Albert Camus

From Philosopedia

Camus, Albert (7 November 1913 - 4 January 1960)

Camus, the novelist whose works illustrate contemporary humanism, was born and reared in Algeria. Partly of Alsatian, partly of Spanish, descent, he was raised as a member of the French white underclass. His father had been killed in France in October 1914, during which battle he became stone blind and suffered terrible wounds. His mother, left with two sons, worked as a domestic in an Algerian slum quarter, leading Camus to remark later, “I did not learn about liberty from Karl Marx. I learned it from being bone-poor.”

Tubercular from boyhood, he ran an amateur theatre company, “The Team,” a troupe in which no one was a star. The members not only acted but also built sets, sold tickets, and did whatever other jobs were required. Camus looked upon theatre, wrote Olivier Todd in Camus: Une Vie (1996), as a social duty not as a vehicle for glamor. He also enjoyed journalism and, when he married (briefly) for the first time he had four typesetters as his witnesses. As an editorialist for Combat, he favored Algeria’s liberation, which did not occur, however, until two years after his death. Camus had envisioned a federation in which Algeria and France would be equal partners, a dream which never transpired. Todd also detailed the surprising multiplicity of Camus’s sexual relationships, describing his skill as a seducer and also the connection between his mood of guilt shown in La Chute and his second wife Francine’s suicidal attempt of throwing herself out of a window.

In 1948, talking to some Dominican priests, Camus said,

• I shall not, as far as I am concerned, try to pass myself off as a Christian in your presence. I share with you the same revulsion from evil. But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.

In 1957, upon winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, he became the first African author - not Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, who won in 1986, or Naguib Mahfoux of Egypt, who won in 1988 - to be honored. The Swedish Academy cited his “important literary production that with clear-sighted earnestness illuminated the problems of the human conscience in our times.”

His three major works are The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). The first, with its famous opening lines (“Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday.”), showed humans as being outsiders trying to obtain self-awareness in a world they do not understand. It is the story of a thoughtless killer, one whose major wish upon the day of his execution was that he would be greeted by “an enormous crowd who would call out to him in hatred.” How tragic, Camus is saying in the novel, that man is a stranger to his environment, a stranger to the humanism of which he is a natural part.

The Plague is an allegorical account of the efforts by determined people in Oran, Algeria, to fight an epidemic, individuals who assert their humanity by rebelling against their circumstances. (In 1863, a plague had wiped out half the population of his birthplace, Mondavi.) Its character, the atheistic Dr. Rieux, struggles valiantly against the disease, in contrast with the laissez-faire attitude of Father Paneloux, who preaches that the plague has been sent as a punishment by God. The latter work develops his theory of the absurd. Camus wrote with a distinctly humanistic viewpoint: “In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between a man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”

Although, like Jean-Paul Sartre, Camus wrote of “the absurd,” he did so in a distinctly different and more constructively humanistic fashion. Sartre tended to think negatively concerning man’s absurd and meaningless existence on earth, whereas Camus expressed no nausea at such absurdity, choosing instead to accentuate the positive concerning our existence. An admitted lover of the sun, a pagan, a person who adored life, Camus treated “absurdism” as intellectual. It might be absurd that war is normal or that the deadly bacillus is a fact of life, but humanity needs to love that which is inevitable in this imperfect life of ours. Such a tragic humanism, to Camus, was not to be confused with pessimism.

Martin Seymour-Smith describes how Camus blamed Christianity for the introduction of the notion of original sin, and although Camus recognized life’s injustices he knew that man must be positively dedicated to life, must develop a moral responsibility, and must be anti-nihilist. Meursault, the anti-Christ of L’Étranger, hates Christ for his sacrifice – for that sacrifice involved pain.

As Seymour-Smith points out in Who’s Who in Twentieth-Century Literature (1976), Camus’s

• anti-Christianity is one of the most absolute of modern times. (He was courted by some Christians and has–naturally–been described as ultimately Christian).

In Le Mythe de Sisyphe, he portrays a man, Smith-Seymour states, not unlike that of the true Nietzsche, “who is doomed to perform an absurd task but who may nevertheless learn to be happy in it. This is a paradox: accept meaninglessness but then fight it with every weapon you have.” Adds Seymour-Smith, “Had he lived he could well have gone on to become the world’s foremost novelist.”

