Why must we imagine Sisyphus happy? Camus explained

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus takes the Greek story of a man condemned to push a rock up a mountain forever and calls him happy. His reasoning is that Sisyphus knows exactly how hopeless the task is, and carries on anyway, without hope and without self-deception. For Camus this shows how a life without ultimate meaning can still be worth living. The essay's last line is "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

The question behind the essay

Camus opens the book with a blunt claim. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes him, there is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide: deciding whether life is worth living answers the fundamental question of philosophy, and all other questions follow from it.

The entry reads this as a question about how to live, more than a theoretical puzzle. Camus asks it because he sees life as absurd. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines the absurd as a tension between two things: the human demand for order and meaning, and an essentially meaningless and indifferent universe. If this question is close to home for you, it is worth talking to someone you trust, or to a local helpline, rather than reading philosophy alone.

Three ways to answer the absurd

The Internet Encyclopedia sets out the options Camus considered. The first is to end one's life, which he rejects. The second is what he calls philosophical suicide, a leap of faith to a world of meaning beyond the absurd. The entry says he rejects it as evasive, because it removes the troubling world and replaces it with a more agreeable one. The third, in his view the only authentic one, is to accept the absurd, or better to embrace it, and keep living. Life, he says, can be lived all the better if it has no meaning.

Why Sisyphus

Camus fills out this third option with a series of absurd figures and ends with Sisyphus. The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that Sisyphus fully incarnates life's absurdity, its "futility and hopeless labor". According to Camus, his scorn of the gods, his hatred of death and his passion for life won him his penalty.

The key moment is when the rock rolls back down and Sisyphus walks after it. That, in Camus's words quoted in the entry, is the hour of consciousness. At those moments he is superior to his fate and stronger than his rock. The reason is that he knows the whole extent of his condition, and a sense of tragedy "crowns his victory."

His fate, the entry quotes, belongs to him, and his rock is his thing. Facing it without hope and without resignation, Sisyphus takes ownership of what was imposed on him. The entry sums up Camus's answer as full consciousness, no false solutions such as religion, refusal to submit, and carrying on with vitality and intensity.

What the happiness is, and is not

The word happy needs care. In the story the rock still rolls down, and nothing about Sisyphus's situation improves. The entry points to "the struggle itself toward the heights", which he says is enough to fill a man's heart. The happiness comes from clarity and from refusing to look away, not from any improvement in his situation.

Doubts about the answer

Not everyone is convinced. The Internet Encyclopedia reports that some critics, Sartre among them, have suggested that there may be deep logical inconsistencies in Camus's philosophy. If the world has no meaning, they ask, what grounds his claim that human life has dignity? It quotes Camus himself writing that the world has no supernatural meaning, but that something in it has meaning, namely man. The entry describes such lines as having more rhetorical force than logical force.

Camus also denied that he was an existentialist, even though, the Stanford entry says, his essay belongs squarely in that tradition.

Where it sits on our map

Absurdism holds that the clash between our search for meaning and a silent world cannot be resolved, and that we should live in it with open eyes. You can read more on the page for Camus, on absurdism and on absurdism versus nihilism, and look at the questions the absurd clash and does meaning still matter.

If you would like to see where your own answers place you on the map, you can take the walk.