’s credit anyway) that his campaign was shrewd enough and gifted in foresight and calculation enough to run up the maximum delegate totals it could by pouring its resources as efficiently as possible into the regions where delegate rules meant that a lost district could be turned into a tie or a big win meant more delegates than a big win elsewhere in the state. But does this shrewdness translate into legitimacy as “the people’s choice?” Not necessarily at all.

David Plouffe recently stressed that even though Obama is winning the popular vote contest that superdelegates should not take that into account but only take into account the pledged delegate score since those were the rules the campaigns campaigned under. Their campaigns were designed to rack up pledged delegate totals and not popular votes. But why should the superdelegates care about campaign strategies? Just because the Obama campaign sought to rack up the most pledged delegates it could by gaming the system as well as it could does not mean that they couldn’t also put efforts into genuinely being the candidate chosen by the most people. And it doesn’t mean that a superdelegate should see their victories tallied up in delegate rich pockets as necessarily indicative of the will of the people. By the rules, their shrewdness in attaining pledged delegates is already rewarded in pledged delegates. Superdelegates are free to take in other considerations with respect to what legitimately represents the will of the people and what legitimately represents the good of the party. When the superdelegates see that the popular vote totals are far narrower than the pledged delegate race—which was essentially over before March 4 even—-why shouldn’t they take that to mean that the will of the democratic party is split, regardless of how that is reflected in the pledged delegate count?

One reason to think the superdelegates should just endorse the pledged delegate results is that it is unfair to caucus states which take a smaller sample of the population to determine delegates. Since caucuses occur in a narrower time-window and require a greater time commitment proportionally fewer people show up. In this respect, Obama’s campaign has a solid case to make that it put resources into caucus states expecting their delegates to be proportional to those in popular vote states. If the popular vote was the primary metric under consideration and not delegates then the caucus states wouldn’t even have caucuses since such would lead to under-representation of their state in the total popular tally. Caucus states and the Obama campaign which put great resources and strategy into them deserve to be given the equal consideration that primary states did. It is reasonable to assume, without doing the numbers, that were we to extrapolate the caucus vote totals to a more equivalent representation of total voters in those states to the representation in other states, then Obama’s popular vote lead would increase significantly.

So even though I don’t think it’s any more legitimate or democratic to consider sacrosanct the results of districts where mathematical idiosyncracies misrepresent the will of the people of a given district, I do think superdelegates should pay more attention to the pledged delegates to the popular vote. But three further challenges must be considered before settling on the opinion that the superdelegate ratification of Obama as Democratic nominee is sufficiently democratic to be considered fair. Are caucuses sufficiently representative of the people’s will? Caucuses favor party activists more willing to commit time, more willing to proclaim openly their support, and less susceptible to peer pressure in standing by their decision. Would primaries in states with caucuses really produce popular vote verdicts of similar percentages to caucuses? If Texas is any indication, a state where they prominently held both a primary and a caucus, the answer is no. Obama lost the popular vote in the state but dominated in the caucus percentages enough to net more delegates total from the state. Take out the caucuses and replace them with primaries and do more of his wins turn to losses? Does more of his popular vote total move into Clinton’s column instead? We don’t know definitively, but I’m afraid that would likely happen.

So, is this democratic? Is it fair? I think it is an acceptable situation because a political party in the United States is in some sense a “private” institution. The selection of a nominee is different than the selection of an office holder. If we are to be truly democratic in our elections, selecting office holders our government must be as democratic as possible, showing no favoritism to party activists or traditionally active voters over casual ones, etc. There should be no party bosses reaching in to decide elections to offices. But a party is a party and not a government institution. The Democratic party has every right to maintain a little hierarchy within its structure and reward those who are more committed to their party with opportunities like caucuses to show their commitment and have it count more. They are open in allowing any one to caucus. That the greater commitment involved requires a little more from their voters only allows those more committed to the party to have a greater say. Similarly all districts in any state are welcome to vote democratic. Rewarding party loyalty with greater say in future nominees to those districts is similarly fair and so I say, “more power” to those districts with a little extra representation in pledged delegates. And since the superdelegates are only superdelegates because along the way they’ve been voted into leadership roles by other members of the party, again the Democratic party is remaining at its core democratic even though it is introducing hierarchical structures that allow a little more say to those who are a little (or, in the case of many superdelegates, a whole lot) more committed to the cause of their party.

I think that the introduction of these hierarchical dimensions is fair for parties. In general elections, every vote should count the same and the voting procedures should be far more normalized. But the party seems legitimate in its weighting pledged delegates to reflect party loyalty and its use of caucuses for party building and for giving special say to the most committed party members. I also think though that along this same logic, the superdelegates have every right to break with the pledged delegates and favor popular vote totals with their votes if they disagree with their judgment. The more committed activists have had their extra say with their extra proportion of pledged delegates. If the total pledged delegates are not enough to seal a nomination and a superdelegate wants to use his or her extra say to vote against that nomination, that’s as fair as the caucuses and disproportionate delegation that went in to creating the initial pledged delegate total. And if enough superdelegates are willing to overrule the pledged delegates, then that means there is a solid enough agreement to overcome the pledged delegates’ current advantage, and so that’s an accomplishment of great support in favor of the candidate who lost the pledged delegates.

So, even though if I were a superdelegate, I would not overrule the nomination of Barack Obama personally, I think they’re entitled to. Fortunately, enough of them will accept the judgment of the pledged delegates (and, incidentally, the legitimate current popular vote total taken from the officially sanctioned contests) and informally ratify Obama’s nomination in a matter of weeks. But, I don’t begrudge Hillary at all her appeal (in general) to the closeness of the popular vote as a justification to be reconsidered by the superdelegates. I don’t think it’s just games with math. Yes, her campaign only emphasizes the math that favors her. But any campaign would do this and it’s unnecessary to demand her to do otherwise. There is a legit way to read the math that says the superdelegates are legit in using their superifluence to overturn the superinfluence of party activists in caucuses. It’s also a legit reading of the math to say, the pledged delegates and the actual popular vote lead in legitimate contests (i.e. contests not in Michigan or Florida this year) should be ultimate.

Both campaigns have a defensible case. There’s not a simple answer to what the superdelegates should do and there’s no rule that tells them to favor one metric over another.

Your thoughts?

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.