Atop the mountain, his work is for naught, Sisyphus pauses, recognizes his suffering, accepts that is all there is, laughs at it, and thus achieves a self-consciousness worthy of his torment. However, the happiness that Sisyphus might feel is not from the universe it is from himself. The peak is littered with boulders seemingly placed by gods. For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it. In itself weariness has something sickening about it.
At the end of awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. 2īut one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. Parker’s simple lines flick the absurd in the ear. “If I should labor through daylight and dark, One recalls Dorothy Parker‘s poem “Philosophy”: Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm-this path is easily followed most of the time. We continue to believe we are responsible, reason will prevail, and life will be worth something.Ĭamus escorts his metaphor to modern day: we fail to see things as absurd, because we do not want to relinquish our sense of order, meaning, or control. He is stronger than the rock.Ībsurdity, argues Camus, is what the universe throws back when we try to impose meaning upon indifference. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. Or rather, could be happy.Īt the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved.
Learn more.Īlthough bound to this utterly ineffective (and harsh) existence, Sisyphus, Camus argues, was happy.
The artist’s choice to depict the tragic hero carrying (rather than pushing) the boulder heightens the drama and our empathy. Camus looks at Sisyphus as a representative human: one engaged in endless mechanical and meaningless toil. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a precocious human punished by the gods to push a boulder to the top of a mountain only to have it roll back down again. Meaning, if the world is indifferent, should we too be indifferent to a meaningful life or even life itself? 1 Try to ignore the fully-packed context of the word “suicide” in a mental health capacity Camus means it as a philosophical question. The answer, underlying and appearing through the paradoxes which cover it, is this: even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate. The fundamental subject of The Myth of Sisyphus is this: it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning therefore it is legitimate to meet the problem of suicide face to face.
Albert Camus‘ (Novem– January 4, 1960) monumental philosophical work, The Myth of Sisyphus is a series of essays in which Camus makes sense of the human quest for order and meaning in an indifferent (and thus absurd) universe.