The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus – Flashcards

The central concern of The Myth of Sisyphus is what Camus calls "the absurd." Camus claims that there is a fundamental conflict between what we want from the universe (whether it be meaning, order, or reasons) and what we find in the universe (formless chaos). We will never find in life itself the meaning that we want to find. Either we will discover that meaning through a leap of faith, by placing our hopes in a God beyond this world, or we will conclude that life is meaningless. Camus opens the essay by asking if this latter conclusion that life is meaningless necessarily leads one to commit suicide. If life has no meaning, does that mean life is not worth living? If that were the case, we would have no option but to make a leap of faith or to commit suicide, says Camus. Camus is interested in pursuing a third possibility: that we can accept and live in a world devoid of meaning or purpose. The absurd is a contradiction that cannot be reconciled, and any attempt to reconcile this contradiction is simply an attempt to escape from it: facing the absurd is struggling against it. Camus claims that existentialist philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Chestov, and Jaspers, and phenomenologists such as Husserl, all confront the contradiction of the absurd but then try to escape from it. Existentialists find no meaning or order in existence and then attempt to find some sort of transcendence or meaning in this very meaninglessness. Living with the absurd, Camus suggests, is a matter of facing this fundamental contradiction and maintaining constant awareness of it. Facing the absurd does not entail suicide, but, on the contrary, allows us to live life to its fullest. Camus identifies three characteristics of the absurd life: revolt (we must not accept any answer or reconciliation in our struggle), freedom (we are absolutely free to think and behave as we choose), and passion (we must pursue a life of rich and diverse experiences). Camus gives four examples of the absurd life: the seducer, who pursues the passions of the moment; the actor, who compresses the passions of hundreds of lives into a stage career; the conqueror, or rebel, whose political struggle focuses his energies; and the artist, who creates entire worlds. Absurd art does not try to explain experience, but simply describes it. It presents a certain worldview that deals with particular matters rather than aiming for universal themes. The book ends with a discussion of the myth of Sisyphus, who, according to the Greek myth, was punished for all eternity to roll a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down to the bottom when he reaches the top. Camus claims that Sisyphus is the ideal absurd hero and that his punishment is representative of the human condition: Sisyphus must struggle perpetually and without hope of success. So long as he accepts that there is nothing more to life than this absurd struggle, then he can find happiness in it, says Camus. Camus appends his essay with a discussion of the works of Franz Kafka. He ultimately concludes that Kafka is an existentialist, who, like Kierkegaard, chooses to make a leap of faith rather than accept his absurd condition. However, Camus admires Kafka for expressing humanity's absurd predicament so perfectly.

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. If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror. It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him. 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.

