'The Myth Of Sisyphus'
by Austin Fowler of State University, New York.
from 'Monarch Notes on CD Rom'




The Myth Of Sisyphus


     The notion that life is "rational" comes primarily from the Greeks. As
early as Homer, we may note the large areas of reality which have come
under the domination of intelligence, and the growing assumption 
culminating in the encyclopedic work of Aristotle that existence can be 
made understandable to reason. Generally speaking, at the back of this 
assumption there are two other assumptions at work: that mind is 
separately and distinct from matter, and that reality (as "an object," or
continuum of discrete, separate, interconnected "objects") can be 
classified, or mapped. The inevitable result of this approach is a 
dichotomy, or double mode of existence. Man (as "mind") though an "object"
in reality, is at the same time somehow apart from it. Existence then 
becomes known by its systematization into a gridwork of rules:
rules of logic, rules of conduct, rules of behavior. Every subject (object)
can be understood insofar as it is objectified and systematized. For the
thousands of years from the Greeks to the present, this basic relationship
between the individual and the rest of existence has consciously or
unconsciously been held valid in the Western world. Until the twentieth
century most men, with certain notable exceptions, believed that the "map"
which tradition had made available to them was a true, valid explanation of
reality.

The "Absurd":

     However, for many men of the twentieth century, Camus among them, this
old map ceased to be valid. It no longer made sense. Life could no longer
be understood by means of it. Existence, far from being the orderly and
illuminated thing tradition said it was, was, in fact, chaotic,
meaningless, "absurd." The rejection of the tradition was thoroughgoing. 
Men became nihilistic; they accepted nothing (nihil) as valid, given, true.
Some chose merely to denounce, violently, bitterly. They felt betrayed and
were furious because of the betrayal. Some, freed from the restraints of 
the old logic, saw existence as merely a joke and made a philosophy of 
their conclusion (the Dadaists, for instance). Other retreated from life 
to one extent or another, even to that total retreat of suicide. Camus, 
having recognized the situation, explored it more profoundly. The Myth of 
Sisyphus is the result of his analysis of the situation and his attempt to 
make sense of it. We cannot understand his novels or plays without 
understanding his essays.



The Myth Of Sisyphus:

     Camus began to work on the essay as early as 1938. During those years
he had already come to the conclusion that he was a nihilist, that the
traditional explanations were insufficient. And yet there was in him a
strong reaction against the despair and pessimism which seemed the only 
"logical" stance to take as the result of his discovery of the "absurd."
He wanted to be happy. He regarded happiness as a categorical imperative
of human existence.
This question then is the central question with which The Myth of Sisyphus
deals: given the meaninglessness of existence, how can a man be happy? The
book then is a more or less systematic investigation of the position of
"l'homme absurde" (man as absurd). The work as published breaks into not so
much one single production as a series or set of essays concerned with the
same subject.

[See Myth Of Sisyphus: Given the meaninglessness of existence, how can a
man be happy.]

     Camus was quite a young man when he wrote the essay. Perhaps it is for
this reason that the notion of happiness is his primary concern. But, in
spite of his youth, he realized the need for the total eradication of the
illusions which prevent one from seeing the condition of absurdity. So 
the first section of The Myth of Sisyphus is concerned with a ruthless 
dissection of the human condition as Camus sees it. He does this in order 
to lay bare the sickness which is at the root of contemporary sensibility. 
Man is sick, but he does not know the cause of his sickness. Like a 
physician, Camus set out to diagnose the disease, and then offer a cure. 
His purpose is ethical and positive. He demanded happiness; he said that 
man could be and should be happy. But he would never be happy until he 
understood what was making him unhappy. The young men, especially those 
of intelligence, of the twenties and thirties were the heirs of the 
terrible malady of spirit of the 1880 - 1890s, the so-called fin de siecle.
Skeptical, pessimistic, world weary, their spirits corroded by nihilism,
they concluded that life was a farce, a sort of joke. How could one 
seriously participate in a joke? What Camus insisted on was that accepting
nihilism as an end was defeatist, self-pitying, and a type of Romanticism.
He addresses his essay particularly to this audience of pessimists, 
evolving before them the logic necessity in such a situation, that suicide
is the only out, but, having reached this extreme, he rejects it as the 
wrong answer. The limit of human existence having been noted, it is for
man to revolt against this limit, accept life within the boundaries of
death and suffering, and in this acceptance find happiness.

