The myth of sisyphus summary4/28/2023 "What counts is not the best living but the most living." Without meaning in life, there is no scale of values. To embrace the absurd implies embracing all that the unreasonable world has to offer. 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". However, the absurd can never be permanently accepted: it requires constant confrontation, constant revolt. The contradiction must be lived reason and its limits must be acknowledged, without false hope. Suicide, then, also must be rejected: without man, the absurd cannot exist. Taking the absurd seriously means acknowledging the contradiction between the desire of human reason and the unreasonable world. 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.įor Camus, who sets out to take the absurd seriously and follow it to its final conclusions, these "leaps" cannot convince. He then characterizes several philosophies that describe and attempt to deal with this feeling of the absurd, by Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Lev Shestov, Søren Kierkegaard, and Edmund Husserl. 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." This is the absurd condition and "from the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all." Once stripped of its common romanticism, the world is a foreign, strange and inhuman place true knowledge is impossible and rationality and science cannot explain the world: their stories ultimately end in meaningless abstractions, in metaphors. He begins by describing the following absurd condition: we build our life on the hope for tomorrow, yet tomorrow brings us closer to death and is the ultimate enemy people live their lives as if they were not aware of the certainty of death. The essay is dedicated to Pascal Pia and is organized in four chapters and one appendix.Ĭamus undertakes the task of answering what he considers to be the only question of philosophy that matters: Does the realization of the meaninglessness and absurdity of life necessarily require suicide? Home The Myth of Sisyphus Wikipedia: Summary
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