Philosophers
Albert Camus
kah-MOO; the final s in the French spelling is silent
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Albert Camus was a philosopher, novelist and essayist who gave the absurd its most influential modern statement, though he spent much of his career resisting the label his readers kept giving him. His 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus asks whether life is worth living once its search for meaning meets a universe that answers with silence, and argues that the honest response is neither suicide nor false hope but a lucid revolt that keeps living anyway. His 1951 essay The Rebel extended that revolt into politics, arguing that rebellion against injustice carries its own limit and turns into the very tyranny it opposed the moment it claims a total, revolutionary license to remake human nature. Camus publicly and repeatedly denied being an existentialist, most explicitly in a November 1945 interview, insisting his one work of philosophical ideas was written against the existentialist philosophers he was said to belong to. His 1952 public break with Jean-Paul Sartre, after Sartre's journal ran a hostile review of The Rebel, was never fully repaired before Camus's death in 1960.
Facts
Defining MomentIn 1957 Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature, three years before his death and the reverse of Sartre's own 1964 refusal of the same prize. 2 Defining MomentIn November 1945 Camus stated in an interview that he was not an existentialist, insisting that The Myth of Sisyphus, his one work of philosophical ideas, was written against the existentialist philosophers his readers kept linking him to. 2 TraditionContinental philosophy; philosophy of the absurd (Camus rejected classification as an existentialist) 2 Learn More
A Philosophy Against Philosophy
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Albert Camus opened The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942 with a claim that startles on first reading: there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and it is whether life is worth living. Camus called the condition he was diagnosing the absurd, not a flaw in the world and not a flaw in the human mind, but the friction between the two, a mind that demands the world make sense set against a world that answers with silence. He considered and rejected two ways out. Suicide ends the confrontation by ending the person who feels it, which Camus treated as a kind of surrender. A leap into religious or philosophical faith ends it by inventing an answer the absurd itself has already ruled out, which he treated as a kind of cheating. What is left, on Camus's account, is to keep living inside the confrontation without either exit, which is why his essay closes on Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a mountain forever, and why Camus insists we must imagine him happy. The book was, by its own author's account, aimed squarely at the existentialist philosophers of his day, not written to join them.
The Quarrel That Never Mended
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In October 1951 Albert Camus published The Rebel, an essay arguing that rebellion against injustice carries its own built-in limit, a line a rebel says must never be crossed, and that a revolution claiming total license to remake history and human nature crosses that line and becomes the tyranny it set out to replace. The book read, to many on the French left, as an attack on revolutionary politics generally and on Soviet communism specifically. In 1952 Jean-Paul Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes ran a long, hostile review by Francis Jeanson, and Camus responded with an open letter addressed not to Jeanson but to Sartre himself. Sartre's reply was blunt and personal, and the two men, close friends through the years of the Occupation and after, never spoke again in the same terms. The break is often told as a literary feud, but its center was a real philosophical disagreement: whether a revolution is answerable to any limit at all, and whether an intellectual's solidarity with a revolutionary cause outweighs an honest account of what that cause does in practice.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Closely associated with the movement through friendship with Sartre and Beauvoir and a shared preoccupation with freedom, contingency and the absurd human condition, though Camus publicly and repeatedly rejected the existentialist label himself, stating in a November 1945 interview that his one work of philosophical ideas, The Myth of Sisyphus, was written against the existentialist philosophers he was said to belong to.
Critiqued Here
The two broke publicly in 1952 after Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes ran Francis Jeanson's hostile review of Camus's The Rebel (1951); the rupture centered on Camus's argument that a revolution claiming total license to remake human nature betrays the very limit that makes rebellion legitimate, against Sartre's continuing sympathies with revolutionary Marxism. The two never spoke in the same terms again before Camus's death in 1960.
In Branch
The Rebel is a moral philosophy of revolt and its limits.
The Myth of Sisyphus confronts the human demand for meaning against a silent universe.
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