The Myth of Sisyphus : And Other Essays

Rating:
Summary: a must read for anyone who wants to understand Camus
Review: I agree with the reviewer below who points out that this collection, especially the title essay, is a great companion for reading The Stranger. My AP English students loved The Stranger, but they got a much clearer idea of what Camus' brand of existentialism was after reading this essay. It sounds like a bizarre concept, but Camus regarded Sisyphus as a hero because every single time he toiled to push the rock up the mountain, there is one brief moment when he reaches the top that he is CONSCIOUS of his task, and in this brief glance downwards, Camus feels that Sisyphus experiences a small degree of something close to hope. This realization defeats the gods who sentenced him because he finds consolation in his struggle. For Camus, it is the struggle that must occupy us. The difference between Sisyphus and a factory worker is that Sisyphus experiences the freedom to think and process what he doing. For Camus, this level of consciousness can free any of us from our everyday lives.

This collection is a must to get a better understanding of The Stranger and other Camus novels and ideas.

Rating:
Summary: A comfort in exile
Review: I am a from Bosnia, and I have been a refugee for almost 8 years, first in Germany, then in the States. The first book I read by Camus was L'Etranger, and the second L'exile et le royaume. Both of them were painful to me and even though I admired Camus literary skill, I thought I would never read another of his books. Le mythe de Sisyphe, which I had to read for a French class, changed my attitude. There are very few books, if any, that offered me such comfort - precisely because of the pain and the utter desolation emphasized in it. It always gives me the strength to go on - precisely because everything is futile, we have to live and to respect life.

Rating:
Summary: Camus' introduction to the absurd
Review: I have read this essay several times and I have to say that the ideas here can be dangerous.

If the ideas that have been written in this book i.e. the meaningless state of existence, its absurdity in the light of atheism and the point of it all have not been raised independently by the reader, then the reader is likely to get caught in a dangerous maze.

The essay is beautifully written, the ideas are wonderfully interwoven and there is a sense that Camus is facing those important questions dead in the face. But aside from all that the greatest thing about Camus' essay is his directness. Every sentence in this book has some depth in it, there is not one superficial idea. The quotations leave the reader deep in thought and stay carved in the mind.

But as I mentioned and perhaps because of these reasons the book is dangerous. From the point of view of Camus, a man that looks at the world logically, he cannot help but come to the conclusion that it is absurd. Hence despair reigns, and then there is the necessary existential choice that the individual is faced with.

To me these questions are far more important than any others. When man knows that at the end of this great struggle he is faced with the nothingness, he wonders what is the point of it all. But is there? Camus answers positively that there is a point in living. By keeping the struggle alive and being absorbed in the finite condition that existence brings forth, in the mutation of consciousness an alternative set of values is introduced and everything is seen in a new light.

I know that many of the ideas here have already been covered by other thinkers in the past. Camus admits this and further mentions them in their struggle and ethics.

Camus has done a wonderful job, and this is a great introduction to his other novels, which illuminate the absurd and mans struggle.

Rating:
Summary: A confusing concept
Review: I read this book when I was around 15 years old and I was forced to read it. I know you can't really expect a 15 year old to understand one of Camus' works, but I had to.
In this essay, Albert Camus states his concept in a way that you have to reread it in order to understand it. I've read it twice and I still don't understand it.
Basically, it's about the philosophy is life worth living? Camus says that life is but it has to do a lot about the "absurd world". I don't really undertand, so I recommednd that you dont read this unless youre REALLY interested in philosophy or youre more understanding of the concept.

Rating:
Summary: An indifferent, stammering god.
Review: In this book, Albert Camus speaks to us with much understanding and clarity about the unconscious cause and the rational basis of suicide, and the aspects of belief and atheism. I would say that how he justifies, or by which manner he justifies his atheism, is somewhat clearer or more "decent" (forgive the expression) than that of Nietzsche, Sartre or even Freud.

