Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with the question of suicide, but it is the thought of the absurdity of existence that holds together Camus’s whole essay and confirms its force.
The endeavor to “resolve the problem of suicide” brings the whole essay face to face with what precedes and leads to the attempt at killing oneself, with what is constantly entangled with every endeavor to render oneself absent, that is, the absurd.
Why Is Suicide a Philosophical Question?
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. All the rest— whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards”
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Suicide, for Camus, is a “serious philosophical problem” because it arises and announces itself only when what is questioned, doubted, and disputed is the meaning of life in its privacy, particularity, and individuality. “Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought and suicide”.
Suicide is a “philosophical problem” because it constantly presents itself to us as a response to the human condition and as a justified attempt at escaping the meaninglessness of existence.
But, according to Camus, not everyone notices and suffers from this meaninglessness. Meaninglessness often hides itself and remains unnoticed; it does not show itself to everyone. Yet, this inability to become aware of the meaninglessness of existence does not mean that life is not meaningless.
Human existence, for Camus, is meaningless. Our failure to glimpse or grasp this meaninglessness does not negate the meaninglessness in which we are placed. Camus thus says that there is a difference between the “fact” of the absurdity of existence and the recognition and realization of this absurdity. The fact that existence is absurd and meaningless is certain, yet not everyone comes face to face with this meaninglessness and with this absurdity.
Why Is Existence Absurd?
The absurdity of existence occurs and holds sway because of the non-familiarity, obscurity, and incomprehensibility lying at the heart of human existence. What renders existence absurd and life meaningless is that the world refuses to be reduced to that which is human by being understood. The world rejects and evades our attempts at reducing it to our own concepts, feelings, and thoughts.
“The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feelings in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal. The cat’s universe is not the universe of the ant-hill. The truism ‘All thought is anthropomorphic’ has no other meaning. Likewise, the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought. If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. If thought discovered in the shimmering mirrors of phenomena eternal relations capable of summing them up and summing themselves up in a single principle, then would be seen an intellectual joy of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ridiculous imitation. That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse for the human drama”
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
The absurdity of existence arises and holds sway because of the unfulfilled and unrealizable desire, appetite, and nostalgia for unity, clarity, familiarity, and understanding. Understanding is reducing that which is foreign in the universe to what is human so that a reconciling with happiness could take place: “There is no happiness if I cannot know.”
This means that, for Camus, it is not the world that is absurd, but rather the human condition itself. The world is merely obscure and unintelligible. Human existence is absurd because it finds itself violently separated and distanced from a world closing itself off in its foreignness, unintelligibility, and rejection.
“What, then is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide…there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death”
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Camus speaks of an alienation resulting from a sudden and violent loss of a home and of a divorce rendering apart and distant, that is, of an abyss of silence separating human existence from the world, an abyss in which deprivation, alienation, and obscurity dwell.
Absurdity is a meaningless void that “is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world”; it “is the confrontation [between the irrational silence of the world] and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart”; it “depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together. It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together”.
Death as the Origin of Meaninglessness
In The Myth of Sisyphus, there are two deaths leading to the arising and holding sway of meaninglessness: the death of God and our own death. Yet the way in which both deaths are brought together into the same relation is neither simple nor direct because, for Camus, it is not the death of God that is the origin of all meaninglessness, but rather our death, the certainty of our death, that is, our heading toward our death.
Camus’s thinking of the absurd unfolds as a spiraling toward that which is the origin of all meaninglessness and absurdity, that is, human mortality. In his spiraling toward that from out of which all absurdity and every meaninglessness emerge, Camus passes through, as a necessary detour, what renders human existence suddenly and violently homeless and hence homesick, that is, the death of God. Yet the death of God is not, for Camus, the origin of all meaninglessness and every absurdity.
This detouring means that there are relative absurdities and perhaps one absolute absurdity, or perhaps that there are mere absurdities and that from out of which every absurdity and all meaninglessness arise, that is, our death, our constant heading toward our own destruction and disappearance as that after which nothing remains or occurs.
The Myth of Sisyphus on the Death of God
God died and then familiarity and clarity disappeared: “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world”. The death of God has inserted a void into the relation linking together human existence with the world and hence rendered them apart, disconnected, and distant. The world suddenly appeared to be distancing itself into obscurity.
