Albert Camus
He never knew his father, grew up in poverty in Algiers, and contracted tuberculosis at seventeen. He edited a clandestine newspaper during the Nazi occupation and asked whether life was worth living without meaning. He said yes -- but only through revolt. He was forty-six when the car crashed, with the manuscript of his unfinished novel in his bag.
Albert Camus never knew his father. Lucien Camus was killed at the Battle of the Marne in 1914, when Albert was less than a year old. He died of shrapnel wounds in a military hospital in Saint-Brieuc. He had never learned to read. He left behind a wife who was nearly deaf and nearly illiterate, two small sons, and almost nothing else. Albert grew up in a two-room apartment in Belcourt, a working-class district of Algiers, in a silence that was partly the silence of poverty and partly the silence of a woman who had no language for what had happened to her.
This is where the philosophy began. Not in a university seminar, but in that apartment, in the light and heat of the Algerian coast, in the gap between the human need for meaning and the universe’s complete indifference to it.
Camus was a brilliant student. His elementary school teacher, a man named Louis Germain, recognized something in him and personally lobbied the family to allow Albert to continue his education past the age at which poor children were expected to stop. Without Germain, there would have been no university, no philosophy, no Nobel Prize. Forty years later, when Camus accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature in Stockholm, he wrote to Germain first. He said that Germain was always present in his success, and that the news of the prize had gone to him before it went to Camus’s own mother. “I had a master,” he wrote, “who taught me that knowledge was a responsibility.”
He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers. At seventeen he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which would recur throughout his life and which permanently shaped how he thought. Tuberculosis, in that era, was not abstract. It was bodily. It was the awareness of the lungs filling, of mortality in the chest, of the body’s fragility against the backdrop of the Algerian sun. It made him a philosopher of physical existence, of beaches and light and the smell of the sea, at the same time that he was becoming a philosopher of meaninglessness. These two things were not contradictions for him. They were the same thing.
He joined the French Communist Party in 1935 and left two years later, disillusioned. The party’s willingness to subordinate truth to political necessity was, for Camus, a form of the philosophical dishonesty he would spend the rest of his career attacking. He was not anti-political. He was anti-ideological. The difference mattered enormously to him.
He came to France in 1940, worked as a journalist at Paris-Soir, and found himself in an occupied country. During the Occupation he became the editor of Combat, one of the central clandestine newspapers of the French Resistance. The work was genuinely dangerous. He was writing philosophy and simultaneously running a newspaper that could have gotten him killed. This combination -- the philosophical and the engaged, the theoretical and the bodily -- was never separable for Camus. He did not believe in philosophers who stayed at a safe distance from events.
In 1942 he published two works simultaneously: The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. They were designed as a pair. The Stranger was the literary demonstration; The Myth of Sisyphus was the philosophical argument.
The Stranger’s narrator, Meursault, is a French-Algerian clerk who attends his mother’s funeral without crying and without performing the grief that society expects. A few days later, on a beach under the crushing Algerian sun, he shoots an Arab man. At his trial, he is condemned less for the killing than for his emotional indifference at the funeral. The jury cannot comprehend a man who refuses to perform feelings he does not have. They kill him for it.
The novel is one of the most precise literary investigations of what Camus meant by the Absurd. Meursault does not lie about what he feels. He refuses the social performances that allow collective life to function by pretending we share more than we do. The machinery of justice, the machinery of mourning, the machinery of outrage: Meursault simply will not participate. And the machinery destroys him.
The Myth of Sisyphus begins with a sentence that has never lost its force: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Not: should we commit suicide? But: given that life has no inherent meaning, what justifies continuing it?
Camus identified the Absurd not as a property of the world alone, nor of the human mind alone, but of the confrontation between them. Human beings demand meaning, clarity, reason. The world offers none. The Absurd is the gap between the demand and the silence.
He identified three possible responses. The first is physical suicide: remove yourself from the confrontation by dying. Camus rejected this as evasion. It resolves the tension by eliminating one of its terms. The second is philosophical suicide: take the leap of faith, as Kierkegaard did, and convert the experience of meaninglessness into religious affirmation. Camus rejected this as equally dishonest -- equally an evasion, wearing a theological costume. The third response -- the only honest one -- is revolt. Stay in the confrontation. Refuse all consolation. Live passionately and fully without appeal to any authority outside yourself. Keep the question alive. Do not resolve it.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Not because his rock will reach the top. It will not. But because the struggle itself, the clarity about the struggle, the refusal to be crushed by it, is its own form of freedom.
In 1947 came The Plague. A city in Algeria is sealed by epidemic. The characters who matter in the novel are not the ones who have answers. They are the ones who choose to fight the plague regardless. Dr. Rieux, who spends the novel in exhausting, unglamorous medical work, does not believe in God. He does not believe history is on his side. He does not believe the plague will be defeated. He fights it anyway, because suffering demands a response, and no metaphysical argument is required to recognize this. The Plague is a novel about solidarity. About the obligation that arises from simply being present when others are dying.
It was also an allegory for the Nazi occupation, and for any collective evil that forces a choice between complicity and resistance.
In 1951 came The Rebel, his most sustained philosophical work. A critique of every revolutionary ideology that justified present violence in the name of a future utopia. Camus argued that the will to absolute justice always becomes the will to absolute power. The revolutionary who kills in the name of freedom ends by requiring freedom to be surrendered to him. He was writing about Nazism. He was also writing about Stalinism. He refused to choose which atrocity was more forgivable based on whose side it was on.
This ended his friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre.
Sartre believed that the Soviet Union, despite its crimes, represented a genuine alternative to capitalist imperialism, and that to condemn both sides was to fail the Left. Camus believed that looking away from the Gulag in the name of historical necessity was exactly the kind of philosophical murder he had been writing against. Francis Jeanson, in Sartre’s journal, wrote a hostile review of The Rebel. Camus addressed his response to Sartre directly. Sartre’s reply was savage and personal. They had been the two defining voices of postwar French intellectual life. They never spoke again.
In October 1957, Camus received a telegram informing him that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was forty-four years old. He sent his first telegram to Louis Germain, his elementary school teacher from Belcourt.
He made no great gesture with the prize. He wrote. He continued the work. He was revising a novel he had been working on for years, an autobiographical novel he had never managed to finish, a book about his childhood, his mother, his father’s death, the apartment in Belcourt and the teacher who had seen something in him.
On January 4, 1960, he was a passenger in the car of his publisher Michel Gallimard, driving from Lourmarin back toward Paris. The car crashed. Gallimard died several days later from his injuries. Camus was killed instantly.
In his coat pocket was an unused train ticket for the same journey. He had changed his plans at the last moment and accepted a lift in the car.
In his bag was the manuscript of The First Man. The unfinished novel was published posthumously in 1994. It is, by general consensus, among the most beautiful things he wrote. It is about a man returning to Algeria looking for traces of the father he never knew. It is about the boy in the apartment in Belcourt. It is about what we owe to the people who saw us before we saw ourselves.
He was forty-six years old.