Here he lists down the different responses on the absurdity of existence, citing that of Kierkegaard and Kafka, among others, and thereafter he inserts his obvervations on their "leaping" acquiesence. In the appendix of the book, Camus blasted the "existentials" with eloquence: "They embrace the God that consumes them." After you read the book, and despite of its many cryptic epigrams, you will carry inside you the clarity of the author's honest reasoning.

And the accompanying essays? "Summer in Algiers" is one of the most beautiful writings by any man that I have ever read. Here is the voice of an indifferent, stammering god. "A hopelessly poignant thing," Nabokov would say.

The other essays in this collection are in same manner, lyrical, and are an essential part of the book as a whole.





Rating:
Summary: Excellent!!!
Review: In this series of essays Camus, the giant of literature, confronts the most vexing question of our times. In a world stripped away from the illusions of religion, where man must face life as it is without the obscuring veil of fantasies, is life worth living? Camus combining a poetic literary style and exceptional philosophic genius shows that in fact life has no meaning. But far from a reason for despair, this realization "restores the majesty to life". For Camus one evades life when one hides behinds religious dogma or in the midst of some untenable philosophical system, for reason can bring us no closer to the truth than blind faith. We must, for Camus, accept that we can find no truth, and live life as it is; a life without answers, without meaning, without purpose. Other books I liked were Paul Omeziri's Descent into Illusions and Heiddeger's Being and Time.

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful and compelling work--an invitation to discomfort
Review: It is interesting to note that, in spite of the gorgeous way in which Camus describes the joy that is the physical, immanent world, what Camus insists of the reader is no more than a challenge to what, for many people, are core notions about sadi world and its worth (or lack thereof). This book, when read closely, clears up many misconceptions held about existentialist or "absurd" thought, namely that, from an exceedingly nihilistic standpoint, the world and, by extension, life is utterly meaningless and altogether a futile endeavor devoid of hope. What Camus argues for is, contrary to uninformed assumptions, the beauty and joy inherent in the struggle of life (particularly against the notion of some ultimate/transcendent meaning that is applicable to all, and, perhaps more so, some sort of "next life" that ultimately bestows meaning on "this" life). In spite of Camus arguments, which are beautiful and compelling, I find his conflicting points regarding the inherent joy and meaning within life and the utter, ultimate hopelessness and futility which stems from its finite nature difficult to balance. Camus would, however, argue that this is as it should be, and that this contradiction is precisely what he talks about throughout the primary essay--the "absurd" (the divergence between the true and the expected/assumed/presumed) Though much of what Camus argues for is difficult and, at times, unpleasant to digest (considering their full assault on many preconcieved notions operating within the West/Christendom), I cannot help but admit that they are true. It is this criterion, whether or not something is evidently true, which serves as the impetus for his analysis; one cannot help but admire the ruthless inquisitiveness and honesty with which he asks and answers such questions of himself and of us. Strongly recommended. Camus, in addition to his evident passion for man and for life, writes gorgeous, aphoristic prose--which, I feel, is the best (or at least most pleasant) way for a philosopher to write.

Rating:
Summary: Title
Review: It is to my great misfortune that, as I am only twelve, I lack the ability to really appreciate the sheer beauty with which Camus writes. While intellectually stimulating, the true joy to be found in this work lies in Camus' prose. Unlike most philosopher/novelists, Camus' writing is not muddied and heavy, but rather it is light and clear and conducts the reader over the page rather than dragging him. Camus' style is an expression of his thought and his philosophy: it is pure and exuberant and wonderful. He proposes a life worth living despite all, and because of the precision, clarity, and beauty of his prose we can see this for the truly wonderful and simple thing it is. From the prose of the Myth of Sisyphus I received the same feeling as that I took from the material of The First Man; it is difficult to describe, perhaps, though, it is best described as clarity and strenght, as a polish which does not remove texture, which does not scour but rather elicits that which was already there. When I think of Camus writing Sisyphus, I cannot help but be reminded of a line by Cummings: nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands. Camus does not create the objects of his prose, but he renders each with such clarity that he seems almost like a child, adrift in his own universe, with everything to discover.

