The Absurdity of Albert Camus

In August 1944, as the French Resistance fought to liberate Paris, Albert Camus went to see Jean-Paul Sartre at the Comédie-Française. It was a perilous moment. Now that the German forces were on the back foot, Hitler had ordered his troops to inflict as much damage on the capital as possible. Sartre had been sent to defend the Comédie-Française – Paris’ oldest and most prestigious theatre – from sabotage. But the journey across the city had worn Sartre out and by the time Camus arrived he had fallen asleep in the stalls. Camus couldn’t help being amused. Waking Sartre, he quipped: ‘You have turned your seat in the direction of history.’ Camus had known Sartre for a little over a year by then. They had first met at the premiere of Sartre’s play, The Flies, on 3 June 1943 and had soon become friends. They were, in some ways, an unlikely pair. Whereas Sartre came from a respectable bourgeois family and had been educated at the elite École normale supérieure, Camus had been born into poverty in French Algeria. Raised by his mother – an almost illiterate widow – and his tyrannical grandmother, he had cut his teeth in journalism and the theatre before finally moving to Paris shortly before the outbreak of war. But they were bound together by a mutual respect and a shared philosophical outlook. So close had they become, in fact, that Camus had signed Sartre up as a correspondent when he became editor of Combat, the newspaper of the French Resistance, a few months after their meeting; and Sartre, in turn, had even asked Camus – no mean actor – to star in his play No Exit. Camus’ quip in the Comédie-Française was meant in good spirits. It was, in all likelihood, a playful reminder that, while the dashing Camus had found it easy to throw himself into the Resistance, Sartre had struggled. But Camus’ joke also highlighted a more fundamental difference between them – one which centred on their views of history, and which would soon turn them into bitter rivals. The absurd Their disagreement had its roots in Camus’ concept of the ‘absurd’. As he had explained in many of his early writings, the absurd describes a basic contradiction at the heart of all human existence: between man’s innate desire for reason and clarity on the one hand, and his awareness of the irrationality and meaninglessness of life on the other. Not everyone becomes conscious of this in the same way, of course. It can ‘strike [you] in the face’ at any moment, ‘on any street corner’. But once you have seen it, its effect is profound. Familiar habits, routines, assumptions, and beliefs suddenly seem pointless. You start to feel alienated from the world around you. A stranger in your own life. How, then, should one respond to the absurd? Early in his career Camus became aware of, and in some senses, a spokesman for, a growing sense of nihilism in contemporary culture. He recognised that, confronted with the meaninglessness of life, a person might easily be tempted by hedonism, faith, despair – even suicide. As time went on, however, Camus came to realise that each of these responses is in some way inadequate. Each seeks to liberate the self from meaninglessness by denying the absurd. While that might seem sensible at first, it turns out to be self-defeating. Since we can only perceive the absurd because we are rational creatures, it is impossible to deny the absurd without also denying that which makes us human. A more satisfactory response, Camus realised, was to embrace the absurd. As he wrote in the newspaper Alger-Républicain in 1939, it should be a beginning, and not an end. This was less paradoxical than it sounds. If existence is meaningless then clearly it is pointless trying to make it otherwise. The only rational thing to do, Camus argued in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), is to accept that life is uncertain – to accept, in other words, that death is inevitable, love fickle, and fame fleeting – and live accordingly. ‘Everything’, in principle, ‘is permitted.’ Since the world obeys no rhyme or reason, all actions are morally equivalent. The key is to live fully – to recognise that we are all in the same boat, to savour the impossible struggle, to accept the inevitability of defeat or disappointment. In short, to be a ‘happy Sisyphus’. Camus dramatised this in his novella The Stranger (1942). Following the death of his mother the protagonist, Meursault, is acutely conscious of the absurd. But he is nevertheless committed to the truth. He feels no grief at his mother’s funeral; he is indifferent to his lover; and he refuses to express regret at having shot an Arab on the beach. This alienates him from society. Indeed, it is his detachment from life’s absurdity that ultimately condemns him. But it is what liberates him, too. He realises that his sense of estrangement is the only thing he truly shares with other human beings. And, in the end, as he faces the inevitability of his execution, he sees that he is happy. Rebellion