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Albert Camus’ Best Stories, Books, and Essays Ranked 📚

Albert Camus is remembered today as one of the leaders of existentialism and more specifically, absurdism.

Emma Baldwin

Written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

This philosophical idea, which is at the heart of so much of Camus’ written work, states that life is essentially meaningless. Humankind’s quest to find meaning in a meaningless life is absurd. There are several ways one might try to contend with this fact but the best option is to accept the true nature of existence. Taking this into consideration, below are the best stories, books, and essays from Albert Camus ranked.

1. The Stranger

The Stranger is certainly Camus’ best-known novel. It follows the absurdist sorry of the character Meursault , a strange and unhappy man living in Algeria. He moves through his life without purpose and then eventually commits a murder on a beach. The novel is seen as a leading work of the existentialist or the absurdist (a term Camus preferred) movement. Meursault’s personality, his general disregard for others, himself, and his lack of emotions have been studied and pondered since the novel’s publication . The opening and closing lines of The Stranger are some of the best-known in modernist fiction.

2 . The Plague

‘The Plague’ explores a plague that takes place in Algiers, Oran. In order to write this story, Camus looked to an outbreak of cholera in 1849 as inspiration. He moved the events from the 1840s to the 1940s and brought in his own absurdist viewpoint. 

It focuses more on the crisis of the moment rather than the illness itself. Camus was interested in exploring the struggle between life and death and what human beings will do to try to control their own fate. The novel was published in 1947.

3. The Myth of Sisyphus

‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ is Camus’ best-known essay. It was published in 1942 and outlines Camus’ beliefs about the absurd. Humans must, he wrote, continue to live knowing that there is nothing they can do to avoid their ultimate fate. Camus takes the legend of Sisyphus and uses it as a metaphor for the impossible fight humans have on their hands against the absurdity of life. 

4. The Fall

‘The Fall’ was Camus’ last complete fiction work. The story is set in Amsterdam and explores truth, existence, and imprisonment, all themes that can be found in several other stories and novels.  It follows the story of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a lawyer who delivers the story of his life. The book is made up of a series of monologues that explore his successes and failures. It was published four years before his death and a year before he won the Nobel Prize.

5. The Rebel

‘The Rebel’ is an essay on rebellion. Camus explores why people rebel and how the act of rebellion has changed in the modern world. The essay is quite long, resembling a book more than a story in length. In the end, he comes to the conclusion that people rebel because they are always seeking out meaning, or at least a meaning to their own lives. This is all part of the constant purposeless quest for meaning that all of humanity is on and that absurdism says can’t be resolved. 

6. The First Man

‘The First Man’ is an unfinished novel that Camus was working on when he died in January of 1960. It was going to be an autobiographical novel and was published by his daughter in 1994. The novel follows the main character, Jacques Cormery, through his youth and young adulthood. It stands apart from the rest of Camus’ works in its physicality and emotion. 

7. A Happy Death

‘A Happy Death’ was Camus’ first novel. It was written when he was in his early twins and was not published until after his tragic death in 1960. The topic of the novel is generally defined as the creation of one’s own happiness and how money and time relate to one’s ability to successfully become happy. In the novel, Camus looks back on his life. Memories of his fight with TB and his travels through Europe informed his writing. 

8. Exile and the Kingdom

‘Exile and the Kingdom’ is a collection of six stories that Camus published in 1957. The stories in the volume focus primarily on absurdism, an offshoot of existentialism. One of the best in the collection is ‘La pierre qui pousse’ or ‘The Growing Stone,’ which is often cited as the polar opposite of ‘The Stranger’. Other stories include ‘The Silent Men,’ ‘The Guest’ and ‘The Adulterous Woman’ . 

9. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

‘Resistance, Rebellion, and Death’ is a collection of essays that was published in 1960, the year of Camus’ death. The essays focus on conflict, specifically in regard to Algeria and the Algerian War of Independence. In ‘Reflections on the Guillotine’ he discusses the death penalty. One of the best-known parts of this collection is the ‘Create Dangerously,’ an address which is included in ‘The Artist and His Time’. The address was given by Camus three years before his death in Uppsala and revolves around the purpose of art-making and the role of the artist. 

Emma Baldwin

About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

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Albert Camus

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a journalist, editor and editorialist, playwright and director, novelist and author of short stories, political essayist and activist—and, although he more than once denied it, a philosopher. He ignored or opposed systematic philosophy, had little faith in rationalism, asserted rather than argued many of his main ideas, presented others in metaphors, was preoccupied with immediate and personal experience, and brooded over such questions as the meaning of life in the face of death. Although he forcefully separated himself from existentialism, Camus posed one of the twentieth century’s best-known existentialist questions, which launches The Myth of Sisyphus : “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide” ( MS , 3). And his philosophy of the absurd has left us with a striking image of the human fate: Sisyphus endlessly pushing his rock up the mountain only to see it roll back down each time he gains the top. Camus’s philosophy found political expression in The Rebel , which along with his newspaper editorials, political essays, plays, and fiction earned him a reputation as a great moralist. It also embroiled him in conflict with his friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, provoking the major political-intellectual divide of the Cold-War era as Camus and Sartre became, respectively, the leading intellectual voices of the anti-Communist and pro-Communist left. Furthermore, in posing and answering urgent philosophical questions of the day, Camus articulated a critique of religion and of the Enlightenment and all its projects, including Marxism. In 1957 he won the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in a car accident in January, 1960, at the age of 46.

1. The Paradoxes of Camus’s Absurdist Philosophy

2. nuptials and camus’s starting point, 3.1 suicide as a response to absurdity, 3.2 the limits of reason, 3.3 criticism of existentialists, 3.4 happiness in facing one’s fate, 3.5 response to skepticism, 4.1 absurdity, rebellion, and murder, 4.2 against communism, 4.3 violence: inevitable and impossible, 5. the fall, 6. philosopher of the present, primary works, secondary works, other internet resources, related entries.

There are various paradoxical elements in Camus’s approach to philosophy. In his book-length essay, The Myth of Sisyphus , Camus presents a philosophy that contests philosophy itself. This essay belongs squarely in the philosophical tradition of existentialism but Camus denied being an existentialist. Both The Myth of Sisyphus and his other philosophical work, The Rebel , are systematically skeptical of conclusions about the meaning of life, yet both works assert objectively valid answers to key questions about how to live. Though Camus seemed modest when describing his intellectual ambitions, he was confident enough as a philosopher to articulate not only his own philosophy but also a critique of religion and a fundamental critique of modernity. While rejecting the very idea of a philosophical system, Camus constructed his own original edifice of ideas around the key terms of absurdity and rebellion, aiming to resolve the life-or-death issues that motivated him.

The essential paradox arising in Camus’s philosophy concerns his central notion of absurdity. Accepting the Aristotelian idea that philosophy begins in wonder, Camus argues that human beings cannot escape asking the question, “What is the meaning of existence?” Camus, however, denies that there is an answer to this question, and rejects every scientific, teleological, metaphysical, or human-created end that would provide an adequate answer. Thus, while accepting that human beings inevitably seek to understand life’s purpose, Camus takes the skeptical position that the natural world, the universe, and the human enterprise remains silent about any such purpose. Since existence itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This paradoxical situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls the absurd . Camus’s philosophy of the absurd explores the consequences arising from this basic paradox.

Camus’s understanding of absurdity is best captured in an image, not an argument: of Sisyphus straining to push his rock up the mountain, watching it roll down, then descending after the rock to begin all over, in an endless cycle. Like Sisyphus, humans cannot help but continue to ask after the meaning of life, only to see our answers tumble back down. If we accept this thesis about life’s essential absurdity, and Camus’s anti-philosophical approach to philosophical questions, we cannot help but ask: What role is left for rational analysis and argument? Doesn’t Camus the philosopher preside over the death of philosophy in answering the question whether to commit suicide by abandoning the terrain of argument and analysis and turning to metaphor to answer it? If life has no fundamental purpose or meaning that reason can articulate, we cannot help asking about why we continue to live and to reason. Might not Silenus be right in declaring that it would have been better not to have been born, or to die as soon as possible? [ 1 ] And, as Francis Jeanson wrote long before his famous criticism of The Rebel that precipitated the rupture between Camus and Sartre, isn’t absurdist philosophy a contradiction in terms, strictly speaking no philosophy at all but an anti-rational posture that ends in silence (Jeanson 1947)?

Was Camus actually a philosopher? He himself said no, in a famous interview with Jeanine Delpech in Les Nouvelles Littéraires in November of 1945, insisting that he did “not believe sufficiently in reason to believe in a system” (Camus 1965, 1427). This was not merely a public posture, since we find the same thought in his notebooks of this period: he describes himself as an artist and not a philosopher because “I think according to words and not according to ideas” (Camus 1995, 113). Still, Jean-Paul Sartre saw immediately that Camus was undertaking important philosophical work, and in his review of The Stranger in relation to Sisyphus , had no trouble connecting Camus with Pascal, Rousseau, and Nietzsche (Sartre 1962). After they became friends Sartre spoke publicly of his friend’s “philosophy of the absurd,” which he distinguished from his own thought for which he accepted the “existentialist” label that Camus rejected. In the years since, the apparent unsystematic, indeed, anti-systematic, character of his philosophy, has meant that relatively few scholars have appreciated its full depth and complexity. They have more often praised his towering literary achievements and standing as a political moralist while pointing out his dubious claims and problematic arguments (see Sherman 2008). A significant recent exception to this is Ronald Srigley’s Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity (Srigley 2011).

This entry will negotiate Camus’s deliberate ambivalence as a philosopher while discussing his philosophy. It is not just a matter of giving a philosophical reading of this playwright, journalist, essayist, and novelist but of taking his philosophical writings seriously—exploring their premises, their evolution, their structure, and their coherence. To do so is to see that his writing contains more than a mood and more than images and sweeping, unsupported assertions, although it contains many of both. Camus takes his skepticism as far as possible as a form of methodical doubt—that is, he begins from a presumption of skepticism—until he finds the basis for a non-skeptical conclusion. And he builds a unique philosophical construction, whose premises are often left unstated and which is not always argued clearly, but which develops in distinct stages over the course of his brief lifetime. Camus’s philosophy can be thus read as a sustained effort to demonstrate and not just assert what is entailed by the absurdity of human existence. In the process Camus answers the questions posed by The Myth of Sisyphus , “Why should I not kill myself?”, and by The Rebel , “Why should I not kill others?”

Camus’s graduate thesis at the University of Algiers sympathetically explored the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christianity, specifically the relationship of Plotinus to Augustine (Camus 1992). Nevertheless, his philosophy explicitly rejects religion as one of its foundations. Not always taking an openly hostile posture towards religious belief—though he certainly does in the novels The Stranger and The Plague —Camus centers his work on choosing to live without God. Another way to understand Camus’s philosophy is that it is an effort to explore the issues and pitfalls of a post-religious world.

Camus’s earliest published writing containing philosophical thinking, Nuptials , appeared in Algeria in 1938, and remain the basis of his later work. These lyrical essays and sketches describe a consciousness reveling in the world, a body delighting in nature, and the individual’s immersion in sheer physicality. Yet these experiences are presented as the solution to a philosophical problem, namely finding the meaning of life in the face of death. They appear alongside, and reveal themselves to be rooted in, his first extended meditation on ultimate questions.

In these essays, Camus sets two attitudes in opposition. The first is what he regards as religion-based fears. He cites religious warnings about pride, concern for one’s immortal soul, hope for an afterlife, resignation about the present and preoccupation with God. Against this conventional Christian perspective Camus asserts what he regards as self-evident facts: that we must die and there is nothing beyond this life. Without mentioning it, Camus draws a conclusion from these facts, namely that the soul is not immortal. Here, as elsewhere in his philosophical writing, he commends to his readers to face a discomforting reality squarely and without flinching, but he does not feel compelled to present reasons or evidence. If not with religion, where then does wisdom lie? His answer is: with the “conscious certainty of a death without hope” and in refusing to hide from the fact that we are going to die. For Camus “there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside of the curve of the days…. I can see no point in the happiness of angels” ( N , 90). There is nothing but this world, this life, the immediacy of the present.

