Episode #224 ... Albert Camus - The Stranger
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So today we're going to start talking about Albert Camus and how perfectly he fits into this conversation we've been having lately. See, when people talk about Camus, a lot of people know about his book, The Stranger. I mean, it's one of the most famous books in history. It's expected. But not as many people know about something else that's exciting from him, which is the book he wrote just before he wrote The Stranger. It's a book that he chose to never publish during his lifetime, for reasons we'll see. And

It was only published after his death by his estate. But nonetheless, if your goal was to understand Camus the best you could, then reading this book in particular is going to be important for knowing how his thinking was evolving during the late 1930s. And this book has context in it that's often missed if you want to understand his full project as a thinker. The book is called A Happy Death, and it's a book that surprisingly, of all things, mostly focuses on the idea of happiness.

Now, if you're confused here a little bit, you have good right to be. I mean, why would Camus start, write, and finish a book about happiness, then choose to never publish it, then to only have his next book be written about a character who seems to care almost nothing about happiness? Well, we'll understand why by the end of this here today.

I mean, if you're reading The Stranger, if that's the reason you came to this episode, just in the first few pages of this book, you'll notice it's written from the perspective of a guy named Merceau, and that this guy Merceau is a character that's famously indifferent to the state of the world around him. You've no doubt heard the first line of this book. People will have a conniption fit talking about it. Mother died yesterday, or was it the day before? I can't remember.

All over the world, conniption fits happen every day about this line because this is great writing from Camus. Just a few words into the book, we already know quite a bit about who Meursault is as a character. He doesn't play the game of society like other people do. He doesn't put on any affect just to please people. In fact, Meursault represents an indifference towards the typical ways that people get their meaning in the world that to a reader makes you feel like there's something deeply unrelatable about his experience. I mean, what person doesn't care about their mother to the point they don't even know what day she died?

And when people comment on this book after reading it, you'll often hear them say about Meursault that he's some kind of an absurd hero for Camus. That by facing the absurdity of the universe and by embodying it to this level, that at the end of the book, when he's sentenced to death and he stares the absurdity of the world in the face and is truly happy, feeling a kind of harmony with the absurd, they'll say this is a kind of example that Camus is putting out there for people to emulate. That we should all seek to be in harmony with the absurd like this.

But this isn't the full picture of what Camus was going for in the character of Meursault. In fact, for whatever it's worth, I think that there's a lot missing from this take. I think a lot of Camus gets missed when you only read his novels, that there's a lot of context to be found in the lectures that he gave, the lesser-known essays that he wrote over the years.

More than that, I think the symbolism of the sun in the book The Stranger is something that's often overlooked and can only be appreciated when knowing his interest in the Mediterranean lifestyle during this period of his thought. And I even think that Sartre, you know, Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote one of the most famous reviews ever of The Stranger,

I think Sartre reads a bit too much of his own work into the work of Camus. And I think his review of The Stranger still causes people to misunderstand it all these years later. What I'm saying is that Camus once famously said that he's an artist, not a philosopher. And some people think he was being modest when he says that. Like, oh, no, no, I'm not a philosopher. My ideas aren't that good.

But no, this was a very specific, intentional thing for Camus to say about his work. He didn't want to be a philosopher. He thought the philosophers of his time were lost in abstractions, lost in a type of fatalism and realism that allowed for the rise of Hitler and people like him. We'll talk more about this as we paint the bigger picture of Camus' overall project, but the thing to understand right now is that Camus refused what he saw as the temptation to become a philosopher in his work because he disagreed with the entire dangerous game that he thought that they were playing.

And understanding this detail of his work begins with this book, A Happy Death, written just before The Stranger. So let's get into it.

Now on the surface, a happy death shares quite a few similarities to The Stranger. The main character of the book is also named Meursault. The book also has sunlight that's often used as symbolism. And Meursault similarly kills someone on a beach as a major plot point near the beginning of the novel. But the similarities in there, because in a happy death, Meursault doesn't kill someone who's trying to attack him with a knife like what happens in The Stranger. No, this Meursault is killing someone out of mercy. It's an agreement that the two of them have.

