The Myth of Sisyphus

“Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.”

People who think carefully often discover that the pieties on which they’ve been nourished are empty and without value, especially in explaining the often-random tragedies that afflict everyone. Pondering the absurdities of life, especially losses that seem unbearable, can be dangerous, since the process sometimes pushes people toward the edge of death.

“You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.” 

Suicide serves as a confession that life has become meaningless and, finally, too burdensome. One suddenly feels like a stranger in the universe. It’s an understandable response to a profound sense of the hopelessness and absurdity of life. However, Camus insists it’s possible to face that absurdity and still live vibrantly.

“Tenacity and acumen are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue.”

The pursuit of deep questions can lead to dry, empty dead ends. It’s the task of the dedicated thinker to persevere and dispassionately observe the landscape of emptiness, searching it for understanding and insight.

“Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness.”

The mechanical dullness of daily life takes its toll, and one day life’s meaning collapses, which brings on a crisis. This crisis can lead to self-destruction or to insight and rebirth.

“If thought discovered in the shimmering mirrors of phenomena eternal relations capable of summing them up and summing themselves up in a single principle, then would be seen an intellectual joy of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ridiculous imitation.” 

The search for ultimate truth is all too human: We long for certainty. It’s also impossible: There is no principle that can verify itself, for which we can say that it’s true that it’s true. Instead, uncertainty lies at the bottom of all our attempts to be certain. Yet the lure of certainty persists as a distant dream.

“This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.” 

We can never truly know ourselves. The part of us we use for observing is the part we want to observe. Like a dog chasing its tail, we turn forever, fruitlessly trying to get behind ourselves and truly see ourselves as if from the outside. Without an unbiased, outsider’s understanding of our own minds, we must always mistrust our thoughts and doubt our conclusions.

“The important thing […] is not to be cured, but to live with one’s ailments.”

In confronting the essential absurdity of human life, we shouldn’t try to fix that insight as if it were an affliction. It’s better to suffer the pains of realization than to ignore them and lose the benefit of its wisdom.

“But if I recognize the limits of the reason, I do not therefore negate it, recognizing its relative powers.” 

Many philosophers, confronted with the absurdity of life, embrace the irrational and reject the power of reason that failed them. While it’s true that reason fails us in plumbing the depths of reality, it’s not true that reason is useless.

“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”

Philosophers try to understand reality, but reality is rarely—if ever—desirable or comforting. If philosophers shy away from unpleasant facts, they’re derelict in their duty to the truth. Camus calls this dereliction of duty philosophical suicide.

“For the existentials negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men. There are many ways of leaping, the essential being to leap.” 

Existentialists resolve life’s absurdity by leaping over the problem and arriving at some form of what they believe to be an eternal verity, which comforts them. It’s one thing to arbitrarily leap away from an arbitrary problem, but it’s quite another to conclude that this leap somehow lands in something that makes sense. That is wishful thinking.

“And these two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know that I cannot reconcile them.” 

Camus faces the ultimate frustration that a philosopher, or anyone, must confront: that we ache to know the meaning of a world whose meaning must always escape us. How a person resolves this tension will define their philosophy of life.

“It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.” 

The failure to find a meaning in life once seemed a disaster, but now it becomes an asset. The person who lives fully while knowing that life has no meaning no longer needs to cling to false hopes and beliefs. This freedom throws the range of creative possibilities wide open.

“Just as danger provided man the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience.” 

The way to use absurdity is to keep it in mind, never give into it, and never run from it. A growling, hungry tiger clarifies the mind, and so does a thundering, empty universe. The knowledge of absurdity sharpens thought and scrapes away false beliefs that offer the illusion of safety while dulling the senses.

“The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.” 

After all the philosophizing is done, the individual still must confront daily life in all its hopeless glory. Camus rejects the pursuit of solace in false truths or eternity, considering it an act of cowardice. He instead recommends living in defiance of absurdity, which requires perseverance and courage, and which enables creative freedom.

“We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible. But of love I know only that mixture of desire, affection, and intelligence that binds me to this or that creature.”

Instead of looking for the love described in books, we should search for the unique feeling we have for each person we love. This honors them more than some boilerplate emotion; at the same time, it acknowledges the fleeting nature of love in an absurd universe; it doesn’t try to force feelings into a theoretical straitjacket.

“The actor has three hours to be Iago or Alceste, Phèdre or Gloucester. In that short space of time he makes them come to life and die on fifty square yards of boards. Never has the absurd been so well illustrated or at such length.” 

Actors have a unique view of the absurd. They condense the lives and yearnings and tragedies of great characters into a few hours onstage; their performances distill the futility of the human attempt to find permanence in life.

“Yes, man is his own end. And he is his only end. If he aims to be something, it is in this life. Now I know it only too well. Conquerors sometimes talk of vanquishing and overcoming. But it is always ‘overcoming oneself that they mean.” 

The conqueror revels in the certainties of life and death and doesn’t escape into dreams of eternity. The conqueror knows that most great causes, most revolutions, are futile but joins them anyway. In refusing to take the easy way out by hoping for a happy afterlife lies the greatness of the human spirit.

“The lover, the actor, or the adventurer plays the absurd. But equally well, if he wishes, the chaste man, the civil servant, or the president of the Republic. It is enough to know and to mask nothing.”

Camus chooses extreme lifestyles to bring out his points about living with absurdity, but a lucid life can be led by anyone, in any walk of life. It’s not what we do but how we see the world that matters. A queen or a field hand can hold the same awareness of life’s futility and absurdity; it’s a dignity available to all.

“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.”

Since it doesn’t matter what one does in life—everything comes to dust in the end, with no clear win after death—then the only worthy option is to enter into the stream of life with intensity and abandon, regardless of the good or bad nature of that action.

“Man simply invented God in order not to kill himself. That is the summary of universal history down to this moment.”

This quote is from Dostoevsky, who in the 1870s reached much the same conclusion as Camus: If there’s no God, then what’s the use of living? The absurdist—freed from the shackles of rules and purposes made up by people and attributed to a deity—chooses not to commit suicide but to live boldly in the face of meaninglessness.

“Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man’s sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile.” 

To create is to stare at emptiness until something comes of it. The hardest part of creation is sustaining that stare in the face of the probable failure of the project. The artist fails many times, tries again, and fails again, yet keeps creating. The act of creation is an absurd act; the best result is something that speaks to that emptiness and its absurdity.

“Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.” 

Sisyphus lives life with roguish gusto and suffers pointless labors in the afterworld. He typifies Camus’s ideal of someone who exists for the dark joy of it and who doesn’t care if it all means nothing.

“In absurd terms, as we have seen, revolt against men is also directed against God: great revolutions are always metaphysical.”

Kafka’s stories, especially The Trial, examine the absurd randomness of life, the absurdities of human bureaucracies, and the lack of an explicit godly purpose for that absurdity. Such emotionally painful occurrences may inspire a desire to rebel against authorities, both human and divine. A rebellion against one effectively is a rebellion against the other.