Saying Yes to the Absurd as the Creative Rebel: A Reinterpretation of the Sisyphean Revolt in Camus’s Absurdism

Introduction

Think of the childhood ambitions that we uttered when surrounded by the eyes of the eagerness of others in anticipation of our answer to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”. A scientist, a policeman, a teacher, a lawyer, or simply, myself. These are the most generic outlooks of life a child can afford but are embedded with the most profound yearning that encompasses the entirety of human existence, that is, the strive for the meaning of life or a reason to avert death. This meaning grounds all activities that spur from the onset of our existence. And as we begin our uphill battles to solidify that ground, the world around us starts its callous disenchantment to unveil its unyielding indifference towards our aspirations. We fail at our endeavors, occasionally rewarded with the temporary sweetness of achievements, persistently surveilled by the boredom in between projects, and constantly propelled by the need for more satisfaction. Despite our unceasing efforts to ground this endless search for meaning, the unchanging theme of repetition creeps in when most unexpected to remind us of the unforgiving world that relentlessly ignores our most burning desire to know and mark ourselves with significance. And that moment finally came, the moment of disillusionment when our life is stripped of all meaning regardless of our will to find it. In The Myths of Sisyphus (MS 1955), Camus describes it as a “divorce between man and this life, the actor and his [or her] setting,” which is “the feeling of absurdity.” (MS, p.6).

At the intersection of our will to meaning and the universe devoid of meaning, we’re condemned to go through life as exiles with the lucid awareness of fate’s viciousness to have us fail in the hunt for meaning. Our childhood dreams shatter in the weariness of a mechanical life in a world that refuses to alter its rules to accommodate our demands for unity and clarity through reason. A parallel emerges between our futile efforts in a groundless life of hectic tasks and Sisyphus’ indefinite condemnation by the Greek gods to roll a boulder up a mountain only to have it rolled back again. We’re faced with the ultimate question, which is to resign ultimately from the futility by suicide, or to carry on in full consciousness of the absurd.

Camus called for us to look to Sisyphus, who must be imagined happy in his tenacious perseverance to continue the pointless act with a heroic revolt at heart and a clear grasp of the futility in mind. My paper aims to illustrate the exercisability of a silent rebellion in the confrontation of the absurd modeled after Sisyphus’ scornful defiance in a total acceptance of his fate of definite meaninglessness. By examining the analogy between us and Sisyphus closely, our harsh reality is revealed to be more forgiving than that burdens Sisyphus to allow creative ways of rebellion, where feminist, political, and artistic rebels are omnipresent among us, embodying that Sisyphean rebellious spirit.

The Fundamental Absurdity as the Human Condition

We use the absurd to describe an implausible yet real situation where our humanness is found to be unmatched by the encountered. We’re appalled by a sense of unrecognizable strangeness in the unfolding occurrence, but somehow, this premonition of alienness haunts us repeatedly where it’s no longer a single implausible exception but an inexplicable and inescapable mist that looms over us. And there is only one appropriate feeling to crown that astonishment towards the inhuman strangeness external to us, which is the absurd, “born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world” (MS, p.20).

