CAMUS

There is a curious parallelism between the lives of our previous subject Sartre and his contemporary Camus, who happens to be the subject of the present last entry of this section. Despite his unquestionable brilliance, Camus had somewhat been confined to dwell in Sartre’s shadow since early on, and even the famous revelation of fairly recent memory that the American President George W. Bush was-- what do you know!-- a reader of Camus, appeared so utterly ludicrous that it kept the spotlight on the absurdity of that suggestion, rather than on its positive side effect, that is, bringing it to where it mattered more, namely, to the philosophy of the absurd proper, for which Camus had become historically famous.

The larger figure of Sartre had become a large circle, within which the slightly smaller circle of Camus was contained. Camus (1913-1960) was born after Sartre and died (in an automobile crash) before him. Both of them were French, although Camus has been misleadingly labeled as Algerian-French. (He was indeed born in French Algeria, but his father was a Frenchman and his mother was Spanish.) They were both outstanding writers (Camus saw himself as a writer first and foremost and always denied that he was a philosopher), and both of them were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (Sartre in 1964, at the age of fifty-nine, and Camus seven years earlier, in 1957, at the age of forty-three). Both of them have been labeled existentialist philosophers, although Camus never agreed with such a label, and Sartre-the-existentialist agreed with him. In a celebrated 1945 interview, Camus said this about the practice of comparing the two giants: “No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked.”

As a matter of fact, there was yet another, this time political, connection falsely attributed to them. Camus began his political life as a Marxist and a Communist, like Sartre; but he deviated from Marxism early on. Having joined the French Communist Party in 1935, he was expelled already in 1937, and he was counted as an anarchist, and thus incompatible with Communism. In the later post-WWII years, he became quite vocal against the repressive policies of the USSR in Eastern Europe and considered the Soviet Union an authoritarian state. He and Sartre parted their ways on this question in particular.

Despite Camus’ explicitly negative attitude toward the USSR (to be fair, he was no less critical of the US in his opposition to all forms of state violence and strong-arm politics), his books were well-known, available, and much-read in Russia. Curiously, I happened to read two of his books, La Peste and La Chute, in French as part of my French studies at a fairly early age. At that time, I naturally thought of him, just as he thought of himself, as an intense and thoughtful writer in the philosophizing tradition which was so characteristic of Russian literature. Today, although I still see him as a brilliant philosophical writer, I find his philosophy of the Absurd worthy of being separately discussed in the Philosophy section. (See my entry Absurdism As A Philosophy there.)

Unlike Sartre’s, the essence of Camus’ philosophy is not an expected rebellion against political and social injustice, but a philosophical recognition of the Absurd, both inside and outside us, as the driving force of life. Even those oppressive social regimes, as fascism and communism, are merely different expressions of the absurd. In his brilliant philosophical essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942), he compares human life to the eternal misery of Sisyphus, whose work is incessant and hard, and at the same time completely meaningless.

The absurdity proceeds from the incongruity of human existence clashing with that of the universe. Camus suggests that one cannot find a meaning in life by trying either to rationalize the absurd or to transcend it by finding a meaning in the transnatural. He calls for a revolt against absurdity, which he understands as… our refusal to commit suicide.

But that already properly belongs in the Philosophy section. See you there!