ABSTRACT
Long gone are the days when metaphysical revolt, the pitiless contemptuous affirmation of absurdity, the silent solidarity of all reclusive souls, and the moral confines of freedom constituted genuine philosophical issues in lieu of an occasion for ironic remarks or blasé dismissals, as they have become since. “Chronologically and thematically,” writes Jacob Golomb, “Camus is the last thinker on authenticity.”1 But he is not just that. The exemplariness of his biography includes elements that have disappeared almost completely from the personal profile of contemporary thinkers.2 Born on November 7, 1913 in a small Algerian village, Albert became a fatherless child at a very early age. His introduction to philosophy happened when he had just turned 18, thanks to the writer Jean Grenier. When his first marital experience proved a fiasco, he joined the Algerian Communist Party, became more and more involved with the theater, and started a life-long engagement with journalism. During the Second World War he worked as editor-in-chief of the clandestine newspaper, Combat and quickly acquired a national fame. The success, however, had its own troubles. For throughout his entire activity, be it literary, philosophical, or dramatic, Camus displayed an uncompromising attachment to the values of freedom, human dignity, and justice. The price paid for this attitude in socio-political matters was, indeed, bitter. Having been expelled from the ranks of Algerian communists, Camus gradually turned into an open anti-communist and ended up as a persona non grata amongst the French intelligentsia. On the basis of the same humanism he publicly protested against both the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. December 1957 is a memorable date in the history of French culture since this is when Albert Camus was granted the Nobel Prize for literature. Although he was diagnosed with tuberculosis since adolescence, his death would not have natural causes. On January 4, 1960 he lost his life in a car crash, leaving behind an impressive corpus that ranges from novels and theatrical plays to philosophical essays and day-to-day journalism. History also remembers him as the theorist of the
1 Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus, New York and London: Routledge 1995, p. 119. 2 For more biographical details see Ieme van der Poel, “Camus: A Life Lived in Critical Times,” in The Cambridge Companion to Camus, ed. by Edward J. Hughes, Cambridge:
absurd and of the “crisis of justification” which plagued the first half of the twentieth century. He has been called, often sardonically, the directeur de conscience of the middle class or the pope of a secular neohumanism.4 Even so, most of his works target an ontological level that goes beyond philosophical fashions, ideological creeds, and crude politics. It is precisely on this level, namely, that of the singular individual,5 that the French-Algerian essayist interacts with another thinker with a similar inclination towards polemics, though with a more detached attitude vis-à-vis social and political exigencies.