Camus unraveled his diagnosis of the absurd human condition in terms of the world and our human experience in it. And he began illustrating the world through our relations to it. We’re tied to the certainty of death, which robs us of all conditions for any kind of inquiry. Therefore, the most serious philosophical question is, first and foremost, to judge the validity of suicide (MS, p.4). Life is lived by many as if no one is aware of the possibility of death at any moment, where the experience of death is not “lived and made conscious” (MS, p.12). But this most basic aspect of living constitutes the absurd feeling that it would all come to an end, and “the chain of daily gestures” (MS, p.10) is broken. Facing the judgment on suicide, we experience the first sign of absurdity, where this chain of life is rendered null at the end of the tunnel. And all the humanness we’ve attributed to the operating world or nature that must correspond to our needs, such that the weather must be clear for the days I plan my camping trip or that the caller at the bank must be able to answer all my financial needs, suddenly falls short with the dawn of lucidity with the eventual void after death. “The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia” (MS, p.11), which was only anthropomorphized by us in the past with human meaning. Why do I believe the stacks of rectangle paper on my table with random men’s portraits to be so valuable? Why do I blindly follow a justice system that organizes a troop of men to surveil every bit of my living in the name of safety and security? Why do I believe the sun is only shining to warm and energize me? At this moment, all prior symbols in life lost their significance. The buildings that we live in, the societies that we function within, the myths that we created, the teleological histories that we’ve written, the earth that we morphed into our own playground, the narratives that we tell of a future self, suddenly become arbitrary and unidentifiable. It is almost like a psychotic episode experienced in schizophrenia where we transcend above our noematic field to observe our own noesis as just another object in the phenomenological view of the world (Husserl, 1913/1982; Sass, 2000). The sheer feeling of absurdity arises as our consciousness finds itself surrounded by the “denseness and strangeness of the world” (MS, p.11) that has reverted to its most bare form without any projections of meaning from us.

And at this dawning of lucidity, when we answer “nothing” to the question “what are you doing?”, we simultaneously ask a series of “why?”. Why do I wake up at 8 o’clock every day to work for five days straight, see my friends and family on the other days of the week, and go on vacation for three weeks in a year so that I could repeat the same exact condition for the finitude of my entire life? Sleep, eat, reproduce, and start all over. This repetition of a mechanical schedule is presumed to continue forever until a death that we are consciously oblivious to yet unconsciously aware of annihilates our premeditated habit of living. Sadly, this cycle is kicked off by the intrinsic human characteristic of our mind to distinguish the truth through unification. All of the mechanical operations we conduct are a result of this “insistence upon familiarity” and “appetite for clarity” (MS, p.13). It stems from a Kantian notion of our mind that seeks to unify all judgments in the faculty of reason, which leads to transcendental ideas of universalization of all conditioned into unconditioned (Kant, 1998). Camus considers this transcendental strive to unification a mechanism to reduce the inhuman world to the human understanding, which inevitably fails where the unifying aim of totality is contradicted by the mind’s chained condition to prioritize its unique humanness (MS, p.13). Our knowledge of the world is forever undermined by our humanness, where the restless drive to understand the whole universe in its inhuman nature is utterly irresolvable and, therefore, absurd. To think that we are bound to be repeating a mechanical life set up for failure to reach the world in completeness and clarity is where absurdism is born. Our coded “appetite for the absolute and for unity” is predestined to crash with the “impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle” (MS, p.34). We will forever remain strangers in the world and cursed to a futile loop of irrational mechanisms propelled by the limits of reason that leaves our demand for meaning unsatisfied.

Thus, it is an invalid question to ask if absurdism is a satisfactory explanation of the meaning of life or if absurdism itself is a part of the absurd. Absurdity is the inextricable human condition that emerged from “the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart” (MS, p.15). We’re doomed to discover that absurdity sooner or later, even if it is on the verge of entering the gateway to death. When that moment of lucidity arrives, only absurdism is apt to describe our human condition. What remains is the only question: should I give up or carry on, namely, suicide or revolt (MS, p.10)?

Sisyphean Rebellion as the Only Response to the Absurd

Standing at that crossroad where the absurd dawned on us, where the certain faith in oneself as the meaningful agent determining her own future with “that freedom to be” (MS, p.38) is crumbling down, suicide seems to be the only way out. However, death is the ultimate negation of freedom. One can only be less free when dead, as freedom is conditioned on life itself. Suicide is the ultimate deprivation of the attempts at being free or the basis for meaning to survive. Thus, we must accept absurdity as the ontological condition of life and live meaninglessly as though it does not defeat us. And Camus points us to Sisyphus, where “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” (MS, p.76), but is nevertheless an absurd hero who confronts futility with scornfulness by immersing oneself back into the mechanical repetitions in full consciousness of its utter senselessness.

