Albert Camus or the tragedy of happiness

«Happiness, after all, is an original activity these days. The proof is that we tend to hide to practice it. Happiness today is like common crime: never confess. Don't say, out of the blue, ingenuously: «I'm happy». Because you'll immediately see your condemnation on the lips of those around you: «Ah, you're happy, my boy! And what about the orphans of Kashmir, or the lepers of New Zealand, who are not happy?» And immediately, we're as sad as toothpicks. But I have the impression that you have to be strong and happy to help people in trouble.» Albert Camus

Albert Camus's philosophy is very close to the life he led. He was born in 1913 in Mondovi (Algeria) to a poor, illiterate family; his family moved to Algiers at an early age (following the death of his father in the war), which led to a meeting between the young Camus and schoolteacher Louis Germain, who saw talent in him and convinced his family to enroll him in high school, despite their poverty. His first struggle was with language: he wanted to be the spokesman for all those who, being poor or unable to go to school, couldn't speak. At the same time, he discovered the inequalities caused by poverty, and surprisingly used soccer to counter them! A goalkeeper, he was described as «solitary in the cage, but a team player». He later went on to study philosophy.

At the age of seventeen, his life took a major turn when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The lively young man, in love with the sun, discovers death as an injustice. «My youth is running away from me, that's what being sick is all about.» This was followed by a period of great doubt, which only served to sharpen his desire to live. He was struck by a phrase from André Gide: «I wished to be happy as if I had nothing else to do». He continued his studies and became involved in the Resistance.

Orphaned by the war, he joined the Communist Party in 1935, but soon realized that it represented the very thing he was trying to combat - indoctrination, in this case political indoctrination. He left the party two years later, and became involved through theater and journalism. As he himself would say: «Theaters and soccer pitches were my real universities».». As for journalism, it enabled him to express loud and clear what his novels - he had been writing since he was seventeen - contained in embryo. In a spirit of solidarity, he wanted to join the war, but his physical condition would not allow it: his revolt would therefore take the form of books.

The atrocities of war, the misfortunes of his country, and his own youth, ravaged by illness, gave birth to the first aspect of his philosophy: the absurd. The absurd is born of «confrontation of the human call with the unreasonable silence of the world».». Indeed, man, who does not understand the world in which he lives, feels a deep sense of absurdity arise within him, through three realizations: first, why is existence so mechanical, so weary and habitual? Secondly, man realizes that he is as much a stranger to the world in which he lives as he is to himself: he struggles to understand its meaning, even more so when he becomes aware of his own finitude, the final condition for absurdity.

It's important to realize that, for Camus, it's not the world itself that's absurd, but the individual's relationship with it. One appears immutable, eternal, while the other is only change and ephemeral reality. He also sees that man is different, a kind of exception to nature, a being whose mind is not modelled on the reality of his world. cosmos. Camus wonders whether the gulf between the two can simply be crossed. In other words, whether life is really worth living, since sooner or later we have to die, and the world will remain mute to human questions anyway.

He sees several reactions and consequences, some positive, some not. He rejects suicide, which is simply the suppression of consciousness, of the lucidity that enables rebellion. He also rejects religions and doctrines - both spiritual and political - as illusory beliefs that place our hopes and the meaning of life in a world other than the one we live in. On the contrary, Camus draws three positive attitudes from this absurdity: revolt in the face of renunciation (refusing to create false hopes and having the courage to live the absurd), the freedom to know one's condition in the face of the servitude of those who veil their face, and finally passion against indifference. «There's no love of living without despair of living».

If, for Camus, despair can be embodied in human finitude or absurdity, hope can be found in “experiences facing the world”. This last point is perhaps linked to the nature of the character: Camus was in love with life, the sun, the sea, the beauty and warmth of the landscape - and with many women, too! We mustn't passively endure a life that's been given to us: on the contrary, we must act, remain in action, and live each moment to the full. He himself will say: «I draw three consequences from the absurd, which are my revolt, my freedom, my passion. By the mere play of my conscience, I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death - and I refuse suicide.» That's the solution: «You have to imagine Sisyphus happy».».

From his recent literary and journalistic successes with the cycle de l'absurde (books such as The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, Caligula), Camus, who once seduced, now intimidated: at the end of the war, he once again committed himself, notably against the atomic bomb (which he was one of the few to denounce), because «you can't get out of the game once the game is deadly.» As the political context became increasingly violent and terrible, Camus symmetrically became a man in revolt, and entered the most active part of his life, opening the second cycle of his philosophy, which is also a response to the first.

Revolt is a struggle against the suffering of the world in two ways: on the one hand, collective revolt, service to the victims of the injustices of war, for example, or simply to those of life. This revolt unites everyone in a single identity, that of human nature, common to all, and it acts by defending a cause, such as human rights, not by rejecting what already exists without proposing to improve it. On the other hand, it is a refusal to accept terror - especially the terror of war. While the absurd man wonders about suicide, the rebellious man asserts that «the only really serious moral problem is murder.» Camus strongly denounces the law of the strongest (used as a justification for murder by fascists at the time), which although natural has no place in human society. Revolt must lead to a society that respects human nature and rejects atrocities: the works in this cycle are The Revolted Man, The Righteous and The Plague.

