Albert Camus, the Absurd, and Football
Some of Camus’ most insightful discoveries were deduced from his experience playing the beautiful game.
“What I know most surely about morality and the duty of man, I owe to football.”
Albert Camus died in a car crash in the small French town of Villeblevin in 1960, in his pocket were the train tickets he decided not to use at the last minute.
Camus was a French-Algerian Philosopher, Author, and journalist. Three years before his death he won the Nobel prize for literature. In his adolescence, he was a passionate lover of Football until he was forced to give up the game at seventeen due to contracting tuberculosis.
Camus is most commonly known for works such as The Outsider, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Plague. Camus’ most notable contribution to Philosophy was centred around the notion of what he called the absurd:
“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
