Albert Camus and the Meaning of Life

Is the Absurd the key to the meaning of life? But if so, what is the Absurd? And where is it? Does it live, for example, in the apparently unbridgeable gap between humanity’s desperate cry for meaning and the world’s resolute refusal to respond, as Albert Camus concluded? But are these even legitimate questions? Can we sensibly talk about “the Absurd” as a proper noun, preceded by the definite article, as if it is a thing or some sort of tangible presence? Shouldn’t we perhaps take the path advocated by A.J. Ayer and the Logical Positivists (discussed in the previous article in this series), and simply dismiss such concepts as chimeras generated by the misuse of language, much as Martin Heidegger and the Existentialists misused the concepts of “the Nothing” and “Being”?

These are vital questions that emerge immediately one seeks to understand Camus’s view of the meaning of life, which was for him “the most urgent of questions”, as he confirms in Le Mythe de Sisyphe  (1942). This was not a question of logic or of rational argument, nor did it involve a search for a proof. As Camus observed, “I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument.” On the contrary, for Camus it was a question that called upon deep intuitions, addressed in the looming presence of the Absurd.

Camus approached the question of the meaning of life from within the Continental tradition of philosophy, as opposed to the Analytical tradition, of which Ayer was a pre-eminent representative. This meant there was a fundamental intellectual disconnect between Camus and Ayer, as Ayer made clear in a series of pioneering if dismissive essays on Existentialism published in the 1940s. Consequently, the key works expounding Camus’s position are a novel, L’Étranger (1942), and a long literary essay, Le Mythe de Sisyphe. In the latter, the Absurd appears in various forms some 200 times, condemning innumerable aspects of life as “nonsensical”, “impossible”, “contradictory”,  “unreasonable” and so on. However, Camus also depicted the Absurd as a sort of domineering presence, lurking in the world, a spectre that demands a carefully considered (or intuited?) response, one that answers the “one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide … judging whether life is or is not worth living”.

In the end, Camus answered in the affirmative, conjuring up the figure of the Sisyphean hero as a viable response to a world teetering always on the abyss of utter futility. He depicted Sisyphus rolling his great stone to the top of the mountain, only for it to roll back down time after time forever, but not thereby falling into despair, as had been expected by the gods that imposed this punishment. Instead, Camus has Sisyphus concluding that “all is well”. Having consigned God to the scrapheap, he rejoices: “This universe henceforth without a master seems to [Sisyphus] neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world.”

How did it come to this, that one of the great writers of the mid-twentieth century should conclude that the meaning of life is to be found by embracing a punishment designed by the Greek gods to be soul-destroying for all eternity? It seems the answer is signalled in the essay’s final two sentences: “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Camus is insisting that humanity must find the meaning of its existence in an absurd world by making a victory out of defeat, a triumph out of a condemnation. Yes, the gods had the power to sentence Sisyphus to an eternity of punishment, but they had no power over how he viewed or valued that sentence, nor could they prevent him from embracing it, if he chose, as the keystone to the meaning of his life.

Camus (1913–1960) lived through the great abyss of the twentieth century, and many of its horrors impacted upon him intimately, especially the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Algerian War. Together these stretched across his entire life and led to his extremely bleak view of contemporary history, and of any life doomed to be lived within it, and this shaped his attempt to frame a positive philosophical response to such a world.

But there was much more to it than this. Camus’s concept of the Absurd, and his answer to the question of the meaning of life, did not arise solely or even mainly from a meditation on the horrors of history. Rather, they emerged from intense reflection on the dire challenges thrown up by his own existence and that of those around him. He was driven repeatedly to ask the question: Why? But crucially, when he found no satisfactory answer, Camus didn’t rest but seized upon this mute response, interrogated it, and made it the foundation of his philosophy.

It seems as if Camus’s early life unfolded according to a script or novel that he himself, or his literary heroes, Dostoevsky or Kafka, might have written. Born into a working-class, pied-noir (French-Algerian) family, he grew up in the direst poverty. He never knew his young father, who was conscripted and promptly killed in the early months of the First World War, after which his mother plunged into near catatonia, comforted by a grim memento of her husband, a shell splinter removed from his skull. Along with his older brother, he was raised by her and his illiterate and austere grandmother in a dilapidated, cockroach-infested three-room tenement apartment that they shared with a similarly silent uncle who expressed himself almost entirely through hand gestures and facial expressions.