Camus finally abandoned himself to the theater, the great passion that would animate him for the rest of his life, but this did not prevent his world from becoming darker. He distanced himself from the existentialists - who didn't believe in human nature - and the communist intellectuals, notably Sartre, who criticized him for his passivity or idealism, for remaining only in theoretical revolt. In a milieu where almost all intellectuals were left-wing, Camus dared to exclaim: «The truth of a thought is not decided by whether it is to the right or to the left, and even less by what the right and the left decide to do with it. [...] If, finally, the truth seemed to me to be on the right, I'd be there.» With all his press problems, Camus became increasingly nostalgic for the simple, sunny happiness he used to enjoy: «In intellectual society, I always feel guilty. So I become less natural, and that annoys me terribly.». His illness became increasingly present, as did his thirst for life and the ardor of his revolt. In 1954, Algeria was on fire: «We're going to have to have French people shooting French people, and I don't want to put myself in either camp.».

Three years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize, to the sarcasm of the press, who spoke of the «crowning of a finished work». Camus was deeply disappointed and saddened, as much as they were silent. He drowns himself in work, and once again refuses to let life defeat him. Unwilling to let himself be denatured and flee from what he had always been, he set off on a journey, this time to the South, far from the cold, polemical Paris, close to the sun, the sea, life and warmth. «I need a bit of solitude, the share of eternity.» L'absurde and la révolte, both of which took fifteen years of his life, opens on the last - and most important - philosophical cycle to which he will not be able to devote himself for long: Love. He begins Visit First Man, and is already thinking of two more books, each more full of the life and sunshine he finds in the south. «You can't just pass through the south, you have to stop there».». «Lucidity is the closest wound to the sun».». It was in this return to the sunny life of his childhood that he died, on January 4, 1960, in a car accident, on a straight, half-shaded, tree-lined road. Journalist Jean Daniel, a great friend of Camus, wrote:

«On January 4, 1960, I was reporting from Tunisia. I receive an urgent communication. François Herval speaks to me:
- Jean, Camus has just been in a car accident!
- Serious?
- Yes.
- Is he dead?
- Yes.
- Alone?
- No, with Michel Gallimard.
- How did it happen?
- The road was straight, dry and deserted.
- Deserted, dry, straight. It's destiny.
- It's destiny.

If we compare the various philosophies since the dawn of time, few possess as much beauty and light as Camus's, to the point where we might wonder whether it is really a philosophy at all. It's true that it's not as theoretical as Descartes or Aristotle, but it does keep at its core, in a fundamental way, what the others forget, and which is nonetheless the most essential: Man. Throughout history, philosophers have sought to explain the world, its phenomena and its causes; little by little, they have created systems that claim to be logically perfect, with reason, but which are oh so shaky when applied to the reality of the world that never ceases to amaze us.

The world is not an arithmetical sequence of cause and effect, without faults or imperfections; there are certainly certain rules that govern it, but they leave room for the particular, the imperfect, the mistaken, the different. Camus doesn't question the reasons for this world's existence, but looks for man's involvement in it - the only thing that really matters, because it concerns everyone, and it attempts, as a true philosophy of life rather than a theory, to answer human questions and the quest for meaning in existence. As Camus once said: «What interests me is being a man.» Not to know the distance between the moon and the earth, or the distance between two atoms in a molecule: by focusing on the infinitely large and the infinitely small, man has forgotten the middle ground and the reference point for all these studies, which is himself.

As far as philosophy itself is concerned, it may appear pessimistic or even nihilistic, but it is only devoid of the illusions that man creates for himself when he is afraid of events and phenomena that are incomprehensible and greater than himself. Camus wants to avoid at all costs being blinded and indoctrinated by theories conceived by men about truths of which they cannot be certain, just as he rejects the attitude of closing one's eyes and failing to find meaning in one's life because it is too difficult to face reality. Why do we get up in the morning? why do we study? why do we start a family? how do we react to death? For Camus, personally answering these questions means facing the world, overcoming absurdity and placing one's ideals in the world, not outside it, because the absolute, the inhuman absolute, cannot be reached or created.

A final point of Camusian philosophy is this profound respect for human nature, and all the concessions it implies. He defends a common nature that unites mankind, unlike politico-religious doctrines that tend to disunite. Camus is a great humanist: he wants to give back to man what is man's, relying on his fellow human beings to lessen the harshness of life and devote themselves to the quest for happiness, which is «the greatest of conquests, the one we make against the destiny imposed on us.»

Food for thought.

«I've never been able to give up the light, the happiness of being, the free life I grew up in. But although this nostalgia explains many of my errors and faults, it has undoubtedly helped me to better understand my profession, it still helps me to stand, blindly, with all those silent men who only endure in the world the life made for them by the memory and return of brief, free happinesses.» - Albert Camus