Category: Camus
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Remembering Albert Camus
Albert Camus, one of the luminaries of French existentialism, died on this day in 1960, in a car crash. Not tragically, straining hubristically against limits, but absurdly, a passenger in a recklessly-piloted vehicle. "In his coat pocket was an unused train ticket. He had planned to travel by train with his wife and children, but…
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Die Like a Man
Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, tr. A. Bower, Vintage 1991, p. 15, French original published by Gallimard in 1951: Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees. Good advice if one can take it without false heroism and existentialist hyperventilation.
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The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu
I have been re-reading Thomas Nagel's seminal paper, "The Absurd," which originally appeared in The Journal of Philosophy, October 1971, and is collected in Nagel's Mortal Questions (Cambridge UP, 1979, 11-23.) Damn, but it is good. Nagel is one of our best philosophers. He's the real thing. Nagel's central contention is that human existence is…
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Bogus Camus Quotation
One finds the following on several of those wretched unsourced quotation sites: "I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't, and die to find out there is." ~Albert Camus Having read and taught Camus, the above…
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Camus and Shestov
Albert Camus is a frustrated rationalist. He values reason and wants the world to be rationally penetrable, but he finds that it is not. What he calls the Absurd consists in the disproportion between the human need for understanding and the world's unintelligibility, "the unreasonable silence of the world." (Myth of Sisyphus, Vintage 1955, p.…
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Was Camus Contemplating Baptism?
Albert Camus, one of the luminaries of French existentialism, died on this day in 1960, in a car crash. He was 46. Had he lived, he might have become a Christian. Or so it seems from Howard Mumma, Conversations with Camus. This second-hand report is worth considering, although it must be consumed cum grano salis. See…
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Czeslaw Milosz on Simone Weil and Albert Camus
Czeslaw Milosz, "The Importance of Simone Weil" in Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision (University of California Press, 1977), p. 91: Violent in her judgments and uncompromising, Simone Weil was, at least by temperament, an Albigensian, a Cathar; this is the key to her thought. She drew extreme conclusions from the Platonic current…