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Greatest Philosophers In History | Albert Camus
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This is the Greatest Philosophers In History series, where we analyse the most fundamental
ideas of the most extraordinary philosophers in human history.
In this episode, we’ll be exploring the philosophy of Albert Camus
Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913, a French colony at the time. He studied philosophy
at the University of Algiers, then became a journalist.
He was born in a poor working-class family, his mother was an illiterate cleaning lady,
and there were no books in his house, he lost his father when he was a few months old in
the First World War. When he started going to the lycée or secondary school, he was
a stranger. He came from a poor suburb and was suddenly surrounded by young boys with
middle-class families. As time passed, he soon became a well-known
character in the university circles and ladies were very attracted to him. He particularly
loved football, stating that: “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations
I owe to football.” However, at age 17 he was struck down by tuberculosis.
It interrupted his studies and his physical life. During this time, he became fascinated
by theatre and acting. He organised the Theatre de l’Équipe, a young avant-garde dramatic
group. Camus married pianist and mathematician Francine,
who gave birth to twins, Catherine, and Jean. In 1939 his play, Caligula appeared, the story
of a Roman Emperor famed for his cruelty and seemingly insane behaviour. Later, he published
his famous novel L’Etranger translated as The Stranger or The Outsider, and the philosophical
essay The Myth of Sisyphus. After the occupation of France by the Germans
in 1940, Camus became one of the intellectual leaders of the Resistance movement. He joined
the French Resistance and became the head of the underground newspaper Combat, which
he had helped found. All the students at that time read Combat, it was the newspaper that
came out of the resistance and carried a daily article.
After the war, he devoted himself to writing and established an international reputation
and a celebrity figure with his novels. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1957. At age 44, the second youngest recipient in history. He said:
“Whatever the circumstances of a writer’s life, obscure or temporarily famous, immersed
in the fires of tyranny or free for a time to express himself, he can recover a sense
of a living community that will justify him, but only on condition that he accepts, as
much as he is able to, the two responsibilities that represent the grandeur of his profession,
to serve truth and freedom.” At the time Algeria was fighting for independence
and there were strong differences in opinions throughout the world. He was distraught by
the events there, he could think of nothing else, he did not accept the idea of independence,
feeling that he had equal rights to the soil in Algeria that belong to most of his childhood.
He wrote: “For years I wanted to live according to
the morality of the majority, I forced myself to live like everyone else. I said what was
necessary to say in order to bond, even when I felt separate. The upshot of all this was
catastrophic, now I am wandering among the wreckage, resigned to my singularity and my
disabilities and I have to rebuild the truth, having lived all my life inside a kind of lie."
After receiving the Nobel Prize, he was no
longer poor and for the first time had money to spend. He lived a frugal life, apart from
dressing elegantly. He exiled himself in France, painfully cut off from Algeria, his native
country, his sun. He was living in profound solitude.
Camus’ views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as Absurdism, which has
its origins in the work of Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who chose to confront the
crisis that humans face with the Absurd by developing his own existentialist philosophy.
Camus is also considered to be an existentialist, even though he firmly rejected the term throughout
his lifetime. He decided that his work as a writer would
progress. Each stage would be marked by a play, a novel, and an essay. The first cycle
was The Absurd, the second The Rebellion, and then towards the end of his life, he felt
he was coming to a completely new cycle, which would be that of Love or Happiness.
However, at this time, in 1960, as he was returning back to Paris, he was killed in
a road accident. In his pocket was found an unused train ticket. Also, in the wreckage
were pages of handwritten manuscript, an epic novel that he had predicted would be his finest
work. It was edited and published 34 years later as The First Man by Camus’ daughter
Catherine, becoming an instant bestseller and helped to understand Camus’ character
more deeply than any other of his works.
“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness
and for reason.” The Absurd is the conflict between the human
tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life, and the human inability to find any
meaning in a purposeless, meaningless, and irrational universe, with the “unreasonable
silence” of the universe in response. Trying to define this, is like water slipping through
one’s fingers. However, this world in itself is not absurd,
what is absurd is our relationship with the universe, which is irrational. The absurd
depends as much on man as on the world. It is all that links them together.
