Albert Camus was a
French-Algerian journalist, playwright, novelist, philosophical
essayist, and Nobel laureate. Though he was neither by advanced
training nor profession a philosopher, he nevertheless made important,
forceful contributions to a wide range of issues in moral philosophy
in his novels, reviews, articles, essays, and speeches—from terrorism
and political violence to suicide and the death penalty. He is often
described as an existentialist writer, though he himself disavowed the
label. He began his literary career as a political journalist and as
an actor, director, and playwright in his native Algeria. Later, while
living in occupied France during WWII, he became active in the
Resistance and from 1944-47 served as editor-in-chief of the newspaper
Combat. By mid-century, based on the strength of his three novels (The
Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall) and two book-length philosophical
essays (The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel), he had achieved an
international reputation and readership. It was in these works that he
introduced and developed the twin philosophical ideas—the concept of
the Absurd and the notion of Revolt—that made him famous. These are
the ideas that people immediately think of when they hear the name
Albert Camus spoken today. The Absurd can be defined as a metaphysical
tension or opposition that results from the presence of human
consciousness—with its ever-pressing demand for order and meaning in
life—in an essentially meaningless and indifferent universe. Camus
considered the Absurd to be a fundamental and even defining
characteristic of the modern human condition. The notion of Revolt
refers to both a path of resolved action and a state of mind. It can
take extreme forms such as terrorism or a reckless and unrestrained
egoism (both of which are rejected by Camus), but basically, and in
simple terms, it consists of an attitude of heroic defiance or
resistance to whatever oppresses human beings.
In awarding Camus its prize for literature in 1957, the Nobel Prize
committee cited his persistent efforts to “illuminate the problem of
the human conscience in our time.” He was honored by his own
generation, and is still admired today, for being a writer of
conscience and a champion of imaginative literature as a vehicle of
philosophical insight and moral truth. He was at the height of his
career—at work on an autobiographical novel, planning new projects for
theatre, film, and television, and still seeking a solution to the
lacerating political turmoil in his homeland—when he died tragically
in an automobile accident in January 1960.