Preface
Essay seeks resolution to problem of suicide
“It is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has meaning; therefore it is legitimate to
meet the problem of suicide face to face.”
Even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate.
“Although the ‘Myth of Sisyphus’ poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid
invitation to live and create, in the very midst of a desert.”
15 years after writing it remained his most personal
O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible--Pindar, Pythian
An Absurd reasoning
Absurdity and suicide
Only 1 truly serious philosophical problem--suicide: judging whether life is or is not worth living
Never seen anyone die for an ontological argument (even Galileo decided the truth was not
worth the stake); whether the earth or sun revolve the other is a matter of indifference
On the other hand, he sees others die because they don’t think life is worth living and others
getting killed over ideas (illusions) that give them a reason for living
(La Palisse and Don Quixote)
Suicide investigated at the level of the individual rather than social in this essay
Individual’s thought. Act prepared within silence of the heart (like art)
Worm w/in the heart (what set it off often unknown)
Rarely an act of reflection
Hard to pinpoint instant of thought; easier to deduce from the act the consequences it implies
Killing self=confessing life is too much or you don’t understand, life is not worth the trouble.
Living is never easy.
Voluntarily quitting implies you recognize the absence of any profound reason for living
Even bad reasons can make the world familiar. A universe suddenly divested of illusions and
light man feeling an alien, stranger. Exiled with no way home or hope of Promised Land
Divorce between Man-- his life/actor--set is properly the feeling of absurdity
Specifically this essay addresses relation between absurd and suicide
(Especially after Nietzsche) philosophers can say there is no meaning, implying life isn’t worth
living. Yet ACT otherwise, by continuing to live.
He describes exceptions in myth and literature
Schopenhauer praising suicide while feasting
Footnote on author with bad book
Body’s judgment shirking from annihilation
We get in the habit of living before thinking
Hope of another life one must deserve
Truism of people killing themselves because life isn’t worth living
Does absurdity require 1 to escape through hope or suicide?
Easy to be logical, but not to the bitter end. Most probably follow emotional conclusion
With Jaspers begins addressing limits of objective reason. Like other philosophers heralding
reason abdicates it--suicide of thought
Absurd Walls
Deep feelings mean more than they are consciously saying. The passions
Feeling of absurdity striking you in the face
Can’t really know people, but recognize them by their behavior and totality of deeds. Watching
actor in 100 roles. Acknowledges true knowledge is impossible.
All great deeds (thought and art) have ridiculous beginning, born on streetcar or in a revolving
door
What does it mean to be “thinking of nothing”
Endless grinds on sets, factories, offices of mechanical life “Why”absurdity
p. 13 “For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through
it.”
We live on the tomorrow, when you’ve made your way, when you’re old enough
~30 starting to realize years
P 14 “Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it.
That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.”
Inhuman beauty of the natural world
Strangeness of the world (and others; former lovers)
Robotic lives
Nausea
Self in mirror
Only proper to avoid pathos. Everyone lives as if no one knew. Can’t mention death.
Nothing is experienced but what is lived and made conscious.
Certainty of inevitable end--inert body.
How far is one to go to elude nothing.
Aristotelian logic
If man realized that the universe like him can love & suffer, he could be reconciled (bridging the
gap of desire); Logos
Mortality
Hopes and nostalgia can keep the peace
Certainties for him feelings & sensation
Self slips through fingers
Truths but no truths
Logic and “Know thyself” “Be virtuous” at confessionals; platitudes
Reason and knowledge give him nothing to assure the world is his
Conclusions of science
Still can’t apprehend world (parallels w/ Hume)
The world isn’t unreasonable or absurd.
Man<world is (absurdity defines our relation)
Longing for clarity in an unknowable universe
p. 23 Zarathusa (by Nietzsche) quote
Heidiger following Kant’s pure reason “Phenomenology”
Consciesness of deathnothingness, terror/anxiety
*Jaspers lost naïveté
*Chestov’s analysis of literature examples (Hamlet, Crime & Punishment)
*Kierkegaard Aesthetic and religious realm examples
*God and hope in afterlife
Snide comment of wagging the tongue about the unexplainable
Dead end of science and the insistent demands to “know”
The world whose single meaning I do not understand is irrational
Life w/o meaning
Key phrase p 28 contradiction between human needs and unreasonable silence
Philosophical suicide
Feeling≠Idea (of absurd)
Hot sun (stay in or get out) analogy with meaninglessness and living or suicide
Innocent accused of monstrous crime; man charging machine gun with sword
Disproportion between intention and reality
(dissonance like) divorce between bare fact and reality involves comparison
Absurd= A confrontation and unceasing struggle (absent of hope, but not despair), continued
rejection, and conscious dissatisfaction
Once admitted can’t go back; once conscious of the absurd
Kant and others critiques of reason
Earlier existentialists relying on divine solution (philosophical suicide; not completing logical
conclusions) (like noted in earlier book logical problems w/ Descartes conclusion) Leaps (of
Faith) or escapes
p. 34 Chestov, “We only turn to God to obtain the impossible.” Instead simply recognizing and
naming the absurd
For the absurd mind reason is useless and there is nothing beyond reason
Appetite for nostalgia, understanding, and the absolute
Kierkegaard: sacrifice of the very things that lead to despair of meaning and depth of life.
Sacrifice of the intellect. In failure the believer finds triumph!
Sin is what alienates us from God, the absurd is sin without God
Absurd mind prefers to adopt fearlessly despair in response to Kierkekaard’s question, What
would life b?.
Philosophical suicides
Negation of reason
Note reason sprang from Aquinas’s scholasticism
Double Truth Universe
Issues with relying on platonic metaphysics or Neo-Platonism.
p. 50 divorce between mind’s desires and this fragmented universe
desire for unity, clarity, meaning
but only have concrete experience (like Hume); insolvable desire
If we were animals, no problem
Tempation of the absurd man to conform, accept the sin of his guilty pride, confess (p. 53)
Notion of suicide
We are not free and God is all powerful & responsible for evil or
We are free and responsible but God is not all powerful
P 56
Counting on the someday
Death is the only certainty 58 issue related to bad faith
Like a slave
Turning toward death liberating (59)
Refusing death/suicide
Point is to live
Group:_________________________________
1) Explain what Camus means by the absurd.
2) Why does he charge other philosophers with philosophical suicide?
3) What does he think is the most important question in philosophy?
4) What was his general point in the section Absurd Walls?
5) How would he characterize absurd man?
6) How does Kierkagaard fail to ultimately accept the Absurd?
7) 2. How does the Absurd man relate to sin?
8)
1. What did Camus mean when he said, "These are our nights in Gethsemane,"
in the Myth of Sisyphus? To what was he alluding?
9) 2. Why does Camus describe suicide as a "confession"? Give an example of
what would be confessed.
10)
1. "I said the world was absurd, but I was too hasty," what does Camus state is
the truly absurd?
11) 2. Once one begins to question 'why' to the aspects of their life, their
consciousness is awoken. At the end of this awakening, what are the two
possible consequences?
12) . What does Camus claim is the source of absurdity?
13) 2. How does Camus relate the story of Sisyphus to the idea of absurdity?