Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus

Albert Camus published Le Mythe de Sisyphe, an essay on the absurd, in Paris in October 1942, during the German occupation of France. He was 28. It opens with a startling claim: the one truly serious philosophical question is suicide, since judging whether life is or is not worth living answers the basic question of philosophy. Camus says the absurd arises from the clash between the human demand for meaning and the silent, unreasonable world, which gives none. The absurd is the confrontation, not the world and not the human alone.¹²³

He considers the possible responses. One is suicide, which Camus rejects because it ends the confrontation instead of living it. Another is what he calls philosophical suicide, the leap into faith or a system, which he finds in Kierkegaard, Jaspers and Husserl. The third, which he endorses, is revolt: to live in full awareness of the absurd, without hope of an ultimate meaning, and to make the most of freedom and passion. He illustrates this with Sisyphus, the king of Corinth who defied the gods and was condemned in the underworld, as in Homer's Odyssey, to roll a boulder up a hill forever, only to see it roll down. Camus focuses on the moment when Sisyphus walks back down, aware of his fate. His scorn makes him stronger than the rock. Camus concludes that one must imagine Sisyphus happy, because the struggle toward the heights is enough to fill a human heart.¹²

The essay appeared the same year as his novel The Stranger. Camus refused the label existentialist, but the essay is one of its core texts. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, at 44.¹³