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.

If religious hope is based on the mistaken belief that death, in the sense of utter and total extinction body and soul, is not inevitable, it leads us down a blind alley. Worse, because it teaches us to look away from life toward something to come afterwards, such religious hope kills a part of us, for example, the realistic attitude we need to confront the vicissitudes of life. But what then is the appropriate path? The young Camus is neither a skeptic nor a relativist here. His discussion rests on the self-evidence of sensuous experience. He advocates precisely what he takes Christianity to abjure: living a life of the senses, intensely, here and now, in the present. This entails, first, abandoning all hope for an afterlife, indeed rejecting thinking about it. “I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me it is a closed door” ( N , 76).

We might think that facing our total annihilation would be bitter, but for Camus this leads us in a positive direction: “Between this sky and the faces turned toward it there is nothing on which to hang a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion—only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch” ( N , 90). This insight entails obstinately refusing “all the ‘later on’s of this world,” in order to lay claim to “my present wealth” ( N , 103), namely the intense here-and-now life of the senses. The “wealth” is precisely what hope cheats us out of by teaching us to look away from it and towards an afterlife. Only by yielding to the fact that our “longing to endure” will be frustrated and accepting our “awareness of death” are we able to open ourselves to the riches of life, which are physical above all.

Camus puts both sides of his argument into a single statement: “The world is beautiful, and outside there is no salvation” ( N , 103). Only in accepting death and in being “stripped of all hope” does one most intensely appreciate not only the physical side of life, but also, he now suggests, its affective and interpersonal side. Taken together, and contrary to an unverifiable faith in God and afterlife, these are what one has and one knows : “To feel one’s ties to a land, one’s love for certain men, to know there is always a place where the heart can find rest—these are already many certainties for one man’s life” ( N , 90).

Only if we accept that Nietzsche is right, that God is dead and there is only nothingness after we die, will we then fully experience—feel, taste, touch, see, and smell—the joys of our bodies and the physical world. Thus the sensuous and lyrical side of these essays, their evocative character, is central to the argument. Or rather, because Camus is promoting intense, joyous, physical experience as opposed to a self-abnegating religious life, rather than developing an argument he asserts that these experiences themselves are the right response. His writing aims to demonstrate what life means and feels like once we give up hope of an afterlife, so that in reading we will be led to “see” his point. These essays may be taken as containing highly personal thoughts, a young man’s musings about his Mediterranean environment, and they scarcely seem to have any system. But they suggest what philosophy is for Camus and how he conceives its relationship to literary expression.

His early philosophy, then, may be conveyed, if not summed up, in this passage from “Nuptials at Tipasa”:

In a moment, when I throw myself down among the absinthe plants to bring their scent into my body, I shall know, appearances to the contrary, that I am fulfilling a truth which is the sun’s and which will also be my death’s. 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. Yet people have often told me: there’s nothing to be proud of. 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.

3. Suicide, Absurdity and Happiness: The Myth of Sisyphus

After completing Nuptials , Camus began to work on a planned triptych on the Absurd: a novel, which became The Stranger , a philosophical essay, eventually titled The Myth of Sisyphus , and a play, Caligula . These were completed and sent off from Algeria to the Paris publisher in September 1941. Although Camus would have preferred to see them appear together, even in a single volume, the publisher for both commercial reasons and because of the paper shortage caused by war and occupation, released The Stranger in June 1942 and The Myth of Sisyphus in October. Camus kept working on the play, which finally appeared in book form two years later (Lottman, 264–67).

“There is only one really serious philosophical problem,” Camus says, “and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that” ( MS , 3). One might object that suicide is neither a “problem” nor a “question,” but an act. A proper, philosophical question might rather be: “Under what conditions is suicide warranted?” And a philosophical answer might explore the question, “What does it mean to ask whether life is worth living?” as William James did in The Will to Believe . For the Camus of The Myth of Sisyphus , however, “Should I kill myself?” is the essential philosophical question. For him, it seems clear that the primary result of philosophy is action, not comprehension. His concern about “the most urgent of questions” is less a theoretical one than it is the life-and-death problem of whether and how to live.

Camus sees this question of suicide as a natural response to an underlying reality, namely, that life is absurd. It is absurd to continually seek meaning in life when there is none; and it is absurd to hope for some form of continued existence after death, which results in our extinction. But Camus also thinks it absurd to try to know, understand, or explain the world, since he regards the attempt to gain rational knowledge as futile. Here Camus pits himself against science and philosophy, dismissing the claims of all forms of rational analysis: “That universal reason, practical or ethical, that determinism, those categories that explain everything are enough to make a decent man laugh” ( MS , 21).

These kinds of absurdity are driving Camus’s question about suicide, but his way of proceeding evokes another kind of absurdity, one less well-defined, namely, the “absurd sensibility” (MS, 2, tr. changed). This sensibility, vaguely described, seems to be “an intellectual malady” ( MS , 2) rather than a philosophy. He regards thinking about it as “provisional” and insists that the mood of absurdity, so “widespread in our age” does not arise from, but lies prior to, philosophy. Camus’s diagnosis of the essential human problem rests on a series of “truisms” ( MS , 18) and “obvious themes” ( MS , 16). But he doesn’t argue for life’s absurdity or attempt to explain it—he is not interested in either project, nor would such projects engage his strength as a thinker. “I am interested … not so much in absurd discoveries as in their consequences” ( MS , 16). Accepting absurdity as the mood of the times, he asks above all whether and how to live in the face of it. “Does the absurd dictate death” ( MS , 9)? But he does not argue this question either, and rather chooses to demonstrate the attitude towards life that would deter suicide. In other words, the main concern of the book is to sketch ways of living our lives so as to make them worth living despite their being meaningless.

According to Camus, people commit suicide “because they judge life is not worth living” ( MS , 4). But if this temptation precedes what is usually considered philosophical reasoning, how to answer it? In order to get to the bottom of things while avoiding arguing for the truth of his statements, he depicts, enumerates, and illustrates. As he says in The Rebel , “the absurd is an experience that must be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence, of Descartes’s methodical doubt” ( R , 4). The Myth of Sisyphus seeks to describe “the elusive feeling of absurdity” in our lives, rapidly pointing out themes that “run through all literatures and all philosophies” ( MS , 12). Appealing to common experience, he tries to render the flavor of the absurd with images, metaphors, and anecdotes that capture the experiential level he regards as lying prior to philosophy.

He begins doing so with an implicit reference to Sartre’s novel, Nausea , which echoes the protagonist Antoine Roquentin’s discovery of absurdity. Camus had earlier written that this novel’s theories of absurdity and its images are not in balance. The descriptive and the philosophical aspects of the novel “don’t add up to a work of art: the passage from one to the other is too rapid, too unmotivated, to evoke in the reader the deep conviction that makes art of the novel” (Camus 1968, 200). But in this 1938 review Camus praises Sartre’s descriptions of absurdity, the sense of anguish and nausea that arises as the ordinary structures imposed on existence collapse in Antoine Roquentin’s life. As Camus now presents his own version of the experience, “the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday according to the same rhythm …” ( MS , 12–3). As this continues, one slowly becomes fully conscious and senses the absurd.

Camus goes on to sketch other experiences of absurdity, until he arrives at death. But although Camus seeks to avoid arguing for the truth of his claims, he nevertheless concludes this “absurd reasoning” with a series of categorical assertions addressed to “the intelligence” about the inevitable frustration of the human desire to know the world and to be at home in it. Despite his intentions, Camus cannot avoid asserting what he believes to be an objective truth: “We must despair of ever reconstructing the familiar, calm surface which would give us peace of heart” ( MS , 18). Turning to experiences that are seemingly obvious to large numbers of people who share the absurd sensibility, he declares sweepingly: “This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said” ( MS , 21). Our efforts to know are driven by a nostalgia for unity, and there is an inescapable “hiatus between what we fancy we know and what we really know” ( MS , 18).

“With the exception of professional rationalists, people today despair of true knowledge” ( MS , 18). Camus asserts that the history of human thought is characterized by “its successive regrets and its impotences” ( MS , 18), and that “the impossibility of knowledge is established” ( MS , 25). When writing more carefully, he claims only to be describing a certain “climate,” but in any case his bedrock assumptions appear again and again: the world is unknowable and life is without meaning. Our efforts to understand them lead nowhere.

Avi Sagi suggests that in claiming this Camus is not speaking as an irrationalist—which is, after all, how he regards the existentialists—but as someone trying to rationally understand the limits of reason (Sagi 2002, 59–65). For Camus the problem is that by demanding meaning, order, and unity, we seek to go beyond those limits and pursue the impossible. We will never understand, and we will die despite all our efforts. There are two obvious responses to our frustrations: suicide and hope. By hope Camus means just what he described in Nuptials , the religion-inspired effort to imagine and live for a life beyond this life. Or, second, as taken up at length in The Rebel , bending one’s energies to living for a great cause beyond oneself: “Hope of another life one must ‘deserve’ or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it” ( MS , 8).

What is the Camusean alternative to suicide or hope? The answer is to live without escape and with integrity, in “revolt” and defiance, maintaining the tension intrinsic to human life. Since “the most obvious absurdity” ( MS , 59) is death, Camus urges us to “die unreconciled and not of one’s own free will” ( MS , 55). In short, he recommends a life without consolation, but instead one characterized by lucidity and by acute consciousness of and rebellion against its mortality and its limits.

In his statement of the problem and its solution, Camus’s tone, ideas, and style are reminiscent of Nietzsche. “God is dead” is of course their common starting point, as is the determination to confront unpleasant truths and write against received wisdom. At the same time Camus argues against the specific philosophical current with which Nietzsche is often linked as a precursor, and to which he himself is closest—existentialism. The Myth of Sisyphus is explicitly written against existentialists such as Shestov, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Heidegger, as well as against the phenomenology of Husserl. Camus shares their starting point, which he regards as the fact that they all somehow testify to the absurdity of the human condition. But he rejects what he sees as their ultimate escapism and irrationality, claiming that “they deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. That forced hope is religious in all of them” ( MS , 24).

Sartre, too, is subject to Camus’s criticisms—and not just politically as will be described in the following section. Although some of the ideas in The Myth of Sisyphus drew on Sartre’s Nausea (as noted above), in 1942 Sartre was not yet regarded as an “existentialist”. But as Sartre’s philosophy developed, he went on to explore how human activity constitutes a meaningful world from the brute, meaningless existence unveiled in his novel [ 2 ] (Aronson 1980, 71–88). In the process, the absurdity of Nausea becomes the contingency of Being and Nothingness , the fact that humans and things are simply there with no explanation or reason. As Sartre described it, the absurd is “the universal contingency of being which is, but which is not the basis of its being; the absurd is the given, the unjustifiable, primordial quality of existence” (quoted in Sagi 2002, 57). Having rooted human existence in such contingency, Sartre goes on to describe other fundamental structures of existence, core human projects, and characteristic patterns of behavior, including freedom and bad faith, all of which arise on this basis. The original contingency leads to our desire to undo it, to the futile project to “found being,” in other words the “useless passion” of the project to become God.

