The Myth of Sisyphus

[Hunger Artist]

@Darcy88. I'm the same way, I've only read some of his fictional works. One I'm really looking forward to reading is Exile and the Kingdom. I've just begun thoroughly exploring philosophy.

[YesNo]

The fact that the world "just is" makes the world absurd.

I disagree. That does not even seem to be Camus' intention. A Google Translate version of what Camus says is this:

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

What Camus is saying may be meaningless. It may be incorrect. It may be irrational. All of those things are characteristics or not of Camus' text. But they are not characteristics of the world except to the extent that we are in the world and we can be meaningless, incorrect and irrational.

Part of us doesn't want a world that "just is." We want a world vested with meaning and purpose. People have been doing it since people have been doing anything - looking at the stars and at history and at everything and laying rational meaning overtop of what simply, as you say, "just is."

I wonder if we are saying the same thing or not.

Who vests the world with meaning and purpose? We do. As you say, "People have been doing it since people have been doing anything". To that I agree.

[Darcy88]

@Darcy88. I'm the same way, I've only read some of his fictional works. One I'm really looking forward to reading is Exile and the Kingdom. I've just begun thoroughly exploring philosophy.

The Plague is simply brilliant, both philosophically and as a work of art. I like the Stranger but I don't view it as his masterpiece like so many others do.

[Hunger Artist]

@Darcy88. That's how I was first introduced to his work by reading The Stranger. Unfortunately, I only read it once, but from what I remember it was so beautifully descriptive, and so devastatingly real that I couldn't help but love it.

@YesNo. I recommend, if you haven't done so already, look into Richard Wright's "The Outsider".

[Darcy88]

I disagree. That does not even seem to be Camus' intention. A Google Translate version of what Camus says is this:

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

What Camus is saying may be meaningless. It may be incorrect. It may be irrational. All of those things are characteristics or not of Camus' text. But they are not characteristics of the world except to the extent that we are in the world and we can be meaningless, incorrect and irrational.

I wonder if we are saying the same thing or not.

Who vests the world with meaning and purpose? We do. As you say, "People have been doing it since people have been doing anything". To that I agree.

Camus defines the absurd in a whole host of ways. The one I'm talking about is the contrast between man's desire for coherent meaning and the world's seemingly silent inanimateness. If a 1st century worshipper of the Roman pantheon of gods, someone used to interpreting the entrails of sacrificed animals and subject to all sorts of superstitions, seeing meaning everywhere in everything, were suddenly revealed the truth behind all natural phenomena, his eyes abruptly shown a world divested of all its veils of fanciful man-made meaning, he would be struck to the core by the sheer absurdity of everything.

A being that experiences love and pain and possesses an ever-active imagination that strives to make meaningful a world that silently and inhumanly "just is," well I think such a being could fairly be called in a way "absurd."

You yourself YesNo have beliefs about God and consciousness and the universe that Camus did not share. I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong and he necessarily right, but if you look at the world from his radically atheistic perspective, its not hard to see the rationale behind his labelling man and the world absurd.

Hunger Artist - have you read his book The Rebel? Its amazing stuff. Talks about the philosophy of murder and rebellion, about the bases of fascism and communism and revolution. Discusses the french revolution, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, even mentions Hamlet and Heathcliffe. A great and profound book. I know I'll have to re-read it possibly several times to really "get it."

[Hunger Artist]

@Darcy88. No not yet, but I intend to read it.

[YesNo]

@YesNo. I recommend, if you haven't done so already, look into Richard Wright's "The Outsider".

Thanks for the recommendation, Hunger Artist. I'm beginning to think that Camus is not important as a philosopher. The main interest in him is as a novelist.

[YesNo]

Camus defines the absurd in a whole host of ways. The one I'm talking about is the contrast between man's desire for coherent meaning and the world's seemingly silent inanimateness.

If you're in the center of a large city the world can be quite animate and noisy.

Do you have any alternate quotes from Camus that would help clarify the word "absurd"? In the one I provided where the feeling of absurdity is about the divorce between the actor and the setting, it doesn't make sense to say the setting is absurd or meaningless or irrational.

[Darcy88]

If you're in the center of a large city the world can be quite animate and noisy.

Do you have any alternate quotes from Camus that would help clarify the word "absurd"? In the one I provided where the feeling of absurdity is about the divorce between the actor and the setting, it doesn't make sense to say the setting is absurd or meaningless or irrational.

Well this thread has made me want to re-read M of S and so I'll post pertinent sections as I come across them.

Even if the city is noisy, its noisy because of man, and even the tall red-wood-like skyscrapers, the rivers of concrete, and the growling four-wheeled beasts all confront one as inhumanly aloof, beyond sympathy or meaning, unlike a numinous Grecian river with its attendant deity and its mythical story and its centaur inhabitants. They actually bestowed upon rivers personality and will, unlike we who reduce rivers to natural scientifically rather than spiritually coherent phenomena.

