the myth of sisyphus camus essay

The Myth of Sisyphus: Embracing the Absurdity of Existence 9 min read

July 1, 2023
Classic , Non-Fiction

One Sentence Summary

Unearth the timeless philosophical journey of “ The Myth of Sisyphus ” by Albert Camus , as it unravels the complexities of the human condition and the profound significance of embracing life’s inherent absurdity.

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In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion. ― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

The Myth of Sisyphus Quick Summary

Many consider Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus” to be a seminal philosophical essay because of the way it questions established ideas and provides a fresh viewpoint on humanity. In this article, Camus examines the idea of absurdity, which he defines as the struggle between humanity’s need for meaning and the universe’s apathy. Camus depicts the absurdity of life and encourages humans to accept it via the narrative of Sisyphus, a Greek legendary character who is doomed to roll a rock up a hill forever. Learn how “The Myth of Sisyphus” might help you find meaning and purpose in life by delving further into its philosophical relevance in this post.

#1. The Absurdity of Existence: Exploring the Foundations of “The Myth of Sisyphus”

Unveiling the concept of absurdity.

The concept of absurdity is central to Camus’ philosophy, and it refers to the conflict between our search for meaning and the indifferent universe. According to Camus, human beings have an innate desire for meaning and purpose, but the universe is inherently meaningless and indifferent to our existence. This conflict creates a sense of absurdity that can lead to despair and nihilism . However, Camus argues that we can also embrace the absurd and find freedom in our acceptance of the meaningless universe.

The Absurd Hero: Sisyphus and His Eternal Struggle

In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus uses the story of Sisyphus to illustrate the absurdity of existence. Sisyphus is a Greek mythological figure who is condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to see it roll back down again. This eternal struggle represents the futility of human existence, as we are all engaged in a similar struggle to find meaning in a meaningless universe.

#2. Embracing the Absurd: Camus’ Examination of the Human Condition

Confronting the absurd: existential crisis and its implications.

The conflict between our search for meaning and our indifference to the universe can lead to an existential crisis, a state of despair and confusion about the purpose of our existence. Camus argues that this crisis is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be confronted. By accepting the absurdity of existence, we can free ourselves from the burden of finding ultimate meaning and creating our own meaning and purpose.

The Search for Meaning: Absurdism versus Traditional Philosophies

Camus’s absurdism is critical of theories that aim to give human lives a higher significance. Camus argues that such philosophies are flawed because they assume too much and hence fail to adequately address the problem of the absurd. Instead, Camus encourages his readers to accept the absurd and look for meaning in their own lives.

#3. Absurdity and Rebellion: The Relevance of “The Myth of Sisyphus” in Today’s World

Nihilism and the absurd: a dichotomy explored.

The word ludicrous is commonly used to describe the notion of nihilism, the rejection of all religious and moral standards. Nihilism, as Camus says, is an escape from reality and not the answer to the problem of the ridiculous. Camus urges rebellion instead—a refusal to accept the illusory answers provided by established philosophies and a dedication to forging one’s own path in life.

Camus’ Call for Revolt: Embracing Freedom and Authenticity

Camus’ philosophy of rebellion is based on the idea that individuals have the freedom to create their own values and live authentically. This requires a rejection of the false values imposed by society and a commitment to creating our own values. By embracing the absurd and rebelling against traditional philosophies, we can find freedom and authenticity in our existence.

#4. The Absurd in Everyday Life: Applying Camus’ Philosophy

Absurdity in the modern world: examples and interpretations.

Absurdity is not just something that exists in theoretical discussions; it is present in actual life as well. The absurd is ever present in our lives, from the boredom of everyday routines to the existential anxiety of the brave new world . By adopting Camus’s absurdist worldview, we may achieve independence and calm in the face of the absurd. According to Camus, the conflict between the search for meaning and the ultimate emptiness of the cosmos is at the heart of the absurdity of existence. The monotony of our daily lives is a reflection of this strain. It’s easy to feel foolish when going through the motions of mundane activities like commuting, working, and sleeping. Yet if we can see the humour in our mundane routines, we may free ourselves from their stifling confines. Finding happiness and contentment in the here and now is more important than searching for some greater meaning in life. Camus argues that the existential agony of existence may be alleviated if one accepts and embraces the absurdity of life.

Embracing the Absurd: Finding Freedom and Serenity

Realising that there is no ultimate meaning to life allows us to focus on developing our own sense of meaning and purpose. This calls for a denial of conventional wisdom and a dedication to genuine life. The ridiculous may help us achieve tranquilly and freedom in our lives despite the challenges we confront.

#5. Critiques and Controversies: Examining the Reception of “The Myth of Sisyphus”

Intellectual debates: camus and existentialism.

Camus’ philosophy of absurdism has been a subject of intellectual debate and controversy. Some scholars argue that Camus’ philosophy is a form of existentialism, while others see it as a distinct philosophy. Camus himself rejected the label of existentialism , but his philosophy shares some similarities with existentialism, such as the emphasis on the individual’s subjective experience and the rejection of traditional values.

The Influence of “The Myth of Sisyphus” on Philosophy and Literature

In both philosophical and literary circles, “The Myth of Sisyphus” has left a lasting impression. Several authors and intellectuals, including Samuel Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre, have been influenced by Camus and his concept of absurdism . Literature, drama, and cinema are just a few of the art disciplines that have dabbled in absurdity.

#6. FAQs about “The Myth of Sisyphus”

What is the central idea of “the myth of sisyphus”.

The central idea of “The Myth of Sisyphus” is the concept of absurdity, the conflict between our search for meaning and the indifference of the universe. Camus argues that the absurdity of existence can lead to despair and nihilism, but it can also be embraced as a source of freedom and authenticity. Camus argues that meaninglessness is intrinsic to the human experience since we live in a universe that doesn’t care about us. To illustrate the point that life is pointless and silly, he references the tale of Sisyphus, who is doomed to move a rock up a hill just to have it roll back down.

Camus contends that although our lives may appear meaningless, we have the ability to give them significance through acts of defiance and revolt against the absurdity of existence. Camus argues that in the face of an uncaring cosmos, authenticity and personal fulfilment may be found through an acceptance of the ridiculous. This kind of unconditional love and independence gives us strength and direction in an otherwise meaningless world.

How does Camus define the absurd?

According to Camus, the ridiculous occurs when our need for meaning collides with the apathy of the cosmos. This war makes everything seem ridiculous, which might make people give up hope and become nihilists. Camus, however, thinks that we might find liberation in our acceptance of meaningless reality by embracing the ludicrous.

What is the significance of Sisyphus in Camus’ philosophy?

In Camus’s philosophy, Sisyphus stands for the meaninglessness of life. He rolls a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down again and again, symbolising the pointlessness of the history of humankind . Camus views Sisyphus not just as a tragic figure who accepts his fate with resignation but also as a hero who finds liberation in doing so. Sisyphus finds freedom from the oppressive character of his punishment by accepting the absurdity of his duty.

Camus uses Sisyphus as a metaphor for humanity, which is doomed to repeat the same pointless tasks over and over again. But instead of giving in to hopelessness or nihilism, Sisyphus faces his calamity with stoic resolve. Because of his ability to laugh in the face of absurdity, he is able to overcome the restrictions set by the gods. Sisyphus, in this act of defiance, personifies Camus’s belief that the only way to find freedom is to accept and embrace the emptiness of life. By doing so, he serves as an example of how to forge one’s own identity and sense of purpose in a universe devoid of either. Because of this, Camus’ philosophy finds a potent metaphor in Sisyphus, who challenges us to face the absurdity of our own existence and find our own liberation within it.

Finally, “The Myth of Sisyphus” provides a fresh viewpoint on the human situation by forcing us to consider the purpose of life. The ideology of absurdism, which Camus championed, serves as a sobering reminder that existence lacks any absolute significance. Instead, we ought to embrace the ridiculous, reject conventional wisdom, and forge our own path.

It’s easy to become lost in the maze of contemporary life and forget what’s important in the process. Yet if we open ourselves to the absurd, we may discover freedom and peace even in the midst of turmoil and unpredictability. We don’t have to live by conventional standards in order to have a life that is genuine and fulfilling. Remember the myth of Sisyphus and the absurdist philosophy the next time you feel trapped in a never-ending loop of pointless toil. Be comfortable with the ridiculous, defy authority, and forge your own way. Maybe this is your chance to finally experience the independence and genuineness you’ve been yearning for.

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A Summary and Analysis of the Myth of Sisyphus

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The poster-boy of existentialism, Sisyphus has become associated with laborious and pointless tasks, because he was condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, only for the boulder to roll back down to the bottom just as he was about to complete the task. He was thus doomed to repeat this action forever.

However, there’s a lot more to the story of Sisyphus than this snapshot, so let’s take a closer look at the Sisyphus myth, who he was, and why he was so important to ancient Greek civilisation.

Summary of the Sisyphus myth

Although he’s best-known now for rolling a stone up a hill, Sisyphus did lots before he was doomed to repeat that (literal) uphill struggle. He was the mythical founder of the city-state of Corinth (called Ephyra at the time) and was viewed as the successor to Medea – she of the doomed relationship with Jason, of Argonauts fame.

He was also credited with founding the Isthmian games, which were held both the year before and the year after the Olympic Games (the second and fourth years of an Olympiad), from around 582 BC (nearly two centuries after the first Olympic games were held).

Sisyphus is credited with siring, among others, Glaucus, Bellerophon, and even – in one version – wily Odysseus himself. The story goes that Autolycus had stolen Sisyphus’ flock, but Sisyphus, viewed by many as the most cunning of all men, had taken the precaution of branding his name onto his animals, so he could prove the stolen flock was his.

Autolycus’ daughter Anticleia was due to marry Laertes the next day after this thwarted act of farmyard theft took place, and Sisyphus, to get his revenge, slipped into Anticleia’s bed the night before her wedding and seduced her. She conceived Odysseus as a result.

But because Autolycus was impressed by Sisyphus’ cleverness, he happily gave up his daughter to Sisyphus, because he wanted to have a wily and quick-thinking grandson. Odysseus certainly grew up to be just that, as Homer’s Odyssey attests. Laertes, in this version of the Odysseus’ story, wasn’t Odysseus’ biological father, then.

But how did Sisyphus end up being condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, for all eternity? That, too, depends on which version of the myth you read.

For instance, according to one account, Sisyphus ended up rolling that rock uphill because he snitched on Zeus during one of the god’s various acts of abduction involving young and beautiful women. When Zeus made off with Aegina, Sisyphus saw him. Aegina’s father, Asopus, found out that Sisyphus had witnessed it and he asked Sisyphus to tell him who had taken his daughter.

Sisyphus, ever the wily man, made him a deal: he’d tell Asopus who had made off with his daughter if Asopus made a spring gush onto the citadel of Corinth. Asopus agreed to this, and Sisyphus dropped Zeus right in it.

Zeus, whose short temper was as legendary as his penchant for running off with maidens, wasn’t too happy about Sisyphus dobbing him in like this, so he struck Sisyphus down with a thunderbolt. Transported to the Underworld, Sisyphus was condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, for all eternity.

Homer, however, tells the story quite differently. Here, Sisyphus’ ‘crime’ was refusing to die when the gods decreed it. So, Zeus sent Thanatos, the spirit of Death, to carry the stubborn Sisyphus off to the Underworld. But Zeus had underestimated how wily Sisyphus was, and Sisyphus was waiting for Thanatos when he arrived, chained up this deathly agent, and in doing so, suspended death across all of the world. With Thanatos in captivity, nobody – including Sisyphus himself – could die.

But you cannot cheat death forever, and Sisyphus was forced, by Zeus, to unchain Thanatos so that the daily business of death could resume.

Unfortunately for Sisyphus, his name was first on the list.

But once again, Sisyphus tricked his way out of it. He hatched a plan with his wife, telling her that when they carried him off to the Underworld, she shouldn’t observe the funeral rites usually accorded a dead person. When Sisyphus arrived before Hades in the Underworld, he complained that his wife had refused to honour him when he died, and Hades agreed to let him go back and chastise his rude widow. The trick worked, and Sisyphus somehow got away with living for many more years.

When he did eventually die, the gods made sure he couldn’t trick his way out of the Underworld again, by setting him the endless task with which he is now so closely associated: rolling that massive rock forever up a hill, only to find – when he reached the top of the hill – that the rock rolled all the way back down to the bottom and he had to start all over again.

Analysis of the Sisyphus myth

Not all Greek myths have a ‘moral’ as such, but it’s clear, when we look at a fuller summary of the story (or stories) of Sisyphus, that his punishment – rolling that rock endlessly up a hill – was contrived by the gods in response to Sisyphus’ legendary craftiness and cunning. You really can be too clever for your own good: Sisyphus was.

The story of Sisyphus is so well-known in modern times thanks to Albert Camus, whose essay ‘ The Myth of Sisyphus ’ (1942) is an important text about the absurdity of modern life (although it’s often described as being ‘Existentialist’, Camus’ essay is actually closer to Absurdism).

For Camus, Sisyphus is the poster-boy for Absurdism, because he values life over death and wishes to enjoy his existence as much as possible, but is instead thwarted in his aims by being condemned to carry out a repetitive and pointless task. Such is the life of modern man: condemned to perform the same futile daily rituals every day, working without fulfilment, with no point or purpose to much of what he does.

However, for Camus – and again, this part is generally misunderstood by people who haven’t read Camus’ essay but only heard about its ‘argument’ at second hand – there is something positive in Sisyphus’ condition, or rather his approach to his rather gloomy fate. When Sisyphus sees the stone rolling back down the hill and has to march back down after it, knowing he will have to begin the same process all over again, Camus suggests that Sisyphus would come to realise the absurd truth of his plight, and treat it with appropriate scorn.

In a sense, he is ‘free’: not from having to perform the task, but from performing it unquestioningly or in the vain hope that it will end. He has liberated his own mind by confronting the absurdity of his situation, and can view it with the appropriate contempt and good humour. As the old line has it, ‘you have to laugh …’

Of course, the Greek gods were capricious, and weren’t always justified when meting out their punishments to mortals, but Sisyphus’ determination to cheat death is obviously doomed to failure, in the long run.

Indeed, the ancient Greeks knew, as every civilisation worthy of the name has known, that death is an inevitable and even desirable part of life: for people to live forever would be unbearable, a hell on earth, with no room being made for the next generation. In all the various versions of the myth of Sisyphus, he is not merely cunning (a quality we can applaud), but self-interested .

He sleeps with Laertes’ bride-to-be as revenge for Autolycus’ attempted theft of his flock, and, one suspects, because he fancied the girl himself. He dropped Zeus in it with Asopus, not because he believed it the morally right thing to do, but because there was something in it for him. And he tried to cheat death because he didn’t want to face his own end.

We might admire Sisyphus for his quick-thinking skills and his guile, but what makes him a compelling Greek ‘hero’ – if we can use that word of him – is his selfish streak that makes him flawed, and, therefore, more human to us.

About Greek mythology

The Greek myths are over two thousand years old – and perhaps, in their earliest forms, much older – and yet many stories from Greek mythology, and phrases derived from those stories, are part of our everyday speech. So we describe somebody’s weakness as their Achilles heel , or we talk about the dangers of opening up Pandora’s box . We describe a challenging undertaking as a Herculean task , and speak of somebody who enjoys great success as having the Midas touch .

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1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Camus on the Absurd: The Myth of Sisyphus

Author: Erik Van Aken Category: Phenomenology and Existentialism , Ethics Word Count: 1000

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“T here is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy .” – Albert Camus

It might seem flippant to remark that the essential question in philosophy is “Should I kill myself?”

But the question of suicide rests on what Camus considered the essential human problem: the sense in which our lives are entirely absurd .

This essay will outline the origin and consequences of Camus’s notion of the absurd from his 1942 The Myth of Sisyphus . [1]

1. The Absurd and its Origin

There are many things we might naturally call absurd: a rude joke, an outrageous statement, or the price of a pair of designer jeans.

This though is not what Camus means by “absurd.” For Camus, the absurd originates from a combination of two things: the way we want the world to be and the way the world actually is .

About how we want the world to be, it just seems to be a part of human nature that we have a sense of justice and fairness, and so we want the world to be just and fair: we want evil punished and virtue rewarded. We also want to understand why bad things happen to good people, why good things happen to bad people, why we’re here, where we’re going, and what it all means.

Concerning how things actually are, however, evil goes unpunished, good deeds often are not rewarded, good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people, and we don’t understand any of it. We just do not, and according to Camus, we cannot understand what we want to understand.

Camus’s doctrine of the absurd then has both metaphysical and epistemological aspects. As a metaphysical thesis, the absurd is a confrontation between the human mind and an indifferent universe: what exists is a “mind that desires and the world that disappoints” (50). As an epistemological thesis, the absurd highlights our desire to understand and the fundamental limits of our knowledge.

2. The Inescapability of the Absurd

Having diagnosed the essential human problem, Camus shifts his interest to prognosis , determining whether and how to live in the face of the absurd.

The Myth of Sisyphus is primarily a critique of existentialism, specifically the attempts by thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Heidegger to overcome the absurd by appealing to God or the transcendent. These thinkers, Camus claims, contradict themselves by presupposing that life is absurd in some way, but proposing a solution to the absurd (so that life isn’t really absurd after all).

