The Human Condition
Major Premise
We yearn for meaning in a meaningless universe. Albert Camus calls this situation “absurd”. The only resolution to absurdity is either suicide or embrace.
Stage 1 – Habits of Living
Absurdity is not an early life problem. At this stage, we’re simply learning to survive. By the time we’re old enough to “think”, we’re already attached to numerous responsibilities and hopes for the future.
“We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.”
“Before encountering the absurd, the everyday man lives with aims, a concern for the future or for justification (with regard to whom or what is not the question). He weighs his chances, he counts on “someday,” his retirement or the labor of his sons.”
Stage 2 – Habits of Thinking
At some point in our maturity, we develop the capacity to think (or reason). We begin to question our own assumptions about life and meaning.
“Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.”
Stage 3 – Confront Absurdity
Eventually we might realize our yearning for meaning cannot be satisfied, which contradicts everything we’ve ever assumed. This causes despair, i.e. “what’s the point of living?”
Suicide now becomes a possibility.
It’s also possible we’ve committed philosophical suicide before arriving here. Meaning, we’ve adopted beliefs that satisfy meaning, and don’t yet see absurdity for what it is.
“A day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.”
“From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. It must die or else reverberate.”
Option 1 – Suicide
There are two types of suicide: philosophical and physical.
Philosophical suicide means adopting beliefs that satisfy meaning, and therefore, prevent us from thinking about it further. An example might be: “Everything we don’t understand is God, and God has a plan for us.”
“Thus the absurd becomes god (in the broadest meaning of this word) and that inability to understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything.”
Other examples might be unquestioning nationalism or patriotism, dogmatic political movements, extreme materialism, or escapism in amusement. In each case, our values and behavior are aligned with some external sense of meaning, and we avoid confronting absurdity.
Camus notes an abundance of meaning prophets – both religious and non. This was in 1942, and is probably even more true today.
“History is not lacking in either religions or prophets, even without gods. He is asked to leap. All he can reply is that he doesn’t fully understand, that it is not obvious. Indeed, he does not want to do anything but what he fully understands.”
Physical suicide needs no explanation. It is a permanent solution to existential despair.
“Suicide, like the [philosophical] leap, is acceptance at its extreme. Everything is over and man returns to his essential history. His future, his unique and dreadful future—he sees and rushes toward it.”
In both cases, the Absurd is dealt with by escape.
Option 2 – Embrace Absurdity
To embrace absurdity is to see our yearning for meaning, and admit that it cannot be satisfied from outside. Then, to revolt against this fact with courage and reasoning. This is actual freedom.
“What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime.”
In other words, once we are liberated from assumptions and beliefs about how life ought to be lived, this is a great gift, not a tragedy.
“Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.”
“The absurd man realizes that hitherto he was bound to that postulate of freedom on the illusion of which he was living. In a certain sense, that hampered him. To the extent to which he imagined a purpose to his life, he adapted himself to the demands of a purpose to be achieved and became the slave of his liberty.”
Suicide Is Unreasonable
Suicide is unreasonable, because it overlooks the root cause of existential dread. It’s an unnecessary overreaction, even if an understandable one.
Suicide is unreasonable because it forgoes true freedom.
If we acknowledge our yearning for meaning in a meaningless universe, and further, if we acknowledge the flaws and limits of our knowledge, then we are liberated from our own limiting beliefs or “make-believe” (and everyone else’s too).
We need not be stuck with beliefs that cause despair. We need not eliminate our life to cure it. Instead, a lucid embrace of absurdity is not only medicine, but a gift.
“A man defines himself by his make-believe as well as by his sincere impulses.”
“Living is keeping the absurd alive. Keeping it alive is, above all, contemplating it. Unlike Eurydice, the absurd dies only when we turn away from it. One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt.”
“In its way, suicide settles the absurd. But I know that in order to keep alive, the absurd cannot be settled. It escapes suicide to the extent that it is simultaneously awareness and rejection of death.”
Supporting Points
The following points are central to the argument.
We Know Nothing
We must admit how little we know.
“It is essential to consider as a constant point of reference in this essay the regular hiatus between what we fancy we know and what we really know.”
“Of whom and of what indeed can I say: “I know that!” This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.”
We are Fundamentally Mysterious
We can know we exist, but not much else – i.e. why we exist, or who or what we really are.
