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Albert Camus’ Philosophy of Love

Article in Philosophical Investigations · March 2021

DOI: 10.1111/phin.12312

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DOI: 10.1111/phin.12312
Philosophical Investigations :  2021
ISSN 0190-0536

Albert Camus’ Philosophy of Love

Paul G. Neiman, Weber State University

Abstract
Albert Camus does not provide a direct or sustained exploration of
romantic love. Instead, love is addressed only indirectly in The Myth of
Sisyphus, and sporadically in other writings. This article analyses the
experience of absurdity in love. Absurdity clears away the social,
cultural, and philosophical ideals of love to focus on the actual
experience of love. With this in mind, a positive account of Camus’
philosophy of love is developed from several different works. This shows
that Camus’ philosophy of love centres on the biological feelings of love,
which are temporary, non-exclusive, and do not imply commitment.

I. Introduction: Albert Camus and the Philosophy of Love

Albert Camus has the reputation of someone who enjoyed being in love.
Robert Royal reports that “Camus wrote to five separate women the
week before he died, telling each that she was ‘the love of his life. . .’”1
Beyond the “flirtations, amorous adventures, the countless conquests and
brief encounters,” Elizabeth Hawes lists significant loving relationships
that Camus maintained, often simultaneously: “In addition to his two
marriages and his long affair with Maria Casares, he had significant
shorter affairs with Patricia Blake, the actress Catherine Sellers, and the
young art student named in biographies only as Mi.”2 Oliver Todd offers
this explanation: “As part of the infinite richness of existence, Camus
believed in loving several women at the same time. With those he loved
passionately, he went from love to affection, maintaining a tenderness for
them all.”3 And yet Camus is also reported to have felt guilty, especially
about the impact of these love affairs on his wife Francine, whom he

1. Royal (2014).
2. Hawes (2009: 213).
3. Todd (2000: 234).

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2 Philosophical Investigations
claimed to have “never stopped loving in my bad way.”4 Despite his
need for “women as friends and lovers,” Camus proposed to his second
wife, Francine, but “without swearing to be faithful to her.”5 According
to Hawes, Camus “wanted to have une vie de famille [a family life] and
une vie de passion [life of passion], which were separate compartments,
but he had not foreseen the complicating issues of honor, loyalty, and
responsibility.”6 This brief sketch suggests a person experiencing the
absurdity of love: strong feelings of love for multiple women that include
but go beyond sexual desire, which are in conflict with social norms that
value commitment to a single individual, especially as expressed through
marriage.
In his finished works, Camus does not provide a direct or sustained
exploration of romantic love. Instead, love is addressed only indirectly in
The Myth of Sisyphus through an examination of Don Juan as an absurd
hero, and only sporadically or incidentally in his other writings. Camus
did sketch out a third cycle on love, which was to consist of an essay
centred on the myth of Nemesis, a novel, The First Man, and a play,
“Don Faust.” But of these, Camus left behind only a draft of The First
Man, recovered from the wreckage of the accident that took his life. It is
tempting to imagine that Camus would have resolved the contradiction
between his desire for multiple loves and the constraints of social and
moral norms. Grace Whistler speculates that in the third cycle, “Camus’
ethics would have continued to embody this focus on love as a kind of
human solidarity, not abstracting from life, or upholding theoretical ide-
als, but responding to the Other with love and compassion.”7 Regardless
of how Camus’ thought would have developed, there is simply not
enough of the proposed third cycle from which to draw a complete phi-
losophy of love. As a result, most of the literature on Camus either fails
to address romantic love or Don Juan at all, or only briefly mentions
Don Juan as an exemplar of absurd living.8
There is, though, sufficient material in Camus’ existing writings to
develop a philosophical account of love. In his Notebooks, for example,

4. Ibid (373).
5. Ibid (98).
6. Hawes (2009: 224).
7. Whistler (2020: 56).
8. Bronner (1999), Parker (1986), Sagi (2002), Sherman (2009), Sprintzen (1988) and
Thody (1961) do not address romantic love or Don Juan at all, while Bree (1959), Will-
hoite (1968) and Foley (2008) only briefly discuss Don Juan as an exemplar of absurd liv-
ing. John Cruickshank (1960) provides a detailed discussion of Don Juan, though his
focus is to further explain the absurd hero rather than seek to understand Camus’ philoso-
phy of love. Anthony Rizzuto (1998) provides a significant exploration of Camus’ views
on love and sexuality; however, Rizzuto often views love and sexuality as opposed to one
another, rather than seeing sexuality as part of love. This is addressed further below.

