Adventure Sports

Excerpted from: Duits, Rufus (2020). Mountaineering, Myth and the Meaning of Life: psychoanalysing alpinism. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 47 (1):33-48.

Of all the world’s myths that I am aware of, the one that strikes me as most obviously illuminating of the mountaineer’s obsession is the myth of Sisyphus, brought so forcefully to the philosopher’s attention by Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus).

Sisyphus was the King of Ephyra. Homer called him the craftiest of men. He betrayed Zeus, who, in retribution, ordered Thanatos – death – to chain him up in the underworld. But Sisyphus cheated death by tricking Thanatos into chaining himself up instead. Thereafter, no one died on earth until Ares, the god of war, intervened and released Thanatos because war had ceased to be fun. Returned to the underworld, Sisyphus tricked Persephone – wife of Hades and ruler of the underworld – into releasing him a second time. And as punishment for all this impious deceit, Sisyphus was given the at first sight unenviable task of rolling a boulder up a mountain –whereupon it would immediately roll down, so that Sisyphus had to start again, and again, ad infinitum.

One way of reading this myth would be to consider Sisyphus as being faced with exactly those few essential options that we are all faced with when we try at the most fundamental level to make meaning in our lives. A first option is to embrace some form of transcendental meaning, whether in the form of religious teachings, or in the form of a belief in objective morality, and thereby cling to objective and absolute norms governing conduct with authority and legitimacy. This is the path of the transcendentalist. She locates meaning in some objective, transcendental and unchanging reality that she takes to determine the timeless moral truths of the shifting world of our experience. But Sisyphus rejects and undermines the rule of the gods; he places his own agenda above the divine law. A second option is suicide – the path of despair. Camus famously begins his book with the suggestion that this option is the philosopher’s fundamental concern. Is life worth living? But Sisyphus chains up Thanatos; Sisyphus rejects death as well. According to this reading, there is

thus only one remaining option available to him: to embrace an absurd reality of pointless activity – the path of nonsense, meaninglessness and nihilism. On this reading, then, the myth invites us to consider that, just as for Sisyphus, these three are the fundamental options that are available to us as finite and free agents seeking meaning in our lives. This would amount to the symbolic content and truth of the myth.

But Camus himself asks his readers to consider that there might be in fact a fourth fundamental option: although, from an objective perspective, Sisyphus’s toil, as he climbs up the mountain, has no point or purpose, produces no consequences, has no import or effects, from Sisyphus’s own perspective, the subjective perspective, all his actions are goal-oriented, effective, load-lifting efforts that take their significance from the admittedly curtailed project of getting to the top of the mountain. Mountaineering, his steps upward, has meaning for Sisyphus, at least during the progress of his ascent. Whilst there may be no worth or value to his efforts from ‘the point of view of the universe’ (Henry Sidgwick’s phrase), i.e., from a transcendental perspective, from his own subjective perspective they are meaning-laden and worthwhile. ‘All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein’ (2005, 118). Thus, according to Camus, Sisyphus is the absurd hero who, whilst accepting or embracing the absence of any transcendental signifier, is able to find meaning within life nevertheless. ‘The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing’ (119). ‘All is well’, Camus concludes; indeed, ‘one must imagine Sisyphus happy’ (119).

Camus asks us to consider all our projects and endeavours to be Sisyphean: ultimately pointless, but not thereby subjectively meaningless and not necessarily unconstitutive of a subjectively worthwhile life. On this reading of the myth, mountaineering –the striving to get to the top of a mountain—plays the role of a sort of purified, generic allegory for any and all of life’s endeavours, that is, for human endeavour in general.

There are good reasons that explain why mountaineering fulfils this allegorical role particularly well – better, at least, than many other activities – i.e., that explain why Sisyphus gets climbing a mountain in particular as his punishment. In the first place, its various facets and aspects bear on homo sapiens’ particular limitations – somatic and psychological – very precisely: one’s body is a heavy burden to oneself that is increased by gradient; one requires warmth to survive although mountains are cold; one requires food and water, although mountains are barren; one requires oxygen, although high mountains have little; one yearns for safety and security, although mountains are dangerous; we are tool-using, technological animals, although mountains are primitive, untamed places; we require companionship, although mountains are wild. No one ever lives or remains on the top of high mountains: they are crucially places from which one returns (or, at least, tries to do so). For this reason, mountaineering can symbolise synthetically a whole gamut of human practices that are concerned with the constraints of the human condition.

In the second place, divested of any instrumental value or practical import beyond itself – or at least largely so – mountaineering seems almost deliberately contrived to bring to light the restriction of existential meaning to the limits of individual projects of individual subjects – just like Sisyphus’s repeated projects. One sets off; one reaches the summit or turns back; one returns. Nothing – or at least nothing of essential significance – is left over. Camus’ fourth option couldn’t be more clearly illustrated by this aspect of the mountaineer’s craft. As Kevin Krein writes: ‘Nature sports [such as mountaineering] offer a framework that facilitates a consciously absurd life of the type Camus recommends…There are few pursuits that are followed with such passion that are also accompanied by the clear recognition of their meaninglessness’ (2019, 108, my italics).

Thirdly, it is also worth pointing out – although this would require considerable fleshing out that I am unable to pursue here – that the so-called ‘golden age of mountaineering’, when the major peaks of the alps were ascended for the first time and exploration of mountains in the Greater Ranges began, commences with the Enlightenment. Is it the case that mountaineering can fill the void left by the ‘flight of the gods’ (Martin Heidegger’s phrase) as the role of divinity and the transcendental assurances it provides declines in the life of the individual and their society? I.e., is mountaineering a particularly apt symbol for the endeavours of the godless, like Sisyphus?

Seen with these lights, what the alpinist is trying to do is to enact a generic act – reduced to its essentials. Mountaineering can be interpreted as a lived allegory for, and an enacted commentary on, human endeavour in general. The mountaineer might not be conscious of this, of course. But they would have some sense of being connected to what is essential and universal in the meaning-making of life by participating in it, and thus some sense of its peculiar importance. One glimpses profundity in the mountaineer’s craft – or at least an allusion to it. I think that this at least partly explains its extraordinary lure. ❚

There are few pursuits that are followed with such passion that are also accompanied by the clear recognition of their meaninglessness’