This is the struggle of the absurd man to exist in an apathetic, incoherent universe while longing for meaning. From the perspective of the universe, our labor is meaningless, so it falls upon our shoulders to find meaning in what we do. So it is with our own lives-if there is no God and no coherent meaning in the universe then our everyday activities become entirely meaningless. Sisyphus realizes that the rock’s falling is inevitable, so pushing the rock up the mountain becomes pointless. As a metaphor for the human condition and the absurdity of our experience, Sisyphus is the epitome of the absurd hero because he is able to recognize the absurdity of the human condition, abandon hope, find happiness in material reality, and ultimately find meaning in the struggle itself. Sisyphus’ punishment, to roll a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll down again-ad infinitum-is a fitting symbol of the post-WWI modernist era. Then, I use these heroes to analyze the existentialist perspective of man’s freedom from the bias of false truth. In this research paper, I explain Sisyphus’ fulfillment of the absurd hero and then hold Ferdinand to the same criteria of the absurd hero as defined by Camus: one that realizes and accepts the absurd, one that is guided by his passions and who values life above all. He attempts to save himself in his final moments, but he fails and dies anyway. They live together until Marianne reveals she has another lover, at which point Ferdinand kills them both and commits suicide. Ferdinand realizes the absurdity of consumerism and flees from his home and family with his lover, Marianne. Inspired by the same sentiments, French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard adopted the absurd theme in his film “Pierrot le Fou” that explores the struggle of the modern man through Ferdinand, the protagonist. Sisyphus faces an absurd task because his task loses meaning after he becomes conscious of the inevitable fall after each struggle pushing the rock up the mountain. Sisyphus’s eternal punishment in the underworld is to push a giant boulder up a mountain, only to have it fall down again upon its own weight every time he reaches the summit. The Greek myth explains how Sisyphus broke the rules of the Gods by chaining Death when Death came to take Sisyphus to the underworld. In 1942, Albert Camus wrote about the absurdity of life in his essay of the “Myth of Sisyphus.” Camus presents Sisyphus as the portrait of the absurd hero. Thus, in the void left by the disappearance of God and any sense of purpose commuted by Christianity, the existentialists saw “absurdity,” or the absurd. Most of all, humanity ultimately would have to face death without any fulfillment of greater purpose on earth. Without the presence of a higher entity embedded in western society and culture, the existentialists followed this reasoning until it led to the loss of purpose in daily life and routine. Second, he is ultimately responsible for his own fate in the world. First, man can no longer expect salvation at death, which is followed by nothingness. Either way, this tenet has two important implications. One of the guiding principles of existentialism is that God is either dead or has abandoned humanity. These sentiments incited young philosophers to understand the world in a new philosophy they termed “existentialism,” giving their era a modernist perspective grounded in a loss of meaning. How could God exist in such a morally desolate world? Abandoned and mutilated, how we could be the child of God. In the wake of this unprecedented suffering, we began to question how we define our selves, our God and our purpose. Suddenly, in the trenches of war, we witnessed the horror of chemical warfare, the damage of bombs and grenades, and the mass deaths wrought by automatic machine guns. Before World War I, the world was not fully cognizant of the magnitude of man’s capacity to destroy and maim.
0 kommentar(er)
