The Philosophy Arc has begun.
"O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible" - Pindar
The Myth of Sisyphus is a 1942 philosophical essay by none other than the great Albert Camus (kam-OO, please don't say kay-mus that's like criminal behaviour).
Camus' younger life was one that was surrounded by constant conflict. He grew up in a poor neighbourhood in his native homeland of Algeria, where the native Algerian population was caught up in constant battle with the colonizing French Europeans. Camus' mother was a humble cleaning lady and never knew his father — as he was killed during the First World War when Camus was just an infant. Camus himself was a second-generation French inhabitant of Algeria and was thus referred to as a "Pied-Noir" - black foot, that is someone born of European descent but born in Algeria.
Rather than distance himself from the conflict around him, Camus sought to understand and explore the roots of conflict. Rebellious by nature, Camus was involved in numerous political parties throughout his time and also worked as a resistance journalist for many newspaper publishers. After covering many war stories, witnessing so much meaningless bloodshed, Camus dwelled on the question of whether one's life still has value even amidst, or even despite, the world's arbitrary cruelty.
When he to moved to Paris in 1940 he wrote his 'first cycle' - the novel L'Étranger (The Stranger), the play Caligula and Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus).
The Myth of Sisyphus is widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophical texts of the 20th century that provides a comprehensive mediation on the legitimacy, or rather, the illegitimacy of suicide.
The Myth of Sisyphus marks the beginning of Camus’ journey to reconcile the problem of suicide, an idea he would explore throughout his lifetime. He asks whether it is legitimate or necessary to find if life has meaning. Or if it is even possible to meet suicide face-to-face and find something more?
He begins with a provocative statement:
"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”
Rather than seek to address the question such as the meaning of life, Camus wants to address the apparent complement to that question - suicide.
A man, at that every instance before he throws himself off the bridge is in an emotional state, one in which he is certain of what life has to offer and decides that nothing more can be experienced. Yet to live is to be damned, in the end, to live is to eventually die.
Many live their lives in hope of tomorrow, the hope of a better future, they build their lives as if death is evitable - it's the destination we all share, tomorrow always brings us one step closer to death. In a sense, constantly living for tomorrow is to deprive yourself of life's present. You cannot have the life of someone else, you cannot know if there is anything after death, therefore we must think as though this life is our only one — that life is finite. Life stripped of such romanticism, becomes a seemingly cruel, cold and indifferent place, a truly absurd reality. We may never find the meaning, all rationality, all the science in the world cannot give us meaning as all will end in abstraction and metaphor.
"From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all."
Many philosophers of the past have dwelled on the question of life, striving to somehow rationalize and somehow resolve the absurd. Camus claims that Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Lev Shestov, Søren Kierkegaard, and Edmund Husserl all make different arguments for resolving absurdity but all end up in circular contradictory logic or surrender their reason and turn to God. Camus, instead of trying to resolve absurdity, seeks to embrace absurdity and justifies why life is worth living even despite the world's seemingly cruel indifference. To fully embrace the absurd is to experience the most of what this unreasonable reality has to offer.
Acknowledging this absurd reality and fully coming to terms with it, one can still be fully content with living as he is no longer shackled by the chains of hope for a better future or immortality; without the need to give life meaning or devote himself to a higher cause, the absurd man becomes truly free to enjoy life's most immediate pleasures and can "enjoy freedom with regard to common rules".
"if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living."
The most living is not something that can be quantified on an absolute scale, it can only be evaluated through the quantity of unique experiences he has accumulated throughout his lifetime. But all men have the same quantity of experiences, twenty years for one is also twenty years for another, yet it is very likely that one man has lived more than another. Could it be because one man was more fortunate with money, was more handsome than the other, or was born into a better era where he was able to live more? No. The absurd teaches us that all experiences are unimportant, yet it simultaneously urges us towards the greatest quantity of experiences. The mistake is thinking that the quantity of experiences depends on the circumstances of our condition. Time moves the for all of us, it is only up to us to be conscious of our absurd reality, of everyday life; being aware of one's life, one's revolt, and one's freedom. Living to the maximum requires us to consciously appreciate all life has to offer.
"What in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime. That is his field, that is his action, which he shields from any judgement but his own. A greater life cannot mean for him another life."
The absurd man is a man that ceases to hope. Acknowledging that his actions in the end amount to cosmic nothingness, he pushes forward regardless knowing his time is limited he seeks out all life has to offer. Camus gives three examples of an absurd man. He begins with Don Juan, a serial womanizer who seeks a life of passion going from woman to woman. It is not through a lack of love that Don Juan goes from woman to woman but a love for love that he chooses to spread his love and repeat his gift over and over again. To Don Juan, having different lovers over and over, is his way of exercising his limited freedom, it makes him feel alive and therefore conscious of all his past romances.
Camus' next example is the actor, who projects himself deeply into lives that are not his own, in three hours he travels the whole course of the dead-end path that the man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover. He lives both for the fantasy and spectacle of others and also for the great number of lives he himself has lived.
"For him, not to be known is not to act, and not acting is dying a hundred times with all the creatures he would have brought to life or resuscitated."
Camus' third example of the absurd man is the conqueror, the one warrior that completely forgoes any hope for eternity to fully engage in history. His struggle, his unwillingness to yield, his eagerness to fight are how he feels the most alive. The conquerors are merely those who are conscious enough of their own strength and potential enough to be sure of living at those heights. To be remembered and romanticized after death is not the objective for the conqueror; in the rebel universe of the conqueror, death is the ultimate injustice.
"All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime."
The most absurd character in the human world are those who create; the artists, the writers, the sculptors of the world. "If the world were clear, art would not exist"; "We have art in order to not die from the truth," said Nietzsche. The stroke of the brush, the picking of flowers, and the tap of the chisel has no more significance than the continual and imperceptible creation in which the actor, the conqueror, and all absurd men indulge in every day. Art is not something that seeks to remedy or solve the questions of existence but rather to merely explain and describe. Creation and art are the purest forms of rebellion and expression of freedom, despite knowing that one's creation essentially has no future, that a creation destroyed within days is fundamentally no different to one that lives on for centuries, that being an artist is to work and create "for nothing", the artist will still give the void its colours.
Sisyphus forever rolling the boulder
Sisyphus twice tricked the gods, and twice cheated death. When Sisyphus was finally brought back to the underworld, as punishment for his defiance and trickery, Hades condemned him to roll a massive boulder up a steep hill of the underworld, only before he reached the summit, the boulder would roll all the way back down to the foot of the hill, consigning Sisyphus to an eternity of futile struggle. To Camus, Sisyphus was the epitome of an absurd hero, a man who loves life, hates death, and is condemned to an existence of utter hopelessness.
The myth of Sisyphus is a mirror of the human condition, how the working man working in offices and factories, like Sisyphus, is condemned to an existence of constant struggle without the comfort of eternity.
"The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious."
When Sisyphus marches down the hill to start anew, he is consciously aware of his futile struggle and absurd reality. "It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end." Sisyphus, scorning his own condition will not bring about any change, his reality is all that he has and like the true absurd hero he is, recognises his struggle and the certainty of his fate; once he is at peace with his reality, devoid of any fantastical illusions, he can finally find his own joy in his ceaseless struggle.
"But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy"
Indeed.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
WHO UP PUSHING THEY BOULDER???
