The Absurd Hero Essay, Research Paper

The Absurd HeroSisyphus is the absurd hero. This adult male, sentenced to endlessly turn overing a stone to the top of a mountain and so watching its descent, is the prototype of the absurd hero harmonizing to Camus. In reciting the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus is able to make an highly powerful image with inventive force which sums up in an emotional sense the organic structure of the rational treatment which precedes it in the book. We are told that Sisyphus is the absurd hero & # 8220 ; as much through his passions as through his anguish. His contempt of the Gods, his hate of decease, and his passion for life won him that indefinable punishment in which the whole being is exerted toward carry throughing nothing. & # 8221 ; ( p.89 ) . Sisyphus is witting of his predicament, and in this lies the calamity. For if, during the minutes of descent, he nourished the hope that he would yet win, so his labor would lose its torture. But Sisyphus is clearly witting of the extent of his ain wretchedness. It is this limpid acknowledgment of his fate that transforms his torture into his triumph. It has to be a triumph for as Camus says: I leave Sisyphus at the pes of the mountain! One ever finds one & # 8217 ; s load once more. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the Gods and raises stones. He excessively concludes that all is good. This universe henceforth without a maestro seems to him neither unfertile nor ineffectual. Each atom of that rock, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a universe. The battle itself towards the highs is adequate to make full a adult male & # 8217 ; s bosom. One must conceive of Sisyphus happy. ( p.91 ) .Sisyphus & # 8217 ; life and torture are transformed into a triumph by concentrating on his freedom, his refusal to trust, and his cognition of the absurdness of his state of affairs. In the same manner, Dr. Rieux is an absurd hero in The Plague, for he excessively is under sentence of decease, is trapped by a apparently ageless torture and, like Sisyphus, he continues to execute his responsibility no affair how useless or how undistinguished his action. In both instances it matters small for what ground they continue to fight so long as they testify to adult male & # 8217 ; s commitment to adult male and non to abstractions or & # 8216 ; absolutes & # 8217 ; . The thoughts behind the development of the absurd hero are present in the first three essays of the book. In these essays Camus faces the job of self-destruction. In his typically flooring, formidable mode he opens with the bold averment that: There is but one genuinely serious philosophical job and that is suicide. ( p. 3 ) .He goes on to detect if self-destruction is a legitimate reply to the human quandary. Or to set it another manner: Is life deserving life now that God is dead? The treatment begins and continues non as a metaphysical cobweb but as a well reasoned statement based on a manner of cognizing which Camus holds is the lone epistemology we have at our bid. We know merely two things: This bosom within me I can experience, and I judge that it exists. This universe I can touch, and I likewise justice that it exists. There ends all my cognition, and the remainder is building. ( p. 14 ) With these as the basic certainties of the human status, Camus argues that there is no significance to life. He disapproves of the many philosophers who & # 8220 ; have played on words and pretended to believe that declining to allow a significance to life needfully leads to declaring that it is non deserving living. & # 8221 ; ( p.7 ) Life has no absolute significance. In malice of the human & # 8217 ; s irrational & # 8220 ; nostalgia & # 8221 ; for integrity, for absolutes, for a definite order and significance to the & # 8220 ; non me & # 8221 ; of the existence, no such significance exists in the silent, apathetic existence. Between this longing for significance and ageless truths and the existent status of the existence there is a spread that can ne’er be filled. The confrontation of the irrational, hankering human bosom and the apathetic universe brings about the impression of the absurd.The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human demand and the unreasonable silence of the universe. ( p.21 ) and further: The absurd is non in adult male nor in the universe, but in their presence together & # 8230 ; it is the lone bond unifying them. ( p. 21 ) Peoples must recognize that the feeling of the absurd exists and can go on to them at any clip. The absurd individual must demand to populate entirely with what is known and to convey in nil that is non certain. This means that all I know is that I exist, that the universe exists, and that I am mortal. Doesn & # 8217 ; t this do a ineffectual pessimistic pandemonium of life? Wouldn & # 8217 ; t suicide be a legitimate manner out of a nonmeaningful life? & # 8220 ; No. & # 8221 ; & # 8220 ; No. & # 8221 ; replies Camus. Although the absurd naturals all opportunities of ageless freedom it magnifies freedom of action. Suicide is & # 8220 ; credence at its extreme & # 8221 ; , it is a manner of squealing that life is excessively much for one. This is the lone life we have ; and even though we are cognizant, in fact, because we are cognizant of the absurd, we can happen value in

this life. The value is in our freedom, our passion, and our rebellion. The first alteration we must do to populate in the absurd state of affairs is to recognize that thought, or ground, is non tied to any ageless head which can unite and “make visual aspects familiar under the pretense of a great rule, ” but it is:

