Can a French-speaking philosophy student help me with a question about Camus?

I am not a philosophy student, but I do speak French. I was unable to find the entire text of “Le Mythe de Sisyphe”, but I believe I found the sentence you are looking for:

Son rocher est sa chose.

I honestly don’t know how else to translate that other than “his rock is his thing.”

Source in French (paragraph 6, third sentence).

I missed part of your details when I posted the above. Chose does not have too many shades of meaning, it pretty much is just “thing” in a simple form (like an object or item). Reading the preceding sentences, I take it to mean that the rock is his destiny, it’s his “thing” in that it’s his sole purpose.

That’s exactly the paragraph. I can make out enough French to assure myself that it’s the right one. Great! Thank you so much.

So then:

Does ”chose” have only an abstract sense, or only concrete, or both? Does it refer to something definite, such as a solid object, or would it be more vague and indefinable, as for asking “What kind of thing is a hunch?”?

Would you use it to say that there is something you want to tell me?
... to ask where you should put your things?
... to complain that there is a little black thing in your cup?
... to say that I’m getting worked up over a very small thing?
... to remark that cooking is just not your thing?
... to tell me that the thing you’re looking for is an item of value?
Would you use the same word for “thing” and “item”?

Merci beaucoup.

Wow, great questions. You have definitely gotten me thinking here. :)

I was having a hard time thinking past the concrete, but you’re right about being able to use it abstractly. You could use it to refer to something tangible, but also something more vague, much like we use the word “thing”. So, yes on “what kind of thing is a hunch”. (Quel type de chose est un pressentiment) – note, I’m not as fluent as I once was, so we’ll go with that translation of “hunch” as “foreboding”.

- Yes. (Je voudrais te dire quelque chose)
– Yes, but most likely in conversation they would use a slang term for “stuff” rather than “things”.
– Yes. (C’est une petite chose noir dans ma tasse)
– Yes. (Tu as trouvé bouleversé au cours d’une petite chose)
– Maybe not.. my gut tells me they’d be more likely to say something like “cooking is not for me”. Though they might say something like “cooking is not something I enjoy” and use quelque chose that way.
– Yes. (Je cherche une chose de valeur)
– I would say generally, yes, but there is also the word article that means “item” (amongst other meanings). Chose is the most used of the two, though.

De rien!

Magnifique!

So then, then:

When Camus says “His rock is his thing,” it is not “his thing” in the same sense that “cooking is not my thing.” It’s more like “This thing, this rock, belongs to him.” N’est-ce pas?

That’s pretty much how I take it to mean.

Exactly what I wanted to know.

Layers of language. Shades of meaning. Nuance. Reading these works in the original language is surely hard enough; the difficulty of working with translations is that we don’t know what compromises and choices the translator had to make in choosing a single word for each purpose.

Many thanks for your help, @MissAnthrope. I feel better now.

Glad I could help. :)

I think you two are on to something here – I suspect it might best be translated as “His rock is his object”, since “object” is quite the philosophical buzzword. However, I’d have to take a stab at translating the section before I could say for sure, since the context would be the tell here. I bet a friend of mine has already translated this, actually, and she’s kind of the French guru in the department, too – I’ll grab the text from her and ask her opinion.

Yes, I’m sure they could. :-)

Also think about “rocher.” If you’re talking normal rocks, you’d say “la roche.”

“Une roche lunaire” is a lunar rock.

“Le rocher” is more substantial and seems to carry more metaphorical weight.

“Le rocher de Sisyphe”
“Le rocher de Gibraltar”
“Faire du rocher” is alpine rock climbing.

And I wonder about Petrus; “And I say to thee. thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Matthew 16:18

(“Une pierre” is a small French stone, interestingly enough.)

Ask yourself why he chose “le rocher” to be “sa chose.”

Me again; Why did he not say, “Ma chose est mon rocher?” You can spin a nice thread from each version.

@gailcalled – Very good point and I thought of this, myself.. Roche is “rock”, but the kind of the size you can pick up and hold, a smallish rock, but bigger than a pebble. Rocher is a large rock, but I figured it was a given that Sisyphus was tasked with rolling a boulder.

The answer to why Sisyphus takes ownership of the rock is the whole point of the text, and that is indeed the crucial question. I feel that I have an adequate grasp of it an am not making that the focus of this question, but I would not discourage anyone from commenting on that aspect.

However, this question is about the words. I think examining minutiae of this sort always sheds light. Even ordinary words have depths and layers that it is my pleasure to expose if I can. That’s why I use so many dictionaries in so many languages. But my French is too impoverished for these niceties of distinction. I didn’t even think about the various words for rock; but @MissAnthrope is right, the fact that it’s a boulder is a given.

@gailcalled, I think the sentence is constructed as it is because the subject is emphatically Sisyphus and not the rock. Your illustrations with roche and rocher do amplify the meaning. Thank you.

It was my understanding that Petrus (Peter) is the Greek word for “rock” (as in “petrify” and “petroglyph”) and that in the quote from Matthew, Jesus is renaming Simon as Simon Peter, Simon the rock. But I’m not tearing off down that digressive path this afternoon. I have to finish an essay on Camus.

@wildpotato, “object” in what sense?—as a material composition having mass and volume, or as object versus subject?

@Jeruba When you see “object” in a philosophical text, it usually does not refer to the material quality of a thing. That concept is barely interesting, even for materialists (and their detractors), because the material aspect of things is mostly just taken at face value and used to scaffold or erode debates about how the subject experiences the object. To describe things in Heideggerian terms, few bother with the notion that what we are trying to get at in uncovering a thing (Being) lies in the input-end of its qualia.

“Object” as in object versus subject is pretty common, but what I was getting at was more “object” in the sense of aim, actually. But all three meanings kind of shade together – physicality, objectiveness, and telos. So my guess would be that what Camus might really be doing is playing on the multiple meanings of ‘object”, especially because he uses the word “chose” (which is most immediately translatable as “thing”, as you guys pointed out) to stand for “object”. It just seems to make some sense if I think of it as “His rock is his purpose/aim/becoming-real/concrescence”. His rock is his thing, his reality, his purpose – the rock is his only (and the only necessary) avenue of Being – by doing as he does he is being who and what he is. As the essay says, “The struggle itself…is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

That was a stab in the dark – I have never studied or translated this text, and know less than I ought about Camus’ positions on materialism and process to be making the claims I just did. I’m probably wrong, but now you’ve got me interested; I will ask my French philosophy translating group for opinions.

Very interesting, @wildpotato, and you may have something there, a real added dimension, as long as “chose” supports it. I don’t see Camus playing on the multiple meaning of a word he does not use, unless “chose” has all the same meanings in French as “object” has in English (in which case, what is objet for?).

Camus does not appear to have any interest in materialism and process. Camus is interested in the Absurd, freedom, and death, and other big existentialist themes. He begins the long essay the Myth of Sisyphus with the statement that the central problem of philosophy is suicide. To Camus, the issue of suicide is the same as the issue of whether or not life is worth living. In view of the absurdity of life, what do we live for? After a hundred pages he gives us the portrait of Sisyphus, who uses his consciousness to take in the sum of his present experience, to exercise his freedom, and to make his rock his thing—to own it. In this way he triumphs over his unending ordeal.