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 Paul G. Neiman 3
Camus writes, “A love which cannot be faced with reality is not a real
love.”9 This suggests, consistent with Whistler’s speculation about the
third cycle, that Camus’ philosophy of love must be grounded in the
actual, lived experience of love, rather than abstractions or theoretical
ideals. The first stage of developing Camus’ philosophy of love, then, is
to understand the experience of absurdity as it arises from a conflict
between the love that is desired and socially recognised, and the love
that is experienced. Camus argues, “Absurdism, like methodical doubt,
has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley.”10 An experience
of the absurdity of love, if it is confronted rather than eluded, can simi-
larly ‘wipe the slate clean’ of social and cultural norms that fail to recog-
nise the reality of people’s lived experiences of love. Camus argues that
the appropriate response to absurdity is revolt. The second stage of
developing Camus’ philosophy of love is to identify what emerges from
a revolt that embraces, rather than rejects or covers over, the actual
experience of love.
The first stage of this argument begins in section two, which provides
a brief explanation of absurdity and the three responses Camus considers:
suicide, philosophical suicide, and revolt. Section three applies this analy-
sis to the feeling of absurdity that arises when the frameworks persons
create to understand and give meaning to relationships as loving fail to
function. This experience of absurdity, and the revolt that follows, clears
away the social and cultural ideals of love, as well as the philosophical
arguments that support them. The second stage of the development of
Camus’ philosophy of love starts from the ‘blind alley’ created by
absurdity and develops a positive account of love from Camus’ various
writings.

II. The Feeling and Concept of Absurdity

“The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and
the unreasonable silence of the world.”11 This is the closest Camus
comes to a definition of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus. His aim is
“rather an enumeration of the feelings that may admit of the absurd.”12
The goal of this enumeration is to connect readers with their own expe-
riences of absurdity and in this way create the proper mood or climate

9. Camus (2010a: 120).

10. Camus (1991b: 10).
11. Camus (1991a: 28).
12. Ibid (14, n. 4). P€
olzler (2018) argues that Camus distinguishes between the feeling of
the absurd, which is a mood, and the appearances of the absurd, which are emotions, such
as weariness, anxiety, strangeness, nausea and horror.

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4 Philosophical Investigations
from which one can consider the human situation. For example, Camus
writes,
It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in
the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal,
sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday
according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the
time. But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weari-
ness tinged with amazement.13
In this case, absurdity arises from the conflict between the value persons
consciously or unconsciously assign to work, and the awareness that they
have been following the same, tired, and ultimately meaningless routine.
More generally, absurdity results when the conceptual, cultural, philo-
sophical or social framework persons use to find value in their actions or
lives fails to function. These frameworks are transmitted as cultural or
social norms, by philosophy, religion and literature, by poets and man-
agers, television shows and movies. For example, picking up an extra
shift at work, completing a project over the weekend, or defending the
company on social media, may seem meaningful within a framework in
which one identifies who they are with who they are at work, or within
a framework of reciprocal loyalty between employee and management.
But “the stage sets collapse” when the company replaces employees with
independent contractors, who work more cheaply and without benefits,
in order to increase profits or raise share prices. Absurdity “springs from
a comparison” between the desire for meaningful work and the belief in
one’s value to the company, and the revealed reality that one was never
anything more than a replaceable part.14
For those who find work genuinely and intrinsically meaningful,
regardless of how long it lasts or how it might change, Camus’ enumera-
tion of absurdity offers other absurd experiences. The feeling of absurdity
can also emerge from one’s relationship with nature or with other peo-
ple, in the search for absolute knowledge, or through attempting to
understand personal identity.15 If there is one experience of absurdity
that is perhaps universal, it is the realisation that life does not go on for-
ever:
Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he
asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to
time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain
point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He
belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his

13. Camus (1991a: 13-14).

14. Ibid (30).
15. Ibid (13-22).

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 Paul G. Neiman 5
worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas
everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of flesh is the
absurd.16
In this case, the experience of absurdity arises from the understanding
that the end of one’s life, or even just the end of a period of one’s life
(i.e., this was the time when I worked at. . .) is near and moving inex-
orably closer, whereas previously it had always floated comfortably on
the horizon. Absurdity arises from the contrast between persons’ desire,
for example, to see a friend or visit a place just one more time, and the
realisation that this shall never occur. The framework had contained an
implicit guarantee that there would always be a next time, located safely
in the indefinite future. Sudden death, a pandemic, or just the march of
time can create the experience of absurdity that reveals the reality that
that future was never assured.
In each instance of Camus’ enumeration of the absurd, the framework
persons construct to understand themselves, their lives, or their relation-
ships with others or the world itself, fails to function. Camus argues,
“The mind’s deepest desire. . .is an insistence on familiarity, an appetite
for clarity.”17 It is inevitable that persons construct frameworks that
enable them to find this familiarity and clarity that seems to make expe-
riences, or life itself, meaningful. But these frameworks also, perhaps
unavoidably, break down in the face of experience. The absurd thus
brings persons back to the reality of their immediate experience: “This
heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can
touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge,
and the rest is construction.”18 The ‘construction’ or framework previ-
ously used to understand and give meaning to experiences falls away,
revealing the reality of their immediate experience. The somewhat dis-
orienting, depressing feeling of absurdity arises from the realisation that
the framework through which one had understood the world, found
meaning and comfort in it, has instead obscured the reality of this expe-
rience.
Camus considers three responses to absurdity: suicide, philosophical
suicide or a leap of faith, and revolt. Both suicide and philosophical sui-
cide represent a refusal to confront the reality the absurd has laid bare.
Absurdity “is that divorce between the mind that desires and the world
that disappoints.”19 Suicide eliminates “the mind that desires” by elimi-
nating the subject of those desires; philosophical suicide eliminates the

