Albert Camus was a French-Algerian journalist, playwright, novelist, philosophical

essayist, and Nobel laureate. Though he was neither by advanced training nor profession a
philosopher, he nevertheless made important, forceful contributions to a wide range of issues in
moral philosophy in his novels, reviews, articles, essays, and speechesfrom terrorism and
political violence to suicide and the death penalty. He is often described as an existentialist
writer, though he himself disavowed the label. He began his literary career as a political
journalist and as an actor, director, and playwright in his native Algeria. Later, while living in
occupied France during WWII, he became active in the Resistance and from 1944-47 served as
editor-in-chief of the newspaper Combat. By mid-century, based on the strength of his three
novels (The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall) and two book-length philosophical essays (The
Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel), he had achieved an international reputation and readership. It
was in these works that he introduced and developed the twin philosophical ideasthe concept
of the Absurd and the notion of Revoltthat made him famous. These are the ideas that people
immediately think of when they hear the name Albert Camus spoken today. The Absurd can be
defined as a metaphysical tension or opposition that results from the presence of human
consciousnesswith its ever-pressing demand for order and meaning in lifein an essentially
meaningless and indifferent universe. Camus considered the Absurd to be a fundamental and
even defining characteristic of the modern human condition. The notion of Revolt refers to both
a path of resolved action and a state of mind. It can take extreme forms such as terrorism or a
reckless and unrestrained egoism (both of which are rejected by Camus), but basically, and in
simple terms, it consists of an attitude of heroic defiance or resistance to whatever oppresses
human beings. In awarding Camus its prize for literature in 1957, the Nobel Prize committee
cited his persistent efforts to illuminate the problem of the human conscience in our time. He
was honored by his own generation, and is still admired today, for being a writer of conscience
and a champion of imaginative literature as a vehicle of philosophical insight and moral truth. He
was at the height of his careerat work on an autobiographical novel, planning new projects for
theatre, film, and television, and still seeking a solution to the lacerating political turmoil in his
homelandwhen he died tragically in an automobile accident in January 1960.
Camus's understanding of absurdity is best captured in an image, not an argument: of
Sisyphus straining to push his rock up the mountain, watching it roll down, then descending after
the rock to begin all over, in an endless cycle. Like Sisyphus, humans cannot help but continue to
ask after the meaning of life, only to see our answers tumble back down. If we accept this thesis
about life's essential absurdity, and Camus's anti-philosophical approach to philosophical
questions, we cannot help but ask: What role is left for rational analysis and argument? Doesn't
Camus the philosopher preside over the death of philosophy in answering the question whether
to commit suicide by abandoning the terrain of argument and analysis and turning to metaphor to
answer it? If life has no fundamental purpose or meaning that reason can articulate, we cannot
help asking about why we continue to live and to reason. Might not Silenus be right in declaring
that it would have been better not to have been born, or to die as soon as possible? And, as