For example, Kierkegaard sees life as profoundly absurd, due to its central lack of meaning. He thereby proposes that we take “a leap of faith,” essentially arguing that belief in God will ultimately provide one’s life with meaning. Camus opposes this form of escapism , claiming that existentialists “deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them” (24).

Camus rejects appeals to the transcendent; for him, the absurd – the “divorce” between us and the world – represents the inescapable human condition. As we’ll see, in place of the false hope of religiosity, Camus advises a vivid awareness of the absurd and a form of revolt .

3. Absurdity and Happiness: The Myth of Sisyphus

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to the pointless task of rolling a large rock up a mountain, only to watch the rock roll back down, and to repeat the task for eternity.

As a life filled entirely of mundane and trivial labor, Sisyphus’s existence is meant to illustrate the futility (and absurdity) we confront in our own lives. Camus observes that a person’s life can become, essentially, a mundane routine: “Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday according to the same rhythm…” (12-13).

Yet, for Camus, Sisyphus is not to be pitied. Sisyphus represents the “absurd hero” because he chooses to live in the face of absurdity . This “choosing to live” is a matter of consciousness, for through his attitude and outlook, Sisyphus can free himself from his punishment and triumph over his situation without being able to change it . Sisyphus is aware of the full extent of his punishment: he is fully conscious of the fate imposed on him by the gods and the utter futility of his existence. His passion , freedom , and revolt , however, make him stronger than the punishment intended to crush him.

Though it may seem odd, Camus indicates that Sisyphus is happy. By making his rock “his thing” (123), Sisyphus finds joy in being. Perhaps the climb up becomes more comfortable over time: maybe the muscles that once strained under the weight of the rock now effortlessly control it; conceivably, the rock moves so gracefully upwards that the act of moving it becomes a work of art.

Through his freedom, Sisyphus revolts against the gods and refuses the futility of their punishment by consciously living with passion. The rock, the mountain, the sky, and the dirt belong to him and are his world. Sisyphus has no hope to change his situation but, nevertheless, he uses all that’s given to and available for him.

4. Conclusion

Camus’s answer to the question of suicide is no . Camus insists that we must persist in the face of absurdity and not give ourselves over to false hope; he ultimately suggests that life will be lived all the better if it has no meaning .

It is up to us to live our lives with passion , freedom , and revolt – three consequences of the absurd – or else we give in to false hope or even choose not to live at all. By embracing our passions and absurd freedom, we can thus throw ourselves into the world with a desire to use all that’s given. Though we can never reconcile the metaphysical and epistemological tensions that give rise to the absurd, we can remember that the “point,” after all, is “to live” (65).

[1] Further quotations will be from The Myth of Sisyphus and given in the main text. The first quote is from page 3.

Camus, Albert (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus, J.O’Brien (trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2018.

For Further Reading

Aronson, Ronald, “Albert Camus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/camus/ >.

Related Essays

Existentialism by Addison Ellis

Meaning in Life: What Makes Our Lives Meaningful? by Matthew Pianalto

The Philosophy of Humor: What Makes Something Funny? by Chris A. Kramer

Hope by Michael Milona & Katie Stockdale

Happiness by Kiki Berk

PDF Download

Download this essay in PDF .

Acknowledgments

The editors thank Matthew Howery and Melissa Shew for their feedback on this essay.

About the Author

Erik received an MSc in philosophy from the University of Edinburgh and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Kent. He has taught philosophy at the University of Kent as an Assistant and Associate Lecturer. His main interests lie at the intersection of metaphysics and the philosophy of agency. https://kent.academia.edu/Erikvanaken

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The Myth of Sisyphus

Albert camus, everything you need for every book you read..

In The Myth of Sisyphus , Albert Camus aims to draw out his definition of absurdism and, later in the book, consider what strategies are available to people in living with the absurd. The absurd is often mischaracterized as the simple idea that life is meaningless. In fact, Camus defines the absurd as the confrontation between man’s desire for logic, meaning and order, and the world’s inability to satisfy this desire. Camus believes that confronting the absurd takes precedence over all other philosophical problems, because it is intimately linked with the act of suicide. People commit suicide when life is meaningless, he says, and sometimes to defend the meaning that they do perceive (for instance, someone dying for a political cause). If life is meaningless, which is a proposition Camus certainly agrees with, is it logical to commit suicide—dutiful, even? Camus outlines how people turn to religion and hold on to the hope of a better life that never comes in order to suppress the absurd. Camus wants to know if it’s possible to live in full awareness of the fact that life is meaningless.

Camus examines the work of philosophers like Soren Kierkegaard , Lev Chestov , Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl . All of these, says Camus, went some way to outlining the absurdity of life. But each of them has a fatal flaw—they were too afraid to commit to the absurdity of life, and instead restored meaning to the world through a leap of faith (usually to God). They try to conjure meaning out of meaninglessness, which Camus sees as distinctly irrational. Camus argues for three main characteristics of the absurd life: revolt, freedom and passion. The absurd life must resist any temptation for answers or explanations in life; act and think with total freedom; and pursue life with passion.

In “The Absurd Man,” Camus tries to move towards a more practical approach to the absurd, providing examples of figures that he feels have accommodating the absurd into their lives. For Camus, it is not about finding a solution to the absurd, but living a life that maintains full awareness of life’s meaninglessness. As an illustrative example, he looks first at Don Juan , a notorious seducer. He praises Don Juan for living a life of quantity, rather than quality—since no experience is inherently more valuable than any other, the absurd man should strive to experience as much as he can. In Don Juan’s case, this means sex with as many different women as possible. Camus’ other examples of absurd lives are actors —who live in the present and try out many different lives—and conquerors , whose political and violent struggles add urgency and vividness to life.

Camus then turns his attentions to the relationship between the absurd and creation. The creative life, says Camus, is an especially absurd one. Artists expend great energy on their creation, though their creation is ultimately meaningless. The creator can only experience and describe, not explain and solve; Camus is disdainful of those works that have a “smug” motive of proving a particular “truth.” Within this framework, Camus examines the writings of the Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevksy . In particular, he looks at a character from The Possessed , Kirilov , who commits a kind of “logical suicide.” In order for life to have meaning, Kirilov thinks, God must exist—but Kirilov intuitively feels that there is no God and decides to take control by killing himself. His last words are “all is well,” which for Camus are precisely the words that living with the absurd require. Though Camus praises Dostoevsky for showing the absurd in action—which is a special capability of novels as opposed to philosophy—he criticizes Dostoevsky for turning back to God later in his personal life.

Camus concludes his essay by discussing the myth of Sisyphus mentioned in the title. Sisyphus, a Greek King, was condemned by the gods. His eventual fate was to push a rock up a mountain, only for it to fall back down, necessitating the process to start over again and again for all eternity. There are different stories about why Sisyphus incurred the wrath of the gods but, in essence, he disrespected them. One of the stories is that he put Death in chains, angering the god Pluto . Just before he died, Sisyphus wanted to test his wife’s love by ordering that she “cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square.” Annoyed that she actually did so, instead of burying him properly, he received permission from Pluto to return to earth in order to chastise her. Upon his return from the underworld, Sisyphus fell in love with the earth again—particularly its natural beauty—and refused to leave. Mercury was sent to retrieve Sisyphus, and when Sisyphus got back to the underworld his rock and the eternal, futile labor it represents were waiting for him. In this fate, Camus sees the struggle of man longing for meaning in a meaningless world. Sisyphus, says Camus, is the ultimate “absurd hero,” because he is fully aware of the futility of his actions. The moment when Sisyphus walks back to the foot of the mountain is the one that most interests Camus, representing Sisyphus’ “hour of consciousness” and total understanding of his fate. Camus pictures Sisyphus saying that “all is well,” like Kirilov did earlier. It is necessary, says Camus, to “imagine Sisyphus happy.”

“The Myth of Sisyphus”, analysis of the essay by Albert Camus

The punishment of the gods or the joy of liberated labor

It is difficult to find at least one work by Albert Camus, free from philosophical concepts. Such is the analysis of his many critics. However, the writer did not recognize himself as a philosopher in the classical sense of the word. But the “The Myth of Sisyphus”, written in 1942, can without exaggeration be considered a purely philosophical treatise.

True, Camus called his work “an essay on the absurd.” This genre was not chosen by him by chance, since it presupposes a free composition of the work and leaves the author with the right to remain at least a little writer, and not just a philosopher.

The composition of the essay is such that the myth of Sisyphus itself occupies only an insignificant part of the work and is placed in the epilogue. He summarizes the study of the problem of the absurdity of the existence of an individual. Sisyphus, according to the writer, is a happy person, because he rejects the gods and personally controls his fate. True, it is difficult for a reader with traditional thinking to imagine a happy man who is engaged in hard labor day and night. The rebellious mood of Camus himself, his desire to challenge the Higher Forces, clearly manifested here.

The problems of the essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”, in essence, are not new. The question of the meaning or meaninglessness of existence has always been a favorite subject of study of philosophers. He was engaged in many schools and the greatest single minds. Many scientists have come to the conclusion that human life is absurd. Camus takes this conclusion as the starting point of his reasoning.

Studying human experience, he believes that man isolates eternal truths about himself and the surrounding space not by knowing life, but by means of feelings. The main thing here is a sense of absurdity, which casts doubt on the existence of God and the rationality of social structure.

But, in this way, one has to deny any aesthetic norms and rules. In a state of absurdity, everything is permitted. The only meaning is the fullness of life experiences. Therefore, the absurdity should not be destroyed by suicide, you just need to live it by making your choice. In the life of everyone there comes a time when it is necessary to choose between action and contemplation. This is called: to become a person. This conclusion is made by Camus.

The author himself does not believe in the harmony of man with nature. She, in his opinion, is very hostile to sentient beings. Therefore, each person can understand the other only on an individual, absurd level. What then are the general laws of perception?

Camus conducts a serious analysis of the philosophical views of those thinkers who touched on the question of absurdity before him. Among them: Kierkegaard, Shestov, Dostoevsky, Husserl, Nietzsche and other philosophers. However, it is worth recognizing that, as a stable doctrine, absurdism is owed specifically to Camus.

Sisyphus is not alone at the top, where he once again rolled his stone. The storyline of the essay is such that before we meet with many historical and literary characters of the past, Camus are interesting in terms of confirming their conclusions. This is Kirillov from Dostoevsky’s Demons; Don Giovanni, Commander, Alcest Moliere; Adrienne Lekuvrer and many others.

“ I have chosen only those heroes who set as their goal the exhaustion of life …”, Camus admitted.

What, of course, is difficult to disagree with the writer, is that each person has his own choice: absurd or reasonable.

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Albert Camus

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a journalist, editor and editorialist, playwright and director, novelist and author of short stories, political essayist and activist—and, although he more than once denied it, a philosopher. He ignored or opposed systematic philosophy, had little faith in rationalism, asserted rather than argued many of his main ideas, presented others in metaphors, was preoccupied with immediate and personal experience, and brooded over such questions as the meaning of life in the face of death. Although he forcefully separated himself from existentialism, Camus posed one of the twentieth century’s best-known existentialist questions, which launches The Myth of Sisyphus : “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide” ( MS , 3). And his philosophy of the absurd has left us with a striking image of the human fate: Sisyphus endlessly pushing his rock up the mountain only to see it roll back down each time he gains the top. Camus’s philosophy found political expression in The Rebel , which along with his newspaper editorials, political essays, plays, and fiction earned him a reputation as a great moralist. It also embroiled him in conflict with his friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, provoking the major political-intellectual divide of the Cold-War era as Camus and Sartre became, respectively, the leading intellectual voices of the anti-Communist and pro-Communist left. Furthermore, in posing and answering urgent philosophical questions of the day, Camus articulated a critique of religion and of the Enlightenment and all its projects, including Marxism. In 1957 he won the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in a car accident in January, 1960, at the age of 46.

1. The Paradoxes of Camus’s Absurdist Philosophy

2. nuptials and camus’s starting point, 3.1 suicide as a response to absurdity, 3.2 the limits of reason, 3.3 criticism of existentialists, 3.4 happiness in facing one’s fate, 3.5 response to skepticism, 4.1 absurdity, rebellion, and murder, 4.2 against communism, 4.3 violence: inevitable and impossible, 5. the fall, 6. philosopher of the present, primary works, secondary works, other internet resources, related entries.

There are various paradoxical elements in Camus’s approach to philosophy. In his book-length essay, The Myth of Sisyphus , Camus presents a philosophy that contests philosophy itself. This essay belongs squarely in the philosophical tradition of existentialism but Camus denied being an existentialist. Both The Myth of Sisyphus and his other philosophical work, The Rebel , are systematically skeptical of conclusions about the meaning of life, yet both works assert objectively valid answers to key questions about how to live. Though Camus seemed modest when describing his intellectual ambitions, he was confident enough as a philosopher to articulate not only his own philosophy but also a critique of religion and a fundamental critique of modernity. While rejecting the very idea of a philosophical system, Camus constructed his own original edifice of ideas around the key terms of absurdity and rebellion, aiming to resolve the life-or-death issues that motivated him.

The essential paradox arising in Camus’s philosophy concerns his central notion of absurdity. Accepting the Aristotelian idea that philosophy begins in wonder, Camus argues that human beings cannot escape asking the question, “What is the meaning of existence?” Camus, however, denies that there is an answer to this question, and rejects every scientific, teleological, metaphysical, or human-created end that would provide an adequate answer. Thus, while accepting that human beings inevitably seek to understand life’s purpose, Camus takes the skeptical position that the natural world, the universe, and the human enterprise remains silent about any such purpose. Since existence itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This paradoxical situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls the absurd . Camus’s philosophy of the absurd explores the consequences arising from this basic paradox.

Camus’s understanding of absurdity is best captured in an image, not an argument: of Sisyphus straining to push his rock up the mountain, watching it roll down, then descending after the rock to begin all over, in an endless cycle. Like Sisyphus, humans cannot help but continue to ask after the meaning of life, only to see our answers tumble back down. If we accept this thesis about life’s essential absurdity, and Camus’s anti-philosophical approach to philosophical questions, we cannot help but ask: What role is left for rational analysis and argument? Doesn’t Camus the philosopher preside over the death of philosophy in answering the question whether to commit suicide by abandoning the terrain of argument and analysis and turning to metaphor to answer it? If life has no fundamental purpose or meaning that reason can articulate, we cannot help asking about why we continue to live and to reason. Might not Silenus be right in declaring that it would have been better not to have been born, or to die as soon as possible? [ 1 ] And, as Francis Jeanson wrote long before his famous criticism of The Rebel that precipitated the rupture between Camus and Sartre, isn’t absurdist philosophy a contradiction in terms, strictly speaking no philosophy at all but an anti-rational posture that ends in silence (Jeanson 1947)?

Was Camus actually a philosopher? He himself said no, in a famous interview with Jeanine Delpech in Les Nouvelles Littéraires in November of 1945, insisting that he did “not believe sufficiently in reason to believe in a system” (Camus 1965, 1427). This was not merely a public posture, since we find the same thought in his notebooks of this period: he describes himself as an artist and not a philosopher because “I think according to words and not according to ideas” (Camus 1995, 113). Still, Jean-Paul Sartre saw immediately that Camus was undertaking important philosophical work, and in his review of The Stranger in relation to Sisyphus , had no trouble connecting Camus with Pascal, Rousseau, and Nietzsche (Sartre 1962). After they became friends Sartre spoke publicly of his friend’s “philosophy of the absurd,” which he distinguished from his own thought for which he accepted the “existentialist” label that Camus rejected. In the years since, the apparent unsystematic, indeed, anti-systematic, character of his philosophy, has meant that relatively few scholars have appreciated its full depth and complexity. They have more often praised his towering literary achievements and standing as a political moralist while pointing out his dubious claims and problematic arguments (see Sherman 2008). A significant recent exception to this is Ronald Srigley’s Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity (Srigley 2011).

This entry will negotiate Camus’s deliberate ambivalence as a philosopher while discussing his philosophy. It is not just a matter of giving a philosophical reading of this playwright, journalist, essayist, and novelist but of taking his philosophical writings seriously—exploring their premises, their evolution, their structure, and their coherence. To do so is to see that his writing contains more than a mood and more than images and sweeping, unsupported assertions, although it contains many of both. Camus takes his skepticism as far as possible as a form of methodical doubt—that is, he begins from a presumption of skepticism—until he finds the basis for a non-skeptical conclusion. And he builds a unique philosophical construction, whose premises are often left unstated and which is not always argued clearly, but which develops in distinct stages over the course of his brief lifetime. Camus’s philosophy can be thus read as a sustained effort to demonstrate and not just assert what is entailed by the absurdity of human existence. In the process Camus answers the questions posed by The Myth of Sisyphus , “Why should I not kill myself?”, and by The Rebel , “Why should I not kill others?”

Camus’s graduate thesis at the University of Algiers sympathetically explored the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christianity, specifically the relationship of Plotinus to Augustine (Camus 1992). Nevertheless, his philosophy explicitly rejects religion as one of its foundations. Not always taking an openly hostile posture towards religious belief—though he certainly does in the novels The Stranger and The Plague —Camus centers his work on choosing to live without God. Another way to understand Camus’s philosophy is that it is an effort to explore the issues and pitfalls of a post-religious world.