16. Ibid (13-14).

17. Ibid (17).
18. Ibid (19).
19. Ibid (50).

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6 Philosophical Investigations
“world that disappoints” by giving in to hope at the expense of lucidity.
For example, one might elude the absurdity of meaningless work by
imagining a future, perhaps in retirement or after a promotion, which
shall retroactively make each day of drudgery worthwhile. This frame-
work covers over the reality of human experience without actually
changing it. The reality is that the hoped-for promotion or retirement
may never come, or if it does, it may not be as satisfying as one imag-
ined. Suicide and philosophical suicide respond to the absurd by “Negat-
ing one of the terms of the opposition,” which “amounts to escaping”
the absurd, rather than confronting it.20
Camus thus recommends revolt as the only response consistent with
the absurd experience. What the absurd person “demands of himself is to
live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is, and
to bring in nothing that is not certain. . .he wants to find out if it is pos-
sible to live without appeal.”21 To revolt, one must not surrender one’s
desire for meaning – to do so would be a form of suicide; but one must
also never cease to realise that this meaning does not exist in the world
as it is given in experience. A person in revolt thus does not cease to
desire meaningful work. But once absurdity has removed the framework
that promises that such meaning can be found, a person in revolt can
confront the meaninglessness of their present work-life honestly. This
might motivate one to make changes, such as by seeking meaningful
work from a different employer or in a different field. But revolt is not a
‘solution’ that delivers desire-satisfaction. A person who revolts against
the absurdity of meaningless work does not simply replace one failed
framework, which sought meaning in loyal service or the promise of a
future retirement, with another framework that promises meaningful
work. The person in revolt – the rebel – instead attempts to live with
reality as it actually is. To “live without appeal” means to live without
appealing to a framework that provides comfort and familiarity at the
expense of an honest account of one’s present experience. This is not to
say that meaningful work does not exist or cannot be successfully sought.
Instead, it is a demand that one stay true to the evidence of their present
experience, rather than simply hope for a future in which one’s desires
are satisfied. An absurd person “devoid of hope and conscious of being
so has ceased to belong to the future.”22 Thus, what is problematic about
the frameworks mentioned above is their promise of meaningful work,
which always seems to lie just over the horizon.

20. Ibid (53).

21. Ibid (53).
22. Ibid (32).

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 Paul G. Neiman 7
The next step in developing Camus’ philosophy of love is to explore
the experience of absurdity in love. Absurdity arises when the frame-
works persons construct to understand and give meaning to their rela-
tionships fail to function. Revolt clears away the frameworks of love that
rely on abstractions from immediate experience, make promises about a
future that is uncertain or limit persons’ experience to what is socially
recognised by others as love. In this way, the analysis of the absurdity of
love shows what Camus’ theory of love rejects in order to focus on the
reality of the immediate experience of love. Absurdism thus ‘wipes the
slate clean’ of abstractions and ideals of love that are inconsistent with
experience. This allows for the development of a positive account of
Camus’ philosophy of love in section four.

III. The Absurdity of Love

The absurdity of love arises when the framework used to understand

love and give meaning to relationships fails to make sense of persons’
lived experiences of love. These frameworks are found in cliches,
movies, books, myths, religions, and philosophies of love. For example,
the concept of ‘soulmates’, or more generally the idea that two people
are ‘meant to be’ together, can make a relationship appear comforting
and permanent. According to the myth related by Aristophanes in Plato’s
Symposium, human beings were originally “completely round. . .they had
four hands each, as many legs as hands, and two faces.”23 After a failed
coup attempt on the gods, Zeus cut each of these beings in half. “This,
then, is the source of our desire to love each other. Love is born into
every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature
together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human
nature.”24 A relationship with one’s soulmate makes one feel ‘complete’,
and signifies a deep connection that shall last forever.
This same soulmates-framework is supported by Robert Nozick’s phi-
losophy of love. According to Nozick, love is the intention to form a
‘we’, a joint identity characterised by having one’s “own well-be-
ing. . .tied up with that of someone you love romantically.” 25 This
entails a willingness to “limit or curtail [one’s] own decision-making
power and rights,” which helps to ensure that the couple develops shared
values, interests, and properties.26 Love, then, results in a union of two

23. Plato (1997: 189a-190e).

24. Ibid (191d).
25. Nozick (1989: 70-71).
26. Ibid (70-71).

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8 Philosophical Investigations
people who are uniquely suited for each other, such that no other person
with any other combination of characteristics will fit quite as well:
The feeling that there is just ‘one right person’ in the world for you,
implausible beforehand – what lucky accident made that one unique
person inhabit your century – becomes true after the we is formed.
Now your identity is wrapped up in that particular we with that partic-
ular person, so for the particular you you now are, there is just one
other person who is right.27
Nozick thus defends the concept of soulmates, modified from Plato’s
myth to suggest that individuals create their soulmate rather than find
them pre-existing in the world. The result, though, is the same: there is
one, perfect person with whom one can have a deep connection that
will last forever.
The soulmates-framework satisfies the mind’s desire for meaning,
comfort and familiarity within a relationship by assuring one of its special
status and permanence. Regardless of whether the relationship is joyous
or merely tolerable, the soulmates-framework confirms that one is in the
right place, with the right person. But as anyone who has had their heart
broken can attest, the belief one has found their soulmate is no guarantee
that the love, or the relationship, will last. The reality that the soul-
mates-framework covers over is that most loving relationships end. Eliza-
beth Brake, for example, estimates the divorce rate in the United States
to be 40%.28 Of course, not all marriages arise out of love, but this fig-
ure also does not include all of the non-matrimonial, loving relationships
that end, despite people’s fervent beliefs that they and their partner were
a perfect fit. A 2017 YouGov poll of 2,051 adults in the United King-
dom found that 33% had said “I love you” to 3 or more partners, with
the share increasing in older age brackets.29 While these data lack the
specificity needed to analyse how often people have experienced the end
of genuine love, it does suggest that the end of love is not an uncom-
mon experience. The feeling of absurdity thus arises when a framework
that promises that love is permanent, whether grounded in myth or
philosophical argument, fails to make sense of the reality that love ends
and relationships fail.30

