Myth Of Sisyphus Research Articles

The Stranger: Adventures at zero point

In one of his notebooks, Albert Camus describes, The stranger, The myth of Sisyphus, Caligula and The misunderstanding as pertaining to a series; a schema that suggests that if one were to write about one of these literary works, one would be writing about parts of a whole unless one also engaged with the others. Whether one does this or not, may or may not reflect the nature of the relationship one sees these texts as sharing. The stranger and The myth of Sisyphus share something unique: they are both as Camus describes them, zero points; a zero point here being understood as the zero point at which one thinks about one’s existence. This article begins with a reflection upon the relative philosophical value of understanding The myth of Sisyphus as a work of art and then occupies itself with how this understanding might provide an opportunity for self-reflection when reading The stranger. The reading of The myth of Sisyphus is not used so much to better understand Meursault (the protagonist of The stranger) and his story but to invert our interpretative methodology such that it is possible to speak to the reader as a significant actor. The novel is thought of in terms of the gifting of a philosophical problem, a problem which the author of this article attempts to understand from the point of view of how one might see oneself as paradoxically implicated in the drama of its articulation. It is this paradox that will lead us to speak of the narrative of The stranger as referring to a problem in how philosophy speaks to our experience of education.

Absurdism as a fundamental value: Camusian thoughts on moral development in organisations

In current society the lives and actions of individuals often unfold in organisational settings. This paper explores the human condition in organisations and the intellectual legacy of Albert Camus (1913-1960). Although considered to be an existentialist, Albert Camus distinguishes himself from other existentialists with his special attention to the individual in a world which cannot be known exactly. Moreover, man is living in a world which has no particular concern for the individual and can be considered absurd. Using these thoughts from his essay the Myth of Sisyphus as a framework to explore acting and living in an organisation and reflecting on this framework, we define three implications for moral development. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Blomme, R.J. (2013) 'Absurdism as a fundamental value: Camusian thoughts on moral development in organisations', Int. J. Management Concepts and Philosophy, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp.116-127.

Journeys in Poetry, Painting and Philosophy

A SOTERIOLOGY is a system of salvation: like going to heaven, achieving enlightenment, and so on. I shall set aside the notion of human destiny which is central to it. But I shall retain two other notions which are part of its meaning. First, there is the view that it is possible and desirable to move from an unsatisfactory state of consciousness to a more satisfactory one. Second, is the view that this aspect of human affairs can be designated 'spiritual'. I will not offer a definition ofthat word here.1 What is important is that I regard poetry and painting as spiritual exercises, and that they become even more so when linked with the kind of transitional journeys which I will describe.In literature, this transition is often presented using the metaphor of a journey. Some well-known examples include Dante's poem The Divine Comedy in which the protagonist travels through Hell and Purgatory to a vision of Heaven and the unity of all things;2 John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress which portrays Christian's journey from the City of Destruction through the Slough of Despond, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and so on to the Eternal City;3 and Farid Ud-Din Attar's The Conference of the Birds which describes the journey of the birds across seven valleys - the Valley of Love, the Valley of Understanding and so on, until they arrive in the presence of the Simurgh, the Great Bird which is a symbol of God.4Even if different symbols are sometimes used, such proposed transitions can also be found in philosophy. In the Republic, Plato imagines an educational journey from the shadowy world of the cave to the brilliant sunshine of knowledge of the Forms.5 In Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes tells the story of his journey of reasoning from doubt to purported certainty.6 In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus proposes a human journey from pushing a Sisyphusian rock up a hill to a liberating revolt against the absurdity of this condition.7 The journey motif appears to be a basic part of our way of describing human experience and aspirations.The five journeys to be described here are nothing like the grand narratives, as some postmodernists may wish to call them, of Bunyan and Plato. They are small-scale soteriologies, as I insist on calling them, which are located in this life. They are mostly autobiographical in nature, and are, perhaps, a little more elaborate than Joycean epiphanies - Joyce too reached for a spiritual word to name his insight - but there is something epiphanic at their root.In each case, the poem was written before I did the accompanying painting. So it could be said that the poetic impulse was the driving force. The painting and philosophising were later developments. The paintings were not intended as illustrations of the poems, for the paintings insisted on going their own way. The poetry, painting and philosophy are free-standing concerns, but here they are in dialogue with each other.Existentialist trucksWhile travelling from Kingston to Mandeville, where I lived and worked at the time, I often found myself stuck behind trucks for long periods, especially in the evenings. This was before the new highways, and the roads were narrow and winding, so most times I would have to wait a long time before I got an opportunity to overtake. Each time I came upon one of these trucks, my first reaction was impatience and annoyance. I was usually returning from a frustrating meeting in Kingston and I was eager to get home.But gradually I relaxed and passed the time studying the passengers on the back seat who sat facing me. We studied each other, and after a while I felt I knew them a little and a bond would develop between us. I wondered who they were, where they were coming from, and where they were going. I imagined stories about them. Some came from deep rural villages and probably left home at 4:00 a.m. to take the truck to the city. They went to the markets, to visit relatives, to apply for passports and to wrestle with government departments of various kinds. …

