The Myth of Sisyphus
The Teaching
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Commentary
Camus opened The Myth of Sisyphus with one of the most direct sentences any philosopher has written: there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. The book is his answer to that question, written in occupied France in 1942 by a man who refused both the consolation of religion and the resignation of despair.
The absurd, in Camus's vocabulary, is not the universe being meaningless. It is the gap between the human need for meaning and the universe's refusal to supply it on demand. The honest response to this gap, he argued, is neither suicide nor faith but rebellion: the full embrace of the human condition, lived completely and without illusion. Sisyphus, condemned to roll the boulder up the hill forever and watch it roll back down, is the figure of the human condition itself. The choice that remains is what attitude to take inside the situation. Camus's answer is that the struggle itself is enough.
This is the secular tradition's most honest response to meaninglessness, and it points toward the same ground the contemplative traditions point at, arrived at through the absence of mythology rather than its presence. The Buddhist who has seen through the illusion of permanence and the Stoic who has internalized amor fati and Sisyphus at the bottom of the mountain reaching again for the rock are doing something structurally similar. Each has refused the false comforts. Each has chosen full presence to what is. The aperture is open. Camus did not call it that. But he was looking at the same thing.