Albert Camus saw confronting the absurd world as the way to protect human dignity. His works and ideas contain deep reflections on life and freedom.
Albert Camus was born in 1913 in the French colony of Algiers, in the town of Mondovi, as the second son of a poor family. His father, who was a miner, died in World War I and he lived with his mother, who never went to school, his stubborn grandmother, and his crippled uncle. As he later recalled, he learned poverty from Marx instead of learning freedom from him (during his college years, he had joined the French Communist Party). His youth was miserable.
His mother worked at an ammunition factory, carrying ammunition and even acting as a housekeeper, but Camus had difficulty going to high school after finishing the compulsory education at the time. However, with the help of a teacher who appreciated his talent, he was able to receive a scholarship. He was always known as a scholarship student, but those were depressing days for him.
He suffered from lung disease, but because of his introverted nature, he did not show it to the outside world, and was branded as a rebellious and spoiled student. Then, under the influence of his high school teacher Jean Grenier (a French novelist, philosopher, and author of the prose collection Islands, which Camus praised highly), he devoted himself to literature.
He then enrolled in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Algiers, where he became absorbed in football, amateur theater, and the liberation movement of abused social groups. In 1934, he joined the Communist Party, but he left the party the following year. After finishing his studies, which he had suspended in 1936, he worked as a newspaper reporter in Algeria, but he was transferred to Paris because he offended the authorities with his racial views. Around that time, he published his first work, the poetic essay “Nuptials,” which was well received in a very limited space, and this work marked the beginning of his philosophical questioning.
Camus argued that “when one is conscious of one’s sense of existence, one can escape the anxiety that comes from the conflict between the physical demands of life and the spiritual demands of striving for the absolute, and human dignity lies in rejecting all compromises, facing the absurdity that is the fate of human beings, and denying God, eternity, and hope.” When his philosophical review The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe) (1942) and The Stranger were published the following year, people called him an existentialist philosopher. In 1944, the absurd play Le Malentendu attracted a lot of attention when it was staged.
After that, he devoted himself to the anti-Nazi resistance movement and served as the editor-in-chief of the underground newspaper Combat. After Germany’s defeat, Paris was liberated, and he participated in the surrealist magazine Minotaure, which was published under the leadership of André Breton, and actively worked with artists from various fields and genres.
In 1947, Camus’s work The Plague, which can be said to be the sum total of his philosophy, was published by Gallimard and won the Prix de la Critique that year, laying the foundation for his career as a writer. He then published the play “The State of Siege” (1948), “Les Justes” (1949), the collection of political essays “Current Affairs (Actuelles) 1” (1950), and “The Rebel (L’Homme révolté)” (1951), a collection of essays that describes active rebellion against absurdity. This review can be read as an extension of The Myth of Sisyphus.
In 1952, Sartre’s relationship with Marx, which had been ongoing since 1943, was severed due to differences in Marx’s private materialism and Stalin’s view of the proletarian dictatorship and his view of the revolution.
Following the publication of “Current Affairs Review 1” in 1950, “Current Affairs Review 2” in 1953, and the collection of essays “Summer” in 1954, he published “The Fall” in 1956 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year in 1957. After that, the book 《Current Affairs Review 3》 was published in 1958, but it did not receive much attention. In 1959, he adapted Dostoevsky’s “Demons” and began writing the feature-length “The First Human” while touring the provinces. He died in a car accident on his way back from vacation in 1960, and the film was released posthumously as an unfinished work.
Camus’s masterpiece, The Stranger, seems like an ordinary story, but it depicts the vanity felt by individuals connected to the irrationality and absurdity of the world in Camus’s unique style. At the end, you will get a glimpse of a rich cross-section of human life and an amazingly exquisite taste.
