Contemporary analytic accounts of meaningfulness specify its local conditions through the attribution and ordering of value. This essay situates philosophical vignettes about life’s meaning within a larger polemic concerning absurdity as an existential diagnosis, examining how repetition functions in three rhetorically distinct ways to produce their evaluative ambiguity. By taking Thomas Nagel’s crucial step back of self-reflection and critical distance, one can view the highly specific and arbi…
Read moreContemporary analytic accounts of meaningfulness specify its local conditions through the attribution and ordering of value. This essay situates philosophical vignettes about life’s meaning within a larger polemic concerning absurdity as an existential diagnosis, examining how repetition functions in three rhetorically distinct ways to produce their evaluative ambiguity. By taking Thomas Nagel’s crucial step back of self-reflection and critical distance, one can view the highly specific and arbitrary set of presuppositions that ground local criteria for meaning. I argue that Nietzsche’s presentation of eternal recurrence in The Gay Science (1882), §341, foregrounds a demand for unconditional affirmation that reiterates a correlative demand implied by finitude. By contrast, I interpret the myth of Sisyphus as rendering life’s futility via the metonymy of repetitive labor. Taken together as works addressing the meaning of life, these address absurdity through permutations of repetition which yield solutions as diverse as affirmation and defiance. Among them, Nagel’s account of knowing irony recasts repetition as a means for traversing unconditional affirmation and despair. Elaborating this structure reveals irony as an existential posture capable of superseding rival responses to the burden of absurdity. By comparing these strategies, the essay shows how philosophical fables of repetition transform existential diagnosis into rival practical orientations toward finite life.
