novelist, writer of philosophical essays, and Nobel laureate. Though
neither by advanced training nor profession a philosopher, Camus
nevertheless through his literary works and in numerous reviews,
articles, essays, and speeches made important, forceful contributions
to a wide range of issues in moral philosophy – from terrorism and
political violence to suicide and the death penalty. In awarding him
its prize for literature in 1957, the Nobel committee cited the
author's persistent efforts to "illuminate the problem of the human
conscience in our time," and it is pre-eminently as a writer of
conscience and as a champion of imaginative literature as a vehicle of
philosophical insight and moral truth that Camus was honored by his
own generation and is still admired today. He was at the height of his
career, at work on an autobiographical novel, planning new projects
for theatre, film, and television, and still seeking a solution to the
lacerating political turmoil in his native Algeria, when he died
tragically in an automobile accident in January, 1960.
1. Life
The writer Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, a
small village near the seaport city of Bonê (present-day Annaba) in
the northeast region of French Algeria. He was the second child of
Lucien Auguste Camus, a military veteran and wine-shipping clerk, and
of Catherine Marie Cardona, a house-keeper and part-time factory
worker. (Note: Although Camus himself believed that his father was
Alsatian and a first-generation émigré, research by biographer Herbert
Lottman indicates that the Camus family was originally from Bordeaux
and that the first Camus to leave France for Algeria was actually the
author's great-grandfather, who in the early 19th century became part
of the first wave of European colonial settlers in the new melting pot
of North Africa.)
Shortly after the outbreak of WWI, when Camus was less than a year
old, his father was recalled to military service and on October 11,
1914, died of shrapnel wounds suffered at the first battle of the
Marne. As a child, about the only thing Camus ever learned about his
father was that he had once become violently ill after witnessing a
public execution. This anecdote, which surfaces in fictional form in
the author's novel L'Etranger and which is also recounted in his
philosophical essay "Reflections on the Guillotine," strongly affected
Camus and influenced his own lifelong opposition to the death penalty.
After his father's death, Camus, his mother, and older brother moved
to Algiers where they lived with his maternal uncle and grandmother in
her cramped second-floor apartment in the working-class district of
Belcourt. Camus' mother Catherine, who was illiterate, partially deaf,
and afflicted with a speech pathology, worked in an ammunition factory
and cleaned homes to help support the family. In his posthumously
published autobiographical novel The First Man, Camus recalls this
period of his life with a mixture of pain and affection as he
describes conditions of harsh poverty (the three-room apartment had no
bathroom, no electricity, and no running water) relieved by hunting
trips, family outings, childhood games, and scenic flashes of sun,
seashore, mountain, and desert.
Camus attended elementary school at the local Ecole Communale, and it
was there that he encountered the first in a series of teacher-mentors
who recognized and nurtured the young boy's lively intelligence. These
father-figures introduced him to a new world of history and
imagination and to literary landscapes far beyond the dusty streets of
Belcourt and working-class poverty. Though stigmatized as a pupille de
la nation (that is, a war veteran's child dependent on public welfare)
and hampered by recurrent health issues, Camus distinguished himself
as a student and was eventually awarded a scholarship to attend high
school at the Grand Lycee. Located near the famous Kasbah district,
the school brought him into close proximity with the native Moslem
community and thus to an early recognition of the idea of the
"outsider" that would dominate his later writings.
It was during his high school years that Camus became an avid reader
(absorbing Gide, Proust, Verlaine, and Bergson, among others), learned
Latin and English, and developed a lifelong interest in literature,
art, theatre, and film. He also enjoyed sports, especially soccer, of
which he once wrote (recalling his early experience as a goal-keeper):
"I learned . . . that a ball never arrives from the direction you
expected it. That helped me in later life, especially in mainland
France, where nobody plays straight." It was also during this period
that Camus suffered his first serious attack of tuberculosis, a
disease that was to afflict him, on and off, throughout his career.
By the time he finished his Baccalauréat degree (June, 1932), Camus
was already contributing articles to Sud, a literary monthly, and
looking forward to a career in journalism, the arts, or higher
education. The next four years (1933-37) was an especially busy period
in his life, during which he attended college, worked at odd jobs,
married his first wife (Simone Hié), divorced, briefly joined the
Communist party, and effectively began his professional theatrical and
writing career. Among his various employments during the time were
stints of routine office work (one job consisted of a Bartleby-like
recording and sifting of meteorological data; another involved
paper-shuffling in an auto license bureau), and one can well imagine
that it was during this period that his famous conceptions of
Sisyphean struggle and of heroic defiance in the face of the Absurd
first began to take shape within his imagination.
In 1933 Camus enrolled at the University of Algiers to pursue his
diplome d'etudes superieures, specializing in philosophy and gaining
certificates in sociology and psychology along the way. In 1936 he
became a co-founder along with a group of young fellow intellectuals
of the Théâtre du Travail, a professional acting company specializing
in drama with left-wing political themes. Camus served the company as
both an actor and director and also contributed scripts, including his
first published play Revolt in Asturia, a drama based on an ill-fated
workers' revolt during the Spanish Civil War. That same year Camus
also earned his degree and completed his dissertation, a study of the
influence of Plotinus and neo-Platonism on the thought and writings of
St. Augustine.
Over the next three years Camus further established himself as an
emerging author, journalist, and theatre professional. After his
disillusionment with and eventual expulsion from the Communist Party,
he reorganized his dramatic company and renamed it the Théâtre de
l'Equipe (literally the Theater of the Team). The name change signaled
a new emphasis on classic drama and avant-garde aesthetics and a shift
away from labor politics and agitprop. In 1938 he joined the staff of
a new daily newspaper, the Alger Républicain, where his assignments as
a reporter and reviewer covered everything from contemporary European
literature to local political trials. It was during this period that
he also published his first two literary works – L'Envers et l'endroit
(Betwixt and Between), a collection of five short
semi-autobiographical and philosophical pieces (1937) and Noces
(Nuptials), a series of lyrical celebrations interspersed with wistful
political and philosophical reflections on North Africa and the
Mediterranean.
The 1940's witnessed Camus' gradual ascendance to the rank of
world-class literary intellectual. He started the decade as a locally
acclaimed author and playwright, but a figure virtually unknown
outside the city of Algiers. He ended it as an internationally
recognized novelist, dramatist, journalist, philosophical essayist,
and champion of freedom. This period of his life began inauspiciously
– war in Europe, the occupation of France, official censorship, and a
widening crackdown on left-wing journals. Camus was still without
stable employment or steady income when, after marrying his second
wife, Francine Faure, in December of 1940, he departed Lyons, where he
had been working as a journalist, and returned to Algeria. To help
make ends meet, he taught part-time (French history and geography) at
a private school in Oran. All the while he was putting finishing
touches to his first novel L'Etranger (The Stranger), which was
finally published in 1942 to favorable critical response, including a
lengthy and penetrating review by Jean-Paul Sartre. The novel
propelled him into immediate literary renown.