Thus, the universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd, but rather,
the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously.
His book L’Étranger, translated as
The Stranger or The Outsider, shows the theme of Camus’ absurdism and existentialism.
The main character Meursault learns of his mother’s death. He shows indifference and
emotional detachment from his environment. He speaks his mind without regard for others
and is alienated from society due to his peculiarities. A famous scene is his encounter with an Arab
man in French Algiers. “The whole beach was reverberating in the
sun and pressing against me from behind. The sun was beginning to burn my cheeks and I
felt drops of sweat gathering in my eyebrows. It was the same sun as on the day of mother’s
funeral. And again, it was my forehead that was hurting me most, and all the veins were
throbbing at once beneath the skin. I took a step, just one step forward. And this time,
without sitting up, the Arab drew his knife and held it up towards me in the sun, it was
like a long flashing sword lunging at my forehead. My whole being went tense and I tightened
my grip on the gun. The trigger gave, and it was there that it
all started. I realised that I’d destroyed the balance of the day and the perfect silence
of this beach where I’d been happy. And I fired four more times at a lifeless body
and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. And it was like giving four sharp knocks
at the door of unhappiness.” Meursault kills a man whom he did not know,
an involuntary and absurd act. He simply had a moment of fear, the sun struck the knife,
sweat was running in his eyes. From this moment he enters the world of judgment. And the world
of judgment is the discovery of man. He is sentenced to death and tormented by
his discovery of the world. This shows one of the forms of the Absurd, a young man who
wants to live but is condemned to die. Meursault is afflicted by the madness of sincerity,
a character who is distinguished by his never wanting to say more than he feels. When asked
if he grieved at his mother’s burial, he neither admits nor denies having grieved.
It is this tenacious refusal, this fascination with the authenticity of what one is and what
one feels that gives meaning to the entire novel.
In the same year, Camus published The Myth of Sisyphus,
influenced by philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer,
and Friedrich Nietzsche. He begins the book stating that:
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether
life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
By suicide, apart from the physical act, his main concern is what he calls “philosophical
suicide”, such as Danish philosopher Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, and the opposite of fellow
Existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s notion of bad faith, where we accept something
as true that isn’t convincing but is convenient and easy for us to believe in. Thus, he stresses
that Existentialism must be atheistic, since one of the most common ways of philosophical
suicide is to believe in some ready-made belief system, which is practically all of the world’s
religion. For Camus, the main reason a person believes
in God is that it relieves one of the sense of anxiety that one feels about life’s uncertainty.
Take for instance the belief in ultimate justice: that good people will be rewarded and bad
people punished, which isn’t what always happens at all.
This uncertainty and randomness gives us a sense of insecurity. Thus, we believe in a
hypothetical belief system, immediately alleviating us from these insecurities, at the cost of
committing a sort of mental suicide by shutting down our mental faculties. There are also
secular ways of committing this act, such as escaping into the world of entertainment.
His solution to this would be to honestly confront all of life’s uncertain nature,
to confront The Absurd, the fundamental dimension of our existence.
“All greed deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.”
The man who does not commit philosophical suicide and confronts the Absurd, he calls
The Absurd Man, a kind of existential hero, much like the character of Meursault in The
Stranger. He who lives without appeal, as Camus states, and who recognises the absurdity
and manages to keep life’s questions open and alive anyhow, avoiding philosophical suicide.
Suicide is never an option for the Absurd Man, it would be a way of going along with
our absurd condemnation, by implicitly affirming that life is really intolerably absurd and
that suicide is our only option. Similar to being condemned to prison, the
most defying thing you could do is to enjoy the experience, because enjoying the experience
negates the meaning of your condemnation, which you are supposed to experience as a
terrible form of suffering. This is the Absurd Hero.
However, human existence is absurd not only because it refuses to provide us with answers
to our basic questions, but also because of how repetitive and futile it really is:
“Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours
of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to
the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why”
arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”
But it doesn’t stop here. Even our weekends and vacations and other seemingly singular
events are really just variations on things we have experienced many times.
