1/10/2024 0 Comments One must imagine sisyphus happy![]() By claiming that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”, Camus makes the point that all individuals must act against this meaninglessness of life by rejecting suicide (which was previously assumed to be the only way to get rid of an existential angst). In this way, Sisyphus finds genuine happiness because he has accepted his fate. In spite of being consciously aware of the fact that rolling the boulder serves no ultimate purpose, he rolls it anyway. In other words, Sisyphus purposefully attempts to ascribe meaning to life through rebelling against suicide. Through the act of rolling the boulder up the hill repeatedly, Sisyphus acts in defiance to the gods and against his absurd, purposeless existence. As Camus mentions in his Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus 1942), Sisyphus’s existence is tragic and purposeless, yet he desires purpose. Thus he was condemned to eternal effort and futility, a paradigm of the absurd. Everything that is indomitable and passionate in a human heart quickens them, on the contrary, with its own life.”Ĭamus found a model for this idea in the ancient story of Sisyphus, a Greek king condemned daily to roll a large boulder up a steep hill only to have it slip from his grasp as he reached the summit and roll back to the bottom of the hill. Thus he wrote, “Consciousness and revolt, these rejections are the contrary of renunciation. Camus called for rebellion against death, against renunciation, and against the passive surrender to the inevitable. ![]() Camus and other existentialists were of the belief that ultimately death comes to every person and while it is absurd to value life, it is possible, nevertheless, to embrace life in all its absurdity. Camus modifies this thought and posits the idea that in order to exist, one must constantly rebel against the absurdity of life and against the knowledge that one is born without any predefined meaning or purpose in life. The abovementioned quote by Albert Camus, from his book L’Homme Révolté ( The Rebel 1951), is a modernist existential take on René Descartes’s philosophy of cogito ergo sum – “I think therefore I exist” – which implies that it is only through doubting and contemplating on the mind’s perceptions that one gets an affirmation of one’s consciousness or existence.
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