Abstract
Two types of eternity exists: everlastingness and atemporality. On Earth only everlastingness is possible. But everlastingness comes with a possible price of boredom and endless repeat. It is hard to understand what atemporality would mean for humans, and whether our interest in continuation of consciousness is served by atemporality, given that humans are steeped in temporality. There is also a question on whether an atemporal god will be tolerant of the everlasting, and everlasting immortality will in any event not be everlasting in an absolute sense, since the time-dependence will mean that death can be chosen. Only the atemporal can jump off a cliff and not die a definitive death.
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Notes
- 1.
De Rerum Natura.
- 2.
As, indeed, it is in Mormonism, where all souls are deemed to be co-equal with God and hence with no beginning and no end.
- 3.
Intimations of Immortality. It should be noted that Wordsworth’s idea of pre-existence is the opposite of what most people seek in immortality. For Wordsworth you arrive as a newborn as an unwritten sheet of paper, without experience, and exactly because of that lack of experience the child is ‘the greatest philosopher’. The child is able to feel without the shackles of experience. However, what humans seek in immortality is to be able to carry forward the shackles defined by Wordsworth. The shackles of experience and the mature personality is what humans want to retain forever – not to be brought back to original matter or to a state of innocence wiping out individuality.
- 4.
Den roede traad, translation Harry Eyres.
- 5.
Clearly not on the individual level, however, since it seems obvious that some people lead happier lives than others. Yet, this does not exclude aggregation of happiness and unhappiness within a species, all living things or the cosmos – and a zero-sum balancing.
- 6.
Nietzsche was clearly in two minds about this. His amor fati suggests that the ‘higher being’ might want to change nothing in the lived life, and thus might welcome endless repetition. This is incongruent. If there is no continued consciousness both a repeated imperfect life and a repeated perfect life are as livable as it was first time around. And if there is some kind of continued consciousness then even a perfect life will lose its luster by eternal repetition.
- 7.
Plato, Timaeus: ‘Wherefore he made an image of eternity which is time, having a uniform motion according to number, parted into months and days and years, and also having greater divisions of past, present, and future. These all apply to becoming in time, and have no meaning in relation to the eternal nature, whichever is and never was or will be; for the unchangeable is never older or younger, and when we say that he ‘was’ or ‘will be,’ we are mistaken, for these words are applicable only to becoming, and not to true being; and equally wrong are we in saying that what has become IS become and that what becomes IS becoming, and that the non-existent IS non-existent…These are the forms of time which imitate eternity and move in a circle measured by number’.
- 8.
Fifth Objections.
- 9.
The Sickness unto Death, 43 (Penguin Classics).
- 10.
The Concept of Anxiety, 108–9 (Liveright Publishing Corporation). This has similarities to McTaggart, explored below at footnote 3 at Chap. 9.
- 11.
Somewhat in that direction Bernard Williams, The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality, in David Benetar, Life, Death & Meaning.
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Hulsroj, P. (2015). What Is Eternity?. In: What If We Don't Die?. Springer Praxis Books(). Copernicus, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19093-8_4
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