27. Ibid (81).

28. Brake (2012: 30).
29. YouGov (2017).
30. It need not be one’s own love or relationship that ends to create an experience of
absurdity. Much as the death of a friend or relative can cause one to realise their own
mortality, so too can the dissolution of other people’s relationships, which one had
thought were permanent, lead to a realisation of the impermanence of one’s own relation-
ships.

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 Paul G. Neiman 9
In this example of the absurdity of love, one is left with a contradic-
tion between a desire for love’s permanence and the reality that love
might end, or already has ended. According to Camus, a person experi-
encing absurdity is faced with three options: suicide, philosophical sui-
cide or revolt. Suicide eliminates the desire for love’s permanence by
eliminating the subject of that desire. Philosophical suicide is an attempt
to reconstruct the soulmates-framework by once again covering over or
ignoring the reality that love ends. For example, one might hope that
the end of a relationship is only a temporary setback, or that one day,
perhaps when each partner ‘is ready’, or has ‘learned the lessons’ they
could not understand while together, the relationship will resume. Alter-
natively, one might retroactively deny that a former partner was one’s
soulmate at all. If, as the soulmates-framework promises, true love is per-
manent, then any relationship that ends cannot have been true love. As
Camus notes, “There are many ways of leaping, the essential being to
leap.”31
Nozick seems to commit this form of philosophical suicide by ruling
out the ways that people might cease to be in love. First, Nozick dis-
counts the possibility that a person in love could find a better match,
and so ‘trade-up’. Nozick argues, “A willingness to trade up, to destroy
the very we you largely identify with, would then be a willingness to
destroy your self in the form of your extended self.”32 If self-harm is
irrational, and leaving a loving ‘we’ harms oneself, a rational person in
love will never cease to love. Second, Nozick argues people in a loving
relationship cannot drift apart. Since the formation of a ‘we’ requires giv-
ing up autonomy to the unit, lovers will act and change only in ways
that are chosen by, and are acceptable to, the ‘we’.33 Nozick concludes,
“One could not, therefore, intend to link into another we unless one had
ceased to identify with a current one – unless, that is, one had already
ceased to love.”34 Nozick’s argument commits philosophical suicide
because rather than confront the reality of people’s experience of love,
which includes both trading up and drifting apart, Nozick sticks to the
framework, and insists that a relationship that ends was never truly a lov-
ing ‘we’ in the first place. Confronted with absurdity, the soulmates-
framework can be reconstructed only by ignoring or covering over the
reality that love ends.

31. Camus (1991a: 42).

32. Nozick (1989: 78).
33. Keller (2000: 171) provides a detailed account of how lovers change only in ways that
ensures love lasts. Insofar as Keller and Nozick assume that love is an equal partnership,
such that the interests and pursuits of the couple are always jointly chosen, they also cover
over the reality of power imbalances and biases, especially gender biases, in relationships.
34. Nozick (1989: 78).

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10 Philosophical Investigations
For Camus, the appropriate response to the absurdity of love is revolt.
Absurdity in love. . .
. . .finds its expression in the opposition between what lasts and what
does not last. Granting that there is but one way of lasting, which is last-
ing eternally, and that there is no middle way. We belong to the world
that does not last. And all that does not last – and nothing but what
does not last – is ours. Thus it is a matter of rescuing love from eternity
or at least from those who dress it up in the image of eternity.35
The absurdity of love is the tension between the desire for permanence
in love and the reality that love ends, which the absurd person “main-
tains constantly by solitary effort.”36 To revolt, one must accept that
feelings of love may create or include a desire for love to be permanent,
while at the same time recognising the reality that the end of love is
always a possibility. Revolt is thus inconsistent with any framework that
covers over persons’ actual experiences of love, including the end of
love. As discussed further in the next section, this suggests that Camus
understands love as a temporary experience, rather than a permanent
state of a relationship.
The absurdity of love can also arise when one’s feelings of love are
not recognised as love by others, or by society more generally. Carrie
Jenkins’ philosophy of love illustrates this possibility when she defines
love as both a biological and social phenomenon. Biologically, love is
defined by examining the chemical reactions in the brains of people who
report being in love. Following the research of Helen Fisher, Jenkins
writes, lust “is associated primarily with testosterone, romantic love with
dopamine and attachment with oxytocin and vasopressin.”37 While
Fisher identifies romantic love with dopamine, Jenkins argues for a more
expansive view of the feelings and chemicals that constitute love.
Regardless, biological love is reduced to how love feels. But Jenkins
argues that love is also a social construct, which influences both what
people regard as love, and how people think about and act towards those
for whom they feel biological love. The social construct “serves to har-
ness. . .a bundle of powerful (potentially disruptive) feelings and desires,
channelling them into a safe, stable, nuclear family structure.”38 Jenkins
describes the social construct of love as a composite image built from the
themes embedded in social and cultural norms, such as living together,

