Albert Camus
The world is silent: live lucidly, in revolt.
Albert Camus (1913 – 1960, France) : philosophy of the absurd. Camus starts from an observation: the world does not answer our demand for meaning. He calls this the absurd. On AskPhilosophy: 2 reconstructed arguments, 4 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 4 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Why he matters
He is one of the few philosophers read by millions outside school, because he also writes novels, plays and articles. He asks the question of meaning without promising a ready-made answer, and draws from it an ethics of measure. At 44 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature (1957). His Stockholm speech sums up his position: the task of his generation, he says, is to keep the world from falling apart.
His times
He was born in Algeria into a poor family; his father died in the war in 1914. He studied philosophy in Algiers. During the Second World War he wrote for Combat, a Resistance newspaper. He published The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942, The Plague in 1947, The Rebel in 1951. That last book led in 1952 to the break with Sartre and the journal Les Temps modernes. He died in a car accident at 46.
Mind the words
In Camus, "absurd" does not mean "ridiculous": it is the clash between a mind that asks for meaning and a world that offers none. He says so himself: the absurd is neither in man nor in the world, but in their joint presence. Likewise "revolt" means the refusal that affirms a value, not violence. Finally, the extracts from The Rebel on this page come from an OCR digitisation that has not been fully proofread.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceHe builds no positive atheism. In The Myth of Sisyphus he writes that he does not know whether the world has a meaning beyond it, but that he does not know that meaning. A note specifies that it is not the affirmation of God he challenges, but the logic that leads to it. His attitude is to live "without appeal", as if God did not answer. Many class him among atheists, others among agnostics.
He develops no theory of knowledge. He holds that what he understands is what he touches and what resists him, and he refuses to negate reason: it has an order in which it is effective, that of human experience. This brings him closer to empiricism, without his calling himself an empiricist.
Very few certainties: man's appetite for clarity and the impossibility of reducing the world to a reasonable principle. He says a single certainty is enough for the seeker. For the rest, he refuses to rely on what he cannot check.
He does not treat the mind-body question as such. He only writes that the body's judgment is as good as the mind's, and that the body shrinks from annihilation.
He sets the question of free will aside: whether man is free does not interest him, because he can experience only his own freedom. He affirms a freedom of thought and action, limited by death. The absurd, he says, cancels the chances of eternal freedom but magnifies freedom of action.
In The Myth of Sisyphus he sets value judgments aside in favour of factual judgments. In The Rebel he finds in revolt a value that "pre-exists" action and suspects a human nature. But he also says nothing authorises us to claim these principles have always been. His position evolves and remains discussed.
He refuses the "leap" of faith, which he judges an evasion, and writes that for an absurd mind there is nothing beyond reason. But he does not therefore negate reason: he recognises its limits and relative powers. He does not say reason judges everything, only that he will not leave it.
No given meaning: life will be lived all the better if it has no meaning, he writes. He does not conclude that life is not worth living: quite the opposite, it is lucid revolt that gives it its value.
In The Rebel he suspects a human nature, with something "permanent to preserve". But he knows that revolt can turn into rancour and tyranny. He does not say man is good, nor that he is evil.
He defends a "new individualism" founded on the "We are": one cannot let common dignity be degraded, in oneself or in others. He refuses to sacrifice today's people to tomorrow's history. But he admits that every society requires discipline. He does not set out a political programme in our texts.
Neither a calculation of consequences, nor abstract duty, nor virtue ethics in Aristotle's sense. The starting point is revolt, which discovers a value and a limit. He writes that "to breathe is to judge": living already supposes values. He refuses abstract principles: the morality of revolt discovers them "in the heat of insurrection".