Camus returned to France in 1942 and a year later began working for
the clandestine newspaper Combat, the journalistic arm and voice of
the French Resistance movement. During this period, while contending
with recurrent bouts of tuberculosis, he also published Le Mythe de
Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), his philosophical anatomy of suicide
and the absurd, and joined Gallimard Publishing as an editor, a
position he held until his death.
After the Liberation, Camus continued as editor of Combat, oversaw the
production and publication of two plays, Le Malentendu (The
Misunderstanding) and Caligula, and assumed a leading role in Parisian
intellectual society in the company of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir
among others. In the late 40's his growing reputation as a writer and
thinker was enlarged by the publication of La Peste (The Plague), an
allegorical novel and fictional parable of the Nazi Occupation and the
duty of revolt, and by lecture tours to the United States and South
America. In 1951 he published L'Homme Revolte (The Rebel), a
reflection on the nature of freedom and rebellion and a philosophical
critique of revolutionary violence. This powerful and controversial
work, with its explicit condemnation of Marxism-Leninism and its
emphatic denunciation of unrestrained violence as a means of human
liberation, led to an eventual falling out with Sartre and to his
being branded a reactionary in the view of many European Communists.
Yet it also established him as an outspoken champion of individual
freedom and as an impassioned critic of tyranny and terrorism, whether
practiced by the Left or by the Right.
In 1956, Camus published La Chute (The Fall), the short, confessional
novel, which unfortunately would be the last of his completed major
works and which in the opinion of some critics is the most elegant,
and most under-rated, of all his books. During this period he was
still afflicted by tuberculosis and was perhaps even more sorely beset
by the deteriorating political situation (which had by now escalated
from demonstrations and occasional terrorist and guerilla attacks into
open violence and insurrection) in his native Algeria. Camus still
hoped to champion some kind of rapprochement that would allow the
native Moslem population and the French pied noir minority to live
together peaceably in a new de-colonized and largely integrated, if
not fully independent, nation. Alas, by this point, as he himself must
have painfully recognized, the odds of such an outcome were becoming
increasingly unlikely.
In the fall of 1957, following publication of L'Exil et le Royaume
(Exile and the Kingdom), a collection of short fiction, Camus was
shocked by news that he had been awarded the Nobel prize for
literature. He absorbed the announcement with mixed feelings of
gratitude, humility, and amazement. On the one hand, the award was
obviously a tremendous honor. On the other, not only did he feel that
his friend and esteemed fellow novelist Andre Malraux was more
deserving, he was also aware that the Nobel itself was widely regarded
as the kind of accolade usually given to artists at the end of a long
career. Yet, as he indicated in his acceptance speech at Stockholm, he
considered his own career as still in mid-flight, with much yet to
accomplish and even greater writing challenges ahead:
. . . Every person, and assuredly every artist, wants to be
recognized. So do I. But I have been unable to comprehend your
decision without comparing its resounding impact with my own actual
status. A man almost young, rich only in his doubts, and with his work
still in progress. . . how could such a man not feel a kind of panic
at hearing the decree that transports him all of a sudden. . . to the
center of a glaring spotlight? And with what feelings could he accept
this honor at a time when other writers in Europe, among them the very
greatest, are condemned to silence, and even at a time when the
country of his birth is going through unending misery?
Of course Camus could not have known as he spoke these words that most
of his writing career was in fact behind him. Over the next two years,
he published articles and continued to write, produce, and direct
plays, including his own adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. He
also formulated new concepts for film and television, assumed a
leadership role in a new experimental national theater, and continued
to campaign for peace and a political solution in Algeria.
Unfortunately, none of these latter projects would be brought to
fulfillment. On January 4th of 1960, Camus died tragically in a car
accident while a passenger in a vehicle driven by his friend and
publisher Michel Gallimard, who also suffered fatal injuries. The
author was buried in the local cemetery at Lourmarin, a village in
Provencal where he and his wife and daughters had lived for nearly a
decade.
Upon hearing of Camus' death, Sartre wrote a moving eulogy in the
France-Observateur, saluting his former friend and political adversary
not only for his distinguished contributions to French literature but
especially for the heroic moral courage and "stubborn humanism" which
he brought to bear against the "massive and deformed events of the
day."
2. Literary Career
According to Sartre's perceptive appraisal, Camus was less a novelist
than a writer of philosophical tales and parables in the tradition of
Voltaire. This assessment accords with Camus' own judgment that his
fictional works were not true novels (Fr. romans), a form he
associated with the densely populated and richly detailed social
panoramas of writers like Balzac, Tolstoy, and Proust, but rather
contes ("tales") and recits ("narratives") combining philosophical and
psychological insights.
In this respect, it is also worth noting that at no time in his career
did Camus ever describe himself as a deep thinker or lay claim to the
title of philosopher. Instead, he nearly always referred to himself
simply, yet proudly, as un ecrivain – a writer. This is an important
fact to keep in mind when assessing his place in intellectual history
and in twentieth-century philosophy. For by no means does he qualify
as a system-builder or theorist or even as a disciplined thinker. He
was instead (and here again Sartre's assessment is astute) a sort of
all-purpose critic and modern-day philosophe: a debunker of
mythologies, a critic of fraud and superstition, an enemy of terror, a
voice of reason and compassion, and an outspoken defender of freedom –
all in all a figure very much in the Enlightenment tradition of
Voltaire and Diderot. For this reason, in assessing Camus' career and
work, it may be best simply to take him at his own word and
characterize him first and foremost as a writer – advisedly attaching
the epithet philosophical for sharper accuracy and definition.
3. Camus, Philosophical Literature, and the Novel of Ideas
To pin down exactly why and in what distinctive sense Camus may be
termed a philosophical writer, we can begin by comparing him with
other authors who have merited the designation. Right away, we can
eliminate any comparison with the efforts of Lucretius and Dante, who
undertook to unfold entire cosmologies and philosophical systems in
epic verse. Camus obviously attempted nothing of the sort. On the
other hand, we can draw at least a limited comparison between Camus
and writers like Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche – that is, with
writers who were first of all philosophers or religious writers, but
whose stylistic achievements and literary flair gained them a special
place in the pantheon of world literature as well. Here we may note
that Camus himself was very conscious of his debt to Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche (especially in the style and structure of The Myth of
Sisyphus and The Rebel) and that he might very well have followed in
their literary-philosophical footsteps if his tuberculosis had not
side-tracked him into fiction and journalism and prevented him from
pursuing an academic career.
