Leaving Sisyphus on the Mountain
I remember being a teenager when I first came across Albert Camus’s philosophy and his work “The Myth of Sisyphus.” In hindsight, it was the perfect time to read Camus; it seemed to speak to me just like Nirvana did.
But as I get older (and further away from the orbit of my teenage wasteland), I realize it might have spoken to me a bit too much as Nirvana did: a sound that is aesthetically fitting to my current state/interpretation of the world, but that kind of loses its magic if you think too much about it.
For those who had better things to do than read philosophy as teenagers, Albert Camus, a French philosopher, wrote this essay during the Fall of France.
Its main subject, put simply, is how a human being should react to a truly meaningless world.
It describes the “absurd”, that spooky realization we get from a sudden glimpse into how utterly meaningless our lives are, and then goes on to talk about how to deal with that and still live our lives to the fullest.
The Myth of Sisyphus for People on the Go
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus explores the “absurd,” a condition that arises when humanity’s desperate desire for meaning and rational understanding collides with a cold, indifferent, and meaningless universe.
Rather than escaping this uncomfortable reality through physical suicide or “philosophical suicide” (leaping into religion or false hope), Camus argues we must confront the absurd head-on.
By living without the illusion of eternal purpose or a larger moral scale, individuals gain a profound, concrete freedom.
The “absurd man”, exemplified by figures like the serial seducer, the actor, the conqueror, and the purely descriptive artist, rejects future promises, choosing instead to live with intense passion, continuous revolt, and a commitment to experiencing the absolute maximum of the present moment.
Camus illustrates this philosophy through the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who is condemned by the gods to an eternity of rolling a boulder up a mountain only to watch it roll back down.
Camus parallels this ceaseless, futile toil with the modern human condition, particularly the repetitive grind of everyday life.
However, the true tragedy, and ultimate triumph, occurs during Sisyphus’s walk back down the mountain, when he becomes fully conscious of his wretched fate.
By accepting the futility of his task without resorting to hope or despair, Sisyphus masters his destiny through scorn and revolt.
Camus concludes that the universe without a master is neither sterile nor futile; the very struggle to push the rock is enough to fill a person’s heart, meaning “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Issues with the Myth
As I stated earlier, the idea that the world is meaningless and that you revolt against it by living according to your life’s desires is certainly a strong one for the teenage mind. It paints the “unreasonable silence” of the universe as something to “revolt” against, and in doing so, you kind of create meaning by… just doing what you’re basically currently doing.
It is a strong but ultimately futile rallying call against the “absurd.”
Given the fact that it was written during a time when France was being invaded by Germany, right in the middle of World War II, it makes sense that Camus came to this conclusion, but he did not dare to think further.
It is very “rock-and-roll” to imagine Sisyphus happy, him revolting against the void, living nobly while sticking it up to the man.
Yet, it is pretty easy to poke holes in the logic that Camus employs here. Thomas Nagel’s essay “The Absurd” (1971) is basically the closest thing you can get to a philosophy “diss-track” where he figuratively strangles the logic and forces it to fully consider itself to the logical end.
Nagel’s “The Absurd” for People on the Go
In his essay “The Absurd”, philosopher Thomas Nagel challenges traditional arguments for life’s meaninglessness, such as our cosmic insignificance, our brief lifespans, or the fact that nothing we do will matter in a million years, by pointing out that if our current actions won’t matter in the distant future, then their future insignificance shouldn’t matter to us right now.
Instead, Nagel defines the absurd as a purely internal, epistemological collision: the inescapable clash between the profound, unavoidable seriousness with which we approach our daily lives and our unique human capacity to step back and view those exact same pursuits as completely arbitrary.
From this objective, transcendent perspective, we recognize a total lack of ultimate, objective justification for our values and choices.
Yet, despite this awareness, we are continually pulled back into living our lives with earnest intensity, much as a theoretical physicist might profoundly doubt the reality of the external world yet still go about eating their dinner.
Because of this internal framing, Nagel explicitly diverges from Albert Camus’s assertion that the absurd arises from the friction between human desire for meaning and a cold, indifferent universe.
