Albert Camus

Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondavi, French Algeria. His pied-noir family had little money. Camus's father died in combat during World War I, after which Camus lived with his mother, who was partially deaf, in a low-income section of Algiers. Camus did well in school and was admitted to the University of Algiers, where he studied philosophy and played goalie for the soccer team. He quit the team following a bout of tuberculosis in 1930, thereafter focusing on academic study. By 1936, he had obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy. Camus married and divorced twice as a young man, stating his disapproval of the institution of marriage throughout. Camus became political during his student years, joining first the Communist Party and then the Algerian People's Party. As a champion of individual rights, he opposed French colonization and argued for the empowerment of Algerians in politics and labor. Camus would later be associated with the French anarchist movement. At the beginning of World War II, Camus joined the French Resistance in order to help liberate Paris from the Nazi occupation; he met Jean-Paul Sartre during his period of military service. Like Sartre, Camus wrote and published political commentary on the conflict throughout its duration. In 1945, he was one of the few Allied journalists to condemn the American use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. He was also an outspoken critic of communist theory. The dominant philosophical contribution of Camus's work is absurdism. While he is often associated with existentialism, he rejected the label, expressing surprise that he would be viewed as a philosophical ally of Sartre. Elements of absurdism and existentialism are present in Camus's most celebrated writing. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) elucidates his theory of the absurd most directly. The protagonists of The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947) must also confront the absurdity of social and cultural orthodoxies, with dire results. As an Algerian, Camus brought a fresh, outsider perspective to French literature of the period—related to but distinct from the metropolitan literature of Paris. In addition to novels, he wrote and adapted plays, and was active in the theater during the 1940s and '50s. His later literary works include The Fall (1956) and Exile and the Kingdom (1957).  Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He died on January 4, 1960, in Burgundy, France.

Camus is often classified as an existentialist writer, and it is easy to see why. Affinities with Kierkegaard and Sartre are patent. He shares with these philosophers a habitual and intense interest in the active human psyche, in the life of conscience or spirit as it is actually experienced and lived. Like these writers, he aims at nothing less than a thorough, candid exegesis of the human condition, and like them he exhibits not just a philosophical attraction but also a personal commitment to such values as individualism, free choice, inner strength, authenticity, personal responsibility, and self-determination. However, one troublesome fact remains: throughout his career Camus repeatedly denied that he was an existentialist. Was this an accurate and honest self-assessment? On the one hand, some critics have questioned this “denial”, attributing it to the celebrated Sartre-Camus political “feud” or to a certain stubbornness or even contrariness on Camus’s part. In their view, Camus qualifies as, at minimum, a closet existentialist, and in certain respects as an even truer specimen of the type than Sartre. On the other hand, besides his personal rejection of the label, there appear to be solid reasons for challenging the claim that Camus is an existentialist. For one thing, it is noteworthy that he never showed much interest in metaphysical and ontological questions. Of course there is no rule that says an existentialist must be a metaphysician. Another point of divergence is that Camus seems to have regarded existentialism as a complete and systematic world-view, that is, a fully articulated doctrine. In his view, to be a true existentialist one had to commit to the entire doctrine and this was apparently something he was unwilling to do. Camus actively challenged and set himself apart from the existentialist motto that being precedes essence. Ultimately, against Sartre in particular and existentialists in general, he clings to his instinctive belief in a common human nature. In his view human existence necessarily includes an essential core element of dignity and value, and in this respect he seems surprisingly closer to the humanist tradition from Aristotle to Kant than to the modern tradition of skepticism and relativism from Nietzsche to Derrida.

I think Albert Camus is an interesting person because of the way he thinks. For example, “The Myth of Sisyphus”, Has a bold beginning, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or not worth living. That is the fundamental question of philosophy.” The reason for this is in Camus ‘eyes is as soon as we start think seriously, as a philosopher do, we will see that life has no meaning and therefore we will be compelled to wonder. Whether or not we should just be done with it all. Unlike some philosophers, he ends up resisting utter hopelessness. He argues we have to live with the knowledge that our efforts will be largely futile, our lives soon forgotten, and our species irredeemably corrupt and violent and yet we should endure nevertheless. We are like Sisyphus, the Greek figure ordained by the gods, to roll a boulder up a mountain, and watch it fall back down again in perpetuity. But ultimately, Camus suggest we should cope as well as we can at whatever we have to do, we have to acknowledge the absurd background to existence, and then triumph of the constant possibility of hopelessness. In his famous formulation “One must imagine Sisyphus happy”. This bring us to the most charming and seductive side of Camus, the Camus wants to remind himself and us of the reasons why life can be worth enduring.