2/26/2023 0 Comments Albert camus sisyphus![]() ![]() Just before he died, Sisyphus wanted to test his wife’s love by ordering that she “cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square.” Annoyed that she actually did so, instead of burying him properly, he received permission from Pluto to return to earth in order to chastise her. One of the stories is that he put Death in chains, angering the god Pluto. There are different stories about why Sisyphus incurred the wrath of the gods but, in essence, he disrespected them. His eventual fate was to push a rock up a mountain, only for it to fall back down, necessitating the process to start over again and again for all eternity. Sisyphus, a Greek King, was condemned by the gods. Though Camus praises Dostoevsky for showing the absurd in action-which is a special capability of novels as opposed to philosophy-he criticizes Dostoevsky for turning back to God later in his personal life.Ĭamus concludes his essay by discussing the myth of Sisyphus mentioned in the title. His last words are “all is well,” which for Camus are precisely the words that living with the absurd require. In particular, he looks at a character from The Possessed, Kirilov, who commits a kind of “logical suicide.” In order for life to have meaning, Kirilov thinks, God must exist-but Kirilov intuitively feels that there is no God and decides to take control by killing himself. The creator can only experience and describe, not explain and solve Camus is disdainful of those works that have a “smug” motive of proving a particular “truth.” Within this framework, Camus examines the writings of the Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevksy. Artists expend great energy on their creation, though their creation is ultimately meaningless. The creative life, says Camus, is an especially absurd one. Camus’ other examples of absurd lives are actors-who live in the present and try out many different lives-and conquerors, whose political and violent struggles add urgency and vividness to life.Ĭamus then turns his attentions to the relationship between the absurd and creation. In Don Juan’s case, this means sex with as many different women as possible. He praises Don Juan for living a life of quantity, rather than quality-since no experience is inherently more valuable than any other, the absurd man should strive to experience as much as he can. ![]() ![]() As an illustrative example, he looks first at Don Juan, a notorious seducer. For Camus, it is not about finding a solution to the absurd, but living a life that maintains full awareness of life’s meaninglessness. In “The Absurd Man,” Camus tries to move towards a more practical approach to the absurd, providing examples of figures that he feels have accommodating the absurd into their lives. The absurd life must resist any temptation for answers or explanations in life act and think with total freedom and pursue life with passion. Camus argues for three main characteristics of the absurd life: revolt, freedom and passion. They try to conjure meaning out of meaninglessness, which Camus sees as distinctly irrational. But each of them has a fatal flaw-they were too afraid to commit to the absurdity of life, and instead restored meaning to the world through a leap of faith (usually to God). ![]() All of these, says Camus, went some way to outlining the absurdity of life. Camus wants to know if it’s possible to live in full awareness of the fact that life is meaningless.Ĭamus examines the work of philosophers like Soren Kierkegaard, Lev Chestov, Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl. If life is meaningless, which is a proposition Camus certainly agrees with, is it logical to commit suicide-dutiful, even? Camus outlines how people turn to religion and hold on to the hope of a better life that never comes in order to suppress the absurd. People commit suicide when life is meaningless, he says, and sometimes to defend the meaning that they do perceive (for instance, someone dying for a political cause). Camus believes that confronting the absurd takes precedence over all other philosophical problems, because it is intimately linked with the act of suicide. In fact, Camus defines the absurd as the confrontation between man’s desire for logic, meaning and order, and the world’s inability to satisfy this desire. The absurd is often mischaracterized as the simple idea that life is meaningless. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus aims to draw out his definition of absurdism and, later in the book, consider what strategies are available to people in living with the absurd. ![]()
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