“Violently attacked in the 1960s and 1970s, when theoretical debate ran rife,” wrote Germaine Brée, “Camus has emerged in the 1980s as one of the precursors of a revolt against the constraints and evils of totalitarian systems. He has become a classic but a classic whose work has not lost its bite.”

In 1952, Sartre had broken publicly with Camus over his essay, “The Rebel,” in which Camus had denounced Soviet concentration camps. “One thing that Hegel and I have in common,” Sartre wrote, “is that Camus has read neither of us.” But in 1994, a time Alan Riding has observed, when “leftist intellectuals no longer rule the roost in Paris,” Camus’ daughter Catherine published the work under the title Le premier homme (The First Man). It glorifies Algeria, his birthplace, the nation which he was unable to commit to independence for that would have meant, in his mind, the permanent loss of his childhood home. The work takes up the questions of morality, “how we should act” and how we should live if we do “not believe in God or in reason.” Its main character, Jacques (who is a thinly disguised Camus), “was 16, then he was 20, and no one had spoken to him, and he had to learn by himself, to grow alone, in fortitude, in strength, find his own morality and truth, at last to be born as a man.” The work’s release resulted in a reassessment of Camus’s literary stature. Upon its publication, many in France, where The Stranger is required reading in many schools, held that Camus had finally triumphed over Sartre, for it was Sartre who tarnished his old friend’s reputation and it was the “anti-humanists” who had contributed to the fashionable view that Camus had declined in status as a writer. The intellectual complaint was that Camus rejected violence and terror in all its forms, particularly in the Algeria he knew and loved. His denunciation of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and his failure to commit himself to Algerian independence under Arab rule, observed The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, had “earned him the enmity of the left, while his literary endeavors–engagé, earnest and devoted to the consideration of moral issues–struck the fashionable new avatars of structuralism as old-fashioned, sentimental, and contemptibly humanistic.”

Paul Edwards, in God and the Philosophers, noted that

• Camus never uses an argument like Sartre’s appeal to free will. His certainty that there is no God seems to stem from his belief that the universe and more specifically human life is “absurd.” By this he means that the universe is indifferent to the human demand for rationality and justice. Camus’s view that human life is absurd and what we should infer from it is worked out in The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus has been condemned by the gods to roll a rock to the top of a mountain. As soon as he reaches the top, the rock starts rolling down, and Sisyphus has to start all over again. This cycle is repeated forever. “If this myth is tragic,” Camus wrote, “that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?”

André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henry Lévy, the so-called “New Philosophers,” scorned Camus for his “moralizing” obsession with responsibility. But now Glucksmann and Lévy have lost all favor, alleges Tony Judt of New York University: “They have been discredited by their casual resort to future History to justify present crimes, and by the ease with which they asserted that others must suffer for the sins of their own fathers. The lucidity and moral courage of Camus’s stand shine through today in a way that was not possible in the polarized world of 1958 [when Camus had written]. ‘As for me, I find it disgusting to beat the other man’s breast, in the manner of our judge-penitents.’” Judt continues: “What Camus understood perhaps better and earlier than any of his (metropolitan) contemporaries was not Arab nationalism–though as early as 1945 he had predicted that the Arabs could not much longer be expected to tolerate the conditions under which they were governed–but the particular culture of Algeria’s inhabitants, and the price that would be paid should anyone attempt to shatter it. The lost world of French Algeria is at the center of his last, unfinished novel, and it is a subject to which French readers are open now in a way that would have been unthinkable in 1960, when the manuscript was found in Camus’s briefcase at the scene of his death.”

Camus was asked by Warren Allen Smith in 1960 to go on record as to his philosophic stance. His secretary responded that he would do so just as soon as he returned from a trip. But it was on that trip that his life ironically and absurdly ended, in a crazy burst of speed by a car he was not driving. Near that wreck in Sens, Algeria, was found a mud-stained briefcase containing 144 pages of almost indecipherable handwriting that made up the first draft of the early chapters of a novel based closely on his life. His wife, Francine, knowing her husband was on poor terms with Sartre and other Left Bank luminaries, decided against publication at that time.

(See letter, from James T. Farrell], calling Camus a humanist.)

{CE; EU, Germaine Brée; Jeannette Lowen, “The Search for Connection Between Two Worlds,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1996-1997; TYD}