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 Meursault 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.
It was, above all, a shrewd, unflagging adversary; a skilled organizer, doing his work thoroughly and well. Clad in a gaudy military uniform bedecked with ribbons and decorations, the character Plague a satirical portrait of Generalissimo Francisco Franco—or El Caudillo as he liked to style himself is closely attended by his personal Secretary and loyal assistant Death, depicted as a prim, officious female bureaucrat who also favors military garb and who carries an ever-present clipboard and notebook.
So Plague is a fascist dictator, and Death a solicitous commissar. Together these figures represent a system of pervasive control and micro-management that threatens the future of mass society.
In his reflections on this theme of post-industrial dehumanization, Camus differs from most other European writers and especially from those on the Left in viewing mass reform and revolutionary movements, including Marxism, as representing at least as great a threat to individual freedom as late-stage 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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
To all who argue that murder must be punished in kind, Camus replies:. 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.
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? In their view, Camus qualifies as, at minimum, a closet existentialist, and in certain respects e. 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.
Of course there is no rule that says an existentialist must be a metaphysician. 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. 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.
The first thing that can be noted in this respect is that, unlike Sartre and many other European intellectuals, Camus never delivered a formal critique of colonialism. Nor did he sign any of the frequent manifestos and declarations deploring the practice — a sin for which he was sharply criticized and even accused of moral cowardice.
In addition to his perceived silence on the issue of colonialism a silence, as Algerian Chronicles reveals, motivated by his fear that speaking out aggressively would be more likely to heighten tensions than secure the united and independent post-colonial Algeria he hoped for , Camus has also been criticized for the virtual erasure of Arab characters and culture from his fiction.
Moreover, the few Arab characters who do appear, these critics point out, are inevitably mute and anonymous. They are either shadow figures, including the nameless murder victim at the climactic center of The Stranger , or mere bodies, like the uncounted and unidentified native Algerians who presumably make up the major part of the death toll in The Plague but who otherwise have no speaking role or even visible presence in the novel.
Along this same line of criticism, The Meursault Investigation is a fictional and metafictional riposte to Camus by the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud. A reimagining of the characters and events of The Stranger , told from the point of view of the brother of the murdered Arab, the novel represents both a corrective rebuke and a literary tribute to it famous original.
He truly lived his philosophy; thus it is in his personal political stands and public statements as well as in his books that his views are clearly articulated. In short, he bequeathed not just his words but also his actions. 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.
This muted, laconic style frequently becomes a counterpoint or springboard for extended musings and lavish descriptions almost in the manner of Proust. Moreover, this base style frequently becomes a counterpoint or springboard for extended musings and lavish descriptions almost in the manner of Proust.
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.
David Simpson Email: dsimpson depaul. Albert Camus — Albert Camus was a French-Algerian journalist, playwright, novelist, philosophical essayist, and Nobel laureate. 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.
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. Drama Camus began his literary career as a playwright and theatre director and was planning new dramatic works for film, stage, and television at the time of his death.
Philosophy To re-emphasize a point made earlier, Camus considered himself first and foremost a writer un ecrivain. 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.
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. Guilt and Innocence Throughout his writing career, Camus showed a deep interest in questions of guilt and innocence. Christianity vs. 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.
Existentialism Camus is often classified as an existentialist writer, and it is easy to see why. References and Further Reading a. Works by Albert Camus The Stranger. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage-Random House, The Plague. New York: Vintage-International, The Fall. The Myth of Sisyphus and other Essays. A philosophical meditation on suicide originally published as Le Mythe de Sisyphe by Librairie Gallimard in The Rebel.
Anthony Bower. Exile and the Kingdom. Lyrical and Critical Essays. Philip Thody. Ellen Conroy Kennedy. A selection of critical writings, including essays on Melville, Faulkner, and Sartre, plus all the early essays from Betwixt and Between and Nuptials. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. New York: Vintage International, A collection of essays on a wide variety of political topics ranging from the death penalty to the Cold War.
Caligula and Three Other Plays. The First Man. David Hapgood. New York: Alfred Knopf, A posthumous novel, partly autobiographical. Camus at Combat: Writings Jaqueline Levi-Valenci. Arthur Goldhammer. Algerian Chronicles. Alice Kaplan. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Critical and Biographical Studies Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero.
