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In “Sisyphus�� Camus explores the great Greek myth to address Hamlet’s ultimate question as to whether one should be or not be. Camus scoffs at Kierkegaard who also addresses the plight of the Absurd Man, by which both thinkers understand the human condition today when faced with life in which it appears incomprehensible through pure reason. Camus darkly adds that life is ultimately futile because mankind is powerless and after all life is simply an endless series of hardships, which symbolically entail rolling a boulder up a mountainside only to watch it fall to the bottom whereupon the process must be repeated endlessly. Camus derides the Kierkegaardian “leap of faith�� as committing a suicide of logic, reason and abandoning both to sacrifice the lucidity which only a person confronting the hopelessness of his human condition with reason can assume. Camus praises Nietzsche and in the writing style in many places Camus reads very much like Nietzsche. Camus also widely praises Kafka and his novels as projecting in "The Trial" and "The Castle" worthy epitomes of the hopeless condition of man against the absurdity of life. For Camus, reason takes one sooner or later to the abyss where one peers into the utter hopelessness of the human condition and catches a lucid glimpse of death, which challenges him to question the "everydayness of existence." For Camus this glimpse requires an intellectual honesty brought only by standing up to the Absurd and projecting the lucidity of reason into the abyss. In his mind Camus believes that Sisyphus finds a certain happiness in the futility of his condition, when the boulder rolls back down the mountain, for it is in these moments of climbing back down the mountainside that Sisyphus is able to consider that despite the futility of his existence “all is well.�� He adds that Homer deemed Sisyphus to be the wisest of mortals and admires that Sisyphus was in a state of revolt against the gods and was unafraid of their power in his protest against them despite his rebellion landing him with an eternal task of futility at their bidding. In his view the everydayness of mankind in work robs us of the consciousness necessary to gain a lucid perspective of life. Camus has infinite faith in reason. This is where he and Kierkegaard divide their views of the human condition. Camus criticizes Kierkegaard for making a leap of faith into the god which consumes him. He sees Sisyphus as becoming as strong as the rock that he pushes up the mountainside and views himself as the Absurd Man pushing the rock up the mountain in revolt of the gods but gaining the lucidity of a Zarathustra in the process and accepting his life bravely "without appeal." Consider that the rock pushed by Sisyphus is of sufficient size and weight that the mortal can actually move it up the mountainside: in other words the boulder is not so great that Sisyphus cannot maneuver it even up a mountain despite the enormous strains that the process takes of him. Camus proposes that it is senseless and perhaps even foolhardy and cowardly to abdicate to hope and then wander into the “desert of god’s grace.�� He sees Kierkegaard as abdicating himself to a “humiliated logic�� which is intellectual suicide and cites Kierkegaard’s foolish pursuit, now legendary, of Regina Olson as an example of what can happen when reason is given up to faith and hope and love. As Camus writes with the confidence of Nietzsche in his beautiful phrasing in this essay, at times almost gnostic in tone and sense, with a propensity to cite apparent contradictions in which the opposites both seem true. Kierkegaard understands the fallacy of the either/or set-up with more than two possible answers or solutions and won’t fall victim to them. Camus wants us to choose between the either/or of faith, or humiliated reason, and pure reason. And for Camus this choice is a life and death matter. While I admire the writing and philosophy of Camus, he does not seem fully to understand the reason why reasonable people adopt positions of faith. Camus is an egoist and narcissist for whom the world beyond his reason is a reason not to commit intellectual suicide at the expense of humiliated reason. Kierkegaard is a higher genius in my view because he has taken a long, perceptive and intelligent study of the abyss and recognizes that his reason can only take him so far. If God exists, as Kierkegaard believes, then He has not created humanity with sufficient brains to make sense of the vastness, complexity and mystery of the universe. Kierkegaard is a proponent of reason but recognizes with proper humility that he is not the center of the universe and when his reason reaches a dead-end, then faith can kick-in as a reasonable means of experiencing the Absurd in a life affirming-approach which recognizes that some of the deeper questions may be answered later, if only one will persist, and that the