Myth of Sysphus - Urdu Translation by Inaam Azmi

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. All the rest— whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. 

These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.

If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right.That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason 

for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to answer it? 

On all essential problems (I mean thereby those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity. In a subject at once so humble and so heavy with emotion, the learned and classical dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest attitude of mind deriving at one and the same time from common sense and understanding.

Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship between individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. 

One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps. Of an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that that experience had "undermined" him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is inman's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.

There are many causes for a suicide, and generally the most obvious ones were not the most powerful. Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection. What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable. Newspapers often speak of "personal sorrows" or of "incurable 

illness." These explanations are plausible. But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently. He is the guilty one. For that is enough to precipitate all the rancors and all the boredom still in suspension.

 

But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is 

easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let's not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that "is not worth the trouble." Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence, for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, [6] the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of 

suffering. 

What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world 

that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly 

divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of 

the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and 

his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be 

seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for 

death. 

The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree 

to which suicide is a solution to the absurd. The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat, 

what he believes to be true must determine his action. Belief in the absurdity of existence must then dictate his conduct. It is legitimate to wonder, clearly and without false pathos, whether a conclusion of this importance 

requires forsaking as rapidly as possible an incomprehensible condition. I am speaking, of course, of men 

inclined to be in harmony with themselves.

Stated clearly, this problem may seem both simple and insoluble. But it is wrongly assumed that 

simple questions involve answers that are no less simple and that evidence implies evidence. A priori and 

reversing [7] the terms of the problem, just as one does or does not kill oneself, it seems that there are but two 

philosophical solutions, either yes or no. This would be too easy. But allowance must be made for those who, 

without concluding, continue questioning. Here I am only slightly indulging in irony: this is the majority. I 

notice also that those who answer "no" act as if they thought "yes." As a matter of fact, if I accept the 

Nietzschean criterion, they think "yes" in one way or another. On the other hand, it often happens that those 

who commit suicide were assured of the meaning of life. These contradictions are constant. It may even be 

said that they have never been so keen as on this point where, on the contrary, logic seems so desirable. It is 

a commonplace to compare philosophical theories and the behavior of those who profess them. But it must 

be said that of the thinkers who refused a meaning to life none except Kirilov who belongs to literature, 

Peregrinos who is torn of legend,3

 and Jules Lequier who belongs to hypothesis, admitted his logic to the 

point of refusing that life. Schopenhauer is often cited, as a fit subject for laughter, because he praised 

suicide while seated at a well-set table. This is no subject for joking. That way of not taking the tragic 

seriously is not so grievous, but it helps to judge a man.

In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we conclude that there is no relationship 

between [8] the opinion one has about life and the act one commits to leave it? Let us not exaggerate in 

this direction. In a man' s attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world. The 

body' s judgment is as good as the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of 

living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body 

maintains its irreparable lead. In short, the essence of that contradiction lies in what I shall call the act of 

eluding because it is both less and more than diversion in the Pascalian sense. Eluding is the invariable 

game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion that constitutes the third theme of this essay, is hope. 

Hope of another life one must "deserve" or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for some great

idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it.

Thus everything contributes to spreading confusion. Hitherto, and it has not been wasted effort, 

people have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily 

leads to declaring that it is not worth living. In truth, there is no necessary common measure between these 

two judgments. One merely has to refuse to be misled by the confusions, divorces, and inconsistencies 

previously pointed out. One must brush everything aside and go straight to the real problem. One kills 

oneself because life is not worth living, that is certainly a truth—yet an unfruitful one because it is a truism. 

But does that insult to existence, that flat denial in which it is plunged come from the fact that it has no 

meaning? Does its absurdity require one to [9] escape it through hope or suicide—this is what must be

clarified, hunted down, and elucidated while brushing aside all the rest. Does the Absurd dictate death? 

This problem must be given priority over others, outside all methods of thought and all exercises of the 

disinterested mind. Shades of meaning, contradictions, the psychology that an "objective" mind can

always introduce into all problems have no place in this pursuit and this passion. It calls simply for an 

unjust—in other words, logical—thought. That is not easy. It is always easy to be logical. It is almost 

impossible to be logical to the bitter end. Men who die by their own hand consequently follow to its 

conclusion their emotional inclination. Reflection on suicide gives me an opportunity to raise the only 

problem to interest me: is there a logic to the point of death? I cannot know unless I pursue, without reckless 

passion, in the sole light of evidence, the reasoning of which I am here suggesting the source. This is what I

call an absurd reasoning. Many have begun it. I do not yet know whether or not they kept to it. 

When Karl Jaspers, revealing the impossibility of constituting the world as a unity, exclaims: 

"This limitation leads me to myself, where I can no longer withdraw behind an objective point of view 

that I am merely representing, where neither I myself nor the existence of others can any longer become 

an object for me," he is evoking after many others those waterless deserts where thought reaches its 

confines. After many others, yes indeed, but how eager they were to get out of them! At that last 

crossroad where thought hesitates, many men have arrived and even some of the humblest. They then [10] 

abdicated what was most precious to them, their life. Others, princes of the mind, abdicated likewise, but they 

initiated the suicide of their thought in its purest revolt. The real effort is to stay there, rather, in so far as that is 

possible, and to examine closely the odd vegetation of those distant regions. Tenacity and acumen are privileged 

spectators of this inhuman show in which absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue. The mind can then 

analyze the figures of that elementary yetsubtle dance before illustrating them and reliving them itself. 

ایک واقعی سنجیدہ فلسفیانہ مسئلہ ہے، اور وہ خودکشی کا مسئلہ ہے۔ زندگی جینے کے قابل ہے یا نہیں، اس کا فیصلہ کرنا فلسفے کا بنیادی سوال ہے۔ باقی تمام چیزیں—چاہے دنیا میں تین جہتیں ہیں یا دماغ کی نو یا بارہ اقسام ہیں—یہ سب بعد میں آتی ہیں۔ یہ سب کھیل ہیں؛ پہلے اس سوال کا جواب دینا ضروری ہے۔ اور اگر نطشے کا کہنا درست ہے کہ ایک فلسفی کو ہمارے احترام کا مستحق ہونے کے لئے اپنے عمل سے بات کرنی چاہیے، تو آپ اس جواب کی اہمیت کو سمجھ سکتے ہیں، کیونکہ یہ عمل سے پہلے کا سوال ہے۔ یہ ایسی باتیں ہیں جنہیں دل محسوس کرتا ہے، لیکن انہیں سمجھنے کے لیے دماغ کی گہری توجہ درکار ہوتی ہے۔

اگر میں پوچھوں کہ یہ سوال زیادہ اہم کیوں ہے، تو میرا جواب ہے کہ آپ اس کا فیصلہ ان اعمال سے کرتے ہیں جو اس سوال کے ساتھ جڑے ہیں۔ میں نے کبھی کسی کو 'وجود' کے سوال پر مرنے کے لیے تیار نہیں دیکھا۔ گیلیلیو، جس نے ایک اہم سائنسی حقیقت پر یقین کیا تھا، نے اپنی جان کے خطرے میں فوراً اپنا بیان واپس لے لیا۔ اس نے ٹھیک کیا، کیونکہ یہ سوال جان دینے کے قابل نہیں تھا۔ یہ سوال کہ زمین سورج کے گرد گھومتی ہے یا سورج زمین کے گرد، حقیقت میں غیر اہم ہے۔ اس کے برعکس، میں دیکھتا ہوں کہ بہت سے لوگ زندگی کو بے معنی سمجھ کر اپنی جان دے دیتے ہیں۔

زندگی کا مطلب سب سے اہم سوال ہے۔ اس کا جواب کیسے دیا جائے؟ تمام بنیادی مسائل پر، جو یا تو موت کا خطرہ رکھتے ہیں یا زندگی کے جوش کو بڑھاتے ہیں، دو خیالات کی ترکیب موجود ہے: ایک حقیقت اور دوسرا خیالی۔ صرف ثبوت اور جذبے کے توازن سے ہی ہم ایک ہی وقت میں جذبات اور عقل کو حاصل کر سکتے ہیں۔ ایسے نازک اور جذباتی موضوع میں، فکری مباحثے کو ایک زیادہ سادہ اور سمجھنے والے انداز سے بدلنا ضروری ہے۔

خودکشی کو ہمیشہ ایک سماجی مسئلے کے طور پر دیکھا گیا ہے، لیکن یہاں ہم اس کو فرد اور سوچ کے تعلق سے دیکھ رہے ہیں۔ ایک ایسا عمل جو دل کی خاموشی میں تیار ہوتا ہے۔ انسان کو اس کا علم بھی نہیں ہوتا، اور ایک دن وہ اپنی زندگی ختم کر لیتا ہے۔ 

---

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying. The regularity of an

impulse or a repulsion in a soul is encountered again in habits of doing or thinking, is reproduced in 

consequences of which the soul itself knows nothing. Great feelings take with them their own universe, 

splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. 