or revolution? This had profound implications for politics, too. In The Rebel (1951) Camus argued that, just as man is tormented by the contradiction between his desire for clarity and the meaninglessness of existence, so he also has an innate impulse to rebel against anything which he perceives to be unjust, or which conflicts with the intrinsic value of human life and liberty. It was at this point that history made its entrance – and that Camus and Sartre came to blows. Much like Camus, Sartre agreed that rebellion was a natural response to injustice. He saw it as a ‘rational’ reaction against the irrationality of the world. But he nevertheless understood it as a component in a historical process. To be sure, he did not think that human societies followed a predetermined path towards the creation of an ‘ideal’ society. He disagreed quite strongly with Karl Marx on this. As he later argued in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), there was no inevitability to history. People could not know how it would work out. But if they acted as if they did, they stood a decent chance of making the Communist ideal a reality. Camus was not insensitive to this view at first. He had joined – and been expelled from – the Communist Party in Algeria long before Sartre had begun his dalliance. He had even run the Party’s Théâtre du Travail. In his letters he had also spoken about history as having a certain directionality about it. But the experience of the Second World War, and his encounter with Nazism, had changed his mind. The key, Camus believed, was to differentiate between rebellion and revolution. As he saw it, revolutions sought to protect freedom and humanity against injustice by creating a perfect social order – in other words, by putting an end to history. The problem is that in trying (and failing) to create an ideal society, revolutions end up crushing the freedom and humanity they purport to be defending. This was especially true of the French Revolution, but no ‘revolutionary’ regime was any better – or worse – than any other. In this respect, Camus believed, the Soviet Union was indistinguishable from Nazi Germany. Rebellion, by contrast, should respond to injustice by emphasising a shared humanity and by clinging doggedly to the value of human life. It required not just individual commitment, but solidarity with others. As Camus pointed out in Neither Victims, nor Executioners (1946), it should not aim to end history, but to ‘fight within History, to preserve from History that part of man which is not its proper province’. Camus gave vivid expression to this in The Plague (1947). Set in Oran, in Algeria, during an outbreak of the plague in the 1940s, the novel has been widely recognised as an allegory of the German occupation of France and is, in many ways, a blueprint for his concept of rebellion. As Ronald Aronson has argued, it ‘conveys the unheroic determination to do what must be done in the face of a total threat’. Although the journalist Rambert, for example, initially tries to flee, he eventually resolves to stay and – realising that the plague can only be combatted through solidarity – accepts the risks that entails. Blinded by history Sartre was appalled by Camus’ view of rebellion. He saw it as an undisguised attack on Communism. At his urging, his secretary, Francis Jeanson, wrote a furious response to The Rebel. A bitter war of words ensued, centred on the nature of history. Whereas Jeanson argued that Camus had effectively denied any role for history, Camus responded that he had done nothing of the sort. He had merely tried to draw attention to those ‘whom history blinded to present suffering’ – a sly dig at Sartre’s narrow-minded refusal to condemn Soviet work-camps. Never shy of a fight, Sartre hit back. He alleged that Camus – himself blinded by arrogance and indifference to justice – was pretending that he could step outside history. He even suggested that Camus saw history as a threat to humanity itself. And so it went on. The controversy was briefly overshadowed in 1957 when Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Though he accepted the award with characteristic modesty, his success was met with considerable criticism in France because of his surprisingly cautious attitude towards the Algerian War, by then entering its third year. Refusing either fully to support Algerian independence or to back the French government, he instead equivocated, calling for peaceful co-existence and an ill-defined truce. But the bitterness of Camus’ dispute with Sartre never went away. He was already writing another, more detailed defence of his views when, on 4 January 1960, he was killed in a car accident with his friend and publisher, Michel Gallimard, just outside Sens, in northern France. As he told a friend only a short time before, he felt as if his real work had not yet begun. Whatever role history might play in rebellions, it had proved Camus right. Death – like life itself – is absurd.