best hope to overcome the abyss is to give reason more time to fathom the Absurd. This requires faith in oneself, faith in existence and more faith in the power reason itself. Camus is a chauvinist to pure reason. Kierkegaard says rather humbly that in this grand dance to the music of time that faith is the only sane and, indeed, the most reasonable approach to the Absurd. Camus deals with suicide; Kierkegaard more reasonably proposes faith and love instead as solutions, as real weapons to confront the Absurd. Why address an Absurd universe with reason anyway as Camus proposes? Why not confront an Absurd universe with your own Absurdity: at least, this approach is consistent and attuned to life itself? Kierkegaard’s faith represents humility; total abdication to the blind faith of Camus to reason is highly unreasonable and possibly the height of unreason. I know of no dead men who manage to achieve a higher state of personal enlightenment after they off themselves. It is really only a matter of timing, after all, isn't it? Woody Allen points out that 90% of life is simply showing up; I would add the the other 10% is timing. Why would it not be the height of reason to admit that there are many grand mysteries of existence which man does not have the eyes to see, the ears to hear, nor the limited intellectual bandwidth to process in a universe as vast as ours? It is not necessary to deny life and time the opportunity to hope that answers will be forthcoming and abdicate, as Camus discusses, to the senseless prospect of cutting short both: I find this approach of Camus to be the height of insanity, which is precisely where Nietzsche’s chauvinism to pure reason ultimately led him. In the world of Camus there is no God but him: if God does not exist, then Camus is his own God. Camus believes that, if man has no higher God to appeal to, then man must be free from the will of a non-existent God. Kierkegaard’s view is that faith and love are two of the tools with which mankind is endowed as gifts to overcome the abyss and the Absurd. Further, life requires the courage of Abraham to take the leap of faith and is not intellectual suicide but rather is a higher form of intelligence which enables the faculties beyond the limits of reason to add value to the existential experience of life. I emphasize that taking a leap of faith requires courage: it is neither a blind nor irrational abdication. The leap of faith also requires humility of which many intellectual egotists are incapable: so much so that some intellectual egotists would consider the logic of suicide? Spare me the logic of such pure unreason: death comes to us all soon enough as it is. Faith adds an additional intellectual sense as a another dimension to come into play and to deny its expression, out of egoism or chauvinism to pure reason, seems to me to be the height of pure folly. The vast ego of Camus discounts people who deploy faith as intellectual lightweights because he does not have the good, common sense to give them credit for having the intellectual bandwidth to examine deeply the abyss and find the resources in faith to build a bridge to span it and overcome life’s many anxieties, its pain, suffering and debilitating effects in everyday life. Kierkegaard lived in the streets of Copenhagen like Dostoyevsky in St. Petersberg as a homeless person: this penniless and lonely genius knew intimately from dark experience the depths of despair and yet was able to forge a faith that illuminated life. Kierkegaard’s “Works of Love�� is a masterpiece like “Fear and Trembling�� and “Either/Or�� on how the expansion of the human tool chest beyond pure reason alone enriches life and fulfills hope every single day of life. We have ample reason to believe in hope and our everyday life is full of reason as to why mankind should be hopeful about future outcomes while lucidly grasping from reason and experience that many outcomes will not play out as hoped amid the randomness and chaos which inhabit our vast universe. Mankind does have the highly reasonable freedom at its disposal to hope that on the whole life is well worth living. Even if life were on the whole no better than a zero-sum game, there are valuable lessons in the downsides, which stoke one’s reason, and, when one actively seeks it, incredible joy exists on the upside sufficiently to convince us of the wisdom and rationality both of faith and love. I must reject the narrowness of the perspective of Camus in this essay and embrace in all humility the limits of human reason while concurrently embracing it for all it is worth, which is considerable, and enable both the twin leaps or faith and love to perform for me when the absurdity of life leaves me no other reasonable approach. As Camus points out the trip down the mountainside even for Sisyphus was full of enlightenment and from the mountaintop the view is absurdly vast and truly lucid in its overwhelming and inexhaustible beauty.