craig robert martin: December 2024

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I discovered earlier this year that Albert Camus, alongside George Orwell, was a philosophical and literary influence on Mario Vargas Llosa (see my review of The Call of the Tribe). He helped move the Peruvian writer/politician from Marxism towards liberalism. Perhaps liberals, like Vargas Llosa and maybe even Albert Camus, are always destined to defeat, like Sisyphus.

The Myth of Sisyphus is a collection of writings dealing with philosophy, suicide, and a travelogue of Algiers/Oran in the style of Graham Greene.

There is the silence of noon on the Place du Gouvernement. In the shade of the trees surrounding it Arabs sell for five sous glasses of iced lemonade flavoured with orange-flowers. Their cry ‘Cool, cool’, can be heard across the empty square. After their cry silence again falls under the burning sun: in the vendor’s jug the ice moves and I can hear its tinkle."

But Vienna stands at a cross-roads of history. Around her echoes the clash of empires. Certain evenings when the sky is suffused with blood, the stone horses on the Ring monuments seem to take wing. In that fleeting moment when everything is reminiscent of power and history, can be distinctly heard, under the charge of the Polish squadrons, the crashing fall of the Ottoman Empire."

But beyond the travelogue and history, most of the book is profoundly philosophical and seeks to address the key question of ‘Is life worth living?’. To frame his response, Camus turns to the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus, a cunning and defiant king, was condemned by the gods to eternal punishment for his repeated transgressions—cheating death, outsmarting the gods, and refusing to submit to divine authority. His punishment was as futile as it was cruel: he was tasked with rolling a massive boulder up a hill, only for it to tumble back down each time he neared the summit. This endless, pointless labour symbolised the ultimate futility of human existence.

For Camus, however, Sisyphus is not merely a tragic figure trapped in despair. In the titular essay, Camus reinterprets the myth as a metaphor for the human condition. The eternal struggle of pushing the boulder mirrors humanity’s search for meaning in an indifferent universe. Camus calls this dissonance between our desire for purpose and the lack of it in the world "the absurd." Yet, rather than succumbing to despair or taking refuge in comforting illusions, Camus argues that we must confront and embrace this absurdity. Doing so allows us to live with freedom, defiance, and even joy. In Camus’ words, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

The collection doesn’t stop with this powerful essay. Camus also includes other writings exploring related philosophical questions about art, nihilism, and existence. While these essays are more loosely connected to the theme of absurdity, they enrich the book’s overall exploration of what it means to live authentically in a world without inherent meaning.

The Myth of Sisyphus is not an easy read—it is dense, thought-provoking, and often unsettling. Yet it is also profoundly rewarding, leaving readers with an unforgettable image: Sisyphus, smiling as he begins his endless climb. It is a call not to despair but to live boldly in the face of absurdity.

One of the most profound aspects of The Myth of Sisyphus is Camus’ exploration of consciousness and its role in the human condition. For Camus, consciousness is both a gift and a burden—through our awareness, we confront the absurd, the dissonance between humanity’s longing for meaning and the universe’s indifference. Unlike thinkers who turn to faith or metaphysics to resolve this tension, Camus insists that we remain fully conscious of life’s lack of inherent meaning, resisting the urge to escape into comforting illusions. Consciousness, for Camus, is not about solving life’s mysteries but about living authentically in defiance of its absurdity.

Camus avoids the nihilistic trap by framing consciousness as the source of our struggle and our potential for freedom. Instead, he advocates for a life of clarity, passion, and rebellion. In this way, Camus positions consciousness not as a problem to be explained away but as a call to action—to confront existence with integrity and create value in the very act of living. For readers fascinated by the existential implications of consciousness, Camus offers a deeply humanist perspective that resonates far beyond his time.

"Kierkegaard may shout in warning: ‘If man had no eternal consciousness, if, at the bottom of everything, there were merely a wild, seething force producing everything, both large and trifling, in the storm of dark passions, if the bottomless void that nothing can fill underlay all things, what would life be but despair?’"

For the many of us who also grapple with David Chalmers’ ‘Hard Problem of Consciousness’ (and that includes Christof Koch who lost a case of fine wine in a bet with the Australian philosopher, and who also cites the Myth of Sisyphus in his latest book), Camus offers us some consolation:

”Consciousness suspends in experience the objects of its attention. Through its miracle it isolates them. Henceforth they are beyond all judgements."

I gave the book three stars.

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Review: The Myth of Sisyphus