My Collection
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was an extremely handsome, mid 20th-century French Algerian philosopher and writer whose claim to our attention is based on three novels:
The Outsider, The Plage, The Fall and
two philosophical essays: The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel.
Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 and died at the age of 46, inadvertently killed by his publisher Michelle Gallimard when his Facel Vega sports car they were in crashed into a tree. In his pocket was a train ticket he had decided not to use last-minute.
Camus’ fame began with and still largely rests upon his novel of 1942: The Outsider. Set in Camus’ native Algiers, it follows the story of a laconic detached ironic hero called Meursault.
A man who can’t see the point of love or work or friendship, and who one day, somewhat by mistake, shoots dead an Arab man without knowing his own motivations and ends up being put to death partly because he doesn’t show any remorse but not really caring for his fate one way or the other.
The novel captures the state of mind, defined by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, as “Anomie,” a listless, affectless, alienated condition where one feels entirely cut off from others and can’t find a way to share their sympathies or values.
Reading The Outsider has long been a well-known adolescent rite of passage among French and many other teenagers, which isn’t a way of doing it down for a lot of the greatest themes are first tackled at 17 or so.
The hero of The Outsider, Meursault, cannot accept any of the standard answers for why things are the way they are. He sees hypocrisy and sentimentality everywhere and can’t overlook it. He’s a man who can’t accept the normal explanations given to explain things like the education system, the workplace, relationships or the mechanism of government.
He stands outside normal bourgeois life, highly critical of its pinched morality and narrow concerns for money and family.
As Camus put it in an afterword he wrote for the American edition of the book: “Meursault doesn’t play the game. He refuses to lie…”
“…he says what he is, he refuses to hide
his feelings…”
“…and so society immediately feels
threatened.”
Much of the unusual mesmerizing quality
of the book comes from the coolly distant voice in which Meursault speaks to us, his readers. The opening is one of the most legendary in twentieth-century literature and sets the tone.
“Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.”
The ending is stark and is defiant. Meursault condemned to death for a murder committed almost off-hand because it could be interesting to know what it’s like to press the trigger, rejects all consolations and heroically accepts the universe’s total indifference to humankind.
“My last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution…”
“…and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.”
Even if we’re not killers, and we’ll ourselves be really quite sad when our mother dies, the mood of The Outsider is one we’re
all liable to have some experience of. When we have enough freedom to realize we are in a cage but not quite enough freedom to escape it. When no one seems to understand and everything appears a little hopeless, perhaps in the summer before we go to college.
Aside from The Outsider, Camus’ fame rests on an essay published the same year as the novel called The Myth of Sisyphus.
This book, too, has a bold beginning: “There is but one truly serious
the philosophical problem…”
“…and that is suicide.”
“Judging whether life is or is not worth living,”
“…that is the fundamental question of philosophy.”
The reason for this stark choice is in Camus’ eyes because as soon as we start to think seriously, as philosophers do, we will see that life has no meaning and therefore we will be compelled to wonder whether or not we should just be done with it all.
To make sense of this rather extreme claim and thesis, we have to situate Camus in the history of thought, his dramatic announcement that we have to consider killing ourselves because life might be meaningless is premised on a previous notion that life could actually be rich in God-given meaning.
The concept which will sound remote to many of us today and yet we have to bear in mind that for the last two thousand years in the West, a sense that life was meaningful was a given, accorded by one institution above any other — The Christian Church.
Camus stands in a long line of thinkers, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, to Heidegger and Sartre who wrestle with a chilling realization that there is, in fact, no preordained meaning in life.
We’re just biological matter spinning senselessly on a tiny rock, in a corner of an indifferent universe. We were not put here by a benevolent deity and asked to work toward salvation in the
shape of the Ten Commandments, there’s no roadmap and no bigger point and, it’s this realization that lies at the heart of so many of the crisis reported by the thinkers we now know as the existentialists.
A child of despairing modernity, Albert Camus accepts that all our
lives are absurd in the grander scheme but, unlike some philosophers, he ends up resisting utter hopelessness or Nihilism. He argues that we have to live with the knowledge that our efforts will be largely futile, our lives soon forgotten, and our species
irredeemably corrupt and violent and yet we should endure nevertheless.
