Albert Camus

Key ideas

For Camus, the absurd is not a feature of the world or of us alone, but of the relationship between them: the human demand for meaning and clarity meets a universe that stays silent. The Myth of Sisyphus begins by asking whether, given this, life is worth living at all.

His answer rejects two escapes. Suicide surrenders to the absurd. Religious or philosophical leaps of faith, which he called philosophical suicide, deny it. The honest response is to live with full awareness of it, in revolt, freedom and passion. His image is Sisyphus, condemned to push a rock uphill forever, whom 'one must imagine happy'.

In The Rebel he extended this to politics, arguing that revolt against injustice must respect limits and that no ideology justifies murder, a position that led to a public break with Jean-Paul Sartre. He rejected the label existentialist, though he is often grouped with them; see absurdism.

Life, briefly

Camus was born into a poor family in French Algeria; his father was killed in the First World War when he was a baby. He studied philosophy in Algiers, worked as a journalist, and during the German occupation edited the Resistance newspaper Combat in Paris.

He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, at forty-four. He died in a car accident in 1960; an unused train ticket was found in his pocket.

Major works

• The Stranger (1942)
• The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
• The Plague (1947)
• The Rebel (1951)
• The Fall (1956)

Schools of thought

Absurdism

Further reading

• EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Albert Camus
• WikipediaAlbert Camus