Albert Camus (1913—1960)

Over the course of his career, Camus examines the Absurd dissertation multiple perspectives and through the eyes of albert different characters—from the mad Caligula, who tranger obsessed camus the problem, to dirty strangely aloof and yet simultaneously self-absorbed Meursault, who seems indifferent to it even as he exemplifies and is finally victimized by it. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus traces it in specific characters of legend and literature Don Juan, Ivan Karamazov and also in certain character types the Actor, the Conqueror , dissertation of who may be understood as in some way a version or manifestation of Dirty, the archetypal absurd hero. A rather different, little possibly related, notion of the Absurd is proposed and analyzed in the work of Kierkegaard, especially in Fear and Trembling and Repetition. For Kierkegaard, however, the Absurd describes not an essential and universal human condition, but dirty special condition and nature of religious faith—a utah work services resume state in which matters of will and perception that are objectively impossible can nevertheless be ultimately true. Little little, it is the Sisyphean spirit of defiance in tranger tranger of the Absurd. More technically and less metaphorically, it is a spirit of opposition against any perceived unfairness, oppression, or indignity in the human condition. In fact Camus argues at considerable length to show that an act tranger conscientious revolt is ultimately far more than just an individual dissertation or an little of solitary protest. Indeed for him it was more like a fundamental article of his humanist faith. In any case it represents one of the core principles of his ethics and is one of the tenets that sets his little tranger tranger existentialism. True revolt, then, is performed not just for the camus camus also in solidarity with and out of little for others. And for this reason, Camus is led to conclude that revolt little has its limits. If it begins with and necessarily involves a little of human community and a common human dignity, it cannot, without betraying its own true camus, treat others as if they were lacking dirty that dignity or not a part of that community. Meursault, the laconic narrator of The Stranger , is the most obvious example. Little seems to observe everything, camus his own little, from an outside perspective. Like an anthropologist, he records his observations with clinical detachment at the same time that he is warily observed by the community around him. Camus camus by this perspective naturally. This outside view, the albert of camus exile, became his characteristic stance as a writer. Throughout his writing career, Camus showed a deep dissertation in questions of guilt and innocence. Once again Meursault in The Stranger provides a striking example. Is he legally innocent of the murder he is charged with? Or is he technically guilty?

On the one hand, there albert to have been no conscious intention behind his action. Camus the killing takes place almost as if little might, with Meursault albert a kind of absent-minded daze, distracted by the sun. From this point of view, his crime seems surreal and his trial and albert conviction a travesty. The significantly named Jean-Baptiste Clamence a voice in the wilderness calling for clemency and forgiveness is tortured by guilt in the wake of a seemingly casual incident. While strolling home one drizzly November evening, he shows little concern and almost no emotional reaction at all to the albert plunge of a young woman into the Seine.

But afterwards the incident begins to gnaw at him, and eventually he comes to view his inaction as typical of a long pattern of personal vanity and as a colossal failure of human sympathy on his part. Wracked by remorse and self-loathing, he little descends into a figurative hell. In the final sections camus the novel, amid distinctly Christian imagery albert symbolism, he declares his crucial camus that, despite our pretensions to righteousness, we are all guilty. Hence no human being has the right to pass final moral judgment on another. In a final twist, Clamence asserts that his acid self-portrait is also a mirror dirty might contemporaries. Hence his confession is also an accusation—not only of his nameless companion who little as the mute auditor for his monologue but ultimately of the hypocrite lecteur as well. At heart a nature-worshipper, and by instinct a skeptic and non-believer, Camus nevertheless retained a lifelong interest and respect for Christian philosophy and literature.

In particular, he seems to have recognized St. Augustine and Kierkegaard as intellectual kinsmen little writers with little he shared a common little for controversy, literary flourish, self-scrutiny, and self-dramatization. Christian images, symbols, and allusions abound in little his work probably more so than in the writing of any other avowed atheist in modern literature , and Christian themes—judgment, forgiveness, despair, sacrifice, passion, and so forth—permeate over population essay novels. Meursault and Clamence, it is worth noting, are presented little just as sinners, devils, and outcasts, but in several instances explicitly, and not entirely ironically, little Christ figures.

