Absurdism | Albert Camus

One must imagine Sisyphus happy?

Image via Jonah Calinawan’s Out of the Blue

Someday, not too long from now, you will die. And despite how important all of this seems right now, your death, like your life, will be meaningless. All of your anger and your love, your struggles and successes, every bright idea and blundering mistake you ever made are nothing.

Of course, you’re not alone. Every person that ever lived, every religious prophet and world conqueror; every celebrity, king and lover that you’ve ever heard of lived their lives on this tiny speck of dust orbiting an inconsequential star at the edge of an inconsequential galaxy adrift in an ocean of billions of galaxies. And all of these great people, and every human ever born, lived and died in a mere blink of the cosmic eye — a single heartbeat in the 14 billion year history of the universe not to mention the billions of years yet to come.

And as if that weren’t enough, there’s another layer to the story that turns this ugly truth into a cruel cosmic joke.

You care.

You are wired for meaning. Your heart hungers for a place in the world. It craves importance. But you have no significance. Your existence is simply an accident the world doesn’t care about.

Philosophers call this collision between a cold apathetic universe and a human need for meaning the Absurd. It’s not the universe that’s Absurd — in reality it is merely irrational and meaningless. Nor is it the human hunger for meaning. What’s absurd is the cruel asymmetry of these two meeting. As the French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus put it:

“The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

“The mind’s deepest desire is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal … A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger”

For most of human history and even for most people alive today, this veil of illusions and lights continues to hide them from the stark truth of the absurd. They had or have a metaphysical story whether that’s pagan, Jewish or Buddhist which obscured or obscures this mismatch.

But more and more of us today are not so fortunate. In a moment the horrifying truth is revealed. “the stage-sets collapse” and the hollowness of life is revealed:

“Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, 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. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. … What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery.”

This is the subject of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. The book opens with one of the most iconic lines in the history of philosophy:

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

Having experienced the absurdity of life, how do we continue? What answer is there to the problem of Nihilism? Camus says there are three options in facing the absurd. Only one is legitimate.

1. Suicide

Melancholy by Edvard Munch

In his 1955 preface to The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus summarises the book as follows:

“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. 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.”

But why is suicide not legitimate? Camus argues that it is an evasion of the problem and so it is not a solution to the absurd at all. It is a negation of the problem that “amounts to escaping it”. It doesn’t solve anything.

For Camus, suicide isn’t the ultimate act of hubris and rebellion but rather a renunciation of all human values and indeed the very possibility of human values. It’s not the ultimate act of human freedom but the renunciation of human freedom. He writes that:

“The absurd has meaning only insofar as it is not agreed to”

For Camus, suicide is a surrender to the Absurd — an admission that life isn’t worth living because it lacks meaning. Instead of this capitulation he argues that the proper response is to stay alive and thus to keep wrestling with the absurd.

And so, with ending our lives off the table, we have two options remaining.

2. Philosophical Suicide

The second option is to take what Existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard calls a “leap of faith” —to believe in some doctrine or ideology that tells us there is a meaning we must have faith in. This can be a religion like Christianity or an ideology like Marxism. We swallow a pill of bullshit and in return we get reprieve from the absurd. Camus terms this option philosophical suicide.

He doesn’t just see this reaction to the absurd in the likes of Christianity or Marxism as one would expect but also in the Existentialists who

“deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. That forced hope is religious in all of them”.

In their creation of their own meaning, Camus sees “the mark of a lucidity that repudiates itself”. Existentialists like Sartre, Kierkegaard and Kafka

“attempt to recapture God through what negates Him, to recognize Him not through the categories of goodness or beauty, but behind the empty and hideous aspect of His indifference, of His injustice and of His hatred.”

This is creating a new illusion to hide away the Absurd. Camus, needless to say, isn’t such a fan. His reasoning will not allow “such an abdication” and must begin and end with the Absurd:

“My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence that aroused it. … There can be no question of masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It is essential to know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die from it”.

And so having ruled out suicide and philosophical suicide, Camus sees one remaining option.

3. Absurdism

The sheep-sheep hunter, Sioux by Edward Sheriff Curtis

Camus finds these two options insincere and so he proposes a third option—to embrace the insatiable tension, to embrace the Absurd, to lean into it. This third option is Absurdism. 