For Nagel, the universe isn’t failing to meet our demands; the absurd is simply a byproduct of our own dual perspectives. The universe basically has nothing to do with it, or us.
Consequently, Nagel argues that Camus’s proposed solutions of passionate defiance, scorn, and “revolt” (as seen in his interpretation of Sisyphus) are overly dramatic, romanticized, and ultimately unnecessary.
If life truly lacks ultimate meaning, then the fact that it lacks ultimate meaning is also meaningless, rendering fist-shaking, heroic defiance essentially pointless.
Nagel concludes that our absurd condition is not an agonizing tragedy to be conquered or rebelled against, but rather a second-order effect of our advanced consciousness: a distinctively human quirk that should simply be accepted and met with a sense of gentle, wry irony.
Camus and Nagel on the Absurd
Of course, it would be hard to tell someone who lost their friends and loved ones to a meaningless war to just accept the situation with a “sense of gentle, wry irony.”
Similarly, it will likely be hard to explain to a teenager why a musical act backed by a major music label that makes millions of dollars is technically not a true representative of rebellion or the teenage spirit.
I personally believe it is hard to argue against Nagel and much easier to argue against Camus at this point in my life due to several reasons.
First, as Nagel points out, the “absurd” only exists in relation to the human condition. In his essay, he makes the point by describing that a mouse’s life is just as absurd as the modern human life, but the mouse doesn’t experience the “absurd” because it lacks the self-awareness that humans uniquely possess.
Second, if we go by the actual source material that Camus used, Sisyphus did not have a choice.
He was bound by magic by the gods to keep pushing the boulder up. It is completely irrelevant how he felt, and it made no ultimate difference if he was happy or sad. The rebellion Camus talks about is just a rebellion in his mind.
Third, Camus makes it seem as if the universe has a personality and doubles down on this by invoking the particular myth in which the gods have agency.
He says it’s unreasonable for the universe to be meaningless, but it is only “unreasonable” from the point of view of humans. From a point of view of nothing, there is no “unreasonableness” of a cold universe; it just is.
Fourth, even though Camus clearly uses Sisyphus as an allegorical stand-in for the modern worker, the metaphor itself fails structurally.
If we look at the actual source material, Sisyphus’s universe was not cold or indifferent at all; in fact, the gods (literally, the universe with an agency) were actively punishing him. The cosmos actually cared too much about him.
If rolling the boulder up the mountain is a specific, mandated punishment to appease angry gods, then the act itself isn’t actually meaningless by definition; it is just incredibly boring.
Lastly, I believe that Camus makes very wrong fundamental assumptions about human beings.
He talks about the fundamental need for humans to have a sense of meaning in the world, and, since the universe is cold, we feel the absurdity of that lack. But is that really true? Or is mere survival the base need (and drive) for humans?
Mankind has been surviving for a long time before philosophy even existed. Life was as pointless back then as it is now, but what drove humans was not the urge to find meaning but the biological urge to survive.
It is hard to imagine a world where people would just give up on their lives, their loved ones, their entire sense of self, even if it were 100% proven to them that life has no meaning. As the Matrix showed, some people would rather live a happy life even if it’s false and ultimately meaningless.
It is also worth noting that while Camus feared humans might resort to suicide upon realizing life is meaningless, framing his entire essay as a desperate plea against it, viewing suicide as a cowardly surrender, his underlying panic feels a bit misplaced.
This is proven by the fact that our species has survived and thrived for hundreds of thousands of years without ever needing a grand, cosmic purpose. Our innate, biological drive to survive is simply much louder and older than our philosophical dread.
Nagel’s view of the “absurd” is much more pragmatic in the sense that you don’t even acknowledge it as a serious thing. It is just an artifact of a brain that has figured out survival and is now moonlighting in its quest for meaning.
In my opinion, it is pretty compatible to know that your life is meaningless while at the same time being fully “serious” (in Nagel’s terms) about survival and your current life situation.
It is not a contradiction, and if it is, that contradiction explains the two parts of our modern self that clash constantly in defining who we are: the impulse-driven biological part of us that just wants to survive, and the analytical part of us that wants to explain the world with neat equations and essentially think away our deepest fears.