Rating:
Summary: anti-human
Review: It seems to me that one of the central tragedies of the 20th Century is the failure of faith that assailed good men like Albert Camus. It is tragic in the sense that it made their own lives miserable, but also in that someone like Camus used his genius to propound a philosophy that is enormously dangerous in the hands of men who are, unfortunately, not as decent as the author. The danger, as Dostoevsky said in The Brothers Karamazov, is that: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Try as he might, and I believe that his career was essentially one long attempt to do so, Camus was never able to disprove this dictum.

Camus begins his essay by stating the proposition that:

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.

This indeed is the essence of Existentialism when turned inward upon the self; if there is no point nor purpose to our existence, then why should we continue? Now if it should turn out that there is no good answer to this question, there's not much danger to the rest of us, existentialists can all just kill themselves. But there's a more insidious corollary to this question, one that arises when you turn Existentialism outward upon others : if human life is purposeless, isn't it also valueless? And if human lives have no value then what reasonable basis is there for morality? Why should we refrain from killing each other? Camus unceasingly sought to answer these questions, but, given existential assumptions, his answers are necessarily feeble and therein lies the danger. A philosophy that relies on the inherent goodness of man's nature, and fails to posit absolute laws of behavior, is completely inadequate. And the absolute, by it's very nature, assumes something--some being, some power, some law--external to man. If man is the measure of himself, then everything is relative and anything goes.

Existentialism though, does not merely require that it's adherents deny the possibility of the divine, it also requires them to deny reality, by failing to acknowledge human progress. The famous eponymous metaphor that Camus uses to explain existence is the myth of Sisyphus. Like his better known compatriots Atlas and Prometheus, Sisyphus challenged the gods of Greek mythology and for his temerity was sentenced to push a huge boulder up a hill every day and every day as he reached the top, it would roll back down. Camus draws a parallel here to the human condition, that we, like Sisyphus, toil away at senseless and ultimately futile tasks. But to believe that this is true, one must willfully ignore the enormous strides that we have made as a species in the realms of science, medicine, and social justice. Though our lives may seem at times to be as difficult and unproductive as Camus maintains, at the end of each day we've moved that boulder a little further, and though some slippage does occur, even the most pessimistic among us would have to concede that it's pretty far up the hill at this point and shows virtually no likelihood of ever rolling back to the bottom. In fact, it even seems possible that the summit is in sight.

It may be that Camus was simply a victim of time and place; being French and living through two World Wars would be enough to whip the optimism out of most anybody. It's probably hard to be too upbeat when you spend all your time with one ear cocked, listening for the roar of German guns coming to pummel your nation into submission, again. We, on the other hand, certainly live in a time when it is easy to be optimistic--everything from the cosmos to the genetic code seems to be yielding to our inquiries these days. But it is important not to let Camus off the hook quite that easily. Like Orwell, he should be remembered as a man of great moral courage, character and intellectual honesty, one of the key figures (post Darwin, post Freud, post Nietszche) in trying to preserve ethical standards of conduct for Man in the absence of God. But it should also be recalled that had his philosophy prevailed, enormous harm would have resulted. For the ultimate, inevitable result of his philosophy is to destroy the foundation upon which moral standards must be built. The Myth of Sisyphus is an admirable attempt to rebuild those foundations, but it's real significance lies in it's very failure to do so. Existentialism, which starts out by denying God, ends by denying Man, and is, therefore, anti-human.

GRADE: B-

Rating:
Summary: If not this, then what?
Review: It would be a shame for this book to not have a 5-star rating. This should be the instruction manual of life given to every person who has ever wondered, "what for?" Read this book, and remember that one can take even the most absurd and seemingly cruel punishment the gods can dish out and turn it into an inspiration. It will help to know a little about Camus' life, and his times, before reading these essays, but that should in no way take anything away from this one. The Stranger is probably his most accessible work, and The Plague was actually made into a movie. The Exile and The Kingdom is also fairly accessible, and all of these works as a whole should give a pretty good idea of Camus' philosophy, which was not nearly as bleak as sometimes has been thought.