In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus defines the absurd with, “This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” At the outset the essay poses a critical question on whether life is worth living or should be voluntarily terminated. Brought face to face with this absurd world, a person longs for the answers that would clarify his position and purpose in this universe, but being unable to find the satisfactory explanations he or she succumbs to despair. The very irrationality of human existence with regard to the world triggers this desperate dilemma of life’s worthiness or worthlessness. This seemingly futile existence, devoid of purpose, drives him to the brink of despair and makes him contemplate suicide out of sheer despondency and hopelessness.
Camus opens The Myth of Sisyphus with a presentation of two options: to commit suicide in the face of absurdity, or to live in denial. In an attempt to provide a meaning to this meaningless existence, some philosophers commit, as Camus puts it, “philosophical suicide,” this is: by espousing rationality with irrational beliefs in God and the afterlife. To Camus, an ideal or authentic individual is one who rejects suicide, both physical and philosophical, and heroically accepts his human condition without resorting to self-deceptive, religious illusions. This harsh, austere reality with no consolation of eternal life, Camus argues, offers freedom of action and choice and imposes no moral standards which would restrict individual life and confine it to the set of outworn conventional values.
This feeling of absurdity is what paves the way for the notion of the absurd. When the feeling of absurdity allows for the concept of the absurd to manifest, there is a tension or a disproportion between what we desire from the world and what the world itself can offer, or as Camus says, “a divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints.” He writes 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 (chaos). It is a fundamental and irreducible element of the human existence, because we, at our very core, desire from the world meaning, an explanation for our existence, which the world cannot offer us.
Camus asks if the conclusion that life is meaningless necessarily leads one to commit suicide. If life has no meaning, does that mean that life is not worth living? If that were the case, one would have no option but to make a leap of faith or to commit suicide. But Camus is interested in pursuing a third possibility: that we can accept and live in a world devoid of meaning or purpose.
The feeling of the absurd which Camus is referring to, perhaps by some assigned, comprehensible but false meaning of life or existence or the universe, keeps one from truly embracing and fully exercising his own existence, preventing “good living.” Because it is only through the acceptance of the absurd and a rebellion against it, a middle ground between voluntary death and denial, ignoring the absurd or refusing to realize it removes from the mind an essential knowledge – an essential knowledge that allows for the richest and most fulfilling life experience, beyond that of one which never fully comprehends the nature of the relationship between oneself and the world, or the disjunction between what one may frivolously desire from the world to substantiate existence and life and the world’s complexity which prevents it.
Camus implies that the only meaning that can be drawn from life must be intrinsic, since any extrinsic value or meaning is nonexistent or well beyond the realm of human intelligibility. Suicide and denial in the face of the absurd are counteractive to good living. Acknowledging the absurd, and living one’s life regardless of the absence of concrete answers or formulas or meaning in existence, is what Camus implies. Life cannot be lived well without an understanding of the absurd, because any understanding of existence or life absent or in denial of the notion of the absurd would innately be false – and in that falsehood so could all other aspects of that life be perceived incompletely, falsely. An understanding of and rebellion against the absurd must be attained and employed if one is to fully exercise his own existence.
This work has captured the internal plight of much of the modern world. When a person begins to question his own monotonous reality, seeking to find meaning behind his daily motions of life and failing to find any at all, he comes to contemplate that void. Camus implies that if one were to honestly think about “nothing,” it would be the contemplation of the futility of most questions in life. He exemplifies the fact that the earth revolves around the sun. People lived and died in pursuit of that knowledge, and yet the question and answer alike do not matter, because we live in accordance to social structures and norms that are man-made and will one day be reformed, replaced, or blinked out of existence. The insignificance of human life in comparison to the infinite void of space and the abstract concept of time, which rules over humanity, is the notion which can manifest in the minds of men and bring about absurdity.
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. Sisyphus, the ideal absurd hero, and his punishment are representative of the human condition: Sisyphus must struggle perpetually and without hope of success. Says Camus, so long as he accepts that there is nothing more to life than this absurd struggle, then he can find happiness in it. —Tongue Sophistries
