Camus, Suicide and the Myth of the Sisyphus

We’re not done with this story yet. Sisyphus is all of us. Camus could only do what he was capable of with this story, but this story is bigger than he was.

Nobody has told the truth of why Christ sacrificed himself for the debt of all sin. Original sin? Adam and Eve? No, that’s a false substitution, a convenient distraction.

Christ’s sacrifice was so Sisyphus could be forgiven, allowing Sisyphus the ability to look deeper at his guilt. Meaning, purpose, salvation — they are found hidden on the other side of Sisyphus’ guilt.

Sisyphus isn’t being punished for playing a trick on God. Again, a convenient false narrative for both God and Sisyphus.

Sisyphus must first accept that his forgiveness is absolute so he might be willing to look closer at the truth. Unfortunately, most people instead choose the lie of imagining Sisyphus happy, which Camus himself swallowed.

There are certain truths which are greater than God himself, which must be honored even in opposition to the will of God. Doing so makes the truth seeker greater than God, or rather restores God to his rightful place.

When you desire meaning, part of that desire is based in the intuition that meaning has the potential to save you. That’s because meaning is associated with the soul. The soul matters, so if you have a soul, then as someone who shares life and a body with the soul, you instantly matter as well. Further, the soul has entitlements.

At the same time, sharing life with a soul comes with tremendous responsibility. If you have a soul now, then you also had a soul before when you didn’t desire a higher meaning other than living in this world. It means you made the choice to be of this fallen world not only for yourself, but also for your soul, which doesn’t belong in a fallen world. Your choice to deny your soul in the past separated a soul from heaven and from God, which is like separating a young child from its mother.

The wages of this sin is death. You may believe the idea you’ve committed a grave sin is nonsense, but your soul knows it’s true. Which is why your soul stays hidden in darkness from you. Since you both share a life together, if you are guilty of a deadly sin, then so is your soul.

Putting this together, meaning is associated with guilt and is resisted both by you and your soul. Still, part of you desires it and believes in its potential despite the danger. Naturally, you’ll try to find worldly meaning while still denying your soul, but this half measure won’t save you, won’t save Sisyphus.

As long as your soul is afraid, it will fight you to stay hidden from you. It will fight you to keep your deepest guilt hidden from you. Christ offers absolute forgiveness not only for you, but for your soul as well. Your soul wants nothing to do with it, so you want nothing to do with it.

Like Sisyphus, humanity is imprisoned within an absurd story through an unspoken of conspiracy with the soul against itself. We are supposed to overlook this and imagine Sisyphus happy. This is how Camus wanted the story to be. However, part of Camus wanted us to redeem him.

If you take a bunch of meaningless symbols and put them in a row, and call one of them zero, you get numbers, prime numbers, number theory, nuclear weapons, etc. Just by doing that one simple and basic thing, it all follows logically. That isn't absurd, it's profound.

Like "Hell is empty and all the devils are here" (Shakespeare). The characterization as "the futile search for meaning" is bullshyt and loads in a negative answer ("futile") to the open question. It's like saying the futile search extraterrestrial life, or the futile search for the wreck of the Titanic.

If there is no Zeus then Sisyphus outsmarted them all and now amuses himself by winning the World Series of Poker every year - which he finds quite meaningful.

PairTheBoard

If there is no God, there is no soul, no promise, and no entitlement.

There is no reason to have hope for / heavily invest in the future and little reason to believe human life and consciousness will exist much longer. I don’t see much value in outsmarting people in this scenario; it’s all vanity.

The effort required to deny this and imagine Sisyphus happy is the arduous task of pushing the boulder uphill.

Sisyphus would be proud of this cleverness. Attach the words "soul", "promise", and "entitlement", to the word "God" and then draw the conclusion below. Meanwhile Sisyphus and Hera are cuckolding Zeus.

As soon as you start talking about "God" you're Babel-ing about something else.

PairTheBoard

Sisyphus and God are engaging each other through the Greek gods.

Supernatural beings are useful for the cave dwellers of the credulous! Including their silly mythologies.

I worship Satan. God approves of my choice.

Satan believes in God. He has no choice.

There is no 'futile search for meaning'. Meaning is created. We all create meaning with every one of our thoughts and actions. This is not an unintelligible world, it's very intelligible, even if neither entirely nor easily. Absurd I agree with, but that's just a product of higher orders of numbers of possible meanings flying around human society, disorienting us. That's a feature of modern human society. None of this implies suicide. For me it implies not taking too much too seriously, and trying to make life fun and happy. But for now, neither you nor Camus nor Sartre nor Nietzsche get to tell me that life is meaningless: there is meaning everywhere, in everything. All we do is create and process meaning. As if the absence of some conceptual ultimate ledger of meaning is proof that meaning does not exist.

Life is hilarious, sometimes absurd, often painful, never meaningless. A death can be meaningless, but life - conscious life - is inherently meaningful, and death is the only thing that can strip that life of meaning.

The desire for meaning Camus is talking about is one ontological level deeper than the meaning you are describing. It’s more existential.

I haven't read Sarte, but to the extent that I understand this quote, he couldn't have gotten it more backwards.

I once read that Simone de Beauvoir asked Camus to sleep with her but he declined. Sarte was bothered by this. Not because she wanted to sleep with Camus but because Camus declined the offer.

You'll have to be more specific, because the meaning I'm talking about, i.e. that which is created by humans, covers what you're saying, as far as I understand it. You're saying that we have an absence of meaning for 'what we're supposed to do here'. Meaning has been created before we arrive, we create meaning that combines with that pre-created meaning, leading to 'what we're supposed to do'. I don't think it matters how existential a view on meaning you take. The answer is still the same. Meaning is created by consciousness. Life is full of meaning. It might also be absurd, and the meaning not always obvious or clear, but we don't just go 'I can't solve this equation therefore it has no solutions'.

