The Myth of Sisyphus

The book presents the “absurd sensitivity” that torments modern people. This condition isn’t to be diagnosed and cured by some philosophy; it must first be described, and then later dealt with.

The first question of philosophy should be whether life is worth living. All other philosophical problems are less important. Two main methods of thought can help: the factual, epitomized by Jacques de La Palisse, and the emotional, represented by Don Quixote.

Suicide “is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art” (4). Suicides can happen suddenly when a random act sets off an avalanche of accumulated regrets. It amounts to a confession that life has become too much of a burden.

Occasionally, people discover for themselves a meaning to life and express it through suicide—perhaps as a protest or as a way to publicize something they perceive as important—but this is uncommon. Still, it’s unwise to treat any suicide lightly.

The body doesn’t want to die, and people don’t want to face philosophical torment, so they “elude” the problem by focusing on false hope or by arguing against meaninglessness because it impels one to suicide. But the question that must be followed to its conclusion is, “Does the Absurd dictate death?” (9).

That search, though, can lead to “waterless deserts” of thought from which many have escaped through death or by shutting down their powers of reason. The dedicated investigator will persist, following the trail to its conclusion, observing and learning the dark truths of that arid place.

Deep feelings affect us more than we know. They contain their own “universe,” their own “metaphysic,” and their own attitude. This applies as much to feelings aroused by beauty, for example, as by absurdity. We can come to know others through their behaviors and beliefs, yet deep within them are truths we can never fathom. Analyzing them won’t uncover their deepest selves but can only hint at that elusive quality.

Daily life can cause a deep weariness until we can’t take it anymore. This becomes a “definitive awakening,” which leads to “suicide or recovery” (13). At first traveling along a hopeful path, we pause when we realize that all paths lead to death. The beauties of our surroundings evaporate when we understand that nature ultimately will kill us. We are flooded with a sense of absurdity. Watching others go through the empty motions of their day also seems absurd.

We make up platitudes about death to cover up our complete ignorance of it. Yet death gets under our skin with its absurdity. This is well known; it forms the starting place of the investigation.

Firstly, the mind wants to know what is true. As Aristotle puts it, to say that something is true requires that we ask whether it’s true that it’s true; if we say yes, then we must check that assertion in turn, and so on to infinity. Likewise, “if one says that all is false, that assertion is itself false” (16). The mind reels. Humans search for certainty, but the more certain we are, the more doubt creeps in. We can never be sure that we’re sure.

Another problem is that people can’t help but see the world in human terms, when in fact there are any number of ways to understand it: “The cat’s universe is not the universe of the anthill” (17). All our answers are limited by the human mind; we’re forever prevented from truly understanding the world in a nonhuman way; thus, our understanding must always be incomplete.

What’s absurd isn’t the world itself but our longing to understand it fully. We must know the answers, and yet we can’t. Great minds have long since realized this conundrum; most have tried to solve the absurdity rather than bear it. The real question, then, is “if thought can live in those deserts” (22).

Several philosophers have pointed out features of absurdity’s terrain. Martin Heidegger says that the basic condition of humanity is anxiety; if resisted, it changes to boredom; if accepted, it becomes terror in the face of death. Karl Jaspers sees that all attempts at true understanding have failed, yet he forges ahead, searching for a pathway out of emptiness. Lev Chestov notes all the ways in which reason fails, and all the ways by which the human mind rebels against uncertainty.

Søren Kierkegaard denies all attempts at using reason to decipher life; instead, he revels in the absurdity and welcomes the pain of chaos. For Edmund Husserl, “Thinking is learning all over again to see” (26), a process that entails casting out preconceptions and freshly exploring the deepest aspects of reality.

These explorers of reality manage to prove only that fundamental beliefs are nonsense, and that the mind is forever hemmed in by walls of absurdity: “This must not be forgotten” (28).

Absurdity lies in the distance between what we want and what is possible. In that confrontation the feeling of absurdity appears. If a man must attack a machine gun nest with a sword, the act is absurd; if the facts show innocence but a jury finds a person guilty, this is absurd. An absurd distance between intention and result can apply to “marriages, challenges, rancors, silences, wars, and even peace treaties” (30). In every case, the struggle against absurdity is unceasing. This struggle involves absence of hope (but not despair), rejection (but not repudiation), and dissatisfaction (but not “immature unrest”).

The existentialists instead take refuge in the absurd: “they deify what crushes them” (32). Jaspers, for example, finds in intellectual failure a type of transcendence. Chestov, in the moment of existential crisis, finds God. These approaches dissolve the conflict, and the insight of absurdity is lost. Even Kierkegaard wants to be relieved of the affliction of irrationality; he attributes absurdity to God and worships it through him.

Thus, existentialists effectively commit “philosophical suicide.” This isn’t a wrong decision in itself, but the reasoning by which they reach that stance is flawed. It’s one thing to reject the rationalism of those who believe the universe is orderly and reasonable, but then the existentialists leap to a notion of something eternal, a notion that resolves absurdity for them.

Husserl’s phenomenology treats consciousness not as an arbiter of reality but simply as that which focuses on things, apprehending them one at a time. Everything the mind perceives has equal importance because no one perception can explain reality. This modest approach is compatible with the view that the irrational universe cannot be clarified.

Husserl asserts, however, that every perception contains an immutable truth and that “truth is one, identical with itself, however different the creatures who perceive it, men, monsters, angels or gods” (46). This suggests that there are eternal verities that transcend life’s absurdities; it becomes a belief system that imposes rationality on an irrational universe, a way of consoling oneself. Husserl reintroduces Plato’s world of forms, a set of ideals that exist eternally and control the phenomena of the world. This is simply another kind of “heaven,” where philosophers can take refuge from absurdity and indulge in nostalgia for lost certainties.

Once it’s clear that humans can never know the meaning of life, or even whether there is any such meaning, all that’s left to cling to is the simple truth of that conflict. All one can do is keep that conflict in mind during daily life, to sustain oneself on “the wine of the absurd and the bread of indifference” (52).

The old religions insist that the denial of hope is a sin, yet a sense of the absurd contains a quality of innocence; it inspires a person to live boldly and “without appeal.” Suicide, meanwhile, is simply another way of giving in to absurdity by accepting its verdict. The absurdist rebels against that, like the condemned man who, on his way to the gallows, continues to lives fully and defiantly in the moment, turning to notice something as simple as a shoelace. A life daily lived in that spirit of rebellion contains its own nobility.

If God is all-powerful, then he creates the evil in the world, but if we can do evil, then God isn’t fully in charge. The absurdity of the universe takes away our hope for eternity, but it leaves instead an increased freedom of choice while we live. Our beliefs, on the other hand, reduce our freedoms; they compel us to take certain paths.

Life becomes valuable in whatever form it takes; it’s better to have a long life with a variety of experiences than a short one that conforms to a certain standard of quality. Awareness itself becomes the value.