Camus’s earliest published writing containing philosophical thinking, Nuptials , appeared in Algeria in 1938, and remain the basis of his later work. These lyrical essays and sketches describe a consciousness reveling in the world, a body delighting in nature, and the individual’s immersion in sheer physicality. Yet these experiences are presented as the solution to a philosophical problem, namely finding the meaning of life in the face of death. They appear alongside, and reveal themselves to be rooted in, his first extended meditation on ultimate questions.

In these essays, Camus sets two attitudes in opposition. The first is what he regards as religion-based fears. He cites religious warnings about pride, concern for one’s immortal soul, hope for an afterlife, resignation about the present and preoccupation with God. Against this conventional Christian perspective Camus asserts what he regards as self-evident facts: that we must die and there is nothing beyond this life. Without mentioning it, Camus draws a conclusion from these facts, namely that the soul is not immortal. Here, as elsewhere in his philosophical writing, he commends to his readers to face a discomforting reality squarely and without flinching, but he does not feel compelled to present reasons or evidence. If not with religion, where then does wisdom lie? His answer is: with the “conscious certainty of a death without hope” and in refusing to hide from the fact that we are going to die. For Camus “there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside of the curve of the days…. I can see no point in the happiness of angels” ( N , 90). There is nothing but this world, this life, the immediacy of the present.

Camus is sometimes mistakenly called a “pagan” because he rejects Christianity as based on a hope for a life beyond this life. Hope is the error Camus wishes to avoid. Rejecting “the delusions of hope” ( N , 74), Nuptials contains an evocation of an alternative. Camus relies for this line of thought on Nietzsche’s discussion of Pandora’s Box in Human, All Too Human : all the evils of humankind, including plagues and disease, have been let loose on the world by Zeus, but the remaining evil, hope, is kept hidden away in the box and treasured. But why, we may ask, is hope an evil? Nietzsche explains that humans have come to see hope as their greatest good, while Zeus, knowing better, has meant it as the greatest source of trouble. It is, after all, the reason why humans let themselves be tormented—because they anticipate an ultimate reward (Nietzsche 1878/1996, 58). For Camus, following this reading of Nietzsche closely, the conventional solution is in fact the problem: hope is disastrous for humans inasmuch as it leads them to minimize the value of this life except as preparation for a life beyond.

If religious hope is based on the mistaken belief that death, in the sense of utter and total extinction body and soul, is not inevitable, it leads us down a blind alley. Worse, because it teaches us to look away from life toward something to come afterwards, such religious hope kills a part of us, for example, the realistic attitude we need to confront the vicissitudes of life. But what then is the appropriate path? The young Camus is neither a skeptic nor a relativist here. His discussion rests on the self-evidence of sensuous experience. He advocates precisely what he takes Christianity to abjure: living a life of the senses, intensely, here and now, in the present. This entails, first, abandoning all hope for an afterlife, indeed rejecting thinking about it. “I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me it is a closed door” ( N , 76).

We might think that facing our total annihilation would be bitter, but for Camus this leads us in a positive direction: “Between this sky and the faces turned toward it there is nothing on which to hang a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion—only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch” ( N , 90). This insight entails obstinately refusing “all the ‘later on’s of this world,” in order to lay claim to “my present wealth” ( N , 103), namely the intense here-and-now life of the senses. The “wealth” is precisely what hope cheats us out of by teaching us to look away from it and towards an afterlife. Only by yielding to the fact that our “longing to endure” will be frustrated and accepting our “awareness of death” are we able to open ourselves to the riches of life, which are physical above all.

Camus puts both sides of his argument into a single statement: “The world is beautiful, and outside there is no salvation” ( N , 103). Only in accepting death and in being “stripped of all hope” does one most intensely appreciate not only the physical side of life, but also, he now suggests, its affective and interpersonal side. Taken together, and contrary to an unverifiable faith in God and afterlife, these are what one has and one knows : “To feel one’s ties to a land, one’s love for certain men, to know there is always a place where the heart can find rest—these are already many certainties for one man’s life” ( N , 90).

Only if we accept that Nietzsche is right, that God is dead and there is only nothingness after we die, will we then fully experience—feel, taste, touch, see, and smell—the joys of our bodies and the physical world. Thus the sensuous and lyrical side of these essays, their evocative character, is central to the argument. Or rather, because Camus is promoting intense, joyous, physical experience as opposed to a self-abnegating religious life, rather than developing an argument he asserts that these experiences themselves are the right response. His writing aims to demonstrate what life means and feels like once we give up hope of an afterlife, so that in reading we will be led to “see” his point. These essays may be taken as containing highly personal thoughts, a young man’s musings about his Mediterranean environment, and they scarcely seem to have any system. But they suggest what philosophy is for Camus and how he conceives its relationship to literary expression.

His early philosophy, then, may be conveyed, if not summed up, in this passage from “Nuptials at Tipasa”:

In a moment, when I throw myself down among the absinthe plants to bring their scent into my body, I shall know, appearances to the contrary, that I am fulfilling a truth which is the sun’s and which will also be my death’s. In a sense, it is indeed my life that I am staking here, a life that tastes of warm stone, that is full of the signs of the sea and the rising song of the crickets. The breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there’s nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living. ( N , 69)

The intense and glistening present tells us that we can fully experience and appreciate life only on the condition that we no longer try to avoid our ultimate and absolute death.

3. Suicide, Absurdity and Happiness: The Myth of Sisyphus

After completing Nuptials , Camus began to work on a planned triptych on the Absurd: a novel, which became The Stranger , a philosophical essay, eventually titled The Myth of Sisyphus , and a play, Caligula . These were completed and sent off from Algeria to the Paris publisher in September 1941. Although Camus would have preferred to see them appear together, even in a single volume, the publisher for both commercial reasons and because of the paper shortage caused by war and occupation, released The Stranger in June 1942 and The Myth of Sisyphus in October. Camus kept working on the play, which finally appeared in book form two years later (Lottman, 264–67).

“There is only one really serious philosophical problem,” Camus says, “and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that” ( MS , 3). One might object that suicide is neither a “problem” nor a “question,” but an act. A proper, philosophical question might rather be: “Under what conditions is suicide warranted?” And a philosophical answer might explore the question, “What does it mean to ask whether life is worth living?” as William James did in The Will to Believe . For the Camus of The Myth of Sisyphus , however, “Should I kill myself?” is the essential philosophical question. For him, it seems clear that the primary result of philosophy is action, not comprehension. His concern about “the most urgent of questions” is less a theoretical one than it is the life-and-death problem of whether and how to live.

Camus sees this question of suicide as a natural response to an underlying reality, namely, that life is absurd. It is absurd to continually seek meaning in life when there is none; and it is absurd to hope for some form of continued existence after death, which results in our extinction. But Camus also thinks it absurd to try to know, understand, or explain the world, since he regards the attempt to gain rational knowledge as futile. Here Camus pits himself 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” ( MS , 21).

These kinds of absurdity are driving Camus’s question about suicide, but his way of proceeding evokes another kind of absurdity, one less well-defined, namely, the “absurd sensibility” (MS, 2, tr. changed). This sensibility, vaguely described, seems to be “an intellectual malady” ( MS , 2) rather than a philosophy. He regards thinking about it as “provisional” and insists that the mood of absurdity, so “widespread in our age” does not arise from, but lies prior to, philosophy. Camus’s diagnosis of the essential human problem rests on a series of “truisms” ( MS , 18) and “obvious themes” ( MS , 16). But he doesn’t argue for life’s absurdity or attempt to explain it—he is not interested in either project, nor would such projects engage his strength as a thinker. “I am interested … not so much in absurd discoveries as in their consequences” ( MS , 16). Accepting absurdity as the mood of the times, he asks above all whether and how to live in the face of it. “Does the absurd dictate death” ( MS , 9)? But he does not argue this question either, and rather chooses to demonstrate the attitude towards life that would deter suicide. In other words, the main concern of the book is to sketch ways of living our lives so as to make them worth living despite their being meaningless.

According to Camus, people commit suicide “because they judge life is not worth living” ( MS , 4). But if this temptation precedes what is usually considered philosophical reasoning, how to answer it? In order to get to the bottom of things while avoiding arguing for the truth of his statements, he depicts, enumerates, and illustrates. As he says in The Rebel , “the absurd is an experience that must be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence, of Descartes’s methodical doubt” ( R , 4). The Myth of Sisyphus seeks to describe “the elusive feeling of absurdity” in our lives, rapidly pointing out themes that “run through all literatures and all philosophies” ( MS , 12). Appealing to common experience, he tries to render the flavor of the absurd with images, metaphors, and anecdotes that capture the experiential level he regards as lying prior to philosophy.

He begins doing so with an implicit reference to Sartre’s novel, Nausea , which echoes the protagonist Antoine Roquentin’s discovery of absurdity. Camus had earlier written that this novel’s theories of absurdity and its images are not in balance. The descriptive and the philosophical aspects of the novel “don’t add up to a work of art: the passage from one to the other is too rapid, too unmotivated, to evoke in the reader the deep conviction that makes art of the novel” (Camus 1968, 200). But in this 1938 review Camus praises Sartre’s descriptions of absurdity, the sense of anguish and nausea that arises as the ordinary structures imposed on existence collapse in Antoine Roquentin’s life. As Camus now presents his own version of the experience, “the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday according to the same rhythm …” ( MS , 12–3). As this continues, one slowly becomes fully conscious and senses the absurd.

Camus goes on to sketch other experiences of absurdity, until he arrives at death. But although Camus seeks to avoid arguing for the truth of his claims, he nevertheless concludes this “absurd reasoning” with a series of categorical assertions addressed to “the intelligence” about the inevitable frustration of the human desire to know the world and to be at home in it. Despite his intentions, Camus cannot avoid asserting what he believes to be an objective truth: “We must despair of ever reconstructing the familiar, calm surface which would give us peace of heart” ( MS , 18). Turning to experiences that are seemingly obvious to large numbers of people who share the absurd sensibility, he declares sweepingly: “This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said” ( MS , 21). Our efforts to know are driven by a nostalgia for unity, and there is an inescapable “hiatus between what we fancy we know and what we really know” ( MS , 18).

“With the exception of professional rationalists, people today despair of true knowledge” ( MS , 18). Camus asserts that the history of human thought is characterized by “its successive regrets and its impotences” ( MS , 18), and that “the impossibility of knowledge is established” ( MS , 25). When writing more carefully, he claims only to be describing a certain “climate,” but in any case his bedrock assumptions appear again and again: the world is unknowable and life is without meaning. Our efforts to understand them lead nowhere.

Avi Sagi suggests that in claiming this Camus is not speaking as an irrationalist—which is, after all, how he regards the existentialists—but as someone trying to rationally understand the limits of reason (Sagi 2002, 59–65). For Camus the problem is that by demanding meaning, order, and unity, we seek to go beyond those limits and pursue the impossible. We will never understand, and we will die despite all our efforts. There are two obvious responses to our frustrations: suicide and hope. By hope Camus means just what he described in Nuptials , the religion-inspired effort to imagine and live for a life beyond this life. Or, second, as taken up at length in The Rebel , bending one’s energies to living for a great cause beyond oneself: “Hope of another life one must ‘deserve’ or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it” ( MS , 8).

What is the Camusean alternative to suicide or hope? The answer is to live without escape and with integrity, in “revolt” and defiance, maintaining the tension intrinsic to human life. Since “the most obvious absurdity” ( MS , 59) is death, Camus urges us to “die unreconciled and not of one’s own free will” ( MS , 55). In short, he recommends a life without consolation, but instead one characterized by lucidity and by acute consciousness of and rebellion against its mortality and its limits.

In his statement of the problem and its solution, Camus’s tone, ideas, and style are reminiscent of Nietzsche. “God is dead” is of course their common starting point, as is the determination to confront unpleasant truths and write against received wisdom. At the same time Camus argues against the specific philosophical current with which Nietzsche is often linked as a precursor, and to which he himself is closest—existentialism. The Myth of Sisyphus is explicitly written against existentialists such as Shestov, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Heidegger, as well as against the phenomenology of Husserl. Camus shares their starting point, which he regards as the fact that they all somehow testify to the absurdity of the human condition. But he rejects what he sees as their ultimate escapism and irrationality, claiming that “they deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. That forced hope is religious in all of them” ( MS , 24).

Sartre, too, is subject to Camus’s criticisms—and not just politically as will be described in the following section. Although some of the ideas in The Myth of Sisyphus drew on Sartre’s Nausea (as noted above), in 1942 Sartre was not yet regarded as an “existentialist”. But as Sartre’s philosophy developed, he went on to explore how human activity constitutes a meaningful world from the brute, meaningless existence unveiled in his novel [ 2 ] (Aronson 1980, 71–88). In the process, the absurdity of Nausea becomes the contingency of Being and Nothingness , the fact that humans and things are simply there with no explanation or reason. As Sartre described it, the absurd is “the universal contingency of being which is, but which is not the basis of its being; the absurd is the given, the unjustifiable, primordial quality of existence” (quoted in Sagi 2002, 57). Having rooted human existence in such contingency, Sartre goes on to describe other fundamental structures of existence, core human projects, and characteristic patterns of behavior, including freedom and bad faith, all of which arise on this basis. The original contingency leads to our desire to undo it, to the futile project to “found being,” in other words the “useless passion” of the project to become God.

For Sartre absurdity is obviously a fundamental ontological property of existence itself, frustrating us but not restricting our understanding. For Camus, on the other hand, absurdity is not a property of existence as such, but is an essential feature of our relationship with the world. It might be argued that Sartre and Camus are really quite similar, and that the core futility of Sartre’s philosophy parallels the “despair” Camus describes. After all, if Sisyphus’s labor is ultimately futile, so is the project to become God. But Sartre rejects the “classical pessimism” and “disillusionment” he finds in Camus and instead possesses an unCamusean confidence in his ability to understand and explain this project and the rest of the human world. Camus, on the contrary, builds an entire worldview on his central assumption that absurdity is an unsurpassable relationship between humans and their world (Aronson 2013). He postulates an inevitable divorce between human consciousness, with its “wild longing for clarity” ( MS , 21) and the “unreasonable silence of the world” ( MS , 28). As discussed above, Camus views the world as irrational, which means that it is not understandable through reason.

According to Camus, each existentialist writer betrayed his initial insight by seeking to appeal to something beyond the limits of the human condition, by turning to the transcendent. And yet even if we avoid what Camus describes as such escapist efforts and continue to live without irrational appeals, the desire to do so is built into our consciousness and thus our humanity. We are unable to free ourselves from “this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion” ( MS , 51). But it is urgent to not succumb to these impulses and to instead accept absurdity. In contrast with existentialism, “The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits” ( MS , 49).

Camus clearly believes that the existentialist philosophers are mistaken but does not argue against them, because he believes that “there is no truth but merely truths” ( MS , 43). His disagreement rather takes the subtler and less assertive form of an immanent critique, pointing out that each thinker’s existentialist philosophy ends up being inconsistent with its own starting point: “starting from a philosophy of the world’s lack of meaning, it ends up by finding a meaning and depth in it” ( MS , 42). These philosophers, he insists, refuse to accept the conclusions that follow from their own premises. Kierkegaard, for example, strongly senses the absurd. But rather than respecting it as the inevitable human ailment, he seeks to be cured of it by making it an attribute of a God who he then embraces.

Camus’s most sustained analysis is of Husserl’s phenomenology. Along with Sartre, Camus praises the early Husserlian notion of intentionality. Sartre saw this notion as revealing a dynamic consciousness without contents—the basis for his conception of freedom—while Camus is pleased that intentionality follows the absurd spirit in its “apparent modesty of thought that limits itself to describing what it declines to explain” ( MS , 43). However, Camus criticizes Husserl’s later search in Ideas for Platonic extra-temporal essences as a quasi-religious leap inconsistent with his original insight.

How then to remain consistent with absurd reasoning and avoid falling victim to the “spirit of nostalgia”? The Myth of Sisyphus finds the answer by abandoning the terrain of philosophy altogether. Camus describes a number of absurdist fictional characters and activities, including Don Juan and Dostoevsky’s Kirolov ( The Possessed ), theater, and literary creation. And then he concludes with the story of Sisyphus, who fully incarnates a sense of life’s absurdity, its “futility and hopeless labor” ( MS , 119). Camus sees Sisyphus’s endless effort and intense consciousness of futility as a triumph . “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” ( MS , 120). After the dense and highly self-conscious earlier chapters, these pages condense the entire line of thought into a vivid image. Sisyphus demonstrates that we can live with “the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it” ( MS , 54). For Camus, 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, and wishing to live without dying. Like Sisyphus, we are our fate, and our frustration is our very life: we can never escape it.

But there is more. After the rock comes tumbling down, confirming the ultimate futility of his project, Sisyphus trudges after it once again. This “is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock” ( MS , 121). Why use the words “superior” and “stronger” when he has no hope of succeeding the next time? Paradoxically, it is because a sense of tragedy “crowns his victory.” “Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent” ( MS , 121). Tragic consciousness is the conclusion of “absurd reasoning”: living fully aware of the bitterness of our being and consciously facing our fate.

What then is Camus’s reply to his question about whether or not to commit suicide? Full consciousness, avoiding false solutions such as religion, refusing to submit, and carrying on with vitality and intensity: these are Camus’s answers. This is how a life without ultimate meaning can be made worth living. As he said in Nuptials , life’s pleasures are inseparable from a keen awareness of these limits. Sisyphus accepts and embraces living with death without the possibility of appealing to God. “All Sisyphus’s silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing” ( MS , 123).

