The Purpose of Albert Camus Philosophy

We are in a world where you have to choose to be a victim or an executioner – and nothing else”, writes Albert Camus in the journal Combat. He refuses to play this partition. “Neither victims nor executioners” will be his leitmotif. In a solitary in-between, the writer-philosopher, the journalist, sails against the current of the dogmas that are expressed then. This “French from Algeria”, in solidarity with his native environment, is stretched between two shores, the metropolis and the colony, two extremes, the taste for life and the temptation of death, “between yes and no” sums up the title of one of his short stories. Like the tensions that intertwine and shape his being, revolt is for him the sister of measure. And if this posture earned him enmity, he was convinced that no end could justify the violence of the means employed.

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The Algerian writer Mohamed Dib celebrated in Albert Camus, “this tragic side in full light, sunny”. Born on November 7, 1913 in Mondovi, it was in the working-class suburb of Algiers where he grew up, in this half-shade, half-sun universe, that the lines of force of his work were drawn. Between an illiterate mother, a distant and silent housekeeper, a cooper uncle, tuberculosis which gave him a glimpse of the abyss when he was still only a teenager, maritime drunkenness and football, Albert Camus displays the vitality which characterizes it. Madness that this desire to live in a world of which he perceives the absurdity. He theorized in his first essay, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942), the philosophical counterpart of The Stranger, this “confrontation between the human appeal and the unreasonable silence of the world”. His humanism, which Jean-Paul Sartre considers “austere and sensual” in his obituary, also takes shape during adolescence, through activities that are less cerebral than physical: “I only knew in the sport of team, in my youth, this powerful feeling of hope and solidarity that accompanies the long days of training until the day of the winning or losing match. He insists: “Really, the little morality that I know, I learned it on the football fields and the theater stages which will remain my real universities. »

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At 21, he adapted The Time of Contempt, a novel by André Malraux which castigates Hitlerism. Albert Camus recently joined the Communist Party, from which he was expelled shortly afterwards. This parenthesis, which lasted from 1935 to 1937, was nonetheless charged with meaning. In high school, his philosophy teacher, Jean Grenier, sought the salvation of men in a mystical thought. The student believes he can find it on earth. Driven by a thirst for social justice, a legacy of a miserable childhood, he was touched by activists. In contact with them, he encounters a warmth, a sincerity, a distillation of humanity that he does not find in the speeches: “I believe that there is more truth in the relations between communists than between their professions of faith . His confidence in men is proportional to his distrust of systems. In the 1930s, he was already expressing reservations: “If I went to communism, and it would be possible, I would put my vitality into it, my means, my intelligence, I would put all my talents into it, all my soul can – to be, not all my heart”, he confided. “To join would be to force me, to hide what else is in me. Perhaps he sensed then that he was not cut out to belong to an organization like this. That his generous and fraternal communism, his religion without God, would stumble on the discipline that such a vocation demands.

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Albert Camus obtained his higher education diploma in May 1936 when the Popular Front triumphed. His dissertation explores the relationship between Neoplatonism and Christianity, with regard to Plotinus and Saint Augustine. In the philosophy of the first, the young man salutes the “artist’s point of view. If things can be explained, it is because things are beautiful”. In the second, “pursued by the idea of ​​death”, he detects “at the same time as greatness which surpasses us all, this very African mixture of excess and prudence, of strengths and weaknesses which restore us to greatness. fraternal”. As he does in his future writings, the Pied-noir student juggles with masks to better evoke his personal concerns. Which makes one of his biographers, Daniel Rondeau, say that it is a “hidden self-portrait”. Albert Camus often returns to it. With him, the sublime always rubs shoulders with the tragic. Like this land, “splendid and frightening”. Like Algiers, whose contrasts the young man from Belcourt exalts: “There is an immense brightness in the piece of sky that I see through the window and I don’t know why, it makes me think of a walk we took under the clouds. Romantics, we returned under the lightning and the rain. It was very beautiful”, he writes in a lyrical impulse.

With the influence of the 20th century, people’s idea of ​​freedom and all their conventional thoughts were destroyed due to the existing war. This made the possibility of humans truly being individuals merely imaginary. In this situation, people’s thinking began to change in the form of despair, death and suicide. Existential philosophy was also on the agenda here.

Although Albert Camus was originally seen as a man of letters, his works included philosophy. When his works are viewed from a broad perspective, they can be accepted as philosophy-literary works. In particular, the traces of philosophy are more evident in his works titled The Myth of Sisyphus and The Revolting Man. In his other works, existentialism was kept in the foreground. His name is often mentioned in the context of existentialism in France. However, Camus did not define himself as either an existentialist or a philosopher. Camus’s intention was not to establish a systematic way or a definitive system. According to him, it all started with absurdity and disharmony. In other words, the basis of Camus’ thought was absurd and incongruous.

Camus called his philosophy rebellion because it was seen as a rebellion against disharmony. The disharmony was the result of the coming together of man and the world. People or believers accepted the existence of God and placated themselves with this belief. Because people needed to add meaning to their lives, believing people achieved this belief through belief in God and the Hereafter. However, according to Camus, this was unacceptable. For, according to both Camus and other godless existentialists, the idea of ​​God only accustomed man to laziness and fatalism. However, man had to transform his essence in this world only by his own choices.

Camus’ philosophy begins with both the desire to question the origin of human existence and the desire to clarify the meaning of life. However, there is no place for God in his philosophy. For this reason, Camus started to use suicide as the main concept against the problem of maladaptive and meaning of life. Incongruous is not something that originates only from man or simply from the world. The dissonance arises because of the encounter of man and the world. In other words, both man and the world are needed for the incongruous to emerge. In short, disharmony is a form of relationship. This is why when a person dies, disharmony disappears. But according to Camus, the important thing is to understand whether life has value, and to understand it in the face of the absurd, one must survive as long as possible.

Camus defined the absurd with the word absurd, which is called irrational. According to him, the only serious philosophical issue is suicide. Because the problem of suicide reveals skepticism about whether life is really worth living. He argued that philosophy is not a more serious issue than answering the question of the worthiness of living this life, and said that it should answer this question. He argued that there are two ways to answer this question: suicide and rebellion. However, he says that finding life worth living or committing suicide is losing against the absurd. Because suicide is nothing but an existential act of despair. The aim of Camus’ philosophy, then, is to rebel against the absurd.