& # 8230 ; larning all over once more to see, to be attentive, to concentrate consciousness ; it is turning every thought and every image, in the mode of Proust, into a privileged minute. ( p. 20 ) My experiences, my passions, my thoughts, my images and memories are all that I know of this universe & # 8211 ; and they are plenty. The absurd individual can eventually state & # 8220 ; all is good & # 8221 ; .I understand so why the philosophies that explain everything to me besides enfeeble me at the same clip. They relieve me of the weight of my ain life, and yet I must transport it entirely. ( p. 41 ) Camus so follows his impressions to their logical decisions and insists that people must replace measure of experience for quality of experience. The purest of joys is & # 8220 ; feeling, and experiencing on this earth. & # 8221 ; This statement can non be used to claim a hedonism as Camus & # 8217 ; s basic doctrine, but must be thought of in connexion with the impression of the absurd that has been developed in the early portion of the essay. Man is mortal. The universe is non. A individual & # 8217 ; s self-respect arises from a consciousness of decease, an consciousness that ageless values and thoughts do non be, and a refusal to give in to the impression of hope or entreaty for something that we are unsure of. In the undermentioned essays, Camus presents illustrations of the absurd individual. We are given Don Juan, the histrion, and the vanquisher as illustrations of people who multiply their lives in an effort to populate to the full within the span of their mortality. But more of import is the Godhead who is discussed in the essay & # 8220 ; Absurd Creation & # 8221 ; . & # 8220 ; The absurd joy par excellence is creation. & # 8221 ; For in making a work of art the Godhead is populating double in every bit much as his creative activity id a separate life. & # 8220 ; The creative person commits himself and becomes himself in his work. & # 8221 ; Works of art become, so, the one means for a individual to back up and prolong a lucid consciousness in the face of the absurdness of the existence. The present and the sequence of nowadayss before an of all time witting head, this is the ideal of the absurd adult male. ( p. 81 ) Art is for Camus an indispensable human activity and one of the most cardinal. It expresses human aspirations toward freedom and beauty, aspirations which make life valuable for each transient human being. Art defies that portion of being in which each person is no more that a societal unit or an undistinguished cog in the development of history. In The Myth of Sisyphus so we find the philosophical footing for the alien, the physician, and the judge-penitent. This is the get downing point of Camus & # 8217 ; s thought. Camus is concerned here as in his other plants with individuals and their universe, the relationships between them, and the relationships between individuals and their history. In The Myth of Sisyphus he opposes himself to the rationalism of classical doctrine which seeks universal and digesting truths or a hierarchy of values which is crowned by God ; he believes that truth is found by a subjective strength of passion ; he maintains that the person is ever free and involved in pick ; he recognizes that individuals exist in the universe and are of course related with it ; he is profoundly concerned with the significance of decease, its inevitableness and its conclusiveness. The absurd is a rebellion against tomorrow and as such comes to footings with the present minute. Suicide consents to the absurd as concluding and limitless while rebellion is a an on-going battle with the absurd and brings with it adult male & # 8217 ; s salvation. One can see now why Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is witting of his predicament: it was his contempt of the Gods, hatred of decease, and passion for life that won him the punishment of turn overing a stone to the top of the mountain everlastingly, and he does non appeal to trust or to any unsure Gods. His is the ultimate absurd, for there is non decease at the terminal of his battle. All is non chaos ; the experience of the absurd is the cogent evidence of adult male & # 8217 ; s uniqueness and the foundation of his self-respect and freedom. All that remains is a destiny whose result entirely is fatal. Outside of that individual human death of decease, everything, joy or felicity, is liberty. A universe remains of which adult male is the exclusive maestro. What bound him was the semblance of another universe. The result of his idea, discontinuing to be renunciatory, flowers in images. It frolics & # 8211 ; in myths, to be certain, but myths with no other deepness than that of human agony and like it unlimited. Not the Godhead fable that amuses and blinds, but the terrestial face, gesture, and play in which are summed up a hard wisdom and an passing passion. ( p. 87 ) One could make worse than to see the myths-retold in the plants of Camus.

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