Reading & the Good Life
Join the conversation! Every Friday at Noon EST (Join here), Perennial Meditations readers are welcome to gather for Reading & the Good Life; a space for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living! This week we conclude our exploration of existential philosophy with The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.
***Next month, we transition to the Transcendentalists. We’ll be reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden as well as exploring a few passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Portable Emerson).
Check out our bookshelf below for previous and future reading!
A Study in Existential Philosophy
As discussed in How to Think Like an Existentialist, How to Be Yourself, How to Think, and Being in the World, and Condemned to Be Free, Existentialism is challenging to define. Existentialist thinkers explored a broad range of issues from meaning, purpose, anxiety and authenticity, freedom, absurdity, and the value of human existence. Among the earliest figures associated with Existentialism include: Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the 20th century, prominent existentialist thinkers included Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, and Simone de Beauvoir.
Who is Albert Camus?
Albert Camus (1913—1960) was a French-Algerian journalist, playwright, novelist, philosophical essayist, and Nobel laureate. He spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he worked at various jobs—at the weather bureau, an automobile-accessory firm, a shipping company—to help pay for his courses at the University of Algiers. He then turned to journalism as a career. His books include The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and The Rebel. In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His sudden death on January 4, 1960, cut short the career of one of the most important literary figures in the Western world. Read previous passages: The Myth of Sisyphus (Part I), The Myth of Sisyphus (Part II), and The Myth of Sisyphus (Part III).
One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy
Does your daily routine ever feel like that of Sisyphus? The alarm, the commute, the meetings, etc. “At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth,” writes Camus of Sisyphus’ hopeless task, “the purpose is achieved.” Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world, where he will, again and again, have to push it up toward the summit.
He goes back down to the plain. It is during that return down to the base, the pause, that Sisyphus interests Camus. He sees a man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. Although Camus paints a dreary picture of Sisyphus’ existence. It is an aspirational message. Sisyphus still retains the ability to create his life.
According to Camus,
The final effort for these related minds, creator or conqueror, is to manage to free themselves also from their undertakings: succeed in granting that the very work, whether it be conquest, love, or creation, may well not be; consummate thus the utter futility of any individual life. Indeed, that gives them more freedom in the realization of that work, just as becoming aware of the absurdity of life authorized them to plunge into it with every excess. All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains in which man is the sole master.
Camus explains that to create is likewise to shape one’s fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. Camus concludes that we must imagine Sisyphus happy, “One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness.”
Selected Passages
All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. […]
— Albert Camus, Myth of Sisyphus
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