He would then have to repeat this laborious process, for all eternity. Here the king would have to roll an immense boulder to the top of a steep hill and once he neared the top, the boulder would roll back down to the bottom. For cheating death twice, for his offences to both Zeus and Hades, Sisyphus was sentenced to eternal punishment in Tartarus, the lowest region of the Underworld. But he broke his promise, of course, cheating death once again, living many years on earth until he died of old age. Sisyphus pleaded with Hades to allow him to return to earth for three days to arrange the proper funereal practices, after which he promised to return to the Underworld. Due to this trickery, Sisyphus appeared before Hades as an unburied pauper, arguing that he had no right to be there, especially since he had no fare for Charon, so he should not have been allowed to make the journey across the river Styx. burying him, giving him a funeral feast, performing sacrifices to Hades or Persephone, or placing a coin under his tongue, which was used to pay Charon, who ferried the deceased across the river Styx to the Underworld). Before descending to the Underworld of Hades (the god of the dead), he told his wife Merope not to carry out the traditional funereal practices (i.e. However, the king would come to cheat death a second time.
#Camus sisyphus free#
The war god Ares eventually set Thanatos free and delivered Sisyphus to him. But thanks to his cunning abilities, Sisyphus managed to trap Thanatos in chains in his house. Furious about this betrayal, Zeus sent Thanatos (the god of death) after him. Sisyphus disclosed this secret to Asopus in exchange for an eternal spring to be added to his kingdom. Sisyphus betrayed Zeus by revealing one of the god’s secrets, the whereabouts of Aegina, the daughter of the river god Asopus, who Zeus had kidnapped. The Greek poet Homer described the king Sisyphus as “the most cunning of men” in the Iliad – and it was precisely his craftiness that led to his downfall. But moreover, laughter is perhaps more existentially curative than the purely defiant attitude that characterises Camusian revolt. In fact, I propose that laughter is perhaps the greatest form of existential revolt available to us. I will argue that Camus’ form of revolt, which involves a defiant acceptance of absurdity, without resignation, should also include laughter. In this essay, I do not necessarily want to refute Camus’ recommendation, but I do want to reframe or supplement it. However, Camus offers us a form of salvation, a Camusian kind of existential revolt, which can help us deal with the absurdity of existence. He draws on the ancient Greek myth of King Sisyphus in order to typify what it means to exist as a human in day-to-day life, which is a rather bleak picture it turns out. In his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), the French existentialist Albert Camus lays out his exposition of the human condition.
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