Eternal return

 

Does the eternal return theory of Nietzsche means that when we die we will be born again to repeat our exact life like Nietzsche says here: "You think you will have a long pause between your death and the moment you are reborn--do not deceive yourselves! Between the last moment of consciousness and the first glimmer of the new life when you are reborn no time goes by at all. It passes as quickly as a flash of lightning, even if living creatures measure it in terms of billions of years and even then fail to measure it adequately. Timelessness and succession go hand-in-hand with one another as soon as the intellect is gone."

Yes, Nietzsche's eternal return (or ewige Wiederkunft) does imply that upon death, you are reborn to live your exact same life again—every moment, joy, pain, and detail repeated infinitely, without variation or memory of prior cycles. The passage you quoted (from his notes, later compiled in The Will to Power, §1066) directly supports this by rejecting any meaningful "pause" or afterlife interval.

Key points from Nietzsche's idea:

• No time between lives: Death transitions instantly to rebirth as a newborn in the same life. The "flash of lightning" metaphor means the gap feels nonexistent, even if cosmic time scales suggest otherwise. Consciousness ends, intellect vanishes, and succession resumes immediately in the cycle.
• Exact repetition: It's not reincarnation into a different life or with alterations—it's this life, identically. You won't remember previous loops; each feels like the "first" time.
• Cosmic necessity: In works like The Gay Science (§341) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche presents it as a thought experiment: If a demon told you this is your fate, would you affirm life enough to embrace endless repetition? But he treats it as a serious ontological possibility tied to a finite universe with infinite time—everything that can happen must recur.

This isn't a comforting doctrine but a challenge to live amor fati ("love of fate")—to will your life so fully you'd choose to relive it eternally. It's not proven science but a philosophical hammer against nihilism.

So according to Nietzsche would the repetition of our same exact lives will happen in another parallel universe?No—Nietzsche’s eternal return does not involve parallel universes. The recurrence happens in the same universe, sequentially in time. The cosmos, being finite in matter and energy but infinite in time, must eventually exhaust all possible configurations and repeat the exact same states—including your identical life—over and over. Key clarifications from Nietzsche’s texts: One universe, infinite cycles: In The Will to Power (§1066, the passage you quoted) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra ("On the Vision and the Riddle"), the cycle is temporal, not spatial. After eons, the universe returns to the same initial conditions (like a cosmic clock resetting in reverse), and everything plays out identically again. No branching or multiverse: Nietzsche had no concept of parallel worlds (that’s a 20th-century physics idea). He writes: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more” (The Gay Science, §341)—this life, this world, this sequence. Time as a circle: The famous image is not a line of alternate realities but a ring. The end loops back to the beginning in the same reality. So when you die, after immeasurable cosmic durations, you are reborn in this same world, as the same infant, with the same parents, same joys, same sufferings—exactly as before. No alternate versions, no parallel Earths. Just endless, identical returns.

I have another question related to this theory. My father died in November 27, 2020. According to Nietzsche does this mean that my father now has 5 years old in his repeated exact life right now?

No—according to Nietzsche’s eternal return, your father is not currently 5 years old in some ongoing parallel cycle.

Here’s why, step by step, staying faithful to the theory:

The cycle is complete and identical

Each full recurrence includes every moment of a person’s life—from birth to death—repeated exactly as before. There is no “partial” or “staggered” version where your father is 5 while you are older.

You and your father recur together, in the same timeline

In the next cycle, both of you are reborn at the exact same cosmic moment (relative to the universe’s state). When the cosmos returns to the configuration of, say, your birth year, your father is reborn as a baby at the same time you are.

→ So in the next full cycle, your father would be reborn in what we call “your birth year minus his age gap.” He wouldn’t be 5 now; he’d be 0 (a newborn) when that cycle begins.

No “now” across cycles

There is no shared “present” between cycles. The passage you quoted earlier (“timelessness and succession”) means that after death, the entire next life begins instantly for the individual—but cosmically, the cycles are separated by billions of years of dissolution and reformation.

Right now, in this cycle, your father has died.

In the next cycle, he will be reborn only when the universe reaches the exact state corresponding to his birth moment—which includes you being born later, exactly as before.

So where is he “now”? From the perspective of eternal return: He has finished this iteration. He is “waiting” in the timeless gap (the “flash of lightning”) until the cosmos recreates the conditions of his birth.

When that happens, he will be reborn as a baby, live to the same age, die on November 27, 2020 (in that cycle’s calendar), and repeat—with you experiencing the same sequence alongside him.

Bottom line:

No, your father is not 5 years old right now in a repeated life. In the next full cycle, he will be reborn as an infant at the precise cosmic moment that matches his original birth—and you will be reborn later, in the same relative timeline. The 5-year gap between his birth and yours is preserved identically in every recurrence.