Camus was a moralist and was leaning towards anarcho-syndicalism. He was part of many organisations seeking European integration. During the Algerian War, he kept a neutral stance advocating for a multicultural and pluralistic Algeria, a position that caused controversy and was rejected by most parties.
Camus felt as deeply for the seeming oppressor as for the oppressed. He grasped that the great majority of the settlers in any country, and in Algeria in particular, were as much victims of the circumstance as the locals, and made the same claims on decency and empathy.
This event sheds new light on its entire existence, when it deems as unnecessary and pretentious: he does it anymore. Through Clamence is humanity that portrays Camus: selfish, or autism, living in the pure entertainment, modern man seems to have lost sight of the concepts of justice and accountability.
Camus presents the reader with dualisms such as happiness and sadness, dark and light, life and death, etc. He emphasizes the fact that happiness is fleeting and that the human condition is one of mortality; for Camus, this is cause for a greater appreciation for life and happiness.
Camus' theory of the value of art is based on his “logic of the absurd”, i.e., the idea that the human condition is absurd and that we therefore ought to adopt an attitude of revolt. This idea entails that art lacks any intrinsic value.
Camus defined the absurd as the futility of a search for meaning in an incomprehensible universe, devoid of God, or meaning. Absurdism arises out of the tension between our desire for order, meaning and happiness and, on the other hand, the indifferent natural universe's refusal to provide that.
He is best known for his novels The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Fall (1956). Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.”
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” “I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.” “To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.” “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
Camus identified existentialism with philosophical suicide in the series of the absurd, and with a reduction of human life to its historical dimension in the subsequent series of revolt. In each case, existentialism was seen as life-denying, and as such, as diametrically opposed to Camus's own life-affirming outlook.
Albert Camus was a French-Algerian journalist and novelist whose literary work is regarded as a primary source of modern existentialist thought. A principal theme in Camus' novels is the idea that human life is, objectively speaking, meaningless.
Albert CamusRegionWestern philosophySchoolContinental philosophy Absurdism Existentialism Existentialist anarchism French Nietzscheanism Syndicalist anarchismMain interestsEthics, human nature, justice, politics, philosophy of suicideNotable ideasAbsurdism11 more rows
Camus did well in school and was admitted to the University of Algiers, where he studied philosophy and played goalie for the soccer team. He quit the team following a bout of tuberculosis in 1930, thereafter focusing on academic study. By 1936, he had obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy.
Albert Camus, photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Camus wrote The Stranger from a place of tragedy and suffering. His father had died in World War I, and the unfolding carnage of World War II forced a questioning of life and its meaning.
“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) wrote in his 119-page philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942.
Love is a form of art and, through it, a means of scaffolding a future that does not yet exist, but could. To fail to act, even in the absence of guarantees or the promise of success, is what Camus refers to as philosophical suicide. Of course, the possibility remains that we may never see that future.
INFP – The Healer INFP writers include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Albert Camus, George Orwell, J.R.R. Tolkien, Virginia Woolf, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, A.A. Milne, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, John Milton, William Blake, Hans Christian Anderson, William Shakespeare, Homer, and George R.R. Martin.
The essential paradox arising in Camus’s philosophy concerns his central notion of absurdity.
Camus’s graduate thesis at the University of Algiers sympathetically explored the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christianity, specifically the relationship of Plotinus to Augusti ne (Camus 1992). Nevertheless, his philosophy explicitly rejects religion as one of its foundations.
Camus is sometimes mistakenly called a “pagan” because he rejects Christianity as based on a hope for a life beyond this life. Hope is the error Camus wishes to avoid. Rejecting “the delusions of hope” ( N, 74), Nuptials contains an evocation of an alternative. Camus relies for this line of thought on Nietzsche’s discussion of Pandora’s Box in Human, All Too Human: all the evils of humankind, including plagues and disease, have been let loose on the world by Zeus, but the remaining evil, hope, is kept hidden away in the box and treasured. But why, we may ask, is hope an evil? Nietzsche explains that humans have come to see hope as their greatest good, while Zeus, knowing better, has meant it as the greatest source of trouble. It is, after all, the reason why humans let themselves be tormented—because they anticipate an ultimate reward (Nietzsche 1878/1996, 58). For Camus, following this reading of Nietzsche closely, the conventional solution is in fact the problem: hope is disastrous for humans inasmuch as it leads them to minimize the value of this life except as preparation for a life beyond.