New York: Hill and Wang, Bloom, Harold, ed. Albert Camus. New York: Chelsea House, Camus: A Collection of Critical Essays. Cruickshank, John. Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt. London: Oxford University Press, The Novelist as Philosopher. Foley, John. Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt. Hughes, Edward J. The Cambridge Companion to Camus. Kauffman, Walter, ed.
It contradicted the original life-affirming, self-affirming, and unifying purpose of revolt. Camus focuses on a variety of major figures, movements, and literary works: the Marquis de Sade, romanticism, dandyism, The Brothers Karamazov , Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, surrealism, the Nazis, and above all the Bolsheviks.
Camus describes revolt as increasing its force over time and turning into an ever more desperate nihilism, overthrowing God and putting man in his place, wielding power more and more brutally.
Historical revolt, rooted in metaphysical revolt, leads to revolutions seeking to eliminate absurdity by using murder as their central tool to take total control over the world.
Communism is the contemporary expression of this Western sickness. We might justly expect an analysis of the arguments he speaks of, but The Rebel changes focus. His shift is revealed by his question: How can murder be committed with premeditation and be justified by philosophy? He does not address the Holocaust, and although his had been a voice of protest against Hiroshima in , he does not now ask how it happened.
As a journalist he had been one of the few to indict French colonialism, but he does not mention it, except in a footnote. How was it possible for Camus to focus solely on the violence of Communism, given the history he had lived, in the very midst of the French colonial war in Vietnam, and when he knew that a bitter struggle over Algeria lay ahead? It seems he became blinded by ideology, separating Communism from the other evils of the century and directing his animus there.
But something else had happened: his agenda had changed. Absurdity and revolt, his original themes, had been harnessed as an alternative to Communism, which had become the archenemy. The philosophy of revolt became Cold-War ideology. Because The Rebel claimed to describe the attitude that lay behind the evil features of contemporary revolutionary politics, it became a major political event.
Readers could hardly miss his description of how the impulse for emancipation turned into organized, rational murder as the rebel-become-revolutionary attempted to order an absurd universe. In presenting this message, Camus sought not so much to critique Stalinism as its apologists. His specific targets were intellectuals attracted to Communism—as he himself had been in the s.
But it also reflects his capacity for interpreting a specific disagreement in the broadest possible terms—as a fundamental conflict of philosophies. They are studded with carefully composed topic sentences for major ideas—which one expects to be followed by paragraphs, pages, and chapters of development but, instead, merely follow one another and wait until the next equally well-wrought topic sentence.
The going gets even muddier as we near the end and the text verges on incoherence. However the strain stems from the fact that he is doing so much more. Rebellion, Camus has insisted, will entail murder. He has said that death is the most fundamental of absurdities, and that at root rebellion is a protest against absurdity. Thus to kill any other human being, even an oppressor, is to disrupt our solidarity, in a sense to contradict our very being.
It is impossible, then, to embrace rebellion while rejecting violence. There are those, however, who ignore the dilemma: these are the believers in history, heirs of Hegel and Marx who imagine a time when inequality and oppression will cease and humans will finally be happy.
For Camus this resembles the paradise beyond this life promised by religions, and he speaks of living for, and sacrificing humans for, a supposedly better future as, very simply, another religion. Moreover, his sharpest hostility is reserved for intellectuals who theorize and justify such movements.
Accepting the dilemma, Camus is unable to spell out how a successful revolution can remain committed to the solidaristic and life-affirming principle of rebellion with which it began. In addition, as Foley points out, Camus attempts to think through the question of political violence on a small-group and individual level.
Both in The Rebel and in his plays Caligula and The Just Assassins , Camus brings his philosophy to bear directly on the question of the exceptional conditions under which an act of political murder can considered legitimate. Furthermore, because the killer has violated the moral order on which human society is based, Camus makes the demand that he or she must be prepared to sacrifice his or her own life in return.
But if he accepts killing in certain circumstances, Camus rules out mass killing, indirect murder, killing civilians, and killing without an urgent need to remove murderous and tyrannical individuals. In The Rebel, a complex and sprawling essay in philosophy, the history of ideas and literary movements, political philosophy, and even aesthetics, Camus extends the ideas he asserted in Nuptials and developed in The Myth of Sisyphus : the human condition is inherently frustrating, but we betray ourselves and solicit catastrophe by seeking religious solutions to its limitations.