Camus’s childhood was steeped in silence. And at the centre of this was his mother. In an early essay, “Between Yes and No”, he describes how it seemed his mother spent her days in other people’s homes cleaning, and her nights in her own home mute and vacant, “thinking about nothing”. He remembers staring her as she sat “huddle[d] in a chair, gazing in front of her, wandering off in the dizzy pursuit of a crack along the floor. As the night thickened around her, her muteness would seem irredeemably desolate.” As a child watching her, he remembers being at first terrified by her “animal silence”, but then experiencing a surge of emotion that he concluded must be love, “because after all she [was] his mother”. Later, in the notes for his semi-autobiographical novel The First Man (published posthumously in 1994), Camus revealed that what he wanted most in the world was for his mother “to read everything that was his life and his being”, while knowing that she, “his love, his only love, would forever be speechless”.

The deprivation didn’t stop there. Their tenement lacked running water and electricity, but boasted a “Turkish toilet”, a pit shared by all the building’s tenants. This facility features in an appalling but revealing anecdote Camus recorded in The First Man. Returning home after having been sent to the grocery store, the young Camus attempted to keep the change by telling his grandmother that it had fallen into the toilet pit. Without a word, she rolled up her sleeves, went to the hole, and dug about for the precious coins. In that moment, Camus recalls, he understood the awful power of poverty: “It was not avarice that caused his grandmother to grope around in the excrement, but the terrible need that made two francs a significant amount in this home.” Camus never forget this poverty, and he also never forgot the way in which he felt its victims might rise to the challenge, however daunting.

But this anecdote reveals more. It is possible to detect here the core of Camus’s later version of Absurdist philosophy, a core constructed around a powerful intuition. This is an insight not only into the ultimate meaninglessness of life, a rather banal realisation, but of the crucial role played by unyielding struggle in the face of such vacuity, and, above all, by the heroic meaning this response can bestow on the lives of those prepared to confront the challenge. Camus discussed such heroism in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, and it seems that the ghost of his grimy grandmother may well have been present at his side as he carefully composed that essay.

Unsurprisingly, Camus joined the French Communist Party in 1935 and then the new Algerian Communist Party a year later, and from these he learnt the mendacity of politics pursued for absolutist ends justified by an inhuman ideology. For them he worked on simplistic agitprop theatre pieces, all the time developing his playwriting and acting skills, and devising ways in which he could give theatrical expression to his Absurdist insights, as in Caligula (1944). This leftist political commitment occurred as the three-way battle for the future of Europe between liberal democracy, fascism and communism approached its final Götterdämmerung, but the ideological tension this entailed was magnified in Camus’s case by his alignment with the Algerian People’s Party. This group pursued an anti-colonialist and nationalist agenda that didn’t always align with the mercurial pre-war dictates of the Comintern and eventually led to his expulsion from the Party as a reviled “Trotskyite”. He never forgot his treatment by the Party bureaucracy, or his marginalised pied-noir heritage, or his resentment at the way the native Algerians were treated, even when such considerations later threatened to place him well beyond the ideological pale for the French Left, as the Algerian War nearly tore France apart in the 1950s.

Camus’s intellectual and literary brilliance had been recognised early on, and was nurtured by successive teachers and mentors. Supported by scholarships, in 1936 he graduated from the University of Algiers with a thesis on St Augustine and Plotinus. This study of Early Christian theology and Late Hellenistic philosophy accelerated his estrangement from the Church and its obsession with sin, while nurturing his strong tendency towards the pagan nature mysticism that would later find expression in L’Étranger.

However, such concerns were swept to the margin by close encounters with the irrationalist, bleak and often nihilistic worldview promulgated in diverse ways by such writers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Melville, Stendhal, Bergson, Gide and Kafka. These writers spoke powerfully to his own experience, while also providing the subject matter and intellectual firepower for the essays, articles and reviews he wrote for various magazines, and for his plays and short stories. They also shaped his journalism, including a series of articles on the poverty and exploitation of the Berber people of Kabylia in Northern Algeria.

Above all they informed his well-regarded court reporting, which played a further crucial role in shaping the Absurdist worldview that pervaded his early works. Crucially, this found expression in L’Étranger, where a disconnected office clerk, caught up in petty crime and domestic violence, gratuitously murders an anonymous Arab on a sunlit beach.