For Sartre absurdity is obviously a fundamental ontological property of existence itself, frustrating us but not restricting our understanding. For Camus, on the other hand, absurdity is not a property of existence as such, but is an essential feature of our relationship with the world. It might be argued that Sartre and Camus are really quite similar, and that the core futility of Sartre’s philosophy parallels the “despair” Camus describes. After all, if Sisyphus’s labor is ultimately futile, so is the project to become God. But Sartre rejects the “classical pessimism” and “disillusionment” he finds in Camus and instead possesses an unCamusean confidence in his ability to understand and explain this project and the rest of the human world. Camus, on the contrary, builds an entire worldview on his central assumption that absurdity is an unsurpassable relationship between humans and their world (Aronson 2013). He postulates an inevitable divorce between human consciousness, with its “wild longing for clarity” ( MS , 21) and the “unreasonable silence of the world” ( MS , 28). As discussed above, Camus views the world as irrational, which means that it is not understandable through reason.

According to Camus, each existentialist writer betrayed his initial insight by seeking to appeal to something beyond the limits of the human condition, by turning to the transcendent. And yet even if we avoid what Camus describes as such escapist efforts and continue to live without irrational appeals, the desire to do so is built into our consciousness and thus our humanity. We are unable to free ourselves from “this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion” ( MS , 51). But it is urgent to not succumb to these impulses and to instead accept absurdity. In contrast with existentialism, “The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits” ( MS , 49).

Camus clearly believes that the existentialist philosophers are mistaken but does not argue against them, because he believes that “there is no truth but merely truths” ( MS , 43). His disagreement rather takes the subtler and less assertive form of an immanent critique, pointing out that each thinker’s existentialist philosophy ends up being inconsistent with its own starting point: “starting from a philosophy of the world’s lack of meaning, it ends up by finding a meaning and depth in it” ( MS , 42). These philosophers, he insists, refuse to accept the conclusions that follow from their own premises. Kierkegaard, for example, strongly senses the absurd. But rather than respecting it as the inevitable human ailment, he seeks to be cured of it by making it an attribute of a God who he then embraces.

Camus’s most sustained analysis is of Husserl’s phenomenology. Along with Sartre, Camus praises the early Husserlian notion of intentionality. Sartre saw this notion as revealing a dynamic consciousness without contents—the basis for his conception of freedom—while Camus is pleased that intentionality follows the absurd spirit in its “apparent modesty of thought that limits itself to describing what it declines to explain” ( MS , 43). However, Camus criticizes Husserl’s later search in Ideas for Platonic extra-temporal essences as a quasi-religious leap inconsistent with his original insight.

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.

But there is more. After the rock comes tumbling down, confirming the ultimate futility of his project, Sisyphus trudges after it once again. This “is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock” ( MS , 121). Why use the words “superior” and “stronger” when he has no hope of succeeding the next time? Paradoxically, it is because a sense of tragedy “crowns his victory.” “Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent” ( MS , 121). Tragic consciousness is the conclusion of “absurd reasoning”: living fully aware of the bitterness of our being and consciously facing our fate.

What then is Camus’s reply to his question about whether or not to commit suicide? Full consciousness, avoiding false solutions such as religion, refusing to submit, and carrying on with vitality and intensity: these are Camus’s answers. This is how a life without ultimate meaning can be made worth living. As he said in Nuptials , life’s pleasures are inseparable from a keen awareness of these limits. Sisyphus accepts and embraces living with death without the possibility of appealing to God. “All Sisyphus’s silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing” ( MS , 123).

Lucidly living the human condition, Sisyphus “knows himself to be the master of his days.” By becoming conscious of it, Camus is saying, he takes ownership of it. In this sense Sisyphus reshapes his fate into a condition of “wholly human origin.” “Wholly” may be an exaggeration, because after all, death is “inevitable and despicable,” but it is the very condition of living. In acknowledging this, Sisyphus consciously lives out what has been imposed on him, thus making it into his own end. In the same way, Meursault, protagonist of The Stranger , comes to consciousness in that book’s second part after committing the inexplicable murder that ends the book’s first part. He has lived his existence from one moment to the next and without much awareness, but at his trial and while awaiting execution he becomes like Sisyphus, fully conscious of himself and his terrible fate. He will die triumphant as the absurd man.

The Myth of Sisyphus is far from having a skeptical conclusion. In response to the lure of suicide, Camus counsels an intensely conscious and active non-resolution. Rejecting any hope of resolving the strain is also to reject despair. Indeed, it is possible, within and against these limits, to speak of happiness. “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable” ( MS , 122). It is not that discovering the absurd leads necessarily to happiness, but rather that acknowledging the absurd means also accepting human frailty, an awareness of our limitations, and the fact that we cannot help wishing to go beyond what is possible. These are all tokens of being fully alive. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” ( MS , 123).

We can compare his conclusion with Pyrrho’s skepticism and Descartes’s methodical doubt. First of all, like Pyrrho, Camus has solved his pressing existential issue, namely, avoiding despair, by a kind of resolution entailed in accepting our mortality and ultimate ignorance. But there are two critical differences with Pyrrho: for Camus we never can abandon the desire to know, and realizing this leads to a quickening of our life-impulses. This last point was already contained in Nuptials , but here is expanded to link consciousness with happiness. For Camus, happiness includes living intensely and sensuously in the present coupled with Sisyphus’s tragic, lucid, and defiant consciousness, his sense of limits, his bitterness, his determination to keep on, and his refusal of any form of consolation.

Obviously, Camus’s sense of happiness is not a conventional one but Sagi argues it may place him closer to Aristotle than to any other thinker insofar as he is championing the full realization of human capacities (Sagi 2002, 79–80) Camus is also similar in this to Nietzsche, who called upon his readers to “say yes to life,” and live as completely as possible at every moment. Nietzsche’s point was that to be wholly alive means being as aware of the negative as of the positive, feeling pain, not shunning any experience, and embracing life “even in its strangest and hardest problems” (Nietzsche 1888/1954, 562). But how is it possible that, by the end of The Myth of Sisyphus , Camus has moved from skepticism (about finding the truth) and nihilism (about whether life has meaning) to advocating an approach to life that is clearly judged to be better than others? How does he justify embracing a normative stance, affirming specific values? This contradiction reveals a certain sleight of hand, as the philosopher gives way to the artist. It is as an artist that Camus now makes his case for acceptance of tragedy, the consciousness of absurdity, and a life of sensuous vitality. He advocates this with the image of Sisyphus straining, fully alive, and happy.

4. Camus and the World of Violence: The Rebel

This meditation on absurdity and suicide follows closely on the publication of Camus’s first novel, The Stranger , which also centered on individual experience and revolves around its protagonist’s senseless murder of an Arab on a beach in Algiers and concludes with his execution by guillotine. And it is often forgotten that this absurdist novelist and philosopher was also a political activist—he had been a member of the Algerian branch of the French Communist Party in the mid-1930s and was organizer of an Algiers theater company that performed avant-garde and political plays—as well as a crusading journalist. From October 1938 until January 1940 he worked on Alger républicain and a sister newspaper. In June 1939 he wrote a series of reports on famine and poverty in the mountainous coastal region of Kabylie, among the first detailed articles ever written by a European Algerian describing the wretched living conditions of the native population.

After the start of World War II, Camus became editor of Le Soir républicain and as a pacifist opposed French entry into the war. The spectacle of Camus and his mentor Pascal Pia running their left-wing daily into the ground because they rejected the urgency of fighting Nazism is one of the most striking but least commented-on periods of his life. Misunderstanding Nazism at the beginning of the war, he advocated negotiations with Hitler that would in part reverse the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles. His pacifism was in keeping with a time-honored French tradition, and Camus nevertheless reported for military service out of solidarity with those young men, like his brother, who had become soldiers. Intending to serve loyally and to advocate a negotiated peace in the barracks, he was angered that his tuberculosis disqualified him (Lottman, 201–31; Aronson 2004, 25–28).

These biographical facts are relevant to Camus’s philosophical development after The Myth of Sisyphus . Moving to France and eventually becoming engaged in the resistance to the German occupation, in two “Letters to a German Friend” published clandestinely in 1943 and 1944, Camus pondered the question whether violence against the occupiers was justified. He spoke of the “loathing we [French] had for all war,” and the need “to find out if we had the right to kill men, if we were allowed to add to the frightful misery of this world” ( RRD , 8). Despising war, suspicious of heroism, he claimed that the occupied French paid dearly for this detour “with prison sentences and executions at dawn, with desertions and separations, with daily pangs of hunger, with emaciated children, and above all, with humiliation of our human dignity” ( RRD , 8). Only when we were “at death’s door,” and “far behind” the Germans, did we understand the reasons for fighting, so that henceforth we would struggle with a clear conscience and “clean hands.” In other words killing was morally permissible only within strict limits and after great provocation. Our moral strength was rooted in the fact that we were fighting for justice and national survival. The subsequent letters continued to contrast the French with the Germans on moral grounds drawn directly from Camus’s evolving philosophy, and suggested the transition from The Myth of Sisyphus to The Rebel : if both adversaries began with a sense of the world’s absurdity, Camus claimed that the French acknowledged and lived within this awareness, while the Germans sought to overcome it by dominating the world.

Camus’s anti-Nazi commitment and newspaper experience led to him succeeding Pia in March 1944 as editor of Combat , the main underground newspaper of the non-Communist left. During this period Camus worked on The Plague which, as he later said, “has as its obvious content the struggle of the European resistance movements against Nazism” ( LCE , 339). The novel, begun during the war, describes an epidemic of the bubonic plague in the small Algerian city of Oran, which transforms every aspect of daily life and shuts off the city from the surrounding world. The only possible response besides quarantine is refusing to passively accept disease and death and to actively organize “sanitary squads” to combat it. The Plague philosophically anticipates The Rebel : despite individuals’ most ambitious goals, for example of Tarrou who seeks to end the death penalty and Father Paneloux, who demands that the people of Oran embrace their guilt and God’s love, the actual situation calls for a very limited and specific activity. Individuals must act without fanfare or heroics and above all, in solidarity with each other in seeking to limit the effects of the plague. Like Sisyphus, they act in full consciousness of their limits, except now as a we. The Plague depicts a collective and nonviolent resistance to an unexplained pestilence, and thus quite deliberately does not raise the tactical, strategic, and moral issues built into the struggle of the Resistance against human occupiers ( LCE , 340–1). If readers did not see this as an issue in 1947, it became contentious as the political climate changed, and the novel was attacked by Roland Barthes and later by Sartre (Aronson 2004, 228–9). In point of fact, after the Liberation the question of violence continued to occupy Camus both politically and philosophically. In 1945 his was one of the few voices raised in protest against the American use of nuclear weapons to defeat Japan (Aronson 2004, 61–63). After the Liberation he opposed the death penalty for collaborators, then turned against Marxism and Communism for embracing revolution, while rejecting the looming cold war and its threatening violence. And then in The Rebel , Camus began to spell out his deeper understanding of violence.

At the beginning of The Rebel , Camus picks up where he left off in The Myth of Sisyphus . Writing as a philosopher again, he returns to the terrain of argument by explaining what absurdist reasoning entails. Its “final conclusion” is “the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe” ( R , 6). Since to conclude otherwise would negate its very premise, namely the existence of the questioner, absurdism must logically accept life as the one necessary good. “To say that life is absurd, consciousness must be alive” ( R , 6, tr. changed). Living and eating “are themselves value judgments” ( LCE , 160). “To breathe is to judge” ( R , 8). As in his criticism of the existentialists, Camus advocates a single standpoint from which to argue for objective validity, that of consistency.

At first blush, however, the book’s subject seems to have more of a historical theme than a philosophical one. “The purpose of this essay is … to face the reality of the present, which is logical crime, and to examine meticulously the arguments by which it is justified; it is an attempt to understand the times in which we live. One might think that a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings should be condemned out of hand. But its culpability must still be understood” ( R , 3).

