Trevor's Reviews > The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is the question of whether it is better to have no hope at all, or to be constantly confronted with dashed hope. There are certainly parts of my life that I have structured so as to ensure that I have no hope at all – that is, that I live my life in such a way that it is impossible for certain things to ever happen, and those are things that otherwise I would desire intensely – and in large part that is because ‘dashed hope’ was proving far too much for me to really live with.

Now, that is part of the reason why I thought I would read this book. The myth of Sisyphus is surely one of the better examples of having to live constantly with dashed hope, and so I was hoping (all very ironic, when you think about it) that this book might provide some answers or guidance. This series of essays basically ends with Camus telling the story of the myth – which I found a bit unexpected, as I might have thought he would have started here. But in fact, this myth is sort of the punch line to the series of ideas he is discussing mostly related to suicide.

His main point is the assertion that life is fundamentally absurd. We generally don’t recognise this absurdity – life presents patterns and ways of being that we enact, rather than think about, and so one day follows another. It is only when we pause and think ‘what is the point?’ that the real absurdity of life becomes overwhelming. It is for this reason that Camus says that the only real question of philosophy is ‘why do I not commit suicide?’ – this does seem a rather predictable response to the ‘it is all meaningless anyway’ problem.

I think of this argument as being somewhat an argument with religion and so a sort of ‘first generation atheist’ problem. In the sense that religious people often say stuff like – ‘if life is so meaningless, why don’t you just kill yourself then?’ To which, I presume, the answer is, ‘five more minutes of stupid bloody questions like that and I might welcome it’. As an atheist who has never felt or even felt the need for eternal life, that level of ‘confronted meaningless of life’ has never really bothered me. The absurdity that Camus speaks of is, as he more or less admits himself, an abstract conception outside of the actual living of life. While we are living life, such absurdity is basically impossible to acknowledge – so, the answer, it seems, is just to get back to living life and shut up.

Anyway, you have a great big rock and your task is to push it to the top of the mountain. You never quite get it there. It always rolls back down to the bottom. And on the trip back down the mountain to start pushing the rock back up again, surely you must say to yourself – ‘god, no, not this shit again…’ Which is part of the reason why this is a ‘punishment’. Camus’s response is to say that Sisyphus has to approach his task with a happy heart, despite knowing it is pointless, absurd, meaningless. It is his only refuge from suicide.

Right. But, I’m not sure how well that would keep me from committing suicide, this sort of ‘whistle while you work’ idea. We are not told what reward Sisyphus has been promised if he were to get the rock to the top of the mountain. Presumably, Camus has decided that this is immaterial as Sisyphus would soon realise that was never going to happen. For this reason I find the myth of Tantalus more immediately confronting of the issues I actually want to grapple with. It is completely obvious what Tantalus desires – he is hungry and thirsty – and all around him there is food and drink. But he is never able to satisfy his hunger or thirst. He is surrounded by what he desires, and knows he has no hope of ever satisfying them. This is what I mean about the choice between no hope and dashed hope. For Tantalus, desire is all – but he constantly must live with his desires going unfulfilled, with his hopes being dashed. I don’t know that this is a sustainable way to live one’s life – when it becomes clear to me that my desires will be constantly dashed, that is one of the hardest things I can think of. I’ve worked in jobs as meaningless as Sisyphus’s, boredom I can cope with. Dashed desire is quite another matter. And so, I believe Tantalus is likely to seek to blind himself to his desires. I am not sure how successfully one is able to do this – desire and hope find ways to sneak in while we are unguarded, they find ways to tempt us, despite our will and our reason, but we are soon punished yet again for these hopes and desires in much the same way Tantalus was.

As I said, I had hoped Camus would have discussed these issues – the issues of dashed hope and how to actually live with them. For Camus, Sisyphus is the most proletarian of the myths – something noted previously by Marx and Engels in relation to the meaninglessness of work under capitalist alienation of labour. If Sisyphus is a myth illuminating the horrors of capitalist production – surely Tantalus is the myth that does so for capitalist consumption. We are drowning in desires that can never be satisfied, and are never meant to be satisfied. And yet, we seem to constantly choose thwarted desire over abandoned hope every time – despite our repeated experience, despite the pain of that experience. Perhaps it is because we simply could not live in Dante’s hell – where all hope is abandoned – and so any alternative is preferable?

If you do decide to read this, I recommend you notice when Camus talks about rocks – given what Sisyphus got up to in his day job, this talk of rocks is always something worth considering and worrying over, always worth noticing.