the myth of sisyphus albert camus full essay

He thereby proposes that we take “a leap of faith,” essentially arguing that belief in God will ultimately provide one’s life with meaning. These thinkers, Camus claims, contradict themselves by presupposing that life is absurd in some way, but proposing a solution to the absurd (so that life isn’t really absurd after all).įor example, Kierkegaard sees life as profoundly absurd, due to its central lack of meaning. The Myth of Sisyphus is primarily a critique of existentialism, specifically the attempts by thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Heidegger to overcome the absurd by appealing to God or the transcendent.

Having diagnosed the essential human problem, Camus shifts his interest to prognosis, determining whether and how to live in the face of the absurd. As an epistemological thesis, the absurd highlights our desire to understand and the fundamental limits of our knowledge. As a metaphysical thesis, the absurd is a confrontation between the human mind and an indifferent universe: what exists is a “mind that desires and the world that disappoints” (50). We just do not, and according to Camus, we cannot understand what we want to understand.Ĭamus’s doctrine of the absurd then has both metaphysical and epistemological aspects. We also want to understand why bad things happen to good people, why good things happen to bad people, why we’re here, where we’re going, and what it all means.Ĭoncerning how things actually are, however, evil goes unpunished, good deeds often are not rewarded, good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people, and we don’t understand any of it. This though is not what Camus means by “absurd.” For Camus, the absurd originates from a combination of two things: the way we want the world to be and the way the world actually is.Ībout how we want the world to be, it just seems to be a part of human nature that we have a sense of justice and fairness, and so we want the world to be just and fair: we want evil punished and virtue rewarded. There are many things we might naturally call absurd: a rude joke, an outrageous statement, or the price of a pair of designer jeans.

The myth of sisyphus albert camus full essay