Artists expend great energy on their creation, though their creation is ultimately meaningless. The creative life, says Camus, is an especially absurd one. Camus’ other examples of absurd lives are actors-who live in the present and try out many different lives-and conquerors, whose political and violent struggles add urgency and vividness to life.Ĭamus then turns his attentions to the relationship between the absurd and creation.

In Don Juan’s case, this means sex with as many different women as possible. He praises Don Juan for living a life of quantity, rather than quality-since no experience is inherently more valuable than any other, the absurd man should strive to experience as much as he can. As an illustrative example, he looks first at Don Juan, a notorious seducer. For Camus, it is not about finding a solution to the absurd, but living a life that maintains full awareness of life’s meaninglessness. In “The Absurd Man,” Camus tries to move towards a more practical approach to the absurd, providing examples of figures that he feels have accommodating the absurd into their lives. The absurd life must resist any temptation for answers or explanations in life act and think with total freedom and pursue life with passion. Camus argues for three main characteristics of the absurd life: revolt, freedom and passion. They try to conjure meaning out of meaninglessness, which Camus sees as distinctly irrational. But each of them has a fatal flaw-they were too afraid to commit to the absurdity of life, and instead restored meaning to the world through a leap of faith (usually to God). All of these, says Camus, went some way to outlining the absurdity of life. Camus wants to know if it’s possible to live in full awareness of the fact that life is meaningless.Ĭamus examines the work of philosophers like Soren Kierkegaard, Lev Chestov, Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl.

If life is meaningless, which is a proposition Camus certainly agrees with, is it logical to commit suicide-dutiful, even? Camus outlines how people turn to religion and hold on to the hope of a better life that never comes in order to suppress the absurd. People commit suicide when life is meaningless, he says, and sometimes to defend the meaning that they do perceive (for instance, someone dying for a political cause). Camus believes that confronting the absurd takes precedence over all other philosophical problems, because it is intimately linked with the act of suicide. In fact, Camus defines the absurd as the confrontation between man’s desire for logic, meaning and order, and the world’s inability to satisfy this desire. The absurd is often mischaracterized as the simple idea that life is meaningless. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus aims to draw out his definition of absurdism and, later in the book, consider what strategies are available to people in living with the absurd.

The myth of sisyphus by albert camus