Camus in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 47

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Albert Camus was a legend in his own lifetime, as a successful author, a philosopher and a “ladies’ man”. His philosophical discoveries remain provocative even today. Because, like all great philosophers, Camus posed the question of the meaning of life. But his answer to this question was an answer of an entirely new kind. This question as to the meaning of life has been answered, of course, very differently down the centuries. For Plato it is ‘the Good’ that holds the world together; for Hegel the ‘World-Spirit’; for Marx the relations of production; for Sartre freedom; for Nietzsche ‘will to power’. Really, each philosopher has his own answer to this question. But Camus is the exception here. He has none. Or rather, worse: he has an answer, but one of very sobering effect. His answer to the question ‘what is the meaning of life?’ is simply ‘It has no meaning. Life is absurd’. We plan ahead and make decisions, but in the last analysis our whole life depends on a series of chance events over which we have no control. Nor is there really a goal. Nevertheless, it is our task to live proudly and undauntedly on. Camus compares the life of Man with the myth of Sisyphus. The mythical Sisyphus strained tirelessly to push a boulder up a mountainside, even though it always rolled back down before he reached the top. But precisely in this apparently senseless and absurd activity lay, argued Camus, a chance for a fulfilled life. The book “Camus in 60 Minutes” explains, using selected quotations and examples, this theory of “the absurd”. The chapter on “what use Camus’ discovery is for us today” describes the “absurd style of life” that Camus recommends. Camus’ colourful examples of “absurd life-projects”, and his descriptions of how one best confronts “the absurd” itself and leads a life without God or ideological orientation are, above all in our modern societies, of powerful relevance and topicality. The book forms part of the popular series “Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes”.

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Contents

Camus’ Great Discovery

Camus’ Central Idea

The Sense of Absurdity

Suicide as an Evasion of Absurdity

Religion – the Second Attempt to Evade Absurdity

Ideology – the Third Attempt to Evade Absurdity

Honesty with Oneself in the Face of Absurdity

The Myth of Sisyphus

Rebellion as an Attitude to Life

Of What Use is Camus’ Discovery for Us Today?

Living With Absurdity – Freeing Oneself from Bourgeois Rules of Conduct

Absurd Lifestyles: Actors and Seducers

Finding the “Golden Mean”

Composure in the Face of Life’s Unpredictability

Bibliographical References:

Camus’ Great Discovery

The philosophical discovery made by Albert Camus (1913-1960) is, even today, a provocative one. For, like all great philosophers, Camus posed the question: ‘What is the meaning of life?’ But the answer he gave to this question was of a new sort entirely.

Different answers have been given, of course, down the ages to this question of ‘the meaning of life’. For Plato it is ‘the Good’ that holds the world together; for Hegel the ‘World-Spirit’; for Marx class struggle; for Sartre freedom; for Nietzsche ‘will to power’; and for Habermas the development of communicative reason. In fact, each philosopher has his own answer to this question. But Camus is the exception here. He has none. Or rather, worse: he has an answer, but one of very sobering effect. His answer to the question ‘what is the meaning of life?’ is simply ‘It has no meaning. Life is absurd’:

But Camus would not have been a philosopher if he had been content just to register life’s meaninglessness. He in fact not only backed up his pessimistic judgment with many examples but took this absurdity of the world as the starting point for a whole series of interesting reflections. He posed, for example, the radical question of whether, given the world’s absurdity, the only consistent course of action is to take one’s own life: Is suicide the logical conclusion to be drawn from the experience of meaninglessness? Or must one rather carry on living in and with the feeling of absurdity? And if so – how is one to go about this?

Camus answers these questions in his two main philosophical works, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. Both books are written in an expansive, essayistic style quite distinct from the dry, analytic writing of most classical philosophers. Camus, indeed, saw himself more as a literary man than as a philosopher. Thus, we see his experience of the absurd reflected also in his novels, for which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1959. In the novel The Outsider Camus shows in masterly fashion how a single chance encounter on a beach can completely alter a human life and throw it off course in just a few seconds. But the discovery of absurdity and the conclusions that he draws from it definitely do have a philosophical core. Camus counts, together with Sartre and Heidegger, as one of the most important representatives of philosophical existentialism.

He was born in 1913 in the French colony, Algeria. His father worked as a cellarman and his mother in a factory. In 1939, the 26-year-old North African was deeply marked by the outbreak of the Second World War. It seemed incomprehensible to him that, after the experiences of the First World War, humanity could once again plunge into such slaughter. Bewildered he noted the striking contradiction between the news that war had broken out and the persistence of “the blue sky over the sea” and “the humming of the cicadas”. Camus felt at a loss to align, in his mind, the approaching catastrophe with the enduring beauty of Nature:

His consternation at the outbreak of war may well have sharpened Camus’ sense for the absurd but the revealing of this aspect of human life had from the start for Camus something timeless. Camus’ philosophical problem was, in the last analysis, that of the search for meaning in a chaotic, ungraspable world. Because the world that surrounds us and in which we move is, Camus says, full of surprises. It cannot be controlled; it is random and irrational. Man, however, has always striven after order. He is afraid of a future that lies beyond his power to plan and dispose and would like, ideally, to be able to understand, logically explain, and thereby precisely predict all that confronts or will confront him. It is this experience of the irreconcilability of his inner need for order with the real outer world that necessarily gives rise to Man’s sense of absurdity: