splay foot

Or rather: it becomes, it passes away, but it has never begun to become and never ceased from passing away – it maintains itself in both. – It lives on itself: its excrements are its food. (548b)It would make no sense to say that the world was created. Some provide a logical account for how the world was created from nothing. But they usually have theological motives. (548bc)

Eugene Dühring, for example, argues that even if time is infinite, it must have a beginning. The only way we can clearly conceive of infinity is if we imagine a continuous process of adding additional numerical units to a series. But this process had to begin before we could start the adding process. So even if the past stretches infinitely to now, it had to begin at some point. Hence, time has a beginning, Dühring concludes.

Nietzsche claims that Dühring makes a mistake. His sense of the future might be correct. It never ends, because there is always something more. But his portrayal of the infinite past is erroneous. For him, the infinite past began at some point, and continued infinitely until now. That of course could not be infinite, because there are two determinate points, the beginning point and the now point. So he wrongly considers a finite progress to be an infinite regress.

Indeed, the future is infinite, because we can begin from now, and perpetually add more moments. Nietzsche says we can do the same in reverse for the past. We can begin now and continually subtract moments infinitely into the past.Only if I made the mistake – I shall guard against it – of equating this correct concept of a regressus in infinitum with an utterly unrealizable concept of a finite progressusup to this present, only if I suppose that the direction (forward or backward) is logically a matter of indifference, would I take the head – this moment – for the tail: I shall leave that to you, my dear Herr Dühring!– (548d)Nietzsche argues that the universe always must have been in a state of becoming.

If it ever did stop, there would be no imbalancing forces to get it going again. Since we still experience a state of flux, there must never have been complete stability in the past.If the world could in any way become rigid, dry, dead, nothing, or if it could reach a state of equilibrium, or if it had any kind of goal that involved duration, immutability, the once-and-for-all (in short, speaking metaphysically:

if becoming could resolve itself into being or into nothingness), then this state must have been reached: from which it follows– (548-549) [again, see this entry for more on Nietzsche's infinite time theory.]Lord Kelvin worried that entropy would cause all the forces in the universe to someday spend all their energy, causing the world to die [see this entry for more]. Nietzsche says that if this is true, then that means it is possible for there to be equilibrium. But if it were possible, it should have happened already. So if a mechanistic theory concludes that eventually there will be stasis, it is refuted by the very fact that it has not yet occurred and is thus an impossibility. (549b)

Now Nietzsche will describe the eternal return as being both pure chance and yet also an infinite repetition of the same. It's truly a marvel of computational engineering, the ultimate abstract machine of the digital variety. Purely wild, purely unknown, yet it always is the same thing over-and-over again. And we do not just mean it is difference over-and-over, or chance over-and-over. It is not so simple as "the only thing that remains the same is change." Rather, the same combinations of events recur as exactly the same on infinite scales and yet each individual event is decided by chance.