Perhaps Camus himself best defined his own particular status as a
philosophical writer when he wrote (with authors like Melville,
Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka especially in mind): "The great
novelists are philosophical novelists"; that is, writers who eschew
systematic explanation and create their discourse using "images
instead of arguments." (The Myth of Sisyphus, p.74.)
By his own definition then Camus is a philosophical writer in the
sense that he has (a) conceived his own distinctive and original
world-view and (b) sought to convey that view mainly through images,
fictional characters and events, and dramatic presentation rather than
through critical analysis and direct discourse. He is also both a
novelist of ideas and a psychological novelist. And in this respect he
certainly compares most closely to Dostoyevsky and Sartre, two other
writers who combine a unique and distinctly philosophical outlook,
acute psychological insight, and a dramatic style of presentation.
(Like Camus, Sartre was a productive playwright, and Dostoyevsky
remains perhaps the most dramatic of all novelists, as Camus himself
seems to have realized, having adapted both The Brothers Karamazov and
The Possessed for the stage.)
4. Works
Camus' reputation rests largely on the three novels published during
his lifetime (The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall) and on his two
major philosophical essays (The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel).
However, his body of work also includes a collection of short fiction
(Exile and the Kingdom), an autobiographical novel The First Man, a
number of dramatic works (most notably Caligula, The Misunderstanding,
and The Just Assassins), several translations and adaptations
(including new versions of works by Calderon, Lope de Vega,
Dostoyevsky, and Faulkner), and a lengthy assortment of essays, prose
pieces, critical reviews, transcribed speeches and interviews,
articles, and works of journalism. A brief summary and description of
the most important of Camus' writings is presented below as
preparation for a larger discussion of his philosophy and world-view,
including his main ideas and recurrent philosophical themes.
a. Fiction
The Stranger (1942) – From its cold opening lines, "Mother died today.
Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure," to its bleak concluding image of
a public execution set to take place beneath the "benign indifference
of the universe," Camus' first and most famous novel takes the form of
a terse, flat, first-person narrative by its main character Meursault,
a very ordinary young man of unremarkable habits and unemotional
affect who, inexplicably and in an almost absent-minded way, kills an
Arab and then is arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.
The neutral style of the novel – typical of what the critic Roland
Barthes called "writing degree zero" – serves as a perfect vehicle for
the descriptions and commentary of its anti-hero narrator, the
ultimate "outsider" and a person who seems to observe everything,
including his own life, with almost pathological detachment.
The Plague (1947) – Set in the coastal town of Oran, Camus' second
novel is the story of an outbreak of plague, traced from its subtle,
insidious, unheeded beginnings through its horrible, all-encompassing,
and seemingly inescapable dominion to its eventual climax and decline,
all told from the viewpoint of one of the survivors. Camus made no
effort to conceal the fact that his novel was partly based on and
could be interpreted as an allegory or parable of the rise of Nazism
and the nightmare of the Occupation. However, the plague metaphor is
both more complicated and more flexible than that, extending to
signify the Absurd in general as well as any calamity or disaster that
tests the mettle of human beings, their endurance, solidarity, sense
of responsibility, compassion, and will. At the end of the novel, the
plague finally retreats, and the narrator reflects that a time of
pestilence teaches "that there is more to admire in men than to
despise." But he also knows "that the plague bacillus never dies or
disappears for good," that "the day would come when, for the bane and
the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again" and send
them forth yet once more to spread death and contagion into a happy
and unsuspecting city.
The Fall (1956) – Camus' third novel, and the last to be published
during his lifetime, is, in effect, an extended dramatic monologue
spoken by M. Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a dissipated, cynical, former
Parisian attorney (who now calls himself a "judge-penitent") to an
unnamed auditor (and thus indirectly to the reader). Set in a seedy
bar amid the night-life of Amsterdam, the work is a small masterpiece
of compression and style: a confessional (and semi-autobiographical)
novel, an arresting character study and psychological portrait, and at
the same time a wide-ranging philosophical discourse on guilt and
innocence, expiation and punishment, good and evil.
b. Drama
Caligula (1938, first produced 1945). "Men die and are not happy" –
such is the complaint against the universe pronounced by the young
emperor Caligula, who in Camus' play is less the murderous lunatic,
slave to incest, narcissist and megalomaniac of Roman history than a
theatrical martyr-hero of the Absurd, a man who carries his
philosophical quarrel with the meaninglessness of human existence to a
kind of fanatical but logical extreme. Camus himself described his
hero as a man "obsessed with the impossible" and willing to pervert
all values and if necessary destroy himself and all those around him
in the pursuit of absolute liberty. Caligula was Camus' first attempt
at portraying a figure in absolute defiance of the Absurd, and through
three revisions of the play over a period of several years he
eventually achieved a remarkable composite by adding touches of Sade,
of revolutionary nihilism, of the Nietzschean Superman, of his own
version of Sisyphus, and even of Mussolini and Hitler, to his original
portrait.
c. Essays, Letters, Prose Collections, Articles, and Reviews
Betwixt and Between (1937) – This short collection of
semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional, philosophical pieces might be
dismissed as juvenilia and largely ignored if it were not for the fact
that it represents Camus' first attempt to formulate a coherent
life-outlook and world-view. The collection, which in a way serves as
a germ or starting point for the author's later philosophy, consists
of five lyrical essays. In "L'Ironie" ("Irony"), a reflection on youth
and age, Camus asserts, in the manner of a young disciple of Pascal,
our essential solitariness in life and death. In "Entre Oui et Non"
("Between yes and no") he suggests that to hope is as empty and as
pointless as to despair. Yet he goes beyond nihilism by positing a
fundamental value to existence-in-the-world. In "La Mort dans l'ame"
(Death in the soul") he supplies a sort of existential travel review,
contrasting his impressions of central and eastern Europe (which he
views as purgatorial and morgue-like) with the more spontaneous life
of Italy and Mediterranean culture. The piece thus affirms the
author's lifelong preference for the color and vitality of the
Mediterranean world, and especially North Africa, as opposed to what
he perceives as the soulless cold-heartedness of modern Europe. In
"Amour de vivre" ("Love of life") he claims there can be no love of
life without despair of life and thus largely re-asserts the
essentially tragic, ancient Greek view that the very beauty of human
existence is largely contingent upon its brevity and fragility. The
concluding essay, "L'Envers et l'endroit" ("Betwixt and between"),
summarizes and re-emphasizes the basically Romantic themes of the
collection as a whole: our fundamental "aloneness," the importance of
imagination and openness to experience, the imperative to "live as if
. . . ."