35. Camus (2010b: 56).

36. Camus (1991a: 55).
37. Jenkins (2017: 22). Jenkins (2016) also raises some problems with relying on self-re-
ports of love.
38. Jenkins (2017: 98).

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 Paul G. Neiman 11
exclusivity or monogamy, being physically intimate, having sex, and
viewing one’s relationship as permanent.
The social construct of love, as Jenkins defines it, provides some of
the source material for the construction of the frameworks persons use
to understand and find meaning in their relationships. It is this social
construct that the absurd person revolts against when they realise,
through an experience of absurdity, that it fails to give meaning and
familiarity to their experiences of love. Jenkins herself seems to have
experienced absurdity: she reports biological feelings of love for two
men, and yet because the social construct fails to recognise polyamory as
love, she cannot claim to love both of her partners.39 However, Jenkins
refuses to commit philosophical suicide by covering over the reality of
either her feelings of love or the importance of love being socially recog-
nised:
I can’t just stop caring about monogamy norms because too many
other people care about them. . .it’s impossible for me to stop caring
about whether my situation counts as a genuine case of romantic love
because I know that its being recognized as such could be a powerful
way of convincing people to take my relationships seriously.40
The appropriate response is thus revolt, which Camus describes as the
“certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to
accompany it.”41 Revolt does not free one from the constraints of the
social construct of love, but it does create an “inner freedom,” which
means that absurd persons “feel free with regard to themselves,” and
enjoy “a freedom with regard to common rules.”42 For Jenkins, one
might imagine that revolt means acceptance of the reality that the social
norm of monogamy is not likely to change any time soon, and yet,
despite this ‘crushing fate’, she writes a book advocating for a more
inclusive social construct of love, and starts the Metaphysics of Love pro-
ject to reinvigorate interest in the philosophy of love.43 More generally,
revolt here means to continue feeling love, even in the absence of
social recognition, yet without ignoring the importance of that social
recognition.
Thus far, the development of Camus’ philosophy of love has focused
on what love is not. Love is not defined through any framework that
covers over, ignores or excludes the lived experience of love. Thus, love
cannot be defined through concepts like soulmates or permanence, nor

39. Ibid (102).

40. Ibid (103).
41. Camus (1991a: 54).
42. Ibid (59).
43. https://www.themetaphysicsoflove.com/.

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12 Philosophical Investigations
by a social construct that excludes what persons actually experience as
love. The absurd person is, as Camus says, a rebel “who says no, but
whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.”44 One can refuse or resist
the frameworks that assure one that love is permanent and socially recog-
nised, but one cannot renounce the existence of the desire for love to
have these traits. Maintaining awareness of absurdity requires holding on
to both the desires that love imparts and the reality that their satisfaction
is uncertain. But the absurd person in revolt also “says yes, from the
moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.”45 Now that absurdity
has cleared away the frameworks that cover over the reality of love,
Camus’ writings can be examined to understand what the absurd person
says “yes” to in love.

IV. Camus’ Philosophy of Love

Don Juan is an exemplar of the absurd person, and it is in this context

that Camus addresses love most directly. Camus writes,
We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a
collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible.
But of love I know only that mixture of desire, affection, and intelli-
gence that binds me to this or that creature. That compound is not the
same for another person. I do not have the right to cover all these
experiences with the same name.46
Each individual experience of love is its own unique blend of feelings
and characteristics. Thus, one cannot compare their feelings for x with
their feelings for y, and use the similarities and differences to distinguish
between essential and accidental features of love. For Don Juan, and per-
haps Camus as well, each love is unique, and to be in love with, say,
Maria Cesares is not the same as to be in love with Catherine Sellers.
The fact that social norms of marriage and monogamy often insist that a
person give up one partner in order to love another does not diminish
the feelings one experiences for both.
Love thus ought to be understood as an experience rather than a sta-
tus or state of a relationship. Yet, socially, love is often treated as a series
of checkboxes – dating, marriage, house, children, living and dying
together in old age. This view of love abstracts away from what is actu-
ally felt for another person, so that love becomes something to achieve,
rather than something to experience. Each achievement may then

