“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” wrote the
French philosopher Albert Camus. Is suicide an appropriate answer to the fact that life
appears meaningless for the rational thinking individual, and thus in the midst of suffering,
simply not worth living? After all, he surmised, we live life with the belief that our lives
are very meaningful and profound, only to discover the universe wasn’t made for us
and will continue to exist long after the last human has ushered his last breath. His
answer to this question? "No. It requires revolt." and he detailed why in his philosophical
essay, The Myth of Sisyphus. This video will serve as one interpretation of this essay
and I’ll give some of my thoughts on how relevant the ideas in it are today at the
end.
Written in October of 1942, this work is divided into four main sections. 1. An Absurd Reasoning
2. The Absurd Man 3. Absurd Creation 4. The Myth of Sisyphus, and finally an Appendix
that reflects on the work of Franz Kafka, the bohemian novelest.
First. An Absurd Reasoning.
In the opening pages, Camus describes the main problem with human existence that leads
one to feel life is not worth living, a philosophical idea he calls The Absurd.
“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness
and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the
unreasonable silence of the world.”
See, it’s only natural for humans to seek out meaning in life. However, conflict occurs
when we go to do so and find the universe really cold, chaotic, and utterly devoid of
any meaning. It’s not that we’re irrational or the universe is irrational; it’s simply
this contradiction between our mind’s search for meaning and the reality of nature we can
call ‘The Absurd.’
Now, he doesn’t mean absurd as in the world is impossible to understand or comprehend.
Thanks to science, we have fascinating descriptions of how the world works.
However, true knowledge and rationality are impossible as they cannot explain the world
or give meaning to it. Science and metaphysics can only give descriptions or stories that
end in meaningless abstractions. Just think of the description that humans are made of
electrons. What knowledge does this honestly give us? He writes,
“...At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can
be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is
good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in
which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image.
I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.”
Camus notes that previous philosophers, including Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Søren Kierkegaard,
and others have all confronted the absurd and attempted to reconcile it.
The problem is that all their conclusions end in what he calls Philosophical Suicide,
or an illogical conclusion to the absurdity that there is objective meaning to life that
arises from absurd positioning itself.
For instance, take Kierkegaard. When confronted with the absurd, he asks us to suspend all
rational and moral beliefs and take the “leap of faith” to God. Kierkegaard is asking
us to essentially pretend that make-believe is truth and accept a limited role of freedom
in our lives with the imposed moral codes that follow.
So, we should rule out Philosophical Suicide as an answer to his question.
Also, he writes that we should rule out actual suicide as a reasonable answer to the Absurd
as life is sort of a miracle and without man, the absurd cannot exist.
That leaves us with option 3., embrace the absurd, which he believed was the correct
solution. When one chooses to embrace the absurd, three consequences happen; revolt,
freedom, and passion. When we embrace the absurd, we realize we’re truly free to do
what we want, and one should seize what life has to offer.
How exactly do we do that, though? That brings us to chapter 2. The Absurd Man
How does one embrace the absurd and live? To begin, he writes
“For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing
and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.”
Camus notes that this indifference includes morality and ethics, as ethics denotes a higher
power or authority we know isn’t real.
Camus gives us three sketches, not to be taken as literal descriptions, on how the absurd
man should live one’s life. Duan Juan, The Actor, and The Conqueror.
First, we have Duan Juan, the famous serial seducer of women.
Simply look at the paintings and stories of Duan Juan Camu writes. Does this seem like
a man that’s miserable and unhappy a lot of the time?
Duan Juan sacrifices any promise of eternal life or fake nobility for a life of passion
and excitement each day. A constant smile on his face Duan Juan recognizes that "There
is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional."
Next, Camus gives us the actor, the epitome of the absurd man he writes. Why? Because
a great and talented actor fully invests himself into the character he’s acting out on the
stage only for 2-3 hours. In it, he loses is own identity to live the life of someone
else entirely, knowing the job will end and the character to “die” just hours from
now, over and over again.
“...In those three hours, he travels the whole course of the dead-end path that the
man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover." he writes.
Finally, we have the conqueror.