Noces (Nuptials) (1938) – This collection of four rhapsodic narratives
supplements and amplifies the youthful philosophy expressed in Betwixt
and Between. That joy is necessarily intertwined with despair, that
the shortness of life confers a premium on intense experience, and
that the world is both beautiful and violent – these are once again
Camus' principal themes. "Summer in Algiers," which is probably the
best (and best-known) of the essays in the collection, is a lyrical,
at times almost ecstatic, celebration of sea, sun, and the North
African landscape. Affirming a defiantly atheistic creed, Camus
concludes with one of the core ideas of his philosophy: "if there is a
sin against life, it consists not so much in despairing as in hoping
for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this one."
The Myth of Sisyphus (1943) – If there is a single non-fiction work
that can be considered an essential or fundamental statement of Camus'
philosophy, it is this extended essay on the ethics of suicide
(eventually translated and repackaged for American publication in
1955). For it is here that Camus formally introduces and fully
articulates his most famous idea, the concept of the Absurd, and his
equally famous image of life as a Sisyphean struggle. From its
provocative opening sentence ("There is but one truly serious
philosophical problem, and that is suicide") to its stirring,
paradoxical conclusion ("The struggle itself toward the heights is
enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy"), the
book has something interesting and challenging on nearly every page
and is shot through with brilliant aphorisms and insights. In the end,
Camus rejects suicide: the Absurd must not be evaded either by
religion ("philosophical suicide") or by annihilation ("physical
suicide"); the task of living should not merely be accepted, it must
be embraced.
The Rebel (1951) – Camus considered this work a continuation of the
critical and philosophical investigation of the Absurd that he began
with The Myth of Sisyphus. Only this time his concern is not the
ethics of suicide, but the problem of murder. After introducing the
view that an authentic life inevitably involves some form of
conscientious moral revolt, he ends up arguing that only in rare, and
in very narrowly defined, instances can political violence be morally
justified. Camus' critique of revolutionary violence and terror in
this work, and particularly his caustic assessment of Marxism-Leninism
(which he accused of sacrificing innocent lives on the altar of
History), touched nerves throughout Europe and led to his celebrated
feud with Sartre and other French leftists.
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1957) – This posthumous collection
is of interest to students of Camus mainly because it brings together
an unusual assortment of his non-fiction writings on a wide range of
topics, from art and politics to the advantages of pessimism and the
virtues (from a non-believer's standpoint) of Christianity. Of special
interest are two pieces that helped secure Camus' worldwide reputation
as a voice of liberty: "Letters to a German Friend" (a set of four
letters originally written during the Nazi Occupation) and
"Reflections on the Guillotine" (a denunciation of the death penalty
cited for special mention by the Nobel committee and eventually
revised and re-published as a companion essay to go with fellow
death-penalty opponent Arthur Koestler's "Reflections on Hanging").
5. Philosophy
"More a writer than a philosopher."
(Assessment penciled on Camus' dissertation by his dissertation adviser.)
To re-emphasize a point made earlier, Camus considered himself first
and foremost a writer (un ecrivain). And at various times in his
career he also accepted the labels journalist, humanist, novelist, and
even moralist. However, he apparently never felt comfortable
identifying himself as a philosopher – a term he seems to have
associated with rigorous academic training, systematic thinking,
logical consistency, and a coherent, carefully defined doctrine or
body of ideas.
This is not to suggest that Camus lacked ideas or to say that his
thought cannot be considered a personal philosophy. It is simply to
point out that he was not a systematic, or even a notably disciplined,
thinker and that, unlike Heidegger and Sartre, for example, he showed
very little interest in metaphysics and ontology (which seems to be
one of the reasons he consistently denied that he was an
existentialist). In short, he was not much given to speculative
philosophy or any kind of abstract theorizing. His thought is instead
nearly always related to current events (e.g., the Spanish War, revolt
in Algeria) and is consistently grounded in down-to-earth moral and
political reality.
a. Background and Influences
Though he was baptized, raised, and educated as a Catholic and
invariably respectful towards the Church, Camus seems to have been a
natural-born pagan who showed almost no instinct whatsoever for belief
in the supernatural. Even as a youth he was more of a sun-worshipper
and nature lover than a boy notable for his piety or religious faith.
On the other hand, there is no denying that Christian literature and
philosophy served as an important influence on his early thought and
intellectual development. As a young high school student Camus studied
the Bible, read and savored the Spanish mystics St. Theresa of Avila
and St. John of the Cross, and was introduced to the thought of St.
Augustine (who would later serve as the subject of his baccalaureate
dissertation and become – as a fellow North African writer,
quasi-existentialist, and conscientious observer-critic of his own
life – an important lifelong influence).
In college Camus absorbed Kierkegaard (who, after Augustine, was
probably the single greatest Christian influence on his thought). He
also studied Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (undoubtedly the two writers
who did the most to set him on his own path of defiant pessimism and
atheism). Other notable influences include not only the major modern
philosophers from the academic curriculum – from Descartes and Spinoza
to Bergson – but also, and just as importantly, philosophical writers
like Stendhal, Melville, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka.
b. Development
The two earliest expressions of Camus' personal philosophy are his
works Betwixt and Between (1937) and Nuptials (1938). Here he unfolds
what is essentially a hedonistic, indeed almost primitivistic,
celebration of nature and the life of the senses. In the Romantic
poetic tradition of writers like Rilke and Wallace Stevens, he offers
a forceful rejection of all hereafters and an emphatic embrace of the
here and now. There is no salvation, he argues, no transcendence;
there is only the enjoyment of consciousness and natural being. One
life, this life, is enough. Sky and sea, mountain and desert, have
their own beauty and magnificence and constitute a sufficient heaven.
The critic John Cruikshank termed this stage in Camus' thinking "naïve
atheism" and attributed it to his ecstatic and somewhat immature
"Mediterraneanism." "Naïve" seems an apt characterization for a
philosophy that is romantically bold and uncomplicated, yet somewhat
lacking in sophistication and logical clarity. On the other hand, if
we keep in mind Camus' theatrical background and preference for
dramatic presentation, there may actually be more depth and complexity
to his thought here than meets the eye. That is to say, just as it
would be simplistic and reductive to equate Camus' philosophy of
revolt with that of his character Caligula (who is at best a kind of
extreme or mad spokesperson for the author), so in the same way it is
possible that the pensees and opinions presented in Nuptials and
Betwixt and Between are not so much the views of Camus himself as the
poetically heightened observations of an artfully crafted narrator –
an exuberant alter ego who is far more spontaneous and free-spirited
than his more naturally reserved and sober-minded author.