Do such questions represent an entirely new philosophy or are they continuous with The Myth of Sisyphus ? The issue is not resolved by the explanations that Camus gives for his shift in the first pages of The Rebel —by referring to the mass murders of the middle third of the twentieth century. “The age of negation,” he says, once fostered a concern for suicide, but now in “the age of ideologies, we must examine our position in relation to murder” ( R , 4). Have the “ages” changed in the less than ten years between the two books? He may be right to say that whether murder has rational foundations is “the question implicit in the blood and strife of this century,” but in changing his focus from suicide to murder, it is also clear that Camus is shifting his philosophical optic from the individual to our social belonging.

In so doing Camus applies the philosophy of the absurd in new, social directions, and seeks to answer new, historical questions. But as we see him setting this up at the beginning of The Rebel the continuity with a philosophical reading of The Stranger is also strikingly clear. Novelist Kamel Daoud, retelling The Stranger from the point of view of the victim, correctly calls the murder of his Arab “kinsman” a “philosophical crime” (Daoud 19). 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. … There is no pro or con: the murderer is neither right nor wrong. 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. ( R , 5)

If historically “murder is the problem today” ( R , 5), the encounter with absurdity tells us that the same is true philosophically. Having ruled out suicide, what is there to say about murder?

Starting from the absence of God, the key theme of Nuptials , and the inevitability of absurdity, the key theme of The Myth of Sisyphus , Camus incorporates both of these into The Rebel , but alongside them he now stresses revolt. The act of rebellion assumes the status of a primary datum of human experience, like the Cartesian cogito taken by Sartre as his point of departure. Camus first expressed this directly under the inspiration of his encounter with Being and Nothingness . But in calling it “revolt” he takes it in a direction sharply different from Sartre, who built from the cogito an “essay in phenomenological ontology.” Ignoring completely the ontological dimension, Camus is now concerned with immediate issues of human social experience. Revolt, to be sure, still includes the rebellion against absurdity that Camus described in The Myth of Sisyphus , and once again he will speak of rebelling against our own mortality and the universe’s meaninglessness and incoherence. But The Rebel begins with the kind of revolt that rejects oppression and slavery, and protests against the world’s injustice.

It is at first, like The Myth of Sisyphus , a single individual’s rebellion, but now Camus stresses that revolt creates values, dignity, and solidarity. “I revolt, therefore we are” ( R , 22) is his paradoxical statement. But how can an I lead to a we ? How does “we are” follow from “I revolt”? How can the individual’s experience of absurdity, and the rebellion against it, stem from, produce, imply, or entail the wider social sense of injustice and solidarity? The we in fact is the subject of The Rebel , although the title L’Homme revolt é suggests that one’s original motivation may be individual. Acting against oppression entails having recourse to social values, and at the same time joining with others in struggle. On both levels solidarity is our common condition.

In The Rebel Camus takes the further step, which occupies most of the book, of developing his notion of metaphysical and historical rebellion in opposition to the concept of revolution. Applying his philosophical themes directly to politics in the years immediately after the Liberation of France in 1944, Camus had already concluded that Marxists, and especially the Communists, were guilty of evading life’s absurdity by aiming at a wholesale transformation of society, which must necessarily be violent. And now, in The Rebel , he describes this as a major trend of modern history, using similar terms to those he had used in The Myth of Sisyphus to describe the religious and philosophical evasions.

What sort of work is this? In a book so charged with political meaning, Camus makes no explicitly political arguments or revelations, and presents little in the way of actual social analysis or concrete historical study. The Rebel is, rather, a historically framed philosophical essay about underlying ideas and attitudes of civilization. David Sprintzen suggests these taken-for-granted attitudes operate implicitly and in the background of human projects and very rarely become conscious (Sprintzen 1988, 123).

Camus felt that it was urgent to critically examine these attitudes in a world in which calculated murder had become common. Applying his absurdist ideas and insights to politics, in The Rebel Camus explains what he regards as the modern world’s increasingly organized and catastrophic refusal to face, accept, and live with absurdity. The book provides a unique perspective—presenting a coherent and original structure of premise, mood, description, philosophy, history, and even prejudice.

Camus’s hostility to Communism had its personal, political, and philosophical reasons. 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).

In The Rebel Camus insisted that both Communism’s appeal and its negative features sprang from the same irrepressible human impulse: faced with absurdity and injustice, humans refuse to accept their existence and instead seek to remake the world. Validating revolt as a necessary starting point, Camus criticizes politics aimed at building a utopian future, affirming once more that life should be lived in the present and in the sensuous world. He explores the history of post-religious and nihilistic intellectual and literary movements; he attacks political violence with his views on limits and solidarity; and he ends by articulating the metaphysical role of art as well as a self-limiting radical politics. In place of striving to transform the world, he speaks of mésure —“measure”, in the sense of proportion or balance—and of living in the tension of the human condition. He labels this outlook “Mediterranean” in an attempt to anchor his views to the place he grew up and to evoke in his readers its sense of harmony and appreciation of physical life. There is no substantive argument for the label, nor is one possible given his method of simply selecting who and what counts as representative of the “Mediterranean” view while excluding others—e.g., some Greek writers, not many Romans. In place of argument, he paints a concluding vision of Mediterranean harmony that he hopes will be stirring and lyrical, binding the reader to his insights.

As a political tract The Rebel asserts that Communism leads inexorably to murder, and then explains how revolutions arise from certain ideas and states of spirit. But he makes no close analysis of movements or events, gives no role to material needs or oppression, and regards the quest for social justice as a metaphysically inspired attempt to replace “the reign of grace by the reign of justice” ( R , 56).

Furthermore, Camus insists that these attitudes are built into Marxism. In “Neither Victims nor Executioners” he declared himself a socialist but not a Marxist. He rejected the Marxist acceptance of violent revolution and the consequentialist maxim that “the end justifies the means.” [ 3 ] “In the Marxian perspective,” he wrote sweepingly, “a hundred thousand deaths is a small price to pay for the happiness of hundreds of millions” (Camus 1991, 130). Marxists think this, Camus asserted, because they believe that history has a necessary logic leading to human happiness, and thus they accept violence to bring it about.

In The Rebel Camus takes this assertion a further step: Marxism is not primarily about social change but is rather a revolt that “attempts to annex all creation.” Revolution emerges when revolt seeks to ignore the limits built into human life. By an “inevitable logic of nihilism” Communism climaxes the modern trend to deify man and to transform and unify the world. Today’s revolutions yield to the blind impulse, originally described in The Myth of Sisyphus , “to demand order in the midst of chaos, and unity in the very heart of the ephemeral” ( MS , 10). As does the rebel who becomes a revolutionary who kills and then justifies murder as legitimate.

According to Camus, the execution of King Louis XVI during the French Revolution was the decisive step demonstrating the pursuit of justice without regard to limits. It contradicted the original life-affirming, self-affirming, and unifying purpose of revolt. This discussion belongs to Camus’s “history of European pride,” which is prefaced by certain ideas from the Greeks and certain aspects of early Christianity, but begins in earnest with the advent of modernity. 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.

In the twentieth century, Camus claims, murder has become “reasonable,” “theoretically defensible,” and justified by doctrine. People have grown accustomed to “logical crimes”—that is, mass death either planned or foreseen, and rationally justified. Thus Camus calls “logical crime” the central issue of the time, seeks to “examine meticulously the arguments by which it is justified” ( R , 3), and sets out to explore how the twentieth century became a century of slaughter.

We might justly expect an analysis of the arguments he speaks of, but The Rebel changes focus. Human reason is confused by “slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman” ( R , 4)—the first two refer to Communism, the third to Nazism. In the body of the text, Nazism virtually drops out (it was, he says, a system of “irrational terror”—not at all what interested Camus), sharply narrowing the inquiry. His shift is revealed by his question: How can murder be committed with premeditation and be justified by philosophy? It turns out that the “rational murder” Camus was concerned with is not committed by capitalists or democrats, colonialists or imperialists, or by Nazis—but only by Communists.

He does not address the Holocaust, and although his had been a lone voice of protest against Hiroshima in 1945, 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 age of nuclear weapons, 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. Camus’s ideas, of course, had developed and matured over the years since he first began writing about revolt. 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. Even as he rejected its violent confrontations, 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 1930s.

One of these targets was Jean-Paul Sartre, and toward the end of The Rebel Camus now took aim at his friend’s evolving politics. Camus focuses on “the cult of history” against which the entire book is directed and his belief that “the existentialists,” led by Sartre, had fallen victim to the idea that revolt should lead to revolution. Within Camus’s framework, Sartre is challenged as trying, like the predecessors criticized in The Myth of Sisyphus , to escape the absurdity with which his own thinking began by turning to “history,” that is to Marxism. This is a bit of a stretch because Sartre was still several years from declaring himself a Marxist, and it shows Camus’s tendency towards sweeping generalization rather than close analysis. But it also reflects his awareness that his friend was determined to find a meaning in the world even as he himself foreswore doing so. And it shows his capacity for interpreting a specific disagreement in the broadest possible terms—as a fundamental conflict of philosophies.

The concluding chapters of The Rebel are punctuated with emphatic words of conclusion ( alors , donc , ainsi , c’est pourquoi ), which are rarely followed by consequences of what comes before and often introduce further assertions, without any evidence or analysis. 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.

As often in the book, the reader must be prepared to follow an abstract dance of concepts, as “rebellion,” “revolution,” “history,” “nihilism,” and other substantives stand on their own, without reference to human agents. The going gets even muddier as we near the end and the text verges on incoherence. How then is it possible that Foley judges The Rebel philosophically as Camus’s “most important book” (Foley 55)?

In these pages Camus is going back over familiar ground, contrasting the implicit religiosity of a future-oriented outlook that claims to understand and promote the logic of history, and justifying violence to implement it, with his more tentative “philosophy of limits,” with its sense of risk, “calculated ignorance,” and living in the present. However the strain stems from the fact that he is doing so much more. As he tries to bring the book to a conclusion he is wrestling with its most difficult theme—that the resort to violence is both inevitable and “impossible.” The rebel lives in contradiction. He or she cannot abandon the possibility of lying, injustice, and violence, for they are part of the rebel’s condition, and will of necessity enter into the struggle against oppression. “He cannot, therefore, absolutely claim not to kill or lie, without renouncing his rebellion and accepting, once and for all, evil and murder.” In other words, to not rebel is to become an accomplice of oppression. Rebellion, Camus has insisted, will entail murder. Yet rebellion, “in principle,” is a protest against death, just as it is a source of the solidarity that binds the human community. 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 such a hope resembles the paradise beyond this life promised by religions. Living for, and sacrificing humans to, a supposedly better future is, 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. He does however suggest two actions which, if implemented, would be signs of a revolution’s commitment to remain rebellious: it would abolish the death penalty and it would encourage rather than restrict freedom of speech.

In The Rebel Camus extends the ideas he asserted in Nuptials , developed in The Myth of Sisyphus , and then foreshadowed in The Plague : the human condition is inherently frustrating, indeed absurd, but we betray ourselves and solicit catastrophe by seeking solutions beyond our capacity. “The rebel obstinately confronts a world condemned to death and the impenetrable obscurity of the human condition with his demand for life and absolute clarity. He is seeking, without knowing it, a moral philosophy or a religion” ( R , 101). The book sets out the alternative: to accept the fact that we are living in a Godless universe and rebel against this within limits as do most of the members of the “sanitary squads” in The Plague – or to become a revolutionary, who, like the religious believer committed to the abstract and total triumph of justice, refuses to accept living in the present.

Having critiqued religion in Nuptials and The Plague , 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. “Then the only kingdom that is opposed to the kingdom of grace must be founded-namely, the kingdom of justice-and the human community must be reunited among the debris of the fallen City of God. To kill God and to build a church are the constant and contradictory purpose of rebellion” ( R , 103). If rebellion spills over its limits and is given free rein, our modern need to create kingdoms and our continuing search for salvation is the path of catastrophe. “When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, the order, and the unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man” ( R , 25). 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. This is the path of the metaphysical rebel, who does not see that “human insurrection, in its exalted and tragic forms, is only, and can only be, a prolonged protest against death” ( R , 100).