At the bottom of the hill, waiting for the boulder to come down again, Sisyphus is always explicitly conscious of the next cycle of nothingness that awaits him without any delusional hope of finally achieving an end that successfully unifies the meaning of his labour. “At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock” (MS, 77). This tragic sense of confronting futility head-on marks his triumph over the futility. Without appealing to any external explanation that validates the brutal condemnation imposed on him, Sisyphus lucidly lives through the meaninglessness in a silent revolt that is unnoticeable in appearance but stirs up turmoil in his heart. Everything remains the same externally, but the subjective consciousness is irreversibly altered by the absurd. The absurd hero is charged with bitterness, scornfulness, and hopelessness while proceeding with the usual mechanical life. And the tragic or even romantic anger against fate is what gives Sisyphus ownership over a nihilistic life. In an abstract and counter-intuitive way, meaning is only reserved for those who fervently take up the quest to seek it while knowing it can never be found.

Despair and suicide are not allowed and are contradictory to the condition of the absurd. To be in despair and, therefore, resign from life is to presuppose a hope in life, which is only a confused state prior to the dawning of lucidity where the limits of reason were still unclear. Once the absurd is made transparent, hope is no longer permissible, let alone in the despair that spirals into suicidal contemplations. Therefore, the only appropriate response to the absurd is to silently revolt like Sisyphus, who fills his heart with the struggle, defying the temptations of hope and denying salvation through meaning while holding onto the only valuable life in active non-resolution. The absurd hero concludes, “All is well” (MS, p.78), embracing the never-ending strive for meaning in a world deprived of it with internal defiance and external acceptance.

Creative Rebellions in Political Resistance and Artistic Endeavors

For Camus, Sisyphus stands as a testament that humans can surpass the bounded being by being committed to rebel against the indignity life imposed on us with profound indifference to what the world makes of us but a conscious lucidity to what the rebellion means subjectively. Later in The Rebel (Camus, 1955), Camus developed the metaphysical rebellion further as a personal act with a collective goal, “I revolt, therefore we are” (R, 22). However, given the irrefutable absurd, the rebellion remains an individual commitment directed at generic solidarity, yet always serves as a counter-ideology that aims at universality, knowing that it can never be achieved. This rebellion is laced with heroism and misery, knowingly putting one’s life at risk at a subjectively convicted cause but never willingly taking one’s life away from this devotion. This self-directed dedication to voluntary suffering can be seen as unrealistic, where this prevailing nausea towards an unattainable unity is unbearable. However, upon closer examination of the parallel between us and Sisyphus, I argue that the Sisyphean rebellion is less unbearable when undertaken by us and that rebels exist among us throughout history who are apathetic toward any extrinsic significance of their actions intended only to matter intrinsically.

First and foremost, human struggles vary in the exterior than that endured by Sisyphus. The exact manual of how to rebel is laid out in front of Sisyphus, which is to put his hands on the boulder and march on. However, human suffering changes slightly through time, and we’re always challenged to rebel with different tactics rather than repeat the same procedure and rhythm day after day. In our lives, we learn to assimilate into an existing society, experience the myriad forms of oppression given our distinctive situation, encounter the absurd in the futility to resist and overturn the struggle, and at last, we affirm life by devoting ourselves to resistance anyway. As we go through life, that revolt can show up in very different costumes even though the defiant spirit is the same. It could be writing an article that entails a rebellious attitude, it could be organizing an anti-harassment campaign on the intranet of one’s corporate network, it could be giving a public speech as a form of anti-violence protest amid violent military invasions, it could be making a film to illustrate the obscene wealth disparity, or it could simply be making free breakfast for children in the local community every morning. These different forms of rebellion are similarly absurd when compared to Sisyphus, such that they are assigned individual significance yet have their meaning dissolved swiftly in the universe as they are being conducted. It is absurd how many similar acts of rebellion were repeated over and over with little material changes mounted in the external world. Fortunately, they vary in terms of the actual work being done to offer us some relief from the weariness of repetition. We are not given Sisyphus’ handbook of rebellion, with every step written in stone for us to execute with precision and tirelessly. Our rebellion has a degree of flexibility and allows some creative designs from us that entertain us through the journey against the absurd. Moreover, Sisyphus is immortal. In terms of the relentless suffering involved in the revolt against indignity, our mortality can be comforting. It can also be a catalyst to engender more creativity in the contents of revolt. With our limited time span to confront the absurd, we’re fortunate that there is an end to the pain it brings, yet we somehow must rebel harder with our only freedom in designing the innumerable formulas to rebel.