Zagreus, the man he kills, is a very wealthy, disabled man. He's in quite a bit of pain every day, and he's a man who lives a life where he's mostly confined to his home. Now, this is by no means a happy life that he's living, but Zagreus still thinks he knows a lot about happiness. So in the final moments of his life, he tells Meursault his theory of happiness, after agreeing that if Meursault kills him, he can have all his money after he's gone. Part of the story is that Zagreus just can't pull the trigger on his own.

And he tells him this. Come here, my boy. Before you kill me, come here. I got something to tell you. Happiness lies in three things, Zagreus says. One, happiness lies in money.

Look, a lot of people out there will morally grandstand here and they'll talk about how money doesn't buy happiness. But to Zagreus, it's no coincidence that people that often say this kind of stuff always have money. I mean, nobody that's ever had to struggle to even eat or to find shelter ever talks about money like this. It's obviously way easier to find happiness if you have enough money to secure basic stuff, he thinks. So this point leads Zagreus to number two on his list of stuff. He says that happiness always lies in having time.

Because once you secure those basic necessities of life, somebody always needs time. Time to spend pursuing your own interests. Time that's not just spent working for someone else all day. And time here also implies that you have enough good health to take advantage of the opportunity to have interests to pursue in the first place.

The last thing Zagreus thinks we need to be happy is solitude. Because his thinking is, if you're always distracted and you're always fulfilling some social requirement that people have of you, then you never have time to fully possess yourself. And as he says, how can you ever be happy if you're constantly being something else for somebody else all the time? So Meursault hears all this. He honors the wishes of Zagreus, takes his life and then also all his money.

And then he lives out the rest of the book testing the limitations of this theory of his. And what he finds, just to speed this up so we can talk about The Stranger more, is that Zagreus' theory of happiness, well, it's not stupid. It has some obvious holes in it. See, Camus, throughout the process of writing this book, just in his real life, he's learning more and more about happiness as he goes. And one of the things he does is he goes and visits some religious monks at a monastery and pays close attention to the way that they seem to be achieving happiness.

And upon watching these people, he realizes that the monks are happy even when they have almost nothing. In the same way, someone can have all the money, time, and solitude in the world and still find themselves completely miserable.

Someone can have basically nothing, and it seems that if their will towards happiness is there, that really does seem to be the primary factor here, all things considered. I mean, he writes in an essay called The Desert at one point, what is happiness but just a certain kind of harmony between a person and the life they lead?

Now, this is a beautiful quote. Capture something important about what it is to live life. And for a lot of people, this would probably just be a very inspiring moment. Wait, wait, I can be happy forever if I just will myself to be happy? Come on, guys, let's get to work on that.

But for Camus in his own development, the reaction is quite different. I mean, I can imagine for him this insight about happiness probably started some pretty intense skepticism towards the idea of happiness altogether. I mean, after all, if happiness is just a matter of the will, if happiness just comes down to how we're framing our reality,

then hypothetically, the world could be burning down all around me. Everyone I know and love is in complete misery. And as long as I will myself to frame things in the right way, then I can be happy forever. But like, what is that? I mean, if that is true, then is happiness the ultimate goal of any serious person that's out there? This starts to seem like a goal that someone could only have if they were very young, avoiding responsibility.

I mean, happiness, it seems to Camus, is just another set of theoretical abstractions and then your ability to will yourself to only see them.

But what about what's actually happening in the world? Shouldn't that matter to us too? It's almost like Camus here experienced one of Wittgenstein's ladders. There's a famous metaphor from the history of philosophy, Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, near the end of the Tractatus, implies that what philosophy does sometimes when we do it, you know, when you take a philosophical discussion to the point where you've arrived at some new insight about the world, he says, oftentimes you can look back at the conversation that got you to that place and

And from this new vantage point, that whole conversation you used to be having starts to seem naive or silly to you. It's like a ladder, he says, that you climb up, where once you've used the ladder to get to another perspective of the world, you kick the ladder out from underneath you and you don't need it anymore. And it's nothing against people that are still having these conversations about happiness. It's likely those conversations are the only way you ever get to this other place. But it seems like Camus here is starting to think of happiness more as a matter of will and focus,

and not as some ultimate existential goal that we should all be aiming for is our biggest concern. Not that he ever thought that way. But to focus only on happiness, it's clear, is to ignore something deeper about the human condition more generally. See, this is why the other Meursault, the one at the end of The Stranger, when he accepts the absurdity of the world and sees himself within it and goes into his execution feeling totally happy...