We have been exploring one of the most interesting and perplexing aspects of Camus’s thought: his determination to criticize attitudes that he finds to be natural and inevitable. For one, the possibility of suicide haunts humans, and so does the desire for an impossible order and an unachievable permanence. Existentialist writers had similar insights, but Camus criticizes their inability to remain consistent with their initial insight. Similarly, he insists throughout The Rebel that the metaphysical need he sees leading to Communism’s terror is universal: he describes it and its consequences so that we can better resist it in ourselves as well as others. 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. Clamence’s life is filled with good works, but he is a hypocrite and knows it. 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. In telling Clamence’s story, Camus was clearly seeking to empathize as well as describe, to understand as well as condemn. Clamence is a monster, but Clamence is also just another human being (Aronson 2004, 192–200). Beyond the character and actions of Clamence, The Fall demonstrates a unique message at the heart of Camus’s 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’s philosophy, if it has a single meaning, is that we should learn to tolerate, indeed embrace the frustration and ambivalence that humans cannot escape.

Well into the twenty-first century, the career of Camus’s thought, like that of his onetime friend Jean-Paul Sartre, has been remarkable. Two generations after his death, his complex and profound philosophical project, as discussed by Srigley, is very much with us because it seeks not only to critique modernity but reaches back to the ancient world to lay the basis for alternative ways of thinking and living in the present. Thus, if in some respects he anticipated the postmodernists, he retained a central metaphysical concern with such ideas as absurdity and revolt. Unlike postmodernism, Camus was, as Jeffrey C. Isaac says, a “chastened humanist” who remained deeply attached, as was Hannah Arendt, to “the language of right, freedom, and truth” (Isaac 244).

Camus’s ideas and name have come up again and again during the twenty-first century, not only among philosophers and literary scholars, among specialists in a wide variety of fields, in the press and among political writers, and in conversations among the general public who read his books or have heard about his ideas. First, his exploration of living in a Godless universe has led to his name being mentioned often in discussions about religious nonbelief (Aronson 2011). Yet unlike the “new atheists” the great nonbeliever Camus was never assured enough to declare that God does not exist and was not militantly opposed to religious belief and practice (Carlson 2014). Even as Camus presents in The Plague a profoundly critical picture of Father Paneloux’s sermons describing the plague first as a punishment for human sin and then as a call to embrace the divine mystery, for a time the priest nevertheless humbly joins the collective project of the “sanitary squads.”

Second, after the 9/11 attack and during the “war on terror,” Camus’s writings on violence became much discussed. For example The Rebel was explored anew for hints about the motivations behind twenty-first century terrorism. Paul Berman deployed Camus in his justification for the “war on terror” against Islamic “pathological mass movements” (Berman 2003, 27–33). Foley, on the other hand, devoted attention to the actual relevance of Camus’s attempts to think through the question of political violence on a small-group and individual level. He shows how, 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: (1) The target must be a tyrant; (2) the killing must not involve innocent civilians; (3) the killer must be in direct physical proximity to the victim; and (4) there must be no alternative to killing (Foley 2008, 93). 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, Foley stresses that Camus rules out mass killing, indirect murder, killing civilians, and killing without an urgent need to remove murderous and tyrannical individuals. These demands rest on the core idea of The Rebel , that to rebel is to assert and respect a moral order, and this must be sustained both by clear limits and by the murderer’s willingness to die. [ 4 ]

During the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, sales of The Plague exploded and interest was so great that the New York Times republished its original 1948 review by Stephen Spender. Hundreds of articles were written about it in all languages – by bloggers, artists, cartoonists, journalists, Camus specialists, medical practitioners, scholars from every conceivable discipline – and philosophers. Camus’s work was being mined for what it had to teach about living in and coping with the pandemic, including such topics as: functioning amidst the absurdity of a disease that appeared for seemingly no reason at all (de Botton 2021); the similarities and differences between his plague and ours (Aronson, 2020); living and working within the paralyzing existential fear imposed by the pandemic (Farr 2021); retaining hope amidst catastrophe (Kabel & Phillipson 2020); and the solidarity among members of the “sanitary squads” doing so (Illing 2020). In the face of absurdity and mass death many writers extolled the modest and self-limiting philosophy behind The Plague , rooted in The Myth of Sisyphus and further developed in The Rebel : one must act, with others, wherever one happens to be, by simply doing one’s job. As Rieux says: “there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is – common decency” ( P , 150). [ 5 ]

The abbreviations used to cite Camus’s work ( P , R , MS , RRD , N , and LCE ) are defined in the section ‘Works in English’ below.

Collected Works in French

  • Théâtre, Récits, Nouvelles , R. Quilliot (ed.), Paris: Gallimard, 1962.
  • Essais , R. Quillot and L. Fauçon (eds.), Paris: Gallimard, 1965.
  • Œuvres Complètes , Vols. I–IV, R. Gay-Crosier (ed.) Paris: Gallimard, 2006–09.

Works in English

Reference marks are given for cited English translations.

  • The Plague , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948 [ P ].
  • The Plague , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021 [ P 2021].
  • The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954 [ R ].
  • The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays , New York: Alred A. Knopf, 1955 [ MS ].
  • The Fall , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957.
  • Caligula, and Three Other Plays , New York: Alred A. Knopf, 1958.
  • Resistance, Rebellion, and Death , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961 [ RRD ].
  • “Nuptials at Tipasa”, in Lyrical and Critical Essays , 1968 [ N ].
  • Lyrical and Critical Essays , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968 [ LCE ].
  • The Stranger , New York: Vintage, 1988.
  • Between Hell and Reason , Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1991 [ Camus’ Between Hell and Reason available online ].
  • “Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism”, in J. McBride, Albert Camus: Philosopher and Littérateur , New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992, pp. 93–165.
  • Notebooks 1942–1951 , New York: Marlowe, 1995.
  • Notebooks 1935–1942 , New York: Marlowe, 1996.
  • Camus at Combat: Writing 1944–47 , J. Lévi-Vatensi (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Camus and Sartre

  • Sartre, J.P., “Camus’s The Outsider ,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays , New York: Collier Books, 1962.
  • Sprintzen, D.A., and A. van den Hoven (eds.), Sartre and Camus: A Historic Confrontation , Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004.
  • Aronson, R., 1980, Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World , London: Verso.
  • –––, 2004, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • –––, 2011, “Camus the Unbeliever,” in Situating Existentialism , Robert Bernasconi and Jonathan Judaken (eds.), New York: Columbia University Press.
  • –––, 2013, “Camus et Sartre: parallèles et divergences de leur philosophie,” Cahier Albert Camus, Raymond Gay-Crosier (ed.), Paris: L’Herne.
  • –––, 2020, “Camus’ Plague Is Not Ours,” Tikkun , published online 14 April 2020 [ Aronson 2020 available online ].
  • Berman, P., 2003, Terror and Liberalism , New York: Norton.
  • Betz, M., 2020, “ The Plague , a Review,” The Philosophers Magazine , No. 214, 18 May 2020 [ Betz 2020 available online ].
  • Boisvert, R., 2021, “Camus, The Plague and Us,” Philosophy Now , Issue 143 [ Boisvert 2021 available online ].
  • de Botton, A., 2021, “Camus on the Coronavirus,” New York Times , 18 March 2021 [ de Botton 2021 available online ].
  • Carlson, J, 2014, “Remembering Albert Camus and Longing for the Old Atheism,” Huffington Post , 23 January 2014 [ available online ]
  • Carroll, D., 2007, Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice , New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Daoud, K., 2015, The Meursault Investigation , New York: Other Press.
  • Farr, P., 2021. “In this Moment, We Are All Dr. Rieux: COVID-19, Existential Anxiety and the Absurd History,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology , 61(2): 275–82 [ Farr 2021 available online ].
  • Foley, J., 2008, Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt , Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
  • Gay-Crosier, R., Vanney, P., 2009, Camus et l’histoire , Caen: Lettres modernes Minard.
  • Hanna, T., 1958, The Thought and Art of Albert Camus , Chicago: H. Regnery Co.
  • Hayden, P.E., 2013, “Albert Camus and Rebellious Cosmopolitanism in a Divided World,” Journal of International Political Theory , 9(2): 194–219.
  • Hughes, E.J. (ed.), 2007, The Cambridge Companion to Camus , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Illing, S.D., 2017, “Camus and Nietzsche on politics in an age of absurdity,” European Journal of Political Theory , 16(1): 24–40.
  • –––, 2020, “This is a Time for Solidarity: What Albert Camus’s The Plague Can Teach Us about Life in a Pandemic,” Vox , 15 March 2020 [ Illing 2020 available online ].
  • Isaac, J.C., 1992, Arendt, Camus and Modern Rebellion , New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • James, W., 1896, “Is Life Worth Living?” The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy , New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. [ Reprint of James 1896 available online ]
  • Jeanson, F., 1947, “Albert Camus ou le mensonge de l’absurdité,” Revue Dominicaine no. 53.
  • Kabel, A. and R. Phillipson, 2020, “Structural Violence and Hope in Catastrophic Times from The Plague to COVID-19,” Race and Class , 62(4), 3–18 [ Kabel & Phillipson 2020 available online ].
  • Lazere, D., 1973, The Unique Creation of Albert Camus , New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • Lottman, H. R., 1997, Albert Camus: A Biography , Corte Madera, CA: Gingko.
  • Mélançon, M., 1976, Albert Camus: Analyse de sa Pensé e, Fribourg: Éditions universitaires.
  • McBride, J., 1992, Albert Camus: Philosopher and Littérateur , New York: St. Martin’s Press.
  • McCarthy, P., 1982, Camus , New York: Random House.
  • Neiman, P. G., 2017, “Camus on Authenticity in Political Violence,” European Journal of Philosophy , 25(4): 1569–87.
  • Nietzsche, F. W., 1878/1996, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits , M. Faber and S. Lehmann, (trans.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
  • –––, 1888/1968, “Twilight of the Idols”, in W. Kaufmann (trans.), The Portable Nietzsche , Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, pp. 463–563.
  • O’Brien, C. C., 1970, Albert Camus of Europe and Africa , New York: Viking.
  • Plutarch, Moralia (Volume II), F. C. Babbitt (ed. and trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Rizzuto, A., 1981, Camus’s Imperial Vision , Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
  • Sagi, A., 2002, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd , Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V.
  • Sharpe, M., 2012, “Restoring Camus as Philosophe : On Ronald Srigley’s Camus’s Critique of Modernity ”, Critical Horizons , 13(3): 400–424.
  • –––, M. Kaluza, and P. Francev, 2020, Brill’s Companion to Camus: Camus among the Philosophers , Leiden: Brill.
  • Sherman, D., 2008, Camus , Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Sprintzen, D., 1988, Camus: A Critical Examination , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
  • Srigley, R., 2011, Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity , Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
  • Thody, P., 1973, Albert Camus 1913–60 , London: Hamish Hamilton.
  • Todd, O., 1997, Albert Camus: A Life , New York: Knopf.
  • Zaretsky, R., 2020, “Out of a Clear Blue Sky: Camus’s The Plague and Coronavirus,” Times Literary Supplement , 10 April 2020 [ Zaretsky 2020 available online ].
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aesthetics: existentialist | existentialism | Husserl, Edmund | life: meaning of | Nietzsche, Friedrich | phenomenology | Sartre, Jean-Paul | suicide

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Facing History

albert camus essays

By Adam Gopnik

Blackandwhite photograph of a man in a coat smoking a cigarette.

