The Absurdity of Albert Camus
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"There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. [...] His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. [...] The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. [...] The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
Notice that Camus doesn't say HOW to imagine Sisyphus happy. How do you?
I imagine that he's happy because he takes pride in the quality of his work pushing the stone.
There's a sort of pride in fully knowing, accepting, and disengaging with some rational proof, and still "living your life anyways". In some sense, even though that might be irrational, it's one of the deepest forms of satisfaction.
Personally, this helped https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/03/14/camuss-new-yo...
>Forty-eight hours of pleasant euphoria
Such an epicure? So Epicurean?
(As well as the rest of the diary)
But you're right, it can also be easily used to justify horrible things. And in this case, you can still lead to authoritarian nightmares, or worse.
Maybe bad people are bad, and no matter what philosophy you adopt, one can twist it to be bad.
Basically embracing life with full knowledge that there isn't some final transcendent epiphany or rapturous endpoint
And yet the homonculus presses me forward and I want this, need that, think about this, touch that, stare at those, wonder, get frustrated, click my teeth and tap my desk, build this, build that, not good enough, start over...
I'm well aware that meditation and just calming the fuck down now and then are salves for the insanity, it's just wholly and completely weird that I can be aware of these things and still, reliably, also something resembling crazy.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
Huh? Do you mean that in a literal sense, that Camus doesn't give instructions on how imagination works? To me, the quote certainly does explain how Sisyphus could be happy:
His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing [..] The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart
Struggle alone doesn't do it for me personally, but taking pride in how well I struggle does.
The gods controlled the ascent, but they forgot to regulate the walk back down. In those brief, unburdened minutes descending the slope, Sisyphus is completely outside their authority.
You can imagine him however you like, laughing at the absurdity of it, studying the mountain, or simply enjoying the breeze. It almost doesn't matter. The walk down belongs to him.
The gods imposed the sentence. Sisyphus decides what it means.
This is Camus' idea of the universe and how to rebel against it by owning and enjoying the small freedoms.
Personally, I believe how you see Sisyphus happy reflects how YOU would enjoy your small freedoms, and this shows how Camus often wanted people to do philosophy on their own.
I wonder if Camus had his own answer to that question. Could Camus imagine Sisyphus happy?
I don't think rebellion or ownership are enough. Rebellion is meaningless when you're alone with nothing to rebel against, and ownership is not inherently positive.
Gods not regulating the decent is an interesting take. Can one learn to smile while falling?
I've never seen an unhappy astronaut on the ISS :P
fwiw, I largely agree with mkovach's interpretation because of the direct analogy to modern work culture. But I do admire your view as well, I get a lot of satisfaction from deep cleaning and maintaining things, and there's a commensurate amount of pride watching the item transform back into something clean again.
2. "The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious."
3. "It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end."
4. "I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
Shared my thoughts on the myth in my blog post below if interested.
https://www.rxjourney.net/one-must-imagine-sisyphus-happy
Edit:I don't think the second last line is underrated.
But that is kind of weird because it doesn't really mean what Sisyphus is doing is absurd or meaningless (it follows the perfectly valid logic that gods had put a spell on him, and he must do this continously so its not absurd compared to the question of our existence).
He frames the lack of answer by the universe as "unreasonable" but is it really? Thomas Nagel's paper on this is interesting imo: https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Absu...
You can see something similar on humans with myth if you can call it that where humans humans must work after the sin of Adam and eve
I have my disagreements with Absurdism, but still, Gavin Aung Than's comic on Bill Watterson's "A Cartoonist's Advice" adds to perspective on what it might mean to forever push boulder up hill & yet manifest happiness: https://www.zenpencils.com/comic/128-bill-watterson-a-cartoo... / https://archive.vn/a34Bx
It was an awakening: I began to understand that the problem with the world isn't that everyone needs to learn more physics and think more like me. The problem is that none of this stuff -- life -- really means anything; that's a hard pill for lots of people to swallow (understandably); and our stupid little lives are just 80 years or so of farting around and trying to forget about what is obvious (h/t to KV).
The book ultimately softened my overly critical views about religion and superstition and helped me mature into someone much more sympathetic to the various weird things that people think and do.
Stupid and little in relation to _what_? You cannot ascribe lives as stupid or little unless you’ve got a smart and a grand. So: what is the smart and grand you’ve got? I want to take note of it.
Camus himself described Noces as belonging to a pre-absurdist "pagan" phase. It describes, in beautifully poetic french, the intense, sensual love of physical existence and the here-and-now that gives the absurd its stakes.