Beyond Vaccination:

Beyond Vaccination:

Following in the Footsteps of Sisyphus:

Following in the Footsteps of Sisyphus:

Another angle on the Lee Parker debate

The future of the interdisciplinary accounting research movement relies on the well-being of both the research and the researcher. In this article, we focus on the latter. We use the metaphor of the Myth of Sisyphus alongside Albert Camus’ re-conceptualization of him as the Absurd hero to make sense of the lived experiences of the accounting ethnographer. Drawing on interview data with experienced ethnographic scholars, we push beyond the pages of the ‘how-to’ textbook, describing and discussing the emotional challenges of engaging in accounting ethnography. As with Sisyphus’ task, there is an impossibility to the accounting ethnographer’s mission. The researcher will never ascertain a total understanding of the accounting phenomenon of interest. Either the boulder is too heavy, or the hill is too steep, or both. However, we show how the researcher revolts – in Camus’ sense of the word – against these challenges, ultimately finding professional and personal meaning from the work. We discuss the implications of our findings, providing some recommendations for the well-being of the interdisciplinary accounting project and the interdisciplinary accounting researcher.

Re-Examining Sartre’s Reading of The Myth Of Sisyphus

One of the main obstacles in approaching the work of Albert Camus nowadays is the prevalent notion that his fictional works are somehow an illustration of a philosophy contained in his nonfiction writings. This is an idea which may be traced back to 1 942, to an influential review written of his debut novel, Stranger. review was written by Jean-Paul Sartre soon after completing Being and Nothingness, and while awaiting its publication. Recently, David Carroll has stated: existentialist interpretation Stranger had an important influence on readers of the novel and the essay [The Myth of Sisyphus] for decades. only began to be abandoned, although rarely if ever directly questioned, long after Algerian independence, with the growth postcolonial cultural criticism in the last few decades.1 purpose of this essay is to directly question how Sartre constructed his interpretation of Camus's novel, and to show that the structure of this initial review has not been so easily abandoned. In order to appreciate the prevalence Sartre's interpretative strategy over the reception of Camus's early work, it will be necessary to briefly survey some of the more recent scholarship, and some of the more prominent scholarship from the past. Richard Kamber, for example, bypasses almost all of the text of Stranger in his analysis of it, and goes straight to the final pages, where Meursault converses with the priest: meaning of this passage is critical for a philosophical critique of Stranger, since it is the only place in the novel where Meursault, the speaker and main character, attempts to give a philosophical explanation for his beliefs about the human condition. Yet the explanation presented in this passage seems incomplete in several respects. Let us examine what is missing in this formulation and try to determine how it should or could be completed.2 This is how Kamber completes the novel: The text of Stranger suggests these questions, but it does not provide the answers, he states: Camus's reflections on the importance of life itself, one must turn to Myth of Sisyphus3 Likewise, John Foley states: although we do not of course read them as a single text, if we are to read Outsider as a novel of ideas, then the severe limits imposed on the meaning of the absurd in Myth of Sisyphus need to be taken into account. For Camus, Meursault is the absurd hero par excellence4. novel is thereby circumscribed by the perceived philosophical concerns of the essay: Camus, Meursault represents the modern Sisyphus, the authentic man in a world bereft of transcendent meaning.5 work of Robert C. Solomon is a much more extreme case. He seems to bypass both the novel and the essay and goes straight to imposing a narrowly Sartrean philosophy onto Camus's work: To state my interpretation baldly, Meursault is a philosophically fantastic character who, for the first part of the novel, is an ideal Sartrean pre-reflective consciousness, pure experience without reflection. . . . But then, in the second part of the novel . . . [the] threat of imminent finally forces him into a Heideggerian celebration of the privilege of death and the happy death, which is a constant theme in Camus's novels.6 is from this position that Solomon can then comfortably trace the relationship between novel and essay: It is the movement from pure unreflective experience to reflection and philosophy. is the second part of the book [The Stranger] that carries us into the realm of Myth of Sisyphus.1 David Sherman, drawing heavily from Solomon (a former teacher, then colleague), is likewise determined to contain Camus with certain categories of philosophy, existentialism in particular. As Sherman states: Although Myth of Sisyphus was published shortly after Stranger, its exposition of the Absurd sets the philosophical stage for virtually all that follows. …