Sisyphus is probably more famous for his punishment in the underworld than for what he did in his life. According to the Greek myth, Sisyphus is condemned to roll a rock up to the top of a mountain, only to have the rock roll back down to the bottom every time he reaches the top. The gods were wise, Camus suggests, in perceiving that an eternity of futile labor is a hideous punishment. There are a number of stories—ones which are not mutually exclusive—that explain how Sisyphus came to earn his punishment in the underworld. According to one story, Zeus carried off Aegina, a mortal woman who was the daughter of Asopus. Sisyphus witnessed this kidnapping in his home city of Corinth. Sisyphus agreed to inform Asopus as to who had kidnapped Aegina if Asopus would give the citadel at Corinth a fresh-water spring. In making this deal and bearing witness against Zeus, Sisyphus earned the wrath of the gods while earning earthly wealth and happiness for himself and his people. Another story tells how Sisyphus enchained the spirit of Death, so that during Death's imprisonment, no human being died. Naturally, when the gods freed Death, his first victim was Sisyphus. It is also said that Sisyphus told his wife not to offer any of the traditional burial rites when he died. When he arrived in the underworld, he complained to Hades that his wife had not observed these rites and was granted permission to return to earth to chastise her. Once granted this second lease on life, Sisyphus refused to return to the underworld, and lived to a ripe old age before returning to the underworld a second time to endure his eternal punishment. Camus identifies Sisyphus as the archetypal absurd hero, both for his behavior on earth and for his punishment in the underworld. He displays scorn for the gods, a hatred of death, and a passion for life. His punishment is to endure an eternity of hopeless struggle. We are not told how Sisyphus endures his punishment in the underworld: that much is left to our imagination. What fascinates Camus is Sisyphus's state of mind in that moment after the rock rolls away from him at the top of the mountain. As he heads down the mountain, briefly free from his labor, he is conscious, aware of the absurdity of his fate. His fate can only be considered tragic because he understands it and has no hope for reprieve. At the same time, the lucidity he achieves with this understanding also places him above his fate. Camus suggests that Sisyphus might even approach his task with joy. The moments of sorrow or melancholy come when he looks back at the world he's left behind, or when he hopes or wishes for happiness. When Sisyphus accepts his fate, however, the sorrow and melancholy of it vanish. Camus suggests that acknowledging "crushing truths" like the eternity and futility of his fate is enough to render them less crushing. He refers to Oedipus, who, having suffered so much, is able to "conclude that all is well." Happiness and the absurd are closely linked, suggests Camus. They are both connected to the discovery that our world and our fate is our own, that there is no hope and that our life is purely what we make of it. As he descends the mountain, Sisyphus is totally aware of his fate. Camus concludes: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Analysis Camus has argued that the absurd hero sees life as a constant struggle, without hope. Any attempt to deny or avoid the struggle and the hopelessness that define our lives is an attempt to escape from this absurd contradiction. Camus's single requirement for the absurd man is that he live with full awareness of the absurdity of his position. While Sisyphus is pushing his rock up the mountain, there is nothing for him but toil and struggle. But in those moments where Sisyphus descends the mountain free from his burden, he is aware. He knows that he will struggle forever and he knows that this struggle will get him nowhere. This awareness is precisely the same awareness that an absurd man has in this life. So long as Sisyphus is aware, his fate is no different and no worse than our lot in life. We react to Sisyphus's fate with horror because we see its futility and hopelessness. Of course, the central argument of this essay is that life itself is a futile struggle devoid of hope. However, Camus also suggests that this fate is only horrible if we continue to hope, if we think that there is something more that is worth aiming for. Our fate only seems horrible when we place it in contrast with something that would seem preferable. If we accept that there is no preferable alternative, then we can accept our fate without horror. Only then, Camus suggests, can we fully appreciate life, because we are accepting it without reservations. Therefore, Sisyphus is above his fate precisely because he has accepted it. His punishment is only horrible if he can hope or dream for something better. If he does not hope, the gods have nothing to punish him with. The theory of tragedy is a vast and complicated subject beyond the scope of this commentary, but a brief discussion of Camus's angle on tragedy may be valuable. Camus tells us that the moment Sisyphus becomes aware of his fate, his fate becomes tragic. He also alludes to Oedipus, who becomes a tragic figure only when he becomes aware that he has killed his father and married his mother. He also remarks that both Sisyphus and Oedipus are ultimately happy, that they "conclude that all is well." Tragedy, Camus seems to be suggesting, is not pessimistic. On the contrary, it represents the greatest triumph we are capable of as human beings. So long as Sisyphus and Oedipus continue to hope and to deceive themselves, they are not heroic. With tragic recognition comes a full acknowledgment of our fate and our limitations, and with that acknowledgment comes an acceptance of who we are and what we are capable of. Tragic fate only seems horrible in contrast to the hope for something more. In accepting their fate, Sisyphus and Oedipus have abandoned hope, and so their fate does not seem horrible to them. On the contrary, they have finally found the only genuine happiness. Camus concludes his essay by arguing that happiness and absurd awareness are intimately connected. We can only be truly happy, he suggests, when we accept our life and our fate as entirely our own—as the only thing we have and as the only thing we will ever be. The final sentence reads: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." But why must we imagine Sisyphus happy? Camus's wording suggests that we have no choice in the matter. But is there an alternative? Sisyphus is the absurd hero, the man who loved life so much that he has been condemned to an eternity of futile and hopeless labor. And yet he is above that fate precisely because he is aware of it. If Sisyphus is not happy in this awareness, then absurd awareness does not bring happiness. It would then follow that happiness is only possible if we evade absurd awareness, if we leap into hope or faith. If the leap into hope or faith represents an attempt to escape from the reality of our fate, and if happiness is only possible through such a leap, then happiness would essentially be an escape. Life itself would be inherently unhappy and happiness would be a sham born out of denial. We must imagine Sisyphus happy if we want to believe in genuine happiness. Though this is the last sentence of the essay, we might see it as the initial premise that starts Camus's reasoning. Because Camus essentially believes in the idea that individual human experience is the only thing that is real, if he wants to show that happiness is real he must show that individual humans can truly be happy based on their experiences, not on their denial of experience. If happiness is real, we must be able to find happiness without relying on hope, faith, or anything else that goes beyond immediate experience. The Myth of Sisyphus is essentially an elaborate attempt to show that this is possible, and it concludes with its starting premise: if genuine happiness is possible, then Sisyphus must be happy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus

This guy is known for being a total smarty-pants. He's also known for being totally evil. Whether it's seducing his niece in a plot to kill his brother or killing innocent guests in his home, Sisyphus is always up to no good. His most famous feats of cleverness came when he tricked his way out of the Underworld twice in a row, by first fooling Thanatos, god of death, and then Persephone, queen of the Underworld. While Sisyphus's clever feats are pretty impressive, he gets his in the end. After Hermes drags the crafty mortal down to the Underworld for the last time, Zeus makes an example of Sisyphus by dooming him to roll a giant boulder up a hill for all eternity. It's kind of ironic that a guy who was famous for his brains is forced to do physical labor for all eternity, right? In the end, Sisyphus becomes a warning for other mortals to not let hubris (pride) ever convince them that they are truly cleverer than the gods.

Okay sure, this guy is Death, but that doesn't mean he's a bad guy. Thanatos is actually known for being a good dude, who gently ushers the departed down into the Underworld. In one famous instance, he and his brother Hypnos, god of sleep, ease the pain of the wounded hero, Sarpedon, before they bring his soul to the Land of he Dead. The official title of Thanatos's soul-ushering job is pyschopomp, and Thanatos is generally thought of as a good one. In the myth of Sisyphus, though, Thanatos is made out to look pretty foolish. To put it frankly, the death god just doesn't seem all that bright. When Thanatos tries to chain Sisyphus up in Tartarus, the crafty mortal fools Thanatos by saying, "Hey, why don't you try these chains on and show me how they work." And Thanatos actually falls for it. Okay, we'd probably better stop ripping on Thanatos now. Gentle psychopomp or no, we'd just as soon he not come for us today.

Besides being Zeus's main messenger, Hermes was also known as a psychopomp. So, when he wasn't running around doing Zeus's bidding, he was also escorting the souls of the dead to the Underworld. Hermes was actually more widely known as the chief pyschopomp, while Thanatos was thought of more as simply the incarnation of Death. (We wonder if Thanatos got a demotion after the Sisyphus incident, since Hermes had to come in and clean up the death god's mess.)

In a whole bunch of myths, Zeus is the one doing bad stuff. Like the many corrupt politicians to follow, Zeus spends about half his time seducing innocent young maidens and the other half trying unsuccessfully to hide his affairs from his fuming wife Hera. In the story Sisyphus, however, Zeus takes on his role as the supreme judge of the universe. When there's some imbalance (like a soul escaping the Underworld) it's Zeus's job to make sure things are put back to rights. Though Thanatos fails him at first, Zeus eventually sends Hermes to make sure that Sisyphus is trapped in the Land of the Dead for good and suffers appropriately for all eternity. (Maybe Zeus should get one of those Judge Judy kind of shows. Judge Zeusy sounds good to us.)