This is not Camus championing this man as some way he thinks human beings should aspire to live. No, to Camus, this is just someone who's achieved a certain kind of harmony with the particular life he's leading. And you can see this all throughout the book with the behavior of Meursault. He's very much in harmony with being indifferent to things. He agrees to marry a woman just because she wants to. He kills a man on a beach just because the sun's in his eyes in a tense moment. He agrees to lure a woman into an apartment where he knows she's going to get beaten and hurt.

And again, he's completely indifferent to doing all these things. See, to Camus, Meursault is a picture of happiness, of harmony with the life he's leading. And yet anybody who reads this man's experience from the first sentence of the book, you know that something very human is lacking in this guy.

And the question it starts to raise to the reader is, what exactly is missing from this guy, Meursault? The answer for Camus is going to be revolt against the absurd. But to be able to get to his idea of revolt, first let me talk for a second about the absurd and some much-needed context about the larger project of Camus that this book is fitting into.

Camus is an absurdist, alright? And you may have heard people describe the absurd as the term he uses for the constant tension we live in that's created by our natural desire for meaning and the meaninglessness of the universe. The collision of these two things causes a tension, and that tension is what he calls the absurd. But it should be said, it's more than just that for Camus. Meaning is no doubt a very commonplace people will encounter the absurd in their life.

But in the interest of linking his work here to this larger conversation we've been having on the podcast lately, for Camus, the absurd is something we encounter anytime. There's something that seems to be a part of our natural constitution as beings, but then we're met with a world that can't provide it for us. So seen in this way, not only does that apply to questions about meaning, but how about when we desire to know things? I mean, in theory, we'd love to know everything about the world around us.

But at a certain point, to affirm the world around you as it is, is to acknowledge your own limitations. The limitations of the tools we have, of our senses, of the limited samples that are available to us, of our capacity to reason, of theoretical abstractions in general as a way of framing pieces of our reality. See, for Camus, the existential problem we face is not just that we live in a world where a lot of stuff is still unknown to us. That would be one thing.

The problem is also that given the kind of limited creature that you are, there are certain things that are always going to be unknowable to you, given the tools you have. Now that is a very difficult encounter to have with the absurd as well. And now think about how that applies to ethics. Think about how that applies to our relationship to death. It's a rather uncomfortable place to be in. This is a kind of suffering we face. As it turns out for Camus, another thing about the kind of creatures we seem to be is that we strive to avoid suffering.

And it's the avoidance of this personal suffering, this piece of what we are. Well, it's well documented that this is the origin of the game that Camus thinks philosophers and religious people alike are playing. They create systems out of theoretical abstractions, or they create grand unifying religious narratives. And this is all transparently an effort by them to get out of this uncomfortable place of facing the world as it is, of living in this absurd tension.

See, philosophers and religious people generally see this tension as a problem that needs to be solved or fixed somehow. But Camus asks, what if he didn't try to fix it all the time? What if the goal isn't to just encounter the absurd and then create a system of meaning to get away from it? But what if meaning, like happiness, was not the ultimate goal that someone was shooting for? What if instead someone made lucidity the primary focus or seeing the world as it is? How would that change things in their life?

This is going to be Camus' own unique version of affirming reality without idealizing it or demonizing it or creating rational abstractions where we expect the universe to be something that it's not. He wants to avoid the temptation that even philosophers fall into where they pretty much always get to a point in their work where they create a set of abstractions that allows them to run from the absurd.

And it's this commitment to lucidity in Camus. Well, this is going to lead him to a similar move that we've seen lately on this podcast, where he's going to try to remove the abstractions from how he views reality. And this will eventually land him in a type of experience where it looks a lot like the sort of embodied present moment that we've been talking about lately. But should be said, his version of this is going to be something very different than anything else we've seen on this series so far.