Lost in Translation?: A Note on Sexuality in L’Etranger

FOR several years after its appearance in 1954, Gilbert's English translation of Albert Camus' great novel, The Stranger, originally published in French in 1942, aroused little controversy among literary scholars. Nowadays, especially following publication of Matthew Ward's superior translation of roman in 1988, applause for Gilbert's rendering is exception rather than rule. About that time, Camus scholar Patrick McCarthy pointed out (106-7), seems ill at ease with earthy, working-class flavour of The Stranger. English Showalter agreed, noting existence of two detailed critiques of Gilbert's translation that had appeared in early 1970's (26). Two American scholars, John Gale and Helen Sebba, he observed, have written articles pointing out most glaring instances [of Gilbert's 'infidelity' to Camus' text] and analyzing cumulative effects of individual variations; readers who know at least a little French might want to look them up. Most translators and literary critics would agree that his advice remains valid today. Although Helen Sebba's article, Stuart Gilbert's Meursault: A Strange 'Stranger,' appeared nearly forty years ago, it continues to occupy an honored place in literature on L'etranger. (1) A well-known translator of several works, her opinion carried extra weight, even though she essentially pointed out obvious: that Gilbert's translation of Camus' novel was often stilted and unfaithful to original, pervaded by a stiff-upper lip, British accent throughout. Sebba begins by asserting that discrepancies between Camus's text and Gilbert's translation that we instinctively excuse as products of translator's Englishness nonetheless prima facie distort or detract from Camus's meaning. Small deviations from French text, which at first might seem to be no more than minor adjustments that an idiomatic English style requires, prove on closer examination to blur or destroy vital clues to Meursault's character and behavior, she argues, and finds that Gilbert's anemic translation negates Meursault's idiosyncratic mode of being. Gilbert's manipulations of text to accord with what he thinks it should say deprive Meursault of his simplicity, attachment to Nature and immediate moment, and his uniqueness. Scattered throughout text are elusive understated indications of nature of his sense of life, she asserts. By failing to recognize these, or by deleting or distorting them, English version makes The Stranger conventional precisely at point where his strangeness can best be comprehended (340). Sebba vigorously questions validity of Gilbert's She believes it obscures Meursault's irrationality, instead rendering him a logical, pragmatic individual who understands consequences of his actions. her opinion, the English version [Stuart Gilbert's] of Camus' novel shows certain psychological inconsistencies, not present in original, which stem directly from translation. She aptly points out: In trying to maintain tone of common speech, Gilbert all too often smoothes away insights embodied by Camus in seemingly trivial factual details and substitutes purely conventional ideas or responses or reactions for what are in fact indications of a very idiosyncratic mode of being, of Stranger's cosmic sense of life (334). However, Sebba criticizes Gilbert's translation without acknowledging that her critique may be applicable to other translations of L'Etranger, and indeed is an inevitable, intrinsic concomitant of translating. Sebba stresses validity of her characterization of Meursault, as an individual whose distinctiveness she believes Gilbert's translation does not sufficiently evoke. Meursault's uniqueness, she says, lies in feeling at one with cosmos, albeit tenuously. (She seemingly overlooks theme of Camus's simultaneously written classic, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), which famously emphasized alienation of human beings from a Nature that they cannot feel at one with, especially inevitable Death imposed on us all, which we cannot escape no matter how hard we try. …

