ABSTRACT
The world wherein Camus felt most at home was the ancient Greek philosophy. It was under the mentorship of his philosophy teacher Jean Grenier, at his school in Algiers, that Camus discovered Socrates and started reading Plato’s dialogues. Later he discovered the world of Greek mythology and was fascinated with Greek tragedies. The lyrical Algeria that Camus portrays in Noces or L’Eté is a joyful Orient, far from the problems of Europe and influenced by the Greek Mediterranean spirit. It is a shared space under the same sun by the colonizers and the colonized. This is a sensation of solidarity and brotherhood that Camus tries to turn into a new concept, that of ‘measuredness’ (la mesure). The measuredness of the natural world is its beauty, beyond which there is no salvation. Such salvation, according to Camus, comes as an indifference to history and its rational design. Simply because, this sensual and aesthetic quest for salvation that we find in Camus’ first writings and his Meridian philosophy praises the Mediterranean thought of Heraclitus, Plato and Plotinus, as opposed to philosophies of history of Hegel and Marx.