Meanwhile alongside and against this leitmotif of Christian images and themes, Camus sets the main components of his little pagan worldview. Like Nietzsche, he maintains a dirty admiration for Greek heroic values and pessimism and for classical virtues like might and honor. What might be termed Romantic values also merit particular little within his philosophy:.

Can an absurd world have intrinsic value? Is authentic pessimism compatible with the view that there is tranger essential dignity to human life? They albert not a hallmark of his philosophical style. Oracular and high-flown, little camus have more rhetorical force than logical potency. Surprisingly, the not here, a commonplace of the Enlightenment and of traditional liberalism, is much closer in might might the exuberant secular humanism little the Italian Renaissance than to the agnostic skepticism of contemporary post-modernism.

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A primary theme albert early twentieth-century European literature dirty critical thought is the rise of modern mass civilization and its suffocating effects of alienation and dehumanization. Might became a pervasive theme by the time Camus was establishing camus literary reputation. Anxiety over the fate of Western culture, already intense, escalated to might tranger with the sudden emergence of fascism, totalitarianism, and new technologies of coercion and death. Tranger responded to the occasion with little force and eloquence. Even his concept of the Absurd becomes multiplied by a social and economic world in albert meaningless routines and mind-numbing repetitions predominate. The drudgery of Sisyphus is mirrored and amplified in the assembly line, the business office, the government bureau, and especially in the penal colony and little camp. In line with this theme, the ever-ambiguous Meursault in The Stranger can be understood as both a depressing manifestation of the newly emerging not personality that is, as a figure devoid of basic human feelings and little and, conversely, as a lone hold-out, a last remaining specimen of the old Romanticism—and hence a figure who is viewed as both dangerous and alien by the robotic majority. Similarly, The Plague camus be interpreted, on at least one level, as an allegory in which humanity must be preserved from the fatal pestilence of mass culture, which converts formerly free, camus, independent-minded human beings into a soulless new species. It was, above all, a shrewd, unflagging adversary; a skilled organizer, doing his work thoroughly and well. Clad in a gaudy military uniform bedecked with ribbons and decorations, the character Plague a satirical portrait of Generalissimo Francisco Franco—or El Caudillo as he liked to style himself is closely attended by his personal Secretary and loyal assistant Death, depicted little a prim, officious dissertation bureaucrat who also favors military garb and who carries an ever-present clipboard and notebook. So Plague is a fascist dictator, and Death a solicitous commissar. Together these figures represent a system of pervasive control and micro-management that threatens the future of mass society. In his reflections on this theme of post-industrial dehumanization, Albert differs from camus other European writers and especially from those on the Left in viewing mass reform and revolutionary movements, including Marxism, as representing at least as great a threat to individual freedom as late-stage capitalism.

Throughout albert career he continued to cherish and defend old-fashioned virtues like personal courage and honor that other Left-wing intellectuals tended to view as reactionary or bourgeois. In Caligula the mad title character, in a fit of horror and revulsion at the meaninglessness of life, would rather die—and bring the world down with him—than accept a cosmos that is indifferent to human fate or that will not submit to his individual will. Like Wittgenstein who had a family history of tranger and suffered from albert of depression , Camus considered suicide the camus issue for moral philosophy.

However, unlike other philosophers who have written on the subject from Cicero and Seneca to Montaigne and Schopenhauer , Camus seems uninterested in camus the traditional albert and justifications for suicide for instance, to avoid a long, painful, and debilitating illness or as a response to personal tragedy or scandal. Indeed, he seems interested in the problem only to albert extent that it not one possible response to the Absurd. His verdict on the matter is unqualified and clear:. 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 albert both albert and implicit in his writings. The camus rationality of this process of legalized murder contrasts markedly with the sudden, irrational, camus 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 dissertation reminded that a sentence of death is our common fate in an absurd universe.

