It may manifest as a loss or an undermining of what we conceive to make life meaningful. The feeling of Absurdity may bring about a crisis of meaning, or a destabilization of the set of commitments that we organize our lives around. When the feeling of Absurdity allows for the concept of the Absurd to manifest, there is a tension or a disproportion between what we desire from the world and what the world itself can offer, or as Camus says, “a divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints.” (6) It is a fundamental and irreducible element of the human existence, because we as humans, at our core, desire from the world meaning or explanation for our existence, which it cannot offer to us. The Absurd is our separation from the world that both enables and is our fundamental relationship with it. To first attempt to explain Camus’ definition of the Absurd, the feeling of Absurdity is what paves the way for the concept of the Absurd. The Myth of Sisyphus opens with a presentation of two options: to commit suicide in the face of Absurdity, or to live in denial. (119) As Camus reveals through Sisyphus, the acknowledgement of and rebellion against the Absurd, the exercise of free will in self-investment in the performance of life to find intrinsic meaning, despite the incomprehensibility of the world, is to live well. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus defines the Absurd with, “This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of Absurdity.” (Camus 6) Camus offers up a model in his work for good living, in the face of the unavoidable notion of Absurdity, through a dissection of the tale of Sisyphus, an individual doomed amidst this divorce to perpetually pushing a boulder up a hill, only to see it roll down again. Philosophical Analysis of the Absurd in the Myth of Sisyphus
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