We are like Sisyphus, the Greek figure ordained by the Gods to roll a boulder up a mountain, and to watch it fall back down again in perpetuity. But ultimately, Camus suggests we should cope as well as we can at whatever we have to do, we have to acknowledge
the absurd background to existence, and then the triumph of the constant possibility of hopelessness.
In his famous formulation, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” This brings us to the most charming and seductive side of Camus, the Camus wants to remind himself and us of the reasons why life can be worth enduring, and who in the process writes with exceptional intensity and wisdom about relationships, nature, the summer, food, and friendship.
As a guide to the reasons to live, Camus is delightful. Many philosophers have been ugly and cut off from their bodies, think of sickly Pascal, crippled Leopardi, sexually unsuccessful Schopenhauer or poor peculiar Nietzsche. Camus was by contrast very good-looking, extremely successful with women for the last ten years of his life, he never had fewer than three girlfriends on the go, and wives as well and had a great dress sense, influenced by James Deen and Humphrey Bogart. It isn’t surprising that he was asked to pose by American Vogue.
These weren’t all just stylistic quirks, once you properly realize that life is absurd you’re on the verge of despair perhaps but also compelled to live life more intensely. Accordingly Came grew committed to and deeply serious about the pleasures of ordinary life.
He said he saw his philosophy as “A lucid invitation to live and to create in the very midst of the desert.” He was a great champion of the ordinary which generally has a hard time finding champions in philosophy and after pages and pages of his dense philosophy, one turns with relief to moments when Camus writes with simplicity in praise of sunshine, kissing or dancing.
He was an outstanding athlete as a young man, once asked by his friend Charles Poncet which he preferred, football or the theater.
Camus is set to have replied: “Football, without hesitation.” Camus played as a goalkeeper for the junior local Algiers team. Racing Universitaire de Algier, which won both the North African Champions Cup and the North African Cup in the
1930’s. The sense of team spirit fraternity and common purpose, appeal to Camus enormously.
When he was asked in the 1950s by a sports magazine for a few words regarding his time with football, he said: “After many years during which I saw many things…”
“what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man…”
“I owe to sport.”
Camus was also the great advocate of the Sun, his beautiful essay Summer in Algiers celebrates the warmth of the water and the brown bodies of women. He writes “For the first time in two thousand years the body has appeared naked on beaches, for twenty centuries men have striven to give decency to Greek insolence a naivety to diminish the flesh and complicate dress but today young men running on Mediterranean beaches repeat the gestures of the athletes of Delos.” He spoke up for a new paganism, based on the immediate pleasures of the body.
This extract from Summer in Algiers: “I recall a magnificent, tall girl who danced all afternoon. She was wearing a jasmine garland on her tight blue dress wet with perspiration from the small of her back to her legs she was laughing as she danced and throwing back her head as she passed the tables she left behind her a mingle scent of flowers and flesh.”
Camus railed against those who would dismiss such things as trivial and longed for something higher, better, purer.
“If there is a sin against this life…” he wrote,
“it consists perhaps not so much into sparing of life,”
“as in hoping for another life and eluding the quiet grandeur of this one.”
In a letter he remarked:
“People attract me insofar as they are impassioned about life and avid for happiness…”
“There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.”
Camus achieved huge acclaim in his lifetime, but the Parisian intellectual community was deeply suspicious of him. He never was a Parisian sophisticate, he was a working-class Pied-Noir, that is someone born in Algeria but of European origin, whose father had died of war-wounds when he was an infant, and whose mother was a cleaning lady.
It isn’t a coincidence that Camus’ favorite philosopher was Montaigne, another very down to earth Frenchmen, and someone one can love as much for what he wrote, as for what he was like. Someone one would have wanted as a wise and a life-enhancing friend. This, too, is what philosophy is about.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre made thinking and philosophy glamorous.
He was born in Paris in 1905. His father, a navy captain, died when he was a baby — and he grew up extremely close to his mother until
she remarried, much to his regret, when he was twelve. Sartre spent most of his life in Paris, where he often went to cafes on the Left Bank. He had a strabismus, a wandering eye, and wore
distinctive, heavy glasses. He was very short (five feet three inches) and frequently described himself as ugly.
By the 60’s Sartre was a household name in both Europe and the United States, and so was his chosen philosophy, Existentialism.
Sartre is famous principally for his book Being and Nothingness (1943), which enhanced his reputation not so much because people could understand his ideas but because they couldn’t quite.
