Le Mythe de Sisyphe Reading Order

Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942) by Albert Camus is the philosophical essay that provides the intellectual framework for the fiction Camus was producing at the same time — it was published in the same year as L'Étranger and alongside his play Caligula. The essay begins with the assertion that there is only one truly serious philosophical question: whether life is worth living. Camus's answer is not nihilistic but rigorously argued: the absurd arises in the confrontation between the human demand for clarity and the world's unreasonable silence; the proper response to the absurd is not suicide (which accepts the absurd's terms) and not philosophical leap (which abandons reason in favour of religious consolation) but revolt — the permanent rebellion of a consciousness that refuses both despair and false hope. The essay ends with Camus's famous analysis of Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll a rock up a hill forever only to watch it roll back down: Camus argues that Sisyphus is happy, because the rock is his, the struggle is his, and the moment of watching the rock roll down — the moment of full consciousness — is the moment of revolt. The essay is remarkable for its combination of philosophical rigour and literary beauty; Camus writes about Kafka, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, and Jaspers with the same vivid personal engagement that he brings to the figure of Sisyphus himself.