The Myth of Sisyphus

There is only one truly serious philosophical question, Camus begins — and it is not God, or consciousness, or the nature of matter. It is whether life is worth living. Everything else follows from that. And his answer — arrived at through the most honest confrontation with the absurdity of the human condition that twentieth-century philosophy has produced — is yes. But only after you have looked directly at the void and refused to blink.

The image Camus builds to anchor his argument is one of philosophy’s most enduring: Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll his boulder up a hill forever and watch it roll back down, forever. Camus’s question is: what is Sisyphus thinking on the walk back down? And his answer — which is not resignation and not despair but a kind of defiant, clear-eyed joy in the act of existing — changed the way a generation thought about the meaning of life.

Brief, brilliant, and more useful in a crisis than almost any other philosophical text. The foundation of absurdist philosophy and one of the essential works of twentieth-century thought. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.