Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

by Albert Camus

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

(what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying).

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings.

In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it.

Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinc— tively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

For everything be-gins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.

This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me.

So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art.

I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.

Whatever may be or have been their ambitions, all started out from that indescribable universe where contradiction, antinomy, anguish, or impotence reigns.

The world itself, whose single meaning I do not understand, is but a vast irrational.

The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

I can therefore say that the Absurd is not in man (if such a metaphor could have a meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together. For the moment it is the only bond uniting them.

“The only true solution,” he said, “is precisely where human judgment sees no solution. Otherwise, what need would we have of God? We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible. As for the possible, men suffice.” If there is a Chestovian philosophy, I can say that it is altogether summed up in this way.

Perhaps this notion will become clearer if I risk this shocking statement: the absurd is sin without God.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully.

But the point is to live.

What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal.

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules.

There is but one moral code that the absurd man can accept, the one that is not separated from God: the one that is dictated.

The certainty of a God giving a meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity.

Don Juan knows and does not hope. He reminds one of those artists who know their limits, never go beyond them, and in that precarious interval in which they take their spiritual stand enjoy all the wonderful ease of masters. And that is indeed genius: the intelligence that knows its frontiers.

Half a man’s life is spent in implying, in turning away, and in keeping silent.

“A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.

There is thus a metaphysical honor in enduring the world’s absurdity.

War cannot be negated.

In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation.

fever. In this universe the work of art is then the sole chance of keeping his consciousness and of fixing its adventures. Creating is living doubly.

Expression begins where thought ends.

To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one’s own world, which comes to the same thing).

The fecundity and the importance of a literary form are often measured by the trash it contains. The number of bad novels must not make us forget the value of the best.

In the creation in which the temptation to explain is the strongest, can one overcome that temptation?

What distinguishes modern sensibility from classical sensibility is that the latter thrives on moral problems and the former on metaphysical problems.

It is no longer a question of revenge, but of revolt.

Suicide

“The laws of nature,” says the engineer, “made Christ live in the midst of falsehood and die for a falsehood.” Solely in this sense Jesus indeed personifies the whole human drama. He is the complete man, being the one who realized the most absurd condition. He is not the God-man but the man-god. And, like him, each of us can be crucified and victimized—and is to a certain degree.

If God exists, all depends on him and we can do nothing against his will. If he does not exist, everything depends on us.

Dostoevsky in the following installments of the Diary amplifies his position and concludes thus: “If faith in immortality is so necessary to the human being (that without it he comes to the point of killing himself), it must therefore be the normal state of humanity. Since this is the case, the immortality of the human soul exists without any doubt.”

There is no longer any question of suicide and of madness. What is the use, for anyone who is sure of immortality and of its joys? Man exchanges his divinity for happiness.

Art can never be so well served as by a negative thought. Its dark and humiliated proceedings are as necessary to the understanding of a great work as black is to white. To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions.

To create is likewise to give a shape to one’s fate.

The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd.

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols.

There is no sun without shadow, and it is es-sential to know the night.

At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death.