Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus (#2)

Most periods of transition in my life have been punctuated by existential crises. You are familiar with them.

The sign of an existential crisis is questioning. What is all the effort and worry for? Spinning all of the plates of modern life - managing health, family, relationships, work projects, finances, a career, all while dancing in time to the daily demands of wake, work, commute, entertainment, sleep - takes serious effort. And when the effort demanded is overwhelming, I have told myself that life simply is too much for me to bear, that my unending efforts would come to nothing, that everyone and everything I ever loved would turn to ash, so what was the point of trying?

Albert Camus points out in The Myth of Sisyphus that the dilemma I contemplate in existential crises is suicide, whether I realize it or not. Suicide is the admission that life is too much to bear. Camus puts it in a simpler way: if we take the option of suicide seriously, what can save us from it? What can we do to make life worth living? It is hard to think of a more banal question - indeed, is there anyone who has never asked it of themselves? But, as Camus makes clear, the answer is literally a matter of life-and-death importance. And upon reading The Myth of Sisyphus with no background, I was heartened by Camus's no-bullshit approach to seriously answering a question that has dogged me as long as I can remember: can we live a life without metaphysical consolation, without sentimentality or saccharine hope, yet without despair? Can we look reality in the eye and accept what we have been given - the miracle and the burden of life - with equanimity?

Camus's answer is yes, because our lives are doomed to be absurd, or nothing. Man is condemned to live, then to die and be stripped of consciousness. Try as he might to defeat Nature, Nature always wins in the end. Man's condition on this earth is a confrontation between himself and his hostile, alien environment that has the power to crush him. Man stages his confrontation using the tactics of guerrilla warfare, using his senses to understand and then exploit the patterns he observes. And by doing so he cleaves himself from the world; he is an "I" looking out on all creation. The juxtaposition of our subjective inner world and the indifferent outer world -- how much we strive to accommodate ourselves to an indifferent master -- is the definition of absurdity. This is paralleled by the limits of reason: man seeks a unified understanding of his world that will forever elude his grasp. But he will keep trying, and that is absurd. As he says, absurdity

bursts from the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it. The absurdity is essentially a divorce.

But it is not as if the struggle to survive is the only thing that is absurd. The irony is that modernity has made human life even more absurd, because we have been liberated to focus our efforts on matters that create value -- in the sense that consumers are willing to trade resources (pay money) for them -- but are trivial with respect to life-and-death. Think about the resources dedicated for an advertising campaign, and then think about its expected return: each individual who sees the ad is a fraction of a percent more likely to buy the product. And yet, these advertising campaigns actually ROI. And hundreds of human hands dedicate their most serious efforts in life to making these ad campaigns exist -- because if they do their one specialty well, their material needs will be taken care of.

Here is another manifestation of the absurd brought on by modernity: millions of people turn to therapy to help them handle merely uncomfortable situations, because their emotions respond to them as if they were matters of life-and-death. (I am not grandstanding; I am one of those people.) But the reciprocal of this situation is also absurd: that all of our efforts are dedicated to fighting a losing battle against Nature and there is no consolation awaiting at the end because, well, God is Dead. And so, Camus cleverly converts the question of suicide into a question of whether life is worth living with our absurd condition as a given. Because, to borrow an ancient meme, life is absurdity all the way down. The mind has other ideas - it desperately wants to avoid confronting the absurd through the desire for a world with hope, or nostalgia for a childhood where life was simpler and death was waved away by fairy tales - but Camus is adamant that we direct our efforts toward unflinchingly accepting the truth, and struggling against it at all times as a demonstration of our virility. As he says in one of the more arresting passages of The Myth of Sisyphus:

But I know that in order to keep alive, the absurd cannot be settled. It escapes suicide, to the extent that it is simultaneously awareness and rejection of death. It is, at the extreme limit of the condemned man's last thought, that shoelace that despite everything he sees a few yards away, on the very brink of his dizzying fall. The contrary of suicide, in fact, is the man condemned to death.

We are all the condemned man on the brink of his dizzying fall. We must be lucid enough to perceive the shoelace a few yards away.

To commit suicide is to cheat the absurd by choosing the time and place of our death. But it comes at the ultimate price: one's life, which is the only thing that has been given. Camus proposes that the absurd man live with his absurd fate at the front of his mind so that he can summon the will to rebel against it, to drain life to the bitter end, to defy it with each passing day. This is Camus's "first consequence" of the absurd condition: that we engage in metaphysical revolt against it in every moment of our lives. Suicide is only one feeble attempt at making our mark against the absurd. A life lived in constant rebellion builds monuments to spite it.

