Anamorphic Eternality
Finding magic in meaninglessness
In the spirit of absurdism and connecting dots in outrageous ways, I want to explore Albert Camus’ and Hannah Arendt’s depictions of the eternal. The overlap I discovered fascinates me, and I wonder if you feel the same. We are threading a tapestry with a pattern we will never see.
A few contextual sentences before eternal exploration: Camus and Arendt published during the rise of atheism in 20th century Europe; the catalysts and consequences of World War II forced the public question (and rejection) of morality upon Europeans in a way that was previously deemed blasphemous. Though Nietzsche wrote the famous phrase (“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”), 20th century philosophers, particularly the existentialists, birthed the total erasure of universality, objectivity, and God’s relevance to the presence and application of a practical morality.
“Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference,” wrote Camus in Myth of Sisyphus. If we can’t understand whether or not our lives have any meaning in the most basic sense, how could we possibly know, understand, or care about anything outside of us?
The country responsible for producing some of the greatest minds of the Western world was as responsible for some of humanity’s most egregious tragedies, and this could not be ignored. Nor could it be reconciled.
Enter Here: the Absurd (And Albert Camus)
As Camus simply put, the Absurd is the “divorce between man and his life.” It’s the awareness that there’s no inherent meaning (morality, value judgement, purpose) in anything we do, yet we choose to continue existing.
For what? For whom? Precisely.
Living with the Absurd requires three things: hopelessness, rejection, and rebellion. They are defined by Camus as follows.
Hopelessness: the existence of constraints beyond our control, such as working to pay bills that uphold a socio-economic structure.
Rejection: acknowledging and accepting the absence of hope. We do this in every action, knowing the only guaranteed outcome of our culminated actions is death.
Rebellion: embracing that which we cannot change to still live a fulfilling life absent of distractions and falsities, while still feeling the burden, tension, and magnitude of the meaninglessness of this realization.
Hannah Arendt approached the question of man’s relationship to life slightly differently. Writing The Human Condition over a decade after Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, the second world war appeared in Arendt’s rear view mirror, as opposed to it appearing through the windshield like it had for Camus.
“With the term vita activa,” Arendt wrote, “I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action.” She defines these activities as follows.
Labor: the natural, biological actions taken by man.
Work: the superficial actions taken by man that enable the existence of an artificial world.
Action: the combination of labor and work as it relates to the collective: to men, not Man. The writing of history and the creation of civilizations is the culmination of Action.
We see the similarity between Arendt and Camus as they both acknowledged the existence of a world counter to the one man wants to live; for Arendt, man recognizes but does not solely partake in a natural world, and for Camus, man naturally seeks meaning in a world void of it.
Both are very Sisyphus-y.
Action and Collectivity
Camus touched upon a concept similar to Arendt’s definition of action:
That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama.
Here, both thinkers recognized the inescapable desire for collectivity. I believe Camus’ “human drama” is similar to Arendt’s “political life.”
Where does this leave us? When the only outcome for all of us is death, why do these seemingly semantic distinctions matter?
What if Camus and Arendt suggested that the acceptance of an artificial and meaningless existence can still yield something that escapes our (always untimely) death? Is this a contradiction? Or is it precisely the paradox encapsulated by the Absurd?
Arendt began with this statement:
Natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political… thought.
In other words, though we are dying, we are constantly creating. Our actions stitch themselves onto the fabric of time, becoming permanent patterns of the past. Each word I type, though incredibly minuscule in the vastness of temporality, is nonetheless a creative print on the fabric of time.
When I’m gone, which is the exact moment my needle stops contributing to the intricate work of humanity’s tapestry, my stitches still remain. The impact of those stitches and relation to others’ will not be for me to experience, but in terms of existence, there they are.
The Eternal
“Victory,” Camus said, “would be desirable. But there is but one victory, and it is eternal.”
How is the eternal defined? Thankfully, we can turn to Arendt, who brilliantly distinguished the eternal from the immortal. She noted that everything in nature is immortal because it is promised a rebirth, a renewal. The flower that grows, blooms, and withers, will grow once more come spring. The man? Once he withers…
“Imbedded in a cosmos where everything was immortal,” Arendt observed, “mortality became the hallmark of human existence.”
Death, then, is only relevant in the context of mortality. Since the flower does not die, mortality, and natality, are irrelevant in the context of nature. I like to think of this as the circle of life, with no start or end point.
Camus shared a similar sentiment:
If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem [of seeking meaning] would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity.
Absurdly, contrary to nature’s circle of life, man seems to have a linear life. We are born at a specific time and place, and then we die. But, here is where the eternal pokes its head.
Man becomes eternal when his actions become immortal.
As previously mentioned, immortality belongs to the circle of life. If we act in a way that is continued after we are gone, then we have become eternal through those immortal (repeated) actions.
Think about this essay. Arendt’s and Camus’ writings outlived them, permitting me the opportunity to analyze and respond to their work. While I’m having a conversation with ghosts, those ghosts exist. This is the eternal.
Circling (ha) back to the Absurd, our eternality is still not for us to experience. While we create it, it’s not ours.
Why can we act immortal but not eternal? Because we are always within our condition. We are constrained by time and space, and the eternal isn’t. Immortality, though, exists with us, within time and space.
But there’s a catch! Of course! Arendt provided the clearest example:
“The fall of the Roman Empire plainly demonstrated that no work of mortal hands can be immortal.”
While certain things may remain after we die, nothing man does is actually immortal in the truest sense. How many languages, cultures, and histories are already forgotten? To be human is to continue to work and live toward this unreachable goal of immortality from an inescapable condition.
Returning to Sisyphus
We now return to Camus, Sisyphus, and the inescapable “why?” that haunts everything we do. Even when we comprehend everything aforementioned and our ability to possibly extend our existence beyond our physical presence, we are still left asking, “why?”
Here’s what I would like to add to these trains of thoughts that survived their conductors’ mortalilty:
I think we can find great meaning in connecting with the once-mortal-now-eternal. Limitations exist: misunderstandings, translation hiccups, works falling through the cracks of collective and accessible memories, etc. But in brief respites from our conditions, we can resurrect the works of ghosts and converse in a space that doesn’t necessarily transcend time but at least partially bends it.
We need not seek comfort, explanations, and escapes from omnipotent, mythical, superstitious, astrological, or fictional beings when we are able to connect with the eternal directly. I also think there is great meaning in knowing that we have the potential to become part of the eternal in very tangible, real ways.
Why is permanence sacred? I don’t have to be remembered for the rest of time to be grateful for the opportunity to be remembered at all. So in acknowledging this artificial, meaningless, absurd reality in which I find myself, I have the lucky gift of engaging with that which no longer exists.
That in itself is magical.
Perhaps that’s why I love philosophy so much. I deeply admire the threading of those who partook in intellectual curiosity for centuries, weaving their perspectives around those who sewed before them, and though my anamorphic perspective has its shortcomings and distortions, the existence of the eternal is omnipresent in the discipline.