Albert Camus – Novelist and Philosopher for Our Time

Albert Camus died on 4 January 1960 when the car in which he was a passenger slid into a tree after running off a road in the French countryside outside the small village of Villeblevin in Burgundy. He died instantly. Even though at 46 he was far too young, what he had achieved by then was quite remarkable. Several novels, including The Outsider and The Plague, as well as a number of plays, and many essays on literary, philosophical and political issues. And during the war he had edited the Resistance newspaper, Combat. He had a work in progress, on him when he died, posthumously published as The First Man, which even in its unfinished form is a wonderful work, written with a stony, harsh, unsentimental clarity that is simply unforgettable. Clearly, he was at the height of his powers, even though at the time of his death he had become an isolated figure in the intellectual circles of his adopted Paris because of his anti-communism and his unwillingness to support the forces struggling for the independence of his native Algeria from colonial France. And then in the years that followed his death his influence diminished further as philosophy turned away from literature towards linguistics, psychoanalysis and the social sciences, and as the tide of political events turned increasingly against the colonialism of which Camus had been a supporter, or so it was thought. Yet Camus endures; and 50 years on we get a better sense of the extent of his influence. The Outsider and The Plague are both masterpieces, and stand as canonical references in twentieth-century European literature. There is no better characterisation of the absurd predicament of human existence than that which he gives us in his philosophical works, The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus. And while his uncompromising humanist position on revolution, terrorism and injustice were unfashionable amongst French intellectuals of his day, his political writings and social commentary are a salutary reminder of the ease with which cruelty and violence can find an alibi in a ‘cause’ or in an ideology. SOPHIA (2011) 50:509–511 DOI 10.1007/s11841-011-0288-7

Philosophy as a Way of Life: Albert Camus and Pierre Hadot

This paper compares Pierre Hadot’s work on the history of philosophy as a way of life to the work of Albert Camus. I will argue that in the early work of Camus, up to and including the publication of The Myth of Sisyphus, there is evidence to support the notions that, firstly, Camus also identified these historical moments as obstacles to the practice of ascesis, and secondly, that he proceeded by orienting his own work toward overcoming these obstacles, and thus toward a modern rehabilitation of ascesis. Moreover, in contrast to Hadot’s Platonism, Camus located the source of this practice in the pre-philosophical stage of Athenian tragedy. This points to a further contrast between these two figures, which has historical and cultural precedents, in the distinction between this pre-Platonic form of ascesis - favoured by Camus - and the latter Christian form of asceticism - favoured by Hadot, with the status of Platonic ascesis rendered in terms of prefiguring this Christian form of asceticism.

Camus and Nihilism

Camus published an essay entitled ‘Nietzsche and Nihilism,’ which was later incorporated into The Rebel. Camus' aim was to assess Nietzsche's response to the problem of nihilism. My aim is to do the same with Camus. The paper explores Camus' engagement with nihilism through its two major modalities: with respect to the individual and the question of suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus, and with respect to the collective and the question of murder in The Rebel. While a Nietzschean influence thoroughly suffuses both books, it is in the second that Camus' most explicit, and most critical, engagement with the German philosopher takes place. The crux of Camus' critique of Nietzsche is that the absolute affirmation of existence he proposes as a response to nihilism cannot say ‘no’ to murder. In the terms of Camus' discussion in The Rebel, Nietzsche's philosophy is thus culpable in the straying of rebellion from its own foundations and its slide into bloody revolution. First, the paper argues that Camus' criticisms of Nietzsche are misplaced. Camus focuses his analysis on sections of the problematic text The Will to Power and misses important sections of Nietzsche's published texts which in fact support the condemnation of revolution which is the project of The Rebel. However, the paper argues that Camus moves beyond Nietzsche in radically democratizing the response to nihilism. While Nietzsche's hopes for the creation of meaning are focused on exceptional individuals, Camus insists that any response to nihilism needs to be accessible to the average person. Such a move is laudable, but it raises a number of questions and challenges regarding the type of problem nihilism is, and how these might be addressed.