With slightly more relaxed chains on our limbs than those that trapped Sisyphus, the creative rebel is born. The nature of rebellion is the same as that undergone by Sisyphus, where we “say yes and no simultaneously” (R, p.21), rejecting the humiliating circumstances indifferent to our suffering by affirming the futility required to announce ownership and vitality inwardly. By saying no, the person saying no disappears. Rebellion does not concern others at all; it arises from the introspection of yourself, which you weigh as more important than mere existence. While outwardly, the meaninglessness always prevails. This silent revolt at heart directed to causes that are unacknowledged or unaccredited can be found in many unsung voices in political resistance, especially in women. Historically, women were an unrecognized force in many of the political movements who embodied that rebellious spirit through non-violent actions. They have a greater inclination toward peacebuilding over violence, are less visible, and therefore more mobile to cross conflict lines but are at the same time largely unrepresented in formal political institutions. In the 1970s-1980s, during the first intifada resistance held by the Palestinians against Israeli rule, all-female bodies were created within four left-wing parties as a part of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which started from 25 women and reached as large as 10000 women. They distributed leaflets along with bread supplies, all due to their agility and invisibility as stereotypically presumed to be less threatening at military checkpoints. Many of them organized home-making groups, having meetings of resistance planning disguised under knitting, sewing, and cooking. They led civil strikes and boycotts of Israeli goods and organized farming cooperatives as well as medical care as parallel institutions[1].  However, their legacies were erased when male leaders of PLO returned from exile in Tunis[2]. In a similar example, long before the 1955 Alabama bus boycott triggered by Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat to a white person, the Women’s Political Council (WPC) of Alabama had been actively approaching city commissioners about unfair practices where African Americans had to enter from the back of the bus after paying at the front. Upon Parks’ release, the WPC had already been engaged in organizing meetings and circulating leaflets to boycott Montgomery’s buses[3]. However, history largely neglected their effort and focused on the subsequent leadership of figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King. Not to mention that, in one of the most known political organizations dedicated to black liberation in American’s history, the Black Panther Party, women took up 66% of memberships while their legacies were mostly remembered through sensationalized stories of male leaders such as Bobby Seale and Fred Hampton[4].

In the lives of the countless women in history who rebelled by committing to the most trivial tasks, such as passing leaflets or making bread, the world only rewarded them with anonymity, indifference, and cruelty that eventually buried any material significance of their efforts and crashed their causes for universality. This is the absurd that is undeniably present throughout the extended history of humankind. Somehow, they still chose to rebel. To say no inside one’s heart toward nonsense is the only decision that makes sense for one, and that is everything needed to rebel. “Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right” (R, 21). This sense of self-affirmation comes from the rebel’s identification of her humanness that cannot tolerate the inhumanness present in her world. “The metaphysical rebel declares that he is frustrated by the universe” (R, 25). Otherwise, how could someone sustain years of re-exposure to trauma during the lengthy and repetitive trials in sexual harassment lawsuits? When the 21-year-old intern, Xian-Zi, was harassed in the dressing room of a 50-year-old nationwide known TV host, Zhu Jun, in China, she chose to rebel through a seemingly impossible venture[5]. Just like Sisyphus, who knows that the boulder eventually comes back down, she was angry and heroic, believing that she was right to seek justice and revolted as a result. In the four years following her first legal allegation, countless women activists united and said yes to the same universal cause. She lost the appeal to the case, given the apparent power imbalance between her and the host and the difficulties in gathering evidence and testimonies for sexual harassment cases, but her insistence to carry on is what Camus calls for in a rebel. At last, she stood outside the court, speaking to her fellow supporters. She was lucidly aware that this was going to be a battle destined for failure and that there would be many more battles like this that were seemingly pointless to fight for. But as she decided to say yes to scornfully revolt, meaning is instantly formulated in the act of rebel itself.

