Albert Camus – Novelist and Philosopher for Our Time

Abstract

Albert Camus died on 4 January 1960 when the car in which he was a passenger slid into a tree after running off a road in the French countryside outside the small village of Villeblevin in Burgundy. He died instantly. Even though at 46 he was far too young, what he had achieved by then was quite remarkable. Several novels, including The Outsider and The Plague, as well as a number of plays, and many essays on literary, philosophical and political issues. And during the war he had edited the Resistance newspaper, Combat. He had a work in progress, on him when he died, posthumously published as The First Man, which even in its unfinished form is a wonderful work, written with a stony, harsh, unsentimental clarity that is simply unforgettable. Clearly, he was at the height of his powers, even though at the time of his death he had become an isolated figure in the intellectual circles of his adopted Paris because of his anti-communism and his unwillingness to support the forces struggling for the independence of his native Algeria from colonial France. And then in the years that followed his death his influence diminished further as philosophy turned away from literature towards linguistics, psychoanalysis and the social sciences, and as the tide of political events turned increasingly against the colonialism of which Camus had been a supporter, or so it was thought. Yet Camus endures; and 50 years on we get a better sense of the extent of his influence. The Outsider and The Plague are both masterpieces, and stand as canonical references in twentieth-century European literature. There is no better characterisation of the absurd predicament of human existence than that which he gives us in his philosophical works, The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus. And while his uncompromising humanist position on revolution, terrorism and injustice were unfashionable amongst French intellectuals of his day, his political writings and social commentary are a salutary reminder of the ease with which cruelty and violence can find an alibi in a ‘cause’ or in an ideology. SOPHIA (2011) 50:509–511 DOI 10.1007/s11841-011-0288-7