eli5: how does sisyphus represent absurdism?
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What is more absurd (lacking in meaning) than pushing a rock up a mountain for it to fall again and for Sisyphus to have to go back down to push it up again and to do this ad infinitum?
Let’s start with what absurdism *is* and where it comes from.
Absurdism is closely related to existentialism (which is the philosophy Camus, who wrote *The Myth of Sisyphus* – I’m guessing this is what you’re reading – promoted) and to some extent to nihilism.
The idea is that all of these approaches is that the Universe doesn’t have a “point”, as opposed to the beliefs of many past philosophies, which taught that there is some sort of goal or structure that the Universe imposes on humanity. Christianity, for example, says the purpose is worship of and communion with the Christian god. Greek philosophy focused on personal excellence, particularly as taught by Aristotle’s notions of *eudaimonia*, and taught that this is in some sense what humans are “supposed” to do. Buddhism teaches some degree of cosmology where humans are trapped by our desire to control or steer the Universe, and that our natural goal is to rise above that need to steer it. And so on.
During the 1800s and early 1900s – what we might call the Modern era – these beliefs were challenged by rising scientific knowledge, which taught us that the Universe operates according to physical laws that have nothing to do with moral ones. It also taught us that we are “just” animals, not fundamentally different from others, and that the Universe’s workings often differ in many ways from the way humans naturally think. Existentialism, absurdism, nihilism, romanticism, and a lot of other movements arose as reactions to this challenge to the way people at the time thought.
Absurdism teaches that the Universe simply doesn’t conform to human logic, that randomness, chaos, forces beyond human control, or structures that don’t align with the way humans think are much more important than “logic” as humans understand it. As an example: World War I, and therefore World War II, and therefore arguably the Cold War, and therefore arguably many aspects of modern history, depend fundamentally on the fact that Franz Ferdinand’s driver took a wrong turn and happened to end up across the street from Ferdinand’s would-be assassin, who walked across the street and promptly shot him. That is *ridiculous*. No one could have ever predicted that, or any of its billions of consequences, and in that sense, history is “absurd” (or at least, an absurdist would say that it is).
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So, back to Sisyphus.
Sisyphus, as you probably know, was a character from Greek myth. Like many such characters, he pissed off the gods at some point, and his punishment in the underworld was to push a boulder up a hill. But every time it gets to the top, it rolls back down to the bottom of the hill. Sisyphus can never complete his task, and accomplishes nothing by trying, but has to keep trying anyway.
A pessimistic absurdist might say well, yeah, that’s how the whole world works. We’re always trying to push a boulder up a hill, in the sense that we’re trying to change the world in particular ways, but we can never actually *do* that because the world never played by our rules in the first place.
A more optimistic absurdist like Camus would say yeah, that’s how the world works, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The point isn’t to actually *accomplish* a change in the world, it’s to engage with the struggle of trying to. The fundamental nature of absurdism is that the world doesn’t really give a damn what you try to impose on it, or as Camus puts it:
> At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
…but Camus doesn’t think this necessarily implies that you have to be miserable:
> 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.
The idea here is that Sisyphus’ punishment is only a punishment if he thinks of it as a thing he’s trying to *accomplish*, rather than a thing he’s trying to *do*. Sisyphus here is used as a metaphor for the lesson that the doing, the struggle, the engagement with one’s own goals and feelings and desires is *more important* (to Camus) than what comes of it.
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