The Myth of Sisyphus and the face of the absurd:

“The pages that follow deal with an absurd sensitivity that can be found widespread in the age - and not with an absurd philosophy which our time, properly speaking, has not known…But it is useful to note at the same time that the absurd, hitherto taken as a conclusion, is considered in this essay as a starting-point.” (Sisyphus, p.2)

Sisyphus was written in 1940 “amid the French and European disaster…and declares that even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism.” Camus’ salient point is that if a civilization’s foundation for meaning and purpose on this earth has unravelled to the point at which reality is revealed in all of its absurdity, that point should be understood as the starting point that has been obscured by the cloud of civilization which was a received tradition. A plethora of received traditions have collapsed throughout humans’ time, yet life continues as the old tradition is replaced, revolted against, or just devolves into obscurity. Written history has made it impossible to ignore this process and brought about the period of post-modernism. The cloud of culture known as modernism promised that good times were here to stay because we have learned so much and we can now solve any problem. The notion of absurdity arose out of the collapse of the hope of modernism. In prehistory, when meaning and purpose collapsed to be replaced by a new system, there was no record of the previous collapses so the human view with each collapse and renewal was that humans had reached an enlightened state. The early to mid twentieth century collapse brought about post-modern disillusionment in goals and ideals thought to be eternal. Disillusionment allows absurdity to show through the cloud of culture, and rather than the death of purpose and meaning Camus is suggesting purpose and meaning can be built upon the brute fact of life. If a person no longer matters in a culture, purpose and meaning dissolve for that person who is invested in their received tradition.

“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.” (Sisyphus, p.3)

“Of an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that that experience had ‘undermined’ him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in the man’s heart.” P.4-5


Civilizations have supplied systems of meaning and purpose to people throughout time; however, once they become fragmented and no longer support social plenitude, cycles of revolution occur. Once the logic of a system starts to fail, fragmentation begins; e.g., when a naturalist sits in the middle of a national park campground and explains how the exotic and invasive gypsy moth rides into the Shenandoah National Park on recreational vehicle tires, the question becomes not if that truly happens, but what can be more exotic and invasive than asphalt roads that bring recreational vehicles to a mountaintop. When exotic invasion is resisted in the Hawaiian Islands against non-native species, a person must wonder whether or not all but a lava flow is exotic and invasive to a volcanic island. The desire for homeostasis where we live is understandable, but when it is couched in defensive, moral language, it will eventually fail. That is the face of the absurd, whether it it is cultural and religious foundations falling short or naturalist and scientific explanations that don’t pass muster. Non-logical and inconsistent language that is foundational to a system is transparent and becomes a stumbling block for individuals who can’t quite believe.

Zapffe in his article The Last Messiah talks about the angst, terror or existential despair that arises when an individual loses faith in his received tradition. Zapffe calls it a “a biological paradox, an absurdity, a hypertrophy of the most catastrophic kind.” What he is referring to is the hyper-developed consciousness in humans - “its genius made it not only omnipotent over the outer world, but equally dangerous to itself.” Beyond any natural need, humans have developed consciousness that is capable of self-reflection and more, e.g., what need is there in nature to solve quadratic equations, etc. Camus says “within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism.” Zapffe declared himself to be a nihilist but the difference between the Zapffe and Camus may be only their definition of nihilism.