![]() ![]() The elusion of the Absurd which Camus is referring to, perhaps by some assigned, comprehensible but false meaning of life or existence or the universe, keeps one from truly embracing and fully exercising their own existence, preventing “good living.” Within the concept of the Absurd, one desires meaning but cannot find it in the world, because the world is apart from us and beyond us, and it’s entirety is beyond our potential understanding. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living.” (4) (8) To quote Camus in transition from the first option to the second, “…I see many people die because they decide that life is not worth living. Moreover, if there is no living, there is no “good living.” The second option is denial. (6) Just as those who take their own lives under the guise of the Absurd, giving up on an existence they realize to be necessarily meaningless, believe that any effort to live is futile, in that logic so too is suicide futile in a confrontation with the Absurd. To decide one’s life is not worth living and to end it on account of the concept of the Absurd is to negate free will, determining that suffering is useless, and to be undermined by a concept to which submittance to the extent of suicide yields nothing. (3) Camus presents that to choose suicide in the face of absurdity is not legitimate, because then free will has been negated by the concept of the Absurd, which renders even suicide futile. ![]() The world is simply not reasonable, and cannot be reduced to anything comprehensible, and within this void between the human desire for meaning and the absence of any comprehensible to us exists the Absurd.Īgain, the first option in response to the Absurd offered in Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus is suicide. To have a relationship with the world, we must be separate from it, and we are. If we could understand the world as a whole, we would no longer have a place in it, because the world must be estranged from us as individuals-it must be beyond us. We inherently desire some transcendent explanation by which we can understand our place in the world, or to generally make sense of it we may seek to know the world itself as a whole, but we cannot. It may manifest as a loss or an undermining of what we conceive to make life meaningful. ![]() The feeling of Absurdity may bring about a crisis of meaning, or a destabilization of the set of commitments that we organize our lives around. When the feeling of Absurdity allows for the concept of the Absurd to manifest, there is a tension or a disproportion between what we desire from the world and what the world itself can offer, or as Camus says, “a divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints.” (6) It is a fundamental and irreducible element of the human existence, because we as humans, at our core, desire from the world meaning or explanation for our existence, which it cannot offer to us. The Absurd is our separation from the world that both enables and is our fundamental relationship with it. To first attempt to explain Camus’ definition of the Absurd, the feeling of Absurdity is what paves the way for the concept of the Absurd. The Myth of Sisyphus opens with a presentation of two options: to commit suicide in the face of Absurdity, or to live in denial. (119) As Camus reveals through Sisyphus, the acknowledgement of and rebellion against the Absurd, the exercise of free will in self-investment in the performance of life to find intrinsic meaning, despite the incomprehensibility of the world, is to live well. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus defines the Absurd with, “This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of Absurdity.” (Camus 6) Camus offers up a model in his work for good living, in the face of the unavoidable notion of Absurdity, through a dissection of the tale of Sisyphus, an individual doomed amidst this divorce to perpetually pushing a boulder up a hill, only to see it roll down again. Philosophical Analysis of the Absurd in the Myth of Sisyphus
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