Albert Camus

First published Thu Oct 27, 2011; substantive revision Mon Dec 13, 2021

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a journalist, editor andeditorialist, playwright and director, novelist and author of shortstories, political essayist and activist—and, although he morethan once denied it, a philosopher. He ignored or opposed systematicphilosophy, had little faith in rationalism, asserted rather thanargued many of his main ideas, presented others in metaphors, waspreoccupied with immediate and personal experience, and brooded oversuch questions as the meaning of life in the face of death. Althoughhe forcefully separated himself from existentialism, Camus posed oneof the twentieth century’s best-known existentialist questions,which launchesThe Myth of Sisyphus: “There is only onereally serious philosophical question, and that is suicide”(MS, 3). And his philosophy of the absurd has left us with astriking image of the human fate: Sisyphus endlessly pushing his rockup the mountain only to see it roll back down each time he gains thetop. Camus’s philosophy found political expression inTheRebel, which along with his newspaper editorials, politicalessays, plays, and fiction earned him a reputation as a greatmoralist. It also embroiled him in conflict with his friend, Jean-PaulSartre, provoking the major political-intellectual divide of theCold-War era as Camus and Sartre became, respectively, the leadingintellectual voices of the anti-Communist and pro-Communist left.Furthermore, in posing and answering urgent philosophical questions ofthe day, Camus articulated a critique of religion and of theEnlightenment and all its projects, including Marxism. In 1957 he wonthe 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

There are various paradoxical elements in Camus’s approach tophilosophy. In his book-length essay,The Myth of Sisyphus,Camus presents a philosophy that contests philosophy itself. Thisessay belongs squarely in the philosophical tradition ofexistentialism but Camus denied being an existentialist. BothTheMyth of Sisyphus and his other philosophical work,TheRebel, are systematically skeptical of conclusions about themeaning of life, yet both works assert objectively valid answers tokey questions about how to live. Though Camus seemed modest whendescribing his intellectual ambitions, he was confident enough as aphilosopher to articulate not only his own philosophy but also acritique of religion and a fundamental critique of modernity. Whilerejecting the very idea of a philosophical system, Camus constructedhis own original edifice of ideas around the key terms of absurdityand rebellion, aiming to resolve the life-or-death issues thatmotivated him.

The essential paradox arising in Camus’s philosophy concerns hiscentral notion of absurdity. Accepting the Aristotelian idea thatphilosophy begins in wonder, Camus argues that human beings cannotescape asking the question, “What is the meaning ofexistence?” Camus, however, denies that there is an answer tothis question, and rejects every scientific, teleological,metaphysical, or human-created end that would provide an adequateanswer. Thus, while accepting that human beings inevitably seek tounderstand life’s purpose, Camus takes the skeptical positionthat the natural world, the universe, and the human enterprise remainssilent about any such purpose. Since existence itself has no meaning,we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This paradoxicalsituation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and theimpossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus callsthe absurd. Camus’s philosophy of the absurd exploresthe 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 themountain, watching it roll down, then descending after the rock tobegin all over, in an endless cycle. Like Sisyphus, humans cannot helpbut continue to ask after the meaning of life, only to see our answerstumble back down. If we accept this thesis about life’sessential absurdity, and Camus’s anti-philosophical approach tophilosophical questions, we cannot help but ask: What role is left forrational analysis and argument? Doesn’t Camus the philosopherpreside over the death of philosophy in answering the question whetherto commit suicide by abandoning the terrain of argument and analysisand turning to metaphor to answer it? If life has no fundamentalpurpose or meaning that reason can articulate, we cannot help askingabout why we continue to live and to reason. Might not Silenus beright in declaring that it would have been better not to have beenborn, or to die as soon as possible?^[1] And, as Francis Jeanson wrote long before his famous criticism ofThe Rebel that precipitated the rupture between Camus andSartre, isn’t absurdist philosophy a contradiction in terms,strictly speaking no philosophy at all but an anti-rational posturethat ends in silence (Jeanson 1947)?

Was Camus actually a philosopher? He himself said no, in a famousinterview with Jeanine Delpech inLes NouvellesLittéraires in November of 1945, insisting that he did“not believe sufficiently in reason to believe in asystem” (Camus 1965, 1427). This was not merely a publicposture, since we find the same thought in his notebooks of thisperiod: he describes himself as an artist and not a philosopherbecause “I think according to words and not according toideas” (Camus 1995, 113). Still, Jean-Paul Sartre sawimmediately that Camus was undertaking important philosophical work,and in his review ofThe Stranger in relation toSisyphus, had no trouble connecting Camus with Pascal,Rousseau, and Nietzsche (Sartre 1962). After they became friendsSartre spoke publicly of his friend’s “philosophy of theabsurd,” which he distinguished from his own thought for whichhe accepted the “existentialist” label that Camusrejected. In the years since, the apparent unsystematic, indeed,anti-systematic, character of his philosophy, has meant thatrelatively few scholars have appreciated its full depth andcomplexity. They have more often praised his towering literaryachievements and standing as a political moralist while pointing outhis dubious claims and problematic arguments (see Sherman 2008). Asignificant recent exception to this is Ronald Srigley’sAlbert Camus’ Critique of Modernity (Srigley 2011).

This entry will negotiate Camus’s deliberate ambivalence as aphilosopher while discussing his philosophy. It is not just a matterof giving a philosophical reading of this playwright, journalist,essayist, and novelist but of taking his philosophical writingsseriously—exploring their premises, their evolution, theirstructure, and their coherence. To do so is to see that his writingcontains more than a mood and more than images and sweeping,unsupported assertions, although it contains many of both. Camus takeshis skepticism as far as possible as a form of methodicaldoubt—that is, he begins from a presumption ofskepticism—until he finds the basis for a non-skepticalconclusion. And he builds a unique philosophical construction, whosepremises are often left unstated and which is not always arguedclearly, but which develops in distinct stages over the course of hisbrief lifetime. Camus’s philosophy can be thus read as asustained effort to demonstrate and not just assert what is entailedby the absurdity of human existence. In the process Camus answers thequestions posed byThe Myth of Sisyphus, “Why should Inot kill myself?”, and byThe Rebel, “Why shouldI not kill others?”

2.Nuptials and Camus’s Starting Point

Camus’s graduate thesis at the University of Algierssympathetically explored the relationship between Greek philosophy andChristianity, specifically the relationship of Plotinus to Augustine(Camus 1992). Nevertheless, his philosophy explicitly rejects religionas one of its foundations. Not always taking an openly hostile posturetowards religious belief—though he certainly does in the novelsThe Stranger andThe Plague—Camus centers hiswork on choosing to live without God. Another way to understandCamus’s philosophy is that it is an effort to explore the issuesand pitfalls of a post-religious world.

