Albert Camus on Rebelling against Life’s Absurdity

We are inconsistent creatures. One minute, we might be overflowing with energetic feelings of vitality, meaning, and purpose; the next, we might suddenly feel sapped by a nagging sense that, actually, nothing we do really signifies anything grand or important. Ultimately, nothing we do matters at all.

French thinker Albert Camus (1913 - 1960) was fascinated by this inconsistency. And, in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, he sets out to explore it, writing:

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Is existence worth it? To begin his investigation into this question, Camus brilliantly evokes the mundanity of everyday existence:

Rising, street-car, four hours in the office or the factory meal, street-car, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm — this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

Camus compares our condition to that of Sisyphus, the unlucky protagonist of the ancient Greek myth who, having royally upset the gods, is condemned to push a boulder up a mountain, only for it to roll all the way back down upon reaching the top.

Each time, Sisyphus must descend and start again. And he must do this over and over — forever.

“The workman of today,” Camus continues, “works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd [than Sisyphus’s].”

For 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.

Camus thinks Sisyphus’s situation perfectly encapsulates the entirety of human intellectual and philosophical endeavor. Despite our yearning for an ultimate meaning behind existence, in Camus’s mind such meaning, if it exists at all, lies beyond our comprehension. He writes:

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me — that is what I understand. And these two certainties — my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle — I also know that I cannot reconcile them.

We occupy what Camus calls an absurd space between our impulse to ask deep questions, and our inability to answer them:

[M]an stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

Hence the image of Sisyphus: we build meaning-giving frameworks and projects up, inevitably they crash back down, and compulsively we start again.

So, while trying to work out how to live, maybe we’ll adopt Aristotle’s framework — perhaps that will serve us for a bit. Maybe instead we’ll go all in on Buddhism; or maybe we’ll be inspired by Nietzsche’s Übermensch and carve our own path.

Camus wants us to realize that, given the ultimate unknowability of the cosmos’s meaning — its “unreasonable silence” in the face of our questioning — every choice we make and every value system we adopt is simply arbitrary.

If we decide to fully embrace a particular doctrine — if we delude ourselves into thinking our beliefs are truths — then though we may feel comforted, we are ultimately committing a metaphysical kind of suicide.

Unable to tolerate an unease with uncertainty, we hand ourselves over to the consolation of dogma. Searching for an authentic life, we commit to inauthenticity…

Metaphysical rebellion: refusing delusion or despair

Camus thinks we can live more authentic lives not by escaping or denying life’s absurdity, but by reflecting on how we might live in spite of that absurdity. In his 1938 review of Sartre’s Nausea, Camus writes:

The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.

And the “rules of action” drawn by Camus are metaphysical rebellion: the refusal to surrender to absurdity through delusion or despair, through metaphysical or actual suicide — but living with and despite our absurd fate.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes such rebellion as the

constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity… It challenges the world anew every second. Just as danger provided man the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience.

By refusing to accept comforting delusions, we open ourselves fully to life — to living here and now, lucid and liberated. “There is no sun without shadow,” Camus writes, “and it is essential to know the night.”

Sisyphus as tragic hero

To bring his point home, Camus asks us to once again consider Sisyphus — this time not as a victim to be pitied, but as a hero to be admired.

Despite it all, Camus tells us, Sisyphus just keeps on going: he’s demonstrative of the fact that we can live

with the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.

After the rock tumbles down — confirming the ultimate futility of his project — Sisyphus marches down after it.

This, thinks Camus, is the moment Sisyphus’s absurd fate is wholly laid bare, and where he attains full tragic consciousness. Trudging down the mountainside, he recognizes the full extent of his wretched condition, yet

all Sisyphus’s silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing.

Camus thus recasts Sisyphus’s condition not as a dreary punishment, but as an opportunity for Sisyphus to make of it what he will. He doesn’t look upon his rock with resignation, Camus suggests; he chooses to march down after it — thereby reclaiming the narrative, scorning the gods, and rebelling against the futility of his punishment.

We have the opportunity to do the same. Every crisis of meaning, every project completed: we are Sisyphus on the downward slope, reflecting on our absurd fate.

Will we feel sorry for ourselves? Or will we — as Camus imagines Sisyphus to — revolt against the hand that fate has dealt us? Camus writes:

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

By approaching life with full consciousness, with vitality and intensity, by rebelling against our absurd fate — this is how we defy nihilism and establish what it means to live.

Ultimately, then, while Camus believes we are condemned to absurdity by the human condition, his point is that that’s not necessarily a cause for despair — in fact it’s only by confronting this absurdity and heroically carrying on in spite of it that a truly authentic life can be lived.

We might not always derive maximum meaning and fulfillment from our projects, we might not always believe in the value systems we adopt, we might never rid ourselves of that background, nagging sense of ultimate meaninglessness; but as long as we keep going, as long as we keep our heads held high, perhaps we can find joy — a defiant, authentic kind of happiness — in the mere act of striving.

For, as Camus concludes The Myth of Sisyphus:

The rock is still rolling. 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.

What do you make of Camus’s position?

• Do you think we’ll ever know the ultimate meaning behind the universe? Is there one?
• Can you imagine Sisyphus happy?
• Or does Camus’s defiance in the face of absurdity not do much for you?

Learn more about Camus, absurdity, and existentialism

If you’re interested in learning more about his work, you might like my reading list of Albert Camus’s best books. For a slightly different take on the absurd, meanwhile, 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.

You might also enjoy the following related articles:

• Kierkegaard: Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards, But It Must Be Lived Forwards
• Heidegger On Being Authentic in an Inauthentic World
• Nietzsche On Why Suffering is Necessary for Greatness
• Existence Precedes Essence: What Sartre Really Meant
• Authentic Love: Simone de Beauvoir on What Makes a Healthy Relationship
• 5 Existential Problems All Humans Share
• What is Existentialism? 3 Core Principles of Existentialist Philosophy
• Existentialism: the Best 9 Books to Read

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