     Because life is incomprehensible, he says, it does not follow that it
is meaningless. Such logic is false; it is based on the despair that 
follows from finding the traditional explanations of life 
(Greek-Judeo-Christian) false or inadequate. It is an emotional, not a 
reasonable conclusion. Certainly, life is absurd; it is also precious.
Because it eludes us, because it cannot be reduced to human meaning - this
is what makes it wonderful. Our human awareness is made more acute by the
full understanding of our position in time. He denies the validity of the
existential approach. Contrary to popular opinion Camus was not an 
existentialist; indeed, he not only denied he was one of them, he even 
refuted their assumptions and conclusions. He says that the 
existentialists give arbitrary meaning to what is in fact meaningless.
They are, in effect, rationalists turned inside out. No, he says, one must
accept with total awareness and complete consciousness, the fact that life
has no meaning that is beyond itself. All the approaches which demand of
existence something beyond the moment, transcendent of life, beyond life,
at the end of "history," outside of time or beyond time or at the end of
time are the result of man's refusal to face facts. There is man, there is
nature. That is all. Man finds whatever meaning he is to find by 
acknowledging that fact.

Comment:

     Camus denied categorically that he was a philosopher. He has a
philosophy, but by his denial he meant to emphasize that his answers to the
problems of existence are those which, haphazardly, circumstantially, arose
out of his own confrontation with life and insisted on being answered.
Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, in whose company he is often placed, he made no 
attempt at a systematic, point-by-point elucidation of a complete 
metaphysic. Out of his own temperament, with the specific tools of mind 
and sensibility he had to hand, he faced certain obstacles and, because 
of his honesty and integrity, sought their cause and effect. The validity 
of his analysis and the power of his solutions are the validity and power 
which result from the personal courage to see clearly and react clearly.
He is one who does not falsify data.
His approach to the problem of suicide and the problem of happiness follows
the tempo and curve of his personal fate. Everything he says is said out of
experience, the concrete, the tangible. All he knew was that in spite of
the terrible poverty of his youth, in spite of the deprivation and pain and
sufferings of that time, he had been happy. In a sense, all his work is an
attempt to create an order in the world which would make that primal
happiness of the body and the sun available to him again and to all men.
Any approach to man's existence which puts the possible happiness of the 
present after a happiness in the future (which may or may not come) is to
be denied. In this initial position we find Camus' strength; it is why he
denied Christianity, "historicity," much philosophy, and totalitarianism
in all its forms, including the totalitarianism of the Right (fascism) and
of the Left (communism). They all put the system's success before the
individual's happiness.


The One Philosophical Problem:

     Camus opens his essay by announcing that "There is only one really
serious philosophical problem." This problem is suicide. However, there are
suicides and suicides. He is concerned here not with those which occur
because of terror, or unbearable mental or physical pain, or out of pique 
or insanity. He focuses on those suicides which are precisely the result of
holding that life is meaningless and therefore not worth living. 
The precise question then is laid bare: is suicide a solution to the 
realization that life is absurd?

     In the next section, he defines the meaning of "the absurd." People,
pacified by the pap of routine, go about their business; they get up, they
eat, they dress, go to work, eat, digest, play, sleep. This is unending. Or
apparently. One day, out of nowhere, the question strikes one, "Why?"
Tradition and the dedicated philosophers and maintainers of tradition quiet
us. They have answers. "Wait," "You'll understand," "The future will
disclose all." But in the meanwhile one's life disappears. We revolt. 
But this revolt in itself is an aspect of absurdity.

     Then too there is the sense of dislocation from the objects about us,
the strange disquietude which sets in when, briefly, we note the inhumanity
of humanity, the divorce between our assumptions about what men should be
and our sudden recognition of what they are. This extends even to 
ourselves when unexpectedly our self-awareness, like a bird, flies to a 
distance, and watching, does not recognize what it sees: "the familiar yet
disquieting brother we recognize in our own photographs. . . ." This
dislocation and divorce is also "absurd."

[Hear Definition of Self Awareness]

     And there is the final aspect of the recognition of the absurd: Death.
This is not the knowledge that men die, that nature is a death in life, a
life in death, that loved ones die, that enemies die. The resounding crash
of awareness which comes when one sees and understands that he will die
brings the final realization of the absurd. This "bloody mathematics which
orders our existence" can be given no real and acceptable acceptance by
any code or system of knowledge.

