Hello, my name is Christina Hendricks, and
in this video I'll be talking about a short
discussion of the mythological character of Sisyphus,
by French philosopher Albert Camus, in his
longer essay called "The Myth of Sisyphus."
You've probably heard the story: Sisyphus
was condemned by the gods to push a rock up
a mountain only to have it fall back down,
and then he had to push it back up, then
it fell down, then up, then down, over and
over and over forever.
Albert Camus, a 20th century
French philosopher, wrote an essay on the
myth of Sisyphus, in which he says that
the gods "had thought with some reason
that there is no more dreadful punishment
than futile and hopeless labor."
One might disagree that this is the worst
possible punishment, but clearly it is pretty awful.
Yet Camus also, surprisingly, says that "one
must imagine Sisyphus happy."
He doesn't just say we can imagine Sisyphus happy, which might be
hard enough, but that we must. But why must we?
And how even can we?
Sisyphus was a character in Greek and Roman
mythology, a mythical King of Corinth in ancient Greece.
There are various versions of his story, explaining
why the gods punished him so severely.
Camus notes several of them in his essay.
He expressed a certain "levity towards
the gods," Camus notes, such as in the
following examples.
In one version of his story, Zeus stole the daughter of Aesopus,
a river god, and Sisyphus told Aesopus where
she was
in return for a fresh water supply for the city.
You don't just tell on Zeus and get
away with it.
But Camus says,
"To the celestial thunderbolts Sisyphus
preferred the benediction of water."
In another version of the story, Sisyphus put Thanatos, the god of death, in chains, by tricking him.
No one could die.
Ares, the god of war, finally released Thanatos.
In yet another version, Sisyphus had told his wife that when he died, she should not give him a proper
burial, in order to test whether she really
loved him.
When she did as he said, Sisyphus convinced
the god of the underworld to let him go back
to the world of the living to criticize his
wife and get the burial he should have had.
When he was allowed to do so, he loved
being alive so much he refused to go back
to the underworld as he should have.
According to Camus, "Many years more he lived facing the curve
of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles
of earth," until forced back to the underworld
by the gods.
Camus concludes that Sisyphus was punished
in part because of his deep love of life:
"His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death,
and his passion for life won him that unspeakable
penalty in which the whole being is exerted
toward accomplishing nothing.
This is the price that must be paid for the
passions of this earth," Camus says.
Camus challenges us, I think, to ask ourselves
whether we could love life this much.
But before you answer, consider that Camus
thinks that all human life is as absurd as Sisyphus' task.
Could we be as happy as Camus wants us to
imagine Sisyphus being?
