Camus and philosophy
novel became particularly resonant. The narrator, Dr. Rieux, epitomizes the ethical stance Camus develops in his post-war writings – a commitment to solidarity in the face of an indifferent universe. ‘The only way to fight the plague,’ Rieux insists, ‘is with decency.’ Decency ( décence ) here replaces metaphysical or ideological justification. Critics such as Tony Judt, who writes that it was Camus’s most successful novel, have read La Peste as a novel of resistance, written in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi occupation of France. 3 The plague is a metaphor for totalitarianism, and the narrative insists on the value of acts of compassion, like the work of doctors, volunteers, and ordinary citizens. Philosophically, La Peste extends the insights of Le Mythe de Sisyphe . If the absurd emphasizes individual lucidity, La Peste insists on collective responsibility. The novel reflects a recognition that solidarity itself becomes meaningful in the absence of ultimate justification. L’Homme Révolté was Camus’s most ambitious intervention into political philosophy. The essay examines the concept of rebellion, which, for Camus, emerges from the same recognition of absurdity that appears in his earlier work. Here, however, the refusal to accept injustice as inevitable is much more visible. Yet Camus is wary of rebellion’s degeneration into revolution. In this historical survey, he critiques the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, and other movements that, in seeking to battle injustice, gave way to violence and terror. Unlike Sartre, who in the early 1950s aligned himself with Marxism, Camus remained deeply suspicious of ideologies that glorified violence. Camus and Sartre had their differences throughout their careers, but this spilled into the public eye in 1952 in the pages of Les Temps Modernes . 4 Sartre accused Camus of political naïvety, while Camus countered that Sartre’s existential Marxism risked legitimizing tyranny. As Ronald Aronson has argued, this debate represented the fundamental divide in post-war French Philosophy. 5 Albert Camus’ work was too philosophical to just call him a novelist, yet not quite systematic enough for him to be considered exclusively a philosopher. Instead, he was a thinker who combined literature, philosophy, and political reflection. What distinguishes Camus from his contemporaries, particularly Sartre, is his commitment to the limits of human existence. His rejection of both religious transcendence and historical determinism left him with a resolute ethic – to accept life as meaningless and make of it what one can. In Le Mythe de Sisyphe , Camus lays out the philosophical groundwork for his fiction, and in L’Étranger , this is lived by Meursault as his consciousness is stripped of comforting illusions. In La Peste , it is transformed into solidarity, where human beings, deprived of ultimate meaning, nonetheless show decency. In L’Homme Révolté , Camus presses the question of ethics – how to resist injustice without violence. Each work is a different response to the same philosophy. What unites them is Camus’s distinctive mode of thought and written clarity. This has made his writing especially resonant in times of crisis. La Peste was revisited during the COVID-19 pandemic for its ethic of community, for example.
3 Judt 2002. 4 Davies 2012. 5 Aronson 2004.
247
Made with FlippingBook - PDF hosting