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بِسْÙ…ِ اللهِ الرَّØْمنِ الرَّØِيمِ
According to the solar theory, King Sisyphus is the disk of the sun that rises every day in the east and then sinks into the west.[8] Other scholars regard him as a personification of waves rising and falling, or of the treacherous sea.[8] The 1st-century BC Epicurean philosopher Lucretius
interprets the myth of Sisyphus as personifying politicians aspiring
for political office who are constantly defeated, with the quest for
power, in itself an "empty thing", being likened to rolling the boulder
up the hill.[9] Soren Kierkegaard
saw the myth as pertaining to anything a person loves too much: "It is
comic that a mentally disordered man picks up any piece of granite and
carries it around because he thinks it is money, and in the same way it
is comic that Don Juan has 1,003 mistresses, for the number simply
indicates that they have no value. Therefore, one should stay within
one’s means in the use of the word “love.”"[10] Friedrich Welcker suggested that he symbolises the vain struggle of man in the pursuit of knowledge, and Salomon Reinach[11] that his punishment is based on a picture in which Sisyphus was represented rolling a huge stone Acrocorinthus, symbolic of the labour and skill involved in the building of the Sisypheum. Albert Camus, in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus,
saw Sisyphus as personifying the absurdity of human life, but Camus
concludes "one must imagine Sisyphus happy" as "The struggle itself
towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart."In experiments that test how workers respond when the meaning of their task is diminished, the test condition is referred to as the Sisyphusian condition. The two main conclusions of the experiment are that people work harder when their work seems more meaningful, and that people underestimate the relationship between meaning and motivation.[12]
Literary interpretations
Ovid, the Roman poet, makes reference to Sisyphus in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. When Orpheus descends and confronts Hades and Persephone, he sings a song so that they will grant his wish to bring Eurydice back from the dead. After this song is sung, Ovid shows how moving it was by noting that Sisyphus, emotionally affected, for just a moment, stops his eternal task and sits on his rock, the Latin wording being inque tuo sedisti, Sisyphe, saxo ("you sat upon your rock, Sisyphus").[13]Though purported to be one of the dialogues of Greek philosopher Plato, the Sisyphus is generally believed to be apocryphal, possibly written by one of his pupils.
Albert Camus, the French absurdist, wrote an essay entitled The Myth of Sisyphus in which he elevates Sisyphus to the status of absurd hero. Franz Kafka repeatedly referred to Sisyphus as a bachelor; Kafkaesque for him were those qualities that brought out the Sisyphus-like qualities in himself. According to Frederick Karl: "The man who struggled to reach the heights only to be thrown down to the depths embodied all of Kafka's aspirations; and he remained himself, alone, solitary."[14] The philosopher Richard Taylor uses the myth of Sisyphus as a representation of a life made meaningless because it consists of bare repetition.[15]