     Such an understanding of one's condition produces, as Sartre says,
"nausea," anxiety and tension and disgust. But there are ways which men
have evolved for dealing with this situation. Let us set them out and see
how well they work. All of them, he finds, are based on the substitution
of terms, on nostalgia, on wishful thinking, on emotion rather than reason.
Reason itself can do nothing to introduce motives of hope. Religion is
equally incapable. No, one is not facing the fact. One can touch the world,
see it, taste it, touch it, smell it: that is all one can affirm; the rest
is fancy. "I shall always be an outsider to myself - and to the world." 
We do not live forever. We must therefore live and live fully the life
that we have.

     Camus systematically and rather curtly cuts off all the exits of hope.
Man, each one of us, dies. Unlike all else in creation, we know we die.
Indeed, there is nothing else of any depth we know about our condition. Is
therefore suicide, as it appears to be, the logical answer? No, to take
one's life is precisely to deny the one existence we have. It makes death
important when it is merely a limit, a terminal point. Suicide is, in the
credo of life, an act of faithlessness. Man must, finally, accept his
condition with total lucidity. It is just because life has no extension
beyond the limits of birth and death that one must embrace it with passion.
One must "revolt" against death, and anything which makes death meaningful.

Comment:

     In his early books of essays (Betwixt and Between and Nuptials) Camus
had already recognized the absurdity of life as he experienced it. His
confrontation with death in the hospital wards of Algiers had served to
shock him awake. Up to this time, he had lived the thoughtless life of the
body in the sun. His existence then had an almost primitive quality about
it. He and the physical world were one. In Nuptials his subject is the
union, the marriage, of the life-giving sun with nature of which he
himself was a part. His personal experience had demonstrated the falsity
of all modes of hope for life beyond death. None of the available systems
had answered his persistent questions: why death, what is the meaning of
life? He revolted, then, against the placid acceptance of death and sought
to attain a union with existence as it is. The Myth of Sisyphus is an 
analysis of the situation in which he then found himself, and record of
how he escaped it.



"L'Homme Absurde":

     Having demonstrated to the reader the condition of man as, in his
belief, he is, and with ruthless logic shown that there is no hope to be 
found in the religious or philosophic systems which man has evolved to face
the absurd, Camus then goes on to characterize the man who has accepted 
life as absurd without illusion. He calls him L'homme absurde. He lives 
without nostalgia. That he is in a prison he knows; he accepts the limits 
as there. But the very acceptance fills him with confident life. His one 
enemy is death. He revolts against death, against the "natural" order in
which "death" has a meaning. Man revolts as part of his very humanity.
To accept death is to diminish one's humanity. His hope is for life,
not for the future or for the past. Life is replete with possibilities.
These he accepts. These form his joy.

Comment:

     Later in life, when Camus was questioned about the "pessimism" in his
work he was rather taken aback. He believed that there was affirmation and
optimism there. He said  then that although he might be pessimistic about
humanity, he was full of optimism about man. Humanity is an abstraction.
Men are concrete.


A Gallery Of Men As Absurd:

     Camus' ethic concentrates on the particular and concrete. In the next
section of The Myth of Sisyphus he creates a group of portraits of men, "or
heroes," who may serve as models of those who accept life as absurd but
live it passionately and with full awareness of its limits. Their code of
honor, their commitment is as deep and full as that of the medieval 
knights, the Japanese samurai, the missionaries of any religion or 
philosophy. They put their lives totally on the line, they are fully 
engaged. They are "great men." They are the opposite of frivolous.

     The first of these is Don Juan. For him the passionate diversity of
existence was expressed in the specific and concrete relationship he had
with each of his multitudes of women. Love was for him not mere liberty or
license or hatred of sex or a method of despising women. It was an 
occasion for life; each encounter was a renewal of total engagement with 
existence. Never could he be, never did he wish to be, satisfied. For to 
be satisfied is to accept death. Don Juan's insatiable appetite for love 
was an insatiable appetite for life. It constituted a lifelong revolt,
not against religion, or the establishment, or custom as such, but against
death.

     The next hero, or model of L'homme absurde is the actor. (Camus was,
as the reader knows, deeply involved in the theater as playwright, 
director, actor. He said on one occasion that he was never so happy as
when he was on the stage. Among other roles he played Hamlet in his own
production in Algiers in the 1940s. Of all Shakespeare's characters, 
many of whom are actors, Hamlet is perhaps the most diverse.) Why is the
actor an example of l'homme absurde? Because, taking on many roles, he
lives each with tremendous and passionate intensity upon the stage.
He pours out his substance into the shell of the character he knows exists
only the hour or two he incarnates him. Here is, in little, a perfect 
example of the full, vital life within absolutely known limits. The death 
of the character when the curtain goes down, the many, many deaths of 
Hamlet which the actor experiences, do not affect him any more than his 
own death. The character ceases. He has lived; he ceases. So man. He
lives, he ceases. This does not mean the character on the stage should be
any less lively or passionate because the actor playing him knows he will
die. On the contrary the realization of death to come fills the actor
with the desire to make each second of stage life more complete. It has
always been the case that man sees the stage life of characters as larger
than life. This merely demonstrates that most men are not living life to
the full.