There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness, or of generosity. A universe—in other words, a 

metaphysic and an attitude of mind. What is true of already specialized feelings will be even more so of 

emotions basically as indeterminate, simultaneously as vague and as "definite," as remote and as "present" 

as those furnished us by beauty or aroused by absurdity. 

At any streetcorner the feeling of absurdity can strike [11] any man in the face. As it is, in its distressing 

nudity, in its light without effulgence, it is elusive. But that very difficulty deserves reflection. It is probably 

true that a man remains forever unknown to us and that there is in him something irreducible that escapes 

us. But practically I know men and recognize them by their behavior, by the totality of their deeds, by the 

consequences caused in life by their presence. Likewise, all those irrational feelings which offer no purchase to 

analysis. I can de-fine them practically, appreciate them practically, by gathering together the sum of their 

consequences in the domain of the intelligence, by seizing and noting all their aspects, by outlining their 

universe. It is certain that apparently, though I have seen the same actor a hundred times, I shall not for that 

reason know him any better personally. Yet if I add up the heroes he has personified and if I say that I know him 

a little better at the hundredth character counted off, this will be felt to contain an element of truth. For this 

apparent paradox is also an apologue. There is a moral to it. It teaches that a man defines himself by his make-

believe as well as by his sincere impulses. There is thus a lower key of feelings, inaccessible in the heart but 

partially disclosed by the acts they imply and the attitudes of mind they assume. It is clear that in this way I am 

defining a method. But it is also evident that that method is one of analysis and not of knowledge. For methods 

imply metaphysics; unconsciously they disclose conclusions that they often claim not to know yet. Similarly, 

the last pages of a book are already contained in the first pages. Such a link is [12] inevitable. The method 

defined here acknowledges the feeling that all true knowledge is impossible. Solely appearances can be 

enumerated and the climate make itself felt.

Perhaps we shall be able to overtake that elusive feeling of absurdity in the different but closely 

related worlds of intelligence, of the art of living, or of art itself. The climate of absurdity is in the 

beginning. The end is the absurd universe and that attitude of mind which lights the world with its true 

colors to bring out the privileged and implacable visage which that attitude has discerned in it.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a 

street-corner or in a restaurant' s revolving door. So it is with absurdity. The absurd world more than 

others derives its nobility from that abject birth. In certain situations, replying "nothing" when asked what 

one is thinking about may be pretense in a man. Those who are loved are well aware of this. But if that 

reply is sincere, if it symbolizes that odd state of soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the 

chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again, then it 

is as it were the first sign of absurdity.

It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, street-car, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, 

street-car, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and 

Saturday according [13] to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one 

day the "why" arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. "Begins"—this is 

important. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates 

the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the 

gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in 

time, the consequence: suicide or recovery. In itself weariness has something sickening about it. 

Here, I must conclude that it is good. For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth 

anything except through it. There is nothing original about these remarks. But they are obvious; that is 

enough for a while, during a sketchy reconnaissance in the origins of the absurd. Mere "anxiety," as 

Heidegger says, is at the source of everything.

Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes

when we have to carry it. We live on the future: "tomorrow," "later on," "when you have made your way," 

"you will understand when you are old enough." Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it' s a 

matter of dying. Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. 

But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he 

stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, 

and by the horror that seizes him, [14] he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for 

tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.4

A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense," sensing to what a degree a stone 

is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all 

beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very 

minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. 

The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it 

because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it 

beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it 

becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance 

from us. Just as there are days when under the familiar face of a woman, we see as a stranger her we had loved 

months or years ago, perhaps we shall come even to desire what suddenly leaves us so alone. But the time has 

not yet come. Just one thing: that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd.

Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments [15] of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their 

gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the 

telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you 

wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man' s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before 

the image of what we are, this "nausea," as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. Likewise the stranger 

who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our 

own photographs is also the absurd.

I come at last to death and to the attitude we have toward it. On this point everything has been said and it is

only proper to avoid pathos. Yet one will never be sufficiently surprised that everyone lives as if no one "knew." 

This is because in reality there is no experience of death. Properly speaking, nothing has been experienced but 

what has been lived and made conscious. Here, it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others' deaths. 

It is a substitute, an illusion, and it never quite convinces us. That melancholy convention cannot be 

persuasive. The horror comes in reality from the mathematical aspect of the event. If time frightens us, this 

is because it works out the problem and the solution comes afterward. All the pretty speeches about the soul will have their contrary convincingly proved, at least for a time. From this inert body on which a slap makes 

no mark the soul has disappeared. This elementary and definitive aspect of the adventure constitutes the 

absurd feeling. Under the fatal lighting of that [16] destiny, its uselessness becomes evident. No code of

ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our 

condition.

Let me repeat: all this has been said over and over. I am limiting myself here to making a rapid 

classification and to pointing out these obvious themes. They run through all literatures and all philosophies. 

Everyday conversation feeds on them. There is no question of reinventing them. But it is essential to be sure 

of these facts in order to be able to question oneself subsequently on the primordial question. I am 

interested—let me repeat again—not so much in absurd discoveries as in their consequences. If one is 

assured of these facts, what is one to conclude, how far is one to go to elude nothing? Is one to die 

voluntarily or to hope in spite of everything? Beforehand, it is necessary to take the same rapid inventory 

on the plane of the intelligence. 

The mind' s first step is to distinguish what is true from what is false. However, as soon as thought 

reflects on itself, what it first discovers is a contradiction. Useless to strive to be convincing in this case. 

Over the centuries no one has furnished a clearer and more elegant demonstration of the business than 

Aristotle: "The often ridiculed consequence of these opinions is that they destroy themselves. For by 

asserting that all is true we assert the truth of the contrary assertion and consequently the falsity of our own

thesis (for the contrary assertion does not admit that it can be true). And if one says that all is false, that 

assertion is itself false. If we declare that solely the assertion opposed to ours is false or else that [17] solely 

ours is not false, we are nevertheless forced to admit an infinite number of true or false judgments. For the 

one who expresses a true assertion proclaims simultaneously that it is true, and so on ad infinitum."

This vicious circle is but the first of a series in which the mind that studies itself gets lost in a giddy 

whirling. The very simplicity of these paradoxes makes them irreducible. Whatever may be the plays on 

words and the acrobatics of logic, to understand is, above all, to unify. The mind' s deepest desire, even in 

its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an 

insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the 

human, stamping it with his seal. The cat's universe is not the universe of the anthill. The truism "All 

thought is anthropomorphic" has no other meaning. Likewise, the mind that aims to understand reality can 

consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought. If man realized that the universe like him 

can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. If thought discovered in the shimmering mirrors of 

phenomena eternal relations capable of summing them up and summing themselves up in a single 

principle, then would be seen an intellectual joy of which the myth of the blessed would be but a 

ridiculous imitation. That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse 

of the human drama. But the fact of that nostalgia' s existence does not imply that it is to be immediately 

satisfied. For if, bridging the gulf that separates desire from conquest, we assert with Parmenides the 

reality of the One (whatever it may be), [18] we fall into the ridiculous contradiction of a mind that asserts total 

unity and proves by its very assertion its own difference and the diversity it claimed to resolve. This other vicious 

circle is enough to stifle our hopes.

These are again truisms. I shall again repeat that they are not interesting in themselves but in the 

consequences that can be deduced from them. I know another truism: it tells me that man is mortal. One can 

nevertheless count the minds that have deduced the extreme conclusions from it. It is essential to consider as a 

constant point of reference in this essay the regular hiatus between what we fancy we know and what we really 

know, practical assent and simulated ignorance which allows us to live with ideas which, if we truly put them to 

the test, ought to upset our whole life. Faced with this inextricable contradiction of the mind, we shall fully 

grasp the divorce separating us from our own creations. So long as the mind keeps silent in the motionless world 

of its hopes, everything is reflected and arranged in the unity of its nostalgia. But with its first move this world 

cracks and tumbles: an infinite number of shimmering fragments is offered to the understanding. We must 

despair of ever reconstructing the familiar, calm surface which would give us peace of heart. After so many centuries of inquiries, so many abdications among thinkers, we are well aware that this is true for all our 

knowledge. With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If the only 

significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets 

and its impotences. 

[19] Of whom and of what indeed can I say: "I know that!" This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it 

exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is 

construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing 

but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those 

likewise that have been attributed to it, this up bringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or 

this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to 

me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will 

never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth. 

Socrates' "Know thyself" has as much value as the "Be virtuous" of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at 

the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely 

so far as they are approximate. 

And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars 

at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes —how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I 

feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to 

me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are 

true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous 

[20] and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the 

electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in 

which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you 

have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already 

changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders 

in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of 

these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my 

beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all 

that, apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more. And 

you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that 

claim to teach me but that are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought 

that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to 

know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir 

up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by 

thoughtlessness, lack of heart, or fatal renunciations.