Camus’s earliest published writing containing philosophicalthinking,Nuptials, appeared in Algeria in 1938, and remainthe basis of his later work. These lyrical essays and sketchesdescribe a consciousness reveling in the world, a body delighting innature, and the individual’s immersion in sheer physicality. Yetthese experiences are presented as the solution to a philosophicalproblem, namely finding the meaning of life in the face of death. Theyappear alongside, and reveal themselves to be rooted in, his firstextended meditation on ultimate questions.

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

Camus is sometimes mistakenly called a “pagan” because herejects Christianity as based on a hope for a life beyond this life.Hope is the error Camus wishes to avoid. Rejecting “thedelusions of hope” (N, 74),Nuptials containsan evocation of an alternative. Camus relies for this line of thoughton Nietzsche’s discussion of Pandora’s Box inHuman,All Too Human: all the evils of humankind, including plagues anddisease, have been let loose on the world by Zeus, but the remainingevil, hope, is kept hidden away in the box and treasured. But why, wemay ask, is hope an evil? Nietzsche explains that humans have come tosee hope as their greatest good, while Zeus, knowing better, has meantit as the greatest source of trouble. It is, after all, the reason whyhumans let themselves be tormented—because they anticipate anultimate reward (Nietzsche 1878/1996, 58). For Camus, following thisreading of Nietzsche closely, the conventional solution is in fact theproblem: hope is disastrous for humans inasmuch as it leads them tominimize the value of this life except as preparation for a lifebeyond.

If religious hope is based on the mistaken belief that death, in thesense of utter and total extinction body and soul, is not inevitable,it leads us down a blind alley. Worse, because it teaches us to lookaway from life toward something to come afterwards, such religioushope kills a part of us, for example, the realistic attitude we needto confront the vicissitudes of life. But what then is the appropriatepath? The young Camus is neither a skeptic nor a relativist here. Hisdiscussion rests on the self-evidence of sensuous experience. Headvocates precisely what he takes Christianity to abjure: living alife of the senses, intensely, here and now, in the present. Thisentails, first, abandoning all hope for an afterlife, indeed rejectingthinking about it. “I do not want to believe that death is thegateway to another life. For me it is a closed door”(N, 76).

We might think that facing our total annihilation would be bitter, butfor Camus this leads us in a positive direction: “Between thissky and the faces turned toward it there is nothing on which to hang amythology, 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 intensehere-and-now life of the senses. The “wealth” is preciselywhat hope cheats us out of by teaching us to look away from it andtowards 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 theriches 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 nosalvation” (N, 103). Only in accepting death and inbeing “stripped of all hope” does one most intenselyappreciate not only the physical side of life, but also, he nowsuggests, its affective and interpersonal side. Taken together, andcontrary to an unverifiable faith in God and afterlife, these are whatonehas and oneknows: “To feel one’sties to a land, one’s love for certain men, to know there isalways a place where the heart can find rest—these are alreadymany certainties for one man’s life” (N, 90).

Only if we accept that Nietzsche is right, that God is dead and thereis only nothingness after we die, will we then fullyexperience—feel, taste, touch, see, and smell—the joys ofour bodies and the physical world. Thus the sensuous and lyrical sideof these essays, their evocative character, is central to theargument. 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 experiencesthemselves are the right response. His writing aims to demonstratewhat lifemeans andfeels like once we give up hopeof an afterlife, so that in reading we will be led to“see” his point. These essays may be taken as containinghighly personal thoughts, a young man’s musings about hisMediterranean environment, and they scarcely seem to have any system.But they suggest what philosophy is for Camus and how he conceives itsrelationship to literary expression.

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

In a moment, when I throw myself down among the absinthe plants tobring their scent into my body, I shall know, appearances to thecontrary, that I am fulfilling a truth which is the sun’s andwhich will also be my death’s. In a sense, it is indeed my lifethat I am staking here, a life that tastes of warm stone, that is fullof the signs of the sea and the rising song of the crickets. Thebreeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon andwish 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, thesalt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness andglory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need mystrength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, Isurrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently andarduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts ofliving. (N, 69)

The intense and glistening present tells us that we can fullyexperience and appreciate life only on the condition that we no longertry to avoid our ultimate and absolute death.

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

After completingNuptials, Camus began to work on a plannedtriptych on the Absurd: a novel, which becameThe Stranger, aphilosophical essay, eventually titledThe Myth of Sisyphus,and a play,Caligula. These were completed and sent off fromAlgeria to the Paris publisher in September 1941. Although Camus wouldhave preferred to see them appear together, even in a single volume,the publisher for both commercial reasons and because of the papershortage caused by war and occupation, releasedThe Strangerin June 1942 andThe Myth of Sisyphus in October. Camus keptworking on the play, which finally appeared in book form two yearslater (Lottman, 264–67).

3.1 Suicide as a Response to Absurdity

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

Camus sees this question of suicide as a natural response to anunderlying reality, namely, that life is absurd. It is absurd tocontinually seek meaning in life when there is none; and it is absurdto hope for some form of continued existence after death, whichresults in our extinction. But Camus also thinks it absurd to try toknow, understand, or explain the world, since he regards the attemptto gain rational knowledge as futile. Here Camus pits himself againstscience and philosophy, dismissing the claims of all forms of rationalanalysis: “That universal reason, practical or ethical, thatdeterminism, those categories that explain everything are enough tomake a decent man laugh” (MS, 21).

These kinds of absurdity are driving Camus’s question aboutsuicide, 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 aphilosophy. He regards thinking about it as “provisional”and insists that the mood of absurdity, so “widespread in ourage” does not arise from, but lies prior to, philosophy.Camus’s diagnosis of the essential human problem rests on aseries of “truisms” (MS, 18) and “obviousthemes” (MS, 16). But he doesn’t argue forlife’s absurdity or attempt to explain it—he is notinterested in either project, nor would such projects engage hisstrength as a thinker. “I am interested … not so much inabsurd discoveries as in their consequences” (MS, 16).Accepting absurdity as the mood of the times, he asks above allwhether and how to live in the face of it. “Does the absurddictate death” (MS, 9)? But he does not argue thisquestion either, and rather chooses to demonstrate the attitudetowards life that would deter suicide. In other words, the mainconcern of the book is to sketch ways of living our lives so as tomake them worth living despite their being meaningless.

According to Camus, people commit suicide “because they judgelife is not worth living” (MS, 4). But if thistemptation precedes what is usually considered philosophicalreasoning, how to answer it? In order to get to the bottom of thingswhile avoidingarguing for the truth of his statements, hedepicts, enumerates, and illustrates. As he says inTheRebel, “the absurd is an experience that must be livedthrough, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence, ofDescartes’s methodical doubt” (R, 4).TheMyth of Sisyphus seeks todescribe “the elusivefeeling of absurdity” in our lives, rapidly pointing out themesthat “run through all literatures and all philosophies”(MS, 12). Appealing to common experience, he tries to renderthe flavor of the absurd with images, metaphors, and anecdotes thatcapture the experiential level he regards as lying prior tophilosophy.

