Sisyphus is forced to push a heavy boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down; for all eternity. Camus famously compared Sisyphus’ condition to the human condition. We too are fated to complete mundane, meaningless tasks, to chase desires and achieve goals only for them to be replaced by new desires and goals; always returning back where we started. Ronald Aronson argues it is our awareness, our human self-consciousness, of this condition that makes us superior to it.
“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”[1]
What does this mean as the final line of an essay that “attempts to resolve the question of suicide” [2] - which for Albert Camus was a natural corollary of squarely facing life’s meaninglessness? How does the, at the time of writing, 27-year-old’s often chaotic and always startling essay on absurdity end with happiness and joy, after urgently posing suicide as the alternative to living amidst absurdity? And what does it mean to us today, eighty years later?
Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, in whose Nausea Camus discovered a kinship a couple of years earlier, and who saw absurdity as a founding property of existence, Camus regarded it as an essential feature of our experience of the world, our relationship to it. Absurdity is the fact that we die and cannot do anything about it. It is the tension between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer. It is absurd to try to know, understand, or explain the world because, Camus asserts, our efforts to gain rational knowledge are futile. In these assertions Camus pits himself not only against everyday life and religion but also against science and philosophy, dismissing the claims of all forms of rational analysis: “That universal reason, practical or ethical, that determinism, those categories that explain everything are enough to make a decent man laugh” [3]. Camus does not present this skepticism as a philosopher, arguing for the truth of his conception, but talks rather about the “absurd sensibility”[4] behind it. He points to a widespread “intellectual malady,” and he asserts this alongside, perhaps as an alternative to, systematic philosophical thought.
Starting from this mood of the times, Camus asks how - and, strikingly, whether - one should live in the face of it: “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide”[5]. In other words, “Does the absurd dictate death?"[6] After sharply posing this question, the main concern of The Myth of Sisyphus is to sketch various ways of living life that nevertheless seek to make it worth living.
___
Sisyphus reminds us that we cannot help seeking to understand the reality that transcends our intelligence, striving to grasp more than our limited and practical scientific understanding allows, wishing to live without dying.
___
What about his fellow discoverer of absurdity, Sartre? Does the ultimate futility of Sartre’s philosophy, the famous “useless passion,” parallel the “despair” Camus describes?[7] After all, if Sisyphus’s labor is ultimately futile, so is the project to become God described in Being and Nothingness. But Sartre will reach far beyond the “classical pessimism” and “disillusionment” he finds in his first reading of Camus, and instead, with a profound confidence in reason, goes on to understand and explain not only the god-project but virtually all of the human world. He does so philosophically, then politically, socio-economically, psychologically, and historically. The result was his Promethean intellectual project, reaching with immense energy in every possible direction.
8th July 2024
Join the conversation