Hence the intelligence, too, tells me in its way that this world is absurd. Its contrary, blind reason, may 

well [21] claim that all is clear; I was waiting for proof and longing for it to be right. But despite so many 

pretentious centuries and over the heads of so many eloquent and persuasive men, I know that is false. On this 

plane, at least, there is no happiness if I cannot know. That universal reason, practical or ethical, that 

determinism, those categories that explain everything are enough to make a decent man laugh. They have 

nothing to do with the mind. They negate its profound truth, which is to be enchained. In this unintelligible and 

limited universe, man's fate henceforth assumes its meaning. A horde of irrationals has sprung up and surrounds 

him until his ultimate end. In his recovered and now studied lucidity, the feeling of the absurd becomes clear 

and definite. I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all

that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose

call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all

that links them together. It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together. This is all 

I can discern clearly in this measureless universe where my adventure takes place. Let us pause here. If I hold to 

be true that absurdity that determines my relationship with life, if I become thoroughly imbued with that 

sentiment that seizes me in face of the world's scenes, with that lucidity imposed on me by the pursuit of a 

science, I must sacrifice everything to these certainties and I must see them squarely to be able to maintain them.  Above all, I must adapt my behavior to them [22] and pursue them in all their consequences. I am speaking here 

of decency. But I want to know beforehand if thought can live in those deserts. I already know that thought has at least entered those deserts. There it found its bread. There it realized that it 

had previously been feeding on phantoms. It justified some of the most urgent themes of human reflection.

From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or 

not one can live with one' s passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they 

simultaneously exalt—that is the whole question. It is not, however, the one we shall ask just yet. It stands at 

the center of this experience. There will be time to come back to it. Let us recognize rather those 

themes and those impulses born of the desert. It will suffice to enumerate them. They, too, are known to all 

today. There have always been men to defend the rights of the irrational. The tradition of what may be 

called humiliated thought has never ceased to exist. The criticism of rationalism has been made so often 

that it seems unnecessary to begin again. Yet our epoch is marked by the rebirth of those paradoxical 

systems that strive to trip up the reason as if truly it had always forged ahead. But that is not so much a proof 

of the efficacy of the reason as of the intensity of its hopes. On the plane of history, such a constancy of two 

attitudes illustrates the essential passion of man torn between his urge toward unity and the clear vision he 

may have of the walls enclosing him. But never perhaps at any time has the attack on reason [23] been more 

violent than in ours. Since Zarathustra' s great outburst: "By chance it is the oldest nobility in the world. I 

conferred it upon all things when I proclaimed that above them no eternal will was exercised," since 

Kierkegaard' s fatal illness, "that malady that leads to death with nothing else following it," the significant and 

tormenting themes of absurd thought have followed one another. Or at least, and this proviso is of capital 

importance, the themes of irrational and religious thought. From Jaspers to Heidegger, from Kierkegaard to 

Chestov, from the phenomenologists to Scheler, on the logical plane and on the moral plane, a whole family 

of minds related by their nostalgia but opposed by their methods or their aims, have persisted in blocking the 

royal road of reason and in recovering the direct paths of truth. Here I assume these thoughts to be known 

and lived. Whatever may be or have been their ambitions, all started out from that indescribable universe where 

contradiction, antinomy, anguish, or impotence reigns. And what they have in common is precisely the themes 

so far disclosed. For them, too, it must be said that what matters above all is the conclusions they have managed 

to draw from those discoveries. That matters so much that they must be examined separately. But for the 

moment we are concerned solely with their discoveries and their initial experiments. We are concerned solely 

with noting their agreement. If it would be presumptuous to try to deal with their philosophies, it is possible and 

sufficient in any case to bring out the climate that is common to them. 

Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and [24] announces that that existence is humiliated. 

The only reality is "anxiety" in the whole chain of beings. To the man lost in the world and its diversions 

this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the 

perpetual climate of the lucid man "in whom existence is concentrated." This professor of philosophy 

writes without trembling and in the most abstract language in the world that "the finite and limited 

character of human existence is more primordial than man himself." His interest in Kant extends only to 

recognizing the restricted character of his "pure Reason." This is to conclude at the end of his analyses

that "the world can no longer offer anything to the man filled with anguish." This anxiety seems to him so 

much more important than all the categories in the world that he thinks and talks only of it. He 

enumerates its aspects: boredom when the ordinary man strives to quash it in him and benumb it; terror 

when the mind contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The 

consciousness of death is the call of anxiety and "existence then delivers itself its own summons through 

the intermediary of consciousness." It is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence "to return from 

its loss in the anonymous They." For him, too, one must not sleep, but must keep alert until the 

consummation. He stands in this absurd world and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way 

amid these ruins.

Jaspers despairs of any ontology because he claims that we have lost "naïveté." He knows that we 

can achieve nothing that will transcend the fatal game of [25] appearances. He knows that the end of the mind is failure. He tarries over the spiritual adventures revealed by history and pitilessly discloses the 

flaw in each system, the illusion that saved everything, the preaching that hid nothing. In this ravaged 

world in which the impossibility of knowledge is established, in which everlasting nothingness seems the 

only reality and irremediable despair seems the only attitude, he tries to recover the Ariadne's thread that 

leads to divine secrets.

Chestov, for his part, throughout a wonderfully monotonous work, constantly straining toward the same

truths, tirelessly demonstrates that the tightest system, the most universal rationalism always stumbles 

eventually on the irrational of human thought. None of the ironic facts or ridiculous contradictions that 

depreciate the reason escapes him. One thing only interests him, and that is the exception, whether in the 

domain of the heart or of the mind. Through the Dostoevskian experiences of the condemned man, the 

exacerbated adventures of the Nietzschean mind, Hamlet' s imprecations, or the bitter aristocracy of an 

Ibsen, he tracks down, illuminates, and magnifies the human revolt against the irremediable. He refuses the 

reason its reasons and begins to advance with some decision only in the middle of that colorless desert where all 

certainties have become stones.

Of all perhaps the most engaging, Kierkegaard, for a part of his existence at least, does more than 

discover the absurd, he lives it. The man who writes: "The surest of stubborn silences is not to hold one's 

tongue but to talk" makes sure in the beginning that no truth is absolute or [26] can render satisfactory 

an existence that is impossible in itself. Don Juan of the understanding, he multiplies pseudonyms and 

contradictions, writes his Discourses of Edification at the same time as that manual of cynical spiritualism,

The Diary of the Seducer. He refuses consolations, ethics, reliable principles. As for that thorn he feels in 

his heart, he is careful not to quiet its pain. On the contrary, he awakens it and, in the desperate joy of a man 

crucified and happy to be so, he builds up piece by piece—lucidity, refusal, make-believe—a category of the 

man possessed. That face both tender and sneering, those pirouettes followed by a cry from the heart are the

absurd spirit itself grappling with a reality beyond its comprehension. And the spiritual adventure that leads

Kierkegaard to his beloved scandals begins likewise in the chaos of an experience divested of its setting and

relegated to its original incoherence.

On quite a different plane, that of method, Husserl and the phenomenologists, by their very 

extravagances, reinstate the world in its diversity and deny the transcendent power of the reason. The 

spiritual universe becomes incalculably enriched through them. The rose petal, the milestone, or the 

human hand are as important as love, desire, or the laws of gravity. Thinking ceases to be unifying or 

making a semblance familiar in the guise of a major principle. Thinking is learning all over again to see, 

to be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner of Proust, 

into a privileged moment. What justifies thought is its extreme consciousness. Though more positive than 

Kierkegaard' s or Chestov' s, Husserl' s manner [27] of proceeding, in the beginning, nevertheless negates

the classic method of the reason, disappoints hope, opens to intuition and to the heart a whole 

proliferation of phenomena, the wealth of which has about it something inhuman. These paths lead to all 

sciences or to none. This amounts to saying that in this case the means are more important than the end. 

All that is involved is "an attitude for understanding" and not a consolation. Let me repeat: in the 

beginning, at very least.

How can one fail to feel the basic relationship of these minds! How can one fail to see that they take 

their stand around a privileged and bitter moment in which hope has no further place? I want everything 

to be explained to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The 

mind aroused by this insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradictions and nonsense. What I fail to 

understand is nonsense. The world is peopled with such irrationals. The world itself, whose single 

meaning I do not understand, is but a vast irrational. If one could only say just once: "This is clear," all 

would be saved. But these men vie with one another in proclaiming that nothing is clear, all is chaos, that 

all man has is his lucidity and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him.

All these experiences agree and confirm one another. The mind, when it reaches its limits, must make a 

judgment and choose its conclusions. This is where suicide and the reply stand. But I wish to reverse the 

order of the inquiry and start out from the intelligent adventure and come back to daily acts. The experiences 

called to mind here were born in the desert that we must not leave [28] behind. At least it is essential to know how far they went. At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels 

within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the 

human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. This must not be forgotten. This must be clung to 

because the whole consequence of a life can depend on it. The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the 

absurd that is born of their encounter—these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily 

end with all the logic of which an existence is capable.