Walk to the ocean or lake-side on a clear day. Look upon the illimitable landscape of water and sky. Try and regard it as it is - a great amalgamation of molecules composed of basic chemical ingrediants, hyrdogen and oxygen and such. See it as that and only as that. Its hard, but without man, without us imposing meaning and beauty upon it, its nothing more than that. Its terrifying really, just how mute and unfeeling is this world, this universe we inhabit. Without God or gods we are utterly insignificant and alone, like ants on a mound of dirt.

Or if you want to undertand the absurdity of the actor, imagine some epic scene at the end of an epic film. Imagine right before Martin Sheen is about to plunge the blade into Brando, the great and mysterious and awe-inspiring Colonel Kurtz, in the thick of the deep dark jungle as forboding drums play and hellish flames dance in a flickering rage.... imagine the passion and terror of the scene, the actors and the audience taken wholly in, every thought and every breath arising with utmost profundity and trepidation, totally rapt... and all of a sudden a small smiling caucasion child holding a bright blue balloon on a string wanders through the shot. The emotion and meaning and everything about the scene have suddenly become strikingly absurd. When God died, when world war 1 introduced into the world and the mind of man such utter depravity as had never been imagined or seen, all the fabricated layers of meaning, of truth and morality, were then cataclysmically rent, and man's absurdity became henceforth plainly and unavoidably known. His script was made up, his passions and beliefs false, his setting natural, turned out by the amoral and purposeless cosmic machine.

[Darcy88]

Thanks for the recommendation, Hunger Artist. I'm beginning to think that Camus is not important as a philosopher. The main interest in him is as a novelist.

And that's not true. I thought so too, but in certain contexts, particularly political activism and left-wing intellectualism, Camus is often regarded as THE philosopher, the most important - ever.

[YesNo]

Well this thread has made me want to re-read M of S and so I'll post pertinent sections as I come across them.

Even if the city is noisy, its noisy because of man, and even the tall red-wood-like skyscrapers, the rivers of concrete, and the growling four-wheeled beasts all confront one as inhumanly aloof, beyond sympathy or meaning, unlike a numinous Grecian river with its attendant deity and its mythical story and its centaur inhabitants. They actually bestowed upon rivers personality and will, unlike we who reduce rivers to natural scientifically rather than spiritually coherent phenomena.

Walk to the ocean or lake-side on a clear day. Look upon the illimitable landscape of water and sky. Try and regard it as it is - a great amalgamation of molecules composed of basic chemical ingrediants, hyrdogen and oxygen and such. See it as that and only as that. Its hard, but without man, without us imposing meaning and beauty upon it, its nothing more than that. Its terrifying really, just how mute and unfeeling is this world, this universe we inhabit. Without God or gods we are utterly insignificant and alone, like ants on a mound of dirt.

Or if you want to undertand the absurdity of the actor, imagine some epic scene at the end of an epic film. Imagine right before Martin Sheen is about to plunge the blade into Brando, the great and mysterious and awe-inspiring Colonel Kurtz, in the thick of the deep dark jungle as forboding drums play and hellish flames dance in a flickering rage.... imagine the passion and terror of the scene, the actors and the audience taken wholly in, every thought and every breath arising with utmost profundity and trepidation, totally rapt... and all of a sudden a small smiling caucasion child holding a bright blue balloon on a string wanders through the shot. The emotion and meaning and everything about the scene have suddenly become strikingly absurd. When God died, when world war 1 introduced into the world and the mind of man such utter depravity as had never been imagined or seen, all the fabricated layers of meaning, of truth and morality, were then cataclysmically rent, and man's absurdity became henceforth plainly and unavoidably known. His script was made up, his passions and beliefs false, his setting natural, turned out by the amoral and purposeless cosmic machine.

I'm reading it now but I won't get far without chatting about it with someone. I did find an English version in the library as part of a collection, but it was all in the fiction section.

Camus also has an ethics of "solidarity" which I find suspect, but I guess is the only antidote to his projection of absurdity onto the world. Richard Rorty doesn't like it because it seems to claim that a metaphysical humanness exists to back up Camus' morality making compassion possible. Rorty is too post-modern to accept anything to back up the language we project as meaning.

Recalling Rorty helped me to possibly understand your objection to my claim that meaning is what we project onto the world. When I said that the world "just is" that made it appear unfriendly. For the world to be friendly, there needs to be some others--angels, gods, muses--outside of other humans and the animals and plants around us, who project a powerful, fulfilling, friendly meaning onto us for the world not to be "absurd". We need to be individually the target of meaning as well as the source of meaning for the world to feel like a home.

But I'm not saying those friendly sorts of reality that can project meaning back onto us don't exist when I say the world "just is". The world "just is" with all the gods and demons and angels and what-have-you that we have tried to name by projecting meaning onto the world. When we project meaning onto the world, it is like turning on a flashlight in the dark. It helps us see what is there.

[Darcy88]

But I'm not saying those friendly sorts of reality that can project meaning back onto us don't exist when I say the world "just is". The world "just is" with all the gods and demons and angels and what-have-you that we have tried to name by projecting meaning onto the world. When we project meaning onto the world, it is like turning on a flashlight in the dark. It helps us see what is there.