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That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash fill this. And now, back to the podcast. You know, just because we're on this point here, Albert Camus was somebody who's well aware of this entire conversation we've been having lately.

I mean, this is a guy that called Dostoevsky a prophet of the 19th century at one point. He spent a lot of time and money during his life to get Dostoevsky's book Demons turned into a live-action play. And for anybody coming fresh off that series we just did, you know that Demons, of all his books, is probably the one you need to most be a super fan of Dostoevsky to truly understand and appreciate.

More than that, Camus was one of the people responsible for contributing money and time to make sure the work of Simone Weil was preserved after she died. We might not have her work in the way we do if it wasn't for Camus. He once said that she was the closest thing to a living saint that he had ever seen in his lifetime. So what I mean is, this is a man who understands and appreciates this religious self-emptying we've been talking about.

He just ultimately doesn't accept it himself. In fact, he'd be very suspicious of it, I think. And he'd probably have something to say like, how convenient, you know, how convenient that the primary existential dilemma we face as people is this desire for a unifying sense of connection and how convenient that you found it. I mean, I think he'd say, look, it doesn't matter how intelligent your religious move is. It doesn't matter how much reading it takes to get there or how much work you put in every day to honor this unity that you found.

it is still, at bottom for Camus, the same attempt to create unity out of the absurd. It's the same move. And while he has a lot of respect for these thinkers and their work, he ultimately thinks the stakes of making this kind of move, of giving in to the temptation of becoming a philosopher or a religious follower like this, the stakes are just too high.

This became very evident to Camus when he saw his generation more or less roll over and allow for Adolf Hitler to just show up and do his thing in the world. I mean, from his perspective, weak utilitarian arguments often made by philosophers didn't work against Hitler. The fatalism of his time made people passive, sitting around waiting for the end of history to come around.

And then the realism of his time made people nihilistic, incapable of acting on anything. These philosophers who were supposedly the moral leadership, who faced the absurd, felt uncomfortable, and then created a system of moral universals, but they obviously couldn't get the job done. And why is that? Well, because when it comes down to it, Takemu, these are all people wrapped up in playing the same kind of twisted game we do with philosophy and politics.

to illustrate what he means here. Maybe it's best to think about what somebody could say back to Camus and all he's said here so far. In other words, somebody could say, what are you doing to oppose Hitler, Camus? I mean, I get it, you're criticizing philosophers here, but what alternative do you have?

I mean, all I've heard out of you so far are these basic ideas about what kind of creatures we are. We seem to be the kind of creatures that avoid suffering. We seem to be the kind of creatures that seek meaning. But what foundation do you have for saying any of that stuff? You have no justification for them. You've laid out nothing here, and yet you criticize philosophy? You know, as a man that seems to be basing a lot of his thinking just on the way you seem to be feeling naturally—

Can you really ever morally condemn Hitler and what he did based on that way of looking at things? I mean, what if Hitler just naturally feels like he wants to invade France? Well, Camus might say, you asked me a lot of questions there. Let me answer them one at a time. You asked me what justifications I have for saying these things are the kinds of creatures we are.

Well, if what you're asking me there is, am I willing to play the same game that you do, where you pretend as though you've created a system that gives you a neat philosophical justification that makes things right, where no matter the nuance of the situation, your philosophical rules apply to every single scenario, well, then no. No, I'm not playing that game. In fact, that's the very kind of game that got us into this mess in the first place.

I mean, if we're willing to acknowledge that we live in an absurd universe and that no approach to human behavior is ever going to fix all our problems, Kemu would say, what's more dangerous? Not having a counter-moral system that I can throw in the face of someone like Hitler and tell him that he's wrong? Or continuing on with this mass delusion that philosophy is something that can provide a justification of people's behavior?

That's the mistake we're making to Camus, and it's one that's far more dangerous because it keeps people in a place where they live their lives believing these kinds of justifications are possible. No, what Camus wants to do in his work is something more radical. He wants to find a new way of being that doesn't require always trying to ground it in some set of abstractions we have about the world.