Camus’s Challenge

In the opening essay of The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Camus states that: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” He argues that all the other questions of philosophy, dealing with truth, knowledge, ethics, science, language and so on, are necessarily secondary to this question: “I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.” The meaning of life —why am I here? how am I to live? what is my purpose?—is one of the most enduring questions in philosophy and psychology and it is a question confronted by almost every individual at some point in life. This article provides a contemporary reflection on the relevance and validity of Camus’s thought regarding the connection between suicide and the meaning of life.

Reading Camus “With,” or After, Levinas

Jacques Derrida has remarked that what occurred in Emmanuel Levinas's post-war philosophy : a discreet but irreversible mutation, one of those powerful, singular, and rare provocations in (Derrida 1996, 9). It certainly holds, if we accept the premise of Levinas' postwar philosophy, that then the entirety of the Western philosophical tradition is to be called to account before something that would at once precede and exceed its terms. In a way that challenges the age-old distinction between theory and praxis, asserts that philosophy answers to a more fundamental ethical exigency which all humans undergo, practically, all the time. This is the exigency, simple yet finally incomprehensible, of being faced by another (or precisely Other) person. It would be a difficult task, and one that is not mine here, to condense in a few words Levinas's accounts of this primal ethical encounter. The focus of this essay is on a path less well travelled in philosophic circles: Albert Camus's post-war ethical and political philosophy. Needed here is only a stress on how Levinas's ethics is an ethics of radical responsibility. As readers will know, Levinas's pivotal contention is that, in encountering the Other, a certain (non)relation is lived through by the subject, radically outside his/her conscious control. The Other is, if we can still say this, a uniqueness who signifies to us at that moment otherwise than through her/his relation to any informing semantic or historical totality (e.g., Entre Nous, 194-45; Totality and Infinity, III B). Rather, the Other's alterity manifests itself to the subject in this encounter as a lasting ethical call to answer for itself and to justify its place in the sun. For Levinas, indeed, we always - as speaking subjects - have responded to the Other. And this ineradicable responsibility, maintains, is the transcendental origin of language, and thus underlies (as it undermines) our capacity to give meaning to our Being. This is the discreet but powerful mutation in the history of ideas that Derrida sees first essayed in Levinas. This essay presents three contentions. First, through bringing the later ethico-political philosophy of Albert in The Rebel into an engagement with the more widely known ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I will contest the lasting silence concerning Camus's political philosophy in philosophical literature.1 Secondly, I argue that Camus's account of political subjectivity in L'Homme Revolte decisively anticipates that later expounded by Levinas. What unites with on the nature of subjectivity, I will maintain - and this is the essay's third contention - is that Camus, before Levinas, ties subjectivity to a primordial responsibility before and for other subjects. To be a subject for Camus, as for Levinas, I contend, is - before it is anything else - to have been called to take a stance vis-a-vis the others in whose time one lives.2 These contentions are carried out in the essay's three parts. Part I presents an exposition of Camus's ethical position in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. This exegesis of Camus with Levinas presents Camus's argument as an alternative attempt, before Levinas's, to conceptualize an ethics refractory to all totalizing philosophical systems. Part II then considers Camus's ethics after Levinas, as it were. There are resources in Camus's texts which, I contend, importantly at once resist and anticipate the kind of criticisms that offers of the occidental philosophical heritage, and which we can feasibly imagine he might accordingly have leveled at Camus's mature - avowedly Graecophile - position. The horizon of the essay, which is explicated in the Conclusion, is that Camus's theoretical voice is a potentially timely one in today's theoretical scene. What he offers, we will see, is a very rare thing: namely, a post-metaphysical ethical contention that is at once post-Nietzschean, yet avowedly universalist. …

Beyond the Shadow of Drugs: Groups with Substance Misusers

The myth of Sisyphus speaks to an excruciating cycle of relief and suffering that is central in addiction. This article considers the long shadow cast by drug use, which often constitutes a psychic takeover of personality, with healthier aspects of the self and other interests subsumed by the seductive thrall of intoxication. Such shadows can manifest in groups that promote sober dialogue and eschew anti-dialogue/group process. A means of strengthening psychic muscle, psychodynamic groups are shown to temper the destructive pull towards euphoric or mindless states. In recovery there is a provocative mixing of memory and desire, and recollections of drug highs in groups serve dangerous desires in their enactment of a talking high. Movement towards freedom from drugs, which includes the building of new identities, must be continually fought for. Clinical examples illustrate these points, and point to the devastating impact of addiction in families and the identity voids associated with destructive drinking and drugging.

