A Philosophy Against Philosophy

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Albert Camus opened The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942 with a claim that startles on first reading: there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and it is whether life is worth living. Camus called the condition he was diagnosing the absurd, not a flaw in the world and not a flaw in the human mind, but the friction between the two, a mind that demands the world make sense set against a world that answers with silence. He considered and rejected two ways out. Suicide ends the confrontation by ending the person who feels it, which Camus treated as a kind of surrender. A leap into religious or philosophical faith ends it by inventing an answer the absurd itself has already ruled out, which he treated as a kind of cheating. What is left, on Camus's account, is to keep living inside the confrontation without either exit, which is why his essay closes on Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a mountain forever, and why Camus insists we must imagine him happy. The book was, by its own author's account, aimed squarely at the existentialist philosophers of his day, not written to join them.