The writing of Albert Camus as philosophy
Edward B
Despite often being grouped with existentialist writers, Albert Camus (1913-1960) never considered himself one. In fact, in a 1945 interview with Les Nouvelles Littéraires, Camus himself stated, ’I am not an existentialist. I am not a philosopher.’ Thus, Camus’s view of himself as a writer is entirely different from his reputation as a philosopher and thinker. Most of his career focused on his idea of the absurd, which Camus described as neither a doctrine nor a philosophy, rather an inevitable ‘condition of human existence’. First explicitly introduced in his 1942 publications Le Mythe de Sisyphe and L’Étranger , absurdism holds that life is ultimately meaningless. Whilst existentialists believe that each individual has the capability and responsibility to create their own meaning in their lives, absurdists insist that such quests are futile. Even though Camus’ work warned against searching for meaning and categorization where there is none, critics have continually tried to do just this – labelling Camus either an existentialist or a philosopher. Thus, while some scholars continue to read his work as philosophy, his denial of the label and commitment to absurdism creates the difficult question of whether his work really is philosophy or not. Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria in 1913, the son of a working-class pied-noir family. His father died at the Battle of the Marne the following year, leaving Camus to be raised in poverty by his illiterate and partially deaf mother. Thanks to a scholarship, Camus studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, where he was introduced to classical and modern thought, as well as to contemporary debates about colonialism. His early essays L’Envers et l’endroit (1937) and Noces (1938) already demonstrated some themes of existentialism, but were not explicitly philosophical, and the idea of absurdity made no appearance. His early involvement with theatre in Algiers and journalism for Alger républicain helped shape his commitment to clarity of expression and a suspicion of abstraction divorced from lived reality. Camus’s first novel, L’Étranger , published in 1942, exemplifies how his work can be read as philosophy despite not being articulated in systematic argument, thanks to his engagement with the absurd. The protagonist, Meursault, is an ordinary clerk in Algiers who narrates his life in a flat and emotionally neutral style. The novel opens with the striking sentence: ‘Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.’ This refusal of affect, which was met by readers with consternation upon publication, sets the tone for a narrative in which even the most significant moments, like funerals, murders, and trials, are described with deadpan detachment. Critics have long debated the significance of Camus’ ostensibly bland literary style in L’Étranger . Roland Barthes, in his essay on ‘L’effet de réel,’ pointed to Camus’ prose as an example of how literary minimalism can undermine conventional expectations of psychological depth. 1 Meursault’s narration is not charged with symbolism or emotion but presented as mere fact. For Camus, this is not an absence of meaning but a recognition that the world is
1 Barthes 1968.
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