Albert Camus

 

Albert Camus(এলবার্ত ক্যামু) was born in 1913. He was a mid-20th-century French-Algerian literary philosopher, who is best known for three of his novels - the outsider, the plague and the fall, and two philosophical essays - the myth of Sisyphus and the rebel.

Camus won the Nobel prize in literature in 1957 - being the youngest ever recipient of the honor. He died at the age of only 46 in a car crash. In his pocket was a train ticket he had decided not to use at the last minute. His death was ironic since he had a lifelong fear of automobiles.

Camus became famous for his novel “The Outsider”. It is set in his native town of Algiers. It follows the story of a laconic, detached, ironic hero called Mersault(মার্স্যো) – a man who can’t see the point of love, or work, or friendship. The novel captures the state of mind called ‘anomie’, a listless, affectless alienated condition where one feels entirely cut off from others and can’t find a way to share any of their sympathies or values. 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 is a man who cannot accept the normal explanations given to explain things like the education system, the workplace, relationships, and the mechanisms of government. He lives life on autopilot as he sees no inherent meaning of life in general. In Camus’s own words- “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.”

The opening line of “The Outsider” immediately creates a tone - “Mother died today, or maybe yesterday. I don’t know.” After knowing of his mother’s death Mersault travels to his mother’s old home. Much to the displeasure of the surrounding people Mersault nonchalantly goes about the funereal. He refuses to open his mother’s casket. Smokes when keeping vigil.

The very next day he goes swimming and meets a girl, Marie. They spend time together. Marie asks Meursault if he wants to marry her. He replies indifferently but says that they can get married if she wants to. They become engaged.

Meursault, Marie, and his friend Raymond go to a beach house owned by Masson, one of Raymond’s friends. That afternoon, Masson, Raymond, and Meursault run into two Arabs on the beach, one of whom is the brother of Raymond’s mistress. A fight breaks out and Raymond is stabbed. After tending to his wounds, Raymond returns to the beach with Meursault. They find the Arabs at a spring. Raymond considers shooting them with his gun, but Meursault talks him out of it and takes the gun away. Later, however, Meursault returns to the spring to cool off, and, for no apparent reason, he shoots Raymond’s mistress’s brother.

Meursault is arrested and thrown into jail. His lawyer seems disgusted at Meursault’s lack of remorse over his crime, and, in particular, at Meursault’s lack of grief at his mother’s funeral. The trial shifts from his murder charges to his lack of interest or remorse. He is sentenced to death.

The jail chaplain urges Meursault to renounce his atheism and turn to God, but Meursault refuses. Like everyone, the chaplain cannot believe that Meursault does not long for faith and the afterlife. Meursault suddenly becomes enraged, grabs the chaplain, and begins shouting at him. He declares that he is correct in believing in a meaningless, purely physical world. It’s then Meursault truly embraces the idea that human existence holds no greater meaning. He abandons all hope for the future and accepts the “gentle indifference of the world.” This acceptance makes Meursault feel happy.

The ending is as stark and as defiant. ”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.”

Aside from The Outsider, Camus’s fame rests on an essay, published the same year as the novel, called The Myth of Sisyphus. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide” thus Camus begins this essay. The essay details Camus thoughts on the absurd condition of human life and the three responses to that condition -

1. Physical suicide

2. Philosophical suicide

3. Acceptance.

Camus defines the absurd as man's futile search for meaning in a meaningless universe. He holds life has no inherent meaning. So it’s valid to think if life is worth living.

one response to the absurd is to commit Physical suicide. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation in the uselessness of suffering. But Camus argues that physical suicide is merely an attempt to escape the absurd it does not reconcile the conflict between man's desire for significance and the universe’s cold indifference.

Camus claims that people who find meaning in the concept of God or in the concept of transcendence have taken a leap of faith and have committed Philosophical suicide. one of the most prominent people to adopt this response to the absurd was 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard wants to be cured. To be cured as his frenzied wish and it runs throughout his whole journal. The entire effort of his intelligence is to escape the human condition. Camus rejects this position because like physical suicide it is merely an attempt to escape from the absurd rather than an attempt to overcome it.

The last response to the absurd and the response that Camus supports is that of Acceptance. According to Camus the absurd hero acknowledges the truth of the absurd and embraces the freedom that it bestows upon him. The world has no meaning and hence man has the freedom to create his own meaning.

The ancient Greek King Sisyphus is the epitome of Camus’s absurd hero. According to myth, Sisyphus put ‘Death’ in Chains so that men would no longer die. The gods eventually freed death and then punished Sisyphus. They condemned him to ceaselessly roll a boulder to the top of a mountain only to watch it roll back down again. Much like man’s life, his whole existence after his punishment meant accomplishing nothing. Both Sisyphus and man are condemned to futile and hopeless labor. But Sisyphus teaches man the way to overcome his fate. Sisyphus teaches the higher commitment that negates the gods and raises rocks. He concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither meaningless nor meaningful. 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 triumph over hopelessness. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy".

This brings us to the most charming and seductive side of Camus: the Camus who wants to remind 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.

Once you properly realize that life is absurd, you are on the verge of despair perhaps – but also, compelled to live life more intensely. Accordingly, Camus grew committed to and deeply serious about, the pleasures of ordinary life. He was successful with women, dressed well. He was asked to pose by American Vogue.

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’s favorite philosopher was Montaigne – another very down-to-earth Frenchman, and someone one can love as much for what he wrote as for what he was like.