Existentialism

Debris breaks off and tumbles into darkness. Pushing. Pushing. Sweat. Listless remembrance piercing recognition. Repetition. Feet, bloody, against the ragged rocks. Volcanic heat blazing all around. Trapped? Or happy? The plight of Sisyphus, an eternal misery. And endless oblivion. 

Existentialism is a form of philosophical inquiry that explores the issue of human existence. It is intrinsically nihilistic and posits the value of human existence. We are all masters of our own fate and left to the whims of fancy. Never to search for meaning in life but to create it. Less the destiny set by God and more the future we pave. Existentialism explains as much as it confuses. Why curb our unbound freedom with rules? Mankind is unable to grasp the endless. We can never truly wrap our minds around freedom in its entirety and cannot be left to our own devices. Chaos. Disarray. Pandemonium. So we snip away at the horizon, narrowing it down to the tiniest thread. We live our lives balancing on that thread. Those who fail are punished. Deviation from social norms requires social control, does it not? Existentialism warps the thread, and stretches the horizon back to its ever-expanding glory. Critiquing mass society, it pulls us back from the herd and makes us stop to question the expectations of the public. If we are sheep, then who is the shepherd? God? The government? If a lamb breaks free to make its own destiny, is its death at the hands of a wolf while grazing in the lushest field a cautionary tale or a tale of tragic heroism?

“The novelist is neither a historian nor a prophet: he is an explorer of existence” according to Milan Kundera. A novel usually traces the protagonist's journey through life and delves into their human existence. Does that make the novelist too, an existentialist? In a manner of speaking that is what this research paper hopes to enquire and answer. Recently, with the broadening of the concept of existentialism, it expands its horizons to not just include the pillars of existential literature such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka but going as far back as Shakespeare. According to some scholars this is problematic as it encourages “a tendency to conflate the existentialist with the existential”. However, some could argue in favor of this new approach, for isn’t every work of art either incidentally or emotionally autobiographical to some extent, albeit on a subconscious level?

‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, a book by famous French philosopher Albert Camus (1913 - 1960), highlights the plight of Sisyphus. Forced to roll a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back down again. Over and over. Without an end. Albert Camus postulates that Sisyphus achieved happiness in that absurd repetition. In the essay, Camus dives into the theory of what he calls ‘the absurd’. The conflict between meaning and chaos. Our wants from the universe are rarely met with a response from the vast galaxy of unnerving possibilities. Meaning, by extension, is a leap of faith. Unknown yet bluntly optimistic. Those who do not grasp meaning are therefore lost lambs of the herd. Their probable fate, as gruesome as the snapping jaws of the rabid hound. The other conclusion. Life is meaningless. Two probabilities split the formerly straight path. ‘If life has no meaning, does that mean life is not worth living?’ Camus blazes past mere leaps of faith and or suicide, trenching through the thick woods of the forest to cut forth a new trail. The road less taken, perhaps. Much like Sisyphus achieved happiness through that absurd repetition, human beings can accept our inconsequential lives as atoms floating through a space rock hurtling 107000 kilometers per second, orbiting around the fixed elliptical. Year after year. Happiness in mindless repetition without meaning is absurd. Nonetheless, it is happiness.