The Myth of Sisyphus: the notion of the Absurd in the philosophy of Camus
Kenneth Curmi
Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.
In a very famous essay entitled The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus reflects on the meaning, or lack thereof, of life, and comes to the conclusion that life is really meaningless; there is no inherent meaning in life, or if there is, it is not within our grasp. In the essay he also attempts to answer what he regards as the only true philosophical dilemma: should one choose life or end it?
According to Greek mythology Sisyphus was forever condemned to roll the same rock up a hill, only to see it roll back down once he reached the top. The story is very powerful and Camus uses it to depict his world view and put forward his philosophy: the philosophy of the absurd.
Life is self-defeating. Just as the rock rolls down of its own weight, life falls down of its own weight. And it is the irony of life that the more weight we try to give our lives, the easier we make it for it to crumble apart. We help life to roll down by making it even weightier. And this is the culmination of the absurd.
But it is important to note here that there is nothing absurd about the world, nor is there anything absurd in humanity. It is only the realization of the reality of an unreasonable world viewed by reasonable humans that is the absurd: this is the absurd condition of man.
It is absurd because it goes against reality. The reality we create or expect is nothing like the reality out there. We think that justice transcends the world, but in reality the world transcends justice. The absurd is not the world per se; the world itself is merely unreasonable. It is the attitude towards it, brought on by the need to rationalize and understand, that is absurd.
In the English language Sisyphean is an adjective used to denote a futile or pointless task. To Camus, humanity’s existence and man’s very life is Sisyphean. But to Camus, Sisyphus is actually an absurd hero, which contrasts with the Sisyphus of the myth, whose punishment is precisely a consequence of his hubris.
The Absurd
“The future is always nonsense, until it becomes the past” says a fortune teller in the film The 7 faces of Dr. Lao. “Tomorrow will be like today, and the day after tomorrow will be like the day before yesterday” What the seer foretells of an old lady’s fortune, Camus says of everyone’s life.
The absurd is the realization of living an illogical life, of harbouring hopeless expectations, of demanding the impossible from the possible: the moment we realize this, we are in the absurd.
Ultimately our lives amount to nothing. Our expectations, our zeal and passion for life, together with all our ambitions, illusory goals and senseless pride are absurd. Every occurrence in our life is just that: an occurrence. It has no special meaning, and no real context. We give it context, because order, classification and categorization are human needs.
Seeing life for what it really is: a mundane monotony of routine, systematically categorized but also lavishly decorated with illusionary props, just as the theatre stage is decorated with lavish trees and surroundings, only to find out, upon closer inspection, that the beautiful tree, the splendid greenery is just a flat, two-dimensional cardboard cut-out.
Life is full of such props. And whether we realize what things truly are all depends on where we are seated. If we sit at the back then everything looks natural. The closer we come to the stage however, doubt starts to form, until we are finally face to face with reality.
Life can never be objectively scrutinized while partaking in it. In order to do that, one has to remove himself from the stage, one has to stop being an actor. Paradoxically one has to stop living in order to start living. It is in the moments of boredom that one can listen to the sound of laughter and cries of joy and perceive the silliness in them. It is then that one can see that the joy is artificial; never when one is actually enjoying himself, for during that time joy is joy – we are agreeing to live by life’s rules. This is not to say that the silliness in our joy makes our joy silly. But being able to realize and accept the reality hidden behind the veil is a necessary step for the absurd man.
The perceived beauty thus reveals its ugliness. We are left alone in a desolate and unforgiving world; everything which hitherto looked real and comforting, is now seen as fake and replaced by a despairing and indifferent reality.
We set goals in life, but these are illusory. They mask the goalless nature of life. We are like a sailor who navigates an endless sea, chasing the horizon, only to face a new one, until finally he dies. We see horizons and we mistakenly think that we can reach them, but we obviously can never do so.
The absurd man is the man who realizes, the man who wakes up and sees the mirage of hope for what it really is. The absurd man is the one who realizes that the world does not care, that our demands are pretentious ones, that we are insignificant and the universe is heedless of our cries and complaints, that we are guilty of universal anthropomorphism.
