Nice one.
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus
That is the most corporate (de-)motivational sounding quote if I ever heard one.
its actually Camus’ answer to abject nihilism and why people don’t just kill themselves. Knowing that all the work and effort of living is ultimately meaningless and the absurdity of continuing anyways.
Guess it sort of works if your life doesn’t involve a lot of suffering, kind of a shit philosophy otherwise. Don’t read Camus without reading Beauvoir.
You’re not wrong.
It’s also important to realize that Camus was writing this in response to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Authors who had really expanded on an popularized nihilism and existentialism.
Kierkegaard tried to answer Nietzcsche’s nihilistic writings claiming that existence persists through faith, or something like it. Basically that we continue to live because we believe that living is important, and that gives it meaning.
Camus says, faith is dumb, living is dumb, but it’s not meaningless either. It’s just absurd, and we need to be comfortable with the absurdity.
EDIT: That said, I could still be misunderstanding Camus. I have read “Myth of Sisyphus” twice now and listened to it as an audiobook playing in the background more times than that, and it’s still a complete mess to pick apart. Camus’ writing is so dense with similes and metaphors and he takes the longest route to get to any point.
Or without reading Emil Cioran.
In other words, pure copium.
As someone who’s struggled with severe depression and also studied philosophy, it got really annoying listening to people say shit like “Just imagine Sisyphus happy, hurdeedur.”
Like, yeah, I’ve read it. But no good philosopher believes everything they read. People acted like I don’t know my shit just because I couldn’t will myself out of depression. It was so fucking annoying.
I think sisyphus was a bad example for this idea tbh
I believe it’s supposed to be about Sisyphus rejecting the punishment by reclaiming his internal world from the gods. Meaning, their power over him and ability to punish him have failed.
It strikes me as almost Buddhist, but it could totally be a “suck it up and keep moving boxes -Amazon” message too.
Its Camus, a famed French existentialist, so the buddist take is likely more in line with his intent. The core premise of his philosophy is that life has no instrinsic meaning, so you have to make your own with the radical, total freedom you have as a thinking being.
It’s not about accepting phsycal labor as life’s purpose, although I can easily imagine some profit-driven CEO twisting the philosophy into something soul-crushing.
Oh absolutely, Camus can be soul-crushing if you believe that hope and reason are an innate part of the universe, let me quote Wikipedia:
The essay contains an appendix titled “Hope and the Absurd in the work of Franz Kafka”. While Camus acknowledges that Kafka’s work represents an exquisite description of the absurd condition, he claims that Kafka fails as an absurd writer because his work retains a glimmer of hope.
But Camus work is beautiful in its entirety and he makes a good case for “the universe in and of itself is hopeless and it is pointless, but it’s also huge and beautiful and filled with wonder. Go and enjoy it” the entirety of the ending is:
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
In my eyes it’s about finding your own reason, your own point and your own hope in the daily pointless struggle of existence.
Okay, this is a much better version of the quote that makes more sense and feels less bleak (to me). Thank you for that.
Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus
Perhaps in 1942, today, way too depressingly not ‘enough to fill a man’s heart’ and more an abusive state of life,
There’s an indie game that plays off this question.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3959020/Imagine_Sisyphus_Happy/
One must
That’s why you document down such decisions
“We must imagine a guy who cheated death once by sealing the god of death for a while, and another time by tricking the gods with the flimsy lie of “my wife didn’t bury my body properly, let me teach her a lesson” happy for getting the eternal punishment of never reaching his goals while living forever.”
And people are looking at me angrily when I say that philosophers are dumbasses who has zero media literacy and trying to fill that with constant bullshit.
deleted by creator
I don’t think anybody made him. He thinks he can do it.
Can I stop then? I’m tired Boss…
Sisyphus must have been þe most buff guy, ever. Weight training, 24/7, for eternity.
It’s the same weight forever, though. That’s not strength training, that’s cardio. 🤮
Pfff. That’s just one boulder. Atlas does the real work.
Isn’t Atlas a god (or god-adjacent, a Titan)? Sisyphus was mortal; I figured Titans and gods were essentially immutable. But, I don’t know any personally, so I guess I couldn’t say.
And similarly nobody knows why he thinks he needs to hold the whole planet. I suppose he is some kind of a flat-earther.
He holds up the sky so it doesn’t try and come together with the Earth, he doesn’t hold up the Earth
TIL that’s in fact a celestial sphere not earth itself.
Ah puh, he gets a lot of resting in on his way down the mountain.
