Biography of Albert Camus

Biography of Albert Camus

Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondavi, French Algeria. Camus became known for his political journalism, novels and essays during the 1940s. His best-known works, including The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), are exemplars of absurd. Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 and died on January 4, 1960, in Burgundy. Albert.Camus did well in school and was admitted to the University of Algiers, where he studied philosophy and played goalie for the soccer team. He quit the team following a bout of tuberculosis in 1930, thereafter focusing on academic study. By 1936, he had obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy.

The Rebel was first published on October 18, 1951, represented the culmination of the intellectual and spiritual development of Albert Camus.

In The Rebel, Camus tries to show that solidarity is logically implied even in the absurdist position, for to perceive that life is absurd, there must be consciousness, and for there to be consciousness, there must be life. However, the moment human life becomes a value, it becomes a value for all people. In this way, people may be extended to prohibit murder as well as suicide. However, it does not offer creative solution to an age of exportation, enslavement, and execution. People must turn, instead, to a different kind of revolt ,that which on occasion is born in the heart of a slave who suddenly says, “No; there is a limit. So much will I consent to, but no more.” ,At this moment, a line is drawn between what it is to be a thing and what it is to be a person. Human nature is broken, and a new value comes into being. To be sure, the universe ignores it, and the forces of history deny it. However, it rises, nonetheless, to challenge these; and in so doing creates a new force, brotherhood. Out of rebellion, Camus wrenches a positive principle of politics as French philosopher René Descartes had found certitude in the midst of doubt. Although the first stirrings of rebellion are full of promise, the path they create is straight and narrow, and few follow it to the end. Like the moral virtues in Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea.

In response to the absurd there are four options – escape, denial, engagement, and confrontation.

The Theory of Rebellion

First, we may escape the human condition altogether through suicide.  “There is but one truly serious

philosophical problem,” said Camus, “and that is suicide.”  We have to come to terms with the question of  “whether life is or is not worth living.’  To Camus suicide was a complete cop out – the refusal to come to terms with the human condition.  The decision to take one’s own life is tantamount to a decision to leave the game to avoid struggling with life’s tough questions.  To commit suicide is to opt for immediate, permanent nothingness rather than risk experiencing separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and fear of death.  It represents the ultimate form of despair in which our humanity is trumped by nothingness.

Second, we may deny the human condition through a life based on having – owning, possessing, manipulating, and controlling people, power, money, machines, and material wealth.  Through having we try to find security and certainty in an otherwise uncertain world.  But the benefits of having may be illusory and transitory suggests Erich Fromm:  “If I am what I have and what I have is lost, who then am I?’

Third, we may choose to engage the human condition through being – by our creations, our personal relationships, our spirituality, our sense of community, and our stand towards pain, suffering, and death.  But being may also be another form of denial of the human condition, a form of escapism – escape from the absurdness of what it means to be a human being.

Fourth, we may confront the human condition and peacefully rebél against separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and death.

“Rebellion,” according to Camus, “is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition.  It protests, it demands, it insists that the outrage be brought to an end, and that what has up to now been built upon shifting sands should henceforth be founded on rock.”

To rebél is to confront the human condition head on, to face down separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and death.  The problem said Camus is that, “The rebel refuses to approve the condition which he finds himself.”  And, “he is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of a common good which he considers more important than his destiny.”

The rebel, “confronts an order of things which oppresses him with the insistence on a kind of right not to be oppressed beyond the limit he can tolerate.”  Continuing Camus says that, “It is those who know how to rebél at the appropriate moment, against history who really advance its interests.”

Camus’s rebellion was nonviolent.  He was not into human killing.  In his view killing was grounded in nihilism, and to attack nihilism with another form of nihilism made little sense.  “To kill men leads to nothing but killing more men.”

“Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom is living,” but “The point is to live.”

Unlike Jesus’s rebellion against the human condition which was grounded in hope, Camus’s was not.  Camus frequently reminded us that his rebellion was always without hope of affecting the human condition.  There was no “pie in the sky” in Camus’s

world.  “I share with you the same revulsion from evil.  But I do not share your hope, and I continue to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die.”

No words of Camus were ever more prescient than, “We are suffering a reign of terror because human values have been replaced by contempt for others and the worship of efficiency, the desire for freedom by the desire for domination.  It is no longer being just and generous that makes us right; it is being successful.”  And what should we do about this?  Rebél.

Rebellion provides us with the faith to claw meaning out of meaninglessness, the energy to connect with those from whom we are separate, the power to surmount powerlessness, and the strength to face death rather than deny it.