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

3.2 The Limits of Reason

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

“With the exception of professional rationalists, people todaydespair of true knowledge” (MS, 18). Camus asserts thatthe history of human thought is characterized by “its successiveregrets and its impotences” (MS, 18), and that“the impossibility of knowledge is established”(MS, 25). When writing more carefully, he claims only to bedescribing a certain “climate,” but in any case hisbedrock assumptions appear again and again: the world is unknowableand life is without meaning. Our efforts to understand them leadnowhere.

Avi Sagi suggests that in claiming this Camus is not speaking as anirrationalist—which is, after all, how he regards theexistentialists—but as someone trying to rationally understandthe limits of reason (Sagi 2002, 59–65). For Camus the problemis that by demanding meaning, order, and unity, we seek to go beyondthose limits and pursue the impossible. We will never understand, andwe will die despite all our efforts. There are two obvious responsesto our frustrations: suicide and hope. By hope Camus means just whathe described inNuptials, the religion-inspired effort toimagine and live for a life beyond this life. Or, second, as taken upat length inThe Rebel, bending one’s energies toliving for a great cause beyond oneself: “Hope of another lifeone must ‘deserve’ or trickery of those who live not forlife 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 tolive without escape and with integrity, in “revolt” anddefiance, 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 ownfree will” (MS, 55). In short, he recommends a lifewithout consolation, but instead one characterized by lucidity and byacute consciousness of and rebellion against its mortality and itslimits.

3.3 Criticism of Existentialists

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

Sartre, too, is subject to Camus’s criticisms—and not justpolitically as will be described in the following section. Althoughsome of the ideas inThe Myth of Sisyphus drew onSartre’sNausea (as noted above), in 1942 Sartre wasnot yet regarded as an “existentialist”. But asSartre’s philosophy developed, he went on to explore how humanactivity constitutes a meaningful world from the brute, meaninglessexistence unveiled in his novel^[2] (Aronson 1980, 71–88). In the process, the absurdity ofNausea becomes the contingency ofBeing andNothingness, the fact that humans and things are simply therewith no explanation or reason. As Sartre described it, the absurd is“the universal contingency of being which is, but which is notthe 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 todescribe other fundamental structures of existence, core humanprojects, and characteristic patterns of behavior, including freedomand bad faith, all of which arise on this basis. The originalcontingency leads to our desire to undo it, to the futile project to“found being,” in other words the “uselesspassion” of the project to become God.

For Sartre absurdity is obviously a fundamental ontological propertyof existence itself, frustrating us but not restricting ourunderstanding. For Camus, on the other hand, absurdity is not aproperty of existence as such, but is an essential feature of ourrelationship with the world. It might be argued that Sartreand Camus are really quite similar, and that the core futility ofSartre’s philosophy parallels the “despair” Camusdescribes. After all, if Sisyphus’s labor is ultimately futile,so is the project to become God. But Sartre rejects the“classical pessimism” and “disillusionment” hefinds in Camus and instead possesses an unCamusean confidence in hisability to understand and explain this project and the rest of thehuman world. Camus, on the contrary, builds an entire worldview on hiscentral assumption that absurdity is an unsurpassable relationshipbetween humans and their world (Aronson 2013). He postulates aninevitable divorce between human consciousness, with its “wildlonging for clarity” (MS, 21) and the“unreasonable silence of the world” (MS, 28). Asdiscussed above, Camus views the world as irrational, which means thatit is not understandable through reason.

According to Camus, each existentialist writer betrayed his initialinsight by seeking to appeal to something beyond the limits of thehuman condition, by turning to the transcendent. And yet even if weavoid what Camus describes as such escapist efforts and continue tolive without irrational appeals, the desire to do so is built into ourconsciousness and thus our humanity. We are unable to free ourselvesfrom “this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this needfor clarity and cohesion” (MS, 51). But it is urgent tonot succumb to these impulses and to instead accept absurdity. Incontrast with existentialism, “The absurd is lucid reason notingits limits” (MS, 49).

Camus clearly believes that the existentialist philosophers aremistaken 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 ofan immanent critique, pointing out that each thinker’sexistentialist philosophy ends up being inconsistent with its ownstarting point: “starting from a philosophy of the world’slack of meaning, it ends up by finding a meaning and depth init” (MS, 42). These philosophers, he insists, refuse toaccept the conclusions that follow from their own premises.Kierkegaard, for example, strongly senses the absurd. But rather thanrespecting it as the inevitable human ailment, he seeks to be cured ofit by making it an attribute of a God who he then embraces.

Camus’s most sustained analysis is of Husserl’sphenomenology. Along with Sartre, Camus praises the early Husserliannotion of intentionality. Sartre saw this notion as revealing adynamic consciousness without contents—the basis for hisconception of freedom—while Camus is pleased that intentionalityfollows the absurd spirit in its “apparent modesty of thoughtthat limits itself to describing what it declines to explain”(MS, 43). However, Camus criticizes Husserl’s latersearch inIdeas for Platonic extra-temporal essences as aquasi-religious leap inconsistent with his original insight.

3.4 Happiness in Facing One’s Fate

How then to remain consistent with absurd reasoning and avoid fallingvictim to the “spirit of nostalgia”?The Myth ofSisyphus finds the answer by abandoning the terrain of philosophyaltogether. Camus describes a number of absurdist fictional charactersand activities, including Don Juan and Dostoevsky’s Kirolov(The Possessed), theater, and literary creation. And then heconcludes with the story of Sisyphus, who fully incarnates a sense oflife’s absurdity, its “futility and hopeless labor”(MS, 119). Camus sees Sisyphus’s endless effort andintense consciousness of futility as atriumph. “Hisscorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life wonhim that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exertedtoward accomplishing nothing” (MS, 120). After thedense and highly self-conscious earlier chapters, these pages condensethe entire line of thought into a vivid image. Sisyphus demonstratesthat we can live with “the certainty of a crushing fate, withoutthe resignation that ought to accompany it” (MS, 54).For Camus, Sisyphus reminds us that we cannot help seeking tounderstand the reality that transcends our intelligence, striving tograsp more than our limited and practical scientific understandingallows, and wishing to live without dying. Like Sisyphus, we are ourfate, and our frustration is our very life: we can never escapeit.

