The contrary of suicide is man condemned to death, in constant lucidity of his own absurd nature with the passionate flames of human revolt. Suicide is never an option for the Absurd man, much like the leap of faith, it is acceptance at its extreme, it would be a way of going along with our absurd condemnation, by implicitly affirming that life is really intolerably absurd and that suicide is our only option. Just as danger provided man with the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience.” It challenges the world new every second. It is an insistence upon an impossible transparency. “It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. Thus, we all live in an absurd freedom, and to become lucid and conscious of it is to revolt, which is the only coherent philosophical position: But one day the ‘ why‘ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.” “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. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. However, in a world suddenly divested of illusions, man feels an alien. There are also secular ways of committing this act, such as escaping into the world of entertainment. We believe in a hypothetical belief system, immediately alleviating us from these insecurities, at the cost of committing a sort of mental suicide by shutting down our mental faculties.

Thus, the universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd, but rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously.Īnother important aspect of this book is that it is atheistic in nature, he calls the Absurd, which we all live in to be “sin without God.”įor Camus, believing in some ready-made belief system (practically all of the world’s religion) is one of the most common ways of ‘philosophical suicide’. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. However, this world in itself is not absurd, what is absurd is our relationship with the universe, which is irrational.

The “unreasonable” silence of the universe Trying to define this, is like water slipping through one’s fingers. The Absurd is the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life, and the human inability to find any meaning in a purposeless, meaningless, and irrational universe, with the “unreasonable silence” of the universe in response. The novel presents itself through an absurdist lens. Dying voluntarily implies the absence of any profound reason for living and the uselessness of suffering.

Physical suicide tends to happen without going through reflection, “ one evening the person pulls the trigger or jumps.” Killing oneself is a sort of confession, that life is too much, that it is incomprehensible, or that it is not worth the trouble.

Camus sisyphus