Part One

When the late Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, the second youngest laureate then, and the first born in Africa, he gave a short banquet speech after the ceremony, discussing the larger roles, and responsibilities, of the writer in society. Reflecting on the inherent nature of the writer and artist, Camus observed,

“For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge. And if they have to take sides in this world, they can perhaps side only with that society in which, according to Nietzsche’s great words, not the judge but the creator will rule, whether he be a worker or an intellectual.

“By the same token, the writer’s role is not free from difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it. Otherwise, he will be alone and deprived of his art. Not all the armies of tyranny with their millions of men will free him from his isolation, even and particularly if he falls into step with them. But the silence of an unknown prisoner, abandoned to humiliations at the other end of the world, is enough to draw the writer out of his exile, at least whenever, in the midst of the privileges of freedom, he manages not to forget that silence, and to transmit it in order to make it resound by means of his art” [1].

As a writer for the Parisian resistant newspaper Combat during World War II, and Prudhommeaux’s anarchist journal Le Libertaire in the years after, Camus’ politics, philosophy, and writings became deeply intertwined. And though his background as a writer remains hard-pressed to explain this phenomenon, his ideas and works as a continental philosopher, in novel and essay, might be able to.

Simon Critchley, a professor of philosophy at the University of Essex, and author of the recommended A Very Short Introduction to Continental Philosophy, writes,

“Philosophy as an acute reflection upon history, culture, and society leads to the awakening of critical consciousness, what Husserl would call the reactivation of a sedimented tradition. To push this a little further, the responsibility of the philosopher – in Husserl’s formula ‘the civil servant of humanity’ – is the production of crisis, disturbing the slow accumulation of the deadening sediment of tradition in the name of a reactivating historical critique, whose horizon would be an emancipated life-world. Philosophy in the Continental tradition has an emancipatory intent” [2].

Interpreting Camus in this way, with an eye to the promised emancipatory intent of the work, one can perhaps better explain his writings in terms of his own absurdist philosophy and leftist politics. And with this knowledge, it is not at all hard to see, and understand, the one consistent thread that unites all of his work in literature – the desire to overcome the world as it currently is.

Camus’ dominant literary canon, from The Stranger in 1942 to Resistance, Rebellion, and Death in 1960, represents a vast critique of his own existence, especially in relation to his time and place. Camus’ philosophical critique, with literature as his medium, is an attempt to, in the words of Marx, “not only interpret the world, but change it.”

For the critique to be successful, though, Camus had to explain its historical context and importance satisfactorily to those he meant to influence most – a goal not often taken up and achieved. It is here that Camus, as a man of letters, is able to translate the final goal of his critique, the emancipation of man, and his plans to obtain that goal, into a medium, literature, fiction and essay, that his intended audience, the great masses of thinking people, could not only could grasp, but wanted to understand and practice. The play that is read achieves more than the treatise that isn’t, and that, Camus would point out, is the kind of practicality necessary of a serious critical theory. Camus’ writings and political philosophy have always remained tied to the common human experience of alienation and isolation in society. The critique was to recognize, diagnosis, and treat what Camus believed was destroying both the modern and postmodern man – the problem of nihilism.

The problem of nihilism, a philosophical condition we might be inclined to call the crisis of being, is perhaps the most fundamental issue concerning the use of the critique in Continental philosophy, and Camus, in this respect, does not deviate far. But the nature of the problem – how does one comprehend, let alone over-come, nothingness? – is one that must be recognized and adapted to, as it is this nature that will dictate the terms of the critique. The subject, as always, determines the language used to describe it. The issue had been written about extensively before Camus, and Soren Kierkegaard, one of the great Christian existentialists, used his book Fear and Trembling to lament the problem of nihilism in delightfully terrifying terms,

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there lay only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential, if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hidden beneath everything, what would life be but despair?” [3].

It might be said that, in this context, Kierkegaard, in describing man’s despair in nihilism, rivals Jonathon Edwards in terms of engendering sheer religious terror amongst his readers and himself – his world of permanent angst, one without God or meaning, is unbearable for him, and, perhaps, for any of those able to imagine it themselves.

While Kierkegaard sought the answer to his critique in the Church, or at least in his ideal of it, Camus, whose absurdism remained resolutely atheistic throughout his life, turned to what we will as well – the haunting specter of political radicalism.

Though they consistently, and openly, proclaimed their philosophical and political differences, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre continue to be intimately linked in public consciousness, especially in terms of their personal relationships with existentialism. While the two thinkers vehemently disagreed over their contrasting critique solutions (their respective critique system-programs), and public quarrels were had over theory and various sociopolitical issues such as Marxism, Algerian independence, and the French Communist Party, their respective diagnoses of absurdity and nothingness might, I believe, begin to reveal a common thread of unity and coherence – a vein running directly through the problem of nihilism, one that joins them in solidarity, in being and in thought, against a common enemy.

[1] Albert Camus, Albert Camus: The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957: Banquet Speech – Nobelprize.org – http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1957/camus-speech-e.html

[2] Simon Critchley, A Very Short Introduction to Continental Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2001. Page seventy-three.

[3] Soren Kierkegaard (Johannes de Silento), Fear and Trembling. 1843.