A quote from Nuptials at Tipasa:
In the spring, Tipasa is inhabited by gods and the gods speak in the sun and the scent of absinthe leaves, in the silver armor of the sea, in the raw blue sky, the flower-covered ruins, and the great bubbles of light among the heaps of stone. At certain hours of the day the countryside is black with sunlight. The eyes try in vain to perceive anything but drops of light and colors trembling on the lashes.
[...]
I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there’s nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living.
What does this mean ? Why "black" ?
The countryside is literally so beautiful that the beauty cannot (be) beheld [sic]. That is, the sunlight hitting that bit of the world at that bob of time is so intense that the viewing is indistinguishable in its ordinary pieces because of the sheer pleasure. The view is just a singular whole all at once, because the thick and luminous real is everywhere and dripping off of every thing. The abundance drowns out the particulars.
You’re squinting, but not because of pain.
I eventually read the first 3 pages of The Stranger and then I stopped. I also never read any Baudelaire or Charlotte Sometimes. I am probably in the majority of Cure fans in the United States.
eg: Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls at the Hopetoun Hotel in '86 riffing on lines from Arthur Rimbaud
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrTGWrQ4YGs
Mostly, action/adventure plots that are set in fantasy universes, from American/British authors.
I have also read Catholic philosophy, such as St. Thomas Aquinas.
I was curious about Camus' writing style and to see what had inspired Robert Smith to write his lyrics, but I wasn't interested in the philosophy of existentialism, or the gritty reality, or the setting. I don't really like France or French things at all.
Trivia about "Killing An Arab": on the single/studio version, the very last lyrics Robert Smith nearly mumbles: "oh, Mersault!"
How does it compare with Buddhism of Siddharta Guatama and the preceding buddhas, or Stoicism by Zeno? I have been a big fan of Stoicism 2.0 by Marcus Aurelius. Why should one continue to download and install Absurdity? Can anyone who’s been running Absurdity in production do a comparison of its features vs the existing philosophies ..
Stoicism is a guide on how you should live your life: stay in the place that was given to you at birth, and be satisfied from it. So Camus would call it "philosophical suicide" too.
Camus commands you to accept fully that your life has no purpose despite how bad you would like the Universe to give you one, and then choose to continue living on anyway. This desire for meaning vs the lack of answer from the Universe is what Camus labels "absurd".
The buddha didn't offer a "justification for existence." He pointed out that the demand for one is the problem (part of it anyway). You crave meaning, the craving hurts, so abandon the craving (not just for meaning and not by an act of will). Camus couldn't conceive of that, so he made a virtue out of carrying the boulder
I think the Buddhist reply would be that living without craving and without yearning leads to truly being ‘alive’ and enables one to feel, to touch, and to experience the world as it is and in the immeasurably short time a person is alive within it. An existence where the present is experienced and cherished in the moment of having it, while knowing and accepting the inevitability of this moments ending. Such a life, in the Buddhist tradition, embodies the knowing and accepting of the ultimate emptiness of reality and then proceed to live, not in spite of the emptiness, but in the full appreciation of the act of living.
There's a reason it's often referred to as "waking up." The essential claim is a bit broader than what it seems like you're picking up. It's not craving = blinding. Or rather that's the most extreme end of the spectrum.
It's that we are effectively going through life in a dreamlike state. We are so preoccupied with the contents of our mind that we effectively "shut out" nearly everything about the actual world. Actually clearing your mind feels quite nearly identical to the sensation of waking up from sleep into the waking world.
A bit of practice meditating, I think you will come to prove them correct. It really is incredible how constantly-full a person's mind is, and the degree to which that distracts them from what's really going on.
Note that what Buddhists call suffering or craving is a far, far more expansive set of things than what you would intuitively describe as such. So I think they can mislead into this craving = blindness extremity.
It's slightly too broad, but probably closer to say "thinking [preoccupation with the contents of your mind] = distraction [from the real experience of being your mind]"
Two person on the same exact physical circumstances can experience the same events in highly different meanings and the "World" remains the same shared constant, but how you "Percieve" such events in the world ain't.
or something like that.
If the mind's full of clinging (either in demanding what isn't present or refusing to release what was present but which is now leaving the present) then that mind doesn't have any room left to experience aliveness.
So (to me) the material doesn't suggest asceticism or abandoning the human sensual potential, it reminds that clinging will sneak in and take over the mental cycles, undermining your ability to live to that potential.
I've listened to all of burbea's talks and read most of the TSTF, so i know where you're coming from. If it works for what you want, that's great. I would just encourage you look deeper if you think its what the buddha taught. Or really even related to what the buddha taught. It's pretty much the opposite direction
A lot of discussions I’ve seen, and taken part in, when focusing on Camus and his cadre of fellows lead to a comparison between Buddhist thought and existentialist thought. I tend to side closer to the Buddhist outlook and acceptance of the ground truth of sunyata (often translated ‘emptiness’) versus the more modern tendency toward western Nihilism as a response to the Absurd. The depths of response in people and their dealings with these thoughts and feelings interest me, but I also like to watch people choosing between descriptions of Absurdity to try and make it a completely different concept to the Buddhist ideas.