44. Camus (1991b: 13).

45. Ibid (13).
46. Camus (1991a: 74).

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 Paul G. Neiman 13
become nothing more than a step to the next goal. If total love is
achieved when the final step has been taken, then there is nothing left of
love to experience. This explains Camus’ comment, “The mad thing
about love is that one wants to hurry and lose the interim. In this way
one wants to get closer to the end.”47 The absurdity of love is the
strength of the desire to have everything with another person coming
into conflict with the realisation that doing so just brings one closer to
the end of love.
This suggests that the absurd person should focus on the passionate,
joyful feelings of love as they are experienced, rather than seek to obtain
the symbols or status of love. Don Juan does this by seeking out a new
relationship, and a new feeling of love, long before his current feelings
end: “If he leaves a woman it is not absolutely because he has ceased to
desire her. A beautiful woman is always desirable. But he desires another,
and no, this is not the same thing.”48 These encounters are typically
defined as mere lust, or perhaps infatuation, but never love.49 For Don
Juan, though, there “is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to
be both short-lived and exceptional.”50 Rizzuto explains, “If it were not
unique and passing, love would be caught in the web of enduring
human relations, in situations that require couples to work their union
through the endurance of time.”51 Rather than risk the possibility that
love will turn stale, or develop into a ‘mature love’ devoid of feeling,
Don Juan leaves in search of a new experience of love.
However, Rizzuto argues that the willingness to move from lover to
lover shows that Don Juan is more interested in sex than love. In sup-
port of his view, Rizzuto points to this passage: “But it is indeed because
he [Don Juan] loves them with the same passion and each time with his
whole self that he must repeat his gift and his profound quest.”52 Riz-
zuto’s interpretation appeals to a framework of love that requires mono-
gamy and commitment:
Don Juan’s commitment of his entire person to the erotic act seems, at
first glance, to resemble the passionate attention a lover might give to
an irreplaceable beloved. ‘Each time,’ however, transforms that com-
mitment into a succession of intensely pleasurable seductions. ‘His
entire being’ also underlines the absence of all that is interpersonal in
the experience of love where the woman is solicited.53

47. Camus (2010b: 255).

48. Camus (1991a: 71).
49. See, for example, Solomon (2002). Nozick (1989: 70) also argues that infatuation
“transforms itself into continuing romantic love or else it disappears.”
50. Camus (1991a: 74).
51. Rizzuto (1998: 38).
52. Camus (1991a: 69).
53. Rizzuto (1998: 54).

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14 Philosophical Investigations
From within this framework, Don Juan’s actions are not romantic love,
which requires monogamy, commitment and perhaps the absence of pas-
sion or sexual pleasure as love transitions into ‘mature love’ over time.
But while Camus says Don Juan must be understood with reference to
what he “commonly symbolizes: the ordinary seducer and sexual ath-
lete,” Camus also points out what makes Don Juan different: “he is con-
scious, and that is why he is absurd.”54 An ordinary seducer can be
dismissed as someone controlled, perhaps irrationally, by lust, while Don
Juan is conscious of how his actions contradict the social norms of love.
Camus’ Don Juan is a threat to the social construct of love not because
Don Juan is promiscuous, but because he highlights the passionate love
that the social construct restricts to a single person and often relegates to
infatuation or mere lust.55
Camus’ use of Don Juan to exemplify the absurd person suggests that
Camus views love biologically, as nothing more than a feeling, albeit a
highly desirable one. Like any other feeling, then, love can be felt for
multiple people at the same time, just as one might feel anger or joy for
multiple people at the same time. Similarly, just as one can be angry at
someone for days or years without feeling anger constantly, one need
not feel love constantly. Love can come and go, depending on where
persons focus their attention and with whom they spend time. Loving
multiple people simultaneously thus does not pose philosophical prob-
lems, but rather scheduling problems. For Camus, a great writer of letters
to the significant people in his life, it is perhaps enough to feel love
while imagining his beloveds’ reactions to his letters. In his letters to
Maria Casares, for example, he sometimes implores her to think of him
despite his absence.56
For Camus, then, love seems to be a feeling created by the presence,
or even the thought of the beloveds. Rizzuto attributes this view of love
not to Camus, who he often identifies with the male characters in his
writings, but with Marie from The Stranger: “Marie wants to exist in her
lover’s thoughts when she is not physically present. She wants to be

54. Camus (1991a: 72).

55. David Halperin (2019: 399) makes a similar point about queer love: “Unlike the typi-
cal public manifestation of youthful gay sexuality – the punctual consummation of
momentary desire between young men that is all too easy for straight folks to take in and
to shrug off, or so Foucault claims – ‘what upsets people’ is love between individuals of
the same sex. Such love, in all its gradations and varieties, is too protean, too subtle, too
elusive to be easily socialized; it gives rise to emotions and alliances that are messy, unsys-
tematic, irregular, potentially subversive or disruptive, and in any case hard for our ‘some-
what sanitized society’ to institutionalize and to integrate into its impoverished repertory
of routine, accepted social relations.”
56. For example, Camus writes, “Pense a moi tout au long de ces journees. Dis-toi que
je reste pres de toi, a toutes les minutes,’ (Camus & Casares, 2017: 14).

