Albert Camus (1913-1960) was born into a poor family in French Algeria; his father was killed in the First World War when Albert was an infant. He worked as a journalist, edited the Resistance newspaper Combat during the occupation, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and died in a car accident in 1960, aged forty-six.
Camus is usually grouped with the existentialists, but he rejected the label. He saw himself as a thinker of the absurd, and he thought the existentialists, religious and atheist alike, ended by evading the very problem he wanted to face.
The absurd
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) opens by saying, in substance, that there is only one truly serious philosophical problem: judging whether life is worth living. Camus's starting point is the absurd. He did not mean that the world itself is absurd, or that humans are. The absurd is the clash between our longing for meaning and clarity and the silence of the world. It appears when daily routine (rising, tram, office, meals, sleep) is suddenly interrupted by the question “why?”, or when you watch a man talking behind the glass of a telephone booth and, unable to hear him, find his gestures pointless.
Three responses
- Physical suicide ends the absurd by eliminating one side of it, the person. Camus rejects it as a surrender.
- Philosophical suicide is Camus's name for escaping the absurd by a leap into hope or faith, as he believed Kierkegaard and others had done. It, too, abandons the honest tension.
- Revolt is his answer: to live with the absurd lucidly, without appeal and without hope of final answers, and still to live fully. Revolt brings freedom from false hopes about the future, and passion for living as much as possible.
Sisyphus
In Greek myth, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to roll a rock up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, forever. For Camus he is the absurd hero. The crucial moment is the walk back down, when Sisyphus is fully conscious of his fate. That lucidity, which could be his torment, becomes his victory: by scorning the gods and owning his task, he is conscious of his fate and makes his struggle his own. Camus closes by saying that the struggle toward the heights is enough to fill a human heart, and that we must picture Sisyphus as happy.
The Stranger and The Plague
Camus's novels dramatize these ideas. In The Stranger (1942), Meursault refuses to perform the emotions society expects and is condemned as much for not weeping at his mother's funeral as for killing a man. In The Plague (1947), Dr. Rieux fights an epidemic in the city of Oran because it is the decent thing to do, without any hope of final victory over disease.
The Rebel
The Rebel (1951) moved from the individual to politics. A rebel is someone who says no, yet in saying no affirms a limit, a value shared with others. Camus adapted Descartes: where Descartes reasoned from his own thinking to his own existence, the rebel reasons from revolt to our existence together. Revolt implies solidarity. But Camus argued that revolution goes wrong when it justifies murder and terror in the name of a future history, as he believed had happened in the Soviet Union. The book provoked a bitter public break in 1952 with Sartre, who was then much closer to the Communists. Many readers now see the quarrel as a lasting argument about whether noble ends can excuse cruel means.
Worked example: the ninth year at the call center
Marco has answered phones at a call center for nine years. One morning, putting on his headset, he suddenly wonders why he does any of it. The question does not go away. Camus would say Marco has met the absurd: his longing for a life that makes sense has collided with a world that gives no answer.
Consider his three options. He will not take the first, physical suicide; Camus rejects that as surrender, and so does Marco. If his thoughts ever went there, he would need real support from people around him, not only philosophy.
The second option tempts him more. He could convince himself that the next promotion, or a new relationship, or a grand cause will make everything finally meaningful. Camus would call any such leap that promises to dissolve the question philosophical suicide. It trades lucidity for hope.
The third option is revolt. Marco keeps working, at least for now, but he stops pretending the job is his destiny. He is clear-eyed about it, and he puts his passion into what he can: his friendships, his music, the small kindnesses he shows callers who are struggling. Like Sisyphus walking down the hill, he owns his situation.
Then The Rebel adds a further step. Marco notices his coworkers face the same strain. Revolt becomes solidarity: together they press management for better breaks and fairer targets. Camus would add a warning, though: no cause, however just, should excuse cruelty toward the people on the other side.