But there is more. After the rock comes tumbling down, confirming theultimate futility of his project, Sisyphus trudges after it onceagain. This “is the hour of consciousness. At each of thosemoments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards thelairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than hisrock” (MS, 121). Why use the words“superior” and “stronger” when he has no hopeof succeeding the next time? Paradoxically, it is because a sense oftragedy “crowns his victory.” “Sisyphus, proletarianof the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of hiswretched 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 bitternessof our being and consciously facing our fate.

What then is Camus’s reply to his question about whether or notto commit suicide? Full consciousness, avoiding false solutions suchas religion, refusing to submit, and carrying on with vitality andintensity: these are Camus’s answers. This is how a life withoutultimate meaning can be made worth living. As he said inNuptials, life’s pleasures are inseparable from a keenawareness of these limits. Sisyphus accepts and embraces living withdeath without the possibility of appealing to God. “AllSisyphus’s silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs tohim. His rock is his thing” (MS, 123).

Lucidly living the human condition, Sisyphus “knows himself tobe the master of his days.” By becoming conscious of it, Camusis saying, he takes ownership of it. In this sense Sisyphus reshapeshis fate into a condition of “wholly human origin.”“Wholly” may be an exaggeration, because after all, deathis “inevitable and despicable,” but it is the verycondition of living. In acknowledging this, Sisyphus consciously livesout what has been imposed on him, thus making it into his own end. Inthe same way, Meursault, protagonist ofThe Stranger, comesto consciousness in that book’s second part after committing theinexplicable murder that ends the book’s first part. He haslived his existence from one moment to the next and without muchawareness, but at his trial and while awaiting execution he becomeslike Sisyphus, fully conscious of himself and his terrible fate. Hewill die triumphant as the absurd man.

The Myth of Sisyphus is far from having a skepticalconclusion. In response to the lure of suicide, Camus counsels anintensely conscious and active non-resolution. Rejecting any hope ofresolving the strain is also to reject despair. Indeed, it ispossible, within and against these limits, to speak of happiness.“Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. Theyare inseparable” (MS, 122). It is not that discoveringthe absurd leads necessarily to happiness, but rather thatacknowledging the absurd means also accepting human frailty, anawareness of our limitations, and the fact that we cannot help wishingto go beyond what is possible. These are all tokens of being fullyalive. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to filla man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy”(MS, 123).

3.5 Response to Skepticism

We can compare his conclusion with Pyrrho’s skepticism andDescartes’s methodical doubt. First of all, like Pyrrho, Camushas solved his pressing existential issue, namely, avoiding despair,by a kind of resolution entailed in accepting our mortality andultimate ignorance. But there are two critical differences withPyrrho: for Camus we never can abandon the desire to know, andrealizing this leads to a quickening of our life-impulses. This lastpoint was already contained inNuptials, but here is expandedto link consciousness with happiness. For Camus, happiness includesliving intensely and sensuously in the present coupled withSisyphus’s tragic, lucid, and defiant consciousness, his senseof limits, his bitterness, his determination to keep on, and hisrefusal of any form of consolation.

Obviously, Camus’s sense of happiness is not a conventional onebut Sagi argues it may place him closer to Aristotle than to any otherthinker insofar as he is championing the full realization of humancapacities (Sagi 2002, 79–80) Camus is also similar in this toNietzsche, who called upon his readers to “say yes tolife,” and live as completely as possible at every moment.Nietzsche’s point was that to be wholly alive means being asaware of the negative as of the positive, feeling pain, not shunningany experience, and embracing life “even in its strangest andhardest problems” (Nietzsche 1888/1954, 562). But how is itpossible that, by the end ofThe Myth of Sisyphus, Camus hasmoved from skepticism (about finding the truth) and nihilism (aboutwhether life has meaning) to advocating an approach to life that isclearly judged to be better than others? How does he justify embracinga normative stance, affirming specific values? This contradictionreveals a certain sleight of hand, as the philosopher gives way to theartist. It is as an artist that Camus now makes his case foracceptance of tragedy, the consciousness of absurdity, and a life ofsensuous vitality. He advocates this with the image of Sisyphusstraining, fully alive, and happy.

4. Camus and the World of Violence:The Rebel

This meditation on absurdity and suicide follows closely on thepublication of Camus’s first novel,The Stranger, whichalso centered on individual experience and revolves around itsprotagonist’s senseless murder of an Arab on a beach in Algiersand concludes with his execution by guillotine. And it is oftenforgotten that this absurdist novelist and philosopher was also apolitical activist—he had been a member of the Algerian branchof the French Communist Party in the mid-1930s and was organizer of anAlgiers theater company that performed avant-garde and politicalplays—as well as a crusading journalist. From October 1938 untilJanuary 1940 he worked onAlger républicain and asister newspaper. In June 1939 he wrote a series of reports on famineand poverty in the mountainous coastal region of Kabylie, among thefirst detailed articles ever written by a European Algerian describingthe wretched living conditions of the native population.

After the start of World War II, Camus became editor ofLe Soirrépublicain and as a pacifist opposed French entry intothe war. The spectacle of Camus and his mentor Pascal Pia runningtheir left-wing daily into the ground because they rejected theurgency of fighting Nazism is one of the most striking but leastcommented-on periods of his life. Misunderstanding Nazism at thebeginning of the war, he advocated negotiations with Hitler that wouldin part reverse the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles. Hispacifism was in keeping with a time-honored French tradition, andCamus nevertheless reported for military service out of solidaritywith those young men, like his brother, who had become soldiers.Intending to serve loyally and to advocate a negotiated peace in thebarracks, he was angered that his tuberculosis disqualified him(Lottman, 201–31; Aronson 2004, 25–28).

These biographical facts are relevant to Camus’s philosophicaldevelopment afterThe Myth of Sisyphus. Moving to France andeventually becoming engaged in the resistance to the Germanoccupation, in two “Letters to a German Friend” publishedclandestinely in 1943 and 1944, Camus pondered the question whetherviolence 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 allowedto add to the frightful misery of this world” (RRD, 8).Despising war, suspicious of heroism, he claimed that the occupiedFrench paid dearly for this detour “with prison sentences andexecutions at dawn, with desertions and separations, with daily pangsof hunger, with emaciated children, and above all, with humiliation ofour human dignity” (RRD, 8). Only when we were“at death’s door,” and “far behind” theGermans, did we understand the reasons for fighting, so thathenceforth we would struggle with a clear conscience and “cleanhands.” In other words killing was morally permissible onlywithin strict limits and after great provocation. Our moral strengthwas rooted in the fact that we were fighting for justice and nationalsurvival. The subsequent letters continued to contrast the French withthe Germans on moral grounds drawn directly from Camus’sevolving philosophy, and suggested the transition fromThe Myth ofSisyphus toThe Rebel: if both adversaries began with asense of the world’s absurdity, Camus claimed that the Frenchacknowledged and lived within this awareness, while the Germans soughtto overcome it by dominating the world.

