why you should read Camus
- Written by Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Australian Catholic University
Author and philosopher Albert Camus died in a car crash in 1960, aged just 46. But the existential, moral and political issues Camus’ writings address still trouble us today.
Born in colonial Algeria, Albert was the first member of the Camus family to read, let alone attend university. (His father died before he turned one, his mother did housework to support her family). In the 1930s, he became a playwright, journalist and novelist. After moving to France in 1940, he joined the Resistance against Nazi occupation.
In 1942, Camus shot to fame with his novel The Stranger, a dramatisation of the homicidal implications of modern nihilism (the loss of a sense of meaning). That year, he wrote a disconcerting essay on the ancient Myth of Sisyphus exploring the question of whether, in a world without God, suicide could be rationally justified.
In 1947, The Plague, a novel about a city locked down for one year due to bubonic plague, enjoyed enormous success. In 1952, Camus published his longest philosophical work, The Rebel, a powerful indictment of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century for their crimes against humanity. In 1957, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Camus’ writings urgently addressed problems his own generation faced, which seem to be recurring in our times of increased alienation, anxiety and loss of hope among many. Meanwhile, the rise of authoritarian movements around the world sounds echoes of the dictatorships The Plague and The Rebel were written to warn future generations against.
Beyond nihilism
The Stranger tells the story of Meursault, an emotionally detached French-Algerian “outsider” who is condemned to death for killing an Arab, but displays no remorse for his crime. He can only mouth “the sun, the sea” to explain his murderous violence.
After writing The Stranger, Camus became known as a “prophet of the absurd”.
Yet, he always insisted he should not be identified with his absurd anti-hero. Indeed, Camus’ unwanted “absurdist” fame has meant many dimensions of his work have been popularly passed over.
The loss of shared meaning as religious belief declined in the face of scientific advances, was not, in his view, something to be romanticised. Rather, he contended, this “nihilism” had left a vacuum emboldening totalitarian regimes to kill millions during the second world war in the name of ideologies functioning as substitute religions.
All his writings, Camus would stress, aimed at overcoming nihilism, not glamorising it. If the world has no ultimate, knowable meaning (for those without religious faith), there is still one creature who longs for such meaning: the human being. The challenge is to find meaning, within the limits of what we can know and share.
Federal immigration enforcement agents shatter a truck window and detain two men outside a Home Depot in Illinois last December.
Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times/AAP
For Camus, far right movements should be opposed for the license they give to escalating violences, via their cults of the “strong leader” above the law, and their narratives of ethnic or national redemption. But we need also to understand why millions of people are drawn to them.
The far right, Camus notes, invariably attracts conservatives (who see in it a means to preserve threatened identity and values), as well as a hard core of more extreme followers. But fascism is at heart a form of active “irrationalist” nihilism, which sanctifies force and the will of the leader over any commitment to truth, science, civility or reasoned norms.
Rule by far-right movements hence does not “conserve” anything. It enshrines what Camus calls “gangster morality”: “an inexhaustible round of triumph and revenge, defeat and resentment.” Adolf Hitler, he writes, was “nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by calculated cunning and by a relentless tactical clear-sightedness.”
At the basis of fascism’s appeal for its followers, Camus argues, is an aggrieved sense of entitlement. The far right’s recruits feel cheated by the world, with progressive causes favouring “others” (minorities, liberals, Jews, Muslims, etc.) at their expense.
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In his 1956 novel The Fall, Camus dramatises how people, through such cynicism and despair, can come to embrace the most inhumane perspectives. This novel, Camus’ darkest, is the monologue of a high-flying lawyer who comes, one day, to realise that all his professed moral ideals were a sham, after he failed to do anything to save a young woman who suicides on the Seine.
“Jean-Baptiste Clamence” instead embraces the view that there can be no genuine goodness or innocence in the world. In a war of all against all, the thing is to command the high ground to denounce others, before they can turn on you.
The only values in this “fallen” worldview are strength, cunning and the will to power. The step into political fascism only requires identification with a “strong leader” who emerges in times of social unrest and who promises to redress followers’ grievances, by singling out “others” to blame and mercilessly weeding them out.
The only way to prevent the far right’s resurgence, Camus counselled in the 1950s, was for democracies to ensure all their citizens felt existentially secure and that basic levels of justice prevailed. Only by sustaining balanced societies can we prevent fascism’s darkly cynical worldview from periodically taking popular hold.
Beyond ecocide
It seems anachronistic to see in Camus a precedent of our ecological concerns. Yet as a student and lover of ancient Greek poetry and philosophy, Camus was deeply moved by the beauty of the natural world, in contrast to many other 20th century thinkers.
Camus’ lyrical, little-known 1948 essay “Helen’s Exile” argues modern societies’ devolution into forms of totalitarianism was underwritten by a turning away from any sense of the natural order and of our own minute, transient place within it.
“We live in the time of great cities,” he wrote. “The world has been deliberately cut off from what gives it permanence: nature, the sea, hills, evening meditations.”
We are cut off from nature, Camus wrote in 1948.
Claudel Rheault/unsplash, CC BY
Human beings, he contended, would need to reestablish a sense of natural limits and of our belonging within the larger order, if our societies were to be renewed and ecological or wider disaster be averted.
Ancient Greek mythology, Camus stressed, enshrined wise limits on human power. If human beings, through hubris, crossed the line, the furies or the goddess Nemesis would intervene to restore the world to balance.
In a high-tech age, however, “we light up what suns we want,” Camus writes – with clear reference to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, his words bring to mind the bizarre “posthuman” dreams of tech billionaires to create super-intelligent AI, which will render human labour, if not the entire human species, redundant.
Recognising our dependency on the natural world and its intrinsic beauty, was for Camus, already in the mid-20th century, “a thought which the world today cannot do without for very much longer”.
Authors: Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Australian Catholic University 
