- Length
- 176 pagesO'Brien, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Vintage, 1955
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
The Myth of Sisyphus
A hundred and seventy pages asking whether a life without meaning is worth continuing, written in an occupied country by a man in his twenties. Its answer is that the question is real, the evasions are worse than the problem, and one must imagine Sisyphus happy.
- Date
- 1942
- Author
- Albert Camus
- Region
- Algeria and occupied France
- Language
- French
- 1955 English, Justin O'Brien The standard English version; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Narrative — Argument carried by story, image or confession
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 96 years
Published under German occupation with an essay removed to satisfy the censor, and read continuously since by people who have never opened another philosophy book.
What the book says
An essay that opens by declaring there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, which is suicide - whether life is worth living - and that everything else comes after. Camus arrives at the question through the absurd, which he is careful to locate neither in the world nor in us but in the relation between them: a human demand for meaning and clarity meeting a universe that offers neither, and the confrontation between the two. The absurd is not a conclusion but a starting point, and most responses to it are evasions. Physical suicide abolishes one term of the relation. What Camus calls philosophical suicide abolishes the other, by making a leap into a meaning that reason cannot support - and here he names Kierkegaard, Chestov, Jaspers and Husserl in turn, arguing that each escapes the tension rather than holding it. What is left is to live without appeal: to keep the confrontation alive, in revolt, freedom and passion. The closing pages take Sisyphus, condemned to roll a stone uphill for ever, and locate the interest not in the labour but in the descent, when he walks back down conscious of his fate.
What it argues
That the absurd is a relation and cannot be resolved by removing either side of it. We want the world to make sense; the world does not oblige; and the absurd is the collision, which exists only as long as both parties are present. This means the honest response is neither despair nor faith but the maintenance of a tension - and Camus argues that living without appeal yields three things: revolt, which is the refusal to be reconciled; freedom, since a life with no prescribed meaning has none imposed; and passion, a preference for quantity of experience over quality of justification. He is explicit that this is not a doctrine of despair and that the absurd, properly held, generates more life rather than less.
What it answered
The existential religious thinkers - Kierkegaard above all, and Chestov and Jaspers - and, more distantly, Husserl, whom he accuses of a different kind of escape, deifying reason where the others deify the irrational. His target throughout is the move that relieves the tension while claiming to have honoured it. He is also answering, without much argument, the philosophical suicide of despair: nothing in the analysis licenses killing oneself, and he says so early and treats the rest as following from that refusal.
How it argues
By essay rather than by demonstration, in the French moralist tradition, with images doing the work arguments would do elsewhere - the stone, the stage set collapsing, the man behind glass whose gestures you can see but not hear. Camus insists he is describing a sensibility rather than constructing a philosophy, and he is not a systematic thinker; the concepts are stated once, vividly, and not defended. Whether this counts as philosophy has been asked since publication, usually by people who concede that the writing is superb.
The moment
Camus was born in Algeria to an illiterate mother and a father killed at the Marne, grew up poor, contracted tuberculosis at seventeen, and was twenty-eight when the book appeared. It was published in occupied Paris by Gallimard, and the essay on Kafka had to be dropped because a Jewish author could not be discussed. He edited the resistance paper Combat under the occupation and won the Nobel Prize in 1957 at forty-four, dying in a car crash three years later with an unused train ticket in his pocket.
How it travelled
Straight into general readership and never out of it. Camus became the philosopher most read by people who read no philosophy, and the essay is a fixture in schools and on undergraduate lists. Sartre reviewed the novel that accompanied it admiringly, and the two were friends until 1952, when Sartre's journal attacked The Rebel and the friendship ended publicly and bitterly. Camus always denied being an existentialist and objected to the label whenever it was used of him.
The strongest objection
That the conclusion does not follow from the premises and is not meant to. Camus establishes that the world provides no meaning and that we demand one, and then recommends revolt, freedom and passion - but nothing in the absurd rules out despair, cruelty or indifference, and he acknowledged the gap himself by writing The Rebel nine years later to address it. The sharper version is that the imperative to remain lucid is itself a value smuggled in: if nothing is justified, the demand to face the absence of justification honestly is no more justified than the leap he condemns. Camus' answer is that lucidity is not a value but a fact about what one can do once the question has been raised, which is elegant and is not obviously an answer.
Why read it
Because it is short, superbly written and asks its question without evasion, and because almost nobody who reads it forgets the last page. The opening pages on suicide and the closing pages on Sisyphus are what everyone means by the book, and they take under an hour together.
- First printed
- 1942
- First in English
- 1955
- Digitised
- No
Published with several shorter essays. Camus later described the absurd as a starting point he had moved past; The Rebel of 1951 takes up the question of what may be done once one has decided to live, and its reception ended his friendship with Sartre.
Justin O'Brien's 1955 English is the standard and is in copyright, as is the French.
Where it stands
Live in a particular way: little discussed in academic philosophy and continuously read outside it, which makes it one of the few books in this section whose influence is measured in readers rather than citations.
On quoting this book
In copyright in French and English. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether it is philosophy or literature is asked constantly and Camus was uninterested in the distinction. Whether his readings of Kierkegaard, Jaspers and Husserl are accurate is doubted by specialists in each. How much his own position changed by The Rebel is argued. And whether the closing injunction to imagine Sisyphus happy is earned by the preceding argument or is a rhetorical flourish is the question most readers end up with.