“This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.”
Yearning for Meaning is Futile
To be human is to yearn for meaning. We want life to make sense, and our role within it to make sense. However, because knowledge is limited, no explanation can ever be universally true.
“The mind’s deepest desire […] is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.”
“That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama. But the fact of that nostalgia’s existence does not imply that it is to be immediately satisfied.”
”We must despair of ever reconstructing the familiar, calm surface which would give us peace of heart. After so many centuries of inquiries, so many abdications among thinkers, we are well aware that this is true for all our knowledge.”
Embracing Absurdity
How does one embrace Absurdity?
They fully recognize that existence is meaningless, they fully recognize the limits of knowledge, and they express themselves anyhow.
“To an absurd mind reason is useless and there is nothing beyond reason.”
“The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.”
Life Without Morality
The limits of knowledge extend to morality – meaning no definition of right and wrong can tell us exactly how to live. Therefore, we should live according to our own sense of consequences and responsibility.
“There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules.”
”All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion. At very most, such a mind will consent to use past experience as a basis for its future actions.”
This does not imply acting selfishly:
“‘Everything is permitted’ does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions”
Examples
Camus uses three imaginary personas to illustrate living with Absurdity. The hedonist, the actor, and the conqueror.
- The hedonist embodies the quantity of experience and the rejection of eternal or transcendent love. He fully embraces the fleeting nature of passion and the present moment. He finds joy in repetition and the accumulation of experiences, understanding that no single love can provide ultimate meaning.
- The actor is fully aware that their roles are temporary, illusions. Yet, they pour their entire being into each performance, making it real for its duration. This mirrors the absurd man’s choice to live fully and intensely in a world without ultimate meaning, understanding that life itself is a performance, a series of ephemeral moments to be seized.
- The conqueror is less about territorial domination and more the engagement in human history and rebellion against fate. This figure chooses action, struggle, and engagement in the world, even knowing that no victory is eternal or that their efforts will ultimately be absorbed by the sands of time.
Each shows living passionately, despite a world of meaninglessness. This is not to say hedonism, acting, and conquering are good or bad, merely that they are reasonable from the perspective of these individual’s own judgement, and they do so in full recognition of absurdity.
Camus reinforces that, while we might choose such undertakings, we should ultimately maintain freedom from them too. A sort of loose attachment to our passions.
“The final effort for these related minds, creator or conqueror, is to manage to free themselves also from their undertakings: succeed in granting that the very work, whether it be conquest, love, or creation, may well not be; consummate thus the utter futility of any individual life. Indeed, that gives them more freedom in the realization of that work, just as becoming aware of the absurdity of life authorized them to plunge into it with every excess.”
Self-Reliance and Cooperation
Camus does not offer a highly prescriptive way to live. This seems deliberate – he leaves us to reason about this condition, our choices, and our responsibility. He suggests we rely on each other rather than gods or idols.
“There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart. The most destitute men often end up by accepting illusion. There are thus gods of light and idols of mud. But it is essential to find the middle path leading to the faces of man.”
Absurd Expression or Art
To embrace absurdity is to continually appreciate it. To this end, art (or creation) offers limitless horizons.
“All those lives maintained in the rarefied air of the absurd could not persevere without some profound and constant thought to infuse its strength into them.”
“In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation.”
“In this universe the work of art is then the sole chance of keeping his consciousness and of fixing its adventures. Creating is living doubly.”
The absurd artist expresses for the sake of their clarity, without attachment to outcome.
“The great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality”
“To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions.”
The artist and the art co-evolve.
“A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape. Likewise, a man’s sole creation is strengthened in its successive and multiple aspects: his works. One after another, they complement one another, correct or overtake one another, contradict one another too.”
Sisyphus
At the end of the essay, we are asked to imagine the Greek figure Sisyphus, pushing a boulder up and down the hill for his entire life. He is the absurd hero. He knows his actions are futile in the ultimate sense, but he enjoys his experience regardless.
Reflection
By the end of this essay, we may feel relieved, sad, confused, unconvinced, or all of the above.
The Myth of Sisyphus is a progressive ladder of statements. At the lowest rung, we are confronted with the limits of knowledge, and our relentless yearning for meaning. At the highest rung, we are urged to embrace Absurdity and see suicide as unreasonable.
