![]() Reading their essays, one’s first reaction is to cry out in protest, to try to separate them once and for all before their journalistic yoking is translated into the textbooks and they go down into history as immutably and ridiculously twinned as Wyatt and Surrey. Yet it is hard to think of two men temperamentally more different. There has been attached to both from the beginning the same chic aura: Existentialism and the philosophy of the absurd, equally and indistinguishably the latest from Paris for the readers of Partisan Review or Commentary or eventually Life itself. We can scarcely imagine them apart for they came into existence together for the American mind, a package deal and the chief cultural importation from postwar France. It is not merely a coincidence of publication dates which brings Sartre and Camus simultaneously to my desk. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn.The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus further argues that with the joyful acceptance of the struggle against defeat, the individual gains definition and identity. If, as for Sisyphus, suicide is not a possible response, the only alternative is to rebel by rejoicing in the act of rolling the boulder up the hill. According to Camus, the first step an individual must take is to accept the fact of this absurdity. Camus uses the Greek legend of Sisyphus, who is condemned by the gods for eternity to repeatedly roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again once he got it to the top, as a metaphor for the individual’s persistent struggle against the essential absurdity of life. Influenced by the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche, Camus argues that life is essentially meaningless, although humans continue to try to impose order on existence and to look for answers to unanswerable questions.
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