Lucidly living the human condition, Sisyphus “knows himself to be the master of his days.” By becoming conscious of it, Camus is saying, he takes ownership of it. In this sense Sisyphus reshapes his fate into a condition of “wholly human origin.” “Wholly” may be an exaggeration, because after all, death is “inevitable and despicable,” but it is the very condition of living. In acknowledging this, Sisyphus consciously lives out what has been imposed on him, thus making it into his own end. In the same way, Meursault, protagonist of The Stranger , comes to consciousness in that book’s second part after committing the inexplicable murder that ends the book’s first part. He has lived his existence from one moment to the next and without much awareness, but at his trial and while awaiting execution he becomes like Sisyphus, fully conscious of himself and his terrible fate. He will die triumphant as the absurd man.

The Myth of Sisyphus is far from having a skeptical conclusion. In response to the lure of suicide, Camus counsels an intensely conscious and active non-resolution. Rejecting any hope of resolving the strain is also to reject despair. Indeed, it is possible, within and against these limits, to speak of happiness. “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable” ( MS , 122). It is not that discovering the absurd leads necessarily to happiness, but rather that acknowledging the absurd means also accepting human frailty, an awareness of our limitations, and the fact that we cannot help wishing to go beyond what is possible. These are all tokens of being fully alive. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” ( MS , 123).

We can compare his conclusion with Pyrrho’s skepticism and Descartes’s methodical doubt. First of all, like Pyrrho, Camus has solved his pressing existential issue, namely, avoiding despair, by a kind of resolution entailed in accepting our mortality and ultimate ignorance. But there are two critical differences with Pyrrho: for Camus we never can abandon the desire to know, and realizing this leads to a quickening of our life-impulses. This last point was already contained in Nuptials , but here is expanded to link consciousness with happiness. For Camus, happiness includes living intensely and sensuously in the present coupled with Sisyphus’s tragic, lucid, and defiant consciousness, his sense of limits, his bitterness, his determination to keep on, and his refusal of any form of consolation.

Obviously, Camus’s sense of happiness is not a conventional one but Sagi argues it may place him closer to Aristotle than to any other thinker insofar as he is championing the full realization of human capacities (Sagi 2002, 79–80) Camus is also similar in this to Nietzsche, who called upon his readers to “say yes to life,” and live as completely as possible at every moment. Nietzsche’s point was that to be wholly alive means being as aware of the negative as of the positive, feeling pain, not shunning any experience, and embracing life “even in its strangest and hardest problems” (Nietzsche 1888/1954, 562). But how is it possible that, by the end of The Myth of Sisyphus , Camus has moved from skepticism (about finding the truth) and nihilism (about whether life has meaning) to advocating an approach to life that is clearly judged to be better than others? How does he justify embracing a normative stance, affirming specific values? This contradiction reveals a certain sleight of hand, as the philosopher gives way to the artist. It is as an artist that Camus now makes his case for acceptance of tragedy, the consciousness of absurdity, and a life of sensuous vitality. He advocates this with the image of Sisyphus straining, fully alive, and happy.

4. Camus and the World of Violence: The Rebel

This meditation on absurdity and suicide follows closely on the publication of Camus’s first novel, The Stranger , which also centered on individual experience and revolves around its protagonist’s senseless murder of an Arab on a beach in Algiers and concludes with his execution by guillotine. And it is often forgotten that this absurdist novelist and philosopher was also a political activist—he had been a member of the Algerian branch of the French Communist Party in the mid-1930s and was organizer of an Algiers theater company that performed avant-garde and political plays—as well as a crusading journalist. From October 1938 until January 1940 he worked on Alger républicain and a sister newspaper. In June 1939 he wrote a series of reports on famine and poverty in the mountainous coastal region of Kabylie, among the first detailed articles ever written by a European Algerian describing the wretched living conditions of the native population.

After the start of World War II, Camus became editor of Le Soir républicain and as a pacifist opposed French entry into the war. The spectacle of Camus and his mentor Pascal Pia running their left-wing daily into the ground because they rejected the urgency of fighting Nazism is one of the most striking but least commented-on periods of his life. Misunderstanding Nazism at the beginning of the war, he advocated negotiations with Hitler that would in part reverse the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles. His pacifism was in keeping with a time-honored French tradition, and Camus nevertheless reported for military service out of solidarity with those young men, like his brother, who had become soldiers. Intending to serve loyally and to advocate a negotiated peace in the barracks, he was angered that his tuberculosis disqualified him (Lottman, 201–31; Aronson 2004, 25–28).

These biographical facts are relevant to Camus’s philosophical development after The Myth of Sisyphus . Moving to France and eventually becoming engaged in the resistance to the German occupation, in two “Letters to a German Friend” published clandestinely in 1943 and 1944, Camus pondered the question whether violence against the occupiers was justified. He spoke of the “loathing we [French] had for all war,” and the need “to find out if we had the right to kill men, if we were allowed to add to the frightful misery of this world” ( RRD , 8). Despising war, suspicious of heroism, he claimed that the occupied French paid dearly for this detour “with prison sentences and executions at dawn, with desertions and separations, with daily pangs of hunger, with emaciated children, and above all, with humiliation of our human dignity” ( RRD , 8). Only when we were “at death’s door,” and “far behind” the Germans, did we understand the reasons for fighting, so that henceforth we would struggle with a clear conscience and “clean hands.” In other words killing was morally permissible only within strict limits and after great provocation. Our moral strength was rooted in the fact that we were fighting for justice and national survival. The subsequent letters continued to contrast the French with the Germans on moral grounds drawn directly from Camus’s evolving philosophy, and suggested the transition from The Myth of Sisyphus to The Rebel : if both adversaries began with a sense of the world’s absurdity, Camus claimed that the French acknowledged and lived within this awareness, while the Germans sought to overcome it by dominating the world.

Camus’s anti-Nazi commitment and newspaper experience led to him succeeding Pia in March 1944 as editor of Combat , the main underground newspaper of the non-Communist left. During this period Camus worked on The Plague which, as he later said, “has as its obvious content the struggle of the European resistance movements against Nazism” ( LCE , 339). The novel, begun during the war, describes an epidemic of the bubonic plague in the small Algerian city of Oran, which transforms every aspect of daily life and shuts off the city from the surrounding world. The only possible response besides quarantine is refusing to passively accept disease and death and to actively organize “sanitary squads” to combat it. The Plague philosophically anticipates The Rebel : despite individuals’ most ambitious goals, for example of Tarrou who seeks to end the death penalty and Father Paneloux, who demands that the people of Oran embrace their guilt and God’s love, the actual situation calls for a very limited and specific activity. Individuals must act without fanfare or heroics and above all, in solidarity with each other in seeking to limit the effects of the plague. Like Sisyphus, they act in full consciousness of their limits, except now as a we. The Plague depicts a collective and nonviolent resistance to an unexplained pestilence, and thus quite deliberately does not raise the tactical, strategic, and moral issues built into the struggle of the Resistance against human occupiers ( LCE , 340–1). If readers did not see this as an issue in 1947, it became contentious as the political climate changed, and the novel was attacked by Roland Barthes and later by Sartre (Aronson 2004, 228–9). In point of fact, after the Liberation the question of violence continued to occupy Camus both politically and philosophically. In 1945 his was one of the few voices raised in protest against the American use of nuclear weapons to defeat Japan (Aronson 2004, 61–63). After the Liberation he opposed the death penalty for collaborators, then turned against Marxism and Communism for embracing revolution, while rejecting the looming cold war and its threatening violence. And then in The Rebel , Camus began to spell out his deeper understanding of violence.

At the beginning of The Rebel , Camus picks up where he left off in The Myth of Sisyphus . Writing as a philosopher again, he returns to the terrain of argument by explaining what absurdist reasoning entails. Its “final conclusion” is “the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe” ( R , 6). Since to conclude otherwise would negate its very premise, namely the existence of the questioner, absurdism must logically accept life as the one necessary good. “To say that life is absurd, consciousness must be alive” ( R , 6, tr. changed). Living and eating “are themselves value judgments” ( LCE , 160). “To breathe is to judge” ( R , 8). As in his criticism of the existentialists, Camus advocates a single standpoint from which to argue for objective validity, that of consistency.

At first blush, however, the book’s subject seems to have more of a historical theme than a philosophical one. “The purpose of this essay is … to face the reality of the present, which is logical crime, and to examine meticulously the arguments by which it is justified; it is an attempt to understand the times in which we live. One might think that a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings should be condemned out of hand. But its culpability must still be understood” ( R , 3).

Do such questions represent an entirely new philosophy or are they continuous with The Myth of Sisyphus ? The issue is not resolved by the explanations that Camus gives for his shift in the first pages of The Rebel —by referring to the mass murders of the middle third of the twentieth century. “The age of negation,” he says, once fostered a concern for suicide, but now in “the age of ideologies, we must examine our position in relation to murder” ( R , 4). Have the “ages” changed in the less than ten years between the two books? He may be right to say that whether murder has rational foundations is “the question implicit in the blood and strife of this century,” but in changing his focus from suicide to murder, it is also clear that Camus is shifting his philosophical optic from the individual to our social belonging.

In so doing Camus applies the philosophy of the absurd in new, social directions, and seeks to answer new, historical questions. But as we see him setting this up at the beginning of The Rebel the continuity with a philosophical reading of The Stranger is also strikingly clear. Novelist Kamel Daoud, retelling The Stranger from the point of view of the victim, correctly calls the murder of his Arab “kinsman” a “philosophical crime” (Daoud 19). At the beginning of The Rebel Camus explains:

Awareness of the absurd, when we first claim to deduce a rule of behavior from it, makes murder seem a matter of indifference, to say the least, and hence possible. … There is no pro or con: the murderer is neither right nor wrong. We are free to stoke the crematory fires or to devote ourselves to the care of lepers. Evil and virtue are mere chance or caprice. ( R , 5)

If historically “murder is the problem today” ( R , 5), the encounter with absurdity tells us that the same is true philosophically. Having ruled out suicide, what is there to say about murder?

Starting from the absence of God, the key theme of Nuptials , and the inevitability of absurdity, the key theme of The Myth of Sisyphus , Camus incorporates both of these into The Rebel , but alongside them he now stresses revolt. The act of rebellion assumes the status of a primary datum of human experience, like the Cartesian cogito taken by Sartre as his point of departure. Camus first expressed this directly under the inspiration of his encounter with Being and Nothingness . But in calling it “revolt” he takes it in a direction sharply different from Sartre, who built from the cogito an “essay in phenomenological ontology.” Ignoring completely the ontological dimension, Camus is now concerned with immediate issues of human social experience. Revolt, to be sure, still includes the rebellion against absurdity that Camus described in The Myth of Sisyphus , and once again he will speak of rebelling against our own mortality and the universe’s meaninglessness and incoherence. But The Rebel begins with the kind of revolt that rejects oppression and slavery, and protests against the world’s injustice.

It is at first, like The Myth of Sisyphus , a single individual’s rebellion, but now Camus stresses that revolt creates values, dignity, and solidarity. “I revolt, therefore we are” ( R , 22) is his paradoxical statement. But how can an I lead to a we ? How does “we are” follow from “I revolt”? How can the individual’s experience of absurdity, and the rebellion against it, stem from, produce, imply, or entail the wider social sense of injustice and solidarity? The we in fact is the subject of The Rebel , although the title L’Homme revolt é suggests that one’s original motivation may be individual. Acting against oppression entails having recourse to social values, and at the same time joining with others in struggle. On both levels solidarity is our common condition.

In The Rebel Camus takes the further step, which occupies most of the book, of developing his notion of metaphysical and historical rebellion in opposition to the concept of revolution. Applying his philosophical themes directly to politics in the years immediately after the Liberation of France in 1944, Camus had already concluded that Marxists, and especially the Communists, were guilty of evading life’s absurdity by aiming at a wholesale transformation of society, which must necessarily be violent. And now, in The Rebel , he describes this as a major trend of modern history, using similar terms to those he had used in The Myth of Sisyphus to describe the religious and philosophical evasions.

What sort of work is this? In a book so charged with political meaning, Camus makes no explicitly political arguments or revelations, and presents little in the way of actual social analysis or concrete historical study. The Rebel is, rather, a historically framed philosophical essay about underlying ideas and attitudes of civilization. David Sprintzen suggests these taken-for-granted attitudes operate implicitly and in the background of human projects and very rarely become conscious (Sprintzen 1988, 123).

Camus felt that it was urgent to critically examine these attitudes in a world in which calculated murder had become common. Applying his absurdist ideas and insights to politics, in The Rebel Camus explains what he regards as the modern world’s increasingly organized and catastrophic refusal to face, accept, and live with absurdity. The book provides a unique perspective—presenting a coherent and original structure of premise, mood, description, philosophy, history, and even prejudice.

Camus’s hostility to Communism had its personal, political, and philosophical reasons. These certainly reached back to his expulsion from the Communist Party in the mid-1930s for refusing to adhere to its Popular Front strategy of playing down French colonialism in Algeria in order to win support from the white working class. Then, making no mention of Marxism, The Myth of Sisyphus is eloquently silent on its claims to present a coherent understanding of human history and a meaningful path to the future. His mutually respectful relations with Communists during the Resistance and the immediate postwar period turned bitter after he was attacked in the Communist press and repaid the attack in a series of newspaper articles in 1946 entitled “Neither Victims nor Executioners” (Aronson, 2004, 66–93).

In The Rebel Camus insisted that both Communism’s appeal and its negative features sprang from the same irrepressible human impulse: faced with absurdity and injustice, humans refuse to accept their existence and instead seek to remake the world. Validating revolt as a necessary starting point, Camus criticizes politics aimed at building a utopian future, affirming once more that life should be lived in the present and in the sensuous world. He explores the history of post-religious and nihilistic intellectual and literary movements; he attacks political violence with his views on limits and solidarity; and he ends by articulating the metaphysical role of art as well as a self-limiting radical politics. In place of striving to transform the world, he speaks of mésure —“measure”, in the sense of proportion or balance—and of living in the tension of the human condition. He labels this outlook “Mediterranean” in an attempt to anchor his views to the place he grew up and to evoke in his readers its sense of harmony and appreciation of physical life. There is no substantive argument for the label, nor is one possible given his method of simply selecting who and what counts as representative of the “Mediterranean” view while excluding others—e.g., some Greek writers, not many Romans. In place of argument, he paints a concluding vision of Mediterranean harmony that he hopes will be stirring and lyrical, binding the reader to his insights.

As a political tract The Rebel asserts that Communism leads inexorably to murder, and then explains how revolutions arise from certain ideas and states of spirit. But he makes no close analysis of movements or events, gives no role to material needs or oppression, and regards the quest for social justice as a metaphysically inspired attempt to replace “the reign of grace by the reign of justice” ( R , 56).

Furthermore, Camus insists that these attitudes are built into Marxism. In “Neither Victims nor Executioners” he declared himself a socialist but not a Marxist. He rejected the Marxist acceptance of violent revolution and the consequentialist maxim that “the end justifies the means.” [ 3 ] “In the Marxian perspective,” he wrote sweepingly, “a hundred thousand deaths is a small price to pay for the happiness of hundreds of millions” (Camus 1991, 130). Marxists think this, Camus asserted, because they believe that history has a necessary logic leading to human happiness, and thus they accept violence to bring it about.

In The Rebel Camus takes this assertion a further step: Marxism is not primarily about social change but is rather a revolt that “attempts to annex all creation.” Revolution emerges when revolt seeks to ignore the limits built into human life. By an “inevitable logic of nihilism” Communism climaxes the modern trend to deify man and to transform and unify the world. Today’s revolutions yield to the blind impulse, originally described in The Myth of Sisyphus , “to demand order in the midst of chaos, and unity in the very heart of the ephemeral” ( MS , 10). As does the rebel who becomes a revolutionary who kills and then justifies murder as legitimate.

According to Camus, the execution of King Louis XVI during the French Revolution was the decisive step demonstrating the pursuit of justice without regard to limits. It contradicted the original life-affirming, self-affirming, and unifying purpose of revolt. This discussion belongs to Camus’s “history of European pride,” which is prefaced by certain ideas from the Greeks and certain aspects of early Christianity, but begins in earnest with the advent of modernity. Camus focuses on a variety of major figures, movements, and literary works: the Marquis de Sade, romanticism, dandyism, The Brothers Karamazov , Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, surrealism, the Nazis, and above all the Bolsheviks. Camus describes revolt as increasing its force over time and turning into an ever more desperate nihilism, overthrowing God and putting man in his place, wielding power more and more brutally. Historical revolt, rooted in metaphysical revolt, leads to revolutions seeking to eliminate absurdity by using murder as their central tool to take total control over the world. Communism is the contemporary expression of this Western sickness.

In the twentieth century, Camus claims, murder has become “reasonable,” “theoretically defensible,” and justified by doctrine. People have grown accustomed to “logical crimes”—that is, mass death either planned or foreseen, and rationally justified. Thus Camus calls “logical crime” the central issue of the time, seeks to “examine meticulously the arguments by which it is justified” ( R , 3), and sets out to explore how the twentieth century became a century of slaughter.