Francis Jeanson wrote long before his famous criticism of The Rebel that precipitated the rupture
between Camus and Sartre, isn't absurdist philosophy a contradiction in terms, strictly speaking
no philosophy at all but an anti-rational posture that ends in silence (Jeanson 1947). If the
absence of God is the key theme of Nuptials, and the inevitability of absurdity is the key theme
of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus incorporates both of these into The Rebel, but alongside them
he now stresses revolt. The act of rebellion assumes the status of a primary datum of human
experience, like the Cartesian cogito taken by Sartre as his point of departure. Camus first
expressed this directly under the inspiration of his encounter with Being and Nothingness. But in
calling it revolt he takes it in a direction sharply different than Sartre, who built from the
cogito an essay in phenomenological ontology. Ignoring completely the ontological dimension,
Camus is now concerned with immediate issues of human social experience. Revolt, to be sure,
still includes the rebellion against absurdity that Camus described in The Myth of Sisyphus, and
once again he will speak of rebelling against our own mortality and the universe's
meaninglessness and incoherence. But The Rebel begins with the kind of revolt that rejects
oppression and slavery, and protests against the world's injustice. Camus sees this question of
suicide as a natural response to an underlying premise, namely that life is absurd in a variety of
ways. As we have seen, both the presence and absence of life (i.e., death) give rise to the
condition: it is absurd to continually seek meaning in life when there is none, and it is absurd to
hope for some form of continued existence after death given that the latter results in our
extinction. But Camus also thinks it absurd to try to know, understand, or explain the world, for
he sees the attempt to gain rational knowledge as futile. Here Camus pits himself against science
and philosophy, dismissing the claims of all forms of rational analysis: That universal reason,
practical or ethical, that determinism, those categories that explain everything are enough to
make a decent man laugh (MS, 21). These kinds of absurdity are driving Camus's question
about suicide, but his way of proceeding evokes another kind of absurdity, one less well-defined,
namely, the absurd sensibility (MS, 2, tr. changed). This sensibility, vaguely described, seems
to be an intellectual malady (MS, 2) rather than a philosophy. He regards thinking about it as
provisional and insists that the mood of absurdity, so widespread in our age does not arise
from, but lies prior to, philosophy. Camus's diagnosis of the essential human problem rests on a
series of truisms (MS, 18) and obvious themes (MS, 16). But he doesn't argue for life's
absurdity or attempt to explain ithe is not interested in either project, nor would such projects
engage his strength as a thinker. I am interested not so much in absurd discoveries as in their
consequences (MS, 16). Accepting absurdity as the mood of the times, he asks above all
whether and how to live in the face of it. Does the absurd dictate death (MS, 9)? But he does
not argue this question either, and rather chooses to demonstrate the attitude towards life that
would deter suicide. In other words, the main concern of the book is to sketch ways of living our
lives so as to make them worth living despite their being meaningless. According to Camus,
people commit suicide because they judge life is not worth living (MS, 4). But if this
temptation precedes what is usually considered philosophical reasoning, how to answer it? In
order to get to the bottom of things while avoiding arguing for the truth of his statements, he
depicts, enumerates, and illustrates. As he says in The Rebel, the absurd is an experience that

must be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence, of Descartes's

methodical doubt (R, 4). The Myth of Sisyphus seeks to describe the elusive feeling of
absurdity in our lives, rapidly pointing out themes that run through all literatures and all
philosophies (MS, 12). Appealing to common experience, he tries to render the flavor of the
absurd with images, metaphors, and anecdotes that capture the experiential level he regards as
lying prior to philosophy. From the time he first heard the story of his fathers literal nausea and
revulsion after witnessing a public execution, Camus began a vocal and lifelong opposition to the
death penalty. Executions by guillotine were a common public spectacle in Algeria during his
lifetime, but he refused to attend them and recoiled bitterly at their very mention. Condemnation
of capital punishment is both explicit and implicit in his writings. For example, in The Stranger
Merseaults long confinement during his trial and his eventual execution are presented as part of
an elaborate, ceremonial ritual involving both public and religious authorities. The grim
rationality of this process of legalized murder contrasts markedly with the sudden, irrational,
almost accidental nature of his actual crime. Similarly, in The Myth of Sisyphus, the would-be
suicide is contrasted with his fatal opposite, the man condemned to death, and we are continually
reminded that a sentence of death is our common fate in an absurd universe.Camuss opposition
to the death penalty is not specifically philosophical. That is, it is not based on a particular moral
theory or principle (such as Cesare Beccarias utilitarian objection that capital punishment is
wrong because it has not been proven to have a deterrent effect greater than life imprisonment).
Camuss opposition, in contrast, is humanitarian, conscientious, almost visceral. Like Victor
Hugo, his great predecessor on this issue, he views the death penalty as an egregious barbarism
an act of blood riot and vengeance covered over with a thin veneer of law and civility to make
it acceptable to modern sensibilities. That it is also an act of vengeance aimed primarily at the
poor and oppressed, and that it is given religious sanction, makes it even more hideous and
indefensible in his view.