Albert Camus

Introduction

Albert Camus is the French-Algerian writer and philosopher whose work in the 1940s and 1950s articulated the most influential mid-twentieth-century philosophical analysis of the absurd — the gap between the human craving for meaning and the universe's silence on whether life has any. The corresponding ethic of lucid revolt — the response that neither suicides nor leaps into religious or political faith but continues to live in clear-eyed engagement with the absurd condition — made Camus the canonical philosophical voice of mid-century European disenchantment and one of the few twentieth-century writers to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature (1957) for work that is fundamentally philosophical.

Camus is conventionally classified as an existentialist, but he resisted the label and differed from the Sartrean version of the movement on several key questions. His relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most intense intellectual friendships of the post-war period and ended in a famous public break in 1952 over the politics of revolutionary violence. The dispute structured French intellectual life for the decade and continues to be engaged in the scholarship.

Life

Albert Camus was born in 1913 in Mondovi (now Dréan), in French Algeria, to a working-class French settler family. His father, a farm worker who served in the French army, was killed at the Battle of the Marne in 1914 when Camus was less than a year old; his mother, an illiterate cleaning woman of Spanish descent, raised Camus and his older brother in poverty in the working-class neighborhood of Belcourt in Algiers. The Algerian childhood, the working-class roots, the Mediterranean light and culture — these biographical elements shaped Camus's writing decisively and distinguished him from the Parisian intellectuals who dominated French philosophical life.

Camus studied philosophy at the University of Algiers from 1932 to 1936, supported by scholarships and intermittent work. The university years were interrupted by recurring bouts of tuberculosis that prevented him from pursuing the agrégation (the qualification for French university teaching); he completed a thesis on Neoplatonism and Christianity in 1936. The early career was as a journalist and theatre director in Algiers, with early literary work — the essays of L'Envers et l'endroit (Betwixt and Between, 1937) and Noces (Nuptials, 1939), the early plays for the Théâtre du Travail and Théâtre de l'Équipe he founded, and the first drafts of what would become The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus.

Camus moved to mainland France in 1940 and worked in the editorial office of Paris-Soir. After the fall of France he returned briefly to North Africa but came back to occupied France in 1942 and joined the resistance, working on the clandestine resistance newspaper Combat under the alias Beauchard. The breakthrough literary year was 1942 — The Stranger (L'Étranger) and The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe) appeared from Gallimard within months of each other, the two works that established the absurd as Camus's central theme.

The post-war years were Camus's most productive. The Plague (La Peste, 1947) is the major novel of the resistance generation, the allegory of fascism and the question of how to live under and after totalizing evil. The Rebel (L'Homme révolté, 1951) is the major philosophical work of the post-war period, the analysis of revolt as the alternative to both nihilism and totalitarianism. The 1952 break with Sartre over The Rebel's critique of revolutionary violence (Sartre's circle attacked the book in Les Temps Modernes; Camus replied; Sartre replied; the friendship ended) defined French intellectual life through the 1950s.

Camus continued to write in the 1950s, including the experimental novel The Fall (La Chute, 1956) and the short-story collection Exile and the Kingdom (L'Exil et le royaume, 1957). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, at age 44, the second-youngest Nobel laureate in literature. The Nobel speech was notable for its insistence that the writer's vocation is to serve those who suffer history rather than to use it.

The Algerian War (1954–1962) put Camus in an impossible position. As a French Algerian by birth, he could neither endorse Algerian independence (which he believed would lead to the violent expulsion of the European settler population, including his own family) nor support the French repression of the independence movement; he advocated a federal solution that satisfied neither side and that no one took seriously. His famous statement during a 1957 Stockholm press conference that I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice has been continuously quoted and continuously contested.

Camus died on January 4, 1960, in a car accident at Villeblevin in central France, at age 46. The unfinished manuscript of The First Man (Le Premier Homme), the autobiographical novel he had been working on at his death, was published in 1994 by his daughter Catherine Camus.

The problem he worked on

Camus's central project, across the early and middle works, was the philosophical and literary articulation of the absurd condition and the development of an ethic that took the absurd seriously without either capitulating to nihilism or fleeing into the kind of philosophical or religious leap that would deny the condition. The absurd is presented as the structural feature of human existence: human beings demand meaning from a universe that does not provide it; the gap between the demand and the silence is not removable by any philosophical or theological move.