The French novelist and philosopher Albert Camus was a terrifically good-looking guy whom women fell for helplessly—the Don Draper of existentialism. This may seem a trivial thing to harp on, except that it is almost always the first thing that comes up when people who knew Camus talk about what he was like. When Elizabeth Hawes, whose lovely 2009 book “Camus: A Romance” is essentially the rueful story of her own college-girl crush on his image, asked survivors of the Partisan Review crowd, who met Camus on his one trip to New York, in 1946, what he was like, they said that he reminded them of Bogart. “All I can tell you is that Camus was the most attractive man I have ever met,” William Phillips, the journal’s editor, said, while the thorny Lionel Abel not only compared him to Bogart but kept telling Hawes that Camus’s central trait was his “elegance.” (It took the sharper and more Francophile eye of A. J. Liebling to note that the suit Camus wore in New York was at least twenty years out of Parisian style.)

Camus liked this reception enough to write home about it to his French publisher. “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.

It’s perfectly reasonable, then, that a new book by Catherine Camus, his surviving daughter, “Albert Camus: Solitude and Solidarity” (Edition Olms), is essentially a photograph album, rather than any sort of philosophical gloss. Looks matter to the mind. Clever people are usually compensating for something, even if the wound that makes them draw the bow of art is no worse than an overlarge schnozz and sticking-out ears. The ugly man who thinks hard—Socrates or Sartre—is using his mind to make up for his face. (Camus once saw Sartre over-wooing a pretty girl and wondered why he didn’t, as Camus would have done, play it cool. “You’ve seen my face?” Sartre answered, honestly.) When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up.

And then the image of Camus persists—we recall him not just as a fine writer but as an exemplary man, a kind of secular saint, the spirit of his time, as well as the last French writer whom most Americans know something about. French literary critics sometimes treat him with the note of condescension that authors of high-school classics get here, too—a tone that the French writer Michel Onfray, in his newly published life of Camus, “L’Ordre Libertaire,” tries to remedy, insisting that Camus was not only a better writer but a more interesting systematic thinker than Sartre.

The skepticism of his native readers isn’t just snobbish, though. Read today, Camus is perhaps more memorable as a great journalist—as a diarist and editorialist—than as a novelist and philosopher. He wrote beautifully, even when he thought conventionally, and the sober lucidity of his writing is, in a sense, the true timbre of the thought. Olivier Todd, the author of the standard biography in French, suggests that Camus might have benefitted by knowing more about his anti-totalitarian Anglo-American contemporaries, Popper and Orwell among them. Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight? That the answers come to much the same thing in the end—easy does it; tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people—doesn’t diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and looked at it, elegantly, upside down.

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.

Camus was a first-rate philosophy student, and the French meritocratic system had purchase even in the distant province. He quickly advanced at the local university, writing a thesis on Plotinus and St. Augustine when he was in his early twenties. After a flirtation with Communism, he left for the mainland in 1940, with the manuscript of a novel in his suitcase and the ambition to be a journalist in his heart. He worked briefly for the newspaper Paris-Soir , and then returned to North Africa, where he finished two books. By 1943, he was back in France, to join the staff of the clandestine Resistance newspaper Combat , and publish those books: first the novel “The Stranger” and then a book of philosophical essays, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Part of the paralyzing narcotic of the Occupation was that writing could still go on; it was in the Germans’ interest to allow the publication of books that seemed remote enough not to be subversive.

The novel and the essays announced the same theme, though the novel did it on a downdraft and the essays on uplift: meaning is where you make it and life is absurd. In the novel, Camus meant absurd in the sense of pointless; in the essays in the sense of unjustified by certainty. Life is absurd because Why bother? And life is also absurd because Who knows? “The Stranger” tells the story of an alienated Franco-Algerian, Meursault, who kills an Arab on the beach one day for no good reason. The no-good-reason is key: if it’s possible to act for no good reason, maybe there is never any reason to talk about “good” when you act. The world is absurd, Meursault thinks (and Camus seconds), because, without divine order, or even much pointed human purpose, it’s just one damn thing after another, and you might as well be damned for one thing as the next: in a world bleached dry of significance, the most immoral act might seem as meaningful as the best one. The drained, eye-straining beach where Meursault murders his victim is a place not just without meaning but without real feeling—it became the deadened landscape, and the cityscape, that was populated in the decade by everyone from Giacometti’s emaciated walking figures to Bogart’s private eyes.

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.

It was the editorials that Camus wrote for Combat that sustained his reputation. Editorial writers can seem the most insipid and helpless of the scribbling class: they sum up anonymously the ideas of their time, and truth and insipidity do a great deal of close dancing—the right thing to do is often hard but seldom surprising. Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing. It’s a form of conducting, really, where the writer tries to strike a downbeat, a tonic note, for the whole of his section. Not “Say this!” but “Sound this way!” is what the great editorialists teach.

How Albert Camus Faced History

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What Camus wanted wasn’t new: just liberty, equality, and fraternity. But he found a new way to say it. Tone was what mattered. He discovered a way of speaking on the page that was unlike either the violent rhetorical clichés of Communism or the ponderous abstractions of the Catholic right. He struck a tone not of Voltairean Parisian rancor but of melancholic loft. Camus sounds serious, but he also sounds sad —he added the authority of sadness to the activity of political writing. He wrote with dignity, at a moment when restoring dignity to public language was necessary, and he slowed public language at a time when history was moving too fast. At the Liberation, he wrote (in Arthur Goldhammer’s translation):

Now that we have won the means to express ourselves, our responsibility to ourselves and to the country is paramount. . . . The task for each of us is to think carefully about what he wants to say and gradually to shape the spirit of his paper; it is to write carefully without ever losing sight of the urgent need to restore to the country its authoritative voice. If we see to it that that voice remains one of vigor, rather than hatred, of proud objectivity and not rhetoric, of humanity rather than mediocrity, then much will be saved from ruin.

Responsibility, care, gradualness, humanity—even at a time of jubilation, these are the typical words of Camus, and they were not the usual words of French political rhetoric. The enemy was not this side or that one; it was the abstraction of rhetoric itself. He wrote, “We have witnessed lying, humiliation, killing, deportation, and torture, and in each instance it was impossible to persuade the people who were doing these things not to do them, because they were sure of themselves, and because there is no way of persuading an abstraction.” Sartre, in a signed, man-on-the-scene column for Combat , wrote that the Liberation had been a “time of intoxication and joy.” (Actually, Sartre kept off the streets and let Simone de Beauvoir do the writing, while he took the byline.) Intoxication and joy were the last things that Camus thought freedom should bring. His watchwords were anxiety and responsibility.

It was in the forties that Camus became intimate with Sartre. Though each had known the other’s writing before meeting the writer, they became friends, in Saint-Germain, in 1943, a time when the Café de Flore was not an expensive spot but one of the few places with a radiator reliable enough to keep you warm in winter. For the next decade, French intellectual life was dominated by their double act. Although Camus was married, and soon afterward had a mistress, and soon after that had twins (by his wife), an American reader of Todd’s biography is startled to realize that after the twins were born Camus’s life went on exactly as before—his deepest emotional attachment seems to have been to Sartre and his circle. Indeed, the image of the French philosophers in cafés debating existentialism dates from that moment and those men. (Before that, Frenchmen in cafés debated love.)

Philosophers? They were performers with vision, who played on the stage of history. Their first conversation was about the theatre—Sartre asked Camus, impulsively, to direct the coming production of his play “No Exit”—and not long afterward Sartre was sent, by the Resistance unit he had belatedly joined, to occupy the Comédie-Française. (The Resistance actually had a theatre committee.) Camus came into the theatre and found Sartre asleep in an orchestra seat. “At least your armchair is facing in the direction of history,” Camus teased him, meaning that the chair looked more committed than the sleeping philosopher. The wisecrack bugged Sartre more than he first let on, as such jokes will among writers.

Sartre-bashing has become a favorite sport for Anglo-American intellectuals—in the past decades, Clive James and the late Tony Judt have both kicked him around—and so it’s worth recalling why Camus valued Sartre’s good opinion more than anyone else’s. Sartre’s appeal was, in no small part, generational and charismatic. If you had asked people whose lives Sartre changed why they admired him so keenly, they would have said that it was because in his book “Being and Nothingness,” and in the famous 1945 speech “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” he had reconciled Marxism and existentialism. To some, this may seem like not much of an accomplishment—they may feel rather as a parent feels when a child has, over breakfast, reconciled Lucky Charms and Froot Loops in one bowl—but at the time it seemed life-giving. Sartre had found a role for both humanism and history—“humanism” meaning the Enlightenment belief that individual acts had resonance and meaning, “history” meaning the Marxist belief that, in the impersonal working out of the dialectic, they actually didn’t. Sartre said that you couldn’t know how history would work out, but you could act as if you did: “If I ask myself ‘Will the social ideal, as such, ever become a reality?’ I cannot tell, I only know that whatever may be in my power to make it so, I shall do; beyond that, I can count upon nothing.” And again: “Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.” (There are moments when Sartre sounds like Tony Robbins—only you can make you what you want to be!—which may also have been, secretly, part of his appeal.) People aren’t born free and everywhere are in chains; they’re just born. What better way to choose freedom than by unlocking the next guy’s chains, too?

Sartre’s move toward Marxism, and toward the French Communist Party, oddly mimicked that of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s seventeenth-century “wager” in favor of Christianity: the faith might be true, so why not embrace it, since you lose nothing by the embrace, and get at least the chance of all the goodies the faith promises? In Sartre’s case, if the “social ideal” never arrived, at least you had tried, and if it did you might get a place in the pantheon of proletariat heroes. This reasoning may seem a little shabby and self-interested, but to those within Pascal’s tradition it seemed brave and audacious. (Camus called Pascal “the greatest of all, yesterday and today.”) Faith in the Party, which Sartre never joined but to which he gave his purposefully blind allegiance, so closely mirrored faith in the Church that it borrowed some of the Church’s residual aura of moral purpose. It wasn’t that Sartre didn’t notice the Soviet camps. He did. He just thought that you could look past them, as a good Catholic doesn’t pretend not to see the Hell on earth that the Church often has made but still thinks you can see the Heaven beyond that it points to.

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. Sartre was a straight-out fellow-traveller with the P.C.F., the Parti Communiste Français, and Camus was not. Sartre was outraged on behalf of the Party by such episodes as the “affair of the carrier pigeons,” in which the Party Secretary was found with pigeons in his car and was accused by the police of using them, like a good revolutionary, to coördinate illegal demonstrations. (It turned out that, like a good Frenchman, he was merely planning a squab casserole.)

In “The Rebel,” Camus writes (in Philip Mairet’s translation):

He who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself to the earth and reaps from it the harvest that sows its seed and sustains the world again and again. Finally, it is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment, against history who really advance its interests.

In English, this can come across as merely sonorous. In France in 1951, the real meaning was barbed and apparent: only a moral idiot would give his allegiance to the Communist Party in the name of the coming revolution. Camus spotted the catch in Sartre’s account of fellow-travelling as a leap of faith. The only practical way to unlock the next guy’s chains, on Sartre’s premise, is to kill the guy next to that guy first, since he’s the one chaining him up; kill all the jailers and everyone will be free. This sounds great, Camus saw, until you’ve killed all the jailers and all you have is other jailers. There is no difference between dying in a Soviet camp and dying in a Nazi camp. We should be neither executioners nor victims; it is madness to sacrifice human lives today in the pursuit of a utopian future.

This position was rightly praised for its truth and oddly praised for its courage. After all, opposition to both Fascism and Stalinism was exactly the position of every democratic government in North America and Western Europe. It was Harry Truman’s position and it was Clement Atlee’s position; it was Winston Churchill’s position and Pierre Mendès-France’s. It was the doctrine of the liberal version of the Cold War: the true inheritors of “totalitarianism” were the Communists, and had to be resisted.