Camus found his way into journalism after he contracted tuberculosis as a young man. This was a shattering experience, an inexplicable sentence that excluded him from a teaching career, delivered him frequently into unemployment, and stopped him playing football, at which he had excelled and which, as a very physical young person, he loved deeply. It confronted him yet again, and at the deepest possible existential level, with the one question that he spent his life trying to answer: Why? As we will see shortly, he framed one of his most powerful responses in terms of a close study of the life and death of L’Étranger.

The fissure that Camus found running across the universe intruded also into his love-life. Simone, his first wife, was renowned as a beauty of libertine tendencies, but she became a morphine addict despite Camus’s efforts to help her, and then she fell into an affair with her doctor and the marriage dissolved. He subsequently married Francine, a talented pianist and mathematician who was subject, it transpired, to profound depressive episodes and suicide attempts that required hospitalisation, medication and electro-convulsive therapy. Her condition was blamed by some on Camus’s compulsive infidelities, and especially on his high-profile relationship with María Casares, one of France’s most famous actors, which lasted until his death.

Amongst Camus’s many reviews from this period was one in 1938 of La Nausée (Nausea) by Jean-Paul Sartre, about whom Camus then knew very little. This is important because it reveals just how deeply Camus had thought through his concept of the Absurd, a notion embraced also, it seemed at the time, by Sartre. Camus compared Sartre with Kafka and praised him as a writer of “limitless gifts [for whose] next works and lessons we await impatiently”. But although he appreciated La Nausée, he felt that overall it failed as a philosophical novel: “Taken separately, each chapter … attains a sort of perfection in its bitterness and truth”, but taken as a whole it fell short as a fully coherent work of art. Camus found the plight of its hero, Roquentin, to be basically absurd, but in a merely banal way, and he remarked that “the error of some literature is to believe that life is tragic because it is miserable”, adding that “to observe that life is absurd is not an end but a beginning”.

This was the crux of the matter, the key to understanding Camus’s view of the meaning of life. Camus believed that Sartre had stopped short in La Nausée, hadn’t pursued his insight into the human condition far enough, and hadn’t drilled down towards the bedrock upon which humanity’s status in the universe rested. If he had done so Sartre would have discovered that there was no bedrock, that human life rested on nothing, had no status, and that there was none to be had in the vast uncaring abyss of the universe. This is the primal absurdity of life, but it wasn’t the culmination of Camus’s inquiries, but only the starting point from which he set out to fashion his own philosophical vision.

Camus later elaborated upon his attitude towards La Nausée in a letter to a friend: “it’s too close to a certain part of me for me not to like it but that’s exactly the part I want to react against”. To what was it “too close”? At one level, Camus seems to have objected to Sartre’s failure to realise the novel’s underlying philosophy in its key images and scenes: “the philosophy and images are separated from one another and [merely] juxtaposed. That bothers me because I agree with the philosophy and it pains me to see it lose its power as one reads.”

Ultimately, it transpired that the absurdity informing La Nausée was derived from Sartre’s master concept of the Contingent, the realisation that the world could be Otherwise or even be Nothing at all. Camus, on the other hand, was driven by the much more frightful spectre of the Absurd, by an overwhelming awareness of a baseless, irrationalist injustice that infected every aspect of life. In La Nausée, Sartre’s eventual response to the Contingent was to have the protagonist write a novel—La Nausée. In contrast to this self-regarding passivity, Camus’s response to the Absurd in L’Étranger was to have his anti-hero suddenly rise up out of passive acquiescence to his world into a rage, giving vivid and articulate expression to Camus’s Absurdist views while railing against the lies and pretentions of religion and its representatives, after which he prepares to step forward resolutely to accept death as the final affirmation of his freedom.

L’Étranger (The Stranger or The Outsider) is vital to understanding Camus’s philosophy because it allowed him to give it concrete form, and Camus’s philosophy had to be concrete or it was nothing. It appeared in 1942 and propelled Camus not only into literary fame and notoriety, but also into the centre of a debate about the meaning of life that had been made acute by Hitler’s ascendancy, the Nazi rampage and the French humiliation. The story had been inspired in part by Camus’s experience as a court reporter, by the character of a personal friend, and by recent criminal cases. Principally, however, it was a vehicle for an exposition of Camus’s Absurdist philosophy.