But to rebel in this way brings a second consequence: living with freedom, or as Camus says, "a life without appeal" (to ethical or moral codes). I will perhaps write about virtue in a later post built on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Camus's principal point about freedom is that there should be no appeal to transcendent beings to form a moral code - man must get along with his reason. It is a rejection of metaphysical consolation. His "freedom" lies within the bounds of human life. It is the independence to act and the ability to feel:

The divine ability of the condemned man before whom the prison doors open in a certain early dawn, that unbelievable disinterestedness with regard to everything except for the pure flame of life -- it is clear that death and the absurd are here the principles of the only reasonable freedom: that which a human heart can experience and live.

What remains for Camus to define is what we should be defining our revolt and our freedom towards. Camus says we must carry our awareness of life itself. We must bring our lucidity to bear in our ever-present collision with reality. Else, we are ceding our life experience to death:

To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them. Being aware of one's life, one's revolt, one's freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum. Where lucidity dominates, the scale of values becomes useless.

Camus locates examples of the absurd man in Don Juan, actors, and warlords. But the example par excellence is, of course, Sisyphus. Sisyphus is the definition of the absurd hero. We would agree that Sisyphus is absurd - but what makes him a hero? Because Sisyphus continues to roll the rock up the mountain knowing full well what his punishment is. When he has completed his task, he has the opportunity to recognize his punishment with lucidity as he takes his walk down the mountain. And every time he reaches the bottom, he decides to push the rock back up. How do we know this? Because Sisyphus hasn't stopped, which means that Sisyphus has chosen to continue, each time, to spite the Gods. The rock has been transcended by Sisyphus's resolve. As Camus says - "he is stronger than his rock".

Is it too obvious to point out that we, too, are Sisyphus? We were brought into this world against our will; we are condemned to a life of labor to maintain our organic bodies and remake the items that have been consumed or destroyed by decay; we gain awareness of our condition only through the rest that we enjoy when our labors have temporarily ceased; that it is easier to become alienated from ourselves in the midst of our tasks than to confront the fact that the task will always be undone. But there is one thing that must be recognized: that this life of toil is better than no life at all.

To be honest, reading The Myth of Sisyphus this Fall was one of the major turning points in my life. Prior to it, my posture was essentially negative: my main concern was with not getting wiped out by suddenly being fired from my job or coming down with a terminal illness. Which is a reasonable frame to have, so long as you react to setbacks with proportionality. I did not. I was focused on perfection, and hated myself if I made mistakes, because they would make me a little more likely to get fired or irreparably destroying my relationships. Any setbacks from the perfect life script could not be tolerated, because they move the doomsday clock one minute closer to midnight. The only good, stable times were those when I was absolutely perfect and didn't make any mistakes worth dwelling on. They didn't last long. The thing that kept me going was my duty to others. But my mistakes felt like failures of my duty, and in my shame, I felt that I didn't deserve to be given such responsibility. This, I can see now, was something of a death wish.

Camus's frame is different: our reason is limited, and our lives are limited, therefore we will sometimes be placed in situations where we will fail through no fault of our own. Inevitable failure is absurd. These situations are microcosms of our relationship to death; we lack the ability to save ourselves due to the constraint of being mortal beings, and we lack the ability to navigate life situations successfully due to a lack of personal experience. Given that, we owe it to ourselves to revolt against these constraints by bringing an intensity of awareness to these situations to heighten the absurdity and set us apart from our tasks. It is up to us to use our spirit to drive our activity, knowing full well the toil only ends when we perish from the earth.

It is hard to articulate the change in my spiritual posture that I adopted when I finished The Myth of Siyphus. Perhaps it is most illustrative to conjure the ghost of Philip Roth, standing in front of his bathroom mirror, exhorting himself to "Attack! Attack!". I resolved to turn the fulfillment of my responsibilities into an act of self-expression by reclaiming the choice to live. Again, I am circling around and around the same thing, pointing at something that I cannot name. Maybe it's something like elan vital or life force or something else that's been encoded by prior generations. But it's not just that: what Camus offered to me was a rejection of the death wish so strong that I can never go back to the way I was before. And that is partially because he offered it in a package that was easy for me, a skeptic of all things metaphysical and mystical, to accept.

I consider the end of Camus's life to be a fitting postscript to this review. He died in a car crash at age 46. William Faulkner wrote his obituary, saying:

When the door shut for him he had already written on this side of it that which every artist who also carries through life with him that one same foreknowledge and hatred of death, is hoping to do: I was here.