Abstract
What follows is a work of critical reconstruction of Camus' thought. It aims to answer to the wish Camus expressed in his later notebooks, that he at least be read closely. Specifically, I hope to do three things. In Part I, we will show how Camus' famous philosophy of the absurd represents a systematic scepticism whose closest philosophical predecessor is Descartes' method of doubt, and whose consequence, as in Descartes, is the discovery of a single, orienting certainty, on the basis of which Camus would proceed to pass beyond the 'nihilism' that conservative critics continued to level against him (MS 34). Part II will unfold the central tenets of Camus' mature thought of rebellion, and show how Camus' central political claims follow from his para-Cartesian claim to have found an irreducible or 'invincible' basis for a post-metaphysical ethics, consistent with the most thoroughgoing epistemic scepticism. Part III then undertakes to show that the neoclassical rhetoric and positioning Camus claimed for his postwar thought—as a thought of moderation or mesure, and a renewed Greek or Mediterranean naturalism—is more than a stylistic pretension. It represents, so I argue, a singular amalgam of modern and philosophical classical motifs which makes Camus' voice nearly unique in twentieth century ideas, and all the more worth reconsidering today. So let us proceed.
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Notes
Is Camus not then a litterateur who posed as a philosophe, in contrast to Sartre, a trained philosopher who was also a literary genius? Must we not, with Sartre, admire Camus’ literary production, but look down with some condescension upon his theoretical efforts?
With partial truth and partial falsity. As we will see, Camus typically asserts the need to balance the realities of history against the realities of our ahistoric, natural being, nor to exclude one in valorizing the other.
Camus’ rationalism is for instance reflected in the way that Camus’ criticisms of other philosophic positions, particularly in L’homme révolté, can often remind the student of philosophy most of Hegel’s depictions of ‘figures of spirit’ and the critical works of certain great conservative authors. By-passing extensive citation and footnoting, Camus proceeds to reconstruct the positions’ foundational commitments, situate all aspects of their thinking as inferential consequences of these commitments, then assesses the resulting whole in the light of Camus’ own, persisting preoccupations: first, with the meaningfulness of existence after what Nietzsche called the death of god; and second, with the justifiability of murder and meaningless suffering. While this procedure certainly will not always satisfy the academic, it is a less simple thing to say that it is ‘unphilosophical’.
In Camus’ later words: ‘This word ‘absurd’ has had an unhappy history, and I confess that it now rather annoys me. / When I analyzed the feeling of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus, I was looking for a method and not a doctrine. I was practicing methodical doubt. I was trying to make a ‘tabula rasa’ on the basis of which it would then be possible to construct something …’ (LCE 356)
Again, if this ethics of solidarity prevents servitude, it is because ‘instead of the implicit and untrammelled dialogue through which we come to recognize our similarity and consecrate our destiny, servitude gives way to the most terrible of silences.’ (R 282)
This invites an ambiguity which arguably runs throughout Camus’ thought, which is honored in the misreading of his work as allied to that of Sartre’s existentialism. Camus was critical of this association of his work with that of Sartre’s. The rebellion here sometimes seems to be a rebellion against death or a fundamentally unjust or meaningless condition. This would imply an atheistic certainty—life is meaningless—rather than the strict agnosticism which Camus’ position implies. As Camus corrects himself at in The Myth of Sisyphus ‘I [just] said the world was absurd but that was too hasty. The world in itself is not [fully] reasonable, that is all that can be said’ (MS 26); ‘I don’t know whether the world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.’ (MS 51) Moreover, readers will know that there is in Camus’ work an affirmative, almost Rousseauian wonder and love for this world. His more prominent references are Nietzsche and his teacher Jean Grenier than Sartre or other authors of modern alienation, Angst, or anomie. This incidentally is exactly what motivates Camus to complain of Sartre’s early literary works: ‘it is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched. [But] life can be magnificent and overwhelming—that is its whole tragedy.’ (LCE 201)
As Camus reflects, concerning death, in his notebooks: ‘… what would the world be without death—a succession of forms evaporating and returning, an anguished flight, an unfinishable world. But fortunately there is death, the stable one’. (at Wilhouite 1968, p. 79)
References
Books by Camus
MS = Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O’Brien. London: Penguin, 1978.
R = Camus, Albert. The Rebel. Translated by Justin O’Brien. London: Penguin, 1971.
SEN = Camus, Albert. Selected Essays and Notebooks. Translated by Philip Thody. London: Penguin, 1979.
RRD = Camus, Albert. Resistance, Rebellion and Death. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Random House, 1960.
LCE = Camus, Albert. Lyrical and Critical Essays. Edited by Phillip Thody, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. New York: Vintage Books 1968.
Texts by Other Authors
Carroll, D. (2007). Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, terrorism, justice. New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989 [1978].
Foley, J. (2008). Albert Camus: From the absurd to revolt. Stocksfield: Acumen.
Kassoul, A., & Mohamed-Lakdar, M. (2006). The Algerian destiny of Albert Camus. Bethesda: Academica Press.
Margerrison, C., Orme, M., & Lincoln, L. (Eds.). (2008). Albert Camus in the 21st century: A reassessment of his thinking at the dawn of the new millennium. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Orme, M. (2007). The development of Albert Camus’ concern for political justice. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Van der Hoven, A., & Spritzen, D. (2004). Sartre and Camus: A historic confrontation. New York: Humanity Books.
Wilhouite, F. H., Jr. (1968). Beyond nihilism: Albert Camus’s contribution to political thought. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ Press.
Zaretsky, R., & Camus, A. (2010). Elements of a life. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
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Dr Sharpe has published widely on philosophy, the history of ideas, and psychoanalysis. He lectures at Deakin University in philosophy and psychoanalytic studies.
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Sharpe, M.J. The Invincible Summer: On Albert Camus’ Philosophical Neoclassicism. SOPHIA 50, 577–592 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0275-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0275-z