Existentialism was built around a number of key insights:
One: Things are weirder than we think Sartre is acutely attentive to moments when the world reveals itself as far stranger and more uncanny than we normally admit; moments when the logic we ascribe to it day-to-day becomes unavailable, showing things to be highly contingent and even absurd and frightening.
Sartre’s first novel — Nausea, published
in 1938 — is full of evocations of such moments. At one point, the hero, Roquentin, a 30-year-old writer living in a fictional French seaside town, is on a tram. He puts his hand on the seat, but then pulls it back rapidly. Instead of being the most basic and obvious piece of design, scarcely worth a moment’s notice, the seat promptly strikes him as deeply strange; the word ‘seat’ comes loose from its moorings,
the object it refers to shines forth in all its primordial oddity, as if he’s never
seen one before. Roquentin has to force himself to remember that this thing beside him is something for people to sit on. For a terrifying moment, Roquentin has peered into what Sartre calls the ‘absurdity of the world.’
Such a moment goes to the heart of Sartre’s philosophy. To be Sartrean is to be aware of existence as it is when it has been stripped of any of the prejudices and stabilising assumptions lent to us by our day-to-day routines.
We can try out a Sartrean perspective on many aspects of our own lives. Think of what you know as ‘the evening meal with your partner’. Under such a description, it all seems fairly logical, but a Sartrean would strip away the surface normality to show the radical strangeness lurking beneath.
Dinner really means that:
when your part of the planet has spun away from the energy of a distant hydrogen and helium explosion, you slide your knees under strips of a chopped-up tree and put sections of dead animals and plants in your mouth and chew, while next to you, another mammal whose genitals you sometimes touch is doing the same.
Two: We are free
Such weird moments are certainly disorienting and rather scary, but Sartre wants to draw our attention to them for one central reason: because of their liberating dimensions.
Life is a lot odder than we think, but it’s also as a consequence far richer in possibilities. Things don’t have to be quite the way they are.
In the course of fully realising our freedom, we will come up against what Sartre calls the ‘angoisse’ or ‘anguish’ of existence. Everything is (terrifyingly) possible because nothing has any pre-ordained, God-given sense
or purpose.Humans are just making it up as they go along, and are free to cast aside the shackles at any moment.
Three: We shouldn’t live in ‘Bad faith’
Sartre gave a term to the phenomenon of living without taking freedom properly on board. He called it BAD FAITH. We are in bad faith whenever we tell ourselves that things have to be a certain way and shut our eyes to other options. It is bad faith to insist that we have to do a particular kind of work or live with a specific person or make our home in a given place.
The most famous description of ‘bad faith’ comes in Being and Nothingness, when Sartre notices a waiter who strikes him as overly devoted to his role, as if he were first and foremost a waiter rather than a free human
being.
His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the patrons with a step that is a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly: his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer…’
The man (he was probably modelled on someone in Saint-Germain’s Café de Flore) has convinced himself that he is essentially, necessarily a waiter rather than a free creature who could be a jazz pianist or a fisherman on a North Sea trawler.
Four: We’re free to dismantle capitalism. The one factor that most discourages people from experiencing themselves as free is money.
Most of us will shut down a range of possible options (moving abroad, trying out a new career, leaving a partner) by saying, ‘that’s if I didn’t have to worry about money.’
This passivity in the face of money enraged Sartre at a political level. He thought of capitalism as a giant machine designed to create a sense of necessity which doesn’t in fact exist in reality: it makes us tell ourselves we have to work a certain number of hours, buy a particular product or service, and so on. But in this, there is only the denial of freedom– and a refusal to take as seriously as we should the possibility of living in other
ways. It was because of these views that Sartre had a lifelong interest in Marxism.
Marxism seemed in theory to allow people to explore their freedom, by reducing the role played in their lives by material considerations.
Sartre took part in many protests in the streets of Paris in the 60s. Arrested yet again in 1968, President Charles de Gaulle had him pardoned, saying, “you don’t arrest Voltaire.”
Sartre also visited Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and admired them both deeply. As a result of these connections and his radical politics, the FBI kept a large file on Sartre trying to deduce what his suspicious philosophy might
really mean.
Sartre is inspiring in his insistence that
things do not have to be the way they are. He is hugely alive to our unfulfilled potential, as individuals and as a species.
He urges us to accept the fluidity of existence and to create new institutions, habits, outlooks
and ideas.
