He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero.He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains.To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld.They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. 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."The Myth of Sisyphus ", essay in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) by Albert Camus Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962), p.The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.Lewis, Ten blind leaders of the blind 1910 p. Philosophy, never daunted, rolls her Sisyphus stone to the very summit of the mountain and then, when victory seems assured, back it tumbles to the starting point. It builds its imposing temples on foundations of sand, and no sooner is the capstone planted in triumph than the entire superstructive falls into ruin. Round and round it moves in a fatal circle from which there is no exit. Twenty centuries of herculean labors, performed by the greatest intellects the race produced during that period, and philosophy ends where philosophy began - the will-o'-the-wisp it pursues is as far beyond the reach of Kant as it was of Plato. The history of philosophy records a series of defeats, resulting in final and complete disaster.In Greek mythology Sisyphus (Greek: Σίσυφος) was punished for his self-aggrandizing craftiness and deceitfulness by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, repeating this action for eternity. The fight itself towards the summits suffices to fill a heart of man it is necessary to imagine Sisyphus happy.
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