Continental · 1913–1960
Albert Camus
Algerian-born French writer of the absurd and of revolt
Camus held that life is absurd, a clash between our demand for meaning and a silent universe, yet suicide and religious leaps are evasions: we must live in lucid revolt. He himself rejected the label “existentialist”.
Life and thought
Albert Camus (1913–1960) was born in French Algeria, the son of a farm worker killed in the First World War and a nearly deaf mother who cleaned houses. A scholarship took him to the University of Algiers, but tuberculosis ended his hopes of an academic career. He worked as a journalist, edited the Resistance newspaper Combat in Paris, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. He died in a car crash at 46.
The Myth of Sisyphus opens with what Camus called the one truly serious philosophical problem: whether life is worth living. The absurd arises from the clash between our demand for meaning and a world that gives none. Suicide and religious faith both escape the clash instead of facing it; Camus urged living lucidly within it, like Sisyphus pushing his rock: “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”. In The Rebel he defended revolt against injustice but rejected revolutions that justify murder in the name of history, which led to his break with Sartre. He refused the label “existentialist”.