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 Paul G. Neiman 15
57
more than a desirable body.” If, as argued here, love is just a feeling
brought on by the presence or thought of the beloved, then it is Camus
who is seeking something more than sex from his significant relation-
ships. This is obscured by the social construct of love, which denies that
love can be felt for multiple partners, and thus reduces extra-marital liai-
sons to mere sex, and pre-marital sex to mere lust. Treating love as a
feeling experienced in the moment, which promises neither commitment
nor exclusivity, allows for the possibility of loving multiple people at the
same time. Camus’ love for Maria Casares, Catherine Sellers and his wife
Francine, for example, can be understood simply as a feeling he has
while thinking about, writing to or spending time with each one.
Like Don Juan, what Camus may “realize in action is an ethics of
quantity.”58 When lovers are separated, especially during Camus’ pre-in-
ternet time period, they have limited options for stimuli to evoke the
feeling of love. Thus, one thinks about one’s loves, writes letters to
them, imagines the scenes in which they are received, and, importantly,
a confirmation of love in their replies. The more letters one writes, the
more love one can experience. Still, in The Plague, Camus points out the
limitations as access to telephone booths are restricted, and people have
to rely on telegrams: “in practice, the phrases one can use in a telegram
are quickly exhausted, long lives passed side by side, or passionate yearn-
ings, soon declined to the exchange of trite formulas.”59 While the
words used to express love with one person may become stale after
repeated use, those same words used to express love for other people
may not. Don Juan, and perhaps Camus, thus seeks to avoid the loss of
the feeling of love through habituation by seeking out new and varied
loves. Writing loving letters to a variety of people thus multiplies and
extends one’s feelings of love.
As noted in the introduction, Camus is thought to have struggled
with the relationship between love and commitment.60 The philosophy
of love developed out of Camus’ writings suggests a resolution to this
concern. If love is a temporary feeling of intense joy or pleasure at the
thought or presence of the beloveds, then this does not imply any long-
lasting commitment.
In her analysis of love and commitment, Brake points out that “rea-
sonable people realize that their interests may change or that the discov-
ery of new facts may undermine existing commitments. For these
reasons, unconditional commitments or commitment to invariability are

57. Rizzuto (1998: 94).

58. Camus (1991a: 72).
59. Camus (1991c: 69).
60. Hawes (2009: 224).

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16 Philosophical Investigations
morally risky and potentially imprudent.”61 Contrary to the social norms
the rebel rejects, Brake argues, “Not only does love not require uncon-
ditional commitment, love does not require commitment at all” because
such commitments do “not reflect a stable and voluntary prioritisation,
but a possibly episodic psychological fact about the lover.”62 While love
may include a strong desire to share a future together, the absurd person
recognises that this does not match the empirical reality that love often
ends. Hence, the absurd person refuses to make commitments based on
love, which is only an “episodic psychological fact.”
Despite this philosophical rejection of commitment based on love,
Camus does not seem to reject marriage as much as he laments the
effects marriage has on love. In The Plague, Grand relates the “common
lot of married couples. You get married, you go on loving a bit longer,
you work. And you work so hard that it makes you forget to love.”63
Much as the routine of the workday can lead to a weariness from which
absurdity emerges, so too can absurdity emerge from the tired routines
of a marriage that lacks love. Grand blames the decline of his love on
fatigue from overwork, leading to his “failing to keep alive the feeling in
his wife that she was loved. An overworked husband, poverty, the grad-
ual loss of hope in a better future, silent evenings at home – what chance
had any passion of surviving such conditions?”64 It is not, then, marriage
that ruins love, but the social norms that require lovers to have a shared
life and commitment. This makes it easier to take one’s partner for
granted and removes the incentive or desire to create feelings of love.
This points to Camus’ argument in the Notebooks that love depends
on the will. Camus writes,
. . .when we realize that our will alone keeps those human beings
attached to us (stop writing or speaking, isolate yourself, and you will
see them melt around you), that in reality most of them have their
backs turned (not through malice, but through indifference) and that
the remainder always have the possibility of becoming interested in
something else, when we imagine in this way the element of contin-
gency, of play of circumstances, that enters into what is called a love or
a friendship, then the world returns to its night and we to that great
cold whence human affection drew us for a moment.65
It is not a shared identity, the mythical union of two separated souls, or
the commitment created in marriage that keeps people in love. It is “our
will alone” that maintains the possibility of feeling love. To confront this

61. Brake (2012: 53). See also Protasi (2014) for an argument against unconditional love.
62. Brake (2012: 53).
63. Camus (1991c: 82).
64. Ibid (82).
65. Camus (2010b: 57).

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 Paul G. Neiman 17
reality requires acting, in each and every moment, to evoke feelings of
love between oneself and one’s partners. One can choose not to look up
from their phone when their partner enters a room, or one can engage
and make them the centre of their experience; one can lament that a
lover does not write or call and see this as a sign of their diminished
interest, or one can pick up the pen or the phone and attempt to create
the feelings of love one longs for; one can complain that they should no
longer have to ‘put in so much effort’ now that they are living together
or are married, and let the relationship slide into a series of insignificant
routines, or one can realise that their partners’ feelings for them are tem-
porary and must be created in each moment if one wants them to exist.
Of course, one cannot make another person love them, but one can
choose to create the conditions in which love might be felt.
With this in mind, one can perhaps make sense of Camus’ claim that
“Those who love truth must look for love in marriage; in other words,
love without illusions.”66 Marriage, as a life-long commitment to go
through life together, provides no guarantee of the feeling of love. The
absurd person might marry out of love, perhaps caught up in the desire
to make a grand romantic gesture, but will do so without the illusion
that their commitment to another person ensures that love will continue.
Marriage, then, can only be a statement about the belief in one’s will-
power to attempt to create feelings of love in each moment, or in as
many moments as possible, while never forgetting that love may end
despite one’s best efforts. The absurd person thus cannot tell their
beloved that they will love them forever. At most, the absurd person can
say, “I love you today, I will try to love you tomorrow; after that, we’ll
just have to see how it goes.” The anxiety that this may produce in a
person is a sign of the absurd contradiction between the desire that love
will last forever and the knowledge that one has no grounds upon which
to base this hope.
It might be objected that this robs love of its significance. But to
Camus, “Not to believe in the profound meaning of things belongs to
the absurd” person.67 If love has any significance, it is in relation to the
social and cultural norms which the absurd has rejected. In his notes for
an anthology of insignificance, Camus writes,
. . .according to the normal scale of values, if I get married I perform
an act that takes on a general significance in the order of the species,
another in the order of society, in that of religion, and perhaps a final
one in the metaphysical order. Conclusion: marriage is not an insignifi-
cant act, at least in the order of commonly accepted values. For if the

