The Myth of Sisyphus is a philosophical essay by Albert Camus and is considered as one of the most popular existentialist works of the 20th century. It gave rise to the philosophy of Absurdism, sharing some concepts with Existentialism and Nihilism. The fundamental concern of the book is the notion of the Absurd, which is best described as “the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life, and the human inability to find any in a purposeless, meaningless, and irrational universe", with the ‘unreasonable silence’ of the universe in response.
Trying to define this, is like water slipping through one’s fingers. However, this world in itself is not absurd, what is absurd is our relationship with the universe, which is irrational. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world.
It is all that links them together. Thus, the universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd, but rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously. “I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it.
But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.
What I touch, what resists me — that I understand. The Myth of Sisyphus explores the value of life in a world devoid of religious meaning, his work can be seen as a reply to Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. He calls the Absurd, which we all live in, to be “sin without God.
” However, Camus does not consider himself as an atheist. He states: “I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist. ” This reflects the notion of the Absurd.
The search of the possibility of the existence of God is humanly impossible, but this also entails that the proof that God does not exist is impossible too. He writes: “In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.
This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. ” The book declares that within the limits of nihilism, it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism, embracing the absurd. It sums itself as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.
The way out of despair is to reaffirm the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with authenticity. The problem of suicide must be met face to face, he states: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
” One answer to the absurd is physical suicide, which tends to happen without going through reflection, “one evening the person pulls the trigger or jumps. ” Killing oneself is a sort of confession, that life is too much, that it is incomprehensible, or that it is not worth the trouble. He links this to what he calls the “feeling of absurdity”, closely tied to the feeling that life is meaningless.
And the act of suicide is linked to the idea that life is not worth living. Thus, dying voluntarily implies the absence of any profound reason for living and the uselessness of suffering. However, there are plenty of contradictions.
Those who commit suicide might be assured life has a meaning, and those who feel life is not worth living still continue to live. Camus believes that our instinct for life is much stronger than our reasons for suicide, avoiding the full consequences of the meaningless nature of life through an act of eluding, commonly manifesting itself as hope. Physical suicide is never an option for the Absurd man, much like the leap of faith, it is acceptance at its extreme, it would be a way of going along with our absurd condemnation, by implicitly affirming that life is really intolerably absurd and that suicide is our only option.
The difference between an absurd man and an ordinary man is that the absurd man gets more out of life because his detachment comes from a heightened awareness that makes him more open to experiences. An absurd worldview is one that abandons values, one that rests content with description, and does not seek explanation or justification. Through the examples of the seducer, the actor, the conqueror, and the artist, it becomes clear that the Absurd Man lives out a kind of show; he lives only "as if" he were fully committed to what he is doing.
He carries out his days willingly, and lives “without appeal” as Camus puts it. Camus also talks about ‘philosophical suicide’. One of the most common forms of escaping the absurd is precisely believing in some ready-made belief system (practically all of the world’s religion), where one accepts something as true that isn’t convincing but is convenient and easy for him to believe in.
It is any hypothetical belief system that immediately alleviates one from the meaningless void of existence, at the cost of committing a sort of mental suicide by shutting down one’s mental faculties. The contrary of suicide, for Camus, is man condemned to death. Since we cannot evade death, we must entertain death, keep it busy.
Man is in constant lucidity of his own absurd nature with the passionate flames of human revolt. “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. ” We all live in an absurd freedom, and to become lucid and conscious of it is to revolt, embracing a world devoid of meaning or purpose: “[Revolt] is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.
It is an insistence upon an impossible transparency. It challenges the world anew every second. Just as danger provided man with the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience […]” Camus draws from the absurd three consequences: revolt (we must not accept any answer or reconciliation in our struggle), freedom (we are absolutely free to think and behave as we choose), and passion (we must pursue a life of rich and diverse experiences).
Essentially, man is his own end. And he is his only end. If he aims to be something, it is in this life: “the flames of earth are surely worth celestial perfumes.
” Another big part of the absurd is our daily existence, the absurd person is someone who has seen through the ridiculous repetitions of daily life: “Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why‘ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. ” He associates this condemnation to the mythological character of Sisyphus, a man who lived an immoral life, and who is condemned by the gods to the worst punishment of all: a monotonous and repetitive task consisting of rolling a large boulder up a hill, only to reach the top of the hill and have the boulder roll back to the bottom for him to start all over again, and again, and again, for eternity.
Condemned to a life of pain, only to have his efforts be completely insignificant in the end. And there’s nothing he can do to change that situation, so he lives “without appeal. ” For Camus, Sisyphus is the ideal absurd hero, who lives life to the fullest, hates death and is condemned to a meaningless task.
This incredibly vivid imagery is an allegory of the human condition. It is our punishment to our futile search for meaning in an indifferent and meaningless universe, while working on the same mundane tasks, we all have to push our own boulders only to watch it roll back down. What really makes our human existence absurd is our consciousness of our Sisyphean condemnation when we avoid the trap of philosophical and physical suicide.
However, Camus does not encourage us to fall into despair. He imagines Sisyphus defiantly meeting his fate as he walks down the hill to begin rolling the rock again, when he is briefly free, when he is “superior to his fate and stronger than his rock”, he is thus not only a prisoner, but a rebel. Even if the daily struggles of our lives sometimes seem equally repetitive and absurd, we still give them significance and value by embracing them as our own.
“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. ” The Myth of Sisyphus tackles the colossal project of the meaning of life itself.
However, Camus does not try to describe or explain it through metaphysics, he merely observes how we are occasionally struck by the feeling of absurdity, he wants us to follow his analysis of a state of mind we have all shared at one time or another, focusing solely on how we are to live, and how we can be happy. “For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