We might justly expect an analysis of the arguments he speaks of, but The Rebel changes focus. Human reason is confused by “slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman” ( R , 4)—the first two refer to Communism, the third to Nazism. In the body of the text, Nazism virtually drops out (it was, he says, a system of “irrational terror”—not at all what interested Camus), sharply narrowing the inquiry. His shift is revealed by his question: How can murder be committed with premeditation and be justified by philosophy? It turns out that the “rational murder” Camus was concerned with is not committed by capitalists or democrats, colonialists or imperialists, or by Nazis—but only by Communists.

He does not address the Holocaust, and although his had been a lone voice of protest against Hiroshima in 1945, he does not now ask how it happened. As a journalist he had been one of the few to indict French colonialism, but he does not mention it, except in a footnote. How was it possible for Camus to focus solely on the violence of Communism, given the history he had lived, in the age of nuclear weapons, in the very midst of the French colonial war in Vietnam, and when he knew that a bitter struggle over Algeria lay ahead? It seems he became blinded by ideology, separating Communism from the other evils of the century and directing his animus there. Camus’s ideas, of course, had developed and matured over the years since he first began writing about revolt. But something else had happened: his agenda had changed. Absurdity and revolt, his original themes, had been harnessed as an alternative to Communism, which had become the archenemy. Even as he rejected its violent confrontations, the philosophy of revolt became Cold-War ideology.

Because The Rebel claimed to describe the attitude that lay behind the evil features of contemporary revolutionary politics, it became a major political event. Readers could hardly miss his description of how the impulse for emancipation turned into organized, rational murder as the rebel-become-revolutionary attempted to order an absurd universe. In presenting this message, Camus sought not so much to critique Stalinism as its apologists. His specific targets were intellectuals attracted to Communism—as he himself had been in the 1930s.

One of these targets was Jean-Paul Sartre, and toward the end of The Rebel Camus now took aim at his friend’s evolving politics. Camus focuses on “the cult of history” against which the entire book is directed and his belief that “the existentialists,” led by Sartre, had fallen victim to the idea that revolt should lead to revolution. Within Camus’s framework, Sartre is challenged as trying, like the predecessors criticized in The Myth of Sisyphus , to escape the absurdity with which his own thinking began by turning to “history,” that is to Marxism. This is a bit of a stretch because Sartre was still several years from declaring himself a Marxist, and it shows Camus’s tendency towards sweeping generalization rather than close analysis. But it also reflects his awareness that his friend was determined to find a meaning in the world even as he himself foreswore doing so. And it shows his capacity for interpreting a specific disagreement in the broadest possible terms—as a fundamental conflict of philosophies.

The concluding chapters of The Rebel are punctuated with emphatic words of conclusion ( alors , donc , ainsi , c’est pourquoi ), which are rarely followed by consequences of what comes before and often introduce further assertions, without any evidence or analysis. They are studded with carefully composed topic sentences for major ideas—which one expects to be followed by paragraphs, pages, and chapters of development but, instead, merely follow one another and wait until the next equally well-wrought topic sentence.

As often in the book, the reader must be prepared to follow an abstract dance of concepts, as “rebellion,” “revolution,” “history,” “nihilism,” and other substantives stand on their own, without reference to human agents. The going gets even muddier as we near the end and the text verges on incoherence. How then is it possible that Foley judges The Rebel philosophically as Camus’s “most important book” (Foley 55)?

In these pages Camus is going back over familiar ground, contrasting the implicit religiosity of a future-oriented outlook that claims to understand and promote the logic of history, and justifying violence to implement it, with his more tentative “philosophy of limits,” with its sense of risk, “calculated ignorance,” and living in the present. However the strain stems from the fact that he is doing so much more. As he tries to bring the book to a conclusion he is wrestling with its most difficult theme—that the resort to violence is both inevitable and “impossible.” The rebel lives in contradiction. He or she cannot abandon the possibility of lying, injustice, and violence, for they are part of the rebel’s condition, and will of necessity enter into the struggle against oppression. “He cannot, therefore, absolutely claim not to kill or lie, without renouncing his rebellion and accepting, once and for all, evil and murder.” In other words, to not rebel is to become an accomplice of oppression. Rebellion, Camus has insisted, will entail murder. Yet rebellion, “in principle,” is a protest against death, just as it is a source of the solidarity that binds the human community. He has said that death is the most fundamental of absurdities, and that at root rebellion is a protest against absurdity. Thus to kill any other human being, even an oppressor, is to disrupt our solidarity, in a sense to contradict our very being. It is impossible, then, to embrace rebellion while rejecting violence.

There are those, however, who ignore the dilemma: these are the believers in history, heirs of Hegel and Marx who imagine a time when inequality and oppression will cease and humans will finally be happy. For Camus such a hope resembles the paradise beyond this life promised by religions. Living for, and sacrificing humans to, a supposedly better future is, very simply, another religion. Moreover, his sharpest hostility is reserved for intellectuals who theorize and justify such movements. Accepting the dilemma, Camus is unable to spell out how a successful revolution can remain committed to the solidaristic and life-affirming principle of rebellion with which it began. He does however suggest two actions which, if implemented, would be signs of a revolution’s commitment to remain rebellious: it would abolish the death penalty and it would encourage rather than restrict freedom of speech.

In The Rebel Camus extends the ideas he asserted in Nuptials , developed in The Myth of Sisyphus , and then foreshadowed in The Plague : the human condition is inherently frustrating, indeed absurd, but we betray ourselves and solicit catastrophe by seeking solutions beyond our capacity. “The rebel obstinately confronts a world condemned to death and the impenetrable obscurity of the human condition with his demand for life and absolute clarity. He is seeking, without knowing it, a moral philosophy or a religion” ( R , 101). The book sets out the alternative: to accept the fact that we are living in a Godless universe and rebel against this within limits as do most of the members of the “sanitary squads” in The Plague – or to become a revolutionary, who, like the religious believer committed to the abstract and total triumph of justice, refuses to accept living in the present.

Having critiqued religion in Nuptials and The Plague , Camus is self-consciously exploring the starting points, projects, weaknesses, illusions, and political temptations of a post-religious universe. He describes how traditional religion has lost its force, and how younger generations have been growing up amid an increasing emptiness and a sense that anything is possible. He further claims that modern secularism stumbles into a nihilistic state of mind because it does not really free itself from religion. “Then the only kingdom that is opposed to the kingdom of grace must be founded-namely, the kingdom of justice-and the human community must be reunited among the debris of the fallen City of God. To kill God and to build a church are the constant and contradictory purpose of rebellion” ( R , 103). If rebellion spills over its limits and is given free rein, our modern need to create kingdoms and our continuing search for salvation is the path of catastrophe. “When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, the order, and the unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man” ( R , 25). But to restrain oneself from this effort is to feel bereft of justice, order, and unity. Camus recognizes that hope and the revolutionary drive are essential directions of the post-classical Western spirit, stemming from its entire world of culture, thought, and feeling. This is the path of the metaphysical rebel, who does not see that “human insurrection, in its exalted and tragic forms, is only, and can only be, a prolonged protest against death” ( R , 100).

We have been exploring one of the most interesting and perplexing aspects of Camus’s thought: his determination to criticize attitudes that he finds to be natural and inevitable. For one, the possibility of suicide haunts humans, and so does the desire for an impossible order and an unachievable permanence. Existentialist writers had similar insights, but Camus criticizes their inability to remain consistent with their initial insight. Similarly, he insists throughout The Rebel that the metaphysical need he sees leading to Communism’s terror is universal: he describes it and its consequences so that we can better resist it in ourselves as well as others. His reflexive anti-Communism notwithstanding, an underlying sympathy unites Camus to those revolutionaries he opposes, because he freely acknowledges that he and they share the same starting points, outlook, stresses, temptations, and pitfalls. Although in political argument he frequently took refuge in a tone of moral superiority, Camus makes clear through his skepticism that those he disagrees with are no less and no more than fellow creatures who give in to the same fundamental drive to escape the absurdity that we all share. This sense of moral complexity is most eloquent in his short novel The Fall , whose single character, Clamence, has been variously identified as everyman, a Camus-character, and a Sartre-character. He was all of these. Clamence is clearly evil, guilty of standing by as a young woman commits suicide. In him Camus seeks to describe and indict his generation, including both his enemies and himself. Clamence’s life is filled with good works, but he is a hypocrite and knows it. His monologue is filled with self-justification as well as the confession of someone torn apart by his guilt but unable to fully acknowledge it. Sitting at a bar in Amsterdam, he descends into his own personal hell, inviting the reader to follow him. In telling Clamence’s story, Camus was clearly seeking to empathize as well as describe, to understand as well as condemn. Clamence is a monster, but Clamence is also just another human being (Aronson 2004, 192–200). Beyond the character and actions of Clamence, The Fall demonstrates a unique message at the heart of Camus’s writing. Life is no one single, simple thing, but a series of tensions and dilemmas. The most seemingly straightforward features of life are in fact ambiguous and even contradictory. Camus recommends that we avoid trying to resolve them. We need to face the fact that we can never successfully purge ourselves of the impulses that threaten to wreak havoc with our lives. Camus’s philosophy, if it has a single meaning, is that we should learn to tolerate, indeed embrace the frustration and ambivalence that humans cannot escape.

Well into the twenty-first century, the career of Camus’s thought, like that of his onetime friend Jean-Paul Sartre, has been remarkable. Two generations after his death, his complex and profound philosophical project, as discussed by Srigley, is very much with us because it seeks not only to critique modernity but reaches back to the ancient world to lay the basis for alternative ways of thinking and living in the present. Thus, if in some respects he anticipated the postmodernists, he retained a central metaphysical concern with such ideas as absurdity and revolt. Unlike postmodernism, Camus was, as Jeffrey C. Isaac says, a “chastened humanist” who remained deeply attached, as was Hannah Arendt, to “the language of right, freedom, and truth” (Isaac 244).

Camus’s ideas and name have come up again and again during the twenty-first century, not only among philosophers and literary scholars, among specialists in a wide variety of fields, in the press and among political writers, and in conversations among the general public who read his books or have heard about his ideas. First, his exploration of living in a Godless universe has led to his name being mentioned often in discussions about religious nonbelief (Aronson 2011). Yet unlike the “new atheists” the great nonbeliever Camus was never assured enough to declare that God does not exist and was not militantly opposed to religious belief and practice (Carlson 2014). Even as Camus presents in The Plague a profoundly critical picture of Father Paneloux’s sermons describing the plague first as a punishment for human sin and then as a call to embrace the divine mystery, for a time the priest nevertheless humbly joins the collective project of the “sanitary squads.”

Second, after the 9/11 attack and during the “war on terror,” Camus’s writings on violence became much discussed. For example The Rebel was explored anew for hints about the motivations behind twenty-first century terrorism. Paul Berman deployed Camus in his justification for the “war on terror” against Islamic “pathological mass movements” (Berman 2003, 27–33). Foley, on the other hand, devoted attention to the actual relevance of Camus’s attempts to think through the question of political violence on a small-group and individual level. He shows how, both in The Rebel and in his plays Caligula and The Just Assassins , Camus brings his philosophy to bear directly on the question of the exceptional conditions under which an act of political murder can considered legitimate: (1) The target must be a tyrant; (2) the killing must not involve innocent civilians; (3) the killer must be in direct physical proximity to the victim; and (4) there must be no alternative to killing (Foley 2008, 93). Furthermore, because the killer has violated the moral order on which human society is based, Camus makes the demand that he or she must be prepared to sacrifice his or her own life in return. But if he accepts killing in certain circumstances, Foley stresses that Camus rules out mass killing, indirect murder, killing civilians, and killing without an urgent need to remove murderous and tyrannical individuals. These demands rest on the core idea of The Rebel , that to rebel is to assert and respect a moral order, and this must be sustained both by clear limits and by the murderer’s willingness to die. [ 4 ]

During the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, sales of The Plague exploded and interest was so great that the New York Times republished its original 1948 review by Stephen Spender. Hundreds of articles were written about it in all languages – by bloggers, artists, cartoonists, journalists, Camus specialists, medical practitioners, scholars from every conceivable discipline – and philosophers. Camus’s work was being mined for what it had to teach about living in and coping with the pandemic, including such topics as: functioning amidst the absurdity of a disease that appeared for seemingly no reason at all (de Botton 2021); the similarities and differences between his plague and ours (Aronson, 2020); living and working within the paralyzing existential fear imposed by the pandemic (Farr 2021); retaining hope amidst catastrophe (Kabel & Phillipson 2020); and the solidarity among members of the “sanitary squads” doing so (Illing 2020). In the face of absurdity and mass death many writers extolled the modest and self-limiting philosophy behind The Plague , rooted in The Myth of Sisyphus and further developed in The Rebel : one must act, with others, wherever one happens to be, by simply doing one’s job. As Rieux says: “there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is – common decency” ( P , 150). [ 5 ]

The abbreviations used to cite Camus’s work ( P , R , MS , RRD , N , and LCE ) are defined in the section ‘Works in English’ below.

Collected Works in French

Théâtre, Récits, Nouvelles , R. Quilliot (ed.), Paris: Gallimard, 1962.
Essais , R. Quillot and L. Fauçon (eds.), Paris: Gallimard, 1965.
Œuvres Complètes , Vols. I–IV, R. Gay-Crosier (ed.) Paris: Gallimard, 2006–09.

Works in English

Reference marks are given for cited English translations.

The Plague , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948 [ P ].
The Plague , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021 [ P 2021].
The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954 [ R ].
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays , New York: Alred A. Knopf, 1955 [ MS ].
The Fall , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957.
Caligula, and Three Other Plays , New York: Alred A. Knopf, 1958.
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961 [ RRD ].
“Nuptials at Tipasa”, in Lyrical and Critical Essays , 1968 [ N ].
Lyrical and Critical Essays , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968 [ LCE ].
The Stranger , New York: Vintage, 1988.
Between Hell and Reason , Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1991 [ Camus’ Between Hell and Reason available online ].
“Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism”, in J. McBride, Albert Camus: Philosopher and Littérateur , New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992, pp. 93–165.
Notebooks 1942–1951 , New York: Marlowe, 1995.
Notebooks 1935–1942 , New York: Marlowe, 1996.
Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–47 , J. Lévi-Vatensi (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Camus and Sartre

Sartre, J.P., “Camus’s The Outsider ,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays , New York: Collier Books, 1962.
Sprintzen, D.A., and A. van den Hoven (eds.), Sartre and Camus: A Historic Confrontation , Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004.
Aronson, R., 1980, Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World , London: Verso.
–––, 2004, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
–––, 2011, “Camus the Unbeliever,” in Situating Existentialism , Robert Bernasconi and Jonathan Judaken (eds.), New York: Columbia University Press.
–––, 2013, “Camus et Sartre: parallèles et divergences de leur philosophie,” Cahier Albert Camus, Raymond Gay-Crosier (ed.), Paris: L’Herne.
–––, 2020, “Camus’ Plague Is Not Ours,” Tikkun , published online 14 April 2020 [ Aronson 2020 available online ].
Berman, P., 2003, Terror and Liberalism , New York: Norton.
Betz, M., 2020, “ The Plague , a Review,” The Philosophers Magazine , No. 214, 18 May 2020 [ Betz 2020 available online ].
Boisvert, R., 2021, “Camus, The Plague and Us,” Philosophy Now , Issue 143 [ Boisvert 2021 available online ].
de Botton, A., 2021, “Camus on the Coronavirus,” New York Times , 18 March 2021 [ de Botton 2021 available online ].
Carlson, J, 2014, “Remembering Albert Camus and Longing for the Old Atheism,” Huffington Post , 23 January 2014 [ available online ]
Carroll, D., 2007, Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice , New York: Columbia University Press.
Daoud, K., 2015, The Meursault Investigation , New York: Other Press.
Farr, P., 2021. “In this Moment, We Are All Dr. Rieux: COVID-19, Existential Anxiety and the Absurd History,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology , 61(2): 275–82 [ Farr 2021 available online ].
Foley, J., 2008, Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt , Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Gay-Crosier, R., Vanney, P., 2009, Camus et l’histoire , Caen: Lettres modernes Minard.
Hanna, T., 1958, The Thought and Art of Albert Camus , Chicago: H. Regnery Co.
Hayden, P.E., 2013, “Albert Camus and Rebellious Cosmopolitanism in a Divided World,” Journal of International Political Theory , 9(2): 194–219.
Hughes, E.J. (ed.), 2007, The Cambridge Companion to Camus , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Illing, S.D., 2017, “Camus and Nietzsche on politics in an age of absurdity,” European Journal of Political Theory , 16(1): 24–40.
–––, 2020, “This is a Time for Solidarity: What Albert Camus’s The Plague Can Teach Us about Life in a Pandemic,” Vox , 15 March 2020 [ Illing 2020 available online ].
Isaac, J.C., 1992, Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion , New Haven: Yale University Press.
James, W., 1896, “Is Life Worth Living?” The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy , New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. [ Reprint of James 1896 available online ]
Jeanson, F., 1947, “Albert Camus ou le mensonge de l’absurdité,” Revue Dominicaine no. 53.
Kabel, A. and R. Phillipson, 2020, “Structural Violence and Hope in Catastrophic Times from The Plague to COVID-19,” Race and Class , 62(4), 3–18 [ Kabel & Phillipson 2020 available online ].
Lazere, D., 1973, The Unique Creation of Albert Camus , New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lottman, H. R., 1997, Albert Camus: A Biography , Corte Madera, CA: Gingko.
Mélançon, M., 1976, Albert Camus: Analyse de sa Pensé e, Fribourg: Éditions universitaires.
McBride, J., 1992, Albert Camus: Philosopher and Littérateur , New York: St. Martin’s Press.
McCarthy, P., 1982, Camus , New York: Random House.
Neiman, P. G., 2017, “Camus on Authenticity in Political Violence,” European Journal of Philosophy , 25(4): 1569–87.
Nietzsche, F. W., 1878/1996, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits , M. Faber and S. Lehmann, (trans.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
–––, 1888/1968, “Twilight of the Idols”, in W. Kaufmann (trans.), The Portable Nietzsche , Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, pp. 463–563.
O’Brien, C. C., 1970, Albert Camus of Europe and Africa , New York: Viking.
Plutarch, Moralia (Volume II), F. C. Babbitt (ed. and trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rizzuto, A., 1981, Camus’s Imperial Vision , Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Sagi, A., 2002, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd , Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V.
Sharpe, M., 2012, “Restoring Camus as Philosophe : On Ronald Srigley’s Camus’s Critique of Modernity ”, Critical Horizons , 13(3): 400–424.
–––, M. Kaluza, and P. Francev, 2020, Brill’s Companion to Camus: Camus among the Philosophers , Leiden: Brill.
Sherman, D., 2008, Camus , Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Sprintzen, D., 1988, Camus: A Critical Examination , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Srigley, R., 2011, Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity , Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Thody, P., 1973, Albert Camus 1913–60 , London: Hamish Hamilton.
Todd, O., 1997, Albert Camus: A Life , New York: Knopf.
Zaretsky, R., 2020, “Out of a Clear Blue Sky: Camus’s The Plague and Coronavirus,” Times Literary Supplement , 10 April 2020 [ Zaretsky 2020 available online ].

