I Like Thinking About Eternity

Now and again

I had the realization, or rememberance, today that

I had resolved to write on the infinite repetition of everything that has ever happened. In philosophy terms, I mean eternal recurrence, or, depending on your opinions on time and religion, simply eternity. The decision to focus on eternal recurrence came from a 9am shower in my home in Eugene, OR, where I was undergoing the day’s inception of my ongoing frustration: what to write a dissertation on for my PhD when every academic philosophy topic seems pointless from the vantage point of a burning world. Triviality was not the only difficulty, for I had committed to write a dissertation on Latin American philosophy, and this meant an especially narrow filter that drastically limited what I could feasibly write on.

I realized in the shower one morning that no one had taken the motif of cycles in Latin American thought very seriously, and that I was awed by the thought of eternity in the hands of Spinoza as well as Nietzsche. It had not occurred to me until then to bring the two together. Given how long it took me to make the connection, perhaps I should not have been surprised that I soon forgot that this was my focus as I got lost in the mire of Decolonial writings, anthropology, and profusions of temporal interpretation that hardly touched on repetition.

Today was the day I remembered that I am supposed to be writing on cycles of time, but how did I forget? There are certainly cute philosophical explanations why, and the main one begins by asserting that the repetition of everything would change how we think about memory. If everything happens again, forever, memory cannot be primarily understood as a subjective part of absolute history, for memory would no longer belong to a self. The self, a blip in the history of eternity, would come and go again and again, forever, and their memory would form part of the fabric of eternity itself. Subjective memory here would be lost save file, but in the eternal return of everything, memory now is part of the same fabric as everything else. Memory no longer belongs to a self—and such a memory divorced from a self is something else entirely than anything we are used to calling memory.

Anyways. Latin American thought by no means conceives of time as an eternal recurrence of the same. The distinctive motif particular to Latin American thought and beyond (by which I mean to extend up to the Diné) is the recurrence of time, or history, as consisting of four ages plus the one that we are currently in. I would not draw any stable analogy between this tendency and historical periodization in the form of Ancient-Medieval-Renaissance-Modern or whatever, but if such a comparison gets your thinking going then go for it.

Near as I can tell, what is determinative are the turns (revolutions) in particular ages; the moments where a particular age comes to be and ends. To my reading, there is not usually a determined start to the universe, for there are typically already things in existence in Latin American creation myths. The various creations are interesting in part because people are always made of something other than “people matter.” They come from animals, plants, and stones. Latin American thought is particularly interesting for how it treats filiation and alliance: what constitutes a mother, a brother-in-law, a daughter, is by no means a straightforward determination.

But I digress. Is there something like eternity in the thought of the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Incans, or the many other American traditions of thought? It’s hard not to -not- think of forever, but then again it’s hard to think of anything other than what you think. It is more likely that there are many kinds of forevers, eternities, and infinities, and perhaps not enough time to think through them all.