The 20th century presented the modern individual with an exceptional predicament. In a world full of violence, chaos and destruction hitherto unknown, we were forced to confront the human condition, our own mortality and the anxiety-provoking sentiment that our world holds no inherent meaning. Against the background of the Second World War, the horrors of the concentration camps and the threat of nuclear annihilation, an intellectual movement emerged in France known as existentialism.

 

Existentialism encompasses a wide range of ideas, perspectives and underlying philosophical concepts. It emphasises personal responsibility, freedom and the search for meaning in life. It proposes fundamental questions about human existence, including “how can we live authentically in a world that holds no inherent meaning?”

 

The French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir explicitly identified as existentialists. In particular, it is commonly held that Sartre contributed the famous existentialist idea that existence precedes essence. Sartre argues that human beings do not come ready-made with a pre-given essence. Instead, he thinks that we are continuously faced with the task of living, making and creating ourselves through our choices and actions. With this comes the implication that we are self-conscious and responsible beings. Because we are tasked with creating ourselves, we become the author of our lives; we are thus responsible for who we are and how we engage with the world and others around us.

 

While existentialism took off as a formal movement in the mid-20th century thanks to the popular works of French philosophers like Sartre and Beauvoir, its origins are often traced back to Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. It is here, in the late 19th century, that philosophers began to question traditional sources of meaning. In particular, Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the ‘death of God’ had enormous implications on the existentialist movement. The rise of nihilism saw an increasingly scientific worldview take off in the West, which led to the questioning of traditional, transcendent moral frameworks. If meaning was no longer guaranteed or ‘God-given’, human beings would have to struggle with new, definitively existentialist experiences: alienation, anxiety, meaninglessness and absurdity.

 

While he sought to distance himself from the existentialists of his time, the Algerian-born French writer Albert Camus is often grouped in the existentialist camp. Most famous for his work on the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus proposes an interesting and thought-provoking response to these existential experiences faced by the modern individual.

 

The Myth of Sisyphus explores what Camus believed was the most important philosophical question: If the human condition is fundamentally fragmented and reality has lost intrinsic significance, is suicide a viable response?

 

In the absence of external values, Camus (50) describes the absurd as ‘that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together’. To clarify, the absurd is not about the world being meaningless; but our confrontation with a world which eludes full explanation and our desire for such meaning. The absurd arises when our social and cultural frameworks fail. For Camus, ‘at any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man [sic] in the face’.

 

Perhaps the most illuminating description of this experience of the absurd is outlined in the following passage:

 

It happens that the stage-sets collapse. Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

 

Having described the absurd as a condition that imposes itself on human experience, Camus outlines three possible responses to this condition: suicide, philosophical suicide and rebellion.

 

First, Camus makes it clear from the very beginning that ‘even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate’. Throughout the section titled ‘an absurd reasoning’, he explores the topic of suicide by reasoning that ‘living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully’. Camus argues that an honest response to the absurd is maintaining ‘a constant confrontation between man [sic] and his [sic] own obscurity’. Thus, Camus argues that suicide is not a justified response to the absurd because it is ‘acceptance at its extreme’.

 

The second response to absurdity is what Camus calls ‘philosophical suicide’, which involves facing a chaotic and disordered universe, and asserting that it is meaningful anyway. Kierkegaard is one philosopher who adopts this position when he asserts that meaning can be attained through a ‘leap’ beyond human rational thought toward Christian belief. This position entails a form of philosophical suicide because it involves an assertion of meaning that is at odds with the belief that reality is fundamentally devoid of meaning.

 

Finally, Camus thinks that the ideal response to absurdity is rebellion, which ‘sums itself up as the lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert’. In doing so, a human being realises that ‘even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism’. The ancient Greek figure of Sisyphus embodies Camus’ ideal response to absurdity. After defying the gods, Sisyphus’ punishment to eternally roll a large rock up a hill, only for the rock to become too heavy and always roll back to its place at the bottom, is the definition of an absurd existence. Camus’ point is that Sisyphus honestly accepts his situation and continues to roll his rock day after day. Therefore, he encourages us to ‘imagine Sisyphus happy’.

 

As an intellectual movement, existentialism has inspired philosophers to reflect on how human beings are to orient themselves in the modern era. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus shows us that even though the world is inherently indifferent, chaotic and disordered, it is still possible for human beings to proceed beyond nihilism.