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Say Yes to Distress – Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus

“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” So begins existentialist philosopher Albert Camus’ famous essay, The Myth of Sisyphus . [1] But what kind of man was Sisyphus? What did he do to incur the gods’ wrath? Accounts differ.

According to Camus, Homer described Sisyphus as “the wisest and most prudent of mortals.” [2] Other translations of The Iliad use “wiliest.” [3] While the connotations of these two descriptions differ vastly, Sisyphus was at the very least intelligent. The king of Corinth, Sisyphus once offered to help the river-god Asopus find his lost daughter in exchange for a spring of fresh water for his kingdom. Unfortunately, Zeus himself had absconded with Asopus’ daughter, and after Sisyphus led Asopus to her rescue, Zeus sent his brother Hades to bring Sisyphus to his death. [4] But Sisyphus tricked the god of the underworld and held him captive so that no mortal could die. When Ares, god of war, finally rescued Hades and Sisyphus perished, he asked his wife to forgo the traditional funeral rites. Because such an oversight was considered extremely impious in the Greek tradition, Sisyphus convinced Hades to let him go back to Earth to correct this error. [5, 6] Yet Sisyphus had no intention of returning to the underworld once his task was complete, and he lived for many more years before Hades tracked him down and sentenced him to the stone.

Sisyphus was hardly a common sinner. Descriptions of his mortal exploits indicate he was a clever man who was good to his kingdom, loved life and desired to remain on Earth for as long as possible. And for this spirit, the gods condemned him to the most rote and eternally frustrating task in the afterlife. The man who lived to cheat death did merely die; he was sentenced to an endless existence of reiteration, which the gods must have considered the exact opposite of the pleasures he found in life.

The nature of Sisyphus’ torture lies in this endless repetition. Each time he reaches the top of the mountain, the stone falls back to the bottom again. He must push it up the mountain not once, not twice, but over and over again for all eternity. Sisyphus’ bane is his consciousness. He recognizes the nature of his fate. He knows the toll the last trip took on his body and his will, the toll each previous trip took, and he knows he will have to go through it all again. The parallels here to everyday human life are obvious if we view life as a series of tasks to be completed, obstacles to be conquered. But there is no hope of succeeding finally and absolutely in life, just as Sisyphus cannot escape his punishment. There is always another task, another obstacle, and a human lifetime is no match cosmically for time and mortality.

Say Yes to Distress – Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus

Yet Camus reminds us that “there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.” [7] Once Sisyphus comes to grips with the inevitability of his lot, he regains a modicum of control. The rock sits before him. He can drive it up the mountain once again. The gods who put him there cease to matter. The task is in his power to complete. Each successful trip up the mountain is a victory. Each restart at the bottom is an opportunity. Therefore, Camus concludes, “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” [8] For Sisyphus, each step upward, each successful ascent, is another triumph over his fatigue, over the gods and over his past, and these cumulative victories are enough for his happiness.

For me, it is essential to the power of the myth that Sisyphus’ challenge is physical. The choice is certainly a reflection of the era of the story’s original telling (after all, this is the same culture that gave us the Olympics), but the ancient Greeks were not short on great thinkers either (see Aesop, Archimedes, Aristotle, Democritus, Euclid, Hippocrates, Homer, Plato, Pythagoras, Socrates, Sophocles and Zeno for starters). But consider the diminished impact of the following revision of the story:

The gods condemned Steve to ceaselessly solving the same Sudoku puzzle. But each time Steve was about to fill in the last number, all his work would disappear and he was forced to start again from scratch.

I find it hard to see the romantic luster of the original myth in Steve’s plight. We can imagine poor Steve chained to a desk, hunched over a worried scrap of newspaper, frantically jotting down numbers before they wash away. Hardly the same noble figure as Sisyphus straining under his rock.

Does Steve’s fate hit a little too close to home in comparison to our modern lives? Would our feelings about the story change if Steve’s task was to solve Fermat’s last theorem, cure cancer, or unlock the secret to thermonuclear fusion? I think not. Physical achievement holds a broad appeal across our society—consider the salaries earned by professional athletes in comparison to those of mathematicians, oncologists, and nuclear physicists.

What makes Sisyphus’ story so compelling and so tragic is its physicality, its very tangible nature. There are no half-measures, no equivocations. Sisyphus’ rock rests at the top of the mountain or it does not. Intellectual pursuits are too abstract, too indefinite, to carry the symbolism of myth. We can easily picture a scientist who develops a cure for all known forms of cancer, only to see the rise of some new mutation that resists her panacea. Did she truly cure cancer at all? But when the rock reaches the top of the mountain, the rock reaches the top of the mountain. Sisyphus’ task is accomplished. Hades may cause the rock to roll back down again or set a new peak in front of Sisyphus, but these are new challenges and not continuations of one long endeavor.

Likewise, the pure physical torment of Sisyphus’ task strikes a chord with us that the intellectual equivalent does not. There is no end to Sisyphus’ agony as he strains against his stone. His hands and shoulders scrape and bleed against the jagged rock, sweat cascades down his brow, every muscle fiber in his body burns and screams under the weight. Perhaps demons come to whip him if he tarries too long at the bottom before taking up his task again. How will the demons know if Steve is pondering the intricacies of the sums of exponentials or merely daydreaming of Elysia? Everyone sees Sisyphus’ pain. Everyone recognizes his effort. And when he succeeds, we can all acknowledge his triumph.

I in no way intend to diminish intellectual accomplishments. The genius of Leonardo da Vinci, Marie Curie and Albert Einstein is undisputed. But Camus’ Sisyphus demonstrates the psychological power of physical accomplishment. Because of the physical, tangible, definite nature of Sisyphus’ task, “his fate belongs to him.” [9] Each summit of the mountain is a victory of Sisyphus’ own making. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” because he has the power to conquer adversity time and time again. Imagine what he could accomplish (physically, intellectually or otherwise) were he not condemned to his rock. Would anyone doubt him any achievement to which he set his will?

At its foundation, The Myth of Sisyphus is an argument against suicide. For Camus, “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” [10] If life is hopeless and agonizing is one morally justified in taking one’s own life? Camus says no. The Myth of Sisyphus , as a defense of that view, is an essay about a moral choice represented by the image of ceaseless physical toil. It teaches the power and the morality of exercising one’s free will to overcome a physical challenge. And though Camus’ argument applies to any obstacles encountered in the course of our lives, it is the physical nature of Sisyphus’ challenge that makes this myth so inspiring. In the coming months, I will delve more deeply into the connections between physical action and morality. Camus gets us off to a good start here as we prepare to climb that mountain.

___________________

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. New York: Vintage International, 1991, p. 119.
Ibid, p. 119.
Homer. The Iliad . Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: The Penguin Group, 1991.
D’aulaire, Ingri and Edgar Parin. Book of Greek Myths . New York: Dell Publishing, 1992, p. 126-127.
Ibid, p. 127.
Pinsent, John. Greek Mythology . New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1982.
Camus, p. 121.
Ibid, p. 123.
Ibid, p. 3.

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The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus; Literary and Philosophical Essays, by Jean-Paul Sartre

It is not merely a coincidence of publication dates which brings Sartre and Camus simultaneously to my desk. We can scarcely imagine them apart; for they came into existence together for the American mind, a package deal and the chief cultural importation from postwar France. There has been attached to both from the beginning the same chic aura: Existentialism and the philosophy of the absurd, equally and indistinguishably the latest from Paris for the readers of Partisan Review or Commentary or eventually Life itself. Yet it is hard to think of two men temperamentally more different. Reading their essays, one’s first reaction is to cry out in protest, to try to separate them once and for all before their journalistic yoking is translated into the textbooks and they go down into history as immutably and ridiculously twinned as Wyatt and Surrey.

_____________

The world of Sartre is the European City, the City par excellence; so that when he comes to America, what makes our world surprisingly alien to him (this he touches on several times in the essays) is that he cannot find anywhere a space tight enough to define him. Even New York seems to him too open to Nature; and those typical American urban thoroughfares, the Euclid Avenues and Michigan Boulevards pushing relentlessly toward the open road, offend him. To him a real street leads not through but into a center, it is not a place which one travels but a closed circuit where one talks and pauses to drink with friends and talks again. It is out of such talk, out of the life of such streets, those outdoor drawing rooms, crowded and amiable (but which can seem suddenly prisons—with No Exit) that Sartre’s work comes: his essays first of all, but also his philosophy and novels, his plays and movies. His tempo and style are at once polemical and relaxed, the tempo and style of a man who knows that his audience, friendly or hostile, sits across the table from him and will be found night after night making the same promenade, choosing the same temporarily fashionable place to drink in and argue about the same books and manifestoes. He is sometimes the pundit, sometimes the wise guy; but he never feels it necessary to raise his voice.

Yet there is anguish at the heart of his tight little world; for though it was possible once to believe one’s café really Paris, Paris really France, France really Europe, and Europe really the world, two wars and one defeat have made it clear that France is a province even of Europe, and Europe itself on the verge of becoming the province of the oppressed continents it can no longer hold in submission. Besides, the talkers in the cafés have been made aware by Marx that they are only bourgeois, a tiny doomed colony even inside the province of a province. The unconscious image which haunts Sartre, his unavowed but compulsive myth, is that of a little bourgeois in eyeglasses, articulate above an empty glass, but being looked at in contempt and as an Other by some sullen worker hurrying home along the street he will one day claim as his own. To escape from this bourgeois otherness becomes finally his determining drive. And yet neither this psychological anguish—nor its translation into metaphysical terms—creates in Sartre any real humility. He insists upon being chief of his doomed kaffeeklatsch, pope and promulgator of the dogma of a church which he recognizes for an illusion, in a world without gods.

Camus’ real world, on the other hand (I mean the world of his childhood, the only world one knows rather than learns) is the world of North Africa: a world of seedy, second-rate towns and the ruins of classical magnificence; but also a world of endless spaces, of the sea and the desert under an unmitigated sun that dispels all illusions. This sea, one must not forget, is not merely a watery waste; it is the Mediterranean, the sea of Odysseus. The North Africa of Camus is not another America, for it extends deeply in time as well as vastly in space; it is remote from the nighttime civilization of contemporary Europe, and equally remote from Negro or Arab culture. It borders on a Greece that is elsewhere dead, or preserved merely in literature. The compelling image of Camus is not a myth of being looked at but of looking: the image of a boy gazing at the silhouetted shape of a girl dancing in a seaside pavilion—who, defined by a Mediterranean sunset, comes somehow to stand for the persistence of Helen. The notion of a natural beauty and a natural happiness, symbolized alike by the thoughtless bather turning mahogany on an Algerian beach and the pillars of a decayed temple among the heliotropes—but denied to the thinking man by virtue of the fact that he tries to know this happiness—this is the clue to the spiritual nostalgia of Camus. Sartre longs to share the misery of the oppressed, in order to be delivered from the more abject misery of not being miserable enough; and this, too, Camus can feel. But he is also moved by an obligation to be happy, as happy as the simple, sensual man.

He is essentially a religious thinker, as Sartre is essentially an ecclesiastical one; though both are atheist and anti-clerical. One feels, as a matter of fact, a double religious pull in Camus: toward the voluptuous polytheism of the Mediterranean and toward the bleak monotheism of the desert. It is tempting to believe that the really God-ridden Camus considers himself an atheist for the same reason as the ancient Romans considered the Jews atheists; that is, the Mediterranean side of his mind finds the image of God proposed by the desert side so austere in its conviction that absence is the essence of the divine that it takes it for an image of Nothing. At any rate, it is as natural for Camus to make myths as it is for Sartre to deal in abstractions; for the one is a poet-mystic who happens to philosophize, the other a philosopher-inquisitor who happens to write novels. Camus is always insisting in his essays that there is no ultimate difference between philosophy and poetry; and The Myth of Sisyphus swarms with a host of of symbolic figures in addition to the legendary sufferer of the title: Don Juan, Don Quixote, Helen, the Conqueror. Sartre at his most mythopoeic gives us the “en-soi” and the Other. It is typical, I think, that Sartre, who thinks he distrusts rhetoric and is really afraid of poetry, can tell us, “I regard Dos Passos as the greatest writer of our time.”

Camus, on the other hand, has developed in his essays a rhetoric, rich and varied, a style quite surprising to anyone who has assumed that the narrative technique of The Stranger , disjointed, spare, dry, represents the real voice of the author. No, he speaks in his own voice as the prophet out of the desert: in part as a man still talking to himself in order to people the waste with images and sounds; in part as one who carries a message, “Accept and rejoice!” The anti-rhetorician and the poet, the Pope and the Prophet—they make a strange pair. One would not have been surprised to find them joined in the relationship of hangman and victim, inquisitor and heretic; and in a sense they have at last symbolically attained such a relationship: Sartre with iron resolution identifying himself with the heresy-hunting Communist orthodoxy (in which, naturally, he does not really believe, but—) and Camus taking his stand with the non-violent resisters to its terror. The hard thing to believe is that they were once friends and allies.

It is difficult to tell from the public record what Camus’ original feelings were toward Sartre; even in the documents which testify to their falling out 1 he takes toward his former friend a cold and formal stance, addressing him as “Monsieur le directeur”; but Sartre, who has dealt often with Camus in print, speaks more personally and with at least a show of frankness at the blow-up. The present Collection of Sartre’s essays includes a piece on Camus’ The Stranger , which is, by and large, extremely complimentary. Yet Sartre cannot quite conceal the condescension of the scholar for the poet, observing wryly in reference to The Myth of Sisyphus , “M. Camus shows off a bit by quoting passages from Jaspers, Heidegger and Kierkegaard, whom, by the way, he does not always seem to have quite understood.” And in his final letter to “Mon cher Camus,” he makes it quite clear that he has earlier been somewhat less than candid in his criticism only out of regard for what he now characterizes as Camus’ strange mingling of conceit and sensitivity. What it turns out has all along irked him more than anything else is the formal elegance of Camus’ prose and his sense of himself as a “Mediterranean.” Sartre cannot forgive Camus for writing well.

What, then, bound together these unlikely comrades for ten or more years? In the first place, of course, the common elements in Sartre’s version of Existentialism and Camus’ philosophy of the absurd: these two parallel attempts to move from nihilism to humanism without any surrender to abstract morality or any leap to faith. In one sense, there is something a little silly in the ideological contortions it cost both men to arrive at the simple, self-evident decision that one must live and act. In another, there is something heroic in their attempt to accept their lives without pretending on any level that death is unreal; and there is something even more touching in their refusal to embrace death (there is no book I know which reveals more vividly the temptation to suicide that haunted their generation than The. Myth of Sisyphus ) as an escape from life and death alike.

Beyond this, they share a certain literary initiation, the conditioning by certain books which bound together an even larger number of their contemporaries: Nietzsche and Sade, Dostoevsky and Kafka, the American novel—especially Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway. Before they had found philosophical justifications for their commitments, they had created the sensibilities to sustain them out of the reading of these problematical and tragic books. In Camus particularly, Kafka appears as a realer, more intimate influence than Jaspers; and even Sartre sharpened his perceptions, critical and metaphysical, by close examinations of the novels of Faulkner. Certainly, even more from these books than from their philosophical sources, they derived a life style based on the satanic hero of the Romantics: the somewhat contradictory pose of the hero-villain who at once defies God and refuses to believe in him—the pose which they delight to call “absurd.”

Across the circle defined by the cult of absurdity and the belief in the “death of God,” there cuts another circle, determined this time not by literature but by experience, the experience of the Resistance. In the small area at the conjunction of these two circles flourish Sartre, Camus, and the relatively limited group of their colleagues: intellectuals determined to be true at once to their literary heritage and their Great Experience. Through the final recriminations of the two ex-friends, there echoes over and over that key word “Resistance . . . Resistance . . .” and reinforcing it, a group of associated catchwords, “Revolution . . . the Left . . . bourgeois. . . .” Who really represents the spirit of the Resistance? Who is “hopelessly bourgeois”? What is Left, what Right? These are the questions that define the magic circle over which Sartre still presides, and out of which Camus has escaped.