The admission that life doesn’t have some preordained logic and is not inherently meaningful can be a source of immense relief when we feel oppressed by the weight of tradition and the status quo.
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger is without doubt the most incomprehensible German philosopher that ever lived.
Nothing quite rivals the prose in his masterpiece Being and Time, which is filled with complex compound German words like ‘Seinsvergessenheit’ ‘Bodenständigkeit’ and ‘Wesensverfassung’. Yet beneath the jargon, Heidegger tells us some simple, even at times homespun truths about the meaning of our lives, the sicknesses of our time and the routes to freedom.
We should bother with him.
He was born, and in many ways remained, a rural provincial German, who loved picking mushrooms, walking in the countryside and going to bed early. He hated television, aeroplanes, pop music and processed food. At one time, he’d been a supporter of Hitler, but saw the error of his ways. Much of his life he spent in a hut in the woods, away from modern civilisation.
He diagnosed modern humanity as suffering from a number of diseases of the soul.
Firstly: We have forgotten to notice we’re alive.
We know it in theory, of course, but we aren’t day-to-day properly in touch with the sheer mystery of existence, the mystery of what Heidegger called ‘das Sein’ or in English, ‘Being’.
It’s only at a few odd moments, perhaps late at night, or when we’re ill and have been alone all day, or are on a walk through the countryside, that we come up against the uncanny strangeness of everything: why things exist as they do, why we are here rather than there,
why the world is like it is.
What we’re running away from is a confrontation with the opposite of Being, what Heidegger called: ‘das Nichts’ (The Nothing).
The second problems is we have forgotten that all Being is connected.
Most of the time, our jobs and daily routines make us egoistic and focused. We treat others and nature as means and not as ends.
But occasionally (and again walks in the country are particularly conducive to this realisation), we may step outside our narrow orbit — and take a more expansive view.
We may sense what Heidegger termed ‘the Unity of Being’, noticing for example that we, and that ladybird on the bark, and that rock, and that cloud over there are all in existence right now and are fundamentally united by the basic fact of our common Being.
Heidegger values these moments immensely — and wants us to use them as the springboard to a deeper form of generosity, an overcoming of alienation and egoism and a more profound appreciation of the brief time that remains to us before ‘das Nichts’ claims us in turn.
The third problem is we forget to be free and to live for ourselves .
Much about us isn’t of course very free. We are — in Heidegger’s unusual formulation -‘thrown into the world’ at the start of our lives: thrown into a particular and narrow social milieu, surrounded by rigid attitudes, archaic prejudices and practical necessities not of our own making.
The philosopher wants to help us to overcome this ‘Thrownness’ (‘Geworfenheit’ as he puts it in german)
by understanding it. We need to grasp our psychological, social and professional provincialism — and then rise above it to a more universal perspective.
In so doing, we’ll make the classic Heideggerian journey away from ‘Uneigentlichkeit’ to ‘Eigentlichkeit’ (from Inauthenticity to Authenticity). We will, in essence, start to live for ourselves.
And yet most of the time, for Heidegger, we fail dismally at this task. We merely surrender to a socialised, superficial mode of being he called ‘they-self’ (as opposed to ‘our-selves’).
We follow The Chatter (‘das Gerede’), which we hear about in the newspapers, on TV and in the large cities Heidegger hated to spend time in.
What will help us to pull away from the ‘they-self’ is an appropriately intense focus on our own upcoming death. It’s only when we realise that other people cannot save us from ‘das Nichts’ that we’re likely to stop living for them; to stop worrying so much about what
others think, and to cease giving up the lion’s share of our lives and energies to impress people who never really liked us in the first place.
When in a lecture, in 1961, Heidegger was asked how we should better lead our lives, he replied tersely that we should simply aim to spend more time ‘in graveyards’.
It would be lying to say that Heidegger’s meaning and moral is ever very clear. Nevertheless, what he tells us is intermittently fascinating, wise and surprisingly useful. Despite the extraordinary words and language, in a sense, we know a lot of it already. We merely need
reminding and emboldening to take it seriously, which the odd prose style helps us to do.
We know in our hearts that it is time to overcome our ‘Geworfenheit’, that we should become more conscious of ‘das Nichts’ day-to-day, and that we owe it to ourselves to escape the clutches of ‘das Gerede’ for the sake of ‘Eigentlichkeit’ — with a little help
from that graveyard.
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