Camus claims that Sisyphus is the ideal absurd hero and that his punishment is representative of the human condition: Sisyphus must struggle perpetually and without hope of success. The book ends with a discussion of the myth of Sisyphus, who, according to the Greek myth, was punished for all eternity to roll a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down to the bottom when he reaches the top. It presents a certain worldview that deals with particular matters rather than aiming for universal themes.
Absurd art does not try to explain experience, but simply describes it.
CAMUS SISYPHUS FREE
Facing the absurd does not entail suicide, but, on the contrary, allows us to live life to its fullest.Ĭamus identifies three characteristics of the absurd life: revolt (we must not accept any answer or reconciliation in our struggle), freedom (we are absolutely free to think and behave as we choose), and passion (we must pursue a life of rich and diverse experiences).Ĭamus gives four examples of the absurd life: the seducer, who pursues the passions of the moment the actor, who compresses the passions of hundreds of lives into a stage career the conqueror, or rebel, whose political struggle focuses his energies and the artist, who creates entire worlds. Living with the absurd, Camus suggests, is a matter of facing this fundamental contradiction and maintaining constant awareness of it. Existentialists find no meaning or order in existence and then attempt to find some sort of transcendence or meaning in this very meaninglessness. Camus claims that existentialist philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Chestov, and Jaspers, and phenomenologists such as Husserl, all confront the contradiction of the absurd but then try to escape from it. The absurd is a contradiction that cannot be reconciled, and any attempt to reconcile this contradiction is simply an attempt to escape from it: facing the absurd is struggling against it. Camus is interested in pursuing a third possibility: that we can accept and live in a world devoid of meaning or purpose. If life has no meaning, does that mean life is not worth living? If that were the case, we would have no option but to make a leap of faith or to commit suicide, says Camus. Camus opens the essay by asking if this latter conclusion that life is meaningless necessarily leads one to commit suicide. Either we will discover that meaning through a leap of faith, by placing our hopes in a God beyond this world, or we will conclude that life is meaningless. We will never find in life itself the meaning that we want to find. 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).
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