Albert Camus
Philosopher · 1913-1960 · Philosophy, stage 3: Meet the thinkers
Argued that life's lack of inherent meaning is not a reason to give up on it.
Overview
Albert Camus grew up poor in French Algeria and worked as a journalist before his novels and essays made him one of the most widely read philosophical writers of the 20th century. He is best known for the concept of the absurd, the mismatch between the human need for meaning and a universe that offers none, and for arguing that the right response to that mismatch is neither suicide nor religious faith but continued, clear-eyed engagement with life. Camus resisted being grouped with Sartre and the existentialists, insisting his own position, absurdism, was distinct. New readers typically start with The Stranger, a short novel that dramatizes the absurd through its detached narrator, before moving to the more directly argued Myth of Sisyphus.
Where to start reading
The Stranger 1942
A novel narrated by Meursault, a man whose emotional detachment from his own life and his mother's death makes him a stranger to the society around him.
The Myth of Sisyphus 1942
The essay that lays out Camus' concept of the absurd directly, using the myth of Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder uphill forever, as its central image.
The Rebel 1951
An essay on rebellion and revolution that examines when resistance to injustice is justified and when it turns into the very oppression it opposed.
Part of
Sources
- Albert Camus Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Existentialism Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