I’m not sure I agree that ‘Camus couldn’t conceive of’ the Buddhist response to the inherent tension arising from craving ultimate meaning where none is possible; however, he and the other existentialists certainly went to great written lengths to seemingly avoid finding the Buddha’s answer.
That isn't to say it was intentional or to fault them for it, its only natural. What the buddha figured out goes in the opposite direction of how existence is structured. It's essentially impossible to stumble upon, and definitely impossible to figure out purely through thinking. If ones behavior doesn't change, it remains intellectual. In order to abandon craving, you have to not act on it. Otherwise there's no space between 'you' and 'it' so you could never see it for what it is.
That's moreso what i meant by "Camus couldn’t conceive of" - especially in this day and age, you can only get so far without someone else pointing it out. Who would possibly randomly think to just not act on any intention of body, speech, or mind that was rooted in craving? Its in our nature to not do that, so its normal that no one else has gotten there through philosophizing. Shoppenhaur had his whole denial of will thing but he just moved the goalposts and settled on more refined sensuality.
I would even be careful about settling that the buddhist outlook is about acceptance of the ground truth of suyata. Most of that idea comes from later traditions. It definitely is mentioned in the pali canon, but not as some universal ground truth - that often leads to a different dressing around the nihilism you mentioned. The buddha said all determined things are subject to change. All determined things are unsatisfactory. All phenomena are not-self. It's not like there is a nature of reality that is empty or something like that.
(replying to part of another comment you posted): its not about accepting ultimate reality or accepting anything really - quite the opposite. The buddha over and over again told people not to be content with 'progress' they had make. The goal is the inability to suffer amidst things that cause sufferring. Not to learn how to accept them, or quickly deal with them as they come up, as is commonly taught - its to make it so its impossible to suffer no matter what. That can only be done through seeing the structure of your existence. Then you can't take its determined nature for granted anymore (ie take it personally)
The Plague feels closer to an actual reconciliation with the absurd, through Rieux's whole existence, not just ideas and words.
Indeed The Plague was written later than The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus.
From The Plague:
> Rieux had been listening closely to the journalist. Still looking at him, he said gently:
> "Man is not an idea, Rambert."
> The other man jumped up from the bed, his face contorted with emotion.
> "He is an idea and a very brief one, just as soon as he turns away from love. And that's the trouble: we are no longer capable of love. Let's resign ourselves, doctor, let's wait until we are capable of it and if it's really not possible, wait for the general deliverance, without playing at heroes. As for me, I'm not going any further."
> "You're right, Rambert, quite right and I wouldn't want to divert from what you intend to do for anything in the world, because it seems to me good and proper. But I have to tell you this: this whole things is not about heroism. It's about decency. It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency."
> "What is decency?" Rambert asked, suddenly serious.
> "In general, I can't say, but in my case I know that it consists in doing my job."
The first half of the short book is easily on-par with any of the great masterpieces of literature. It was written in a direct, vivid, gripping, and yet somehow languorous style -- something almost paradoxical. It was also very attuned to the aesthetics and flow of the outside world, but inattentive to the narrator's inner life -- insensitive and, in a sense, essentially masculine in a non-performative way. As a purely aesthetic work, it is truly excellent.
The second half falls apart catastrophically. The key scenario, the book's turning point, is contrived almost beyond belief. The trial is a farce on several distinct levels -- you can criticize it from almost any perspective, and you'd be right. (There's a well-known Orientalist critique which is just the tip of the iceberg.) And the close of the book brings with it a number of unreliable narrator problems, which make the book as difficult to resolve as time-travel fiction.
My impression was that it worked wonderfully as pure prose, and that Camus should probably have written travel journals a la Gerard Nerval. As philosophy, though, it was hopelessly muddled, badly contrived, and confused.
Also, could you link the critiques? They sound interesting and I'd like to read them.
Then the murder happens -- which was a highly contrived and even quite ridiculous scenario, in that (a) Mersault's party was quite literally being stalked by an armed gang, (b) Mersault separated himself from the pack and was menaced by one of his stalkers, who was armed with a knife, (c) the naked knife was in the man's hand, as that man was blocking Mersault's path, (d) there were no witnesses, and (e) Mersault was a Frenchman in colonial French Algeria.
Not 1 in 10000 times does that go to court for murder, and not 1 in 1000000 times does it result in the death penalty.
