Sisyphus is a meme. In particular, the representations of his punishment in Hades of an eternity of pushing a boulder up an incline, until its weight became too great, and it rolls back down [22: 106–7]. This image of Sisyphus – of the fruitily of human doing – has circulated throughout history [30: 12]. A reminder of entropy, and the hubris of humanity daring to achieve lasting change in an inhuman universe.
The causes of Sisyphus’s punishment is less clear [22: 105]. The myths mix and diverge. There seems agreement that he was the king of Corinth and was clever, manipulative and pragmatic. He has been accused of murdering travellers and profiting from their goods and seducing his niece as part of a complex plot to murder his brother. However, he seems to come into his myth-hood through tricking the gods and avoiding death. Sisyphus witnesses Zeus carrying off the river god Asopus’ daughter. He tells Asopus her location in return for a water spring in Corinth [22: 425]. Sent to Hades by Zeus, he escapes by tricking and binding Thantos thus preventing death on Earth [22: 553]. Caught again he manipulates his wife around his burial rites and then tricks Persephone and is sent back to Corinth where he thoroughly enjoys himself [19: 368] until finally detained by Hermes and locked into his everlasting punishment [22: 554].
Sisyphus and his punishment have circulated since classical times. He had a roll-on part in Ovid’s version of Orpheus and Eurydice; pausing his eternal labours to listen to Orpheus’ music. Political cartoonists and public pundits have represented agendas as Sisyphean tasks. There are debates about whether health care in a pandemic are ‘Sisyphean’ [15]. Similar poverty law practice has been described as Sisyphean [39: 493] and also the challenges facing minority law professors in North American law schools [20]. One of the more striking invocations of Sisyphus is Albert Camus’ ‘troubling’ [40: 278] 1942 reflection on the absurd and suicide, that ends with Sisyphus and his rock as not a warning but an ideal. Indeed, contrary to the strain and pain that Titian captures in the famous 1548 painting of Sisyphus’ bare back as his struggles with his stone, Camus concludes that: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” [7: 24].
The progression of ideas that leads Camus seemingly to this non sequitur is illuminating. Camus like Kafka is a serious interlocuter of the absurd. Located between reflection on the everyday of then modern mechanical living and the work of Kierkegaard, Jaspers and Heidegger, Camus postulates two essentials. The first is that the world is irrational – a chaos of forces, events and stimulations – that is beyond human reasoning and reckoning. A sovereign nature dark and unknowable: ‘This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said’ [7: 7]. The second is a human condition that is inherently orientated towards trying to make sense of this irrationality, a “wild longing for clarity” [7: 7]. Humans are condemned to be creatures of sense in a nonsensical universe [7: 18]. For Camus “the absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world” [7: 10]. It is absurd to be a being driven to making meaning and sense in a universe that is incapable of providing meaning and sense.
Camus notes that awareness, or a sense of the absurdity of existence comes in moments of doubt. He presents the repetitiousness of modern, more precisely mid-20th century, living:
Rising, street-car, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, street-car, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement [7: 5].
This amazement emerges when the “primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia” [7: 5]. Camus presents three responses to this why.
The first is the response of the modern to redouble efforts. The momentary why becomes sublimated into the time stream: “during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: ‘tomorrow,’ ‘later on,’ ‘when you have made your way,’ ‘you will understand when you are old enough’” [7: 5]. Activity and doing in the present is justified for a sense of a better future. This is the prudence of the moderns that Hobbes discussed, of a being composed of reason and time, who refuses to be subdued by the hostile, alien universe, and plans, accumulates and strives to set in place security, wealth, happiness in the future [26: 12–13]. The present is a nothing. The past is a resource for reflection on previous doing of, what worked, what didn’t, what regrets and what pleasures, should inform the future. The human, more precisely, the modern, in this vision, dwells in the future, located within the material actuality of the world, they cope by becoming a time-spectre, remembering, analysing the past and fixated, obsessing on the future. Pushing down the moments of why and amazement to return to “artifice” [7: 5] and purposeful doing. Camus, in broader community with Heidegger, sees this as masking and deferral. Ultimately, all the plans and dreams for the future are insubstantial: “Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it’ s a matter of dying” [7: 5]. Death is absurdity para excellence: “Death is there as the only reality” [7: 20]. It renders “plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines” [37] Death is the inescapable absurdity that annihilates the future, and with it, human reasoning and meaning making.
Camus’s second response, which he refutes, is suicide. Camus acknowledges that the sense of despair that can emerge in and through the absurd can invoke suicide as an ultimate attempt to control the chaos [7: 3–4, 9]. Through more contemporary discourses on mental health, these parts of Camus’ text are challenging. Early in the text he asks: “Does the Absurd dictate death?” [7: 3]. Camus follows up with a line of reason that pictures a modern facing the absurd and the certainty of death, and coming to the belief that “His future, his unique and dreadful future—he sees and rushes toward it. In its way, suicide settles the absurd.” [7: 19]. Camus, however, is trying to write against suicide, exposing the existentialist basis as a way of affirming living [38, 43: 187].
This affirmation as an alternative to suicide, forms Camus’ third response. For Camus the “revolt” of recognising absurdity should not lead to suicide [7: 18–19]. But rather “freedom”, a freedom from the maddening insecurity and anxiety of modern life but also a freedom from the totality of death [7: 20]. This freedom is the freedom of openness to the moment. A presentism; indifferent to the future: “The present and the succession of presents before a constantly conscious soul is the ideal of the absurd man” [7: 22].
It is at this point, at the very end of Camus’ reflections that he turns to Sisyphus. In describing his crimes and imagining his labouring, Camus focuses on Sisyphus’ moment of return:
At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain…At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock [7: 22].
It is this moment of return, which from the perspective of the moderns and their preoccupation with the future could only been seen as anticipation of toil and pain, is for Camus, the exemplar of absurdist presentism:
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy [7: 24].
It is with this vision of Sisyphus at the base of his mountain, gripping his rock, surrounding by the dark nothingness of Hades that I want to begin to talk of law. It seems absurd to suggest that Camus’ existentialist text has anything to do with law. Yet there is something essential to law that is revealed.