It is important to understand just what the term Resistance means at this moment to a large number of middle-aged men in Western Europe; yet for an American such an understanding is immensely difficult. Half historical event and half legend, it changes shape with the years, like the image of a lost love of one’s youth—as the true participants forget, and their ranks are swelled by imaginary veterans of the movement. An unofficial, spontaneous reaction which defied the Nazis and joined with American and British invaders to create the Liberation, the Resistance has profited by the fact that its victory meant its dissolution; that it never had the opportunity to become an established bureaucracy and reveal its own malice, stupidity, or inertia. The probability that without the armed might of certain “imperialist” foreign powers it would have come to nothing can be ignored. It did in fact share in a victory; and it has been able, therefore, to associate all the glamor of a successful cause with all the purity of a defeated one. It was a victory of the conquered—in what may be understood as the beginnings of a French revolution as well as the end of a war which took place in an already crushed and humiliated France.

By the time the Resistance had taken shape, Soviet Russia had shifted from an ally of Germany to a co-belligerent of the Allied powers; and the Western European Communist parties were able to take leading roles in its underground activities, having secret apparatuses already in existence. Such formerly nihilistic intellectuals as Camus and Sartre, who would have resisted service in the regular French army or have accepted it with reluctance and shame, found it possible to work with Communist “revolutionaries,” in a movement controlled by no established state. Quite unexpectedly, they discovered the possibility of heroism and sacrifice, those virtues which, when espoused by the bourgeoisie, they had regarded as hollow jokes. For this heroic adventure they felt somehow beholden to the Communists, who managed to give them for the first time the sense that they counted in the social life of their country.

In the postwar world, however, such intellectual members of the Resistance found themselves no longer hunted rebels but the bourgeois they had always been: successful novelists, eminent playwrights, professors. Meanwhile, the bourgeois self-hatred they had acquired first from Romantic literature had been compounded by their association with the Communists. It is almost impossible for any American, I think, to understand the passionate self-contempt of the middle-class intellectual in Europe: the appalling sense of guilt which urges him to seek his own destruction in a world where the existence of classes is offensively evident in a way we find it hard to imagine. Only by yielding again to the working class and its political program did it seem possible to find again the thrill of Resistance days, to escape from the shame of being comfortable and safe. But in France the majority of workers have entered or hover near the Communist party; over the Syndicalists, the Social Democrats, the Anarchists, the Communists have the great advantage of being successful themselves—and of representing the success of the Soviet Union. Whatever seems excessive in the price that has been exacted for such success is excessive, the bourgeois intellectual humbly reminds himself, only to his benighted bourgeois eyes.

There is no room for sentimental nonsense. The legitimate heirs of the Resistance are, everyone knows, the Left, and the Communists have pre-empted the Left. The legitimate development of the Resistance is, everyone equally knows, the Revolution; and the Communists have captured the Revolution; therefore. . . . Sartre has not been able to escape from the trap of this specious logic. Only by following the policies of the Soviet Union and of the Communist party of France does it seem to him possible to be faithful still to a belief in the “death of God” and his memories of the Resistance. He cannot, however, join the party, because its leaders would demand of him not less than everything: the humiliating acceptance of the least tenable of all modern philosophical positions—dialectical materialism, the notion of the “objective” guilt of all who disagree with them, a belief in Stalin’s intelligence and Khrushchev’s, etc., etc.

In an essay called “Materialism and Revolution,” Sartre pleads reasonably and respectfully with the masters of the Communist party to recognize that a real philosopher (Sartre, for instance) might swallow the major part of their political line if only he were permitted to abjure their theoretical “materialism”; and he has proved his case by accepting their version of the Korean war, the Rosenberg case, etc., etc. But even this is not enough; the Communists will not permit him to make an honest man of himself, insisting that he continue in his accustomed odd fidelity: marrying no one, but sleeping only with Communists.

Despite the similarity of his background, Camus has in his Homme revolté , and in the concluding essays of the present collection, broken out of this trap of nostalgia and self-hatred. He pursues still that image of Revolution revealed in the days of the Resistance, but for him it is a perpetually retreating horizon, a messiah who is always to come. He likewise chooses still to flee his bourgeois destiny by acting the absolute rebel; but he refuses to identify rebellion with an institutionalized Left. For him the revolution is really permanent, against oppression and terror even in the name of the Revolution, and against all in ourselves which longs for such bloody solutions out of weakness or despair.

It is not really intelligence that protects Camus from the elaborately rationalized abandonment of good sense into which Sartre has fallen. Sartre, as a matter of fact, boasts proudly that he is at home with philosophical texts that Camus pretends to scorn because he cannot understand. But no one is intelligent enough not to be stupid when his inner wishes demand it; and a man may, to his own grief, be smart enough to keep his best friends (though not his most indifferent enemies) from suspecting how hopeless a dupe he really is. I should like to think that it is the artist’s living faith in concrete realities, his inability to deny the world of fact however he may long to (Sartre is theoretically in favor of the concrete, but that is not the same thing) which finally saves Camus.

However one may assess his present anarchist-pacifist-religious position, one at least feels behind it a generous and sensitive man who respects his own humanity and ours, and responds to an actuality of anguish and wonder that we all share. The key, I think, is to be found in a passage of Camus’ essay called “Helen’s Exile.” Referring by implication to the famous phrase of Marx about changing the world rather than understanding it (a sentiment to which, by the way, Sartre eagerly subscribes), Camus observes: “But it is no less true that man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world.” It is Camus’ final virtue that he at least has not abandoned the world, but has persisted in his “lucid love” of man’s condition.

1 In the course of setting down these comments, I have felt obliged to re-read the exchange of letters between Camus and Sartre which followed upon the appearance in a magazine edited by Sartre of a rather vicious and not very astute review of Camus’ Homme revolMt. The whole exchange I found depressing: Camus is noble to the point of pompousness, Sartre insultingly familiar and flip. The documents are to be found in the May and August 1952 issues of Les Temps Modemes.

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The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays Mass Market Paperback – February 12, 1959

Print length 152 pages
Language English
Publisher Vintage
Publication date February 12, 1959
ISBN-10 0394700759
ISBN-13 978-0394700755
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (February 12, 1959)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 152 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0394700759
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0394700755
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.2 ounces
#28,935 in History of Philosophy & Schools of Thought

About the authors

Albert camus.

Albert Camus (French: [albɛʁ kamy]; 7 November 1913 - 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay The Rebel that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

Camus did not consider himself to be an existentialist despite usually being classified as one, even in his lifetime. In a 1945 interview, Camus rejected any ideological associations: ""No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked..."".

Camus was born in Algeria to a Pied-Noir family, and studied at the University of Algiers from which he graduated in 1936. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons to ""denounce two ideologies found in both the USSR and the USA"".

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Photograph by United Press International [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Justin O'Brien

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Books — The Myth of Sisyphus

Essays on The Myth of Sisyphus

Choosing the myth of sisyphus essay topics.

The Myth of Sisyphus, written by Albert Camus, is a thought-provoking philosophical essay that delves into the concept of absurdism and the human condition. As a student, selecting an essay topic related to The Myth of Sisyphus can be a challenging task. However, with the right guidance and understanding of the text, you can choose a topic that will captivate your audience and showcase your critical thinking skills.

Importance of the Topic

The Myth of Sisyphus presents a compelling argument about the futility of human existence and the necessity of finding meaning in a seemingly meaningless world. It challenges readers to confront their own existence and grapple with the absurdity of life. By choosing an essay topic related to this work, you have the opportunity to explore complex philosophical ideas and engage in deep introspection.

Advice on Choosing a Topic

When selecting a topic for your essay on The Myth of Sisyphus, it's essential to consider your interests and the themes that resonate with you. Additionally, you should choose a topic that allows for in-depth analysis and critical interpretation. Look for areas within the text that you find particularly intriguing and consider how you can craft an original and compelling argument.

Existentialism and Absurdism

Discuss the concept of absurdism in The Myth of Sisyphus and its implications for the human condition.
Explore the role of existentialism in Camus' essay and its relevance to contemporary society.
Analyze the character of Sisyphus as a symbol of the absurd hero and its significance in the text.

Morality and Ethics

Examine the ethical implications of Sisyphus' eternal punishment and its relationship to Camus' philosophy.
Discuss the moral implications of embracing the absurd and living a life without inherent meaning.
Explore the role of morality in the context of the absurd and how it shapes human behavior.

Freedom and Choice

Analyze the theme of freedom in The Myth of Sisyphus and its connection to the human experience.
Discuss the concept of choice and its significance in confronting the absurd, as presented in the essay.
Examine the tension between freedom and the absurd and how it influences human agency.

Meaning and Purpose

Explore the quest for meaning in a meaningless world as depicted in The Myth of Sisyphus.
Analyze the various strategies for finding meaning in the face of absurdity, as proposed by Camus.
Discuss the role of purpose in the human experience and how it relates to the absurd condition.

Philosophical Influences

Examine the influence of existentialist philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on Camus' ideas in The Myth of Sisyphus.
Discuss the philosophical lineage of absurdism and its connections to other schools of thought.
Analyze the relationship between Camus' essay and the wider philosophical tradition, including its original contributions.

These essay topics offer a starting point for your exploration of The Myth of Sisyphus and its philosophical implications. Remember to choose a topic that resonates with you and allows for critical analysis and original insights. By delving into the themes and ideas presented in the text, you can craft a compelling and intellectually stimulating essay that showcases your understanding of existentialist philosophy and the human condition.

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus: an Allegory for The Human Condition

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Theme of Absurdity and Human Resilience in "The Myth of Sisyphus"

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Albert Camus’ Interpretations of Absurdity in The Myth of Sisyphus

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A Lesson About Living From a Survivor of Suicide

If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you are in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741741 for the Crisis Text Line.

“T here is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” Albert Camus begins his 1942 essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” “and that is suicide.” It’s a statement to which I’ve long found myself attracted, for both its philosophical rigor (deciding to live, after all, is the ultimate existentialist commitment) and its willful posture of provocation. Let’s stop playing, Camus seems to be insisting, and get real about what matters. Of course, there is no indication that Camus ever considered taking his own life; his essay represents an extended thought experiment, addressing the conundrum of how to exist meaningfully in an absurd universe. Compare that with Clancy Martin, whose new book, How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind , starts with a blunt account of the most recent of the author’s many suicide attempts. “The last time I tried to kill myself,” he confesses, “was in my basement with a dog leash.”

Like Camus, Martin is a philosopher and a fiction writer; he teaches at the University of Missouri at Kansas City and is perhaps best known for his 2009 novel, How to Sell . In How Not to Kill Yourself , he seeks to understand suicide as both philosophy and impulse, interweaving personal history, his own deep reading in the literature of self-annihilation, and the ethical or metaphysical concerns that immersion inspires. The result is a work that feels sui generis. It is also a blunt and bracing read that people who have had experience with suicide may find challenging (if there’s any precursor, it may be A. Alvarez’s 1972 inquiry, The Savage God .) “All my life,” Martin notes, “I’ve feared and avoided physical suffering. It’s mental suffering that I wasn’t able to avoid—as indeed none of us can—and that was what motivated my suicide attempts. Precisely what I was hoping to prevent when I thought about my own death was worse pain. Self-harm? No thank you. Self-extinguish? Now you’ve got my attention.”

I cite that passage because, among other things, it’s funny—intentionally so. Martin may be, as he claims, addicted to suicidal ideation, but he is also aware of the incongruities of this addiction. Early in the book, he recalls a moment when, during an alcoholic blackout, he rear-ends another car on the highway. Martin takes off, veering first down an embankment and then, with two of his wheels destroyed, onto the frontage road. “I’ve got a video of pretty much the whole thing on a CCTV camera,” his lawyer later informs him. “It’s actually hilarious. You want to watch it? Might be therapeutic.” Martin clearly intends to make us laugh.

We can read this as a war story; How Not to Kill Yourself is full of those. And yet, the humor has a bigger point here: to introduce the issue of choice. As a result of the accident, Martin is sentenced to a brief incarceration at a minimum-security facility, where, during intake, he is shown the door through which he might be tempted to leave. The decision to stay or go—in a therapeutic sense, at least—belongs to him. If he makes the latter choice, however, he is told: “‘Be aware that as soon as you do—and we have cameras and alarms, so we’ll know when you do—that a warrant will be issued for your arrest. But no one is going to stop you, and no one from this facility is going to chase you down.’”

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The idea of free will and its implications galvanize Martin. “I felt like I was choosing to be there,” he observes of the prison, then connects this realization, this intuition, to “the Stoics’ ‘the door is always open’ argument in defense of the right to kill yourself.” In framing suicide as a choice rather than a compulsion, we may find an unexpected agency—though it should be quickly added that once genetics or psychiatric disorders come into play, the idea of volition becomes more complicated. For Clancy, though, throughout How Not to Kill Yourself , the notion of a choice becomes a central tenet, one he credits with his capacity to remain alive. “For the Stoic,” he explains, “the ability to commit suicide is the most fundamental and all but irrevocable expression of our freedom. Seneca puts his short version of the … argument this way: ‘A wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can.’” And yet, if this seems like a justification—death can be the wiser choice than living—it also contains its opposite. As he admits late in the book, “I’d always been free to do what I wanted.” For him, this has turned out to mean (much to his surprise, at times) staying alive.

T hat freedom should become the means of Martin’s reintegration (such as it is) feels almost redemptive, because he had often used that same freedom to make a different kind of choice. His first suicide attempt came at 6, when he intentionally stepped in front of a bus after school. He cites his father’s death in 1997 (a suicide itself, perhaps) as another point of origin; a few nights earlier, he’d refused to wire money so the older man could be released from a public mental hospital in Florida. In the aftermath, Martin began what he calls “the ‘gun-in-mouth’ phase of my daily morning suicide attempts,” a ritual that is precisely what it sounds like. That he never pulled the trigger had less to do with intention than it did with fear, he writes. If all of this sounds harrowing, that’s the whole idea; at times, reading How Not to Kill Yourself feels like the white-knuckle experience of fresh sobriety.

What does it feel like to live under constant pressure of death, in what the Austrian writer Jean Améry once called “the moment before the leap,” which Martin defines as “that instant in which one decides either to go on living or to die”? Améry, like Paul Celan and Primo Levi, survived the Holocaust only to die by suicide decades later. Again, Martin argues, this is the expression of a peculiar sort of freedom. “And how many minutes are left?” he writes, quoting Améry: “Maybe ten more minutes that one apportions to oneself. These minutes still let themselves stretch out into a deceptive eternity. Having already chosen to die, one is beset by the sweet enticement of life and its logic right up to the last second.” It is as cogent and (yes) rational an account of the mind existing in the shadow of its own self-destruction as I have read.

What Martin is revealing is a kind of nether state, in which the close contemplation of one’s impending nonexistence becomes at once expansive and unbearable. This is the place where things get serious. “Speaking for myself,” he confides, “especially at a certain stage of my life—say from puberty through my mid-twenties—suicide, despite my attempts, was still in some way a game I was playing … And while I was playing this game, performing this act for myself of the suicide who didn’t really want to die, slowly, slowly, over the course of the decades to come, I became more and more sincerely suicidal.” It’s a reminder to be careful of what you let yourself believe.

To highlight that, Martin turns his attention to a trio of writers who died by suicide: Édouard Levé, David Foster Wallace, and Nelly Arcan. All are his contemporaries who “provide the most detailed and intimate accounts I have found of what it feels like to continue living while frequently or even constantly wanting to kill yourself.” Nevertheless, and despite the power of their work (especially that of Levé, who died in 2007, 10 days after turning in his final novel, Suicide ), this is the one place How Not to Kill Yourself falters. It’s not Martin’s esteem for his subjects that is the problem, but rather his decision to reverse engineer their books, looking for evidence in the material they left behind. If all three wrote about their desire to die, at times in excruciating detail, the approach still seems to me to be tricky and self-determined, a cherry-picking of the data, so to speak.

Perhaps the problem with this section is that, for all its overlap, How Not to Kill Yourself is, in the end, its own sort of book. I say that not because it is nonfiction and Levé, Wallace, and Arcan are invoked for their fiction, but because Martin has an opposing set of goals in mind. For all his focus on suicidal trauma, he is, most fundamentally, trying to write his way out from under it, to create a book not of death but of life. That becomes clear in the closing chapter, which ends with a personal checklist, a set of suggested strategies to deflect the suicidal impulse. These include the value of family connections, the use of exercise, the necessity of abstaining from alcohol or drugs. What he’s getting at is presence, in the world and in one’s head. To explore such a balance, he uses the words of one more writer, Sarah Davys, who, in her 1971 memoir, A Time and a Time , recalls two suicide attempts from which, she laments, “I have brought back nothing”—that is, no useful information about life or death. “This is how I seem to have spent much of my life,” Davys tells us: “edging forward step by step, always forcing myself to look down at the abyss beneath my feet.”

