I thought I was long overdue to revisit Camus’ most popular and influential philosophical work. So, on a recent trip, I bought a copy in Apple Books and read it as my vacation was winding down. I was motivated because I’d seen people posting quotations from it which, while they seemed very Camus-ish didn’t sound to me like anything Camus had actually said in this book. I was right on that score.
Camus and philosophers of his era write in a way that’s quite a bit looser than you might expect if you’re familiar with more recent philosophical work. Camus, steeped in phenomenology, will often be alluding to works and ideas in that tradition, not always calling them out by name. Camus also didn’t make hard distinctions distinctions between his philosophical work and his literary work. In practice, this means he’ll frequently allow himself some very bold claims and, rather often, beautiful turns of phrase. In fact, Camus is among the more quotable philosophers. Striking, thought-provoking one-liners and short passages come easily to him and tend to stick with you.
A potential point of confusion is there are actually several things which commonly go by the name “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The first is the name of the volume itself, the second is the essay by the same name within that volume (which is, of course, more widely read than the entire volume). The third is what I’ll call the extended essay which has three major sections (An Absurd Reasoning, The Absurd Man, and Absurd Creation) before culminating with its concluding essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” These four sections, if you will, comprise the bulk of the book. Tacked onto the end, in an appendix, is an essay on absurd in the works of Kafka. At the beginning, there’s a preface which was added in 1955 and a brief intro to the extended essay which is listed in the table of contents, confusingly, as “The Myth of Sisyphus.” In practice, though, the only division that frequently matters is that of the essay itself and the book itself.
My main point in laying all that out is to say that the essays leading up to the title essay lay the groundwork for it. And, while it can be enjoyed on its own–and is the main attraction–it packs more of a punch if you work your way up to it as Camus intended when he composed it in 1940 and first published it in 1942.
Camus, for the record, never counted himself an Existentialist, though he’s perhaps the second most famous of them, after Sartre. Some of his thinking aligns pretty tightly with Existentialism, but he preferred to think of himself as an absurdist, and this book is where he works out his idea of “the absurd” and what it means to be an absurd man, philosopher, and creator. He comes at that idea from a lot of different angles, but a major focus is his emphasis on individuals and their daily lives with a lack of appeal to the future here on earth or in any sort of afterlife. The bounds of an individual life are, for Camus, what matters. So, perhaps the fact that I’m here, in 2026, raking over the coals of his thought, can also be counted as absurd.
It’s easy to pull quotes from TMOS, but it’s a difficult book to summarize. Camus, in his brief but very useful preface, tries to help out: “The fundamental subject of ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ is this: it legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning; therefore it is legitimate to meet the problem of suicide face to face.” Not to keep you waiting, he answers his own question in the next sentence “The answer, underlying an appearing through the paradoxes which cover it, is this: even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate.” He also situates the book as an answer to nihilism: “this book declares that even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism.” He puts a more lyrical point on that in the concluding sentence of the preface: “Although ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and create, in the very midst of the desert.”
I’d say all of that puts a nice spin on it, and serves as an important reminder of Camus’ intentions, because they can be easy to miss in the bulk of the book (i.e., outside of the title essay itself) where Camus defines the absurd mostly in negative terms as living “without appeal,” and without “nostalgia.” It’s also a fitting preface to the striking first sentence of the first essay–and the first of what I’m calling “the extended essay–“An Absurd Reasoning,” which is subtitled “Absurdity and Suicide.” There, Camus jumps in with both feet, declaring “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
That packs a punch, right? The argument might get murky in other places, but Camus is, as you can see, quite capable of clarity when it suits him. Imagine–in the midst of WWII–how hard a punch that sentence would have landed before Camus decided to add on his preface in 1955.
While he doesn’t come back to the framing question as often as that opening salvo might lead you to expect, if I could sum it up briefly, I’d say Camus doesn’t want you to kill yourself. What he wants, if you’re the sort of person who takes the things that concern him seriously, is for you to live intentionally (he uses the term “consciously”) even while realizing that none of this really matters outside the bounds of your own life: “For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.” Alone in a meaningless universe, thoughtful people find themselves in an alienated position: “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” The rest of the book–and especially the title essay–is an exploration of what living consciously might mean, and why life is worth living in the midst of meaninglessness.
Note
This post was originally published as part of my Goodreads review of the book. Any future elaborations will be made here.