Well, it was courageous, we say, because, though common people and politicians were wiser, intellectuals in France believed the opposite. This is not false, but there is a subtler point at play. It is in the nature of intellectual life—and part of its value—to gravitate toward the extreme alternative position, since that is usually the one most in need of articulation. Harvard and Yale pay some of their professors to tell the students that everything they believe is a bourgeois illusion, as the Koch brothers pay their foundation staff to say that all bourgeois illusions are real, and the fact that neither is entirely true does not alter the need to pay people to say it. The ideas we pay for, as Ayn Rand grasped when she looked at her royalty statements, are those which define the outer edge. We want big minds to voice extreme ideas, since our smaller minds already voice the saner ones.

In this sense, Sartre’s admirers are not wrong when they protest what seems to them the naïve moralizing of his Anglo-American critics. Those admirers, who remain plentiful in Paris, insist that Sartre was, above all, open-minded, that he reproached himself for his own errors, constantly revised his mistakes, broke with the Soviets not all that long after siding with them—that his open-ended, lifelong “ recherché ” was never meant to be concluded, and that you shouldn’t score it like a football match, Right Views 3, Wrong Views 6.

“Whats that look Cmon youre scaring me”

To accuse such a thinker of hypocrisy seems unfair, but perhaps he can be accused of too much habitual happiness. For all their self-advertised agonies, the lives Sartre and Camus led after the war mostly sound like a lot of fun. Their biographies are popular because they dramatize the agonizing preoccupations of modern man and also because they present an appealing circle of Left Bank cafés and late-night boîtes and long vacations. A life like that implicitly assumes that the society it inhabits will go on functioning no matter what you say about it, that the cafés and libraries and secondhand bookstores will continue to function despite the criticism. A professor at the Collège de France who maintains that there should be no professors at the Collège de France does not really believe this, or else he would not be one. This wasn’t a luxury that thinkers in Moscow, much less Phnom Penh, ever had. Sartre’s great sin was not his ideology, which did indeed change all the time. It was his insularity. The apostle of ideas as action didn’t think that ideas would actually alter life; he expected that life would go on more or less as it had in spite of them, while always giving him another chance to make them better. Nice work, if you can get it.

Camus wanted a better Republic. What he got was the Fourth Republic. De Gaulle is often given credit for the myth of the Resistance, which is no more of a myth than the American myth of emancipation; i.e., it really did happen, you just have to leave a lot of other stuff out to make what happened sound like it was mostly good. But he also created another myth: that of the failure of the Fourth Republic, in order to prove the necessity of his Fifth. In fact, the Fourth Republic, far more parliamentary than the Presidential-monarchical Fifth, was no more than normally corrupt and inefficient, and did a terrific job of moving France from paralysis to prosperity from 1945 to 1958. It foundered exactly on the insoluble problems of decolonization, about which it could be no wiser than its constituent parts.

Along the way, it solved philosophical problems. It may be hard to reconcile history and humanism, but it isn’t hard to make laws that force capitalism to give workers more rights and comforts and security than they had before, while still respecting the liberty of each man to run a small shop and curse the government. It’s so easy that every wealthy Western country has done it, and was doing it, even as its masterminds were arguing about whether it would ever be imaginable. These things are easier to do than they are to think about—a Sartrean point that Sartre never quite got around to seeing.

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.)

Each man knew where the other was vulnerable. Calling Sartre “Monsieur le Directeur,” that is, a kind of literary bureaucrat, was Camus’s dig at his friend’s position; Sartre countered by condescending to Camus’s philosophical pretensions. “And suppose you didn’t reason very well? And suppose your thinking was muddled and banal?” he suggested. Infuriated, Camus chose to remind Sartre of the nap at the Comédie-Française, saying that, as a militant who had “never walked away from the combats of the time,” he was tired of being given lessons by those who had “never placed more than their armchairs in the direction of history.” Like the word “upstart,” which makes Groucho declare war in “Duck Soup,” “armchair” was the fatal insult. The two men never spoke again.

Wounded by the exchange, Camus was silenced by the Algerian war. Sartre saw the world’s crisis on a North-South, not an East-West, axis. The Soviet domination of Europe, and the fellow-travelling acquiescence of the French Communist Party in that domination—indeed, its explicit desire to extend it to Western Europe—might have been, perhaps should have been, Sartre’s central subject. But his preoccupation was instead the wars of colonial empire that dominated French foreign policy throughout the fifties, first the war in Indochina and then the one in Algeria, with Suez in between. To see the central political story of the fifties as the attempt by the Western democracies to hold on to their liberty is rational; but to see it as the attempt by the fading European empires to hold on to their overseas possessions is not false, either, and recedes for us in memory only because it failed so completely that we don’t even remember that they tried.

Though impeccably anti-colonial, Camus refused to take part in the sentimental embrace of the National Liberation Front, the F.L.N., that became de rigueur in left-wing circles in those years. Struggling to explain why he could not abandon the idea of a French Algeria—or, at a minimum, of some decent compromise that would insure majority rule while protecting the rights of the “settler” minority—he ended with the weak-sounding formula that he could not abandon his mother, which made it seem merely a question of blood. Lacking a better way of putting it, he chose silence, and this most indispensable of editorialists spent the last five years of his life, until his death, in a car crash, in 1960, with his own tongue under house arrest, vowing not to speak about the Algerian problem.

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. They were for the most part not rootless colonists who had come for the main buck—and those who were would be replaced by a local boss class. Colonialism is wrong, but the human claims of the colonists are just as real as those of the colonized. No human being is more indigenous to a place than any other. This remains an unfashionable, even taboo, position; one feels it still, for instance, in the condescension that American leftists offer white South Africans. (Athol Fugard’s plays are a good antidote for this simplification, while Mandela’s moral greatness was to see, and say, that the Boers were as much South Africans as the Xhosa.) Camus wasn’t wrong. What he meant by his mother was his mother: not blood loyalty or genetic roots but the particular experience of a woman who had labored all her life as a domestic servant and was no more guilty of or complicit in colonial crimes than everyone else who lives on earth is complicit in dispossessing someone. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t abandon his roots for a cause; it was that he wouldn’t abandon his mother for an idea.

Camus called the tendency to dehumanize those who stood in the way of history the problem of “abstraction.” He meant that we can always look past the humanity of the kulaks or the pieds noirs or whoever is the necessary victim of the day. Read too much Marx, and you’ll look right past your own mom. What’s a few hundred thousand peasants in the face of history? Camus thought that all systems of ideal government were wrong, and all atrocities equally atrocious. To be a liberal in that sense, with a style that conferred eloquence on compromise, was the accomplishment. When Sartre’s circle praised Camus’s style and then objected to it, they were on to something. The threat he posed to totalitarian thought came from his ability to attach these common-sense principles to a set of magisterial arguments and timeless aphorisms. There is no better book to read for moral salt and sweetness than his notebooks from the fifties, which are filled with chiselled epigrams: “Progress-minded intellectuals. They are the tricoteuses of the dialectic. As each head falls, they reknit the sleeve of reasoning torn apart by the facts.” Or simply: “Justice in the big things only. For the rest, just mercy.”

Liberalism is optimistic in English-speaking countries, and therefore always a little fatuous. Telling Sisyphus that he’ll get that stone up there someday is an empty hope. He won’t. Camus imagined Sisyphus committed to his daily act; he doesn’t encourage him to hope for a better stone and a shorter hill. The counsel given is essentially the same—short-term commitment to the best available course of action—but, by accepting that the boulder is always going to roll back down, Camus put a tragic mask on common sense, and a heroic face on the daily boulder’s daily grind. It may have been the handsomest thing he ever did. ♦

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When Philosophers Become Therapists

By Nick Romeo

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The Marginalian

Love of Life: Albert Camus on Happiness, Despair, the Art of Awareness, and Why We Travel

By maria popova.

Love of Life: Albert Camus on Happiness, Despair, the Art of Awareness, and Why We Travel

“Those who prefer their principles over their happiness,” Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) wrote in his notebook toward the end of his life, “they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.” Indeed, our principles tend to harden into habits and although habits give shape to our inner lives , they can mutate into the rigidity of routine and create a kind of momentum that, rather than expanding our capacity for happiness, contracts it. In the trance of routine and principled productivity, we end up showing up for our daily lives while being absent from them.

Few things things break us out of our routines and awaken us to the living substance of happiness more powerfully than travel. Camus knew this. Decades earlier, when he was only twenty-two and still a long way from becoming the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, he explored this human perplexity with unparalleled intellectual elegance and spiritual grace in a gorgeous essay titled “Love of Life,” eventually included in his posthumously published collection Lyrical and Critical Essays ( public library ).

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Recounting the sight of a young woman dancing deliriously in a Spanish cabaret, Camus — whose entire life was undergirded by the ethos that happiness is our moral obligation — writes:

Without cafés and newspapers, it would be difficult to travel. A paper printed in our own language, a place to rub shoulders with others in the evenings enable us to imitate the familiar gestures of the man we were at home, who, seen from a distance, seems so much a stranger. For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. One can no longer cheat — hide behind the hours spent at the office or at the plant (those hours we protest so loudly, which protect us so well from the pain of being alone). I have always wanted to write novels in which my heroes would say: “What would I do without the office?” or again: “My wife has died, but fortunately I have all these orders to fill for tomorrow.” Travel robs us of such refuge. Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props, deprived of our masks (one doesn’t know the fare on the streetcars, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves. But also, soul-sick, we restore to every being and every object its miraculous value. A woman dancing without a thought in her head, a bottle on a table, glimpsed behind a curtain: each image becomes a symbol. The whole of life seems reflected in it, insofar as it summarizes our own life at the moment. When we are aware of every gift, the contradictory intoxications we can enjoy (including that of lucidity) are indescribable.

But this contact with absolute bliss, Camus cautions, necessitates an equal capacity for contact with absolute despair:

There lay all my love of life: a silent passion for what would perhaps escape me, a bitterness beneath a flame. Each day I would leave this cloister like a man lifted from himself, inscribed for a brief moment in the continuance of the world… There is no love of life without despair of life.

Echoing Kierkegaard’s unforgettable admonition — “Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy,” the Danish philosopher wrote in contemplating our greatest source of unhappiness — Camus considers how the trance of productivity robs us of the very presence necessary for happiness:

Life is short, and it is sinful to waste one’s time. They say I’m active. But being active is still wasting one’s time, if in doing one loses oneself. Today is a resting time, and my heart goes off in search of itself. If an anguish still clutches me, it’s when I feel this impalpable moment slip through my fingers like quicksilver… At the moment, my whole kingdom is of this world. This sun and these shadows, this warmth and this cold rising from the depths of the air: why wonder if something is dying or if men suffer, since everything is written on this window where the sun sheds its plenty as a greeting to my pity? I can say and in a moment I shall say that what counts is to be human and simple. No, what counts is to be true, and then everything fits in, humanity and simplicity. When am I truer than when I am the world? My cup brims over before I have time to desire. Eternity is there and I was hoping for it. What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness. […] The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death. Besides, how can I define the link that leads from this all-consuming love of life to this secret despair? If I listen to the voice of irony, crouching underneath things, slowly it reveals itself. Winking its small, clear eye, it says: “Live as if …” In spite of much searching, this is all I know.

Complement the altogether beautiful Lyrical and Critical Essays with Camus on happiness, unhappiness, and our self-imposed prisons , his illustrated wisdom on love , and the beautiful letter of gratitude he wrote to his childhood teacher after receiving the Nobel Prize.

— Published November 30, 2015 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/11/30/albert-camus-travel-lyrical-critical-essays/ —

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Albert Camus’s The Stranger: Critical Essays

Albert Camus’s The Stranger: Critical Essays

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Often marginalised on the sidelines of both philosophy and literature, the works of Albert Camus have, in recent years, undergone a renaissance. While most readers in either discipline claim Camus and his works to be ‘theirs’, the scholars presented in this volume tend to see him and his works in both philosophy and literature.