Camus’s anti-Nazi commitment and newspaper experience led to himsucceeding Pia in March 1944 as editor ofCombat, the mainunderground newspaper of the non-Communist left. During this periodCamus worked onThe Plague which, as he later said,“has as its obvious content the struggle of the Europeanresistance movements against Nazism” (LCE, 339). Thenovel, begun during the war, describes an epidemic of the bubonicplague in the small Algerian city of Oran, which transforms everyaspect of daily life and shuts off the city from the surroundingworld. The only possible response besides quarantine is refusing topassively accept disease and death and to actively organize“sanitary squads” to combat it. The Plaguephilosophically anticipatesThe Rebel: despiteindividuals’ most ambitious goals, for example of Tarrou whoseeks to end the death penalty and Father Paneloux, who demands thatthe people of Oran embrace their guilt and God’s love, theactual situation calls for a very limited and specific activity.Individuals must act without fanfare or heroics and above all, insolidarity with each other in seeking to limit the effects of theplague. Like Sisyphus, they act in full consciousness of their limits,except now as a we. The Plague depicts a collective and nonviolentresistance to an unexplained pestilence, and thus quite deliberatelydoes not raise the tactical, strategic, and moral issues built intothe struggle of the Resistance against human occupiers (LCE,340–1). If readers did not see this as an issue in 1947, itbecame contentious as the political climate changed, and the novel wasattacked by Roland Barthes and later by Sartre (Aronson 2004,228–9). In point of fact, after the Liberation the question ofviolence continued to occupy Camus both politically andphilosophically. In 1945 his was one of the few voices raised inprotest against the American use of nuclear weapons to defeat Japan(Aronson 2004, 61–63). After the Liberation he opposed the deathpenalty for collaborators, then turned against Marxism and Communismfor embracing revolution, while rejecting the looming cold war and itsthreatening violence. And then inThe Rebel, Camus began tospell out his deeper understanding of violence.

4.1 Absurdity, Rebellion, and Murder

At the beginning ofThe Rebel, Camus picks up where he leftoff inThe Myth of Sisyphus. Writing as a philosopher again,he returns to the terrain of argument by explaining what absurdistreasoning entails. Its “final conclusion” is “therepudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounterbetween human inquiry and the silence of the universe”(R, 6). Since to conclude otherwise would negate its verypremise, namely the existence of the questioner, absurdism mustlogically accept life as the one necessary good. “To say thatlife is absurd, consciousness must be alive” (R, 6, tr.changed). Living and eating “are themselves valuejudgments” (LCE, 160). “To breathe is tojudge” (R, 8). As in his criticism of theexistentialists, Camus advocates a single standpoint from which toargue for objective validity, that of consistency.

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

Do such questions represent an entirely new philosophy or are theycontinuous withThe Myth of Sisyphus? The issue is notresolved by the explanations that Camus gives for his shift in thefirst pages ofThe Rebel—by referring to the massmurders of the middle third of the twentieth century. “The ageof negation,” he says, once fostered a concern for suicide, butnow in “the age of ideologies, we must examine our position inrelation to murder” (R, 4). Have the “ages”changed in the less than ten years between the two books? He may beright to say that whether murder has rational foundations is“the question implicit in the blood and strife of thiscentury,” but in changing his focus from suicide to murder, itis also clear that Camus is shifting his philosophical optic from theindividual to our social belonging.

In so doing Camus applies the philosophy of the absurd in new, socialdirections, and seeks to answer new, historical questions. But as wesee him setting this up at the beginning ofThe Rebel thecontinuity with a philosophical reading ofThe Stranger isalso strikingly clear. Novelist Kamel Daoud, retelling TheStranger from the point of view of the victim, correctlycalls the murder of his Arab “kinsman” a“philosophical crime” (Daoud 19). At the beginning ofThe Rebel Camus explains:

Awareness of the absurd, when we first claim to deduce a rule ofbehavior from it, makes murder seem a matter of indifference, to saythe least, and hence possible. … There is no pro or con: themurderer is neither right nor wrong. We are free to stoke thecrematory fires or to devote ourselves to the care of lepers. Evil andvirtue 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 truephilosophically. Having ruled out suicide, what is there to say aboutmurder?

Starting from the absence of God, the key theme ofNuptials,and the inevitability of absurdity, the key theme ofThe Myth ofSisyphus, Camus incorporates both of these intoTheRebel, but alongside them he now stresses revolt. The act ofrebellion 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 hisencounter withBeing and Nothingness. But in calling it“revolt” he takes it in a direction sharply different fromSartre, who built from the cogito an “essay in phenomenologicalontology.” Ignoring completely the ontological dimension, Camusis now concerned with immediate issues of human social experience.Revolt, to be sure, still includes the rebellion against absurditythat Camus described inThe Myth of Sisyphus, and once againhe will speak of rebelling against our own mortality and theuniverse’s meaninglessness and incoherence. ButTheRebel begins with the kind of revolt that rejects oppression andslavery, and protests against the world’s injustice.

It is at first, likeThe Myth of Sisyphus, a singleindividual’s rebellion, but now Camus stresses that revoltcreates values, dignity, and solidarity. “I revolt, therefore weare” (R, 22) is his paradoxical statement. But how cananI lead to awe? How does “we are”follow from “I revolt”? How can the individual’sexperience of absurdity, and the rebellion against it, stem from,produce, imply, or entail the wider social sense of injustice andsolidarity? Thewe in fact is the subject ofTheRebel, although the titleL’Hommerevolté suggests that one’s originalmotivation may be individual. Acting against oppression entails havingrecourse to social values, and at the same time joining with others instruggle. On both levels solidarity is our common condition.

InThe Rebel Camus takes the further step, which occupiesmost of the book, of developing his notion of metaphysical andhistorical rebellion in opposition to the concept of revolution.Applying his philosophical themes directly to politics in the yearsimmediately after the Liberation of France in 1944, Camus had alreadyconcluded that Marxists, and especially the Communists, were guilty ofevading life’s absurdity by aiming at a wholesale transformationof society, which must necessarily be violent. And now, inTheRebel, he describes this as a major trend of modern history,using similar terms to those he had used inThe Myth ofSisyphus to describe the religious and philosophicalevasions.

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

Camus felt that it was urgent to critically examine these attitudes ina world in which calculated murder had become common. Applying hisabsurdist ideas and insights to politics, inThe Rebel Camusexplains what he regards as the modern world’s increasinglyorganized and catastrophic refusal to face, accept, and live withabsurdity. The book provides a unique perspective—presenting acoherent and original structure of premise, mood, description,philosophy, history, and even prejudice.

