HW # 4 Blogpost # 3

Response to "The Existentialist View of Human Happiness" by David Banach


I can understand why Camus would like the Greek myth of Sisyphus as a way of explaining human happiness in an absurd world. An absurd world I guess is a world without a higher power (a god) who put people on earth for his own reasons and gives meaning to their life. I looked up the myth and the reason that Sisyphus was condemned forever to roll a boulder up a hill until it almost reached the top when it would roll back down again was because he had made a fool of Zeus and Hades during his lifetime. His punishmen was really bad because even death could not save him from it since he was already dead.

Saying that man's fate during his lifetime is like Sisyphus's fate after he died seems on the surface like saying that the life of human beings is absurd if no matter what we do in this world we are all just going to die. Camus seems to be making the point that it is the struggle to achieve our own goals that makes our lives worthwhile and that the struggle has to be constant to give life a purpose. Reading about Camus made me think of how i feel when athletes who have just done something great thank god for their achievements. I always think "You should thank yourself. You're the one who worked hard so that you could have this time of glory." I realize that a religious person could tell me that these athletes could be thanking god for inspiring them to work hard, but the point is that they are finding great value in the hard work they do challenging themselves to get better and better at their sport.

Another interesting thing about successful athletes (can be true about any successful people) is that to be happy it seems as though they have to keep challenging themselves. Tiger Woods has enough money to retire. He does not have to keep playing and risk losing and having people say that he is not that good anymore. He keeps challenging himself because that is what gives meaning to his life not his money and his collection of trophies. In addition, he gets a lot of satisfaction from inspiring kids to play his sport or to just work hard at whatever they choose to do. In a Camus philopsophy way he keeps pushing up boulders, and there will always be another one coming down for him to try to push up again. The satisfaction or happiness in life comes from all the hard work that makes us get better at something. Awards are nice but the thrill of getting them does not last that long.

My feeling is that there is a lot to be said for existentialism. It puts responsibility on us to make what we can of our own lives and do it in a way that does not hurt others and is good for humanity. Then when death comes, it is not depressing because everyone can say that we had a good life. Maybe death is depressing for people who had once thought they were going to spend eternity on a soft cloud with beautiful angels and now believe they are just going to rot in the ground. I think it doesn't really matter whether we believe in god or not when it comes to the best way to live our lives to achieve satisfaction from what we do.