Creator1

Sisyphus is a tale from Greek mythology of a man who through hubris, thought that he could cheat death. Death, being an actual physical being rather than being only a concept. Sisyphus placed death in chains so that no other person may have to die and they can live forever. Eventually (and this is fast forwarding quite a bit), death is liberated and it becomes Sisyphus’s time to die. Due to his insubordination, and for his capture of death, his punishment must be served out for all eternity. The gods decide that Sisyphus must push a large boulder up a mountain, but after reaching the top, the boulder rolls down the hill. Sisyphus must start over again, and again.

Many people have written about this story and what it means to them. i do want to explore Albert Camus’s writing, ‘the Myth of Sisyphus’. Albert Camus was a French -Algerian journalist, essayist, author, and pretty much everything except being a philosopher, he rejected this term. Regardless of his feelings of it, the world has regarded him as a philosopher based on a few of his writings, this being one of them.

In this essay, Camus wants to explore Sisyphus’s thoughts the moment the boulder returns to the bottom and our hero is left walking heavy-footed, exhausted, defeated. As he puts it, ‘a measured step towards the torment of which he will never know the end.’ This is arguably, one of the most tragic parts of this story, the point where our hero has a cognizant awakening to his gravity of his punishment, it’s designed to invoke hopelessness.

There is an easy jump from Sisyphus’s condition and a parallel world that most of currently live in. It make sense for us to compare his endless, senseless, labor to our endless, senseless toil of today. Whether this is in blue collar work, or an office space (although, the monotony of the situation seems to hold truer for office workers.) Repeating, day-in, day-out, just to repeat again, on a never ending pointless toil, regardless of the condition.

What are we really getting at here?

To put the idea to paper, I’d opine that the real observation that Camus and I are trying to highlight is that life is absurd. Specifically, the world, universe, and our existence is irrational and meaningless. We as people have been raised and like to believe that we are all (or mostly) rational creatures pitted against irrationalities. All one has to do is remember a time when your best intentions and an outcome that presented the opposite, or try assigning subjective value against objective worth. In the end Sisyphus continues to roll the rock.

In the words of Camus, ‘[we] leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! one always finds one’s burdens again.’ and ‘The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ This quote widely misdirects (in my opinion) the point of this story. Many will read this and say, ‘ah ha! There is it, Sisyphus find some meaning in life, some hope in acknowledging his fate and rebelling against those who put him there.’

And while this is an informed opinion, would line up much more closely with existentialism. Meaning, that through his struggles Sisyphus is able to garner meaning in our lives, for him it’s the endless work. But this actually misses the point of Absurdism completely. Absurdism is a close cousin of both Nihilism and existentialism, but they are still different in their own ways.

Absurdism is not about creating meaning within the meaningless of life, that is existentialism. We are all hard-wired to search for meaning, however when we look out to the universe there is no objective meaning there. This creates a contradiction in the absurd. While existentialists will think that this is great, the fact that we don’t have objective meaning, because we are allowed to create subjective meaning through our thoughts, actions, etc. If you like this, you’re an existentialist.

Where most people miss the mark, is failing to understand the Camus looks at the absurd in a different way than Satre and other existentialist. What his writings tell us is that in order to truly be free, one must reject the need for meaning at all. This is what he means by, ‘we must imagine Sisyphus as happy.’ Camus’s work says we cannot simply acknowledge the meaningless of life and make up your own. This is still missing the point. He would rather that we acknowledge it, say ‘screw it, I’m going to live anyway, living in rebellion.’ This isn’t necessarily the same as rebelling against the Gods in Sisyphus’s case, but instead rebelling against meaning. True authentic living is not in creating your own meaning, just existing is enough.

Nobody actually finds meaning by pushing a rock up a hill. Absurdism isn’t replacing objective meaning with subjective meaning, enjoying and embracing the struggle itself, and the entire rejection of meaning. This is a subtle nuance in this conversation. But this is best summed up by two Camus quotes, showing meaning in life is unironically enough, pointless.

‘The literal meaning of life is whatever you’re doing that prevents you from killing yourself.’ and ‘Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?’