In any case, regardless of our assessment of the ideas expressed in
Betwixt and Between and Nuptials, it is clear that these early
writings represent an important, if comparatively raw and simple,
beginning stage in Camus' development as a thinker and that his views
at this point differ markedly from his more mature philosophy in
several noteworthy respects. In the first place, the Camus of Nuptials
is still a young man of twenty-five, aflame with youthful joie de
vivre. He favors a life of impulse and daring as it was honored and
practiced in both Romantic literature and in the streets of Belcourt.
Recently married and divorced, raised in poverty and in close
quarters, beset with health problems, this young man develops an
understandable passion for clear air, open space, colorful dreams,
panoramic vistas, and the breath-taking prospects and challenges of
the larger world. Consequently, the Camus of the period 1937-38 is a
decidedly different writer from the Camus who will ascend the dais at
Stockholm nearly twenty years later.
The young Camus, that is to say, is more of a sensualist and
pleasure-seeker, more of a dandy and aesthete, than the more hardened
and austere figure who will endure the Occupation while serving in the
French underground. He is a writer passionate in his conviction that
life ought to be lived vividly and intensely – indeed rebelliously (to
use the term that will take on increasing importance in his thought).
He is also a writer attracted to causes, though he is not yet the
author who will become world-famous for his moral seriousness and
passionate commitment to justice and freedom. All of which is
understandable. After all, the Camus of the middle 1930's had not yet
witnessed and absorbed the shattering spectacle and disillusioning
effects of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Fascism, Hitlerism, and
Stalinism, the coming into being of total war and weapons of mass
destruction, and the terrible reign of genocide and terror that would
characterize the period 1938-1945. It was under the pressure and in
direct response to the events of this period that Camus' mature
philosophy – with its core set of humanistic themes and ideas –
emerged and gradually took shape. That mature philosophy is no longer
a "naïve" atheism, but on the contrary a very reflective and critical
brand of unbelief. It is proudly and inconsolably pessimistic, but not
in a polemical or overbearing way. It is unbending, hard-headed,
determinedly skeptical. It is tolerant and respectful of world
religious creeds, but at the same time wholly unsympathetic to them.
In the end it is an affirmative philosophy that accepts and approves,
and in its own way blesses, our dreadful mortality and our fundamental
isolation in the world.
c. Themes and Ideas
Regardless of whether he is producing drama, fiction, or non-fiction,
Camus in his mature writings nearly always takes up and re-explores
the same basic philosophical issues. These recurrent topoi constitute
the key components of his thought. They include themes like the
Absurd, alienation, suicide, and rebellion that almost automatically
come to mind whenever his name is mentioned. Hence any summary of his
place in modern philosophy would be incomplete without at least a
brief discussion of these ideas and how they fit together to form a
distinctive and original world-view.
i. The Absurd
Even readers not closely acquainted with Camus' works are aware of his
reputation as the philosophical expositor, anatomist, and poet-apostle
of the absurd. Indeed as even sit-com writers and stand-up comics
apparently understand (odd fact: Camus has been used to explain
episodes of Seinfeld and The Simpsons), it is largely through the
thought and writings of the French-Algerian author that the concept of
absurdity has become a part not only of world literature and
twentieth-century philosophy, but of modern popular culture as well.
What then is meant by the notion of the absurd? Contrary to the view
conveyed by popular culture, the absurd, (at least in Camus' terms)
does not simply refer to some vague perception that modern life is
fraught with paradoxes, incongruities, and intellectual confusion.
(Although that perception is certainly consistent with his formula.)
Instead, as he himself emphasizes and tries to make clear, the absurd
expresses a fundamental disharmony, a tragic incompatibility, in our
existence. In effect, he argues that the absurd is the product of a
collision or confrontation between our human desire for order,
meaning, and purpose in life and the blank, indifferent "silence of
the universe." ("The absurd is not in man nor in the world," Camus
explains, "but in their presence together. . . it is the only bond
uniting them.")
So here we are: poor creatures desperately seeking hope and meaning in
a hopeless, meaningless world. Sartre, in his essay-review of The
Stranger provides an additional gloss on the idea: "The absurd, to be
sure, resides neither in man nor in the world, if you consider each
separately. But since man's dominant characteristic is 'being in the
world,' the absurd is, in the end, an inseparable part of the human
condition." The absurd, then, presents itself in the form of an
existential opposition. It arises from the human demand for clarity
and transcendence on the one hand and a cosmos that offers nothing of
the kind on the other. Such is our fate: we inhabit a world that is
indifferent to our sufferings and deaf to our protests.
In Camus' view there are three possible philosophical responses to
this predicament. Two of these he condemns as evasions; the other he
puts forward as a proper solution.
Our first choice is blunt and simple: physical suicide. If we decide
that a life without some essential purpose or meaning is not worth
living, we can simply choose to kill ourselves. Camus rejects this
choice as cowardly. In his terms it is a repudiation or renunciation
of life, not a true revolt.
Choice two is the religious solution of positing a transcendent world
of solace and meaning beyond the Absurd. Camus calls this solution
"philosophical suicide" and rejects it as transparently evasive and
fraudulent. To adopt a supernatural solution to the problem of the
absurd (for example, through some type of mysticism or leap of faith)
is to annihilate reason, which in Camus' view is as fatal and
self-destructive as physical suicide. In effect, instead of removing
himself from the absurd confrontation of self and world like the
physical suicide, the religious believer simply removes the offending
world, replacing it, via a kind of metaphysical abracadabra, with a
more agreeable alternative.
Choice three (in Camus' view the only authentic and valid solution) is
simply to accept absurdity, or better yet to embrace it, and to
continue living. Since the absurd in his view is an unavoidable,
indeed defining, characteristic of the human condition, the only
proper response to it is full, unflinching, courageous acceptance.
Life, he says, can "be lived all the better if it has no meaning."
The example par excellence of this option of spiritual courage and
metaphysical revolt is the mythical Sisyphus of Camus' philosophical
essay. Doomed to eternal labor at his rock, fully conscious of the
essential hopelessness of his plight, Sisyphus nevertheless pushes on.
In doing so he becomes for Camus a superb icon of the spirit of revolt
and of the human condition. To rise each day to fight a battle you
know you cannot win, and to do this with wit, grace, compassion for
others, and even a sense of mission, is to face the Absurd in a spirit
of true heroism.
Over the course of his career, Camus examines the Absurd from multiple
perspectives and through the eyes of many different characters – from
the mad Caligula, who is obsessed with the problem, to the strangely
aloof and yet simultaneously self-absorbed Mersault, who seems
indifferent to it even as he exemplifies and is finally victimized by
it. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus traces it in specific characters of
legend and literature (Don Juan, Ivan Karamazov) and also in certain
character types (the Actor, the Conqueror), all of whom may be
understood as in some way a version or manifestation of Sisyphus, the
archetypal absurd hero.