This volume is a collection of critical essays by an international menagerie of Camus experts who, despite their interpretive differences, see Camus through both lenses. For them, he is a novelist/essayist who embodies a philosophy that was never fully developed due to his brief life.

The essays here examine Camus’s first published novel, The Stranger, from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives, each drawing on the author’s knowledge to present the first known critical examination in English. As such, this volume will shed new light on previous scholarship.

Peter Francev is a Lecturer in Philosophy and English in southern California. Currently, he is President of the Albert Camus Society US and editor of the Journal of Camus Studies. When he is not writing on Camus, he can be found researching his PhD thesis on Lord Byron or loving the company of his children Katherine and Michael, his poodles Oliver, Mandy and Daphne, and his wife Jennifer, without whom none of this would be possible.

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Lyrical and Critical Essays

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Albert Camus

Lyrical and Critical Essays Mass Market Paperback – September 12, 1970

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-- Donald Lazere, The Nation

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  • Print length 384 pages
  • Language English
  • Publisher Vintage
  • Publication date September 12, 1970
  • Dimensions 4.3 x 1.03 x 7.22 inches
  • ISBN-10 0394708520
  • ISBN-13 978-0394708522
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The Myth of Sisyphus (Vintage International)

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  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (September 12, 1970)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0394708520
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0394708522
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.4 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.3 x 1.03 x 7.22 inches
  • #493 in French Literature (Books)
  • #3,211 in Essays (Books)
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albert camus essays

Albert Camus

Albert Camus (French: [albɛʁ kamy]; 7 November 1913 - 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay The Rebel that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

Camus did not consider himself to be an existentialist despite usually being classified as one, even in his lifetime. In a 1945 interview, Camus rejected any ideological associations: ""No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked..."".

Camus was born in Algeria to a Pied-Noir family, and studied at the University of Algiers from which he graduated in 1936. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons to ""denounce two ideologies found in both the USSR and the USA"".

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Photograph by United Press International [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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The myth of Sisyphus : and other essays

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Penguin Random House

The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays

Introduction by David Bellos

By Albert Camus Introduction by David Bellos Translated by Stuart Gilbert and Justin O’Brien

Part of everyman's library contemporary classics series, category: literary fiction | classic fiction | short stories.

Aug 17, 2004 | ISBN 9781400042555 | 5 x 8 --> | ISBN 9781400042555 --> Buy

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Aug 17, 2004 | ISBN 9781400042555

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About The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays

From one of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the twentieth century and a Nobel Prize-winning author: two novels, six short stories, and a pair of essays in a single volume that deploy his lyric eloquence in defense against despair. In both his essays and his fiction, Albert Camus (1913—1960) provides an affirmation of the brave assertion of humanity in the face of a universe devoid of order or meaning.   The Plague— written in 1947 and still profoundly relevant—is a riveting tale of horror, survival, and resilience in the face of a devastating epidemic. The Fall (1956), which takes the form of an astonishing confession by a French lawyer in a seedy Amsterdam bar, is a haunting parable of modern conscience in the face of evil. The six stories of Exile and the Kingdom (1957) represent Camus at the height of his narrative powers, masterfully depicting his characters—from a renegade missionary to an adulterous wife—at decisive moments of revelation. Set beside their fictional counterparts, Camus’s famous essays “The Myth of Sisyphus” and “Reflections on the Guillotine” are all the more powerful and philosophically daring, confirming his towering place in twentieth-century thought.

Also in Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics Series

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Also by Albert Camus

Caligula and Three Other Plays

About Albert Camus

Born in Algeria in 1913, ALBERT CAMUS published The Stranger–now one of the most widely read novels of this century–in 1942. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car… More about Albert Camus

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Table Of Contents

Introduction 

Select Bibliography 

THE PLAGUE 

THE FALL 

EXILE AND THE KINGDOM 

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS 

REFLECTIONS ON THE GUILLOTINE 

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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Philosophers — Albert Camus

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Essays on Albert Camus

The absurdity of life in the myth of sisyphus by albert camus, symbolic meaning of sun in the stranger by albert camus, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

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Analysis of Albert Camus’ Writing Style

Albert camus’ interpretations of absurdity in the myth of sisyphus, the role of the mother in albert camus' 'the stranger', the question of suicide in albert camus’ the myth of sisyphus, let us write you an essay from scratch.

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Albert Camus’ Portrayal of Optimism as Demonstrated in His Book, The Myth of Sisyphus

Theme of absurdity and human resilience in "the myth of sisyphus", the conflict between duty and heroism in the plague, meursault as an existential character in the stranger, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

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Behavior and Character of Meursault in The Stranger Novel

Absurdity of life in camus’ myth of sisyphus, a theme of finding the meaning in life in the myth of sisyphus, a comparative analysis of how the protagonist in the stranger and the thief and the dog is affected by alienation, exile and the kingdom in camus' the plague, battle against crisis at the conclusion of the plague, ideological tenacity in the plague by albert camus, the myth of sisyphus by albert camus: an allegory for the human condition, a theme of life purpose in the myth of sisyphus by albert camus, albert camus’ idea of life having no meaning in "the myth of sisyphus", existentialism in albert camus' the stranger, meursault as an outsider in albert camus's the outsider, how absurdism functions in camus's novels: analysis of the stranger and the plague, analysis of albert camus' thesis on religion and faith through literature, "the stranger" by albert camus: an existential exploration of absurdity, relevant topics.

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COMMENTS

  1. Category:Essays by Albert Camus

    Pages in category "Essays by Albert Camus" The following 8 pages are in this category, out of 8 total. This list may not reflect ... Neither Victims nor Executioners; Nuptials (essays) R. The Rebel (book) Reflections on the Guillotine; Réflexions sur la peine capitale This page was last edited on 7 May 2023, at 18:09 (UTC). Text is ...

  2. PDF Camus

    Essays Albert Camus Translated from the French by Justin O'Brien 1955. Contents Preface The Myth Of Sisyphus An Absurd Reasoning Absurdity and Suicide Absurd Walk ... —Albert Camus, Paris, March 1955 for PASCAL PIA O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.

  3. The Myth of Sisyphus

    The Myth of Sisyphus (French: Le mythe de Sisyphe) is a 1942 philosophical essay by Albert Camus. Influenced by philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche, Camus introduces his philosophy of the absurd.

  4. 9 of Albert Camus' Best Stories, Books, and Essays Ranked

    1. The Stranger The Stranger is certainly Camus' best-known novel. It follows the absurdist sorry of the character Meursault, a strange and unhappy man living in Algeria. He moves through his life without purpose and then eventually commits a murder on a beach.

  5. Albert Camus

    Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a journalist, editor and editorialist, playwright and director, novelist and author of short stories, political essayist and activist—and, although he more than once denied it, a philosopher.

  6. Camus, Albert

    Albert Camus (1913—1960) Albert Camus was a French-Algerian journalist, playwright, novelist, philosophical essayist, and Nobel laureate. Though he was neither by advanced training nor profession a philosopher, he nevertheless made important, forceful contributions to a wide range of issues in moral philosophy in his novels, reviews, articles, essays, and speeches—from terrorism and ...

  7. The Myth of Sisyphus

    The Myth of Sisyphus, philosophical essay by Albert Camus, published in French in 1942 as Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Published in the same year as Camus's novel L'Étranger ( The Stranger ), The Myth of Sisyphus contains a sympathetic analysis of contemporary nihilism and touches on the nature of the absurd.

  8. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus

    The essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), 1942, expounds notion of acceptance of the absurd of Camus with "the total absence of hope, which has nothing to do with despair, a continual refusal, which must not be confused with renouncement - and a conscious dissatisfaction."

  9. Lyrical And Critical Essays

    December 15, 1968 Lyrical And Critical Essays By JOHN WEIGHTMAN LYRICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS By Albert Camus. Edited and with notes by Philip Thody Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy he...

  10. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

    Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (French: Lettres à un ami allemand, "Letters to a German Friend") is a 1960 collection of essays written by Albert Camus and selected by the author prior to his death. The essays here generally involve conflicts near the Mediterranean, with an emphasis on his home country Algeria, and on the Algerian War of Independence in particular.

  11. Albert Camus

    Author of Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt and others; editor of French Literature and Its Background. John Cruickshank Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

  12. PDF Myth of Sisyphus

    Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus 1 Albert Camus (1913-1960) gives a quite different account of philosophy and politics of existentialism from that of Sartre. Perhaps the most striking difference from Sartre is his ... The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree

  13. Albert Camus's The Stranger: Critical Essays

    Albert Camus's The Stranger: Critical Essays Peter Francev Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Jun 26, 2014 - Literary Collections - 310 pages Often marginalised on the sidelines of both philosophy...

  14. How Albert Camus Faced History

    Facing History. By Adam Gopnik. April 2, 2012. Abjuring abstraction and extremism, Camus found a way to write about politics that was sober, lofty, and a little sad. Photograph by Henri Cartier ...

  15. Love of Life: Albert Camus on Happiness, Despair, the Art of Awareness

    "Those who prefer their principles over their happiness," Albert Camus (November 7, 1913-January 4, 1960) wrote in his notebook toward the end of his life, "they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness." Indeed, our principles tend to harden into habits and although habits give shape to our inner lives, they can mutate into the rigidity ...

  16. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays: Albert Camus, Justin O'Brien

    Albert Camus (French: [albɛʁ kamy]; 7 November 1913 - 4 January 1960) was a French philosopher, author, and journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay The Rebel that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom.

  17. Albert Camus's The Stranger: Critical Essays

    Albert Camus's The Stranger: Critical Essays View Extract Description Editor Bio Often marginalised on the sidelines of both philosophy and literature, the works of Albert Camus have, in recent years, undergone a renaissance.

  18. Amazon.com: Lyrical and Critical Essays: 9780394708522: Albert Camus

    Book Description Editorial Reviews "Here now, for the first time in a complete English translation, we have Camus's three little volumes of essays, plus a selection of his critical comments on literature and his own place in it.

  19. Albert Camus

    Having received the news of the awarding of the prize, he wrote: But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened. [9]

  20. The myth of Sisyphus : and other essays : Camus, Albert, 1913-1960

    The myth of Sisyphus : and other essays by Camus, Albert, 1913-1960. Publication date 1955 Publisher New York : Vintage Books Collection printdisabled; marygrovecollege; internetarchivebooks; americana Contributor Internet Archive Language English. viii, 151 p. ; 19 cm Translation of Le mythe de Sisyphe Access-restricted-item

  21. The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays

    In both his essays and his fiction, Albert Camus (1913—1960) provides an affirmation of the brave assertion of humanity in the face of a universe devoid of order or meaning. The Plague—written in 1947 and still profoundly relevant—is a riveting tale of horror, survival, and resilience in the face of a devastating epidemic.

  22. Essays on Albert Camus

    The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus is a philosophical essay written in 1942 that addresses the question of whether life is worth living through. From the perspective of the author, people share a similar path to the Greek hero Sisyphus, moving a boulder up... The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus Personal Philosophy 2

  23. My Reflections over The Stranger by Albert Camus

    Mersault and His Trial in Albert Camus's "The Stranger" Pages: 3 (875 words) Albert Camus The Stranger: Existentialism and Absurdism Pages: 5 (1260 words) An Analysis of The Stranger, a Novel by Albert Camus Pages: 7 (1811 words) The Stranger Throughout Albert Camus Pages: 6 (1729 words)

  24. Albert Camus Essays: Examples, Topics, & Outlines

    PAGES 3 WORDS 1018. Albert Camus' influential novel, the Stranger, a great work of existentialism, examines the absurdity of life and indifference of the world. This paper provides a summary of the novel, and outlines some of the novel's main themes. The novel's protagoinist, Meursault, is a distanced and indifferent young man.

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