Transcript Albert Camus: - Integrating Biblical World View into

Albert Camus:
Note to students:
Response is required
in some portions of
this presentation
Illuminating the Problem of the
Human Conscience in Our Time
“O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life,
but exhaust the limits of the possible.”
-- Pindar, Greek poet, 5th century B.C.
The Early Years
• Born in 1913 in Mondovi, a small French Algerian village.
(Arab influence)
• Father died in 1914 from war wound. All he knew about
him was that he had become violently ill at a public
execution. (Reflected in The Stranger)
• Early schooling in Algiers influenced his beliefs about “the
outsider.” (Saw the native Moslem society near school).
• Involvement with theater, art, literature, film, and soccer
influenced his views about life.
“I learned that a ball never arrives from the direction you
expect it. That helped me later in life, especially in
mainland France, where nobody plays straight.”
The Later Years
• In 1933 he enrolled at the University of Algiers and
specialized in philosophy and sociology. (Dissertation was on
the thoughts, writings of St. Augustine – Christian influence)
• Never really held stable employment and contended with
recurring bouts of tuberculosis. (This informed his views
about life being a Sisyphean struggle and his sense of the
Absurd).
• Critical of capital punishment, the Nazi Occupation, and
Marxism-Leninism. (Became a outspoken champion of
individual freedom).
• Won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.
“. . . with what feelings (can I) accept this honor at a time
when other writers in Europe . . . are condemned to silence,
and even at a time when the country of (my) birth is going
through unending misery?”
January 4, 1960:
Albert Camus is
killed in a
traffic accident
outside of Paris.
“I continue to believe that this world had
no ultimate meaning, but I know that
something in it has meaning and that is
man, because he is the only creature to
insist on having one.”
-- Camus, from “Letters to a German Friend”
Camus’ Themes
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The Absurd
Revolt
The Outsider
Guilt and Innocence
Christianity vs.
“Paganism”
• Individual vs. History
and Mass Culture
• Suicide
• The Death Penalty
As we go through the following
screens, connect six of these to
The Stranger.
“Perhaps the greatest inspiration and
example that Camus provides for
contemporary readers is the lesson that
it is still possible for a serious thinker to
face the modern world . . . With hardly
a grain of hope, yet utterly without
cynicism.”
-- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Absurd
(comes from Latin
surdis, meaning
irrational. Also
where we get
mathematical
term “surd” or an
irrational number)
• The concept of absurdity comes
from the idea that there is a fundamental disharmony in our existence.
It results from our human desire for meaning, order and
purpose in life and the blank, indifferent “silence of the
universe.” We inhabit a world that is deaf to our protests.
For Camus, there are three responses to this predicament:
• Physical suicide (he says this is cowardly)
• Religion (he calls this “philosophical suicide”)
• Acceptance (he says this is the only valid solution)
Revolt
(a spirit of
opposition against
any perceived
unfairness,
oppression, or
indignity in the
human condition)
• The rebel, according to Camus,
believes that there is a “common
good more important than his own
destiny.” It is a response to the absurd.
• This rebellion for the good of a community is a core principle
of his ethics and it is one of the things that sets his philosophy
apart from existentialism.
The Outsider
• Camus’ works are often written
from the viewpoint of the
“stranger” or the outsider who
seems to observe everything, even
his own behavior, from an outside
perspective.
• The perspective of the exile
became his hallmark, giving a
cool, objective (“zero-degree”)
precision to his work. It was also
what he longed for in friendships,
community, and brotherhood.
Guilt and
Innocence
• He concludes in the novel
The Fall, that despite our
belief that we are all
righteous, the truth is
everyone is guilty. But,
Camus believes, no
human being has a right
to pass final moral
judgment on another.
Christianity vs.
“Paganism”
• Camus had a pagan
world view, but he also
believed in the Augustinian
sense of original sin,
universal innocence, and
the intrinsic beauty and
value of life. Ultimately, he
believes in the meaningfulness of man.
The Individual vs. History
and Mass Culture
• This is a major theme of early
twentieth-century European
literature, the idea that the rise of
the modern mass civilization and
its suffocating effects of alienation
and dehumanization.
• Camus showed this by having his
characters become by-products of
an automated world. They
became more like robots working
through a meaningless type of life.
Suicide and
Sisyphus
• Camus ultimately felt that suicide was
never an option. But he still had to
address how man faces the absurdity of
existence.
• He uses the myth of Sisyphus to explain.
The myth figure survives the monotony
of existence by finding value, rather than
meaning in life. When we approach the
meaningless with hope, it ceases to
torment us. If our condition is unjust we
have only one way of overcoming it – we
must be just.
The Death Penalty
• Using Camus’ own words:
“Capital punishment is the most
premeditated of murders, to which no
criminal’s deed, however calculated, can
be compared.”
• Camus did not live to see the day the
death penalty was abolished in Europe,
but it is now an essential prerequisite for
membership in the European Union.
So is he an existentialist?
• Camus himself denied that he was an existentialist.
• What do you think? What would or would not make Albert Camus’
philosophy existential?
“It would not, then, be much of an error to read
The Stranger as a story of a man who, without
any heroic posturing, is willing to die for the
truth. Once, paradoxically again, I said that I
tried to symbolize in my character the only Christ
of which we are worthy.”
-- Albert Camus