faustuz

No, there are no gods. Gods are a metaphor in the story, as they so often are. Anyway, the story isn't so incompatible with your view as you make it out to be. In fact, your last sentence here may be considered a pretty good summary of the Myth of Sysyphus. Sysyphus as doomed to roll the rock, his life is fated to be bitter. Yet that being his fate he will nonetheless embrace it and make it his. He will therefore beat the gods and make them impotent. Sysyphus will drink from the cup and love life, and love who he is and not only endure but embrace his fate. There’s really no choice, the alternative is despair.

<strong> [ December 23, 2002: Message edited by: faustuz ]</p>

phaedrus

"Living the absurd… means a total lack of hope (which is not the same as despair), a permanent reflection (which is not the same as renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which is not the same as juvenile anxiety)."

How else do you suggest one live?

Beoran

That, everyone needs to decide for themselves.

However, for me, merriment is the key. I enjoy the fantasy of an occasional small hope, the foolishness of occasional impulsiveness and the pleasure of repeated satisfaction. To quote Nietzsche again, as I did in another thread: "What destroys a man more quickly than to think and feel (...) without pleasure, as a mere automaton of duty?" Truly, if I choose life over death, why should do so reluctantly or without joy?

Perhaps your way is different. Our paths cross here, but we must go on in different directions.

crocodile deathroll

It just rules out the concept of any external reward or punishment eg: Heaven of Hell, which is not such a bad thing in my view. And also all the wealth and fame a billion may accumulate through his/her life is absolutely useless to him/her when he/she is dead, as death negates any memory of ever living at all in the first place.

So the post-death state is subjectively identical to the pre-birth state.

faustuz

Beoran,

Camus is not addressing how one deals with with ease and joy, or with “pleasure and satisfaction”. Doing so is trivial, we all do so without any effort and there is no point for a philosopher to address the subject. What one needs to figure out is how to deal with hardship, with burden. How well one has lived will not be judged on how well they dealt with joy, it will be judged on how they dealt with hardship. I’m sure you’re asking who will do the judging. Well, it is the individual himself who will be doing the judging. The individual will feel either angst or satisfaction with their life based on how they deal with their hardship. Every human be dealt hardship in their lives. By this I don’t mean ephemeral hardship, like one rough day, but rather genuine, life altering, hardship: the death of a loved one, an economic catastrophe, a debilitating illness with death at the end, whatever. It is out there for all of us. How will we endure? Well, we must. Fate, the gods, whatever has dealt us hardship just as they dealt us joy. We might sink in despair. Or we might rise to the occasion and see our burden as a self-realization. We might use our overcoming as that which leads to the superman. I am not impressed by those who reveled in their joys, although I do not begrudge them nor do I think they should have done otherwise. Joy is to be savored; I will revel in my joy, and I have. Nonetheless it those who overcame who are the gods.

Let me give an example drawn from my personal experience. A couple has a child. They have dreams and hopes and expectations about the future of that child. However, the child is born with a chromosomal anomaly that caused the child to be severely disabled. The child’s future will not follow the script set out in the parent’s dreams but will instead be severely developmentally disabled. This initially leads to depression and even despair. There is no way out of the situation, these are the cards that have been dealt. Leaving, or failing to care for the child will lead to guilt and pain. The need is urgent, the parents must rise to the situation or the child will suffer and they will suffer a crushing angst. They might dwell on the absurdity of their situation, on the unfairness, but this will only do harm to themselves and the child.

The story has a happy ending. The parents do not fold. They come to see their burden as their joy, and in due course it is not a burden at all. Sysyphus is not rolling his stone up a hill, he is dancing up the hill and the stone dances with him. The parents feel satisfaction in raising their child and this enhances their competence in the matter. The child reaches his full capacity and is himself, through a wonderful personality, a joy to those around him. One must imagine these parents happy. Indeed they are.

I know of a woman in a similar situation. She is religious and has been going to church regularly since a hardship befell her. This does not seem to be helping. She seems unable to understand why God should cause her, who is devout, to suffer. She inflicts additional suffering on herself and those around her with her angst. The universe is out of sync with her desires, the universe is therefore absurd. Her world view is not working for her. She needs to herself become a god, and the only way to do so will be to shoulder her burden with the pride becoming of a god.

