On Albert Camus

I was first attracted by Camus, "prince of the absurd" when I was 16. Camus still fascinates me, now well beyond what would have been his 100th birthday, and more than 60 years after his premature death in a car crash in Burgundy (it's said that he was found with an unused train ticket in his pocket - he'd planned to go by rail to Paris to rejoin his wife and children, but had accepted at the last minute the offer of a lift from his publisher).

Unlike Sartre, who was more of a systematic philosopher, Camus preferred to be labelled only as a writer, since he was doubtful about the power of reason and preferred to focus on how one should live, especially whether one should be primarily "solitaire ou solidaire".

The great advocate of the former, isolated path is Meursault, anti-hero of L'Etranger (full text here), the first book I read for my French A Level course and one of the forces that launched me into adulthood. Meursault talks about the "benign indifference of the universe".

"The realisation that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning" quote shows Camus the absurdist. He argued that nothing has any meaning behind it. Life, the universe, and everything just happens to happen, so we humans have a hard time with this and create systems to bestow meaning on things. When we look at something without meaning and fail to give it one, we experience the feeling of the absurd. Camus argues that we must grasp this, and face the world as the meaningless void that it is. Indeed, in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, which I studied for my MA course at Edinburgh, Camus offered "suicide, religion or acceptance" as three possible responses to the Absurd: he chose acceptance.

Albert Camus wrote in his journals that if he ‘had to write a book on morality, it would have a hundred pages and ninety-nine would be blank’. On the last page he said he would write, ‘I recognise only one duty, and that is to love’. But Camus didn’t tell us (at least not directly) what love is, or how to understand our duty to it. What he did write about was a way of understanding our struggle in an absurd world as an act of rebellion. And what is love if not an act of rebellion? Even the very best of lives will end in death, with no shortage of suffering beforehand. And then there are the rest of us: condemned to death as much as to life. How do we live with this? What makes it worth it? Camus’s answer is rebellion; in art; in beauty, and in love, notes the IAI.

Commentator Geoff Dyer said of Camus that he carried within him "an unconquerable summer" that still warms us today.

Camus wrote a series of short essays for the journal of the French Resistance, which were later published as Neither Victims nor Executioners: An Ethic Superior to Murder.

For more about Camus' life and work, I'd recommend Albert Camus and The Absurd and a BBC radion programme on L'Etranger.

An animation from TED-Ed scopes Camus’s career, outlook and cultural influence, shedding light on how, where he might have found hopelessness, he instead found inspiration.(For more on Camus’s life, including how his worldview clashed with those of his existentialist contemporaries, watch the Aeon animation Sartre vs Camus.)