Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, Penguin (Great Ideas), (2005 [1942]).
On January 4 1960 Camus was killed in a car accident. I have not confirmed this but it appears that an unused return rail ticket was found on his body covering the same journey he was completing by car. At one point in his Sisyphus essay Camus writes that living with the lack of meaning in life is (and finding a form of meaning within this meaninglessness) is "altogether a question of luck" (p. 61). It is then, I think, apropos the the manner of Camus' death was so in consonance with his own philosophy of the absurd. Since it is widely available online it may be approrpiate to post an extended section of Camus' reflection on Sisyphus' predicament:
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor ... You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward tlower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain. It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock. If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism. One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. Discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men. All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.For Camus the pivotal moment if the myth is that point when the boulder is at the base of the moment and, knowing what awaits when it reaches the summit, still repeats again the ascent. It is in that moment that humanity has the opportunity to demonstrate its' absurd sensitivity. It is at this point that Camus raises the intellectual moment that he sees exhibited in religious belief in some cases or, in others, by religious belief. It is well known that Camus begins his essay with the startling claim that there "is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide". The reason, as Camus continues is because judging "whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy". The problem with religious belief is it is literally unrealistic (un-real), and is an analog of suicide. Even Kierkegaard who it is suggested accepts the absurd still posits religion, or more specifically, faith that is an escapist fantasy that he earlier labels "philosophical suicide":
The important thing, as Abbe Galiani said to Mme d'Epinay, is not to be cured, but to live with one's ailments. Kierkegaard wants to be cured. To be cured is his frenzied wish and it runs thoughout his whole journal. The entire effort of his intelligence is to escape the antinomy of the human condition. An all the more desparate effort since he intermittently perceives its vanity when he speaks of himself, as if neither God nor piety were capable of bringing him peace. (p. 37, emphasis added).
There is, I think, moments when most have that confrontation with the absurd, or rather, the appearence for the absurd, and from a Christian angle one confronts this when one reflects at any length on the nature of the messiah's earthly demise. There are of course no neatly concluded rational arguments in Camus' embrace of the absurd as to do so would be to invalidate the whole idea. It would be a misrepresentation to suggest that Camus' message can be reduced to the bumper sticker philosophy of "shit happens" , it can't. But there is something to the idea, not in a fatalistic reading (on which suicide would be the response) but the nonchalant reading. Shit happens, and there's nothing we can do about so lets make the best of it or as he put it "I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile."
My philosophy is not Camus' but there's something about the honesty of the The Myth of Sisyphus that makes reading it a spiritual experience, read it and find out if you see what I mean.
