Sisyphus and his rock
On the axis: The meaning of life · an existence
When our thirst for meaning meets the silence of the world, where can an answer lie: in an end that surpasses us, in the meaning we give ourselves, or in the lucid revolt of a life with no answer?
This problem is brought out by the thought experiment Sisyphus and his rock:
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain, from which the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought, with some reason, that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. Each day, the same effort; each evening, the stone at the bottom. Imagine this life of toil that leads nowhere and never ends: where is meaning to be found, if there is any at all?
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
Faced with this life of effort with no end and no result, where can meaning be found, or must we give up looking for one?
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Justification
Two terms are equally certain for Camus: the human mind demands unity and meaning, and the world stays silent before that demand. lodges in neither term but in their divorce, in the confrontation itself: it is therefore neither a property of the world nor a defect in man, but a relation that cannot be dissolved without suppressing one of its terms. So meaning is neither given in advance nor purely absent: no transcendent meaning fills the divorce, yet the man who holds it without fleeing forges values in the present, hence a share of constructed meaning.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) · The Rebel (1951)
Justification
No teleology presides over existence: being is first of all contingent, de trop (superfluous), without reason to be, as the nausea of the hero Roquentin reveals. Meaning is therefore neither given nor discovered but constructed through each person's choices and commitments, which invent their own values. A measure of absurdity remains, as the backdrop of this radical contingency, but it is not, as in , the last word.
Nausea (1938), the experience of contingency · Existentialism Is a Humanism (man invents his values)