Camus the myth of sisyphus10/29/2022 ![]() ![]() Existentialists find no meaning or order in existence and then attempt to find some sort of transcendence or meaning in this very meaninglessness. Camus claims that existentialist philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Chestov, and Jaspers, and phenomenologists such as Husserl, all confront the contradiction of the absurd but then try to escape from it. ![]() The absurd is a contradiction that cannot be reconciled, and any attempt to reconcile this contradiction is simply an attempt to escape from it: facing the absurd is struggling against it. Camus is interested in pursuing a third possibility: that we can accept and live in a world devoid of meaning or purpose. If life has no meaning, does that mean life is not worth living? If that were the case, we would have no option but to make a leap of faith or to commit suicide, says Camus. Camus opens the essay by asking if this latter conclusion that life is meaningless necessarily leads one to commit suicide. Either we will discover that meaning through a leap of faith, by placing our hopes in a God beyond this world, or we will conclude that life is meaningless. We will never find in life itself the meaning that we want to find. The central concern of The Myth of Sisyphus is what Camus calls "the absurd." Camus claims that there is a fundamental conflict between what we want from the universe (whether it be meaning, order, or reasons) and what we find in the universe (formless chaos). ![]()
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