How then to remain consistent with absurd reasoning and avoid falling victim to the “spirit of nostalgia”? The Myth of Sisyphus finds the answer by abandoning the terrain of philosophy altogether. Camus describes a number of absurdist fictional characters and activities, including Don Juan and Dostoevsky’s Kirolov ( The Possessed ), theater, and literary creation. And then he concludes with the story of Sisyphus, who fully incarnates a sense of life’s absurdity, its “futility and hopeless labor” ( MS, 119). Camus sees Sisyphus’s endless effort and intense consciousness of futility as a triumph. “His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing” ( MS, 120). After the dense and highly self-conscious earlier chapters, these pages condense the entire line of thought into a vivid image. Sisyphus demonstrates that we can live with “the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it” ( MS, 54). For Camus, Sisyphus reminds us that we cannot help seeking to understand the reality that transcends our intelligence, striving to grasp more than our limited and practical scientific understanding allows, and wishing to live without dying. Like Sisyphus, we are our fate, and our frustration is our very life: we can never escape it.
1. The Paradoxes of Camus’s Absurdist Philosophy. 2. Nuptials and Camus’s Starting Point. 3. Suicide, Absurdity and Happiness : The Myth of Sisyphus. 3.1 Suicide as a Response to Absurdity. 3.2 The Limits of Reason. 3.3 Criticism of Existentialists.
In 1957 he won the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in a car accident in January, 1960, at the age of 46. 1.
These certainly reached back to his expulsion from the Communist Party in the mid-1930s for refusing to adhere to its Popular Front strategy of playing down French colonialism in Algeria in order to win support from the white working class. Then, making no mention of Marxism, The Myth of Sisyphus is eloquently silent on its claims to present a coherent understanding of human history and a meaningful path to the future. His mutually respectful relations with Communists during the Resistance and the immediate postwar period turned bitter after he was attacked in the Communist press and repaid the attack in a series of newspaper articles in 1946 entitled “Neither Victims nor Executioners” (Aronson, 2004, 66-93).
Camus's message in The Stranger is that life is absurd. He communicates this message through the protagonist, Meursault, who lives his life according to the belief that his world operates without order, reason, or meaning. Download PDF. Print.
Meursault becomes an outsider because of his absurdist outlook. Other characters believe there is a higher moral order and that everything in life has a rational explanation, such as the people in the courtroom. They are all horrified by Meursault because he represents such an alien view—one that directly challenges their own. So, an additional message of the novel is that the absurdist philosophy is a minority view that most people are unwilling to accept because they crave meaning.
Share Link. In The Stranger, Albert Camus presents life in an absurdist light. Absurdism holds that life is meaningless and that the universe, rather than being benevolent or hostile, is indifferent to human life . The struggle between humanity's attempt to find inherent meaning in life and the fruitlessness of that search is a major part ...
“You know, I can get a film contract whenever I want,” he wrote, joking a little, but only a little. Looking at the famous portrait of Camus by Cartier-Bresson from the forties—trenchcoat collar up, hair swept back, and cigarette in mouth; long, appealing lined face and active, warm eyes—you see why people thought of him as a star and not just as a sage; you also see that he knew the effect he was having.
In America, Camus is, first of all, French ; in France he remains, most of all, Algerian—a Franco-Algerian, what was later called a pied noir, a black foot, meaning the European colonial class who had gone to Algeria and made a home there. A dense cover of clichés tends to cloud that condition: just as the writer from Mississippi is supposed to be in touch with a swampy mysterious identity, a usable past, that no Northern boy could emulate, the “Mediterranean” man is assumed in France to be in touch with a deep littoral history. Camus had that kind of mystique: he was supposed to be somehow at once more “primitive”—he was a strong swimmer and, until a bout of tuberculosis sidelined him, an even finer football player—and, because of his Mediterranean roots, more classical, in touch with olive groves and Aeschylus. The reality was grimmer and more sordid. His father, a poorly paid cellarman for a wine company, was killed in battle during the First World War, when Camus was one. His mother was a maid, who cleaned houses for the wealthy French families. Though he was, as a young man, sympathetic to Algerian nationalism, he understood in his marrow that the story of colonialist exploitation had to include the image of his mother on her knees, scrubbing. Not every colonial was a grasping parasite.