66. Ibid (77).

67. Camus (1991a: 72).

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18 Philosophical Investigations
significance of the species, of society, or of religion is taken from it, as
it would be for all who are indifferent to such considerations, marriage
is really an insignificant act.68
It is precisely those “commonly accepted values” that persons are freed
from by revolt following the experience of absurdity. Viewing marriage
or love as insignificant thus frees persons from the strictures imposed by
society’s, or by one’s own, demand that love have some permanent sig-
nificance.
Don Juan’s movement from lover to lover shows how love might
have genuine significance. Camus’ reflections on insignificance yield the
following insight:
It is worth noticing that eventually insignificance is almost always iden-
tified with the mechanical aspect of things and persons – with habit
most often. In other words, everything eventually becoming habitual,
one can be sure that the greatest thoughts and the greatest deeds even-
tually become insignificant. Life has as its predestined aim insignifi-
cance.69
The shared identity trumpeted by Nozick as love involves the moulding
of one person to another, knowing each other fully and developing
shared interests, habits and routines. It may be comforting to know that
one’s long-term, stale relationship is still, according to Nozick, love, but
Camus offers a different diagnosis: these daily acts, when seen clearly
after the absurd has made us lucid, are part of a routine that has made
them insignificant. For example, saying “I love you” might be significant
the first time it is uttered, but when it becomes an automatic response to
the end of a voice or text conversation, then it has become insignificant.
By contrast, if “I love you” is an expression of intense joy and feeling at
the sight or thought of the person or people one loves, then it resists
becoming routine, and so retains its significance. The focus on the actual
feelings of love, and the effort one puts in to create them, enables per-
sons to recognise when relationships are becoming routine. One is then
left with a choice: work to create feelings of love in some new or novel
way or accept the reality that love has ended.
It may be that one can create significance in even long-term relation-
ships by recognising that one never fully knows one’s partner. In the
Myth of Sisyphus, Camus is sceptical that one can truly know oneself: “if
I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to sum-
marize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can
sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume. . .But aspects

68. Camus (2010b: 63-64).

69. Ibid (65).

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 Paul G. Neiman 19
cannot be added up. The very heart which is mine will forever remain
undefinable to me.”70 If Camus is correct that “aspects cannot be added
up,” then neither oneself nor one’s partner is ever fully disclosed. The
person one knows as their romantic partner may largely disappear in
another context. Further, there always remains the possibility of contexts
to which one has no access. For example, in The First Man, Malan relates
a story about a man “who didn’t like pastries and his wife never ate
them either. Well, after twenty years of living together, he caught his
wife in the pastry shop, and by keeping an eye on her he found out that
she went there several times a week to stuff herself with coffee eclairs.”71
The lesson Cormery draws from this is that “we never know anyone.”72
When persons keep in mind these possibilities, and romantic partners
experience enough separation to develop different and separate identities
in other contexts, then the relationship may resist, at least for a time, the
routines that rob it of significance. Thus, to create significance in love,
one might seek to preserve sufficient individual freedom within a rela-
tionship, and further reject the norms of commitment, shared identity,
and living together.
It is, of course, impossible to know whether, or how, Camus might
have addressed romantic love in his later works. The account of love
offered here focuses on the feeling of love that emerges after absurdity
clears away the frameworks that cover over the reality of persons’ experi-
ence of their relationships. Camus’ philosophy of love thus rejects social
and philosophical ideals of love, including norms of monogamy, perma-
nence, and commitment. Absurd love is instead focused on the biological
feelings of love. As such, love is tenuous. It exists only where it is felt,
and it is up to each person to act to create or maintain love. Love is thus
quantitative, rather than qualitative. Whereas Don Juan seeks to create as
much love as possible by moving from woman to woman, Camus’ phi-
losophy of love leaves open the possibility of creating as much love as
possible within long-term relationships. This requires resisting the ways
that expressions of love become habitual and insignificant, and instead
focusing on how one can create feelings of love through actions.

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3218 E. 54th Street
Minneapolis, MN, 55417
USA
paulneiman@weber.edu

70. Camus (1991a: 19).

71. Camus (1996: 31).
72. Ibid (31).

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20 Philosophical Investigations
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