The plot of the story is famously simple, and falls into two parts. (Indeed, it seems almost to fall apart into two halves, as we will see.) Its narrator, Meursault, is a French Algerian who appears to pass somnolently through life, including through a series of events that most people would have found arresting and traumatic. These include the death of his mother, and Meursault’s character is signalled by the book’s opening sentence: “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.” The rest of Part One elaborates on this attitude. Meursault reluctantly visits the old persons’ home to where he had consigned his mother, and he attends her funeral, where he appears to onlookers to be uninterested and disrespectful. The next day he goes to the beach and picks up Marie, a former co-worker, with whom he goes to see a comedy film, after which they sleep together. When he wakes up, Marie is gone, he stays in bed until noon, and he then sits out on the balcony, smoking and watching people pass by. He finds he remembers little of the funeral and cares less. He seems utterly unreflective.

Consequently, over the next few days Meursault becomes embroiled with Raymond, an unsavoury neighbour and a pimp, and with an ongoing row he’s having with an ex-girlfriend. Raymond describes how he beat her up after discovering she’d been cheating on him. This led to a fight with her brother and now Raymond wants Meursault to write a letter luring the woman back so he can have sex with her and then violently abuse her. Unfazed, Meursault writes the letter.

The following Saturday, Marie visits Meursault at his apartment and asks whether he loves her. He considers briefly, replies probably not, and observes casually that their tryst “didn’t mean anything”. At this point they hear shouting coming from Raymond’s apartment, and go out to watch as police arrive to tell Raymond that he’ll be summoned for beating up his ex-mistress. Later, Meursault agrees to lie to the police and to testify at court on Raymond’s behalf, once again unfazed by any concerns about the morality of the situation into which he is becoming embroiled.

At Marie’s suggestion she and Meursault then become engaged, principally because she insists and he finds no reason to object. The next day, they accompany Raymond to a beach house owned by a friend. They enjoy a swim and lunch together, but that afternoon, while walking on the beach, they run into two Arabs, one of whom is the brother of Raymond’s ex-mistress. A violent fight breaks out and Raymond is stabbed. After some first-aid, he and Meursault go looking for the assailants, who Raymond considers shooting with a pistol he’s carrying. Meursault, however, talks him out of this and takes the gun away.

The narrative now reaches its pivotal moment. Still carrying Raymond’s gun, Meursault later goes on another walk, and as he does the sun, the sea, the heat and the sweat bear down, and it seems he slips into some form of sunstruck reverie. Yet again he encounters the brother and although Meursault could easily turn away, he advances, even after he notices the glimpse of the Arab’s knife. Camus concludes Part One of L’Étranger in a grim rhapsodic manner:

I was conscious only of the symbols of the sun clashing on my skull, and … of the blade of light flashing up from the knife, scarring my eyelashes, and gouging into my eyeballs. Everything began to reel before my eyes, a fiery gust came from the sea, while the sky cracked in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured down through the rift. Every nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed on the revolver. The trigger gave … And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound it all began … I fired four shots more into the inert body … And each successive shot was another loud fateful rap on the door of my undoing.

Part Two presents the reader with a different Meursault. It seems the unreflective drone has been replaced by a reflective rebel. It begins with his arrest for murder, and he is thrown into jail. Neither his lawyer nor the examining magistrate can comprehend Meursault’s disengaged attitude. At first it seems that this is continuous with the detached demeanour he exhibited throughout Part One. But then the magistrate, foreseeing how the case is going to play out, produces a crucifix and urges Meursault to put his faith in God, and at this the previously apathetic Meursault takes a stand, firmly denying any belief in God, so much so that the magistrate comes to label him “Monsieur Antichrist”. The reader is led to wonder what happened to the first Meursault, an amoral cypher prepared to acquiesce to various ignominious acts, and surely someone who couldn’t care less about what the magistrate thinks, especially when acquiescence in this situation might save his life.

When the trial begins, the emphasis shifts away from the circumstances surrounding the death of the Arab, and towards Meursault’s character and particularly to his apparently uncaring attitude to his mother’s death. Witnesses all testify to his lack of grief or tears, and Marie reluctantly testifies how she and Meursault spent the aftermath in sensual indulgence. In his summation, the prosecutor paints Meursault as a moral monster whose lack of common human feeling threatens all of society. Meursault is found guilty and is sentenced to death at the guillotine.