If nothing else, this essay forces us to wonder: Is life really inherently meaningless? Have I committed philosophical suicide? Am I waiting to feel fulfilled by false beliefs?
Perhaps the strongest notion in this essay is philosophical suicide, the idea that our beliefs, values, and behaviors may be hijacked by external ideas that aren’t necessarily coherent, but we’ve never questioned them enough to notice.
Ultimately, this essay is optimistic.
Camus sees a world of “prophets” telling us how to live or what to believe. He sees people swept up in these systems, sometimes killing or being killed for it. Even worse, he sees people ending their lives because they are blindsided by the seeming pointlessness of life. All of this seems like a failure to acknowledge our naked reality for what it is.
Camus’s solution is brutal honestly.
We’re hairless apes flying on a rock through space without any magic rules or meaning. The only thing we have is our own self evidence and responsibility, and each other. We should respect the limits of our knowledge and be vigilant about our beliefs. We should meet this situation with courage and reason. We have good reason to be happy.
In one hand, this is terrifying and unsettling, especially if we grew up believing differently.
In the other hand this is liberating and makes life feel precious.
“Just as danger provided man the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience. It is that constant presence of man in his own eyes.”
Additional Points
Provoking Absurdity
One thing that might cause us to see absurdity is vast inhumanness.
“At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise.”
“This discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this ‘nausea,’ as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd”
Reasoning Against Suicide
While Camus argues against suicide as an escape of absurdity or existential despair, this does comprehensively address suicide in general. For instance, suicide related to extreme physical or mental disease, which is more nuanced and complex.
Outside References
The “Meaning Crisis”
“Meaning Crisis” is a recent term propagated by some modern psychologists and philosophers. They argue that modernization, decline of religion, and loss of shared worldview is leading to people looking for meaning. The response is revival of religion and/or new philosophical narratives.
We must ask, isn’t this just more meaning prophecy? Should we instead guide people toward recognizing meaninglessness, and living well in spite of it? Perhaps the distress is not the meaninglessness itself, but misunderstanding where it comes from.
Going Through Motions
While “philosophical suicide” can imply a dogmatic ideology, it can just as easily mean mindlessly following cultural convention without really knowing why. This was once encapsulated by Charles Bukowski:
“Generally speaking, you’re free till you’re about four years old. Then you go to grammar school, and then you start becoming demented and solved, and orientated and shoved into areas. You lose what individualism you have, if you have enough, of course, you retain some of it, but most don’t have enough, so they become watchers of game shows, you know, things like that. Then you work the 8 hour job with almost a feeling of goodness, like you’re doing something, and you get married, like marriage is a victory and you have children like having children is a victory, but most things people do are a total grind: marriage, birth, children, it’s something they have to do because they have nothing else to do. There is no glory in it, no esteem, no fire, it’s very, very flat. And the Earth is full of them. Sorry, but that’s the way I see it.”
Charles Bukowski
Relying on Your Truth
Camus is not alone in urging us to be our own source of truth. Dostoevsky said something along these lines.
“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.”
Dostoevsky
We Forget Life’s Strangeness
Existence is endlessly bizarre. We are so engulfed in our usual ideas, beliefs, and habits, that we forget it. The clip from Pete Holmes is a reminder of how absurd life really is.
Everybody Worships
Camus pinpoints our compulsive need for meaning, and illustrates how it can lead us astray.
David Foster Wallace similarly saw compulsion in us, and how it can lead us astray. Camus suggests embracing absurdity, and similarly, Wallace suggests “keeping the truth up front”.
“There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.”
David Foster Wallace
Impermanence
In Camus’s view, the absurd person knows their death is coming, and lives accordingly.
“The absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future.”
This parallels a core tenet of Buddhism. By seeing the impermanence of all things, including ourselves, we can let go. Counterintuitively, this tends to bring more happiness, not less.
“Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If we still cling to something in our hearts, we cannot be free.”
Thich Nhat Hanh
To Be or Not to Be
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Hamlet
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep.
Camus is in good company considering suicide the “ultimate philosophical problem”. For if we can’t judge life as worth living, then no other question really matters.
Authors
This was co-written by Jesse Starks and Josh Wagner.
Discussion
This has been posted to reddit for voting and discussion:
The Myth of Sisyphus
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