And you know, in the years leading up to writing this book, The Stranger, Camus becomes fascinated by an example of something that he thinks gets fairly close to this way of being. Something he calls the Mediterranean spirit or the Mediterranean way of being. He has a famous speech he gives about it in 1937. And you know, far from this being some kind of doctrine he thinks we should follow, he just thinks generally that people that have lived in certain Mediterranean cultures over the years, when you see their lifestyle, when you take in their artwork,

These are humans that seem to have found a way to live their lives where, look, it's not like they're not thinking about things, but they choose to place more value on different things than most Europeans might typically. Meaning, if in Europe, it's common for people to live in a kind of guilt about their bodies, or to seek transcendence beyond this world as seen in Christianity or German idealism,

Well, then the Mediterranean spirit is one that more values joy or the physical world around you. It values the landscape itself. In other words, there's an eminence to the way these people see their lives unfolding. Where to Camus, they're much less interested in using all their time here on this planet, chopping up the world around them and trying to manipulate it. And they're much more embodied as people, much more present. To Camus, these are people that are much more capable of noticing and enjoying something like the sun on their face or the wind in their clothes.

And they're much more capable of truly feeling that life itself in this way is enough. Now, in terms of this as an example, this isn't an ethics where Camus is saying this is how you should be living. And for most of the people in Europe that he's talking to, living in this way would require something like a stripping away of the ethical systems are already imposing on reality.

And the point here is that in his novels, one way to view the sun for him is that it becomes a symbol for this, or at least a way of being that's possible that bears resemblance to this Mediterranean spirit.

The son becomes a kind of looming invitation to the characters for an alternative way to live that's more centered around imminence. There's several moments in The Stranger that we can see this if we wanted to. For example, early on in the book, when his mother dies, there's a period of time where Meursault notices that it's really hot outside right now. So what this means for him in the book is that he's got to get these funeral arrangements planned really quickly because his mom's body is already starting to decay. And the son here becomes almost like another character in the book itself.

It becomes something standing by, overseeing the events of the book, where when Meursault could otherwise detach from reality like he normally does, or when a more typical person might need some time here to rationally justify their mother's death, the heat of the sun represents the unending process of the imminence of reality and the affirmation of that imminence. The idea being that, you know, whether you're acknowledging that your mom's dead here or not, the bodies are still decaying, Meursault.

A little later on in the book, at his mom's funeral, there's a scene where the sun is beating down on him as he's standing over by where they're doing the service. And he's so detached from what's going on in the moment that in his inner monologue that we're reading, he's more paying attention to how hot it is outside than to his own mom's funeral.

But the son again here is like an additional character in the book. Where again, if instead of detaching, what if we paid attention to what was really going on around us? What if Meursault committed himself to lucidity at his mom's funeral? How different might his experience of that funeral be? Is there another more affirmative version of that experience that's available to him? And in the book, it's as though this possibility of recognizing this eminence is always right in front of him, but he never actually sees it.

Another example is when he kills the man on the beach and the sun glistens off the knife and blinds him in a really annoying way. So he shoots the guy. This is the reason he gives, by the way, when he's being interrogated at his trial. They ask him why he killed the guy and he says, "'Cause the sun was in my eyes." To which everyone just laughs.

But this is the equivalent of the son as a character, you know, hauling back and smacking Meursault in the face. The possibility of affirming reality more fully, of affirming the life of this man he's about to kill, the son is practically begging him in this moment to engage deeper than his normal level of detachment. And yet he doesn't. He stays inhuman. There's a sense in which what causes him to commit this murder is a failure to fully embrace what the son is a symbol of here.

Now, there's of course other symbolism that Camus is going for in the character of Meursault that's well known. Meursault is definitely also meant to be a human embodiment of the absurd. Where you know the whole process in the book of Meursault killing someone and then being sentenced to death in a trial that's filled with a jury of people that not only don't like him or understand him, but ultimately want him to be found guilty. You know, that is obviously for Camus a symbol of the way that society is always indicting the absurd whenever it shows up.

