French Writer Albert Camus, Born 100 Years Ago Today

There are few recent writers and thinkers in the West who have influenced me as much as Albert Camus, who was born a hundred years ago today in Dréan, Algeria. As a philosopher, I think he was far more of an “honest broker” than his countryman Jean-Paul Sartre; and his ideas have far more relevance to everyday human life than the English and European philosophers who spent the last century analyzing language. In fact, to my mind, there has been very little in Western philosophy that has moved me since Marcus Tullius Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations some two thousand years ago.

Central to his thinking is the Greek myth of Sisyphus. According to Wikipedia:

As a punishment for his trickery, King Sisyphus [of Corinth] was made to roll a huge boulder up a steep hill. Before he could reach the top, however, the massive stone would always roll back down, forcing him to begin again. The maddening nature of the punishment was reserved for King Sisyphus due to his hubristic belief that his cleverness surpassed that of Zeus himself. Zeus accordingly displayed his own cleverness by enchanting the boulder into rolling away from King Sisyphus before he reached the top which ended up consigning Sisyphus to an eternity of useless efforts and unending frustration. Thus it came to pass that pointless or interminable activities are sometimes described as Sisyphean.

What Camus does with this idea is interesting:

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

His novels published during his lifetime—The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Fall (1956)— are worth reading and re-reading, not only for their ideas, but for their style. I hope to read more of the author’s journalism, essays and Notebooks in the coming year. Also recommended are his plays, particularly Caligula (1938) and The Misunderstanding (1944).

I still remember a lecture at Dartmouth College almost half a century ago in which Professor Robert Benamou pointed out how, in The Stranger, the trial of Meursault for murder deliberately makes the accused appear to be habitually amoral and criminal by a clever use of the past imperfect tense—whereas in fact, the first half of the book shows a series of unique occurrences that by no means define his character.

The more of Camus I read, the more I think he is the only one of the Twentieth Century Existential philosophers who had anything to say to me.