4.2 Against Communism

Camus’s hostility to Communism had its personal, political, andphilosophical reasons. These certainly reached back to his expulsionfrom the Communist Party in the mid-1930s for refusing to adhere toits Popular Front strategy of playing down French colonialism inAlgeria in order to win support from the white working class. Then,making no mention of Marxism,The Myth of Sisyphus iseloquently silent on its claims to present a coherent understanding ofhuman history and a meaningful path to the future. His mutuallyrespectful relations with Communists during the Resistance and theimmediate postwar period turned bitter after he was attacked in theCommunist press and repaid the attack in a series of newspaperarticles in 1946 entitled “Neither Victims norExecutioners” (Aronson, 2004, 66–93).

InThe Rebel Camus insisted that both Communism’sappeal and its negative features sprang from the same irrepressiblehuman impulse: faced with absurdity and injustice, humans refuse toaccept their existence and instead seek to remake the world.Validating revolt as a necessary starting point, Camus criticizespolitics aimed at building a utopian future, affirming once more thatlife should be lived in the present and in the sensuous world. Heexplores the history of post-religious and nihilistic intellectual andliterary movements; he attacks political violence with his views onlimits and solidarity; and he ends by articulating the metaphysicalrole of art as well as a self-limiting radical politics. In place ofstriving to transform the world, he speaks ofmésure—“measure”, in the sense ofproportion or balance—and of living in the tension of the humancondition. He labels this outlook “Mediterranean” in anattempt to anchor his views to the place he grew up and to evoke inhis readers its sense of harmony and appreciation of physical life.There is no substantive argument for the label, nor is one possiblegiven his method of simply selecting who and what counts asrepresentative of the “Mediterranean” view while excludingothers—e.g., some Greek writers, not many Romans. In place ofargument, he paints a concluding vision of Mediterranean harmony thathe hopes will be stirring and lyrical, binding the reader to hisinsights.

As a political tractThe Rebel asserts that Communism leadsinexorably to murder, and then explains how revolutions arise fromcertain ideas and states of spirit. But he makes no close analysis ofmovements or events, gives no role to material needs or oppression,and regards the quest for social justice as a metaphysically inspiredattempt to replace “the reign of grace by the reign ofjustice” (R, 56).

Furthermore, Camus insists that these attitudes are built intoMarxism. In “Neither Victims nor Executioners” he declaredhimself a socialist but not a Marxist. He rejected the Marxistacceptance 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 thehappiness of hundreds of millions” (Camus 1991, 130). Marxiststhink this, Camus asserted, because they believe that history has anecessary logic leading to human happiness, and thus they acceptviolence to bring it about.

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

According to Camus, the execution of King Louis XVI during the FrenchRevolution was the decisive step demonstrating the pursuit of justicewithout regard to limits. It contradicted the original life-affirming,self-affirming, and unifying purpose of revolt. This discussionbelongs to Camus’s “history of European pride,”which is prefaced by certain ideas from the Greeks and certain aspectsof early Christianity, but begins in earnest with the advent ofmodernity. Camus focuses on a variety of major figures, movements, andliterary works: the Marquis de Sade, romanticism, dandyism,TheBrothers Karamazov, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, surrealism, theNazis, and above all the Bolsheviks. Camus describes revolt asincreasing its force over time and turning into an ever more desperatenihilism, overthrowing God and putting man in his place, wieldingpower more and more brutally. Historical revolt, rooted inmetaphysical revolt, leads to revolutions seeking to eliminateabsurdity by using murder as their central tool to take total controlover the world. Communism is the contemporary expression of thisWestern sickness.

In the twentieth century, Camus claims, murder has become“reasonable,” “theoretically defensible,” andjustified by doctrine. People have grown accustomed to “logicalcrimes”—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 meticulouslythe arguments by which it is justified” (R, 3), andsets out to explore how the twentieth century became a century ofslaughter.

We might justly expect an analysis of the arguments he speaks of, butThe Rebel changes focus. Human reason is confused by“slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified byphilanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman” (R,4)—the first two refer to Communism, the third to Nazism. In thebody of the text, Nazism virtually drops out (it was, he says, asystem of “irrational terror”—not at all whatinterested Camus), sharply narrowing the inquiry. His shift isrevealed by his question: How can murder be committed withpremeditation and be justified by philosophy? It turns out that the“rational murder” Camus was concerned with is notcommitted 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 lonevoice of protest against Hiroshima in 1945, he does not now ask how ithappened. As a journalist he had been one of the few to indict Frenchcolonialism, but he does not mention it, except in a footnote. How wasit possible for Camus to focus solely on the violence of Communism,given the history he had lived, in the age of nuclear weapons, in thevery midst of the French colonial war in Vietnam, and when he knewthat a bitter struggle over Algeria lay ahead? It seems he becameblinded by ideology, separating Communism from the other evils of thecentury and directing his animus there. Camus’s ideas, ofcourse, had developed and matured over the years since he first beganwriting about revolt. But something else had happened: his agenda hadchanged. Absurdity and revolt, his original themes, had been harnessedas an alternative to Communism, which had become the archenemy. Evenas he rejected its violent confrontations, the philosophy of revoltbecame Cold-War ideology.

BecauseThe Rebel claimed to describe the attitude that laybehind the evil features of contemporary revolutionary politics, itbecame a major political event. Readers could hardly miss hisdescription of how the impulse for emancipation turned into organized,rational murder as the rebel-become-revolutionary attempted to orderan absurd universe. In presenting this message, Camus sought not somuch to critique Stalinism as its apologists. His specific targetswere intellectuals attracted to Communism—as he himself had beenin the 1930s.

One of these targets was Jean-Paul Sartre, and toward the end ofThe Rebel Camus now took aim at his friend’s evolvingpolitics. Camus focuses on “the cult of history” againstwhich the entire book is directed and his belief that “theexistentialists,” led by Sartre, had fallen victim to the ideathat revolt should lead to revolution. Within Camus’s framework,Sartre is challenged as trying, like the predecessors criticized inThe Myth of Sisyphus, to escape the absurdity with which hisown thinking began by turning to “history,” that is toMarxism. This is a bit of a stretch because Sartre was still severalyears from declaring himself a Marxist, and it shows Camus’stendency towards sweeping generalization rather than close analysis.But it also reflects his awareness that his friend was determined tofind a meaning in the world even as he himself foreswore doing so. Andit shows his capacity for interpreting a specific disagreement in thebroadest possible terms—as a fundamental conflict ofphilosophies.

4.3 Violence: Inevitable and Impossible

The concluding chapters ofThe Rebel are punctuated withemphatic words of conclusion (alors,donc,ainsi,c’est pourquoi), which are rarelyfollowed by consequences of what comes before and often introducefurther assertions, without any evidence or analysis. They are studdedwith carefully composed topic sentences for major ideas—whichone expects to be followed by paragraphs, pages, and chapters ofdevelopment but, instead, merely follow one another and wait until thenext equally well-wrought topic sentence.