     The next model is that of the "conqueror." This conqueror, however, is
not the familiar figure of school history who subjugates peoples and
territories. No he is quite the opposite. He is the man who knows that
"history" is an error, that those who act in the name of history to carry
out plans for "humanity" are wrong. He fights this knowing that he will
probably lose; he contradicts with his "absurd" conscience the forces
which forever try to use man for purposes beyond life.

Comment:

     When Camus denounced totalitarianisms of every variety, when he
carried on his argument with Sartre, he was acting precisely as this
"conqueror." When Camus published his second philosophical essay, 
The Rebel, Sartre, with whom Camus had for many years been allied,
broke with him precisely over this point. Sartre had, although not a
Communist, supported the Communist position, even apparently, the need to
destroy and imprison human beings "for the cause." Camus refused to 
condone or justify this even if it were demonstrated that the humanity 
"of the future" was aided by these acts.


Sisyphus:

     The next and last example of l'homme absurde is the greatest of them
all. He is Sisyphus, the hero of the Greek myth. Sisyphus had been 
condemned by the gods to roll a great stone everlastingly to the top of a 
mountain. There at the top and of its own weight it would roll down to the
valley again and the task would begin again. This hopeless and totally 
useless task was, in the opinion of the gods, the worse form of punishment
they could inflict on a man. Why had the gods inflicted this punishment? 
Because Sisyphus, having died, and having been allowed by Pluto 
(god of the underworld) to return briefly to the world, failed to honor 
his word and return to the land of the dead. Sisyphus is the great hero 
because of his disdain for the gods, his hatred of death, his love of life.
His punishment, although useless, is not meaningless. The greatest glory
of man is expending all his substance and existence to achieve precisely
nothing.

Comment:

     Sisyphus is of course a symbol of man. The rock is man's awareness of
the absurdity of his existence. Camus' position is that Sisyphus is fully
alive and as such expresses his potential fully. He cannot waste any
vitality in dreaming or in false hope; he is forced by his knowledge to
extract joy from the given, for he knows that there is nothing else.
Sisyphus, in the monotonous limits of his task, is an extreme case. It is
just because he is an extreme case that he is a good example. It is also
worth noting that at the basis of the story of Sisyphus there is a solar
myth; that is, an attempt to explain the "eternal" movement of the sun,
which seems to be rolled up to the height of the heavens and then rolls
down the other side. This eternally recurrent task seems purposeless,
but without the sun there would be no light, no life. It is curious to
note that in Camus the sun holds the same central importance as it does 
for Wallace Stevens, the American poet, whose fundamental philosophy was
almost identical with Camus. Stevens has a poem called "The Hero," which
is simply about the rising and setting of the sun. Sisyphus, struggling
towards the top of the mountain, knows that he will never reach it; he 
continues to try. That is his greatness. That is man's greatness.

Conclusions:

     Man must, says Camus, first face nihilism: there is no answer to
death. But suicide is cowardice. Man has only one reality-life. He must
live it. He can only live it by accepting its limits. That it has no
meaning beyond itself is not a cause for pessimism. On the contrary it is
the very foundation of our revolt against death, the fundamental reason 
why we should live it fully. One has then the duty to be happy. 
This notion of duty becomes the radical tenet of Camus' ethic. One should
not only engage fully in existence for one's happiness; it is necessary,
like "the conqueror," to engage, with all one's strength, for the happiness
of others. We recognize that we are brothers, with the one commitment,
because we are all to face death. Don Juan is praiseworthy because of his
desire for life, but Sisyphus is the great hero because he symbolizes the
more profound duty to push upward, to expand the limits of existence,
while recognizing that the limits are there.

Comment:

     All Camus' heroes are outsized and extreme. His book, however, is
directed to the ordinary man. How then can the ordinary man live the life
of l'homme absurde? The essay, except insofar as one learns from the
analysis of the examples offered, teaches little. It is in the extended
portrait of Meursault, the "hero" of The Stranger, that this omission is 
rectified.