Sartre responded to “The Rebel” with truly papal exquisitism. Rather than let the condemnation of the heretic come from the seat of Peter, it would come from lower down, which would both imply a certain papal ambiguity and allow the possibility of reproach and an eventual welcome home. The task of condemning Camus was handed to a staff writer for Les Temps Modernes named Francis Jeanson, who went after Camus full tilt, praising his prose style (praising a writer’s smooth prose is usually a way of implying that he’s not too bright about the big ideas) and accusing him of being both a philosophical naïf and an unwitting tool of the French right. Camus, replying, ignored Jeanson completely, and directed his words exclusively to Sartre, as the “Director of the Publication.” Sartre, replying in turn, tried to play the innocent: Jeanson wrote that, not me; by writing to me, you dehumanize Jeanson. In this way, Sartre both protected and belittled Jeanson, implying that he was in need of papal protection, and accused Camus of indifference to the little people Sartre was at that moment belittling. It was a neat job. (Jeanson, as it happens, was a genuinely interesting character, more Catholic than the Pope, and even more heretical than the heretic, and has recently received a good biography by Marie-Pierre Ulloa. While Sartre was far too comfortable and cunning to be any kind of example of Sartrean man, and Camus far too touched by inner rectitude to be an instance of Camusean man, Jeanson was both. A partisan of the Algerian rebels, he ended up, poor guy, in hiding for almost a decade, far from Saint-Germain—the only man in the circle who thought they meant it.)
In “Sisyphus,” though, Camus offers a way to keep Meursault’s absurdity from becoming merely murderous: we are all Sisyphus, he says, condemned to roll our boulder uphill and then watch it roll back down for eternity, or at least until we die. Learning to roll the boulder while keeping at least a half smile on your face—“One must imagine Sisyphus happy” is his most emphatic aphorism—is the only way to act decently while accepting that acts are always essentially absurd.
The reality was grimmer and more sordid. His father, a poorly paid cellarman for a wine company, was killed in battle during the First World War, when Camus was one. His mother was a maid, who cleaned houses for the wealthy French families.
Abjuring abstraction and extremism, Camus found a way to write about politics that was sober, lofty, and a little sad. Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum. The French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus was a terrifically good-looking guy whom women fell for helplessly—the Don Draper of existentialism.
Camus moved toward a break with Sartre, and Sartre’s magazine, Les Temps Modernes, in 1951, after the publication of his “L’Homme Révolté,” called in English, a little misleadingly, “The Rebel.”. The fault line between the two men was simple, if the fault-finding was complex.
Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in a working-class neighbourhood in Mondovi (present-day Dréan ), in French Algeria. His mother, Catherine Hélène Camus (née Sintès), was French with Spanish - Balearic ancestry. His father, Lucien Camus, a poor French agricultural worker, died in the Battle of the Marne in 1914 during World War I.
Camus's first publication was a play called Révolte dans les Asturies ( Revolt in the Asturias) written with three friends in May 1936. The subject was the 1934 revolt by Spanish miners that was brutally suppressed by the Spanish government resulting in 1,500 to 2,000 deaths.
Camus was a moralist; he claimed morality should guide politics. While he did not deny that morals change over time, he rejected the classical Marxist view that historical material relations define morality.
Born in Algeria to French parents, Camus was familiar with the institutional racism of France against Arabs and Berbers, but he was not part of a rich elite. He lived in very poor conditions as a child but was a citizen of France and as such was entitled to citizens' rights; members of the country's Arab and Berber majority were not.
Even though Camus is mostly connected to absurdism, he is routinely categorized as an existentialist, a term he rejected on several occasions.
Camus's novels and philosophical essays are still influential. After his death, interest in Camus followed the rise (and diminution) of the New Left. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, interest in his alternative road to communism resurfaced.
Amin, Nasser (2021). "The Colonial Politics of the Plague: Reading Camus in 2020" (PDF). Journal of Contemporary Development & Management Studies. 9 Spring 2021: 28–38.
The Fall by Camus explores the theme of guilt: the thesis of this philosophical novel in one sentence: we are all responsible for everything. If the plague was focused on the action, the Fall for its analysis of the theme of inaction and its consequences. Summary of the Fall by Camus. The Fall is indeed the story of a confession ...
Summary of the Fall by Camus. The Fall is indeed the story of a confession of a man to another in a bar in Amsterdam, in the form of a monologue. Jean-Baptiste Clamence, former Parisian lawyer, recounts the events that changed his life. Before this event, Clamence describes himself as a perfect selfish love of life itself.
Camus definitely approaches The Plague didactically. Not that we love him any less for it. The difficult part about discussing tone with a novel like this lies in trying to separate the tone of the narrator from the tone of the author. The trick is to think about how Rieux and other characters come across.
Camus definitely approaches The Plague didactically. Not that we love him any less for it. The difficult part about discussing tone with a novel like this lies in trying to separate the tone of the narrator from the tone of the author. The trick is to think about how Rieux and other characters come across.