The constructive project is what Camus calls lucid revolt — the response that affirms life in the face of the absurd condition rather than fleeing it. The revolt is lucid in that it does not pretend the absurd is not there; it is revolt in that it refuses to capitulate to the conclusions (suicide, nihilism, leap into faith) that the absurd might seem to recommend. The later works develop the analysis of revolt as the alternative to revolutionary violence — a position that produced the break with Sartre and that has been influential in subsequent political theory.

Contributions

The absurd

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) is Camus's most direct philosophical articulation of the absurd condition. The book opens with the famous statement that there is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide — the question whether life is worth living given the absurd condition. The book's answer is that suicide is the wrong response (it capitulates to the absurd rather than facing it) and that the religious or philosophical leap (Kierkegaard, Husserl) is equally wrong (it pretends the absurd is not there). The proper response is what Camus calls living without appeal — the lucid acceptance of the absurd that nonetheless continues to engage with life.

The Sisyphus figure of the title represents the proper response. Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for it to roll back down forever, is the image of the absurd hero: the work is pointless, the situation is hopeless, the response is to embrace the work itself. One must imagine Sisyphus happy — the famous closing sentence — is Camus's compressed statement of the ethic of absurd revolt.

The Stranger

The novel The Stranger (L'Étranger, 1942) is the literary counterpart to The Myth of Sisyphus. Meursault, the narrator, lives in a kind of permanent absurd lucidity — he does not lie about his feelings, does not pretend to social conventions, does not invest in meanings that are not there. The novel's plot (Meursault kills an Arab on a beach in Algeria for reasons that are essentially absurd; he is tried and condemned to death essentially for his refusal to perform conventional emotion) is a study in the social consequences of absurd lucidity.

The novel has been continuously read both as the existential masterpiece of mid-century French literature and as a deeply problematic work in its representation of colonial Algeria (the murdered Arab is not given a name; the colonial setting is presented as natural rather than as the structural framework Camus's lucidity might have been expected to examine). Kamel Daoud's 2013 novel The Meursault Investigation (Meursault, contre-enquête) responds to the original by giving the murdered Arab a name (Musa) and writing his story from his brother's perspective.

The Rebel

The Rebel (L'Homme révolté, 1951) is Camus's major work in political philosophy and the immediate cause of the break with Sartre. The book analyzes the historical movement from nineteenth-century rebellion (Romantic, individualist) to twentieth-century revolution (totalizing, ideologically grounded) and argues that revolutionary movements characteristically betray their original revolt by submitting themselves to historical-philosophical schemes that justify any means in service of an imagined future end.

The central distinction is between revolt (the limited, lucid refusal of intolerable conditions) and revolution (the totalizing transformation of society in service of an ideological goal that justifies present violence). Camus argues that revolt is the proper political response and that revolution — especially the Communist version that had become the dominant model of twentieth-century revolutionary politics — inevitably produces the very tyranny it had set out to oppose. The argument was directly aimed at the French Communist Party and at the Sartrean circle that was at the time aligned with Soviet Marxism.

The Sartre-Camus break of 1952 turned on this analysis. Sartre's circle, in Les Temps Modernes, attacked The Rebel as a philosophical incompetence and as betraying the revolutionary cause. Camus replied; Sartre replied; the friendship ended publicly and the larger political and philosophical division shaped post-war French intellectual life.

The Plague

The novel The Plague (La Peste, 1947) is the major novel of the resistance generation. Set in the Algerian city of Oran during an outbreak of plague, the novel is partly the realistic account of an epidemic and partly the allegory of fascism, occupation, and the question of how to live under and after totalizing evil. The central characters — Dr. Rieux, the priest Father Paneloux, the journalist Rambert, the absurdist Tarrou — represent different responses to the plague (and through the allegory, to fascism).

The novel's ethical core is the recognition that the plague is the human condition, that it recurs in different forms across history, and that the only adequate response is the continued, undramatic work of those who refuse to capitulate to it. The closing chapter's recognition that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes for good and that it can rouse up its rats again and send them to die in some well-contented city is one of the most influential single passages in twentieth-century European literature.

Key works

• The Stranger (L'Étranger, 1942). The novel of absurd lucidity.
• The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942). The philosophical essay on the absurd.
• Caligula (play, written 1938, performed 1945)
• The Plague (La Peste, 1947). The major resistance novel.
• The Rebel (L'Homme révolté, 1951). The major political-philosophical work.
• The Fall (La Chute, 1956). The late experimental novel.
• Exile and the Kingdom (L'Exil et le royaume, 1957). The short-story collection.
• The First Man (Le Premier Homme, 1994 posthumous). The unfinished autobiographical novel.