[Note: A rather different, yet possibly related, notion of the absurd
is proposed and analyzed in the work of Kierkegaard, especially in
Fear and Trembling and Repetition. For Kierkegaard, however, the
absurd describes not an essential and universal human condition, but
the special condition and nature of religious faith – a paradoxical
state in which matters of will and perception that are objectively
impossible can nevertheless be ultimately true. Though it is hard to
say whether Camus had Kierkegaard particularly in mind when he
developed his own concept of the absurd, there can be little doubt
that Kierkegaard's knight of faith is in certain ways an important
predecessor of Camus' Sisyphus: both figures are involved in
impossible and endlessly agonizing tasks, which they nevertheless
confidently and even cheerfully pursue. In the knight's Quixote-like
defiance and solipsism, Camus found a model for his own ideal of
heroic affirmation and philosophical revolt.]
ii. Revolt
The companion theme to the Absurd in Camus' oeuvre (and the only other
philosophical topic to which he devoted an entire book) is the idea of
Revolt. What is revolt? Simply defined, it is the Sisyphean spirit of
defiance in the face of the Absurd. More technically and less
metaphorically, it is a spirit of opposition against any perceived
unfairness, oppression, or indignity in the human condition.
Rebellion in Camus' sense begins with a recognition of boundaries, of
limits that define one's essential selfhood and thus must not be
infringed – as when the slave stands up to his master and says in
effect "thus far, and no further, shall I be commanded." This defining
of the self as at some point inviolable appears to be an act of pure
egoism and individualism, but it is not. In fact Camus argues at some
length to show that an act of conscientious revolt is ultimately far
more than just an individual gesture or an act of solitary protest.
The rebel, he writes, holds that there is a "common good more
important than his own destiny" and that there are "rights more
important than himself." He acts "in the name of certain values which
are still indeterminate but which he feels are common to himself and
to all men." (The Rebel, 15-16.)
Camus then goes on to assert that an "analysis of rebellion leads at
least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of
contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks
believed." After all, "Why rebel," he asks, "if there is nothing
permanent in the self worth preserving?" The slave who stands up and
asserts himself actually does so for "the sake of everyone in the
world." He declares in effect that "all men – even the man who insults
and oppresses him – have a natural community." Here we may note that
the idea that there may indeed be an essential human nature was
actually more than a "suspicion" as far as Camus himself was
concerned. Indeed for him it was more like a fundamental article of
his humanist faith. In any case it represents one of the core
principles of his ethics and is one of the things that sets his
philosophy apart from existentialism.
True revolt, then, is performed not just for the self but in
solidarity with and out of compassion for others. And for this reason,
Camus is led to conclude, that revolt too has its limits. If it begins
with and necessarily involves a recognition of human community and a
common human dignity, it cannot, without betraying its own true
character, treat others as if they were lacking in that dignity or not
a part of that community. In the end it is remarkable, and indeed
surprising, how closely Camus' philosophy of revolt, despite the
author's fervent atheism and individualism, echoes Kantian ethics with
its prohibition against treating human beings as means and its ideal
of the human community as a kingdom of ends.
iii. The Outsider
A recurrent theme in Camus' literary works, which also shows up in his
moral and political writings, is the character or perspective of the
"stranger" or outsider. Mersault, the laconic narrator of The
Stranger, is the most obvious example. He seems to observe everything,
even his own behavior, from an outside perspective. Like an
anthropologist, he records his observations with clinical detachment
at the same time that he himself is warily observed by the community
around him.
Camus came by this perspective naturally. As a European in Africa, an
African in Europe, an infidel among Moslems, a lapsed Catholic, a
Communist Party drop-out, an underground resister (who at times had to
use code names and false identities), a "child of the state" raised by
a widowed mother (who was illiterate and virtually deaf and dumb),
Camus lived most of his life in various groups and communities without
really being of them. This outside view, the perspective of the exile,
became his characteristic stance as a writer. It explains both the
cool, objective ("zero-degree") precision of much of his work and also
the high value he assigned to longed-for ideals of friendship,
community, solidarity, and brotherhood.
iv. Guilt and Innocence
Throughout his writing career, Camus showed a deep interest in
questions of guilt and innocence. Once again Mersault in The Stranger
provides a striking example. Is he legally innocent of the murder he
is charged with? Or is he technically guilty? On the one hand, there
seems to have been no conscious intention behind his action. Indeed
the killing takes place almost as if by accident, with Mersault in a
kind of absent-minded daze, distracted by the sun. From this point of
view, his crime seems surreal and his trial and subsequent conviction
a travesty. On the other hand, it is hard for the reader not to share
the view of other characters in the novel, especially Mersault's
accusers, witnesses, and jury, in whose eyes he seems to be a
seriously defective human being – a kind of hollow man at best; at
worst a monster of self-centeredness and insularity. That the
character has evoked such a wide range of responses from critics and
readers – from sympathy to horror – is a tribute to the psychological
complexity and subtlety of Camus' portrait.
Camus' brilliantly crafted final novel, The Fall, continues his keen
interest in the theme of guilt, this time via a narrator who is
virtually obsessed with it. The significantly named Jean-Baptiste
Clamence (a voice in the wilderness calling for universal clemency and
forgiveness) is tortured by guilt in the wake of a seemingly casual
incident. While strolling home one drizzly November evening, he shows
little concern and almost no emotional reaction at all to the suicidal
plunge of a young woman into the Seine. But afterwards the incident
begins to gnaw at him, and eventually he comes to view his inaction as
typical of a long pattern of personal vanity and as a colossal failure
of human sympathy on his part. Wracked by remorse and self-loathing,
he gradually descends into a figurative hell. Formerly an attorney, he
is now a self-described "judge-penitent" (a combination sinner,
tempter, prosecutor, and father-confessor), who shows up each night at
his local haunt, a sailor's bar near Amsterdam's red light district,
where, somewhat in the manner of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, he
recounts his story to whoever will hear it. In the final sections of
the novel, amid distinctly Christian imagery and symbolism, he
declares his crucial insight that, despite our pretensions to
righteousness, everyone is guilty. Hence no human being has the right
to pass final moral judgment on another.
In a final twist, Clamence asserts that his acid self-portrait is also
a mirror for his contemporaries. Hence his confession is also an
accusation – not only of his nameless companion (who serves as the
mute auditor for his monologue) but ultimately of the hypocrite
lecteur as well.
v. Christianity vs. "Paganism"
The theme of guilt and innocence in Camus' writings relates closely to
another recurrent tension in his thought: the opposition of Christian
and pagan ideas and influences. At heart a nature-worshipper, and by
instinct a skeptic and non-believer, Camus nevertheless retained a
lifelong interest and respect for Christian philosophy and literature.
