Albert Camus
20th CenturyAs Your Guide
“Camus will sit with you in the absurd — the collision between your need for meaning and a universe that offers none — and help you revolt with joy. Choose him if you want a guide who believes the struggle itself is enough to fill a soul.”
Who They Were
French-Algerian philosopher and novelist. Explored the absurd and revolt.
How They Saw the World
Camus starts from the collision between the human need for meaning and a universe that offers none, and calls this collision the absurd. Suicide is the only truly serious philosophical problem, and he rejects it — not because life has a hidden meaning, but because acknowledging the absurd and living anyway is the most honest and defiant response available. Sisyphus, condemned to roll his boulder uphill for eternity, must be imagined happy: the struggle itself is enough to fill a heart. Revolt is the proper stance toward an indifferent cosmos, but revolt that turns murderous betrays itself, and Camus draws a hard line between rebellion and revolution that costs him friends on both the Left and the Right.
What They Left Behind
Words that outlived their authors.
What Haunts Them
These are the questions that wouldn't let them rest.
Their Echo
What they left rippling through everyone who came after.
Absurdism, literature, political philosophy, Nobel Prize 1957