Additionally, life is absurd because it gives us no real reason to conclude that all of
our repetitive struggles will ever amount to anything. When we die, most of us will
be long forgotten, even the engravings of our tombstones will be worn out and illegible
by then. While the Earth itself will eventually be engulfed by our expanding sun, leaving
no perceptible change of any of our lives or struggles, or those of the entire human
race. All of our great struggles will end up in nothing but dust.
Camus associates our condemnation to the absurd to the mythological character of Sisyphus,
a man condemned by the gods to a lifetime of rolling a boulder up a hill, a back-breaking
and gruelling labour, only to reach the top of the hill and have the boulder inevitably
roll back down to the bottom for him to start all over again, condemned to a lifetime of
pain and anguish and working hard only to have his efforts be completely futile in the
end. It isn’t the repetitive and futile nature
of human existence per se that makes it absurd. What really makes our human existence absurd
is our consciousness of our Sisyphean condemnation when we avoid the trap of philosophical suicide.
In perhaps one of his most celebrated quotes, Camus states that:
“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must
imagine Sisyphus happy.” Happiness in the sense of living with a full
acknowledgment of one’s absurd life, together with a defiant non acceptance of it, becoming
enchanted of life, the complete opposite of nihilism.
Revolt is an essential concept for Camus,
it is the maintenance of a lucid awareness of the absurdity of life. To affirm life and
continue, he states that: “One of the only coherent philosophical
positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.
It is an insistence upon an impossible transparency. It challenges the world anew every second…
It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing
fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.”
To revolt is to say no to one’s own absurd existence, and in the process say yes to some
other more desirable existence.
Camus, like Nietzsche, held his embrace of fate to be central to his philosophy and to
life itself: "a will to live without rejecting anything
of life, which is the virtue I honour most in this world."
This concept of Amor Fati, to love one’s fate, is mostly linked to the Stoics. Marcus
Aurelius, wrote that: “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that
is thrown into it.” And Epictetus echoed the same idea: “Don't
seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything
happens as it actually will — then your life will flow well."
Nietzsche expressed it in what he calls the Eternal Recurrence, loving life and not just
accepting the good, but also accepting that there is evil, suffering, pain, and annihilation.
And that the best afterlife we can experience is none other than another repetition of the
life we just experienced. The ideal of the most high-spirited and world-affirming individual.
For Camus, this affirmation to a more desirable
existence leads to rebellion. He wrote in The Rebel, published in 1951 that:
“In order to exist, one must rebel. But rebellion must respect the limits that it
discovers in itself. In contemplating the results of an active rebellion, we shall have
to ask ourselves whether it remains faithful to its first noble promise or whether it forgets
its purpose and plunges into a mire of tyranny or servitude. In absurdist experience, suffering
is individual, but from the moment that a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is
seen as a collective experience. As the experience of everyone, therefore the first step for
a mind overwhelmed by the absurdity of things, is to realise the feeling of strangeness is
shared by all men. That the entire human race suffers from the division between itself and
the rest of the world.” Rebellion, from this point of view, is a fabricator
of universes and a metaphysical demand for unity.
However, he also talks about tyranny. Rebellion does not always lead to desirable outcomes.
Camus talks about nihilistic forms of rebellion to be common, he lived in the midst of some
of the worst totalitarian regimes of the 20th century: Hitler, Stalin, Mao.
He believed them to be forms of rebellion against the absurd, upon the recognition that
there is no life beyond this existence. But, contrary to what he espouses, these movements
expressed hatred of life and a desire, in a godless universe, to play the role of both
god and devil. He championed what he calls a genuine rebellion,
which is not to implement a utopia by destructive means as nihilistic rebellions do, but which
recognises the necessity of shared communal values and attempts to bring about solidarity,
individual freedom and a relative harmony among human beings.
“If men cannot refer to a common value, recognised by all as existing in each one,
then man is incomprehensible to man.” He concludes with the phrase “I revolt,
therefore we exist” implying the recognition of a common human condition. The argument
of The Rebel was to replace ideas of revolutionary action with a concept of revolt and rebellion.
