Camus and philosophy
indifferent, that human existence is ultimately meaningless and insignificant – a demonstration of his absurdist views.
The main event of the novel, Meursault’s killing of an unnamed Arab on the beach, has provoked extensive discussion. It arises not from hatred or intent but from his discomfort caused by the sun’s heat, described as an ‘épée ardente’. It is, on one level, completely arbitrary, but Camus set it up that way to highlight the absurd. To seek a cause for Meursault’s actions is to miss the lesson Camus teaches. The trial scene in the second half of the novel is an equally intriguing event. As with the murder, Meursault appears during the trial almost as a spectator. He is so detached and emotionally indifferent to these seemingly significant events in his life that the reader gets the sense that he is not actually experiencing them: one might say that Meursault experiences in this novel the nihilism, for Camus, flows from existentialist thought. Furthermore, the trial scene almost satirically highlights the way society tries to impose meaning on life. Where Meursault accepts the absurd and meaningless nature of life, the court tries to explain his actions on the beach using his behaviour at his mother’s funeral. Instead of being prosecuted for his actions, he is prosecuted for his character. Camus would rather people accepted that there often is no explanation and dealt with life at face value. Meursault’s embrace of the ‘tender indifference of the universe’ at the end of the novel is the existential resolution to the narrative. He rejects the chaplain’s appeal to faith, instead accepting life as it is, stripped of illusions. L’Étranger , then, is not merely a novel of existential despair, but a text that embodies Camus’s conviction that facing the absurd requires neither resignation nor transcendence but lucidity – acceptance of life’s lack of higher meaning. Whilst it is evidently not overt philosophy, Camus’ narrative clearly highlights his idea of absurdity – something that is often seen as philosophy. Published in the same year as L’Étranger , Le Mythe de Sisyphe is far more overtly philosophical than much of Camus’ fiction. Similarly to L’Étranger , the essay begins with a striking opening line, ‘Il n’y a qu’un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux: c’est le suicide.’ This underscores Camus’s main concern – if life has no ultimate meaning, why continue living? Camus’ work continued to provoke questions of whether life is worth living or not for the entirety of his career. What distinguishes Camus’s treatment of the absurd from that of other great thinkers is his refusal to collapse into either resignation or transcendence. He rejects Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, and he is sceptical of Heidegger’s ontological abstractions. Instead, he insists on acceptance. The myth of the condemned figure endlessly rolling his boulder up the hill becomes an allegory for human persistence without chasing illusion. Camus’s philosophy here is less a systematic doctrine than a ‘method of clarity,’ a way of stripping away comforting falsehoods. 2 It is this insistence on seeing life as it is without transcendental justification that links Le Mythe de Sisyphe to L’Étranger . Meursault is a literary embodiment of the Sisyphian figure: he too recognizes life’s lack of higher purpose yet embraces it. It is clear, then, that Le Mythe de Sisyphe is an overt articulation of Camus’s philosophical standpoint, unframed by fictional narrative. Camus’s second novel, La Peste , shifts focus from the solitary consciousness of L’Étranger to the collective experience of a community, demonstrating Camus’s intellectual development in the 1940s. Set in the Algerian town of Oran, which is suddenly struck by an epidemic, the novel is both a narrative of human suffering and an allegory of resistance against fascism. In the context of wartime France, this
2 Gallagher 2010.
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