On the Sisyphean Nature of Life

Camus opens The Myth of Sisyphus by saying there is only one serious philosophical question, and it is suicide. I remember reading that line and being slightly surprised, and then not surprised at all. He is right. Everything else in philosophy comes after the decision to keep going. So why keep going?

Most answers I have heard reduce to one of two.

The first is biological. You are here to pass on your genes, and the meaning of a life is the number of copies it leaves behind. This has the advantage of being true about how we got here and the disadvantage of saying nothing about why I should care. I will not be there to see the copies. A purpose I bear no witness to is not much of a purpose.

The second is God. I know this one from the inside. I lived in it for years, and I still feel warmly toward it. Camus does not. He calls the leap of faith philosophical suicide: you see clearly that the world offers no meaning, and then you stop looking and decide to believe. Believing is not the problem. Knowing better and believing anyway is. That is not faith. It is a way of not answering the question.

Camus's own answer is revolt. Live in defiance of the absurd. Accept that life has no given meaning and refuse to flee from that fact. For a long time I could not see how this was different from the leap he had just condemned. To defy something is to grant that it has authority over you. And "make your own meaning" sounded like a slogan, not an argument. I could not see how he got from the rock to a happy Sisyphus.

Then I looked at the myth again, at the punishment itself.

Sisyphus was a king of Corinth who cheated death twice and was condemned to push a boulder up a hill for eternity. Each time he nears the top it rolls back down, and he walks down after it, and begins again. Camus points out that the punishment works only because Sisyphus is conscious. If he believed, on every climb, that this time the rock would stay, there would be no torture. The clarity is the torment.

Camus stops there and turns the clarity into a victory. I think there is one more step, and it belongs to the gods.

A punishment is not the same as a hardship. A hardship is something that happens to you. A punishment is something someone does to you, and it succeeds only if you suffer. The gods can compel the rock. They can compel the hill and the eternity. What they cannot compel is what Sisyphus makes of it. The suffering is not in the rock; it is in the outlook, and the outlook is the one thing they left in his hands, because they had to. Without it there is no one to punish. They are not tormenting a rock.

So the gods need something from Sisyphus. They need him to hate the hill. The whole arrangement depends on him agreeing that this is a punishment.

That is what acceptance does. It is not resignation, and it is not the leap of faith in disguise, because Sisyphus does not pretend the rock will stay or that the hill means something. He simply stops calling it a punishment. And the moment he does, the gods have nothing. They can keep him there forever. They cannot make it what they intended it to be.

This is what I think Camus meant by revolt, and what I could not see while I read it as defiance. Defiance faces the gods. Acceptance turns away from them, toward the rock, and takes back the only part of the arrangement that was ever his.