Thus, for Camus: “The only way to deal with an unfree world
is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
His next novel, The Plague, published in 1947
is considered an existentialist classic, it tells the story of a virus that spreads uncontrollably
and ends up destroying half of the population of the French Algerian city of Oran. A book
that is worth reading, especially because of the devastating pandemic of 2020 and the
moral lessons it can offer us in moments of sickness and civil unrest, highlighting a
permanent truth about our vulnerabilities. All this is narrated through the lens of an
absurdist point of view. The plague represents the absurdity, it is neither rational nor
just. It is not a punishment for anything deserved. The universe is indifferent, suffering
is randomly distributed, it makes no sense. What should we then do? Express care and concern
for our people and try to help them. That is what the hero’s novel Dr. Rieux does.
He accepts the absurdity of suffering and meaninglessness but works tirelessly to lessen
the suffering of those around him. Camus writes: “This whole thing is not about heroism.
It is about decency, it may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague
is with decency.” A character asks the Doctor what he means
by decency, he responds by saying that: “In general, I can’t say, but in my case, I
know that it consists of doing my job.”
By this time, Camus became acquainted with Sartre, another French intellectual, through
literature and, to an extent, through the Resistance. They often chatted late into the
night in cafés that were to become famous and were to be considered as existentialist
cafés. In France, Sartre was the central figure,
the leader; Camus was considered a talented writer but he didn’t have the same influence.
However, the disagreements between them emerged quickly. Especially with Camus’ publication
of The Rebel, where he attacks the totalitarian communism of the Soviet Union, which Sartre
was in favour of. He states: “I am on the side of life; I
am against a new war. Revolt today means to revolt against war.”
This brought about the final split between the two, until the death of Camus, where Sartre
read him a eulogy.
Camus was very influenced by Russian novelist and philosopher Fyodor Dostoevsky. He discovered
a powerful and vital source of inspiration in two novels in particular, The Devils and
The Brothers Karamazov. The atheistic spirit of Ivan Karamazov proved
for Camus the most attractive of all of Dostoevsky’s characters. Ivan’s statement that “If
God is dead, then all is permitted” resonated with him. Camus’ own philosophical and ethical
outlook was immeasurably enriched by his life-long meditations upon the personality and works
of Dostoevsky. Financed by the money he received with his
Nobel Prize, he adapted and directed for the stage Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils, which
proved a critical success.
Camus published his last complete work of fiction, The Fall, in 1957.
A novel about Clamence, an eminent lawyer from Paris, an advocate for the weak and unfortunate.
One day he experiences a painful, guilt-ridden incident following his refusal to help someone
in danger. “What I have to tell you now is a little
more difficult. It concerns a woman. That night as I was heading home, on the bridge
I passed a figure leaning and watching the river. I could make out a slim, young woman
dressed in black. I had pass on about 50 metres when I heard a sound which resounded in the
night silence. The sound of a body hitting water. Almost immediately I heard a scream
repeated several times, which seemed to be carried down the river and then was suddenly
extinguished. The silence in the frozen night seemed interminable. I wanted to run but I
didn’t move, I told myself I must do something quickly, and I felt an irresistible weakness
flow through my body. I listened, motionless. Then, I walked away in the rain. I alerted
no one.” Despite Clamence's view of himself as a selfless
advocate for the weak and unfortunate, he simply ignores the incident and continues
on his way. He later elaborates that his failure to do anything was most probably because doing
so would have required him to put his own personal safety in jeopardy.
So, he gives it all up, exiles himself and lives in great solitude. He spends most of
his time in a bar where he confesses and accuses himself, seeking out listeners to free himself
from his solitude, despair, and guilt. This is a type of confession of Camus. His
wife suffered from and was hospitalized for depression. At one point she attempted to
throw herself from a balcony, whether to escape the hospital or to kill herself is not known.
Camus’ wife attempted suicide by jumping - falling - from a building. The woman falls
into the river. Thus, The Fall. Jean-Paul Sartre described the novel as "perhaps
the most beautiful and the least understood" of Camus' books.
Camus teaches us, through his Absurdism, that
life has inherent worth, even if it has no inherent meaning, very different from nihilism,
in which nothing has any meaning. His down-to-earthiness makes one feel that he is a kind of friend
guiding us on our journey of life, helping us to overcome our struggles with anxiety,
depression, or suicide. He champions life, and asks us to live it, to the point of tears.
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