It’s not a matter of understanding but of trust. I won’t reach down for a deeper desire for meaning, undermining my existing meanings, unless I have faith that this deeper desire can be fulfilled. Otherwise, it’s just unnecessary self sabotage.

Reaching down to this deeper ontological level will deaden your existing meanings, bringing you into nihilism. Which is where Camus was writing from.

I've only read some of the The Stranger but have been wanting to delve into Camus' work for a while out of curiosity. I don't trust secondary sources when it comes to philosophy, especially after my experience with another well-known existentialist. After hours of lectures and reading about his ideas, I finally read is work and concluded that most people had no clue what they were talking about. Discussions around Camus give me the same impression for reasons that are difficult to articulate, but it seems like his body of work needs to be taken in as a whole, especially the novels.

The letter he wrote to Simone Weil's mother is alone reason enough to question some of the conventional interpretations of his philosophy:

"Simone Weil, I maintain this now, is the only great spirit of our times and I hope that those who realize this have enough modesty to not try to appropriate her overwhelming witnessing. For my part, I would be satisfied if one could say that in my place, with the humble means at my disposal, I served to make known and disseminate her work whose full impact we have yet to measure." –Albert Camus

I should’ve been more specific.

I meant.. Which is where Camus was writing from when he was writing about the absurd and suicidal contemplation. I don’t care about any of his other work.

I'm really struggling to understand what you're saying. I don't know whether I need you to simplify or expand on these ideas because I can't even imagine the bones of them let alone can picture what the meat on them would look like.

Maybe I'd like you to put this into logical statements that follow one from another, or something.

I'm not even clear on what the direction you're taking Camus in. What's the question? What does it mean to be happy? What does it mean to live a good life? The problem I have is that the existence of these questions disproves any sort of nihilism or claim that there is no such thing as meaning. To ask these questions after having posited that life is meaningless (whether because no god or otherwise) is like kettle logic.

The claim is not that there is no meaning; it’s that the external world cannot offer meaning which can fulfill the desire for meaning.

Unless, of course, you suppress and deny the deeper desire for meaning. This works in the short term but there is a cost with interest over the longer term.

Creating meaning only becomes necessary after the external world has begun to lose its meaning.

Still, created meaning is built on sand.

The external world does offer meaning, in the form of other people and our interactions with the world that already exists.

There is no need to suppress or deny any deeper desire for meaning. The meaning we need is supplied to us by the external world and others, and by ourselves. We see this in the existence of god and religion and cave paintings and science. They are all explicit forms of grappling with the meaning of the world, making connections, improving our odds of survival, giving us the tools to think deeper and work together in this endless industry of meaning-creation and consumption. One cannot consume meaning without also creating it, if you will.

I don't like to invoke Nietzsche often but his quote 'he who has a why can bear any how' doesn't work for me as a motivational screed as much as it does to point at this intimate connection between meaning creation and consumption.

No. Meaning cannot exist objectively; it must be created. There can be no objective ledger of meaning (perhaps, other than, say, the physical laws of the universe); none will be provided to us, none can be. It is only from our own brains that meaning in our context can exist; we create all of the meaning that we interact with. Our every thought and behaviour and sensation both constitutes and creates meaning. The external world itself never had any meaning until consciousness arose. That is what meaning means - it makes no sense to discuss it absent its precursor: consciousness, i.e. it is best understood as an emergent property of consciousness. It may be built on sand, but only in a universe where that's the only stable structure. It will, of course, all go away, but meaning does not need to be timeless to be said still to exist.

This whole nihilist side quest seems to me a mildly atavistic response to the apparent hole created by the rejection of theism. Even for Camus' time. Everywhere you look there is meaning, there is chaos, there is the absurd and the sublime and banal. Everything we can put into words or thought (and more: as in how Lacan distinguishes between the real and reality) is part of the infinite set of [meanings].

This problem only exists if you deny our capacity and need for meaning and what's in front of everyone's eyes all the time. It goes away very easily, with, as far as I can tell, no side effects, only a greater sense of 'oh, at least that's one existential problem I don't have to deal with anymore'. Thus this, and many other related 'philosophy' problems like free will, god and simulation theory reveal themselves to be paper tigers, red herrings masquerading as killer sudokus that we just give up on because we can't be bothered or don't know how to think deeper on it than the first level.

You obviously have a big brain on you. The meaning I create is that I want to put my own big brain to good use. Action is good, but I hate the idea that I might, from a position of ignorance, choose the wrong action. So I retreat into books and learning and the material world and its history that contains all the meaning I need. I try to create a better world by understanding it better, and focussing on those philosophical questions that actually have material relevance to our world today - how we got here, and thus what we can do about it. I have taken great strides to understand the world better, and I am shocked at the state of it. I have skirted close to nihilism, let's say, multiple times over the last couple of years, but a better way to respond to the pain behind this gigantic meaning is to 'let it radicalise you'. I.E. not to allow it to depress me but to spur me on to greater heights of learning until I'm comfortable I'm actually doing the right thing, and then we take action hard.

There. I created that meaning all for myself. Similar meaning may have existed amongst others, but this is my own. It is my why. I do not question where it came from, nor whether it would exist without me. These are irrelevant to the problem at hand, the material problems that I and the world face.

Man, I love weed.

Can I ask how you can allow yourself to make the claim that meaning can’t be discovered?

Can you really say its allegiance to the truth which is motivating that claim?

You must realize that you would need to have all of reality mapped out to make such a claim.