The feeling of the absurd is not, for all that, the notion of the absurd. It lays the foundations for it, and 

that is all. It is not limited to that notion, except in the brief moment when it passes judgment on the 

universe. Subsequently it has a chance of going further. It is alive; in other words, it must die or else 

reverberate. So it is with the themes we have gathered together. But there again what interests me is not 

works or minds, criticism of which would call for another form and another place, but the discovery of 

what their conclusions have in common. Never, perhaps, have minds been so different. And yet we 

recognize as identical the spiritual landscapes in which they get under way. Likewise, despite such 

dissimilar zones of knowledge, the cry that terminates their itinerary rings out in the same way. It is 

evident that the thinkers we have just recalled have a common climate. [29]To say that that climate is 

deadly scarcely amounts to playing on words. Living under that stifling sky forces one to get away or to 

stay. The important thing is to find out how people get away in the first case and why people stay in the 

second case. This is how I define the problem of suicide and the possible interest in the conclusions of 

existential philosophy.

But first I want to detour from the direct path. Up to now we have managed to circumscribe the absurd 

from the outside. One can, however, wonder how much is clear in that notion and by direct analysis try to 

discover its meaning on the one hand and, on the other, the consequences it involves.

If I accuse an innocent man of a monstrous crime, if I tell a virtuous man that he has coveted his own 

sister, he will reply that this is absurd. His indignation has its comical aspect. But it also has its 

fundamental reason. The virtuous man illustrates by that reply the definitive antinomy existing between 

the deed I am attributing to him and his lifelong principles. "It's absurd" means "It's impossible" but also 

"It's contradictory." If I see a man armed only with a sword attack a group of machine guns, I shall 

consider his act to be absurd. But it is so solely by virtue of the disproportion between his intention and 

the reality he will encounter, of the contradiction I notice between his true strength and the aim he has in 

view. Likewise we shall deem a verdict absurd when we contrast it with the verdict the facts apparently 

dictated. And, similarly, a demonstration by the absurd is achieved by comparing the consequences of 

such a reasoning with the logical reality one wants to [30] set up. In all these cases, from the simplest to 

the most complex, the magnitude of the absurdity will be in direct ratio to the distance between the two 

terms of my comparison. There are absurd marriages, challenges, rancors, silences, wars, and even peace 

treaties. For each of them the absurdity springs from a comparison. I am thus justified in saying that the 

feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere scrutiny of a fact or an impression, but that it bursts from 

the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it. 

The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their 

confrontation.

In this particular case and on the plane of intelligence, I can therefore say that the Absurd is not in man

(if such a metaphor could have a meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together. For the moment

it is the only bond uniting them. If I wish to limit myself to facts, I know what man wants, I know what the

world offers him, and now I can say that I also know what links them. I have no need to dig deeper. A single

certainty is enough for the seeker. He simply has to derive all the consequences from it.

The immediate consequence is also a rule of method. The odd trinity brought to light in this way is 

certainly not a startling discovery. But it resembles the data of experience in that it is both infinitely simple 

and infinitely complicated. Its first distinguishing feature in this regard is that it cannot be divided. To 

destroy one of its terms is to destroy the whole. There can be no absurd outside the human mind. Thus, like 

everything [31] else, the absurd ends with death. But there can be no absurd outside this world either. 

And it is by this elementary criterion that I judge the notion of the absurd to be essential and consider that 

it can stand as the first of my truths. The rule of method alluded to above appears here. If I judge that a 

thing is true, I must preserve it. If I attempt to solve a problem, at least I must not by that very solution 

conjure away one of the terms of the problem. For me the sole datum is the absurd. The first and, after all, 

the only condition of my inquiry is to preserve the very thing that crushes me, consequently to respect 

what I consider essential in it. I have just defined it as a confrontation and an unceasing struggle. 

And carrying this absurd logic to its conclusion, I must admit that that struggle implies a total absence 

of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with 

renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature unrest). 

Everything that destroys, conjures away, or exorcises these requirements (and, to begin with, consent 

which overthrows divorce) ruins the absurd and devaluates the attitude that may then be proposed. The 

absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to. There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always a prey to his truths. 

Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has 

become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it. A [32] man devoid of hope and conscious of 

being so has ceased to belong to the future. That is natural. But it is just as natural that he should strive 

to escape the universe of which he is the creator. All the foregoing has significance only on account of 

this paradox. Certain men, starting from a critique of rationalism, have admitted the absurd climate. 

Nothing is more instructive in this regard than to scrutinize the way in which they have elaborated their 

consequences.

Now, to limit myself to existential philosophies, I see that all of them without exception suggest 

escape. Through an odd reasoning, starting out from the absurd over the ruins of reason, in a closed 

universe limited to the human, they deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what 

impoverishes them. That forced hope is religious in all of them. It deserves attention.

I shall merely analyze here as examples a few themes dear to Chestov and Kierkegaard. But Jaspers 

will provide us, in caricatural form, a typical example of this attitude. As a result the rest will be clearer. 

He is left powerless to realize the transcendent, incapable of plumbing the depth of experience, and 

conscious of that universe upset by failure. Will he advance or at least draw the conclusions from that 

failure? He contributes nothing new. He has found nothing in experience but the confession of his own 

impotence and no occasion to infer any satisfactory principle. Yet without justification, as he says to 

himself, he suddenly asserts all at once the transcendent, the essence of experience, and the superhuman 

significance of life when he writes: "Does not the failure reveal, beyond any possible [33] explanation and 

interpretation, not the absence but the existence of transcendence?" That existence which, suddenly and 

through a blind act of human confidence, explains everything, he defines as "the unthinkable unity of the 

general and the particular." Thus the absurd becomes god (in the broadest meaning of this word) and that 

inability to understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything. Nothing logically prepares this 

reasoning. I can call it a leap. And paradoxically can be understood Jaspers' s insistence, his infinite 

patience devoted to making the experience of the transcendent impossible to realize. For the more fleeting 

that approximation is, the more empty that definition proves to be, and the more real that transcendent is to 

him; for the passion he devotes to asserting it is in direct proportion to the gap between his powers of 

explanation and the irrationality of the world and of experience. It thus appears that the more bitterly Jaspers destroys the reason' s preconceptions, the more radically he will explain the world. That apostle of 

humiliated thought will find at the very end of humiliation the means of regenerating being to its very 

depth.

Mystical thought has familiarized us with such devices. They are just as legitimate as any attitude of

mind. But for the moment I am acting as if I took a certain problem seriously. Without judging 

beforehand the general value of this attitude or its educative power, I mean simply to consider whether it 

answers the conditions I set myself, whether it is worthy of the conflict that concerns me. Thus I return to 

Chestov. A commentator relates a remark of his that deserves interest: [34]"The only true solution," he said, 

"is precisely where human judgment sees no solution. Otherwise, what need would we have of God? We turn 

toward God only to obtain the impossible. As for the possible, men suffice." If there is a Chestovian philosophy, 

I can say that it is altogether summed up in this way. For when, at the conclusion of his passionate analyses, 

Chestov discovers the fundamental absurdity of all existence, he does not say: "This is the absurd," but rather: 

"This is God: we must rely on him even if he does not correspond to any of our rational categories." So that 

confusion may not be possible, the Russian philosopher even hints that this God is perhaps full of hatred and 

hateful, incomprehensible and contradictory; but the more hideous is his face, the more he asserts his power. His 

greatness is his incoherence. His proof is his inhumanity. One must spring into him and by this leap free oneself 

from rational illusions. Thus, for Chestov acceptance of the absurd is contemporaneous with the absurd itself. 

Being aware of it amounts to accepting it, and the whole logical effort of his thought is to bring it out so that at 

the same time the tremendous hope it involves may burst forth. Let me repeat that this attitude is legitimate. But 

I am persisting here in considering a single problem and all its consequences. I do not have to examine the 

emotion of a thought or of an act of faith. I have a whole lifetime to do that. I know that the rationalist finds 

Chestov's attitude annoying. But I also feel that Chestov is right rather than the rationalist, and I merely 

want to know if he remains faithful to the commandments of the absurd.

[35]Now, if it is admitted that the absurd is the contrary of hope, it is seen that existential thought for 

Chestov presupposes the absurd but proves it only to dispel it. Such subtlety of thought is a conjuror's 

emotional trick. When Chestov elsewhere sets his absurd in opposition to current morality and reason, he 

calls it truth and redemption. Hence, there is basically in that definition of the absurd an approbation that 

Chestov grants it. If it is admitted that all the power of that notion lies in the way it runs counter to our 

elementary hopes, if it is felt that to remain, the absurd requires not to be consented to, then it can be clearly 

seen that it has lost its true aspect, its human and relative character in order to enter an eternity that is both 

incomprehensible and satisfying. If there is an absurd, it is in man' s universe. The moment the notion 

transforms itself into eternity's springboard, it ceases to be linked to human lucidity. The absurd is no longer that 

evidence that man ascertains without consenting to it. The struggle is eluded. Man integrates the absurd and in 

that communion causes to disappear its essential character, which is opposition, laceration, and divorce. This 

leap is an escape. Chestov, who is so fond of quoting Hamlet' s remark: "The time is out of joint," writes it down 

with a sort of savage hope that seems to belong to him in particular. For it is not in this sense that Hamlet says it 

or Shakespeare writes it. The intoxication of the irrational and the vocation of rapture turn a lucid mind away 

from the absurd. To Chestov reason is useless but there is something beyond reason. To an absurd mind reason 

is useless and there is nothing beyond reason.