And thus even the quest for justice in the world is nothing more than a futile and pointless task. It has deep roots in philosophy, and in western philosophy it truly started with Socrates and through Plato’s writings. They, and especially Plato in The Republic, tried to show that justice existed and that it was even the ultimate good, and that it was in the interest of man to act justly, even though popular opinion might show otherwise.
But for Camus equating happiness (as eudemonia, not in the English sense) with justice is the mistake, and the reason of our leading futile lives. It is absurd because we are looking for something which is in fact non-existent, in the same manner an atheist would consider religions and beliefs in a Supreme Being to be absurd.
Humans believe that there must be justice and some kind of retribution. Our obsession with balance leads us to believe in a sort of natural mechanism (which can be and usually is a deity) that will re-install the equilibrium, by punishing the bad and rewarding the good. This belief, this expectation, is the absurd.
According to Camus’s philosophy our reward system is the problem. It instils in us an expectation for reward. All of our actions have consequence and there is a dichotomy of reward and punishment, and we think that life is like that. But life isn’t truly like that. It is, for Camus, a mistaken conception of life, which leads to delusion and an unsatisfied demand for justice, which in turn leads to disappointment.
It is important to note that Camus is not necessarily denying meaning to life or the universe. He is merely denying the possibility of humans knowing it. And if it is impossible for me, as a human, to know it, then it is tantamount to saying that it is non-existent to me.
As Robert Solomon once said in a talk about L’Étranger, “life is the meaning of life”. It is not something extraneous to life; it is life itself that is the meaning of life.
What Camus says in the Myth is very important to understand his philosophy, and his literature. Solomon in fact considers The Myth of Sisyphus as being an essay that explains and accompanies The Outsider.1 In the latter, the character sees clearly. He has no false hopes, and his clear vision makes him a stranger to the world. In Plato’s allegory of the cave, the newly acquired clear vision gives new life to the free man. The problem there is making others understand him. In Camus’s Outsider, the problem is for the free man to understand himself, and the world he lives in. Plato’s allegory was optimistic with regard to such revelatory knowledge, the only problem then being in sharing it with our peers. Camus is asking us: with such new knowledge how can we feel at home? If we are to see things as they really are, living does not become easier; the new insight makes life harder for us. The oasis that is life suddenly becomes a barren desert.
We live and die, and that is about it. Even the romantic notion of living through poetry, so exalted by Shakespeare in his Sonnets,2 is highly doubtful, for its power rests within the confines of poetry and romantic notions of human invention. Immortality through poetry is a sensual and honourable notion, but it serves little purpose when asking about any real goal, independent of human creation. This of course apart from the very obvious problem that most people are not in fact poets, so even then life would be meaningless for the majority (though in this case the fault would lie within man, the potential for meaning existing for everybody).
Even to Christians, life is all meaningless, and it is the eternal life with God that matters. Life on earth is empty and only God can give it meaning. This is made clear in Ecclesiastes.
But for an atheist like Camus, when he removes God from the equation he is left with nothing.
In reality Camus’s work is an inevitable step. In the Preface he writes:
For me “The Myth of Sisyphus” marks the beginning of an idea which I was to pursue in The Rebel. It attempts to resolve the problem of suicide, as The Rebel attempts to resolve that of murder, in both cases without the aid of eternal values which, temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary Europe.3
The dissolution of values was noticed by many other philosophers. The Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi wrote about this and so did Nietzsche, who gave us that most famous and grossly misunderstood phrase: “God is dead”.
In the Zibaldone, Leopardi warns about man’s rejection of religion, replacing it with a reality which is filled with emptiness. In his poem La sera del dì di festa, Leopardi writes about the power of time and how it can erase everything, making even great things seem pointless and of no importance.
Ogni umano accidente. Or dov’è il suono
Di que’ popoli antichi? or dov’è il grido
De’ nostri avi famosi, e il grande impero
Di quella Roma, e l’armi, e il fragorio
Che n’andò per la terra e l’oceano?