The metaphorical stone will be born by all humans regardless of their wishes. Their world view must deal with it. The absurdity of life is that it is out of sync with our desires. The universe will not yield, but we can bend our will to face fate like gods. We can be the overcomers, the supermen. The Myth of Sysuphus can be our inspiration.

Kharakov

I thought sysiphus had already conquered the gods as the first king of rock and roll. I mean, elvis might have the title, but sysiphus is the one that first made it popular.

phaedrus

Think you have misunderstood what camus is offering. He doesnt say "living the absurd" is living like a fatalistic robot. His message is to accept that life with all its absurdities and go on with life and the book's main theme is against religion/faith, faith that need nto be religious as well..

Someone else has put it in better words....Man is therefore presented with two choices. He can reject life and kill himself; but in doing so he allows both Absurd life and meaningless death to triumph over him. Or he can become a rebel in all senses of the word, constantly rejecting death in the complete knowledge that he will one day die. At this point Camus moves from the metaphorical language of rebellion to a more practical discussion of self-awareness in everyday life. The mechanical, repetitive nature of life in industrial society contains for Camus both tragedy and comedy. Seen from within such an existence is tragic, with no room for individual expression and no higher meaning than day-to-day survival. From the outside - from the perspective of one living the Absurd life - a repetitive existence is comic: a meaningless mechanical dumb-show. By recognising life as comic, by incorporating it into the Absurd, one can escape the endless tragic repetitiveness.


The fritz's (who is called a nihilist btw ) saying in the antichrist is not to be looked at in isolation since when he said What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure--as a mere automaton of duty? , he was criticising the christian dogmatism which objected to pleasure....

Everyone takes their own path, but when one claims their path is "better", the problem/argument starts

Beoran

Phaedrus, Yes, I probably don't undrestand fully what Camus is saying, mostly because I have not read the work in question. I'm more commenting on how other people explaining his work to me. So the message is to accecpt life and go against religion? Being a rebel? That's great.

However, I'm also rebelling against the industrial

Sure, Nietzsche was criticing the dogmatism that rejected pleasure. But, does this not equally reject all dogmatism that rejects pleasure? We do away with christianity, wich is a good thing. But why then replace it with an ideology that that equally rejects pleasure? No, we need a philosophy that promotes joy, and helps us to find joy even in the greatest hardship.

Oh, and did I claim my path is better? I'm sorry if I sounded like that. I claim my path is better for me. Sure, I talk about my path to others because I like my path, and I want to share it, in case there is someone else out there who happens to have the same taste as me. But if my path is not to your taste, then by all means, let us part as friends, and go each upon our own ways. After you have told me about the marvels of your path and I have told you about the marvels of mine, of course.

Phaedurs, and also Faustuz, I think I do not disagree in essence with either of you. It's more a matter of nuance, I reckon.

Faustus, first of all, I do not want to feign sympathy, but I must say I am impressed by your strength. In essence, what you seem to have archieved, is to be able to find joy in a great hardship. Is that not the most powerful joy we humans can archieve?

I do have some small hardships to cope with, such as my being fired for economic reasons or my grandfather passing away this tuesday, but they are relatively menial things compared with a parent's worries for their child. I do realise my own weaknesses. I do not know how I shall cope when such great hardships befall me. But I try to improve myself in the hope that I shall be able to find joy in them as well.

Sure, the universe is not how we desire it. Sometimes, when we are powerful and knowledgable enough to do so, then we can change the universe. And sometimes, when we are powerful and wise enough to do so, we can change our own desires. And is wisdom not what philosophy is all about?

However, these human desires we have are not opposed to the universe. In fact, my life springs forth from the universe, my desires spring forth from my life. Life instills me with the will to life, the desire to life, and from that desire comes my desire of joy, and my will to power. I shall not bend my will to face fate. I shall straighten my will and mock "fate", and laugh into it's face. "I refuse to be a slave of fate. I shall be the master of my own destiny."