[36]This leap can at least enlighten us a little more as to the true nature of the absurd. We know that it is 

worthless except in an equilibrium, that it is, above all, in the comparison and not in the terms of that 

comparison. But it so happens that Chestov puts all the emphasis on one of the terms and destroys the 

equilibrium. Our appetite for understanding, our nostalgia for the absolute are explicable only in so far, 

precisely, as we can understand and explain many things. It is useless to negate the reason absolutely. It has 

its order in which it is efficacious. It is properly that of human experience. Whence we wanted to make 

everything clear. If we cannot do so, if the absurd is born on that occasion, it is born precisely at the very 

meeting-point of that efficacious but limited reason with the ever resurgent irrational. Now, when Chestov 

rises up against a Hegelian proposition such as "the motion of the solar system takes place in conformity 

with immutable laws and those laws are its reason," when he devotes all his passion to upsetting Spinoza' s 

rationalism, he concludes, in effect, in favor of the vanity of all reason. Whence, by a natural and     illegitimate reversal, to the pre-eminence of the irrational.5

 But the transition is not evident. For here may 

intervene the notion of limit and the notion of level. The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain 

limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd. Or else, they may justify 

themselves on the level of description without for that reason being true on the level of explanation. [37]

Everything is sacrificed here to the irrational, and, the demand for clarity being conjured away, the absurd

disappears with one of the terms of its comparison. The absurd man, on the other hand, does not 

undertake such a leveling process. He recognizes the struggle, does not absolutely scorn reason, and 

admits the irrational. Thus he again embraces in a single glance all the data of experience and he is little 

inclined to leap before knowing. He knows simply that in that alert awareness there is no further place 

for hope.

What is perceptible in Leo Chestov will be perhaps even more so in Kierkegaard. To be sure, it is hard 

to outline clear propositions in so elusive a writer. But, despite apparently opposed writings, beyond the 

pseudonyms, the tricks, and the smiles, can be felt throughout that work, as it were, the presentiment (at 

the same time as the apprehension) of a truth which eventually bursts forth in the last works: Kierkegaard 

likewise takes the leap. His childhood having been so frightened by Christianity, he ultimately returns to 

its harshest aspect. For him, too, antinomy and paradox become criteria of the religious. Thus, the very 

thing that led to despair of the meaning and depth of this life now gives it its truth and its clarity. 

Christianity is the scandal, and what Kierkegaard calls for quite plainly is the third sacrifice required by 

Ignatius Loyola, the one in which God most rejoices: "The sacrifice of the intellect."6 [38]This effect of 

the "leap" is odd, but must not surprise us any longer. He makes of the absurd the criterion of the other 

world, whereas it is simply a residue of the experience of this world. "In his failure," says Kierkegaard, "the 

believer finds his triumph."

It is not for me to wonder to what stirring preaching this attitude is linked. I merely have to wonder if 

the spectacle of the absurd and its own character justifies it. On this point, I know that it is not so. Upon 

considering again the content of the absurd, one understands better the method that inspired Kierkegaard. 

Between the irrational of the world and the insurgent nostalgia of the absurd, he does not maintain the 

equilibrium. He does not respect the relationship that constitutes, properly speaking, the feeling of 

absurdity. Sure of being unable to escape the irrational, he wants at least to save himself from that 

desperate nostalgia that seems to him sterile and devoid of implication. But if he may be right on this

point in his judgment, he could not be in his negation. If he substitutes for his cry of revolt a frantic 

adherence, at once he is led to blind himself to the absurd which hitherto enlightened him and to deify the 

only certainty he henceforth possesses, the irrational. The important thing, as Abbe Galiani said to Mme 

d' Epinay, is not to be cured, but to live with one's ailments. Kierkegaard wants to be cured. To be cured is 

his frenzied wish, and it runs throughout his whole journal. The entire [39]effort of his intelligence is to 

escape the antinomy of the human condition. An all the more desperate effort since he intermittently 

perceives its vanity when he speaks of himself, as if neither fear of God nor piety were capable of bringing 

him to peace. Thus it is that, through a strained subterfuge, he gives the irrational the appearance and God 

the attributes of the absurd: unjust, incoherent, and incomprehensible. Intelligence alone in him strives to 

stifle the underlying demands of the human heart. Since nothing is proved, everything can be proved.

Indeed, Kierkegaard himself shows us the path taken. I do not want to suggest anything here, but how 

can one fail to read in his works the signs of an almost intentional mutilation of the soul to balance the 

mutilation accepted in regard to the absurd? It is the leitmotiv of the Journal. "What I lacked was the 

animal which also belongs to human destiny. . . But give me a body then." And further on: "Oh!  especially in my early youth what should I not have given to be a man, even for six months . . . what I 

lack, basically, is a body and the physical conditions of existence." Elsewhere, the same man nevertheless 

adopts the great cry of hope that has come down through so many centuries and quickened so many 

hearts, except that of the absurd man. "But for the Christian death is certainly not the end of everything 

and it implies infinitely more hope than life implies for us, even when that life is overflowing with health 

and vigor." Reconciliation through scandal is still reconciliation. It allows one perhaps, as [40]can be 

seen, to derive hope of its contrary, which is death. But even if fellow-feeling inclines one toward that 

attitude, still it must be said that excess justifies nothing. That transcends, as the saying goes, the human

scale; therefore it must be superhuman. But this "therefore" is superfluous. There is no logical certainty 

here. There is no experimental probability either. All I can say is that, in fact, that transcends my scale. If 

I do not draw a negation from it, at least I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want 

to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone. I am told again that here the intelligence 

must sacrifice its pride and the reason bow down. But if I recognize the limits of the reason, I do not 

therefore negate it, recognizing its relative powers. I merely want to remain in this middle path where the 

intelligence can remain clear. If that is its pride, I see no sufficient reason for giving it up. Nothing more 

profound, for example, than Kierkegaard' s view according to which despair is not a fact but a state: the 

very state of sin. For sin is what alienates from God. The absurd, which is the metaphysical state of the 

conscious man, does not lead to God.7

 Perhaps this notion will become clearer if I risk this shocking 

statement: the absurd is sin without God.

It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd. I know on what it is founded, this mind and this 

world straining against each other without being able to em- brace each other. I ask for the rule of life 

of that state, [41]and what I am offered neglects its basis, negates one of the terms of the painful 

opposition, demands of me a resignation. I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as mine; I 

know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured that this ignorance explains everything and 

that this darkness is my light. But there is no reply here to my intent, and this stirring lyricism cannot hide 

the paradox from me. One must therefore turn away. Kierkegaard may shout in warning: "If man had no 

eternal consciousness, if, at the bottom of everything, there were merely a wild, seething force producing 

everything, both large and trifling, in the storm of dark passions, if the bottomless void that nothing can

fill underlay all things, what would life be but despair?" This cry is not likely to stop the absurd man. 

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. If in order to elude the anxious question: "What 

would life be?" one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than 

resigning itself to falsehood, prefers to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard' s reply: "despair." Everything 

considered, a determined soul will always manage. I am taking the liberty at this point of calling the existential attitude philosophical suicide. But this 

does not imply a judgment. It is a convenient way of indicating the movement by which a thought negates 

itself and tends to transcend itself in its very negation. For the existentials negation is their God. To be 

precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human [42]reason.8

 But, like suicides, gods 

change with men. There are many ways of leaping, the essential being to leap. Those redeeming 

negations, those ultimate contradictions which negate the obstacle that has not yet been leaped over, may 

spring just as well (this is the paradox at which this reasoning aims) from a certain religious inspiration as 

from the rational order. They always lay claim to the eternal, and it is solely in this that they take the 

leap.

 

It must be repeated that the reasoning developed in this essay leaves out altogether the most 

widespread spiritual attitude of our enlightened age: the one, based on the principle that all is reason, 

which aims to explain the world. It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that 

it must be clear. That is even legitimate, but does not concern the reasoning we are following out here. In 

fact, our aim is to shed light upon the step taken by the mind when, starting from a philosophy of the 

world' s lack of meaning, it ends up by finding a meaning and depth in it. The most touching of those 

steps is religious in essence; it becomes obvious in the theme of the irrational. But the most paradoxical 

and most significant is certainly the one that attributes rational reasons to a world it originally imagined as 

devoid of any guiding principle. It is impossible in any case to reach the consequences that concern us 

without having given an idea of this new attainment of the spirit of nostalgia.