Tutto è pace e silenzio, e tutto posa
Il mondo, e più di lor non si ragiona.4
So what are we left with if we take away eternal values and meaning from life? We are logically left with the notion that life is basically life. We might still want justice but the world doesn’t care, and therefore our quest for justice, meaning and so on is a futile task, a waste of time, for it is a search for something that does not exist.
The excessive optimism shown by many is also, I believe, the absurd. Clichés such as “you can always find time” are not only illogical,5 they are counterproductive. They also act as veils, making man think that the impossible can be done, thus stopping him from acting on the possible and increasing the limits of the possible. If we think that we can always find time, then we need not do anything in order to create it (such as work less). Similarly if we think that justice will eventually prevail, that we will eventually be rewarded, that our existence is bound to something higher, that it will transcend time and space, then it is easy for us not to care about the possible, about this life, it is easy for us to shun this life.
The absurd man does not think like this however: “Not to believe in the profound meaning of things belongs to the absurd man.”6
But Camus’s work does not invite us to surrender to this absurdity. On the contrary he urges us to fight it. The absurd can be overcome.
To be or not to be: different ways of dealing with the absurd
Camus lists three options that are open to a man faced with the absurd: (i) he can reject it through escapism, by a so called leap of faith, perhaps by invoking religion or a more favourable and hopeful philosophical and world view; (ii) he can commit suicide; (iii) he can accept the absurd and then reject it by defying it. This last position is Camus’s suggested one, and also the most complex.
Camus deals quickly with the first possibility; he is not particularly fond of it. It is according to him a contradictory position, for it is a refusal to accept the truth we have initially set off to discover. It involves a retreat: it starts off in a determined fashion, but cowers once it reaches its destination. Once the absurd is realized, the choice here involves tracing back one’s steps and denying what one has come to know.
In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard introduces the notion of defiance and identifies the traits of the Absurd Man which Camus explicitly deals with in The Myth of Sisyphus, namely the rejection of any escapist leaps, and the rejection of suicide in favour of acceptance of the absurd.
Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, Husserl’s world so reminiscent of Plato’s, all these are according to Camus contradictory positions, for their conclusions do not agree with the premise from which their argument set off.
Camus’s criticism of the philosophers who managed to find the absurd can also be turned to that French philosopher of doubt, Descartes. For the latter likewise found, or rather created, the solution to his existential doubt by turning to God, through a deus ex machina, even though the initial doubt itself could logically be extended to any notion of a benign deity we might have.7
These positions are all guilty of what Camus terms philosophical suicide.8
Camus’s man is in fact the less pretentious one. He is the one who wants to live with his knowledge, and whereas his stance is attacked and described as pride, in reality it is the antithesis of pride, for it is humble in its recognition of limits. It is in fact the negation of reason for something higher (and paradoxically unknown), the claim of hope beyond reason, which is the pretentious position, and, ironically, the absurd one.
For as Camus tells us, and this is his attack on the optimistic yet delusionary philosophies of Kierkegaard and others, “Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”9
This position is rather similar to what I once wrote in an article about miracles. The wise man prefers to admit his ignorance in front of the unexplained, rather than jump to mystical conclusions when faced with something he cannot understand. A person who loves truth is not afraid to say “I don’t know.”
Having rejected the first option as a possible solution, we are thus left with two remaining possibilities: to continue living10 or to commit suicide.
Now Camus is for the first one, but this needs elucidation. For it is not clear why suicide should not be the solution, and in fact the only possible solution when one realizes the meaningless of life. It sounds perfectly logical to end something which is meaningless. At the very least, considering that the subject is a meaningless thing, it would be no more than a meaningless act.
But in a beautifully unexpected move, Camus does not deny life; he actually encourages overindulgence in it. In the Myth of Sisyphus Camus asks “Does the Absurd dictate death?”11 The reply is simple: merely because life has no meaning, does not mean that one should leave it.
And it is not so hard to see Camus’s point, for if life is the point of life, then it follows that living it is the point. Death then becomes the ultimate terror and it needs to be overcome.12 Camus’s response to death is to conquer it. Suicide would be no more than another form of escapism. Any solution which takes off a part of the equation (i.e. man or world) is not a good solution. Living life without the need of illusory hope leaves the equation intact, and is thus an act of defiance.