Absurdism is a rebellion against meaninglessness. We do not escape from the absurd through death or philosophical suicide. We meet the absurd as it is without escape and with integrity and we maintain the tension of the absurd in us without turning away. Camus incites us to a life without consolation—a life characterised by acute consciousness of and rebellion against its own mortality and its limits. As he puts it:

“the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

This Absurd philosophy is embodied most purely by its symbolic figurehead — the Greek mythological figure Sisyphus. Sisyphus was the founder of the Greek city of Corinth. He was known to be the craftiest of all humans — craftier even than Zeus himself. When he was sent to the underworld he managed to trick his way out. Having escaped the underworld, Sisyphus returns to the Earth and revels once again in the pleasures of the world.

But being a mortal man, Sisyphus can’t outrun his fate forever and his crimes against the gods catch up with him. He was dragged back to the underworld and given the punishment of “ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight”. At which point, Sisyphus must return to the base of the mountain and roll the rock right back up again. And so on until the end of time.

The gods are proud of their punishment for:

“they had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour”

It is easy to see why Sisyphus is Camus’s Absurd hero for here is an archetypal representation of our present situation:

“The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks and this fate is no less absurd”

But it’s not just his cruel punishment that makes Sisyphus the Absurd hero. He also embodies the life-affirming spirit of Absurdism. This is a man who loved life so much that even after death took him he tricked his way out of it all so he could return to enjoy the pleasures of the world again.

While the spirit of Nihilism is the deliberate and eternal negation of all values, the spirit of Absurdism is an affirmation of life’s value even in death. Where Nihilism takes the absurd as a conclusion, the Absurdist Camus takes it as a starting point.

In the 1955 preface to The Myth of Sisyphus he writes:

“this book declares that even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to proceed beyond nihilism. In all the books I have written since, I have attempted to pursue this direction. Although The Myth of Sisyphus poses moral problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.”

Sisyphus embodies this spirit of life-affirmation.

But there is more. Sisyphus embodies the Absurd ideal. Where the Existentialists, the religious and the ideologists commit their respective philosophical suicides by fleeing from the tension of the absurd, Sisyphus faces it. This is what Camus’s Absurd philosophy is all about in the end. It is

“to live in harmony with a universe without future and without weakness.”

It’s not about overcoming the absurd but merely of

“being faithful to the rules of the battle … Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance”

This is why Sisyphus is the embodiment of Absurdism. He is a rebel. He outwits death and the gods to return to life. He rebels against the fundamental order of things — he rebels even against the gods themselves. And most importantly of all, he doesn’t flee from the Absurd. Again and again he faces the Absurd — he returns to his rock and rolls it right back up that hill. And it is here that Camus ends the book the same way that he started it — with one of the most iconic passages in the history of philosophy:

“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.”

The Living Philosophy of Absurdism

Sons of JH Burch by Lewis Wickes Hine

Of course, this is all well and good for Sisyphus but what does this look like for those of us trapped in our absurd earthly lives? What is the take-away? What are the solid values that Camus is advocating?

It’s a question you don’t find answered in most of what you see or read on the internet about Absurdism. For the most part we are left with the line “we must imagine Sisyphus happy” which, while undoubtedly a beautiful sentiment, is somewhat challenging to implement.

This is a shame because Camus does give us an answer and it is a thing of beauty and simplicity. Naturally he doesn’t advocate any grand system of philosophy or any religion or other system of thought. Instead it is something simpler and far more tangible:

“I have no concern with ideas or with the eternal”, he writes “the truth that comes within my scope can be touched with the hand”

He says that there is

“but one luxury for [the absurd hero] – that of human relations”

Instead of taking shelter in some abstract idea of system like Nietzsche’s Will to Power or Eternal Recurrence, or Marxism or Existentialism, he brings us into something immediately human. This is the through-line for all of Camus’s philosophy. At the beginning of 1951’s The Rebel he writes:

“In absurdist experience suffering is individual. But from the moment when a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience. Therefore the first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realise that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe . . . this evidence lures the individual from his solitude. It founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel – therefore we exist.”

And so Camus brings us through Nihilism and back to the tangible value of solidarity with our fellow strugglers. I have yet to come across a purer embodiment of this Camusian Absurdist philosophy of tangible love as a way beyond Nihilism than the 2022 movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. If you’re interested in this Absurdist value of moving beyond Nihilism via Nihilism then I’d highly recommend checking out the article on that. Or if you want to learn more about Nihilism and Existentialism you can check out this article.