Protocol #1: Knowledge, Paradox, and Absurdity in The Myth of Sisyphus

The first chapter of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus examines ideas of absurdism and suicide. Camus begins by asserting that suicide is the only “truly serious philosophical problem,” as people die because they see no meaning in life, or, ironically, they die for the things that give life meaning: their families, their virtues, and their beliefs (3). Suicide, therefore, is far more urgent than ontological problems, like whether the planets revolve around the sun or whether the universe can be broken down into individual atoms. The primary reason for suicide, according to Camus, is that people don’t understand life: they recognize the absurdity of life — the “ridiculous character of the habit” and the “uselessness of suffering” (6). When faced with the absurd, the subject feels like an alien: the universe is “suddenly divested of illusions and lights,” as if a fragile glass screen of false understanding has broken into an “infinite number of shimmering fragments” (6, 18). Camus explains that “at any streetcorner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face” (10). However, the absurd is constant. It is a fundamental feature of life that must be reconciled.

The first paradox in The Myth of Sisyphus lies in the definition of the absurd itself. Camus describes the fundamental human “appetite for understanding” and longing for absolute truth — the unquietable desire to explain the world. When humans turn to reality to find meaning, they are met with the “unreasonable silence of the world” (28, 36). In order to reconcile this contradiction, humans may turn to science and reason, but scientific hypothesis “negates itself as soon as it asserts” meaning, and despite so many “pretentious centuries” of scientific discovery, humans have still failed to understand the world (20-21). In the “waterless deserts where thought reaches its confines,” humans resort to philosophical suicide, submitting to the fantasy of a scientific order rather than accepting absurdity (9).

If rationalism results in philosophical suicide, then one would assume that the alternative must be irrational. However, Camus holds that phenomenology and religious thought, which “den[y] the transcendent power of reason,” are just as resistant to the absurd as rationalists (26). While rationalists claim that everything is clear, spiritualists hold that “nothing is clear, all is chaos,” and that we must rely on God to explain the absurd (27). This is also a philosophical suicide. Absurdity, therefore, rejects the dichotomy of rationality and irrationality altogether. Neither idea truly exists — they are just human inventions to categorize a ridiculous world. Absurdism is the observation of the ironic clash between the rational and the irrational. It is the understanding that both ideas are born from a search for meaning in a meaningless world, and it is the acceptance of the ridiculousness and absurdity of these anthropocentric mirages of truth.

To an absurd mind reason is useless and there is nothing beyond reason.”

Albert Camus

However, perhaps the deeper paradox in absurdist philosophy lies in its prescriptions. Camus asserts that a subject “can have peace only by refusing to know” the truth — by succumbing to ideas of the absurd (20). However, is embracing the absurd not a philosophical suicide in itself? Choosing to “accept [the] law” of absurdity is just another way to fill the abyss of meaninglessness and to cope with an absurd world (22). Reading philosophy is no different than reading scientific or religious texts to temporarily satisfy the lack that absurdity presents. As Camus himself later finds, “the absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to” (31).

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. New York, Penguin Random House, 1983.