[43]I shall examine merely the theme of "the Intention" made fashionable by Husserl and the 

phenomenologists. I have already alluded to it. Originally Husserl' s method negates the classic procedure 

of the reason. Let me repeat. Thinking is not unifying or making the appearance familiar under the guise 

of a great principle. Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one' s consciousness, making 

of every image a privileged place. In other words, phenomenology declines to explain the world, it wants 

to be merely a description of actual experience. It confirms absurd thought in its initial assertion that there 

is no truth, but merely truths. From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its 

truth. Consciousness illuminates it by paying attention to it. Consciousness does not form the object of its 

understanding, it merely focuses, it is the act of attention, and, to borrow a Bergsonian image, it resembles 

the projector that suddenly focuses on an image. The difference is that there is no scenario, but a

successive and incoherent illustration. In that magic lantern all the pictures are privileged. Consciousness

suspends in experience the objects of its attention. Through its miracle it isolates them. Henceforth they

are beyond all judgments. This is the "intention" that characterizes consciousness. But the word does not 

imply any idea of finality; it is taken in its sense of "direction": its only value is topographical.

At first sight, it certainly seems that in this way nothing contradicts the absurd spirit. That apparent 

modesty of thought that limits itself to describing what it declines to explain, that intentional discipline 

whence [44]result paradoxically a profound enrichment of experience and the rebirth of the world in its 

prolixity are absurd procedures. At least at first sight. For methods of thought, in this case as elsewhere, 

always assume two aspects, one psychological and the other metaphysical.9 Thereby they harbor two truths. 

If the theme of the intentional claims to illustrate merely a psychological attitude, by which reality is drained 

instead of being explained, nothing in fact separates it from the absurd spirit. It aims to enumerate what it 

cannot transcend. It affirms solely that without any unifying principle thought can still take delight in 

describing and understanding every aspect of experience. The truth involved then for each of those aspects 

is psychological in nature. It simply testifies to the "interest" that reality can offer. It is a way of awaking a 

sleeping world and of making it vivid to the mind. But if one attempts to extend and give a rational basis to 

that notion of truth, if one claims to discover in this way the "essence" of each object of knowledge, one 

restores its depth to experience. For an absurd mind that is incomprehensible. Now, it is this wavering 

between modesty and assurance that is noticeable in the intentional attitude, and this shimmering of 

phenomenological thought will illustrate the absurd reasoning better than anything else.

For Husserl speaks likewise of "extra-temporal essences" brought to light by the intention, and he 

sounds like Plato. All things are not explained by one thing [45]but by all things. I see no difference. To 

be sure, those ideas or those essences that consciousness "effectuates" at the end of every description are 

not yet to be considered perfect models. But it is asserted that they are directly present in each datum of 

perception. There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences 

giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up. Platonic 

realism becomes intuitive, but it is still realism. Kierkegaard was swallowed up in his God; Parmenides 

plunged thought into the One. But here thought hurls itself into an abstract polytheism. But this is not all: hallucinations and fictions likewise belong to "extra-temporal essences." In the new world of ideas, the 

species of centaurs collaborates with the more modest species of metropolitan man.

For the absurd man, there was a truth as well as a bitterness in that purely psychological opinion that 

all aspects of the world are privileged. To say that everything is privileged is tantamount to saying that 

everything is equivalent. But the metaphysical aspect of that truth is so far-reaching that through an 

elementary reaction he feels closer perhaps to Plato. He is taught, in fact, that every image presupposes an 

equally privileged essence. In this ideal world without hierarchy, the formal army is composed solely of 

generals. To be sure, transcendency had been eliminated. But a sudden shift in thought brings back into 

the world a sort of fragmentary immanence which restores to the universe its depth.

Am I to fear having carried too far a theme handled [46]with greater circumspection by its creators? I 

read merely these assertions of Husserl, apparently paradoxical yet rigorously logical if what precedes is accepted:

"That which is true is true absolutely, in itself; truth isone, identical with itself, however different the creatureswho 

perceive it, men, monsters, angels or gods." Reason triumphs and trumpets forth with that voice, I cannot deny. 

What can its assertions mean in the absurd world? The perception of an angel or a god has no meaning for me. 

That geometrical spot where divine reason ratifies mine will always be incomprehensible to me. There, too, I 

discern a leap, and though performed in the abstract, it nonetheless means for me forgetting just whatI do not want 

to forget. When farther on Husserl exclaims: "If all masses subject to attraction were to disappear, the law of 

attraction would not be destroyed but would simply remain without any possible application," I know that I am 

faced with a metaphysic of consolation. And if I want to discover the point where thought leaves the path of 

evidence, I have only to reread the parallel reasoning that Husserl voices regarding the mind: "If we could 

contemplate clearly the exact laws of psychic processes, they would be seen to be likewise eternal and invariable, 

like the basic laws of theoretical natural science. Hence they would be valid even if therewere no psychic process." 

Even if the mind were not, its laws would be! I see then that of a psychological truth Husserl aims to make a

rational rule: after having denied the integrating power of human reason, he leaps by this expedient to eternal 

Reason.

Husserl' s theme of the "concrete universe" cannot [47]then surprise me. If I am told that all essences are 

not formal but that some are material, that the first are the object of logic and the second of science, this is 

merely a question of definition. The abstract, I am told, indicates but a part, without consistency in itself, of a 

concrete universal. But the wavering already noted allows me to throw light on the confusion of these terms. For

that may mean that the concrete object of my attention, this sky, the reflection of that water on this coat, alone

preserve the prestige of the real that my interest isolatesin the world. And I shall not deny it. But that may mean

also that this coat itself is universal, has its particular and sufficient essence, belongs to the world of forms. I

then realize that merely the order of the procession has been changed. This world has ceased to have its 

reflection in a higher universe, but the heaven of forms is figured in the host of images of this earth. This 

changes nothing for me. Rather than encountering here a taste for the concrete, the meaning of the human 

condition, I find an intellectualism sufficiently unbridled to generalize the concrete itself.

It is futile to be amazed by the apparent paradox that leads thought to its own negation by the opposite paths

of humiliated reason and triumphal reason. From the abstract god of Husserl to the dazzling god of Kierkegaard 

the distance is not so great. Reason and the irrational lead to the same preaching. In truth the way matters but 

little; the will to arrive suffices. The abstract philosopher and the religious philosopher start out from the same 

disorder and support each other in the same [48]anxiety. But the essential is to explain. Nostalgia is stronger 

here than knowledge. It is significant that the thought of the epoch is at once one of the most deeply imbued 

with a philosophy of the non-significance of the world and one of the most divided in its conclusions. It is 

constantly oscillating between extreme rationalization of reality which tends to break up that thought into

standard reasons and its extreme irrationalization which tends to deify it. But this divorce is only apparent. It 

is a matter of reconciliation, and, in both cases, the leap suffices. It is always wrongly thought that the notion 

of reason is a one-way notion. To tell the truth, however rigorous it may be in its ambition, this concept is 

nonetheless just as unstable as others. Reason bears a quite human aspect, but it also is able to turn toward the divine. Since Plotinus, who was the first to reconcile it with the eternal climate, it has learned to turn 

away from the most cherished of its principles, which is contradiction, in order to integrate into it the 

strangest, the quite magic one of participation.10 It is an instrument of thought and not thought itself. 

Above all, a man's thought is his nostalgia.

Just as reason was able to soothe the melancholy of Plotinus, it provides modern anguish the 

means of [49]calming itself in the familiar setting of the eternal. The absurd mind has less luck. For it 

the world is neither so rational nor so irrational. It is unreasonable and only that. With Husserl the reason 

eventually has no limits at all. The absurd, on the contrary, establishes its limits since it is powerless to 

calm its anguish. Kierkegaard independently asserts that a single limit is enough to negate that anguish. 

But the absurd does not go so far. For it that limit is directed solely at the reason's ambitions. The theme 

of the irrational, as it is conceived by the existentials, is reason becoming confused and escaping by 

negating itself. The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.

Only at the end of this difficult path does the absurd man recognize his true motives. Upon comparing 

his inner exigence and what is then offered him, he suddenly feels he is going to turn away. In the 

universe of Husserl the world becomes clear and that longing for familiarity that man's heart harbors 

becomes useless. In Kierkegaard's apocalypse that desire for clarity must be given up if it wants to be 

satisfied. Sin is not so much knowing (if it were, everybody would be innocent) as wanting to know. 

Indeed, it is the only sin of which the absurd man can feel that it constitutes both his guilt and his 

innocence. He is offered a solution in which all the past contradictions have become merely polemical

games. But this is not the way he experienced them. Their truth must be preserved, which consists in not 

being satisfied. He does not want preaching.

