We are all Sisyphus, pointlessly rolling our boulders. If we grant Camus that we do occupy this absurd space of yearning but never finding, it could be said that almost all of our concerns simply don’t matter, for on this view all of our beliefs, thoughts, and actions towards the world become trivial and meaningless. ![]() (For a slightly different take on the absurd, see Thomas Nagel’s argument that absurdity arises not from our need for meaning in a meaningless world, but from the fact we are consumed by our concerns, while simultaneously recognizing how contingent they are.) The consequences of living in absurdity Hence the image of Sisyphus: we build theories up, inevitably they crash back down, and compulsively we start again. In other words, despite our yearning for an ultimate explanation for existence, in Camus’s mind such an explanation will always be beyond our comprehension.Īnd it is this hopeless space we occupy - between our impulse to ask deep questions and our inability to answer them - that Camus labels ‘the absurd’. Get philosophy's best answers delivered direct to your inbox with our celebrated introduction to philosophy course. On the other, we are not equipped to ever adequately satisfy this longing - Camus rejects every scientific, metaphysical, or religious attempt at doing so. On the one hand, we are by nature curious animals who long for meaning and purpose - a fundamental reason for existing. How so? Well, Camus argues that a paradox lies at the heart of human experience. Camus thinks Sisyphus's situation perfectly encapsulates the entirety of human intellectual and philosophical endeavour. Beyond everyday absurdityįor Camus, it's not just the similarities between Sisyphus and our repetitive day-to-day schedules that make our existences absurd it goes far beyond that. And this cyclical mundanity points to the fundamental absurdity of the human condition: all this time we thought we were making progress - we're all just Sisyphus, each with our own boulders to bear. We wake up, we toil, we sleep we wake up, we toil, we sleep we push the boulder up, it rolls back down, we start again. ![]() “The workman of today,” Camus writes in his mind-bending book The Myth of Sisyphus, “works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. Or are they? Indeed, 20th-century French thinker Albert Camus believed the myth of Sisyphus to be a brilliant metaphor for our everyday existence. And he must do this over and over - forever.ĭoesn't sound great, does it? Poor guy. Each time, Sisyphus must descend and start again. He's the unlucky protagonist of the Ancient Greek myth where, having royally upset the gods, he's condemned - for all eternity - to push a boulder up a mountain, only for it to roll all the way back down upon reaching the top. Have you ever felt - no matter what you do - that you're not getting anywhere? That all your efforts are futile? That regardless of how you act you simply end up back where you started?
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