But, anyway, back to my point: The minute the murder happens, we're yanked out of the naturalistic world and thrust directly into the world of Kafka's The Trial. Nothing makes sense any longer. What once was so true-to-life becomes something akin to the hallucinatory descent of divine justice -- a bad trip, a fever dream. "Yeah, you're off to the guillotine because you didn't cry at your mom's funeral. What kind of monster are you?" The most parsimonious interpretation is that the narrator has simply lost his mind.
Don't even get me started on the fact that every reviewer thinks that Mersault was executed, when that never actually happens in the book, and would result in him not being able to write the book in the first place. (Further confused by the variety of tenses used in the construction of the prose.) The book, which is written something like a memoir, ends with his appeal still pending, and the prison chaplain "sure of its success."
As to the critiques, the Orientalist one is in Edward Said's "Culture and Imperialism" but I don't think that the full version is online. As I recall, it basically concerned point (e) above, and noted that the trial would not have happened -- so the notion of the trial may be a sort of cope.
Again, maybe this is just cope for bad writing but the fundamental absurdity of the trial, which you have clearly shown, is one of the points of the novel. It's more a philosophical treatise disguised as a novel really. The prose is supposed to reflect someone who is a stranger to us, and the plot is supposed to evoke feelings of incredulity into the reader!
P.S. -> thanks for the critiques!
In that way he is more representative of the society that has placed him on trial than anyone else in it.
This is emphatically not the case, though! Not only does he not deny any sense of hope, he dwells on his hope. He practically lives on it.
I'll quote from the book:
"There were two other things about which I was always thinking: the dawn and my appeal. . .
"Then all day there was my appeal to think about. I made the most of this idea, studying my effects so as to squeeze out the maximum of consolation. . .
"I gave myself leave, to consider the other alternative; that my appeal was successful. And then the trouble was to calm down that sudden rush of joy racing through my body and even bringing tears to my eyes."
The prison scenes mostly concern how he alternates between clinging to hope and distracting his mind. He merely claims to lose hope in the book's very last paragraph, and imagines a spectacular public execution. (Something else that's quite weird in itself, as the French banned public executions in 1939 and the book takes place in the 1940s.)
> I think the first part was an exploration of the absurd hero's life, and the second part was more of the reaction to the absurd hero by society.
This is by no means clear, as I don't think that Mersault is a well-defined "absurd hero" (VERY subtle differences in framing, and more introspective narration, would have you believe that he's the perfect bourgeois citizen!) nor is the "reaction by society" at all credible.
To me the weirdest part of the book, that I find out of character, is that he went along to write that letter for his neighbor, and to aid his neighbor at the police station. If you care so little about anything, if you're that cool, why don't you pass on that weird neighbor. Just close the door without saying anything and go smoke your sigarettes in the window, you poser.
The only way I can make his acts rhyme is if he's just telling himself how cool he is, but he's a actually a social outcast too cool for school who only wants to hang out with people he thinks are cool, e.g. the "bad boy neighbor". That guy was a certified woman beater. And that's the guy he chooses to associate with?
If anything this is the character Dennis of Always Sunny was based on, especially his highschool years.
While I agree with Camus’s philosophical points about the absurdity of existence and the indifference of the universe, within the scope of our tiny little lives there is morality and meaning. Taking action to address the suffering caused by an epidemic is meaningful. So are the deaths of an Arab or one’s mother, and the premise that a human would be so alienated that they would feel nothing at them is unconvincing, even if the universe doesn’t care.
There was an essay in The Guardian a couple days ago on a related topic, positing that the essence of the self is the biological body including the brain, rather than the isolated mind. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/30/alive-...
> While I agree with Camus’s philosophical points about the absurdity of existence and the indifference of the universe, within the scope of our tiny little lives there is morality and meaning.
I'm pretty sure later-life (relatively, since he died pretty young) Camus would agree with you. The way I view it, The Stranger was him diagnosing the problem of existential absurdism and The Plague was his answer to what you do about it after he discovered it himself as part of the French resistance.
The Stranger is, IMO, mostly interesting to see how his own views changed over those ~5 years and shouldn't really be an introduction to his philosophy.
I've always pointed the Absurdists to his nobel prize speech as a quick way of showing them that they don't have the slightest idea of what he was talking about. The cognitive dissonance is generally too great, and the leave in a huff.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1957/camus/spee...
His works (essays, short stories, plays, etc.) build on one another, gradually unfolding an argument: first confronting the absurd, then asking how one should respond to it, and later exploring what it means to live and act in spite of it.
It may just be a Seinfeld Effect for me though
I get that in the context of literature its quite a unique story/take but I just felt like the concept of life being meaningless/absurd is kind of a tired trope for younger generations
Especially if you are someone who grew up on the internet, depression/meaninglessness was like a mainstream meme in the last decade