Sisyphus himself had passion for life. The universe is indifferent, life is just life, without the metaphysical connotations it usually entails, but this does not mean that we should not want to live it. In the famous words of Renton in Trainspotting, we should “choose life”.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. It is probably not a coincidence that it takes millions of years of computation to give the (extremely ambiguous) answer to the meaning of life. It is perhaps an allusion to what Camus is trying to tell us: that even though there might be an answer, we might never find it.
Life is life. We cannot really understand it, but we can understand that it is not what we think it is, or rather what we are led to think it is. We should thus revolt by accepting the absurd condition of our life and living it.
Furthermore, it is not only a life of futile labour that is absurd; I believe Camus meant much more. It is the whole intricate system, the pointless monolith we built, the eternal inane, even puerile, struggle that we condemn ourselves to. It is the enslaving of our own selves to a futile quest for meaning, the enslaving of ourselves to society and work that is absurd. That is why the answer is revolt. Freedom can only be gained through freedom of the mind, and by freeing oneself from the shackles of society’s chains.
But we can only free our mind by freeing it from the constraints of rationality. By this it is not meant that humans should not be rational, but only that they should not be slaves to their rationality. Plato had symbolized rationality as the chariot driver, the controlling element of our lives. But rationality expects and demands justice and comprehension from an indifferent world. This in itself is irrational, and so therefore our own rationality, if taken to extremes, is absurd.
As we have already seen, once man is, in the words of Camus, “divorced” from life, the only apparently logical solution is death.
But what is then that makes us so welcoming to life. What makes us strive for it, and defend it at all costs? What of our innate feeling of self-preservation? It would be too optimistic, and perhaps even naive, to see these problems as discounting the problem of suicide, for we have only found a trait, but the reason for the existence of that trait is still unknown. It is wrong to assume from our instinct of self-preservation that we should preserve ourselves, or that it is good for us to do so. After all, that instinct may be there to serve the purpose of something else.
When an ant is infested by the Dicrocoelium Dendriticum parasite, the latter performs a sort of mind control and makes the ant climb grass blades at night. If the grass it sits on is not eaten by a sheep, it temporarily lets go of the ant’s mind, in order for the ant not to be burnt by the sun and die. But the reason that the parasite “grants” life to the ant is purely egoistic. It does not care about the ant’s life per se; it merely wants the ant to be eaten by a sheep, so that it may inhabit the latter and reproduce in its faeces, and that would obviously not happen if the ant were to die.13
I therefore believe it to be no mere coincidence that Camus does not rely on the mere self-preservation of humans as a reason for not choosing suicide.
The absurd shows us that life is meaningless. When we recognize the absurd, we recognize that life is meaningless. And that leads to the logical conclusion of suicide. That is the time to revolt. To defy this logic which sets man’s fate is to begin to live: “I establish my lucidity in the midst of what negates it. I exalt man before what crushes him, and my freedom, my revolt, and my passion come together then in that tension, that lucidity, and that vast repetition.”14
Camus’s complex philosophy actually rests on powerfully simple logic: if this is the real way life is, then this is how my life should be. If the universe is indifferent, then I should live accordingly.
Ways of living with the absurd
Once we see clearly, there is no going back. In the Matrix there is a scene where one of the characters, Cypher, is offered his normal life back. He cuts a bit of steak and just as he is about to eat it he says: “You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.” He feels it is juicy and delicious because impulses are being sent to his brain. But what he says next is very important: “I don’t want to remember nothing. [sic]” He cannot enjoy it if he does. And that is the crux of the matter for Camus. Once we realize our condition the options are very limited.15 We have only two choices once we reach that crossroad, we can only go forward, or end it all. We can never go back. We do not have the privilege of choice that Cypher has: “a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has be-come conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.”16
But does Camus propose any specific ways of living for the absurd man? According to Camus he has to choose life over suicide, but once he does that, how is he to live?