Albert Camus

In 1932, a nineteen year old Albeit Camus wrote an Essay on Music, perhaps the first sustained attempt at articulating his ideas regarding aesthetics. is instructive to see where his thinking started, youthful affectations included, the better to ascertain where he stood on these matters ten years later, when he published The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. essay argues that this movement from self-expression to self-questioning is also the movement from a form of mimesis-as-representation to mimesis-as-production, or what the Brazilian intellectual, Luiz Costa Lima, has elsewhere traced as the shift from aestheticization to criticity. In the Essay on Music, Camus begins at a point between realism and idealism. rejects realism outright, and he remains consistent in this stance for the remainder of his Ufe; only his arguments for doing so alter over time. In 1932, he states: According to [reaUsm], Art ought to concern itself exclusively with the imitation of Nature and the exact reproduction of ReaUty. is a definition that not only demeans Art, but, further, destroys it.1 However, this initial rejection of realism is based on a naive Romanticism (fitting perhaps for a nineteen year old aspiring dandy and tuberculosis sufferer): To reduce Art to a servile imitation of Nature is to condemn it to produce only the imperfect. The greater part of the aesthetic emotion, in fact, is a product of our personaUty. The beautiful is not in Nature; it is we who put it there.2 Rejecting realism, Camus tentatively accepts idealism, but with certain reservations: This ideaUst theory too often transforms itself into a moral theory, stimulating works that are flat, false, and boring because they want too badly to provide examples diat are healthy, respectable, and destined to be imitated.3 And yet, he goes on to define art as an of the based upon the personality of the artist, and as a form of escapism: will simply be an expression of the ideal. will be the creation of a Dream attractive enough to conceal from us the world in which we live with all its horrors. And aesthetic pleasure will reside exclusively in contemplation of this ideal world. Art will be the expression, the objectification of things such as we feel they ought to be. will be personal and original basically because the ideal, for each of us, varies... And we insist on the role reserved for personality in Art.4 Camus then turns to a comparison between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, pointing out that Nietzsche derives his aesthetics (especially in The Birth of Tragedy) from Schopenhauer; and that Schopenhauer, in turn, derives his ideas from Plato: He [Schopenhauer] studies Art from a metaphysical point of view in relation to the Platonic World of Ideas.. . . And when it has been accomplished we have a vague feeling of deliverance.5 Here, Camus sides with Schopenhauer to the extent that Schopenhauer agrees with Plato: by adding the world of will to an otherwise Platonic metaphysic. Camus then sides with Nietzsche, but only as far as Nietzsche agrees with Schopenhauer. Camus distances himself from Nietzsche only when Nietzsche (after The Birth of Tragedy) moves away from Schopenhauer. But already certain contradictions are present in Camus' thinking. His judgment regarding Nietzsche could be applied to himself: It is only possible to understand these contradictions in Nietzsche's work - clear and bUnding as they are - when one remembers that he is a poet as much as a philosopher, and consequently liable to fall prey to numerous contradictions.6 But as Camus is yet neither a poet nor a philosopher his contradictions are more revealing. Camus agrees with Nietzsche that the decline of tragedy comes with Socrates and the introduction of rationalism. Interestingly, Camus is willing to blame Socrates, even though Socrates is (in The Birth of Tragedy) only a foil for Platonic rationalism. …

PREDICTIVE TESTING AND EXISTENTIAL ABSURDITY: RESONANCES BETWEEN EXPERIENCES AROUND GENETIC DIAGNOSIS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF ALBERT CAMUS

Predictive genetic testing may confront those affected with difficult life situations that they have not experienced before. These life situations may be interpreted as 'absurd'. In this paper we present a case study of a predictive test situation, showing the perspective of a woman going through the process of deciding for or against taking the test, and struggling with feelings of alienation. To interpret her experiences, we refer to the concept of absurdity, developed by the French Philosopher Albert Camus. Camus' writings on absurdity appear to resonate with patients' stories when they talk about their body and experiences of illness. In this paper we draw on Camus' philosophical essay 'The Myth of Sisyphus' (1942), and compare the absurd experiences of Sisyphus with the interviewee's story. This comparison opens up a field of ethical reflection. We demonstrate that Camus' concept of absurdity offers a new and promising approach to understanding the fragility of patients' situations, especially in the field of predictive testing. We show that people affected might find new meaning through narratives that help them to reconstruct the absurd without totally overcoming it. In conclusion, we will draw out some normative consequences of our narrative approach.