Camus speaks of a disruption that is sudden and violent resulting in homelessness and homesickness: “But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land”.
What Camus calls the “divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting” shows to what extent human existence is intertwined with God in its thinking and understanding of itself, in its relating to itself, and hence why the death of God “is properly the feeling of absurdity”, for this death has rendered obscure and incomprehensible human existence and the world in which it is placed.
Mortality as the Origin of All Absurdity in The Myth of Sisyphus
“If bridging the gulf that separates desire from conquest, we assert with Parmenides the reality of the One (whatever it may be), we fall into the ridiculous contradiction of a mind that asserts total unity and proves by its very assertion its own difference and the diversity it claimed to resolve. This other vicious circle is enough to stifle our hopes. These are again truisms. I shall again repeat that they are not interesting in themselves but in the consequences that can be deducted from them. I know another truism: it tells me that man is mortal”
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Death, our death, our constant heading toward our own disappearance is, for Camus, the origin of all absurdity and every meaninglessness. Death takes away meaning from our lives and hides it forever from us. Death is the disappearance of meaning; it renders our existence forever meaningless and absurd.
Death is what renders life forever meaningless and absurd because death is the total destruction of life and the absolute annihilation of existence. Since there is, for Camus, no God and hence there is no immortality, death occurs as the absolute end of existence; death is that after which there is nothing. That is, death is the destruction of the existence that is constantly and naturally turned toward God, a non-existent God.
There is in The Myth of Sisyphus a silent, deep, and private longing for a non-existent God. That is, there is an incessant turning toward an impossible absolute so that an impossible unity and an impossible reconciliation could be glimpsed, even from afar, and hence there is a constant anguish due to the loss of the home, which never existed, and because of an unbearable homesickness.
Meaninglessness is thus not unjustified; it occurs and holds sway because of the non-existence of God and because of the impossibility of immortality. Life lacks a certain meaning that only God and immortality could render available, and death as that which destructs and completely annihilates human existence is what shows how meaningless and unbearable life is in its constant heading toward its own complete disappearance.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, God is neither forgotten nor left behind. God simply does not exist and this non-existence brings about meaninglessness and absurdity, for human existence is naturally turned toward God.
Camus does not offer thorough or structured arguments for the non-existence of God, yet The Myth of Sisyphus indicates why religious beliefs should be resisted and opposed.
“To speak clearly, to the extent to which I hope, to which I worry about a truth that might be individual to me, about a way of being or creating, to the extent to which I arrange my life and prove thereby that I accept its having a meaning, I create for myself barriers between which I confine my life. I do like so many bureaucrats of the mind and heart who only fill me with disgust and whose only vice, I now see clearly, is to take man’s freedom seriously”
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Religious beliefs must be resisted and rejected because their origin is not the world, but rather a distant and foreign God that is distanced and separated from the world. Destiny and morality should be rooted in the world; they should be thought and experienced from out the world to which humane existence belongs. That is, morality and destiny should not be imposed on the world, but rather thought from out of, within, and into the world. (The article, Camus on the Two Forms of Hope, explains Camus‘s rejection of what is infinite)
That is, although there is in The Myth of Sisyphus a deep desire, longing, and nostalgia for God, unity, the eternal, and the promised land, there is also an assertion that God does not exist. Both the acknowledgment that God does not exist and the insistence that human existence is naturally turned toward God do not negate each other.
Camus’s criticism of what he calls the philosophical suicide of Kierkegaard is not directed toward Kierkegaard’s announcement that human existence is made for God, but rather toward Kierkegaard’s leaping into the unknown, toward Kierkegaard’s negating and rejecting of the lucidity of the absurd.
It is only the leap into the unknown that Camus criticizes and not that which precedes and leads to this leaping, for what leads to this leaping and makes it possible is, for Camus, natural and justified. What leads to this leap into the unknown is a nostalgia for the eternal so that death does not become absolute destruction and complete disappearance. (The article, Camus on the Two Kinds of Suicide, introduces and discusses what Camus means by philosophical suicide)
What precedes this leaping into the unknown is a natural longing for God, a natural longing for reconciliation, a nostalgia that is intensified and becoming constantly greater because of the certainty of death and the impossibility of immortality, for death, when it is the absolute end, completely destructs, annihilates, and renders absent. Hence, death is the source of all meaninglessness and absurdity.