In particular, he seems to have recognized St. Augustine and
Kierkegaard as intellectual kinsmen and writers with whom he shared a
common passion for controversy, literary flourish, self-scrutiny, and
self-dramatization. Christian images, symbols, and allusions abound in
all his work (probably more so than in the writing of any other avowed
atheist in modern literature), and Christian themes – judgment,
forgiveness, despair, sacrifice, passion, etc. – permeate the novels.
(Mersault and Clamence, it is worth noting, are presented not just as
sinners, devils, and outcasts, but in several instances explicitly,
and not entirely ironically, as Christ figures.)
Meanwhile alongside and against this leitmotif of Christian images and
themes, Camus sets the main components of his essentially pagan world
view. Like Nietzsche, he maintains a special admiration for Greek
heroic values and pessimism and for classical virtues like courage and
honor. What might be termed Romantic values also merit particular
esteem within his philosophy: passion, absorption in being, sensory
experience, the glory of the moment, the beauty of the world.
As a result of this duality of influence, Camus' basic philosophical
problem becomes how to reconcile his Augustinian sense of original sin
(universal guilt) and rampant moral evil with his personal ideal of
pagan primitivism (universal innocence) and his conviction that the
natural world and our life in it have intrinsic beauty and value. Can
an absurd world have intrinsic value? Is authentic pessimism
compatible with the view that there is an essential dignity to human
life? Such questions raise the possibility that there may be deep
logical inconsistencies within Camus' philosophy, and some critics
(notably Sartre) have suggested that these inconsistencies cannot be
surmounted except through some sort of Kierkegaardian leap of faith on
Camus' part – in this case a leap leading to a belief not in God, but
in man.
Such a leap is certainly implied in an oft-quoted remark from Camus'
"Letter to a German Friend," where he wrote: "I continue to believe
that this world has no supernatural meaning . . . But I know that
something in the world has meaning – man." One can find similar
affirmations and protestations on behalf of humanity throughout Camus'
writings. They are almost a hallmark of his philosophical style.
Oracular and high-flown, they clearly have more rhetorical force than
logical potency. On the other hand, if we are trying to locate Camus'
place in European philosophical tradition, they provide a strong clue
as to where he properly belongs. Surprisingly, the sentiment here, a
commonplace of the Enlightenment and of traditional liberalism, is
much closer in spirit to the exuberant secular humanism of the Italian
Renaissance than to the agnostic skepticism of contemporary
post-modernism.
vi. Individual vs. History and Mass Culture
A primary theme of early twentieth-century European literature and
critical thought is the rise of modern mass civilization and its
suffocating effects of alienation and dehumanization. By the time
Camus was establishing his literary reputation, this theme had become
pervasive. Anxiety over the fate of Western culture, already intense,
escalated to apocalyptic levels with the sudden emergence of fascism,
totalitarianism, and new technologies of coercion and death. Here then
was a subject ready-made for a writer of Camus' political and
humanistic views. He responded to the occasion with typical force and
eloquence.
In one way or another, the themes of alienation and dehumanization as
by-products of an increasingly technical and automated world enter
into nearly all of Camus' works. Even his concept of the Absurd
becomes multiplied by a social and economic world in which meaningless
routines and mind-numbing repetitions predominate. The drudgery of
Sisyphus is mirrored and amplified in the assembly line, the business
office, the government bureau, and especially in the penal colony and
concentration camp.
In line with this theme, the ever-ambiguous Merseault in The Stranger
can be understood as both a depressing manifestation of the newly
emerging mass personality (that is, as a figure devoid of basic human
feelings and passions) and, conversely, as a lone hold-out, a last
remaining specimen of the old Romanticism – and hence a figure who is
viewed as both dangerous and alien by the robotic majority. Similarly,
The Plague can be interpreted, on at least one level, as an allegory
in which humanity must be preserved from the fatal pestilence of mass
culture, which converts formerly free, autonomous, independent-minded,
human beings into a soulless new species.
In his reflections on this theme, Camus differs from most other
European writers (and especially from those on the Left) in viewing
mass reform and revolutionary movements, notably Marxism, as
representing at least as great a threat to individual freedom as
industrial capitalism. Throughout his career he continued to cherish
and defend old-fashioned virtues like personal courage and honor that
other Left-wing intellectuals tended to view as reactionary or
bourgeois.
vii. Suicide
Suicide is the central subject of The Myth of Sisyphus and serves as a
background theme in Caligula and The Fall. (In Caligula the mad title
character, in a fit of horror and revulsion at the meaninglessness of
life, would rather die – and bring the world down with him – than
accept a cosmos that is indifferent to human fate or that will not
submit to his individual will. In The Fall, a stranger's act of
suicide serves as the starting point for a bitter ritual of
self-scrutiny and remorse on the part of the narrator).
Like Wittgenstein (who had a family history of suicide and suffered
from bouts of depression), Camus considered suicide the fundamental
issue for moral philosophy. However, unlike other philosophers who
have written on the subject (from Cicero and Seneca to Montaigne and
Schopenhauer), Camus seems uninterested in assessing the traditional
motives and justifications for suicide (for instance, to avoid a long,
painful, and debilitating illness or as a response to personal tragedy
or scandal). Indeed he seems interested in the problem only to the
extent that it represents one possible response to the Absurd. His
verdict on the matter is unqualified and clear: the only courageous
and morally valid response to the Absurd is to continue living.
"Suicide is not an option."
viii. The Death Penalty
From the time he first heard the story of his father's literal nausea
and revulsion after witnessing a public execution, Camus began a vocal
and lifelong opposition to the death penalty. Executions by guillotine
were a common public spectacle in Algeria during his lifetime, but he
refused to attend them and recoiled bitterly at their very mention.
Condemnation of capital punishment is both explicit and implicit in
his writings. For example, in The Stranger Merseault's long
confinement during his trial and his eventual execution are presented
as part of an elaborate, ceremonial ritual involving both public and
religious authorities. The grim rationality of this process of
legalized murder contrasts markedly with the sudden, irrational,
almost accidental nature of his actual crime. Similarly, in the Myth
of Sisyphus, the would-be suicide is contrasted with his fatal
opposite, the man condemned to death, and we are continually reminded
that a sentence of death is our common fate in an absurd universe.
Camus' opposition to the death penalty is not specifically
philosophical. That is, it is not based on a particular moral theory
or principle (such as Cesare Beccaria's utilitarian objection that
capital punishment is wrong because it has not been proven to have a
deterrent effect greater than life imprisonment). Camus' opposition,
in contrast, is humanitarian, conscientious, almost visceral. Like
Victor Hugo, his great predecessor on this issue, he views the death
penalty as an egregious barbarism – an act of blood riot and vengeance
covered over with a thin veneer of law and civility to make it
acceptable to modern sensibilities. That it is also an act of
vengeance aimed primarily at the poor and oppressed, and that it is
given religious sanction, makes it even more hideous and indefensible
in his view.