Absurdity, Incongruity and Laughter

AbstractInThe Myth of Sisyphus, Camus recommends scornful defiance in the face of our absurd, meaningless existence. Although Nagel agrees that human life possesses an absurd dimension, he objects to Camus’ existentialist ‘dramatics’. For Nagel, absurdity arises from the irreducible tension between our subjective and objective perspectives on life. In this paper I do two things: (i) critically reconstruct Camus’ and Nagel's positions, and (ii) develop Nagel's critique of Camus in order to argue that humour is an appropriate response to absurdity.

Should Women Vote?

Should Women Vote? E. Thomas Ewing (bio), Heather L. Gumbert (bio), David Hicks (bio), Jane L. Lehr (bio), Amy Nelson (bio), and Robert P. Stephens (bio) On 13 July 1910, the English humor magazine Punch published a cartoon depicting a woman pushing a rock labeled “Women’s Suffrage” up a steep hillside labeled “Parliament (Figure 1).” A caption under the picture exclaims “Excelsior!” It is followed by this statement: Suffragist: “It’s no good talking to me about Sisyphus; he was only a man!” The well–dressed woman pushes the rock in a pose suggesting strength, while she gazes directly at the viewer with a determined look on her face. The landscape behind her fades into distant mountains and clouds, leaving no means to judge whether she is approaching the summit.1 A brilliant device for teaching about women’s suffrage, this cartoon provides numerous access points for engaging students in discussion and analysis. The cartoon visually illustrates the central issue: could suffrage advocates persuade Parliament to alter voting statutes? This conflict is illustrated by the determination of the suffragists (symbolized by the woman pushing the boulder up the hill) and the resistance created by Parliament (that is, the force required to push this boulder against gravity up a seemingly unconquerable slope). At the same time, the caption, with its ironic statement (“he was only a man”), validates the larger claim of the suffrage movement that women were not just proving their rights as citizens, but also demonstrating their superior moral and ethical standards. The references embedded in the cartoon thus provoke a more in–depth analysis of multiple meanings. Contemporary students are likely to have some familiarity with the myth of Sisyphus, who was punished for his cleverness by spending eternity in Tartarus pushing a rock up a mountain only to have it fall to the bottom, forcing him to begin all over again. Yet the invocation of this myth in a different historical and political context raises the question of whether women’s struggle for equal rights was a Sisyphean sentence of endless frustration or whether, as the caption suggests, a woman might achieve what a mythical man could not. The title “Excelsior!” represents an even more subtle teaching challenge. Standard dictionary definitions, i.e. “wood shavings used for packing,” [End Page 144] make no sense in this context; it is only by referencing a dictionary with an extensive etymology that the “right” meaning can be found: in Latin, “still higher.” This additional knowledge clarifies the cartoon’s perspective, exhorting women to push still higher to achieve their desired goal. Exposing students to these multiple layers of meaning, from the most obvious images through symbolic references to more obscure textual elements, demonstrates how reading primary sources can yield complex understandings of significant historical processes. Recognizing that these amalgams of text and image are not self–explanatory or simply illustrative requires that students employ the methodologically advanced reading skills acquired through the study of primary sources in a history course. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. “Excelsior!” Punch, 13 July 1910. This cartoon offers a useful place to begin this discussion of teaching about the women’s suffrage in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The suffrage campaign achieved considerable visibility throughout Europe during this period as women mobilized to pressure their governments to expand the rights denied by sex to one–half of the adult population. At the same time, as this cartoon suggests, resistance to suffrage became a significant political force as both governments and organized groups sought to preserve restrictions on women’s rights. To [End Page 145] understand this subject, students need to know about historical context, the contributions of important leaders, the differences between countries, and the chronology of campaigns. Just as important, however, students need the analytical skills to identify point of view, to explain processes of change, and to connect historical examples to contemporary situations. This pedagogical approach teaches students that, in the words of historian Sandra Stanley Holton, the history of women’s suffrage, “like all history, is contested ground, and remains always a provisional and partial form of knowledge.”2 To pursue the objective...

Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts: Experience and Reflection in Camus and Sartre (review)

Reviewed by: Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts: Experience and Reflection in Camus and Sartre Thomas R. Flynn Robert C. Solomon . Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts: Experience and Reflection in Camus and Sartre. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. ii + 241. Cloth, $35.00. This study in existentialist thought is a collection of essays, some previously published, in defense of the thesis that existentialist thought, at least in these works, is the articulation of our pre-reflective experience that yields an immediacy and a richness often sacrificed when one turns to abstract reflection—as Solomon believes Sartre does in Being and Nothingness in contrast to his novel, Nausea. Camus is presented as less bivalent in this regard, which may be why he is considered less the philosopher and more the novelist (193). Solomon insists that both Sartre and Camus draw a crucial distinction between lived experience and reflection in accord with the particular kind of "phenomenology" employed by each. His reading of each text focuses on extreme experiences that are "often dark, perverse, bordering on the obscure and pathological" (4). Still, he assures us, "Camus and Sartre exemplified a weird but palpable love of life. It shines clearly through even their most dreary political and moralistic prose" (5). [End Page 179] Both authors are awarded equal consideration, works of each being allotted four of eight chapters: Camus's The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague, and The Fall, and Sartre's The Emotions, Nausea, Being and Nothingness, and No Exit. Given the scope of his thesis, the selection is fair and apt. He includes close critical analyses of "translucent" consciousness and bad faith in Being and Nothingness, noting that, for Sartre, "reflections [on experience] were more fascinating than the experiences themselves" (4). Again, this would explain why Sartre has been taken more seriously by philosophers than Camus, despite the latter's rehabilitation in recent years—a rehabilitation owed chiefly, I suspect, to Camus's more moderate political stance. Solomon applies the experience/reflection distinction deftly in his close reading of these six texts. He contrasts the passive and profoundly non-reflective Meurseult in the first two thirds of The Stranger with the reflective agent who emerges toward the end of the novel. Similarly, Roquentin in Nausea is considered the protagonist of a "theory-free book." in contrast with Being and Nothingness, which Solomon characterizes as "theory-obsessed" (67). This core dyad serves to reveal new insights into well-studied texts and contributes to the originality of Solomon's reading. For example, he discovers a confusion of reflection with self-consciousness that occurs not only in Sartre but in "a great many phenomenologists" (107). He plausibly observes that we can be reflective without being self-conscious (as when we are thinking about a problem), and self-conscious without being reflective (as in the experience of embarrassment or pride). He considers Sartre's notion of the pre-reflective Cogito an unsatisfactory attempt at synthesizing these two concepts. Appealing to his earlier studies on the passions and the emotions, Solomon argues that "every emotion, as part of its essential structure, involves consciousness of oneself" (107). This is but one of several instances where Solomon uses a refined notion of reflection to reconsider commonly accepted existentialist theses and concepts. Another of Solomon's "revisionist" readings of these texts is his interpretation of Sartrean "bad faith" with the help of "intentionality" understood as "action." Admitting that "it is the self as the agent in bad faith and of bad faith that raises the biggest problems for Sartre" (141), he insists that Sartre's position is incoherent because it defends two conceptions of self-consciousness as equally primordial: namely, one that denotes unmediated awareness of self implicit in every explicit awareness of an object, and the other, a self mediated by our awareness of other subjects (142). While I admit that this is a significant objection, and one that calls for the kind of nuanced analysis that Sartre's dichotomous thinking typically overlooks, I wonder if the sharpness of the dichotomy that Solomon finally resists might be removed by appeal to degrees of implicit or peripheral awareness. In any case, Solomon has brought to our attention...

The myth of Sisyphus: renaissance theories of human perfectibility

The myth of Sisyphus: renaissance theories of human perfectibility