Freedom, lightness and suffering in Camus' philosophy

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning ¹

Do you know the Greek mythology of Sisyphus? He was the founder and king of Ephyra, now known as Corinth. He was a cunning human being and loved to taunt the gods. Of course the gods could not let it slide and eventually were able to punish him in the Underworld. There he was forced to roll a huge boulder up a hill. However, when he would finally arrive close to the top, the boulder would roll downhill again. An endless useless struggle.

The myth inspired many philosophers, writers and artists to compare his punishment to the mundaneness of life. From seeing Sisyphus struggle as the constant rise and fall of the waves to the empty quest of power. Camus was one of them, however he looked at Sisyphus and turned him into a hero. Albert Camus in his book Le Mythe de Sisyphe saw the struggle of Sisyphus as a personification of the absurdity of life. This absurdity emerges through the constant struggle between our need for reason and the universe’s inability to be reasoned with. If that is the constant struggle, why should we live at all?

To be, or not to be; that is the question ²

It all sounds bleak, however it is far from hopeless. Camus concludes that in the end “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”.³ For Camus there is only one way to rebel against the absurdity of life, and that is to live it. By blissfully accepting the doomed fate of futile existence, we are free. It is not closing your eyes for the absurdity, rather it is accepting that the universe is limited, nothing is possible and everything is given, “beyond which all is collapse and nothingness”.⁴ Rather than aspire to live the best life, we must live the most life. “A man’s rule of conduct and his scale of values have no meaning except through the quantity and variety of experiences.”⁵

How very contradictory of Camus, don’t you think? Why live the most experiences if all experiences are futile? How do we know that these experiences will give us the most life? And there Camus comes again with an answer: life is absurd. The quantity of experiences is not based on our circumstances, rather it is based on us. Two women living the same number of years, there is always the same number of experiences. We have to be conscious of the experiences, of our life, our revolt and thus our freedom. That is living to the maximum. “Where lucidity dominates, the scale of values becomes useless.”⁶

Not very dissimilar are the thoughts from Milan Kundera’s unbearable lightness of being. Kundera shows in his novel that by gaining experiences and developing an identity, life becomes heavy and burdensome. The weight defines who we are, what we do and what we will do. However, how why would it all matter? Everything happens only once, and “Einmal ist keinmal” as Nietzsche said and Kundera quotes.⁷ Lightness would be freedom without constraints of identities or sense of self. Choices do not matter, it is all is coincidental, because it happens only once. “That’s why life is always like a sketch. No, ‘sketch’ is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the ground-work for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.”⁸

It’s an impossible choice, especially because we only have one life to live. We cannot compare it to previous lives, or perfect it in lives to come. So which one is better? Lightness or weight? The burden that pins us to the ground and crushes us, or to have your “movements as free as they are insignificant”?⁹ Camus would argue for weight, because in choosing to experience life with all its burdens, you can become free. The burden of the weight is, as is the boulder of Sisyphus, part of the joy, because it is your weight to carry.

Sources:
- Camus, Albert. Great Ideas Myth of Sisyphus. National Geographic Books, 2005.
- Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. New York, United States of America: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1984.
- Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Folger Shakespeare Library: https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/