One may still hesitate at the bumpy and agonizing road of rebellion ahead and object to the practicality of rebellion by referring to the average strength possessed by the common masses that might be too weak for such excruciations. This is where the creative rebels offer their counsel. Don’t be so scared. You can create your own strategy and tactics to rebel. Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist and activist, would advise you to paint your way through what life has put you in. Upon her bus accident at the age of 18, she endured the loneliness and physical pain of being injured and isolated with the help of painting. There was no grand purpose for these paintings, which were only made known to us years after her death at 47 years of age in 1954. They were simply devised out of her own will to rebel against the inexplicable obstacles that the world had arranged for her. In another case much closer to the modern worker in the neoliberal order of capitalistic expansion and individual responsibility that alienates our humanness to achieve maximized productivity, Franz Kafka, who experienced the absurd of working the tedious job in an insurance company, continued writing to document and reflect on the absurdity of human condition in novels. His protagonists rebelled against the strangeness of the world that was suddenly made apparent to them by keeping on living, only with a subjective determination to persevere regardless of the hollowness of life. Kafka wrote without any hope of receiving acclamations or even any responses from the world, only with a subjective loyalty to beat the absurd in writing. Fame only came after death, but it wasn’t expected to grant any meaning to himself in any way. Internally, writing was his way of saying no to that monotonous repetition demanded by modern corporates and saying yes to rebellion.

In sum, unlike Sisyphus, who has only one prescription to confront the absurd, we have a range of strategies to take on in saying yes. These methods vary in shapes and forms throughout life, but they all fail at securing an ultimate meaning for us. The meaning is forever embedded in our silent revolt as creative rebels, unknowable in totality, whose borders are only slightly traceable through the sheer veils that we spend our entire lives uncovering in the daily rebellion. The creative rebels will always be triumphant in spirit but mundane in appearance.

Conclusion

The absurd is ubiquitous as one wanders through a world that is deaf to our human language. Once we wake up from the pointless dreams of meaning-making, the humiliation or mockery played on us by the universe is clear. We’re, in one way or another, tricked into believing in a once grand narrative of ourselves, and suddenly, that cruel joke enlightens us on our limited reason to ever reach the ultimate meaning. But we cannot be defeated to take away life nihilistically; suicide is a contradiction to the human condition that makes us aware of the absurd. Freedom and meaning only depend on life itself, and taking away life itself, the premise of the absurd is never a satisfactory solution. Standing in front of a mirror that reveals the nihilistic essence of being, the only response is to keep going. Following Sisyphus, the creative rebel must revolt in her own manner. She never joyfully wants the hardships of rebellion, yet she must say yes, for she is invalided by saying no to her own humanness. Meaninglessness always prevails, but not in her heart. Silently, she carries on, for that is the only reply worthy of this valuable and vital consciousness, appropriate to the condition of the absurd and justifiable to the condition for meanings to exist in if there ever is going be any.

[1] Gadzo, M. (2018, March 8). How Palestinian women led successful non-violent resistance. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2018/3/8/how-palestinian-women-led-successful-non-violent-resistance

[2] Strasser, F. (2016, October 19). How women drive nonviolent movements for change. United States Institute of Peace. https://www.usip.org/publications/2016/10/how-women-drive-nonviolent-movements-change

[3] Women’s Political Council (WPC) of Montgomery. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. (n.d.). https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/womens-political-council-wpc-montgomery#:~:text=The%20WPC%20had%20been%20planning,paying%20their%20fare%20up%20front.

[4] O’Hagen, S. (2022, September 4). Sisters of the revolution: The women of the black panther party. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/sep/04/sisters-revolution-women-of-black-panther-party

[5] Gan, N. (2022, August 11). China’s leading #MeToo figure loses appeal in sexual harassment case against Star TV Host. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/11/china/china-landmark-metoo-case-appeal-intl-hnk/index.html

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