Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus

Albert Camus was an early twentieth century French philosopher whose works expressed a philosophy of the absurd.

In the Myth of Sisyphus, published in 1952, Camus challenges the idea of reason, logic and rationality, describing the limits of our understanding of the world as humans, protesting that philosophy itself is an almost useless and self-negating task.

Camus is always asking that age old question – what is the meaning of life? Because if we knew the answer to that question we’d know how to act.
The question of acting is an ethical question – what should we do?

The traditional answers to these questions have, for millennia, come from religion. Religion tells us what we should do and why we should do it.
We should not kill because we’ll go to heaven if we don’t. Answering these questions secularly without the aid of a higher celestial authority becomes more difficult. For Camus, in fact, it’s almost useless. How can we ever know what to do with any certainty when even the clearest questions have exceptions?

For Camus, the absurdity of habit and the limits of any transcendental reason are illustrated by the image of Sisyphus – condemned by the gods to roll a rock to the top of a mountain every day, only for it to roll back down for him to repeat all over again.

IN Sisyphus, Camus sees the human conditioned at its starkest.
But he highlights the moment when Sisyphus returns back down to the bottom of the mountain towards the rock – it’s in this moment that he is most aware, and in an awareness of the truth everything becomes clear, we acknowledge our fate and return to it anyway.

Acknowledging the problems of acting and acting anyway takes courage. Knowing that absolute truth is unavailable and being resolute anyway is a demand of being human.

He writes that ‘all Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols.’
We become most human – most free- when we acknowledge this.

We must live with an awareness of this absurdity or risk falling into a numb and frozen immobility – our fate is to act without being sure of how to act
The important thing, Camus writes ‘is not to be cured but to live with one’s ailments.’ Life is ‘unjust, incoherent and incomprehensible.’ We must live anyway.

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Sources:

Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-camus-plague.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/us/coronavirus-medical-rationing.html

https://qz.com/1821843/ethicists-agree-on-who-should-get-treated-first-for-coronavirus/

Aronson, Ronald, "Albert Camus", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/camus/

AMA Journal of Ethics, January 2020, 22, 1, Culture, Context, and Epidemic Contrainment, https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/issue/culture-context-and-epidemic-containment

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