Conqueror does not mean a man who goes into battle for some nobel truth or to becomes
a King, but simply for the love of battle. Think of an entrepreneur of today, perhaps,
that loves the hustle and grind of building businesses. He lives for the climb to the
top more than the fancy car, title, or paycheck he’ll get there.
Next, we have Part Three. Absurd Creation
Here, Camus reflects on art, specifically fiction writing, and how it helps describe
absurd living.
He points out that art reflects different aspects of our lives but cannot add anything
to it. Again, this embodies the absurd man as we can’t hope to explain life or find
true knowledge, only describe it and live it.
Art, in all forms, reflects different aspects of, or perspectives on, life but cannot add
anything to it. There is no meaning or transcendence to be found in art, as in life itself. However,
the creative act of asserting one's own perspective on the world epitomizes the revolt, freedom,
and passion of the absurd man.
"If the world were clear, art would not exist."
Absurd art, especially fiction writing, should avoid explaining life or offer some hope or
philosophical suicide he writes.
An author that captured this, but fell a bit short in the end, was Dostoevsky. He gives
the example of Kirolov from his work The Possessed. Kirolov who commits suicide in a revolt against
the idea that God does not exist, a creative act to “become God” Camus surmises. Kirolov
makes the wrong decision, but Camus uses this example to portray how Dostoevsky understood
the absurd through his characters and writings.
Chapter 4 is The Myth of Sisyphus, where Camus gives us our absurd hero, Sisyphus, from Greek
mythology.
Sisyphus was a man who hated death and put Death itself in chains so no mortal may die
again. The gods were not too happy with this. Death was eventually liberated, and when it
came time for Sisyphus to die, the gods condemned him to a creative eternal punishment. Sisyphus
was to roll a boulder up a mountain only for it fall back down for him to roll up again
over and over, a meaningless but unavoidable task.
Camus says our lives are a lot like the life of Sisyphus. We all fear and hate death, and
most of us spend a good portion of our lives working meaningless jobs in offices and factories
just to survive. We’re all rolling meaningless boulders up hills as life will have many unavoidable
hardships.
What’s the solution to Camus’s initial question of suicide? He writes we need to
be fully conscious of our situation and stop trying to fix it by avoiding false solutions
such as religion, refusing to submit, and living life with intensity and vitality. We
need to imagine Sisphyus happy he writes, embracing the struggle with our condition
head-on and living life to the fullest we can. Stop trying to deny life isn’t hard
and meaningless and instead rebel, seizing the moment and sucking the proverbial marrow
out of life.
“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus
teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too, concludes that
all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor
futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself
forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy. “
Ok so that, in a nutshell, is The Myth of Sisyphus. Of course, there’s far more, so
feel free to read it yourself; it’s not a long read. So are the ideas here relevant
today and correct? Well, here are a few thoughts I had after reading. First, like many other
existential philosophers, Camus seems not interested in taking epistemology, metaphysics,
and science too seriously. In fact, he says something along the lines of it doesn’t
matter whether the earth travels around the sun or the sun around the earth. Of course,
today we know it matters a lot since science is helping lift people out of depression and
darkness every day with things like treatments for childhood cancer or meditations for mental
disorders. Science and metaphysics are far more than mere descriptive elements of reality
and important to the human condition and happiness. It seems like Camus is almost like the philosophers
he ran over at the start. Like Kierkegaard, it seems he arrived at his conclusion to life
at the start, in this case life is fully meaningless no matter what, then began working backward
on how we might arrive there and what to do.
However, there are many good ideas in this essay you can take into your own life, like
not embracing illogical conclusions just to feel comfortable and not being afraid to confront
the realities of life and the human condition. Plus, one could think of his work as a much-needed
response to this idea that we ought to constantly strive to be some great individual we think
we ought to become or others want us to be. Lifes not about some destination. Yes life
is hard, but why not say screw it and pick stuff we love doing and do it, living in the
moment and embracing life.
So let me know your thoughts on The Myth of Sisyphus and anything mentioned here. Did
Camus get it right, essentially? Or is this more like a work of fiction we may pull parts
here and there out of.