Albert Camus:

1. Albert Camus: 1913-1960: Novelist and Philosopher

2. Camus Born and raised in Algeria but of French descent

3. The Stranger (1942) • The protagonist Meursault (who is a kind of anti-hero) commits an inexplicable murder in the beginning of the novel. • He is condemned not only for the murder but for the fact that his mother died and he did not seem to mourn her. He also rejects religion. • His attitudes may raise existentialist questions because he refuses to make judgments and he refuses to conform emotionally to situations according to the expectations of others.

4. Existentialism • This philosophical movement is not so easy to define. It is thought to have its precursors in Dostoevsky’s novels and in the work of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. The main existentialists, besides Camus, were Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre. (Camus said he wasn’t an existentialist but people tend to ignore that because of his similarities with Sartre and de Beauvoir. ) • A standard way of describing existentialism is the idea that ‘existence precedes essence’: We make ourselves the individuals that we are. The kind of being humans become is not predetermined by the creatures that we are.

5. Choice • A second theme in existentialism is the idea of free choice. (Existentialism is a loose family of related ideas, not one doctrine.) • Your commitments are not predetermined by what you are. You choose your own commitments. • Other ways commitments could be predetermined: If there were a certain set of correct commitments given to us by reason and morality. Existentialists seem to deny this. At the same time, they view certain kinds of lives as better lives, e.g., fighting the Nazis during the resistance. • Is this a contradiction?

6. Freedom and Responsibility • Freedom is another theme in existentialist writing. • You choose your own commitments. They are arbitrary and not pre-determined by anything (even what is right). • You are then required to take total and full responsibility for those commitments. • What’s the alternative? What do we usually do? How do people evade responsibility?

7. Kierkegaard • Existentialism is often assumed to depend on atheism. If God doesn’t determine our being, then it is assumed there is no God. • But K. believed in God. He nevertheless saw absurdity in the belief in God. • God is outside human experience and isn’t tangible to us. God doesn’t solve the problem of what we should do with our lives. • But not any life will do: Some lives are fragile in their pointlessness-e.g., pursuing money, fame, success You can fail, people can stop loving you, things can fall apart

8. Kierkegaard’s ‘Leap of Faith’ • A person must make ‘a leap of faith’ and develop a personal commitment to the kind of life led by Jesus Christ. He thinks we will realize the emptiness and unsatisfactory nature of a life lived in the pursuit of success or human love because when we pursue these goals we have this feeling of angst—dread or anxiety—Only a relationship with God is the solution to this dread.

9. Similarities to Camus • Camus does not retain K’s theism. • However, he does agree that there are some questions we can’t avoid. The distress these questions cause us (anxiety, dread, indicates that we must confront them. • We can’t look outside ourselves for the answers. There are no rules for how to live. We cannot look to nature, or God or any other source for the answer to these questions.