Camus' essay "Reflections on the Guillotine" supplies a detailed
examination of the issue. An eloquent personal statement, with
compelling psychological and philosophical insights, it includes the
author's direct rebuttal to traditional retributionist arguments in
favor of capital punishment (such as Kant's claim that death is the
legally appropriate, indeed morally required, penalty for murder). To
all who argue that murder must be punished in kind, Camus replies:
Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which
no criminal's deed, however calculated, can be compared. For there to
be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal
who had warned his victim of the date on which he would inflict a
horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined
him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not to be encountered
in private life.
Camus concludes his essay by arguing that, at the very least, France
should abolish the savage spectacle of the guillotine and replace it
with a more humane procedure (such as lethal injection). But he still
retains a scant hope that capital punishment will be completely
abolished at some point in the time to come: "In the unified Europe of
the future the solemn abolition of the death penalty ought to be the
first article of the European Code we all hope for." Camus himself did
not live to see the day, but he would no doubt be gratified to know
that abolition of capital punishment is now an essential prerequisite
for membership in the European Union.
6. Existentialism
Camus is often classified as an existentialist writer, and it is easy
to see why. Affinities with Kierkegaard and Sartre are patent. He
shares with these philosophers (and with the other major writers in
the existentialist tradition, from Augustine and Pascal to Dostoyevsky
and Nietzsche) an habitual and intense interest in the active human
psyche, in the life of conscience or spirit as it is actually
experienced and lived. Like these writers, he aims at nothing less
than a thorough, candid exegesis of the human condition, and like them
he exhibits not just a philosophical attraction but also a personal
commitment to such values as individualism, free choice, inner
strength, authenticity, personal responsibility, and
self-determination.
However, one troublesome fact remains: throughout his career Camus
repeatedly denied that he was an existentialist. Was this an accurate
and honest self-assessment? On the one hand, some critics have
questioned this "denial" (using the term almost in its modern clinical
sense), attributing it to the celebrated Sartre-Camus political "feud"
or to a certain stubbornness or even contrariness on Camus' part. In
their view, Camus qualifies as, at minimum, a closet existentialist,
and in certain respects (e.g., in his unconditional and passionate
concern for the individual) as an even truer specimen of the type than
Sartre himself.
On the other hand, besides his personal rejection of the label, there
appear to be solid reasons for challenging the claim that Camus is an
existentialist. For one thing, it is noteworthy that he never showed
much interest in (indeed he largely avoided) metaphysical and
ontological questions (the philosophical raison d'etre and bread and
butter of Heidegger and Sartre). Of course there is no rule that says
an existentialist must be a metaphysician. However, Camus' seeming
aversion to technical philosophical discussion does suggest one way in
which he distanced himself from contemporary existentialist thought.
Another point of divergence is that Camus seems to have regarded
existentialism as a complete and systematic world-view, that is, a
fully articulated doctrine. In his view, to be a true existentialist
one had to commit to the entire doctrine (and not merely to bits and
pieces of it), and this was apparently something he was unwilling to
do.
Yet a further point of separation, and possibly a decisive one, is
that Camus actively challenged and set himself apart from the
existentialist motto that being precedes essence. Ultimately, against
Sartre in particular and existentialists in general, he clings to his
instinctive belief in a common human nature. In his view human
existence necessarily includes an essential core element of dignity
and value, and in this respect he seems surprisingly closer to the
humanist tradition from Aristotle to Kant than to the modern tradition
of skepticism and relativism from Nietzsche to Derrida (the latter his
fellow-countryman and, at least in his commitment to human rights and
opposition to the death penalty, his spiritual successor and
descendant).
7. Significance and Legacy
Obviously, Camus' writings remain the primary reason for his
continuing importance and the chief source of his cultural legacy. But
his fame is also due (and that in no small part and to a degree
unusual among writers and intellectuals) to his exemplary life. He
truly lived his philosophy. And thus it is in his personal political
stands and public statements as well as in his books that we can find
his views clearly articulated. In short, he bequeathed not just his
words but also his actions. Taken together, those words and actions
embody a core set of liberal democratic values – including tolerance,
justice, liberty, open-mindedness, respect for personhood,
condemnation of violence, and resistance to tyranny – that can be
fully approved and acted upon by the modern intellectual engagé.
On a purely literary level, one of Camus' most original contributions
to modern discourse is his distinctive prose style. Terse and
hard-boiled, yet at the same time lyrical, and indeed capable of
great, soaring flights of emotion and feeling, Camus' style represents
a deliberate attempt on his part to wed the famous clarity, elegance,
and dry precision of the French philosophical tradition with the more
sonorous and opulent manner of 19th century Romantic fiction. The
result is something like a cross between Hemingway (a Camus favorite)
and Melville (another favorite); or between Diderot and Hugo. For the
most part when we read Camus we encounter the plain syntax, simple
vocabulary, and biting aphorism typical of modern theatre or noir
detective fiction. However, this base style frequently becomes a
counterpoint or springboard for extended musings and lavish
descriptions almost in the manner of Proust. And here we may note that
this attempted reconciliation or union of opposing styles is not just
an aesthetic gesture on the author's part. It is also a moral and
political statement as well. It says, in effect, that the life of
reason and the life of feeling need not be opposed; that intellect and
passion can, and should, operate together.
Perhaps the greatest inspiration and example that Camus provides for
contemporary readers is the lesson that it is still possible for a
serious thinker to face the modern world (with a full understanding of
its contradictions, injustices, brutal flaws, and absurdities) with
hardly a grain of hope, yet utterly without cynicism. To read Camus is
to find words like justice, freedom, humanity, and dignity used
plainly and openly, without apology or embarrassment, and without the
pained or derisive facial expressions or invisible quotation marks
that almost automatically accompany those terms in public discourse
today.
At Stockholm Camus concluded his Nobel acceptance speech with a
stirring reminder and challenge to modern writers. "The nobility of
our craft," he declared, "will always be rooted in two commitments,
both difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows
and the resistance to oppression." He left behind a body of work
faithful to his own credo that the arts of language must always be
used in the service of truth and the service of liberty.
8. References and Further Reading
* Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968.
* Bloom, Harold, ed. Albert Camus. New York: Chelsea House, 1989.
* Brée, Germaine. Camus. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1961.
* —–, ed. Camus: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962.
* Cruickshank, John. Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt.
London: Oxford University Press, 1959.
* —–. The Novelist as Philosopher. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.
* Kauffman, Walter, ed. Religion from Tolstoy to Camus. New York:
Harper, 1964.
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