Returned to prison, Meursault awaits his execution. At first he struggles to come to terms with his situation, and the certainty of his fate. He dreams of a successful appeal and he fantasises an escape. Then, one day, the chaplain visits, despite Meursault’s insistence that he stay away. Driven by his own sense of duty, the chaplain fervently urges Meursault to renounce his atheism and embrace God’s mercy, but Meursault refuses. Like the magistrate, the chaplain cannot accept that Meursault does not long for faith in these final days and look for the afterlife. He persists, and the depth of the chaplain’s sincerity dawns on Meursault, but even then he finds the chaplain tiresome: “I went close up to him and made a last attempt to explain that I had very little time left, and I wasn’t going to waste it on God.” But still the chaplain persists, and Meursault suddenly erupts:

Something seemed to break inside me, and I started yelling at the top of my voice. I hurled insults at him, I told him not to waste his rotten prayers on me … I’d taken him by the neckband of his cassock, and, in a sort of ecstasy of joy and rage, I poured out on him all the thoughts that had been simmering in my brain. He seemed so cocksure, you see. And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair … I was sure of myself, sure about everything, far surer than he; sure of my present life and of the death that was coming … nothing, nothing had the least importance and I knew well why. He too knew why. From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow persistent breeze had been blowing towards me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. And on its way that breeze had levelled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through. What difference could they make to me, the deaths of others or a mother’s love, or his God; or the way a man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses, since one and the same fate was bound to choose not only me but thousands of millions of people … All alike would be condemned to die one day; his turn, too, would come like the others. And what difference could it make … As a condemned man himself, couldn’t he grasp what I meant by that dark wind blowing from my future?

Rushing in, the jailers tear the chaplain free from Meursault’s fevered grasp. Tears in his eyes, the chaplain gazes for a moment at the condemned man, and then turns despondently and leaves the cell. Exhausted, Meursault collapses into a deep sleep.

Waking, he seems to enter into a sort of reverie, finding the stars shining down on him, as the country sounds float in “and the cool night air, veined with smells of earth and salt fanned my cheeks”. He hears a steamer’s siren: “People were starting on a voyage to a world that had ceased to concern me forever.” An epiphanic moment has revealed the truth about human existence. And so, as his grim appointment with the guillotine approaches, Meursault finds himself “ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.”

As such extended quotations illustrate, Camus makes his case for an Absurdist interpretation of the meaning of life through powerful rhetoric and literary art. He eschews more logically coherent philosophical arguments, which in this case don’t exist, as Ayer pointed out at the time in his essays on Existentialism. Instead, Camus invokes rhapsodic moments of almost mystical intensity that serve to seduce or initiate the reader into compliance with his view of life in this world. Camus was quite aware that this literary approach was his strong suit, and he often insisted that he was not a philosopher, despite the post-war tendency to align him with Sartre, and others in the hastily constructed canon of Existentialism. Indeed, when he did venture out of his lane, as with L’Homme révolté (The Rebel, 1951), he exposed himself to strident criticism from the French far Left, led then by Sartre, which had been looking for an opportunity to denigrate a former comrade, especially a demonised pied-noir, who had dared to dissociate himself from Stalinism.

Although one was a novel and the other an extended essay, L’Étranger and Le Mythe de Sisyphe were thematically complementary and Camus had hoped to have them published together, illuminating each other. However, the occupying German censors prevented this because they objected to the inclusion in Le mythe de Sisyphe of a chapter on Kafka, who was Jewish. Nevertheless, the two works established his reputation, and placed Absurdism, Nihilism and Camus’s version of Existentialism firmly on the cultural agenda. This was especially auspicious at a time when Nazism was spreading like a hideous toxic stain across Europe and the question of the meaning of life under such a regime could not have been more stark or more urgent.

Little did either Camus or Sartre know in 1938, as an unimaginable history rushed towards them, how closely entwined their lives and careers would become. They would become fast friends, rivals in theatre and in love, political comrades in the struggle against a common evil, and they would formulate parallel versions of Existentialism that would catapult them into the centre of the intellectual cyclone of the post-war years. However, as the Cold War set in, they would diverge dramatically over their political allegiances, and over their opposing views of how the meaning of life might be found in the hyper-politicised world of the twentieth century. Ideologically, this conflict was a defining event in the Cold War and in subsequent intellectual history, as we will see in a future article in this series.

The first article in this series, “A.J. Ayer and the Meaning of Life”, appeared in the July-August issue