As often in the book, the reader must be prepared to follow anabstract 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 wenear the end and the text verges on incoherence. How then is itpossible that Foley judgesThe Rebel philosophically asCamus’s “most important book” (Foley 55)?

In these pages Camus is going back over familiar ground, contrastingthe implicit religiosity of a future-oriented outlook that claims tounderstand and promote the logic of history, and justifying violenceto implement it, with his more tentative “philosophy oflimits,” with its sense of risk, “calculatedignorance,” and living in the present. However the strain stemsfrom the fact that he is doing so much more. As he tries to bring thebook to a conclusion he is wrestling with its most difficulttheme—that the resort to violence is both inevitable and“impossible.” The rebel lives in contradiction. He or shecannot abandon the possibility of lying, injustice, and violence, forthey are part of the rebel’s condition, and will of necessityenter into the struggle against oppression. “He cannot,therefore, absolutely claim not to kill or lie, without renouncing hisrebellion and accepting, once and for all, evil and murder.” Inother 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 isa source of the solidarity that binds the human community. He has saidthat death is the most fundamental of absurdities, and that at rootrebellion is a protest against absurdity. Thus to kill any other humanbeing, even an oppressor, is to disrupt our solidarity, in a sense tocontradict our very being. It is impossible, then, to embracerebellion while rejecting violence.

There are those, however, who ignore the dilemma: these are thebelievers in history, heirs of Hegel and Marx who imagine a time wheninequality and oppression will cease and humans will finally be happy.For Camus such a hope resembles the paradise beyond this life promisedby religions. Living for, and sacrificing humans to, a supposedlybetter future is, very simply, another religion. Moreover, hissharpest hostility is reserved for intellectuals who theorize andjustify such movements. Accepting the dilemma, Camus is unable tospell out how a successful revolution can remain committed to thesolidaristic and life-affirming principle of rebellion with which itbegan. He does however suggest two actions which, if implemented,would be signs of a revolution’s commitment to remainrebellious: it would abolish the death penalty and it would encouragerather than restrict freedom of speech.

InThe Rebel Camus extends the ideas he asserted inNuptials, developed inThe Myth of Sisyphus, andthen foreshadowed inThe Plague: the human condition isinherently frustrating, indeed absurd, but we betray ourselves andsolicit catastrophe by seeking solutions beyond our capacity.“The rebel obstinately confronts a world condemned to death andthe impenetrable obscurity of the human condition with his demand forlife and absolute clarity. He is seeking, without knowing it, a moralphilosophy or a religion” (R, 101). The book sets outthe alternative: to accept the fact that we are living in a Godlessuniverse and rebel against this within limits as do most of themembers of the “sanitary squads” inThe Plague– or to become a revolutionary, who, like the religious believercommitted to the abstract and total triumph of justice, refuses toaccept living in the present.

Having critiqued religion inNuptials andThePlague, Camus is self-consciously exploring the starting points,projects, weaknesses, illusions, and political temptations of apost-religious universe. He describes how traditional religion haslost its force, and how younger generations have been growing up amidan increasing emptiness and a sense that anything is possible. Hefurther claims that modern secularism stumbles into a nihilistic stateof mind because it does not really free itself from religion.“Then the only kingdom that is opposed to the kingdom of gracemust be founded-namely, the kingdom of justice-and the human communitymust be reunited among the debris of the fallen City of God. To killGod and to build a church are the constant and contradictory purposeof rebellion” (R, 103). If rebellion spills over itslimits and is given free rein, our modern need to create kingdoms andour continuing search for salvation is the path of catastrophe.“When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes thatit is now his own responsibility to create the justice, the order, andthe unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in thisway to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort tocreate, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion ofman” (R, 25). But to restrain oneself from this effortis to feel bereft of justice, order, and unity. Camus recognizes thathope and the revolutionary drive are essential directions of thepost-classical Western spirit, stemming from its entire world ofculture, thought, and feeling. This is the path of the metaphysicalrebel, who does not see that “human insurrection, in its exaltedand tragic forms, is only, and can only be, a prolonged protestagainst death” (R, 100).

5. The Fall

We have been exploring one of the most interesting and perplexingaspects of Camus’s thought: his determination to criticizeattitudes that he finds to be natural and inevitable. For one, thepossibility of suicide haunts humans, and so does the desire for animpossible order and an unachievable permanence. Existentialistwriters had similar insights, but Camus criticizes their inability toremain consistent with their initial insight. Similarly, he insiststhroughoutThe Rebel that the metaphysical need he seesleading to Communism’s terror is universal: he describes it andits consequences so that we can better resist it in ourselves as wellas others. His reflexive anti-Communism notwithstanding, an underlyingsympathy unites Camus to those revolutionaries he opposes, because hefreely acknowledges that he and they share the same starting points,outlook, stresses, temptations, and pitfalls. Although in politicalargument he frequently took refuge in a tone of moral superiority,Camus makes clear through his skepticism that those he disagrees withare no less and no more than fellow creatures who give in to the samefundamental drive to escape the absurdity that we all share. Thissense of moral complexity is most eloquent in his short novelTheFall, whose single character, Clamence, has been variouslyidentified as everyman, a Camus-character, and a Sartre-character. Hewas all of these. Clamence is clearly evil, guilty of standing by as ayoung woman commits suicide. In him Camus seeks to describe and indicthis generation, including both his enemies and himself.Clamence’s life is filled with good works, but he is a hypocriteand knows it. His monologue is filled with self-justification as wellas the confession of someone torn apart by his guilt but unable tofully acknowledge it. Sitting at a bar in Amsterdam, he descends intohis own personal hell, inviting the reader to follow him. In tellingClamence’s story, Camus was clearly seeking to empathize as wellas 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,TheFall demonstrates a unique message at the heart of Camus’swriting. Life is no one single, simple thing, but a series of tensionsand dilemmas. The most seemingly straightforward features of life arein fact ambiguous and even contradictory. Camus recommends that weavoid trying to resolve them. We need to face the fact that we cannever successfully purge ourselves of the impulses that threaten towreak havoc with our lives. Camus’s philosophy, if it has asingle meaning, is that we should learn to tolerate, indeed embracethe frustration and ambivalence that humans cannot escape.

