Albert camus myth of sisyphus pdf

It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when the 'appetite for the absolute and for unity' meets 'the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.

He then characterizes a number of philosophies that describe and attempt to deal with this feeling of the absurd, by Heidegger, Jaspers, Shestov, Kierkegaard, and Husserl. All of these, he claims, commit 'philosophical suicide' by reaching conclusions that contradict the original absurd position, either by abandoning reason and turning to God, as in the case of Kierkegaard and Shestov, or by elevating reason and ultimately arriving at ubiquitous Platonic forms and an abstract god, as in the case of Husserl.

For Camus, who set out to take the absurd seriously and follow it to its final conclusions, these 'leaps' cannot convince. Taking the absurd seriously means acknowledging the contradiction between the desire of human reason and the unreasonable world.

Suicide, then, also must be rejected: without man, the absurd cannot exist. The contradiction must be lived; reason and its limits must be acknowledged, without false hope.

However, the absurd can never be permanently accepted: it requires constant confrontation, constant revolt. While the question of human freedom in the metaphysical sense loses interest to the absurd man, he gains freedom in a very concrete sense: no longer bound by hope for a better future or eternity, without a need to pursue life's purpose or to create meaning, 'he enjoys a freedom with regard to common rules'.

To embrace the absurd implies embracing all that the unreasonable world has to offer. Without a meaning in life, there is no scale of values. Thus, Camus arrives at three consequences from fully acknowledging the absurd: revolt, freedom, and passion. How should the absurd man live? Clearly, no ethical rules apply, as they are all based on higher powers or on justification. Camus then goes on to present examples of the absurd life.

He begins with Don Juan, the serial seducer who lives the passionate life to the fullest. The next example is the actor, who depicts ephemeral lives for ephemeral fame.

In those three hours he travels the whole course of the dead-end path that the man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover. Camus's third example of the absurd man is the conqueror, the warrior who forgoes all promises of eternity to affect and engage fully in human history.

He chooses action over contemplation, aware of the fact that nothing can last and no victory is final. Jordan Jordanovich. A short summary of this paper. Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus.

To do that it will then move on to look at how Camus draws a distinction between 'revolution' and 'revolt and, finally, it will come to the conclusion that happiness ultimately comes from accepting our limits and in the face of accepting those limits striving to be what we can be. Whether the satisfaction and happiness we must imagine Sisyphus possessing, makes his life meaning is an open question. Camus is arguing that, given that there is no God, and there is no for immortality or life after death, we need to accept that we are sentenced to a finite amount of time on earth and then we need just to squeeze out as much as life as we can.

Camus took suicide very seriously and he actually thought that it poses a serious philosophical problem. He thought that most philosophical questions do not concern actual life or death.

So, the question is, what is the meaning of the life, what makes life worth living? Camus knows that people commit suicide for many reasons, it is complex, and he acknowledges that. But all suicides are acts of confession. Therefore, we find that we repeat this pattern over and over in this cycle, and our lives are often full of agitation, frustration, suffering and it makes you wonder why life is worth living.

When someone commits suicide is a sort of confession that life is ridicules in that sense. It is interesting to see what Camus means by absurd walls. It is, actually, not clearly defined and used. Therefore, lets define it as Camus defines it.

The cosmos is mute and irrational in this respect. The universe, described by natural science is ultimately without design and offers no answers to the meaning or the meaning of lives brought into its fold through the lottery of birth. We seek meaning in things. We naturally look for patterns and try to interpret what those patters mean and say. But, as it is said, we are thrown into a universe that affords to those deepest questions. The walls are the walls we put to isolate ourselves and feel comfortable in life.

We ignore the big question and act as if life has meaning. The absurdity of life is realized when the familiar illusion of life is bulldozed. You see life for what it is. You become stranger. The world is no longer a comfort place. It is an alien, stark wasteland. Life is an exercise in futility-without meaning. For Camus, life becomes a mechanical cycle design to keep itself in existence, but one realizes that it is without ultimate meaning. Th fork in the road at the end of this path is suicide or recovery.

You either give up or embrace the absurdity and choose to go on living. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one will live this fate, knowing it to be an absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that the absurd brought to light by consciousness.

Living is keeping the absurd alive - contemplating it. To try to negate the absurd as existentialists did by embracing freedom as an antidot to absurdity, is to destroy or ignore the very thing that is life and true freedom — giving.

To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. Log In Sign Up. Download Free PDF. The Myth Of Sisyphus. Sof Robin. Download PDF. A short summary of this paper. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals.

According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld.

To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld.

Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square.

Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary.

Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him. You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.

This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld.