The Myth of Sisyphus

An Absurd Reasoning

No beliefs are used in the book except the concept of the absurd.

Absurdity and Suicide

Ther is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

The question behind that: Is life worth living?
Everything else is games on top of the answer to that question.

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.

Living is a habit, something we do, but usually don't think about, why we do it and if we we should and why we should.

Killing yourself is confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you.

The body's judgement is as good as the mind's and the body shrinks from annihilation.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.

Does the meaninglessness of life mean that one should end it?

Absurd Walls

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are concious of saying.

The last pages of a book are already contained in the first pages. Such a link is inevitable.

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

Everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.

Time is the enemy and we are afraid of it, but can at the same time look forward to it. Even simple things can have beauty and unreduceable complexity within them. This startles us.

That denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd.

Is one to die voluntarily or to hope in spite of everything?

Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal.

If I try to to seize this self of which I feel sure, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.

Nothing is clear, all is chaos, all man has is his lucidity and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him.

The world is incomprehensible, but humans want to understand it. There is nothing meaningful to life and it ends in death and humans can not cope with that fact. The world is irrational and man can not understand that and keeps searching for rationality in a world that has none except his own, which is about to end for sure. This phenomenon, this confusion about the world that is fundamental to it and can not be resolved is the "absurd".

Philosophical Suicide

Absurd means impossible and contradictory. It comes from comparing a concept to the world and failing in that comparison.

The Absurd is not in man, nor in the world, but in their presence together.

We turn towards God only to obtain the impossible. For the possible, men suffice.
— Leo Chestov

Knowing about the absurd entails believing in it and there can be hope derived from that belief.

Reason is useless but there is something beyond reason. To an absurd mind reason is useless and there is nothing beyond reason.

Without humans there is no absurd. The absurd is born from humans thinking about the world and how it should be but isn't.

In his failure the believer finds his triumph.
— Kierkegaard

The absurd, which is the metaphysical state of the conscious man, does not lead to God.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

The absurd is living with the despair that humans are just bags of meat in the middle of a lot of nowhere that will be wiped out again by the universe because they don't matter. Because nothing matters, even though our consciousness wants to make us bieve really really badly that we do. That's the source of the despair, we want to believe that we are important, but we know better.

Phenomenology thinks there is no truth, only experiences to be described. Consciousness focuses on these experiences.

The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.

Absurd freedom

What I know, what is certain, what I cannot deny, what I cannot reject - this is what counts.

I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me?