6. Philosopher of the Present

Well into the twenty-first century, the career of Camus’sthought, like that of his onetime friend Jean-Paul Sartre, has beenremarkable. Two generations after his death, his complex and profoundphilosophical project, as discussed by Srigley, is very much with usbecause it seeks not only to critique modernity but reaches back tothe ancient world to lay the basis for alternative ways of thinkingand living in the present. Thus, if in some respects he anticipatedthe postmodernists, he retained a central metaphysical concern withsuch ideas as absurdity and revolt. Unlike postmodernism, Camus was,as Jeffrey C. Isaac says, a “chastened humanist” whoremained deeply attached, as was Hannah Arendt, to “the languageof right, freedom, and truth” (Isaac 244).

Camus’s ideas and name have come up again and again during thetwenty-first century, not only among philosophers and literaryscholars, among specialists in a wide variety of fields, in the pressand among political writers, and in conversations among the generalpublic who read his books or have heard about his ideas. First, hisexploration of living in a Godless universe has led to his name beingmentioned often in discussions about religious nonbelief (Aronson2011). Yet unlike the “new atheists” the great nonbelieverCamus was never assured enough to declare that God does not exist andwas not militantly opposed to religious belief and practice (Carlson2014). Even as Camus presents inThe Plaguea profoundlycritical picture of Father Paneloux’s sermons describing theplague first as a punishment for human sin and then as a call toembrace the divine mystery, for a time the priest nevertheless humblyjoins the collective project of the “sanitary squads.”

Second, after the 9/11 attack and during the “war onterror,” Camus’s writings on violence became muchdiscussed. For exampleThe Rebel was explored anew for hintsabout the motivations behind twenty-first century terrorism. PaulBerman deployed Camus in his justification for the “war onterror” against Islamic “pathological massmovements” (Berman 2003, 27–33). Foley, on the other hand,devoted attention to the actual relevance of Camus’s attempts tothink through the question of political violence on a small-group andindividual level. He shows how, both inThe Rebel and in hisplaysCaligula andThe Just Assassins, Camus bringshis philosophy to bear directly on the question of the exceptionalconditions under which an act of political murder can consideredlegitimate: (1) The target must be a tyrant; (2) the killing must notinvolve innocent civilians; (3) the killer must be in direct physicalproximity to the victim; and (4) there must be no alternative tokilling (Foley 2008, 93). Furthermore, because the killer has violatedthe moral order on which human society is based, Camus makes thedemand that he or she must be prepared to sacrifice his or her ownlife 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 removemurderous and tyrannical individuals. These demands rest on the coreidea ofThe Rebel, that to rebel is to assert and respect amoral order, and this must be sustained both by clear limits and bythe murderer’s willingness to die.^[4]

During the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, sales ofThe Plague exploded and interest was so great that theNew York Times republished its original 1948 review byStephen Spender. Hundreds of articles were written about it in alllanguages – by bloggers, artists, cartoonists, journalists,Camus specialists, medical practitioners, scholars from everyconceivable discipline – and philosophers. Camus’s workwas being mined for what it had to teach about living in and copingwith the pandemic, including such topics as: functioning amidst theabsurdity of a disease that appeared for seemingly no reason at all(de Botton 2021); the similarities and differences between his plagueand ours (Aronson, 2020); living and working within the paralyzingexistential fear imposed by the pandemic (Farr 2021); retaining hopeamidst catastrophe (Kabel & Phillipson 2020); and the solidarityamong members of the “sanitary squads” doing so (Illing2020). In the face of absurdity and mass death many writers extolledthe modest and self-limiting philosophy behindThe Plague,rooted inThe Myth of Sisyphus and further developed inThe Rebel: one must act, with others, wherever one happens tobe, by simply doing one’s job. As Rieux says:“there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s amatter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make somepeople smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is –common decency” (P, 150).^[5]

Bibliography

Primary Works

The abbreviations used to cite Camus’s work (P,R,MS,RRD,N, andLCE)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[P2021].
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”, inLyrical and CriticalEssays, 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 UniversityPress, 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’sThe Outsider,”inLiterary and Philosophical Essays, New York: CollierBooks, 1962.
Sprintzen, D.A., and A. van den Hoven (eds.),Sartre andCamus: A Historic Confrontation, Amherst, NY: Humanity Books,2004.

Secondary Works

Aronson, R., 1980,Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in theWorld, London: Verso.
–––, 2004,Camus and Sartre: The Story of aFriendship and the Quarrel That Ended It, Chicago: University ofChicago Press.
–––, 2011, “Camus the Unbeliever,”inSituating Existentialism, Robert Bernasconi and JonathanJudaken (eds.), New York: Columbia University Press.
–––, 2013, “Camus et Sartre:parallèles et divergences de leur philosophie,” CahierAlbert Camus, Raymond Gay-Crosier (ed.), Paris: L’Herne.
–––, 2020, “Camus’ Plague Is NotOurs,”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 andUs,”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 forthe 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 etl’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 RebelliousCosmopolitanism in a Divided World,”Journal ofInternational Political Theory, 9(2): 194–219.
Hughes, E.J. (ed.), 2007,The Cambridge Companion toCamus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Illing, S.D., 2017, “Camus and Nietzsche on politics in anage of absurdity,”European Journal of PoliticalTheory, 16(1): 24–40.
–––, 2020, “This is a Time for Solidarity:What Albert Camus’sThe Plague Can Teach Us about Lifein 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 Willto 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 del’absurdité,”Revue Dominicaine no.53.
Kabel, A. and R. Phillipson, 2020, “Structural Violence andHope in Catastrophic Times fromThe Plague toCOVID-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, CorteMadera, CA: Gingko.
Mélançon, M., 1976,Albert Camus: Analyse de saPensée, Fribourg: Éditions universitaires.
McBride, J., 1992,Albert Camus: Philosopher andLittérateur, New York: St. Martin’s Press.
McCarthy, P., 1982,Camus, New York: Random House.
Neiman, P. G., 2017, “Camus on Authenticity in PoliticalViolence,”European Journal of Philosophy, 25(4):1569–87.
Nietzsche, F. W., 1878/1996,Human, All Too Human: A Book forFree Spirits, M. Faber and S. Lehmann, (trans.). Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press.
–––, 1888/1968, “Twilight of theIdols”, in W. Kaufmann (trans.),The PortableNietzsche, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, pp. 463–563.
O’Brien, C. C., 1970,Albert Camus of Europe andAfrica, New York: Viking.
Plutarch,Moralia (Volume II), F. C. Babbitt (ed. andtrans.), 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 theAbsurd, Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V.
Sharpe, M., 2012, “Restoring Camus asPhilosophe:On Ronald Srigley’sCamus’s Critique ofModernity”,Critical Horizons, 13(3):400–424.
–––, M. Kaluza, and P. Francev, 2020,Brill’s Companion to Camus: Camus among thePhilosophers, 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 ofModernity, 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’sThe Plague and Coronavirus,”Times LiterarySupplement, 10 April 2020 [Zaretsky 2020 available online].

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