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.