My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence [50]that aroused it. That evidence is the absurd. It 

is that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this 

fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together. Kierkegaard suppresses my nostalgia 

and Husserl gathers together that universe. That is not what I was expecting. It was a matter of living and 

thinking with those dislocations, of knowing whether one had to accept or refuse. There can be no question 

of masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It is 

essential to know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of 

it. I am not interested in philosophical suicide, but rather in plain suicide. I merely wish to purge it of its 

emotional content and know its logic and its integrity. Any other position implies for the absurd mind 

deceit and the mind's retreat before what the mind itself has brought to light. Husserl claims to obey the 

desire to escape "the inveterate habit of living and thinking in certain well-known and convenient 

conditions of existence," but the final leap restores in him the eternal and its comfort. The leap does not 

represent an extreme danger as Kierkegaard would like it to do. The danger, on the contrary, lies in the

subtle instant that precedes the leap. Being able to remain on that dizzying crest—that is integrity and the

rest is subterfuge. I know also that never has helplessness inspired such striking harmonies as those of 

Kierkegaard. But if helplessness has its place in the indifferent landscapes of history, it has none in a 

reasoning whose exigence is now known. [51]

Now the main thing is done, I hold certain facts from which I cannot separate. What I know, what is 

certain, what I cannot deny, what I cannot reject—this is what counts. I can negate everything of that part 

of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity 

and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except 

this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don' t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it 

is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can 

understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me—that is what I understand. And these two 

certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a 

rational and reasonable principle —I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit 

without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?

If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this 

problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am now 

opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity. This ridiculous reason is 

what sets me in opposition to all creation. I cannot cross it out with a [52]stroke of the pen. What I believe 

to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support. And what 

constitutes the basis of that conflict, of that break between the world and my mind, but the awareness of it? If 

therefore I want to preserve it, I can through a constant awareness, ever revived, ever alert. This is what, for the 

moment, I must remember. At this moment the absurd, so obvious and yet so hard to win, returns to a man's 

life and finds its home there. At this moment, too, the mind can leave the arid, dried-up path of lucid effort. 

That path now emerges in daily life. It encounters the world of the anonymous impersonal pronoun "one," 

but henceforth man enters in with his revolt and his lucidity. He has forgotten how to hope. This hell of the 

present is his Kingdom at last. All problems recover their sharp edge. Abstract evidence retreats before the 

poetry of forms and colors. Spiritual conflicts become embodied and return to the abject and magnificent 

shelter of man' s heart. None of them is settled. But all are transfigured. Is one going to die, escape by the 

leap, rebuild a mansion of ideas and forms to one' s own scale? Is one, on the contrary, going to take up 

the heart-rending and marvelous wager of the absurd? Let' s make a final effort in this regard and draw 

all our conclusions. The body, affection, creation, action, human nobility will then resume their places in 

this mad world. At last man will again find there the wine of the absurd and the bread of indifference on 

which he feeds his greatness.

Let us insist again on the method: it is a matter of persisting. At a certain point on his path 

the absurd [53]man is tempted. History is not lacking in either religions or prophets, even without 

gods. He is asked to leap. All he can reply is that he doesn't fully understand, that it is not obvious. Indeed, 

he does not want to do anything but what he fully understands. He is assured that this is the sin of pride, but 

he does not understand the notion of sin; that perhaps hell is in store, but he has not enough imagination to 

visualize that strange future; that he is losing immortal life, but that seems to him an idle consideration. An 

attempt is made to get him to admit his guilt. He feels innocent. To tell the truth, that is all he feels—his 

irreparable innocence. This is what allows him everything. Hence, what he demands of himself is to live

solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is, and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He 

is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find 

out if it is possible to live without appeal. Now I can broach the notion of suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At this

point the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a

meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no 

meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one will live this fate, 

knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by 

consciousness. Negating one of the terms of the opposition on which he lives amounts to escaping it. To 

abolish conscious revolt is to [54]elude the problem. The theme of permanent revolution is thus carried into 

individual experience. Living is keeping the absurd alive. Keeping it alive is, above all, contemplating it. 

Unlike Eurydice, the absurd dies only when we turn away from it. One of the only coherent philosophical 

positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. It is an insistence 

upon an impossible transparency. It challenges the world anew every second. Just as danger provided man 

the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience. It is that constant presence of man in his own eyes. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope.

That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.

This is where it is seen to what a degree absurd experience is remote from suicide. It may be thought 

that suicide follows revolt—but wrongly. For it does not represent the logical outcome of revolt. It is just 

the contrary by the consent it presupposes. Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme. Everything 

is over and man returns to his essential history. His future, his unique and dreadful future—he sees and 

rushes toward it. In its way, suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs the absurd in the same death. But I know 

that in order to keep alive, the absurd cannot be settled. It escapes suicide to the extent that it is 

simultaneously awareness and rejection of death. It is, at the extreme limit of the condemned man's last 

thought, that shoelace that despite everything he sees a few yards away, on the very [55]brink of his 

dizzying fall. The contrary of suicide, in fact, is the man condemned to death. 

That revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a life, it restores its majesty to that 

life. To a man devoid of blinders, there is no finer sight than that of the intelligence at grips with a reality 

that transcends it. The sight of human pride is unequaled. No disparagement is of any use. That discipline 

that the mind imposes on itself, that will conjured up out of nothing, that face-to-face struggle have 

something exceptional about them. To impoverish that reality whose inhumanity constitutes man's 

majesty is tantamount to impoverishing him himself. I understand then why the doctrines that explain 

everything to me also debilitate me at the same time. They relieve me of the weight of my own life, and 

yet I must carry it alone. At this juncture, I cannot conceive that a skeptical metaphysics can be joined to 

an ethics of renunciation.

Consciousness and revolt, these rejections are the contrary of renunciation. Everything that is 

indomitable and passionate in a human heart quickens them, on the contrary, with its own life. It is essential 

to die unreconciled and not of one' s own free will. Suicide is a repudiation. The absurd man can only 

drain everything to the bitter end, and deplete himself. The absurd is his extreme tension, which he 

maintains constantly by solitary effort, for he knows that in that consciousness and in that day-to-day 

revolt he gives proof of his only truth, which is defiance. This is a first consequence. [56]If I remain in that prearranged position which consists in drawing all the conclusions (and 

nothing else) involved in a newly discovered notion, I am faced with a second paradox. In order to 

remain faithful to that method, I have nothing to do with the problem of metaphysical liberty. Knowing 

whether or not man is free doesn't interest me. I can experience only my own freedom. As to it, I can have 

no general notions, but merely a few clear insights. The problem of "freedom as such" has no meaning. For 

it is linked in quite a different way with the problem of God. Knowing whether or not man is free involves 

knowing whether he can have a master. The absurdity peculiar to this problem comes from the fact that the 

very notion that makes the problem of freedom possible also takes away all its meaning. For in the presence 

of God there is less a problem of freedom than a problem of evil. You know the alternative: either we are 

not free and God the all-powerful is responsible for evil. Or we are free and responsible but God is not all-

powerful. All the scholastic subtleties have neither added anything to nor subtracted anything from the 

acuteness of this paradox.

This is why I cannot get lost in the glorification or the mere definition of a notion which eludes me 

and loses its meaning as soon as it goes beyond the frame of reference of my individual experience. I 

cannot understand what kind of freedom would be given me by a higher being. I have lost the sense of 

hierarchy. The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst 

of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action. Now [57]if the absurd cancels all my 

chances of eternal freedom, it restores and magnifies, on the other hand, my freedom of action. That 

privation of hope and future means an increase in man's availability.

Before encountering the absurd, the everyday man lives with aims, a concern for the future or for 

justification (with regard to whom or what is not the question). He weighs his chances, he counts on 

"someday," his retirement or the labor of his sons. He still thinks that something in his life can be directed. 

In truth, he acts as if he were free, even if all the facts make a point of contradicting that liberty. But after the absurd, everything is upset. That idea that "I am," my way of acting as if everything has a meaning (even if, 

on occasion, I said that nothing has)—all that is given the lie in vertiginous fashion by the absurdity of a 

possible death. Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences—all this 

presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it. But at that 

moment I am well aware that that higher liberty, that freedom to be, which alone can serve as basis for a 

truth, does not exist. Death is there as the only reality. After death the chips are down. I am not even free, 

either, to perpetuate myself, but a slave, and, above all, a slave without hope of an eternal revolution, 

without recourse to contempt. And who without revolution and without contempt can remain a slave? What 

freedom can exist in the fullest sense without assurance of eternity?

But at the same time the absurd man realizes that hitherto he was bound to that postulate of 

freedom on [58]the illusion of which he was living. In a certain sense, that hampered him. To the extent to 

which he imagined a purpose to his life, he adapted himself to the demands of a purpose to be achieved and 

became the slave of his liberty. Thus I could not act otherwise than as the father (or the engineer or the leader of 

a nation, or the post-office sub-clerk) that I am preparing to be. I think I can choose to be that rather than 

something else. I think so unconsciously, to be sure. But at the same time I strengthen my postulate with the 

beliefs of those around me, with the presumptions of my human environment (others are so sure of being free, 

and that cheerful mood is so contagious!). However far one may remain from any presumption, moral or social, 

one is partly influenced by them and even, for the best among them (there are good and bad presumptions), 

one adapts one' s life to them. Thus the absurd man realizes that he was not really free. To speak clearly, to the 

extent to which I hope, to which I worry about a truth that might be individual to me, about a way of being or 

creating, to the extent to which I arrange my life and prove thereby that I accept its having a meaning, I create 

for myself barriers between which I confine my life. I do like so many bureaucrats of the mind and heart who 

only fill me with disgust and whose only vice, I now see clearly, is to take man' s freedom seriously.