That may be an illusion, but I care not. For even when my rock crushes me, it will be like in the cartoons. I'll be painfully flattened, but at least others will get a chance to laugh. I take my inspiration from Will E Coyote and Daffy Duck.

faustuz

Beoran,

I do not find joy in hardship. I find joy in overcoming hardship. That is how I read Myth of Sysyphus as well. I think our views are not so far apart, in any case. By the way, I’ve read a good deal of Camus and must say that Myth of Sysyphus is not very indicative of the bulk of his writing. He does indeed tend to dwell on the absurd and despair in his works which can be very disturbing indeed. His characters are placed in situations where their best intentions go wrong, where they made decisions early in life that have kept them from following their proper path, or who are faced with an empty existence left by the absence of God (The Stranger). Emptiness and nihilism are often the theme. This does not mean that Camus preached nihilism. It only means that he addressed the nihilism that his characters were faced with, his very realistically drawn out characters. Camus’ work is a kind of psychological study of despair. I see Myth of Sysyphus as Camus’ philosophical answer to his other work. Here are the problems, now here, maybe, is an answer.

JP2

I agree in a sense.

For Camus, happiness is that fleeting moment of consciousness - the triumph over inescapable absurdity of life. Sysyphus may be condemned to an ultimately pointless, meaningless (absurd?) task, but the brief second of acheivement that seperates his pushing the rock up the hill and it roling back down again, is, for Camus, the sensation that makes life meaningful. While Sysyphus may be condemned to an absurd reality, it his his fleeting victory over it - very much a sensation that can only ever be appreciated in the all too brief "present" - that we can imagine makes him happy.

The Myth of Sysyphus was very much written as the sort of "philosophical guide" to "L'Etranger", so you could do worse than to read the latter in order to understand the former. Mersault realises, after being condemned to death, that the sensations that seem meaningless to him at first were actually those which gave him meaning all along:

"In the darkness of my mobile prison, I redisovered one-by-one, as if rising from the depths of my fatigue, all the familiar sounds of a certain town that I loved and of a certain time of day when I sometimes used to feel happy."

When reading "L'Etranger", in my opinion, one must consider Part I as the part of the novel which extolls all the disjointed sensations that comprise the "absurd life" for any given person, and Part II as the part which extolls exactly why these disjointed sensations should make us happy.

While waiting in his cell, uncertain as to exactly when he will be summoned to the guillotine, he summises his situation. He comprehends that life is meaningless. He comprehends that whether he dies now or in twenty years he will still succumb to the same, eternal state "nothingness" - of non-being - that we all succumb to. Regardless of what we acheive in life, I'm sure the argument goes, we cannot take our memories or acheivements with us. They disolve into nothingness just as we are destined to:

"I wasn't unaware of the fact that it doesn't matter very much whether you die at thirty or at seventy since, in either case, other men and women will naturally go on living, for thousands of years even."

But then after rationalising to himself the meaningless of existence ("at that point and only at that point") he considers the alternative: that he is not condemned to death by guillotine, and is pardoned, free to live again:

"The annoying thing was that somehow I'd have to control that bruning rush of blood which would make my eyes smart and my whole body delerious with joy."

"I'd feel my heart give this terrifying leap at the thought of having another twenty years to live."

So, you see, the point of this novel is to demonstrate that while life is undeniably absurd and meaningless (we are all condemned to the same fate as Mersault - namely death) it is what we do with the present - the fleeting moments of consciousness, of triumph over absurdity - that makes human life worth living.

We are all condemned to death by the metaphorical guillotine, regardless of how we try to postulate (predominantly theistic) ways around or mortality (Mersault says, with regards to his desire to escape his death sentance: "But when I really thought about it, there was nothing to permit me that luxury, everything was set against it, and I was caught in the mechanism again") but, for Camus, the question of God or immortality is meaningless (Mersault repeatedly denies the chaplain's offer of redemption for instance). For both Camus and his character Mersault, the meaning of life is merely that thin sliver of consciousness that separates the past and the future.

In other words, if Sysyphus - for a tiny fraction of time - is able to be completely conscious of his absurd, inescapable situation, then we can postulate that he is happy. No human being can demand anything more than this.