Camus' idea of the absurd depends, in the context in which we are speaking now, on the inhuman character of the cosmos, on there not being angels and demons, no numinous presences whatsoever. The world itself is not hostile, not anything. I agree that it "just is." But to us, from our human perspective, this world divested of the divine can seem hostile, foreign, like an alien planet next to the earth of our forbears which was as a playground of Gods and mythical beasts and was created with a purpose by a conscious deity.

I really have to read the book again in order to discuss the other meanings Camus has for the absurd. I probably will tonight. Another is the sheer futility of human existence, as like Sisyphus we must push day after day the banal tedium of passionless modern life. Also, we can imagine immortality, we can imagine ourselves as gods, but men we remain, our lives to be extinguished like candles some soon day. There is so wide a chasm between what we want and what we can want, and what we are and will for our short lives always be. There are many facets of the absurd. Its a rich concept.

[YesNo]

Camus' idea of the absurd depends, in the context in which we are speaking now, on the inhuman character of the cosmos, on there not being angels and demons, no numinous presences whatsoever. The world itself is not hostile, not anything. I agree that it "just is." But to us, from our human perspective, this world divested of the divine can seem hostile, foreign, like an alien planet next to the earth of our forbears which was as a playground of Gods and mythical beasts and was created with a purpose by a conscious deity.

I really have to read the book again in order to discuss the other meanings Camus has for the absurd. I probably will tonight. Another is the sheer futility of human existence, as like Sisyphus we must push day after day the banal tedium of passionless modern life. Also, we can imagine immortality, we can imagine ourselves as gods, but men we remain, our lives to be extinguished like candles some soon day. There is so wide a chasm between what we want and what we can want, and what we are and will for our short lives always be. There are many facets of the absurd. Its a rich concept.

I agree with your description of Camus' view. His universe has no gods in it. What is more, the people in his world have no "god within" either.

Currently, I am seeing Camus as an intellectual manic-depressive. The depressive part is his description of our lives as "absurd" and our work as futile (le travail inutile et sans espoir). The manic part is when he believes Sisyphus is happy which I find as hard to accept as his view of Sisyphus as representing us as workers. From my metaphysics, or more generally, my worldview, Camus flips between delusion and sentimentality.

The delusion is in thinking that what we do as work is anything like what Sisyphus is doing. Sisyphus receives no reward for his labor nor do the gods benefit from it. It is truly "inutile". I don't know of any worker employed by someone else who is in this situation. The worker receives a wage and the employer receives a benefit from the work.

The sentimentality comes from the happiness that Camus links with the absurd. He expects Sisyphus, and by his own projection, any worker, to put up with futility. Cacian, earlier in this thread, asked why Sisyphus continues with his labor. Why doesn't Sisyphus just stop doing what is futile? I think it is part of the problem with Camus' philosophy that he doesn't ask this very thing when retelling the myth.

[Darcy88]

Yeah I really have to read the book again to discuss it. Right now I have my head already buried in so many. I'll get to it though.

I do often feel like Sisyphus. I cut a bucket of onions or I build another house and each bucket and each house is just another grain of sand in the great Sahara of this world. Its not delusional to see the analogy between the stone and our work, our lives. Tomorrow there will be more vegetables to chop, more stacks of lumber to move. It can feel like I and everything is nothing but water running endlessly and pointlessly downhill. What real reward do I get for my labor? A small paycheck that goes towards food, housing and tuition? Its better than being a slave for sure. But I still draw no real meaning or pleasure from what I do. For that, for meaning and for delight all I have is love and art really, and I remember some character in some novel of Camus saying precisely that. And for many real love and real art are things unknown. Dulled and deadened by the never-ending quest to move the great stone of necessity and fear and limitation, nothing is really felt, nothing really thought, nothing arises or strikes them with any true profound poignancy.

His novel The Plague is really worth reading. It follows a doctor struggling to keep up with the sheer toll of death wrought upon him and his town by a nasty virulent plague. The doctor maintains this detached but determined air throughout as he faces this impossibly over-powering enemy. It almost seems pointless after a while. The absurdity of opposing this incredibly mighty, almost super-powerful presence occurs to him but does not deter him. He and his friends fight it and fight it, not as heroes but as regular men. They just do it. And they take pleasure in the things we take pleasure in despite our mortality, despite the futility of all that we do and of our very lives themselves. In friendship, in food, in hobbies they find pleasure, solace, a reason to continue.

The book Myth of Sisyphus is about suicide. Why not just give up? I'm still not entirely sure how Camus answers this question but I know he does. As long as there is something then that something is everything and that is more than enough. That's my answer. I probably came up with it after reading Camus years ago.

[Darcy88]

The sentimentality comes from the happiness that Camus links with the absurd. He expects Sisyphus, and by his own projection, any worker, to put up with futility. Cacian, earlier in this thread, asked why Sisyphus continues with his labor. Why doesn't Sisyphus just stop doing what is futile? I think it is part of the problem with Camus' philosophy that he doesn't ask this very thing when retelling the myth.

Sisyphus doesn't stop because the gods have made the stone his punishment. Its like asking why a prison laborer does not stop making license plates. He can't.

The whole point of the book actually is why we, the Sisyphuses, do not commit suicide and escape the futility of life that way.