The absurd enlightens me on this point: there is no future. Henceforth this is the reason for my inner freedom. I 

shall use two comparisons here. Mystics, to begin with, find freedom in giving themselves. By losing themselves 

in their god, by accepting his rules, they become [59]secretly free. In spontaneously accepted slavery they recover 

a deeper independence. But what does that freedom mean? It may be said, above all, that they feel free with regard 

to themselves, and not so much free asliberated. Likewise, completely turned toward death (taken here as the most 

obvious absurdity), the absurd man feels released from everything outside that passionate attention crystallizing in 

him. He enjoys a freedom with regard to common rules. It can be seen at this point that the initial themes of 

existential philosophy keep their entire value. The return to consciousness, the escape from everyday sleep 

represent the first steps of absurd freedom. But it is existential preaching that is alluded to, and with it that spiritual 

leap which basically escapes consciousness. In the same way (this is my second comparison) the slaves of 

antiquity did not belong to themselves. But they knew that freedom which consists in not feeling responsible.11

Death, too, has patrician hands which, while crushing, also liberate.

Losing oneself in that bottomless certainty, feeling henceforth sufficiently remote from one' s own life to 

increase it and take a broad view of it—this involves the principle of a liberation. Such new independence has a

definite time limit, like any freedom of action. It does not write a check on eternity. But it takes the place of the 

illusions offreedom, which all stopped with death. The divine availability of the condemned man before whom 

the prison doors open in a certain early dawn, [60]that unbelievable disinterestedness with regard to every-

thing except for the pure flame of life—it is clear that death and the absurd are here the principles of the 

only reasonable freedom: that which a human heart can experience and live. This is a second consequence. 

The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing 

is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness. He can then decide to 

accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a 

life without consolation. 

But what does life mean in such a universe? Nothing else for the moment but indifference to the future and a

desire to use up everything that is given. Belief in the meaning of life always implies a scale of values, a choice,

our preferences. Belief in the absurd, according to our definitions, teaches the contrary. But this is worth ex-

amining.

Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me. I do not want to get out of 

my depth. This aspect of life being given me, can I adapt myself to it? Now, faced with this particular 

concern, belief in the absurd is tantamount to substituting the quantity of experiences for the quality. If I 

convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole 

equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which 

it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its [61]limited fate, then I 

must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living. It is not up to me to wonder if this is 

vulgar or revolting, elegant or deplorable. Once and for all, value judgments are discarded here in favor of 

factual judgments. I have merely to draw the conclusions from what I can see and to risk nothing that is 

hypothetical. Supposing that living in this way were not honorable, then true propriety would command me

to be dishonorable.

The most living; in the broadest sense, that rule means nothing. It calls for definition. It seems to begin

with the fact that the notion of quantity has not been sufficiently explored. For it can account for a large 

share of human experience. A man' s rule of conduct and his scale of values have no meaning except 

through the quantity and variety of experiences he has been in a position to accumulate. Now, the 

conditions of modern life impose on the majority of men the same quantity of experiences and 

consequently the same profound experience. To be sure, there must also be taken into consideration the 

individual's spontaneous contribution, the "given" element in him. But I cannot judge of that, and let me 

repeat that my rule here is to get along with the immediate evidence. I see, then, that the individual character 

of a common code of ethics lies not so much in the ideal importance of its basic principles as in the norm of 

an experience that it is possible to measure. To stretch a point somewhat, the Greeks had the code of their 

leisure just as we have the code of our eight-hour day. But already many men among the most tragic cause

us to foresee that a longer experience changes this table [62]of values. They make us imagine that adventurer 

of the everyday who through mere quantity of experiences would break all records (I am purposely using this 

sports expression) and would thus win his own code of ethics.12 Yet let' s avoid romanticism and just ask 

ourselves what such an attitude may mean to a man with his mind made up to take up his bet and to observe 

strictly what he takes to be the rules of the game.

Breaking all the records is first and foremost being faced with the world as often as possible. How can that be 

done without contradictions and without playing on words? For on the one hand the absurd teaches that all

experiences are unimportant, and on the other it urgestoward the greatest quantity of experiences. How, then, can 

one fail to do as so many of those men I was speaking of earlier—choose the form of life that brings us the most 

possible of that human matter, thereby introducing a scale of values that on the other hand one claims to reject?

But again it is the absurd and its contradictory life that teaches us. For the mistake is thinking that that quantity 

of experiences depends on the circumstances of our life when it depends solely on us. Here we have to be over-

simple. To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is 

up to us to be conscious of them. Being [63]aware of one' s life, one' s revolt, one' s freedom, and to the 

maximum, is living, and to the maximum. Where lucidity dominates, the scale of values becomes useless. 

Let's be even more simple. Let us say that the sole obstacle, the sole deficiency to be made good, is constituted   by premature death. Thus it is that no depth, no emotion, no passion, and no sacrifice could render equal in the eyes of the absurd man (even if he wished it so) a conscious life of forty years and a lucidity spread oversixty years.13

Madness and death are his irreparables. Man does not choose. The absurd and the extra life it involves therefore do 

not depend on man's will, but on its contrary, which is death.14 Weighing words carefully, it is altogether a 

question of luck. One just has to be able to consent to this. There will never be any substitute for twenty years of 

life and experience.

By what is an odd inconsistency in such an alert race, the Greeks claimed that those who died young were

beloved of the gods. And that is true only if you are willing to believe that entering the ridiculous world of the 

gods is forever losing the purest of joys, which is feeling, and feeling on this earth. The present and the 

succession of presents before a constantly conscious soul is the ideal [64]of the absurd man. But the word 

"ideal" rings false in this connection. It is not even his vocation, but merely the third consequence of his 

reasoning. Having started from an anguished awareness of the inhuman, the meditation on the absurd 

returns at the end of its itinerary to the very heart of the passionate flames of human revolt.15

***

Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. 

By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and 

I refuse suicide. I know, to be sure, the dull resonance that vibrates throughout these days. Yet I have but 

a word to say: that it is necessary. When Nietzsche writes: "It clearly seems that the chief thing in heaven 

and on earth is to obey at length and in a single direction: inthe long run there results something for which it isworth the 

trouble of living on this earth as, for example, virtue, art, music, the dance, reason, the mind—something that transfigures,

something delicate, mad, or divine," he elucidates the rule of a really distinguished code of ethics. But he also points the way 

of the absurdman. Obeying the flame is both the easiest and the [65]hardest thing to do. However, it is good for man 

to judge himself occasionally. He is alone in being able to do so. "Prayer," says Alain, "is when night 

descends over thought." "But the mind must meet the night," reply the mystics and the existentials. Yes, 

indeed, but not that night that is born under closed eyelids and through the mere will of man—dark, 

impenetrable night that the mind calls up in order to plunge into it. If it must encounter a night, let it be 

rather that of despair, which remains lucid—polar night, vigil of the mind, whence will arise perhaps that 

white and virginal brightness which outlines every object in the light of the intelligence. At that degree, 

equivalence encounters passionate understanding. Then it is no longer even a question of judging the 

existential leap. It resumes its place amid the age-old fresco of human attitudes. For the spectator, if he is 

conscious, that leap is still absurd. In so far as it thinks it solves the paradox, it reinstates it intact. On this 

score, it is stirring. On this score, everything resumes its place and the absurd world is reborn in all its 

splendor and diversity.

But it is bad to stop, hard to be satisfied with a single way of seeing, to go without contradiction, perhaps 

the most subtle of all spiritual forces. The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to 

live. 

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the 

stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more 

dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another 

tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in 

this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with,

he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Ægina, the daughter of 

Æsopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to 

Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Æsopus would give

water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was 

punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto 

could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated 

Death from the hands of her conqueror.

It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to 

[120]cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. 

And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to 

return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed 

water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, 

signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the

sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the 

impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, 

where his rock was ready for him.

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as 

through his torture. 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. Nothing is told to us about Sisyphus in the underworld. 

Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole 

effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; 

one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered 

mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-

clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort [121]measured by skyless space and time without depth, 

the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower 

world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is 

already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment 

of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his

suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and 

gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at 

every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the 

same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes 

conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his

wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his 

torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. 

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not 

too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and [122] the sorrow was in the beginning. 

When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, 

it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The 

boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from 

being acknowledged. Thus, Œdipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he 

knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond

linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many 

ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' 

Œdipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms 

modern heroism.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What! by 

such narrow ways—? " There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the 

same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the 

absurd discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that 

all is well," says Œdipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It 

teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with 

dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be

settled among men.

[123]All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing 

Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe 

suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, 

secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no 

sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will 

henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one 

which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his 

days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his 

rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, 

created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the 

wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, 

he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus 

teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This 

universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each

mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights 

is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.