The Central Problem of Philosophy

Camus starts The Myth of Sisyphus by stating that the central problem of philosophy is to figure out whether life is worth living, everything else is details. People don’t die in the name of the ontological problem. What gives life meaning is the irrational illusions. These same ideas that, when removed, are enough to cause thoughts of suicide.

People rarely commit suicide from reflection, the cause is often unverifiable. Killing yourself is a way of admitting that life is too much, or that you do not understand it.

When people are disillusioned, when they no longer accept that there is any redemption to life, even a false one, then they recognize the absurdity of life. Thinking about suicide often follows this realization. Camus discusses the relationship between suicide and the absurd in the rest of the book, drawing on philosophical novels, absurd historical characters and roles, and the myth of Sisyphus.

Philosophical reasoning cannot satisfy feelings of existential dread, neither can science with its detailed explanation of what things are. Science can describe how the universe can be reduced to the atom, and how atoms can be reduced to the electrons, but ultimately science can be reduced to statements of certainty that do not teach you about the world, or hypotheses that aren’t certain. It is not that science does not have answers, but its answers are irrelevant to the dilemma of the absurdity of life.

Don Juan

The character of Don Juan symbolizes the version of man who does not ruminate on the past, and does experience feelings of melancholy. He is drawn to new experiences, and new pleasures. He is, in a way, a hedonist. And while he is cast as a heretic by the religious, the only heresy according to hi is to forego the pleasures he can knowingly achieve in this life for the promise of something that he isn’t certain exists. Don Juan’s philosophy has wisdom in it.

This life gratifies his every wish, and nothing is worse than losing it. This madman is a great wise man. But men who live on hope do not thrive in this universe where kindness yields to generosity, affection to virile silence, and communion to solitary courage. And all hasten to say: “He was a weakling, an idealist or a saint.” One has to disparage the greatness that insults.

Camus makes a distinction between the saint and Don Juan. The saint looks for quality, while Don Juan looks for quantity. But more than that, Don Juan is conscious of himself. He knows that he is a seducer, and that Is what makes him absurd. The saint believes in the ultimate profundity in things, but Don Juan does not, this makes him absurd.

He does not wish to live with them, he spends his life looking only forwards, not thinking about the past, not looking at portraits. His character is ridiculed and pitied, and even accused of selfishness, but this is unwarranted. What each individual thinks of as “love” is different than what their partner thinks of “love.” Love, the mix of feelings that are experienced are informed by biology and culture, and that is what binds you to another person. But this compound is not the same for another person.

“I do not have the right to cover all these experiences with the same name. This exempts one from conducting them with the same gestures. The absurd man multiplies here again what he cannot unify. Thus he discovers a new way of being which liberates him at least as much as it liberates those who approach him.

There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional. All those deaths and all those rebirths gathered together as in a sheaf make up for Don Juan the flowering of his life. It is his way of giving and of vivifying. I let it be decided whether or not one can speak of selfishness.”

Camus is saying that we erroneously assume that the concept of love can be unified – to include all the experiences of attraction that you feel towards others. But that is false. No relationship is the same. In that sense, he is vindicating Don Juan since the latter does not seek the same experience, but new ones.

There are two remedies to the problem of the absurd as Camus sees it, one is awareness, and the other, is revolt.

“The conqueror or the actor, the creator or Don Juan may forget that their exercise in living could not do without awareness of its mad character. One becomes accustomed so quickly. A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end. Likewise, the whole effort of this conqueror will be diverted to ambition, which was but a way toward a greater life. Don Juan in turn will likewise yield to his fate, be satisfied with that existence whose nobility is of value only through revolt. For one it is awareness and for the other, revolt; in both cases the absurd has disappeared.”

The Church has historically persecuted heretics, deeming those who have gone astray its worst enemies.

“But the record of Gnostic effronteries and the persistence of Manichean currents have contributed more to the construction of orthodox dogma than all the prayers. With due allowance, the same is true of the absurd. One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it.”

On creativity…

“Elsewhere I have brought out the fact that human will had no other purpose than to maintain awareness. But that could not do without discipline. Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man’s sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile. It calls for a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise estimate of the limits of truth, measure, and strength. It constitutes an ascesis.

All that “for nothing,” in order to repeat and mark time. But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.”

It is important to control your aspirations to be free. If you are too attached to the mission you are on, you are destined for dissatisfaction because nothing will ultimately be complete.

“On the way to that liberty, there is still a progress to be made. The final effort for these related minds, creator or conqueror, is to manage to free themselves also from their undertakings: succeed in granting that the very work, whether it be conquest, love, or creation, may well not be; consummate thus the utter futility of any individual life. Indeed, that gives them more freedom in the realization of that work, just as becoming aware of the absurdity of life authorized them to plunge into it with every excess.”

The Myth of Sisyphus

If the Myth of Sisyphus is tragic, I summarize it here. it is because the hero is conscious. He wouldn’t feel like he was being tortured if he had any hope of success while he carried the rock up the hill. He knows his fate, and Camus thinks it is this knowledge that is tragic. However, he is not always conscious of this, there are moments when he forgets the reality he is in.

“Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

Camus also thinks that Sisyphus may even experience feelings of joy in brief moments.

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… At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life,

Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling…

Perhaps it is the climb up, and not the reward itself that gives us happiness.

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…The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The Myth of Sisyphus is an argument against nihilism. By showing us that having control and competency over our environment albeit a minimum amount, that creating, conquering, loving, experiencing progress, unlocking new experiences – despite the ultimate futility and absurdity of life, makes life worthwhile, even philosophically.