Camus proposes a life of quantity over a life of quality. He must have a passion for life and seek a quantity of experience. Like Don Juan, Camus urges us to live a life for the passions of the present moment. This is thus consistent with the view that the absurd man will seek no other worldly hope; “his reasoning that tells him that all his actions are limited to having consequences in this world, and not in a world beyond.”17
The traveller and adventurer is another type of man has chosen to revolt. He has chosen a quantity of experience in a life of travel, devouring country after country, city after city, landscape after landscape. Camus is quick to warn us however that once the means becomes the end, it loses the absurd. When travelling, or any other way of defying the absurd life, becomes the main concern of the individual it too becomes routine, and it too becomes an illusion, an escape rather than a revolt.
Problems in the Philosophy of Camus
“Living is keeping the absurd alive.”18 So writes Camus. Living is knowing the absurd and defying it. The absurd man is afraid, and he is also tempted by the comfort of hope. But he does not yield to this palliative, he summons his courage and prefers the life of reason and defying acceptance.
The paradox that Camus wants us to believe, and that I myself also believe, but that others will fiercely debate, is that this stance provides for a better life; the man who is willing and brave enough to confront the absurd is the man who truly lives life. He is set on no future rewards, he knows no afterlife and is concerned with the present. He thus lives life to the full, he experiences the adventure that is life, considering it the greatest thing ever, understanding its greatness so far as to admit that it merits no other greater reward. To him the man who hopes for an afterlife is the ungrateful man; it is only he who does not appreciate this life enough who would wish for another.
And yet the doubt resurfaces. For one can still appreciate this life and yet find it hard to deal with the lack of a consequential. Perhaps one of the worst things of having a goal is reaching it. But how much, if at all, this poses a problem to Camus is debatable, for after all it is precisely this state of affairs which he has set out to explain. The realization of it is discouraging, and this is in fact admitted. But the point is that once the absurd is recognized, there is nothing more to do about it. It cannot be prevented, and thus acceptance is the only possibility (having rejected the escapism offered by some philosophies and religions), and so it only the way which we choose to accept which becomes the question, it being the only thing in Man’s control.
Just because we have a longing for something does not mean that it exists, or even that it should exist. This, I believe is the problem with religions. They posit a deity simply because there is a “need” to have one.
Life is full of despair as it is. But once we accept it as it really is, then we can start enjoying it. If we do not expect anything more from life, then our disappointment naturally ends. Still, it is highly doubtful how this can be expected from us. It is itself perhaps an absurd proposition.
In the Outsider we meet with the idea that social constructs are just that: constructs created by us, having no real substantial meaning. Thus at the end of the book we read: “The fact that the death sentence had been read at eight o’clock at night and not at five o’clock . . . the fact that it had been handed down in the name of some vague notion called the French (or German, or Chinese) people — all of it seemed to detract from the seriousness of the decision.”
If according to Camus it is man who gives life meaning, why ridicule the meaning that man has given throughout the ages through these very social constructs: through the notions of justice, love, respect, order, etc.
Perhaps Camus was not against the social constructs per se, but against any idolization of the latter, against any philosophy or religion which deifies them and hinders us from seeing them for what they really are.
As Marx perspicaciously noted, the fault lies within humans. They distort life, and in an effort to improve it, they actually make it worse. Life should be enjoyed, experienced, not turned into a tyrannical dictator.
“There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”19 Camus’s statement is perhaps, and strangely so, overly optimistic. It shows us that the conflict between a meaningless fate, living a “campaign in which he is defeated in advance” ,20 and the desire to revolt, defy and triumph over this same cruel fate, is not easily resolved. The search of a solution in highly dubious and poetic stances, the same expedients Camus so much despises in others, endangers our briefly attained confidence.
And yet his insistence of the need to find independence restores this very confidence in us: fate is a human matter. It is up to us to decide what guise it will take. But isn’t the very act of defying meaningless as well?