[ Read: The suicide wave that never was ]

And yet, for Martin, there is, if not a way out, then a way (for the moment, at least) to live with the uncertainty. There is a way to make a choice. He recasts the 12-step bromide “One day at a time,” emphasizing all that is unknown about tomorrow. “I’m not sober for nine years,” he reflects, “or four years, or since my last relapse: I’m only ever sober today. You know, I’m also only ever alive today. In fact I’m only ever alive right now. I don’t know if I’ll make it to the end of the day—none of us do, whether we’re suicidal or not. Death comes when it pleases.”

Such a sentiment is as existential as any in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” although Martin’s terms are more down-to-earth. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus insists at the end of his essay, an acknowledgment of the futility of his existence but also of the grace or consolation that comes from choosing to accept one’s fate. Martin has less use for Camus than I do, finding his conclusion “not entirely satisfying.” Yet both, I think, work in similar territory, in which in order to learn how to die, we must first, and most essentially, learn how to live.

A Lesson About Living From a Survivor of Suicide

What if ‘Groundhog Day’ talks about all of us? An investigation into the most famous time loop in cinema

Critics santiago alonso and isabel sánchez have published an essay on the comedy starring bill murray that went on to gain cult status, generate imitations, and raise existential questions 30 years after its release.

What does “Groundhog Day” mean to you? If the phrase automatically leads you to think about the same day repeating itself over and over again, it is thanks to the 1993 movie of the same name, which is one of the most influential comedies of recent decades.

The film’s title comes from a real life annual tradition, celebrated in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania on February 2. Groundhog Day is the day when, according to a Pennsylvania Dutch superstition, a groundhog known as Punxsutawney Phil predicts how long the winter will continue, based on whether or not he sees his shadow when he emerges from his burrow in the morning.

The movie follows the misadventures of surly meteorologist Phil ( Bill Murray ), who has been sent to broadcast from the Pennsylvania town on the eponymous Groundhog Day. However, after he finishes recording his segment, he is forced to spend the night in the town due to bad weather. To his horror, when he wakes up, it is February 2 again, and nobody has noticed except him. The same happens the next day, and the next, and the next. And so on indefinitely.

Directed by Harold Ramis, Groundhog Day became an instant classic and spawned an ever-increasing number of films in the same narrative mold, such as Edge of Tomorrow (2014), Happy Death Day (2017), and Palm Springs (2020). It also became an inexhaustible source of analysis, theories, and all kinds of literature.

One such study is the recently published Prisioneros del bucle (Prisoners of the loop), a Spanish-language essay in which journalists and film critics Santiago Alonso and Isabel Sánchez delve into the key elements that made Groundhog Day a cultural phenomenon. “It’s sobering to think that a film from only 30 years ago has given rise to so many others that copy it or are based on it. There was something to research,” Alonso tells EL PAÍS. For the co-author, the reasons for the study’s validity are clear: “It is due to the philosophical depth of its topic. Any viewer can identify and become hooked on its existentialist perspective. And, above all, the idea behind the plot is great.”

In one of the scenes in the film, Phil shares his affliction with the patrons of a bowling alley and, after asking them what they would do if their life was stuck in a place where every day is the same and nothing you do matters, one responds: “That’s the story of my life.”

“In middle age, we often get bored with our own lives, it seems like we are repeating the same day over and over again,” Isabel Sánchez reflects. The writer admits that what interested her most about the comedy is its nature as a fantastical love story that develops over time, which puts it in the orbit of classic films such as A Matter of Life or Death (1946), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), and Portrait of Jennie (1948). After all, the role of Rita, the producer played by Andie MacDowell , is essential for Phil’s transformation.

“When Rita tells him what her perfect man would be like, she unknowingly becomes his guide and draws him a map,” the journalist explains. “It makes him realize that he is an asshole but he can take a path to become better, to see that life can be something else, and to learn to enjoy it as part of a community.”

Prisioneros del bucle is made up of a first part that tells the story of the production of the film, a second based around the literary and cinematographic background and its philosophical interpretations, and a third where the two authors dialogue about other movies involving time loops.

Jon Mikel Caballero, director of the Spanish movie The Incredible Shrinking Wknd (2019), features in the book with a final interview, as does the screenwriter of Groundhog Day , Danny Rubin. The Californian playwright says that the idea for the story came to him from the novel The Vampire Lestat (1985), by Anne Rice. “The universe Rice had created included people who were exactly like us, except in a few things. One of them was that they were always the same age and lived forever. That’s what I started thinking about that day,” Rubin clarifies in the book.

The film was a huge box office success in 1993 but also marked the end of the friendship and collaboration between Ramis and Murray. Both had worked together on Meatballs (1979), Caddyshack (1980), and Ghostbusters (1984), movies that are considered to have contributed to transforming the codes of American comedy of their time.

However, Murray’s stress over his divorce during the filming of Groundhog Day and the creative differences between the two (apparently Murray, who was looking for a career change, advocated a more tragic original version of Rubin’s script, while Ramis turned it into a romantic comedy) created an extremely tense atmosphere. According to the book How to be Bill Murray (Gavin Edwards, 2016), the actor stopped speaking to Ramis and hired a deaf-mute interpreter to mediate between them using sign language. They did not speak again until Murray decided to visit the terminally ill filmmaker shortly before his death in 2014.

“It was always said that, of the two, Bill Murray was the one who threw the map out the window and Harold Ramis was the one who looked for a way to get home,” says Sánchez. “That’s why they worked so well as a duo, one was chaos and the other was order.”

For Alonso, “it is not worth it” to think about what the film would have been like if that more dramatic vision that the screenwriter and Murray initially advocated had been imposed: “What matters is what it was. If one of the parts of the whole had been different or was made differently, perhaps we would not be talking about the same film.” Sanchez also vindicates Ramis and his sense of lightness: “He achieved a very difficult balance between comedy, romance, and thematic depth. Curiously, despite how light it appears to be, it has given philosophers, psychologists, and all kinds of theorists much more to talk about than other more pretentious films.”

The groundhog is Jesus Christ

Since the premiere of Groundhog Day , many fans have tried to determine how many years Murray’s character spends living on February 2. Although the film only shows 38 different days, the information that the protagonist gives about everything he has done, together with the time it would take him to learn to sculpt ice, speak French, or play the piano at the level he demonstrates, recently led journalist Simon Gallagher to place his estimate at 33 years and 350 days.

Others have taken deep dives into its alleged religious subtext. Danny Rubin received letters from monks or Kabbalah researchers who thought the screenwriter was one of them. There are also those who have seen in the transformation of the character a reflection of the path of perfection of Saint Teresa of Ávila, based on the idea of progress from the contemplative life. And then there is the critic and university professor Michael Bronski, who in 2004 argued: “The groundhog is clearly the risen Christ, the ever-hopeful renewal of life in spring. And when I say that the groundhog is Jesus, I say it with great respect.”

Rabbi Niles Goldstein commented on the ending, when the protagonist is allowed to live outside the loop once he has become the best version of himself: “The film tells us, as Judaism does, that the work is not finished until the world has been made perfect.” In Prisioneros del bucle , Alonso and Sánchez go back to other works that have dealt with the theme of time, self-improvement, and the existential trap.

One reference that stands out is the mythical tale of Sisyphus , the character from Greek mythology condemned by the gods to push a large stone up a mountain, which would roll back down just before reaching the top, forcing him to repeat the process for eternity. As the book states, in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) the philosopher Albert Camus invited us to imagine that the condemned man was happy, because, despite the fact that “the gods thought, with some reason, that there is no punishment more terrible than useless and hopeless work”, Sisyphus still experienced freedom every hour he descended the mountain again.

“The film reflects a model of change that consists of letting oneself accept the repetition,” explains Alonso. “Many people are afraid of repetition because of the feeling of not moving and always doing the same thing over and again, but if you manage to change something in yourself and ride the loop, your perspective changes.”

Sánchez equates the film’s outline with the theory of grief: “According to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, grief is structured in five phases: denial, anger, negotiation, depression, and acceptance. “They are the steps that the character takes psychologically. Phil is someone with Peter Pan syndrome, who never thinks about anyone, and does whatever he wants, and he progressively acquires a new perspective.”

The evocative influence of Groundhog Day goes further. In 2016, director Cynthia Kao made the short Groundhog Day for a Black Man , a critique of police racism. It tells the story of a Black man who, no matter what he does, is trapped in a loop and always ends up being murdered by a police officer.

It is a premise that was also taken by the Oscar-winning medium-length film Two Distant Strangers (2020). Not to mention other films also devoted to exploring how a decision made on one day can alter an entire existence, a theme that ranges from Edgar Neville’s Spanish classic La vida en un hilo (1945), through Mr. Nobody (2009), until the recent premiere on Netflix last February of the series One Day , an adaptation of the book of the same name by David Nicholls, which shows what it is like every July 15 throughout the life of Emma and Dexter, who meet at their graduation and spend a night together but whose lives take different paths from the morning after.

“I really like stories that take place in a single day, with or without a loop. Also in literature, such as Mrs Dalloway [1925], by Virginia Woolf. It is a way to concentrate an entire life and an entire person on how they live a day,” says Isabel Sánchez. “You can’t see what your life would be like every time you choose to do one thing or another, but art does open those possibilities to you. That cliché phrase ‘live each day as if it were your last’ has a ring of truth because, by chance or by design, any day can change your life.” By the way, the groundhog Punxsutawney Phil has predicted that spring will come early this year.

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The Myth Of Sisyphus And Other Essays Albert Camus Translated from the French by Justin O'Brien 1955. Contents Preface The Myth Of Sisyphus An Absurd Reasoning Absurdity and Suicide ... —Albert Camus, Paris, March 1955 for PASCAL PIA O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.
PDF Myth of Sisyphus
The myth of Sisyphus is a potent image of futility. Camus' response is that only the 'lucid' recognition of the absurdity of existence liberates us from belief in another life and permits us to live for the instant, for the beauty, pleasure and the 'implacable grandeur' of existence. Lucidity is the clarity and courage of mind which ...
The Myth of Sisyphus
The Myth of Sisyphus (French: Le mythe de Sisyphe) is a 1942 philosophical essay by Albert Camus.Influenced by philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche, Camus introduces his philosophy of the absurd.The absurd lies in the juxtaposition between the fundamental human need to attribute meaning to life and the "unreasonable silence" of the universe in ...
The Myth of Sisyphus
The Myth of Sisyphus, philosophical essay by Albert Camus, published in French in 1942 as Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Published in the same year as Camus's novel L'Étranger ( The Stranger ), The Myth of Sisyphus contains a sympathetic analysis of contemporary nihilism and touches on the nature of the absurd. Together the two works established his ...
The Myth of Sisyphus: Full Work Summary
Full Work Summary. The central concern of The Myth of Sisyphus is what Camus calls "the absurd." Camus claims that there is a fundamental conflict between what we want from the universe (whether it be meaning, order, or reasons) and what we find in the universe (formless chaos). We will never find in life itself the meaning that we want to find.
The Myth of Sisyphus: Embracing the Absurdity of Existence
Many consider Albert Camus's "The Myth of Sisyphus" to be a seminal philosophical essay because of the way it questions established ideas and provides a fresh viewpoint on humanity. In this article, Camus examines the idea of absurdity, which he defines as the struggle between humanity's need for meaning and the universe's apathy.
A Summary and Analysis of the Myth of Sisyphus
The story of Sisyphus is so well-known in modern times thanks to Albert Camus, whose essay ' The Myth of Sisyphus ' (1942) is an important text about the absurdity of modern life (although it's often described as being 'Existentialist', Camus' essay is actually closer to Absurdism). For Camus, Sisyphus is the poster-boy for ...
Camus on the Absurd: The Myth of Sisyphus
This essay will outline the origin and consequences of Camus's notion of the absurd from his 1942 The Myth of Sisyphus.[1] 1. The Absurd and its Origin. There are many things we might naturally call absurd: a rude joke, an outrageous statement, or the price of a pair of designer jeans.
The Myth of Sisyphus: Study Guide
The Myth of Sisyphus is a philosophical essay written by French author and philosopher Albert Camus and published (as Mythe de Sisyphe) in 1942.In it, Camus explores the absurd, which he identifies as coming about in the confrontation between our desire for clarity and our understanding of the world's irrationality.. The essay contains no metaphysics, since Camus's goal in The Myth of ...
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus Plot Summary
Though Camus praises Dostoevsky for showing the absurd in action—which is a special capability of novels as opposed to philosophy—he criticizes Dostoevsky for turning back to God later in his personal life. Camus concludes his essay by discussing the myth of Sisyphus mentioned in the title. Sisyphus, a Greek King, was condemned by the gods.
"The Myth of Sisyphus", analysis of the essay by Albert Camus
The composition of the essay is such that the myth of Sisyphus itself occupies only an insignificant part of the work and is placed in the epilogue. He summarizes the study of the problem of the absurdity of the existence of an individual. Sisyphus, according to the writer, is a happy person, because he rejects the gods and personally controls ...
The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays
Books. The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays. Albert Camus. Vintage Books, 1955 - Absurd (Philosophy) - 151 pages. One of the most influential works of the 20th century, this is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide: the ...
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus
The essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), 1942, expounds notion of acceptance of the absurd of Camus with "the total absence of hope, which has nothing to do with despair, a continual refusal, which must not be confused with renouncement - and a conscious dissatisfaction." Meursault, central character of L'Étranger (The Stranger ...
Albert Camus: THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. ... Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred ...
The myth of Sisyphus : and other essays : Camus, Albert, 1913-1960
The myth of Sisyphus : and other essays Bookreader Item Preview ... The myth of Sisyphus : and other essays by Camus, Albert, 1913-1960. Publication date 1955 Publisher New York : Vintage Books Collection printdisabled; marygrovecollege; internetarchivebooks; americana Contributor
Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus is a book-length philosophical essay by French-Algerian writer Albert Camus. It serves as an introduction to Camus' philosophy of Absurdism. The book opens with the famous quote:
Albert Camus
1. The Paradoxes of Camus's Absurdist Philosophy. There are various paradoxical elements in Camus's approach to philosophy. In his book-length essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus presents a philosophy that contests philosophy itself.This essay belongs squarely in the philosophical tradition of existentialism but Camus denied being an existentialist.
Say Yes to Distress
January 1, 2013. "The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.". So begins existentialist philosopher Albert Camus' famous essay, The ...
The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus; Literary and Philosophical
The Myth of Sisyphus. By Albert Camus. Knopf. 212 pp. $3.50. Literary and Philosophical Essays. By Jean-Paul Sartre. Criterion. 239 pp. $4.00. It is not merely a coincidence of publication dates which brings Sartre and Camus simultaneously to my desk.
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
One of the most influential works of this century, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide; the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Albert Camus brilliantly posits a way out of ...
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays: Camus, Albert: 9780394700755
The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays Mass Market Paperback - February 12, 1959. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Mass Market Paperback - February 12, 1959. by Albert Camus (Author) 3,357. See all formats and editions. Report an issue with this product or seller. Print length.
Essays on The Myth of Sisyphus
3 pages / 1470 words. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus is a philosophical essay written in 1942 that addresses the question of whether life is worth living through. From the perspective of the author, people share a similar path to the Greek hero Sisyphus, moving a boulder up... The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus Personal Philosophy.
Sisyphus
The Myth of Sisyphus, a 1942 philosophical essay by Albert Camus which uses Sisyphus' punishment as a symbol for the absurd. Sisyphus: The Myth, a 2021 South Korean TV series, which uses the myth as a symbol for its theme. Sisyphus cooling, a cooling technique named after the Sisyphus myth; Syzyfowe prace, a novel by Stefan Żeromski
The Myth of Sisyphus
The Myth of Sisyphus. Albert Camus. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Sep 15, 2015 - Philosophy - 88 pages. The Myth of Sisyphus is a philosophical essay by Albert Camus. It comprises about 119 pages and was published originally in 1942 in French as Le Mythe de Sisyphe; the English translation by Justin O'Brien followed in 1955.
My review of "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus
#the myth of sisyphus #reading #The end is the absurd universe and that attitude of mind which lights the world with its true colors to bring out the privileged and implacable visage which that attitude has discerned in it #seriously why #albert camus #albert camus why would you do this to me smh my head #I AM SCREAMING
A Lesson About Living From a Survivor of Suicide
"T here is but one truly serious philosophical problem," Albert Camus begins his 1942 essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus," "and that is suicide." It's a statement to which I've long ...
What if 'Groundhog Day' talks about all of us? An investigation into
As the book states, in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) the philosopher Albert Camus invited us to imagine that the condemned man was happy, because, despite the fact that "the gods thought, with some reason, that there is no punishment more terrible than useless and hopeless work", Sisyphus still experienced freedom every hour he descended the ...

The Myth of Sisyphus: Embracing the Absurdity of Existence 9 min read

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#1. The Absurdity of Existence: Exploring the Foundations of “The Myth of Sisyphus”

The Absurd Hero: Sisyphus and His Eternal Struggle

#2. Embracing the Absurd: Camus’ Examination of the Human Condition

The Search for Meaning: Absurdism versus Traditional Philosophies

#3. Absurdity and Rebellion: The Relevance of “The Myth of Sisyphus” in Today’s World

Camus’ Call for Revolt: Embracing Freedom and Authenticity

#4. The Absurd in Everyday Life: Applying Camus’ Philosophy

Embracing the Absurd: Finding Freedom and Serenity

#5. Critiques and Controversies: Examining the Reception of “The Myth of Sisyphus”

The Influence of “The Myth of Sisyphus” on Philosophy and Literature

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