The standard French edition is the Œuvres complètes in the Pléiade series (Gallimard, four volumes, 2006–2008). The standard English collected edition is the Lyrical and Critical Essays (Knopf, 1968) and the various individual works in current Penguin and Vintage editions. The new translation of L'Étranger by Sandra Smith (The Outsider, Penguin, 2013) is the best recent English version.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Nietzsche (Camus's most extensive philosophical engagement; the analysis of the absurd is recognizably post-Nietzschean); Dostoevsky (whose Ivan Karamazov is one of the canonical figures of the absurd condition); Pascal (the Jansenist tradition of human finitude and the wager); André Malraux (whose La Condition humaine, 1933, gave the literary form Camus extended); the Algerian and Mediterranean settings of his youth; Sartre and de Beauvoir (intellectual friends through the 1940s before the 1952 break); the Greek tragedies (Camus was a serious classicist).

Influenced: the wider mid-century French intellectual culture; the literature of the absurd through Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, and the broader theater of the absurd; the post-war French novel through Gracq, Modiano, and many others; the political theory of revolt through Hannah Arendt (On Revolution, 1963, engages Camus's distinction extensively), Albert Memmi, and the anti-totalitarian tradition; the post-colonial literature through Edward Said's engagement with Camus in Culture and Imperialism (1993) and through Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation (2013); the contemporary literature on the absurd through Thomas Nagel's The Absurd (1971) and the broader engagement; the broader cultural reception in popular philosophy, in self-help literature engaging mortality and meaning, and in the contemporary discourse about meaning in a post-religious culture.

Reception

Camus's reception during his lifetime was substantial. The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus were the breakthrough works of 1942; The Plague was a major bestseller in 1947; The Rebel was the major intellectual event of 1951; the Nobel Prize came in 1957. He was the second-youngest Nobel laureate in literature; his death in 1960 produced a international outpouring.

The post-1960 reception has been mixed and continuous. The dominant period of Sartrean and post-structuralist French intellectual life found Camus politically unsympathetic and philosophically unsystematic; his reputation as a moralist (a French term that connotes the tradition of La Rochefoucauld and Pascal more than a contemporary moralism) made him insufficiently theoretical for the prevailing currents. The post-Communist reassessment from the 1980s and 1990s onward has been more positive; Camus's critique of revolutionary violence has been read as prescient rather than reactionary; his ethic of lucid revolt has been engaged across the political spectrum.

The post-colonial reception has been critical of the Algerian dimensions of the work. Edward Said's engagement in Culture and Imperialism (1993) raised the question of whether Camus's absurdist humanism can be sustained alongside his actual positions on the Algerian War and on the representation of Arab Algerians in his fiction. The contemporary literature continues to engage these questions, often with sympathy for the complexity of Camus's actual position and criticism of the limits the colonial framework imposed on him.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Robert Zaretsky's A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning (2013) and Albert Camus: Elements of a Life (2010), Ronald Aronson's Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It (2004), Olivier Todd's Albert Camus: A Life (1996), David Carroll's Albert Camus the Algerian (2007), and the work of Matthew Sharpe, David Sherman, and Eve Morisi. The journal Cahiers Albert Camus documents continuing scholarship. Active scholarly debates concern the relation between Camus and Sartre (especially over revolution and violence), the precise interpretation of the absurd as a philosophical category, Camus's politics on the Algerian War and his relation to French colonialism, his place in the existentialist tradition (or his independence from it), and the contemporary applicability of The Rebel in conditions of renewed political polarization.

Further reading

• Existentialism — the tradition he is conventionally classified within (though he resisted the label)
• The Absurd — his central philosophical category
• Nietzsche — the philosophical predecessor whose post-religious analysis Camus extended
• Sartre — the contemporary whose friendship structured his intellectual life and whose break with Camus shaped post-war French thought
• Authenticity — the related existential category that Camus's lucid revolt extends in a specifically post-religious direction
• Amor Fati — the Nietzschean ideal that the affirmative response to the absurd most closely articulates

The French-Algerian writer and philosopher whose analysis of the absurd and ethic of lucid revolt made him the canonical philosophical voice of mid-century European disenchantment.