We're always running from it, putting it on trial, finding ways to get rid of it so we don't have to look at it, just like Meursault. At bottom for Camus, society cannot tolerate people who refuse to conform to its narrow emotional expectations.

But again, one key thing here to remember, even with this layered symbolism that isn't on the surface, none of Meursault as a character was supposed to be an instruction manual for how a person should live. No, in a sense we should always remember Meursault is the absurd. He literally says he finds himself in the absurd in the book. And the point here for Camus was clearly that to be human and to be reading this book,

is to find yourself at at least some point in reading it not relating to Meursault and the way that he feels. And there's a reason he works in this level of unrelatability. Because this brings me back to the point I made before about what's missing from Meursault as a human being. What's missing is what Camus calls revolt against the absurd.

Now, you may say back to this, hold on, Camus. You're not about to tell me that you have moral instructions for how I should be living after you just got done trashing every philosopher that tries to do that, right? To which Camus would probably reply, yeah, that's right. I'm not going to do that. Because the key thing to remember here is that when Camus is saying something's missing from the behavior of Meursault, he's not making an ethical claim there. He's making a descriptive claim.

See, we already know that affirming the absurd means to affirm this tension between things like meaning that we desire and the reality of the fact that the universe doesn't have it. Well, to be living authentically in that tension doesn't mean that you're going to stop desiring meaning. It means that you continue on living with that desire, knowing that the universe can never and will never give it to you.

To affirm reality then for Camus is to acknowledge that the universe doesn't care, but I do. I am the kind of creature that does care about the things around me. And what you find when you don't try to run from that fact, but instead try to live as lucidly as you possibly can within it. I mean, his point is, if you continued on living there, doing anything authentic in your life beyond that point, well, that would be by default an act of revolt against the absurd. Just descriptively, that's what's going on there.

This is why Camus starts this line of thinking with his famous question that he says everybody needs to be asking, whether or not to commit suicide. And of course, his answer to that is that you shouldn't. And then, of course, his next step after that is that you also shouldn't just commit philosophical suicide either.

And what he means by this is fascinating. That to affirm reality means that you wouldn't need some grand philosophical justification to help you escape it. You wouldn't need some religious unity or some narrative you've come up with. No, to live authentically for him, just like in the Mediterranean lifestyle,

life itself would be enough for you. And more than that, my obvious experience of caring about the things in the world around me, why wouldn't that be good enough to ground whether something is worth doing or not? You wouldn't need to ground it in fake moral universals that keep people living in a fake moral delusion. We'll get into this more on future episodes, but it's this kind of revolt against the absurd. Without committing philosophical suicide, this becomes the backdrop that Meursault's character is supposed to be a contrast against.

And this will also be the place that he begins writing his other works from in The Rebel and The Plague. And I guess it bears repeating here. This is the place he begins a pretty radical project he has for the entire rest of his career. He asks, what does life-affirming behavior truly look like when you start from a place where you're not going to rely on abstractions like that? Is this even possible, you could ask?

Well, this is the question Camus chooses to grapple with for his entire life. I mean, it was worth it to him. Because while this is a difficult question, and while it may not make him the picture of perfect happiness all the time, the alternative of slipping back into some kind of cheap fatalism or realism or committing philosophical suicide of any type, all of that was unthinkable to him. He was about to find out what it would be like for him to proceed in this world as more of an artist and not a philosopher.

Anyway, I hope this brings some clarity to the way The Stranger sets up the rest of the story of Albert Camus. Let me know if you want to hear the next chapter in this story. Should I do an episode on the plague next? Always incredibly grateful for the people that tell me what they want next. And look, I know for a lot of you out there, like, you leave a comment once letting me know what you want. And like, what are you going to do? You're going to leave a comment every time retelling me what you want? I mean, I get it. You have a life to lead at a certain point. But I appreciate when you do. Appreciate the people that take time out of their day to make my job easier.

All I'm ever trying to do is translate and humanize philosophy that you guys want to hear about. So patreon.com slash philosophize this if you value the show. And as always, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.