Our alternatives are to accept the fact that we are living in a Godless universe—or to become a revolutionary, who, like the religious believer committed to the abstract triumph of justice in the future, refuses to live in the present. Having critiqued religion in Nuptials , Camus is self-consciously exploring the starting points, projects, weaknesses, illusions, and political temptations of a post-religious universe.
He describes how traditional religion has lost its force, and how younger generations have been growing up amid an increasing emptiness and a sense that anything is possible.
He further claims that modern secularism stumbles into a nihilistic state of mind because it does not really free itself from religion. Our modern need to create kingdoms and our continuing search for salvation is the path of catastrophe. Thus in the twenty-first century Camus remains relevant for having looked askance at Western civilization since classical times, at progress, and at the modern world.
At the heart of his analyses lie his ambivalent exploration of what it is like to live in a Godless universe. But to restrain oneself from this effort is to feel bereft of justice, order, and unity. Camus recognizes that hope and the revolutionary drive are essential directions of the post-classical Western spirit, stemming from its entire world of culture, thought, and feeling.
The possibility of suicide haunts humans, as does the fact that we seek an impossible order and an unachievable permanence. Camus never directly attacks existentialist writers, but largely confines himself to describing their inability to remain consistent with their initial insight. His reflexive anti-Communism notwithstanding, an underlying sympathy unites Camus to those revolutionaries he opposes, because he freely acknowledges that he and they share the same starting points, outlook, stresses, temptations, and pitfalls.
Although in political argument he frequently took refuge in a tone of moral superiority, Camus makes clear through his skepticism that those he disagrees with are no less and no more than fellow creatures who give in to the same fundamental drive to escape the absurdity that we all share.
This sense of moral complexity is most eloquent in his short novel The Fall , whose single character, Clamence, has been variously identified as everyman, a Camus-character, and a Sartre-character. He was all of these. Clamence is clearly evil, guilty of standing by as a young woman commits suicide. In him Camus seeks to describe and indict his generation, including both his enemies and himself. His monologue is filled with self-justification as well as the confession of someone torn apart by his guilt but unable to fully acknowledge it.
Sitting at a bar in Amsterdam, he descends into his own personal hell, inviting the reader to follow him. Clamence is a monster, but Clamence is also just another human being Aronson , Camus won the Nobel Prize for literature in , after The Fall was published.
The story, a literary masterpiece, demonstrates a unique capacity at the heart of his philosophical writing. Life is no one single, simple thing, but a series of tensions and dilemmas. The most seemingly straightforward features of life are in fact ambiguous and even contradictory. Camus recommends that we avoid trying to resolve them. We need to face the fact that we can never successfully purge ourselves of the impulses that threaten to wreak havoc with our lives.
Camus and the World of Violence: The Rebel 4. In a sense, it is indeed my life that I am staking here, a life that tastes of warm stone, that is full of the signs of the sea and the rising song of the crickets. The breeze is cool and the sky blue.
I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition.
Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow.
It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living. N , 69 The intense and glistening present tells us that we can fully experience and appreciate life only on the condition that we no longer try to avoid our ultimate and absolute death.
At the beginning of The Rebel Camus explains: Awareness of the absurd, when we first claim to deduce a rule of behavior from it, makes murder seem a matter of indifference, to say the least, and hence possible. We are free to stoke the crematory fires or to devote ourselves to the care of lepers.
Evil and virtue are mere chance or caprice. Philosopher of the Present In The Rebel, a complex and sprawling essay in philosophy, the history of ideas and literary movements, political philosophy, and even aesthetics, Camus extends the ideas he asserted in Nuptials and developed in The Myth of Sisyphus : the human condition is inherently frustrating, but we betray ourselves and solicit catastrophe by seeking religious solutions to its limitations.
Quillot ed. Essais , R. Quillot and L. I—IV, R. Gay-Crosier ed. Paris: Gallimard, — Works in English Reference marks are given for cited English translations. Knopf, Knopf, [ R ]. Knopf, [ MS ]. Knopf, [ RRD ]. The Stranger , New York: Vintage, Notebooks — , New York: Marlowe, Camus at Combat: Writing —47 , J. Camus and Sartre Sartre, J. Sprintzen, D. Secondary Works Aronson, R. Daoud, K. Foley, J. Gay-Crosier, R.
Hanna, T. Regnery Co. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above. Albert Camus died on January 4, Back to top Back To Top Takes users back to the top of the page. Nobel Prizes Thirteen laureates were awarded a Nobel Prize in , for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. See them all presented here.
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