A Serious Philosophical Question

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus examines whether suicide is a logical course of action for a man to take after he realizes that his existence has no meaning. A reader might object that people commit suicide because of sorrow resulting from personal loss, not philosophical arguments about life's meaning. But according to Camus, the recognition that life is meaningless brings with it a feeling of alienation from the world, and this same alienation is experienced by people who commit suicide because of emotional pain resulting from things such as terminal disease, the death of a loved one, or professional scandal. A man can feel at home in the world only when he can give reasons, even bad ones, for his existence. But when he is no longer able to give reasons for existence--because he recognizes that God does not exist and life is meaningless, or because of personal loss that makes happiness impossible--he loses hope of a promised land and the memory of being at home in the world. This "divorce" between "the actor and his setting" is the feeling of absurdity. Camus wants to determine, strictly as a matter of logic, and not as a matter of habit, emotion, or fear, whether life is worth living when man is conscious of its absurdity.

By saying that human life is absurd, Camus means that human beings have basic psychological drives that go unfulfilled because of the nature of the world. Most people have an innate longing for a meaning that transcends their own lives, but that longing is inevitably frustrated because the universe has no moral structure or overarching purpose. Further, people cannot help but structure their lives around the attainment of their goals in the future; they live for that "someday" when they will have established a career, overcome some challenge, or started a family. The only thing the future certainly promises, however, is death. It makes no more sense for a man to structure his life around the accomplishment of his long-term goals than it does for him to strive for constant consciousness of his inevitable demise. Camus’s subject is whether, in the face of these contradictions, the value of human life can be affirmed without resorting to religious or philosophical doctrines that offer false solutions to the problem of absurdity. An intellectually honest man cannot resolve the problem by convincing himself that life has meaning or that the afterlife will provide him with an escape from death. Such solutions are false because the world has no meaning and death is unavoidable; these solutions simply deny the existence of the terms of the problem, which are the divorce between man’s need for a future and the absence of any future apart from death, and the divorce between man’s longing for meaning and the world’s meaninglessness.

Camus argues that human life can actually be lived all the more robustly because it is meaningless. To live a fate known to be absurd, man must strive to remain conscious of its absurdity. Revolt is one of the only coherent positions that can be held in an absurd world because it does not falsely deny the existence of any aspect of the absurdity of man's condition. The absurd man carries out his revolt against life by simultaneously acknowledging the meaninglessness of the world and his psychic need for meaning. He acknowledges his need to live for the future while rejecting the future because it will bring about his death. The conscious revolt that is carried out by the absurd man gives life its value. It is magnificent because of the discipline and will it requires. Suicide cannot be a logical response to the absurdity of existence, to the divorce between the world we inhabit and the world we want to inhabit, because it constitutes an acceptance of death. Suicide takes away one piece of the problem of absurdity--man’s horror toward death--and replaces it with complete acceptance.

On first reading this argument, I thought that Camus was guilty of circular reasoning when he claimed that suicide was an invalid response to absurdity because it replaced man's revulsion toward death with complete acceptance. I thought that a man rationally could opt for suicide if he found that he could not be happy and did not want to live in a meaningless world. But this rejoinder does not address Camus’s point because he is looking at suicide from a dispassionate, strictly logical standpoint. Certainly some people may for emotional or other subjective reasons choose death over living a meaningless life, but suicide does not follow as a logical consequence from the fact that life is meaningless, in the same way the conclusion of a syllogism follows from the major and minor premises.

And yet, how can Camus argue that a life without meaning can be lived more fully than a life that has meaning? It is because the lack of meaning gives man the freedom to make judgments about how to live out his life. While revolt is the first consequence Camus draws from the absurdity of life, the second is total freedom. By stripping man of any hope for freedom from death, of any reason to live for the future, consciousness of the absurd magnifies man's freedom of action. Before recognizing the absurdity of life, man acted as if his life was given meaning by the long-term aims he set for himself. He felt obliged to act according to whatever purposes he sought to achieve, as, for example, a father, engineer, leader, or clerk. Man’s false sense that his life took on meaning from his long-term goals created barriers that constrained his range of action. But the conscious man grasps that it is absurd to live for a future that means his own inevitable death. Thus, he is released from any obligation that may come from a sense that one’s life is given purpose through the goals he sets. A man’s goals create no obligation to act in a manner consistent with those goals because “there is no future.”

The third consequence Camus ascribes to the absurd is quantity. If life had a meaning, it would imply a scale of values that would allow us to say whether one life was more valuable than another, but the absurd rejects both meaning and the scale of values meaning implies. Because no scale enables us to rank a life filled with one set of experiences as better than a life filled with another, the sole criterion by which lives can be judged is the quantity of living they contain. But the importance of quantity does not mean that the purpose of life is to live as long as possible, that man should strive break all records and maximize one’s lifespan. Life has no purpose. Living to the maximum is a matter of luck.

The Absurd Hero

At the end of his investigation, Camus addresses the Greek myth that gives his essay its name. Sisyphus was a mortal who had been condemned by the gods to spend eternity in the underworld rolling a boulder to the top of a mountain. Whenever he reached the summit, the boulder rolled back down and he had to repeat his labor. Camus imagines that, when Sisyphus is returning to the plain before resuming his toil, he is conscious that he has no hope of succeeding in the work he must perform endlessly. It is Sisyphus’s lucidity on the descent--his awareness of the futility of the task that he must perform forever--that makes his story tragic and gives his futile work its element of torture. But it also makes Sisyphus superior to his fate. He is able to scorn his wretched, powerless condition. This contempt makes him superior to his fate.

At times on the return, Sisyphus remembers too vividly the pleasures he had enjoyed while alive--the beauty of the sea, the touch a woman’s hand, a glass of wine--and he is struck by sorrow for what he has lost. But the weight of his loss is bearable when he regards it coolly. He recognizes that his only link to the world is the memories of earth that brought on his sorrow. This recognition leads him to cry out, “All is well!” despite the eons of pointless labor that stand before him.

Sisyphus has a fate like that of the modern laborer, who works every day of his life performing the same pointless tasks. Both can be happy and proclaim that all is well because the futility of their work and the meaninglessness of their lives do not, or at least need not, exhaust them. Man’s awareness of the absurdity of life dispels his delusional fears and hopes about God and the future. He can glance backward over his life and coolly regard the series of meaningless actions that have come to define his fate. In his effort to maintain his absurd revolt--his striving for consciousness that the world has frustrated his need for knowledge, meaning, and a future--the absurd man undertakes a struggle like that of Sisyphus’s. That struggle by itself can provide him with a measure of happiness. Having abandoned any hope for the future, the absurd man recognizes himself in the “noble, soulless land” on which he lives out his time on earth.