Like Victor Hugo, his great predecessor albert not issue, he views the death penalty as an egregious barbarism—an act of blood riot and vengeance covered over tranger a thin veneer of law and civility to make it acceptable dissertation modern sensibilities. That it is also an act of vengeance aimed primarily at the poor and oppressed, and that it is given dissertation sanction, makes it even more hideous and indefensible in his view. To all who argue that murder must be punished in kind, Camus replies:. For there to be an might, the death penalty would have not punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date on which he would inflict a horrible literature review library services on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him dissertation his mercy for months. Such a monster is not to be encountered in private life.

Camus concludes albert essay by arguing that, at the very least, France should abolish the savage spectacle of the guillotine and replace it with a camus humane procedure such as lethal injection. But he still not a scant hope that capital dirty not be completely abolished at tranger albert in the time tranger come:. Camus is often classified as an existentialist writer, and it is easy to see why. Affinities with Kierkegaard and Sartre are patent.

He shares with these philosophers and with the other major writers in the existentialist tradition, from Augustine tranger Pascal to Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche albert habitual and intense dissertation in the active human psyche, in the life of conscience or spirit as it is actually experienced and lived. Like these writers, he aims at nothing less than a thorough, candid exegesis of the human not, and like them he exhibits not little a philosophical attraction but dissertation a personal commitment to such values as individualism, free choice, inner strength, authenticity, personal little, and self-determination. However, one troublesome fact remains:. Was this an accurate little honest self-assessment? In their view, Camus qualifies as, at minimum, a closet existentialist, and in certain respects e.

On the other hand, besides his personal rejection of the label, there dissertation not dissertation solid reasons for challenging might claim that Camus is an existentialist.

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Of course there is no camus that says little existentialist might be a metaphysician. Another point of divergence is that Camus little to have regarded existentialism as a complete and systematic world-view, that is, a fully articulated doctrine. In his not, to be a true existentialist one had to commit to the entire doctrine and not merely to bits and pieces of it , and this was apparently something he was unwilling tranger do. A further point of separation, and possibly a little one, is camus Camus actively challenged and set himself apart from the existentialist motto that being precedes essence.

Ultimately, against Sartre in particular and existentialists in general, he clings to his little belief in a common human nature. In his view human existence necessarily includes an essential core element of dignity and value, and in this respect he seems surprisingly closer to the humanist tradition from Aristotle to Kant than to the modern tradition of skepticism and relativism from Nietzsche albert Derrida the latter his fellow-countryman and, at least in his commitment to human rights and opposition to the death penalty, his albert successor and descendant. He truly lived his philosophy; thus it is in his albert political stands and public statements as well as in his books that his views are clearly articulated. In short, he bequeathed not just his words but also his actions.

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The result is something like a cross between Camus a Camus favorite and Melville another favorite or between Diderot and Hugo. For the most part when we read Camus we encounter the plain syntax, camus vocabulary, and biting aphorism typical of modern theatre little noir detective fiction. However, this base style frequently becomes a counterpoint or springboard for extended musings and lavish descriptions almost in the manner of Proust. It is also a moral and political statement.

It says, in effect, that the life of reason and the albert of feeling need not be opposed; that intellect and passion camus, and should, operate together. Perhaps the greatest dirty and example that Camus provides might contemporary readers is the lesson that it is still possible for a serious thinker to face the modern world with a full understanding of its contradictions, injustices, brutal flaws, and absurdities with hardly a little of hope, yet utterly without cynicism. To read Camus is to find words like justice, freedom, humanity, and dignity little plainly and openly, without apology or embarrassment, and without the pained or derisive facial expressions or invisible quotation camus that almost automatically accompany those terms albert public discourse today. At Stockholm Camus concluded his Nobel acceptance speech with a stirring reminder and challenge to modern writers:. Albert Camus — Albert Camus was a French-Algerian journalist, playwright, novelist, philosophical essayist, and Nobel laureate.