In L’Étranger we encounter the notion of meaningless in a very peculiar way. Actions do not really matter, though they do have consequences. A person can do this, or otherwise he can do that. Anything we do will be similarly meaningless and everything will eventually lead to death. This raises problems, for if this is so, then Camus’s own exaltation and exhortation for revolt and defiance, instead of suicide or leaps of faith, loses credibility. What is good for the goose is good for the gander, and once an all pervasive blanket of meaninglessness is thrown over existence, nothing can be said to constitute a better choice.
We might conclude from Camus’s view of life that we are here simply to reproduce.21 That is strange and unsatisfactory for us humans. We need a reason for everything. But why do we need a reason? That is perhaps the question we should ask. It is only humans after all who need it. It is our defect.22
Some positions have cropped up to try and paint a better picture of life, thus attempting to restore hope in Camus’s relatively gloomy world-view. It is thus said that we transcend life by leaving something after us: a sort of metaphysical testament. I find this highly unsatisfactory. First of all it has the feel of a palliative, and not a very good one at that. For unless I convince myself that this is good and this is my happiness, then what I leave behind is really not so comforting. This is also a case of begging the question, for if I manage to convince myself of that, there would not really be any problem, for I can just as likely convince myself of an existence of an omnibenevolent deity or even of a meaning inherent in life itself. But the problem is that these palliative measures are themselves being put in question, and for someone who refuses to accept them, any optimism quickly fades out.
Also the fact of having helped someone is itself not a satisfactory answer. For if we are questioning the meaning of life in the first place, due to its lack of a definite goal, we would have the same problem, only on a bigger scale. In this case the ultimate goal becomes the question. If I am helping people who come after, and they are doing the same, we end up in an infinite regress, and if ultimately there is no final reason for all this help, then it would still be worthless. It is like dying in order to save someone else’s life, only for the latter to die an hour later.
The only way out is to declare that all was done for that extra hour, and it was worthwhile. Life itself then becomes the meaning, the reward of living. The experience is what is sought and nothing else should matter. The meaning of life is life. This might sound circular, but in reality it is not so.
“Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance.”23
Again this begs the question. Why is suicide so easily shrugged off as an alternative, if man is defeated in advance? Camus’s own invocation of defeat, and his view of suicide as escape loses ground here, for apart from the obvious question of why should defeat be preferred to escape, it is also a moot point how escape, if seen in a bad light, cannot be seen as defeat, which would basically mean that the two tantamount to the same thing.
Freedom, passion and revolt are the 3 elements that make us decide against suicide. But this again is not a satisfactory answer and in fact no answer at all, for it merely begs the question: why not refuse them? They are after all, meaningless.
Camus tells us that we must live with the absurd. We must defy it: that is his answer. But merely repeating an answer ad nauseam does not explain why it is the answer. Camus fails to tell us why it is better live with the absurd than escape it. He fails to tell us why we should live with it. It is true that he tells us that it is better to live with knowledge and without appeal to something which is doubtful. He shuns the philosophies of hope. But the reason why it is better to live without hope is somewhat murky. A whole essay could be dedicated to extracting reasons but it is enough here to point out that the answer is not so obvious, and that in fact most of the answers given beg other questions.
It is important to note here that the point being made is not that the solution is not a good one. I myself have after all chosen to defy the absurd. The point is simply that one cannot shun escapism as an inferior route to the “good life”24 without strong evidence supporting such a thesis. In all fairness Camus himself admits this in his essay, and more than once he reminds us that his subject is the absurd mind. It is the absurd man, as described in the essay itself, which is his main concern.
Perhaps there is no answer, and the only way to overcome the problem is by actually enjoying the activity of rolling the rock up the hill.
Bibliography
Albert Camus, The Myth Of Sisyphus, (Electronic Version), Translated from the French by Justin O’Brien, 1955.
Albert Camus, L’Étranger, Translated from the French by Joseph Laredo, Penguin, 2000.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Penguin Books Ltd (United Kingdom), 1989.
Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, “La sera del dì di festa”, leopardi.it/canti13.php
Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science, Section 108, online text found at the following link: geocities.com/thenietzschech … rohl7d.htm
Plato, The Republic, Oxford University Press (United Kingdom), 1998.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 55, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_55