The Myth of Sisyphus
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus presents a depressing philosophical problem and then offers a solution that is just as depressing.
Man, he tells us, thirsts for a meaning in life and finds none; he is a being with an intrinsic need for meaning in a universe that is intrinsically meaningless; an animal at odds with its world. [1] This conundrum, which Camus called L'Absurde, leads him to ask in all seriousness and with all the subtlety of a battering ram if everyone should commit suicide. But no: suicide symbolizes the triumph of life and death over the individual, cutting the Gordian knot of the Absurd without unraveling it, and so he decides against it. What then are we to do? According to Camus, we must do two things. First, we must remain aware of the fact that life is absurd; that is, we must not be tempted to escape into oblivion. A man who finds order in his work, in filing papers and catching punctual buses, is not confronted by the Absurd but to maintain this sense of order he is required to ignore the universe. Camus' second imperative, both more obscure and more interesting, is that man must then try to find a defiant enjoyment in, or in spite of, his absurd existence. If he can do this, if Sisyphus can admit that he is not unhappy and smirk to himself as he descends for the millionth or billionth time after his ridiculous bolder, that ineradicable smirk is sufficient to undermine the gods that are punishing him and the universe in which that punishment is his fate. This is our only hope of negotiating the Absurd. The difficulty of reading Camus is that his thesis, though interesting, is couched in a bewildering philosophical prose. In dramatic contrast to the spare and lucid style favoured in his novels, I think there are many aspects of his essay writing that could be criticized. To choose something at random, he likes to introduce everyday words and phrases which, as his usage makes clear, are being given idiosyncratic meanings known only to Camus. He does not pause to clarify what he means, nor does he pause to substantiate the vague arguments he uses these words and phrases to postulate. Instead he goes on, breathlessly, forming yet another private argument from private premises, introducing still more words from his maddening idiolect and recklessly multiplying the confusion until he achieves a kind of second and third-order ambiguity. Here, for example, is a paragraph that heads up a new section and is in no way foregrounded by the preceding one:
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When something is incomprehensible to you after many readings, it is reasonable to assume that the author is either a genius or an idiot. Camus is neither. He is simply guilty of fudging sentences to make his ideas appear more complex, more esoteric, than they really are. Or perhaps the game with which he finds defiant enjoyment in the absurdity of his existence consists in avenging himself on his readers with his atrocious philosophical cant. I said that Camus' thesis is interesting. It is. Whether it is interesting enough to justify the Sisyphean toil of reading and rereading paragraphs like the above will depend on your patience.
[1] The problem was phrased in a tidy syllogism by one of Tolstoy's characters when he says, ''Without knowing what I am and why I'm here, it is impossible for me to live; and I cannot know that, therefore I cannot live.''
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