PhilosophersAlbert Camus

Albert Camus

The world is silent: live lucidly, in revolt.

Philosophy of the absurd1913 – 1960 FrancePhilosopher of the absurdWriter and essayistThinker of revoltCommitted journalist
Il n’y a qu’un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux: c’est le suicide.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. The Myth of Sisyphus, first sentence.
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Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy. The Myth of Sisyphus, last sentence.
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Je me révolte, donc nous sommes.
I rebel, therefore we are. The Rebel, chapter I. Camus compares revolt to Descartes's cogito.
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Nous choisirons Ithaque, la terre fidèle, la pensée audacieuse et frugale, l’action lucide
We shall choose Ithaca, the faithful land, audacious and frugal thought, lucid action. The Rebel, chapter V (Thought at the meridian).
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Misconceptions

False
Camus was an existentialist philosopher, like Sartre.

He rejected the label. In The Myth of Sisyphus he writes that existential philosophies all, without exception, offer escape, and he calls their leap toward God a "philosophical suicide". In the foreword he says he deals with an absurd sensibility, not a philosophy. In interviews of the 1940s he also refused the word (those interviews are not in our corpus). But he shares themes with the existentialists: choice, freedom, anxiety.

Nuanced
For Camus, Sisyphus is happy with his fate.

The sentence is an imperative: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy". Camus does not say the punishment becomes pleasant. He writes that the myth is tragic because the hero is conscious, and that there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. Happiness does not necessarily spring from the discovery of the absurd: what Sisyphus gains is that his fate belongs to him and his rock is his thing.

Nuanced
For Camus, the world is absurd.

He says the opposite: the absurd is neither in man nor in the world, but in their joint presence. There can be no absurd outside a human mind, nor outside this world. The world is silent, unreasonable; it is the confrontation with the mind that asks for meaning that is absurd.

False
If life is absurd, according to Camus, everything is permitted.

In The Myth of Sisyphus he does write that value judgments are discarded in favour of factual judgments, and this fed the received idea. But nine years later, in The Rebel, he rejects it: "one is not a nihilist by halves", and the first thing that cannot be denied is the life of others. For him, the absurd does not justify murder.