Episode #227 ... Albert Camus - On Exile
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West, this is Philosophize This. So listen to these last three episodes we've done recently on Albert Camus. You can hear some of the terms he's been throwing around like solidarity, rebellion, lucidity. You can hear these things and be on board with what he's saying in theory. But it's quite another thing to be able to apply these things to your life in any sort of real way. I mean you can theoretically understand, you could be looking at the world in a more life-affirming way, but you can't be looking at the world in a more life-affirming way.

But look, you can't just all of a sudden be like, oh, I get it now. I just got to be more lucid about stuff. That's what's been missing from my life this whole time. No, to Camus, you don't just think your way into a more lucid framing of your reality. This is something that in many ways a person has to arrive at through lived experience. That much like in the work of Dostoevsky or the religious mystics we've talked about or even certain lines of Zen Buddhism on the podcast lately.

There's certain insights about what it is to be a human being that can only be arrived at by experiencing them directly. And to Camus, one of these important experiences that you've got to have in your life, but that a lot of people spend most of their lives running away from, is what he's going to call the experience of exile. Now, just to understand what he's talking about here, let's start with an example of exile that's far too extreme, and then we'll readjust from there. Imagine being a member of a village deep in the jungle somewhere, you know, lots of people in this village of yours, and you're

And let's say one day you do something that makes everyone in this village really mad at you. They all decide they've had enough of your genius behavior for one lifetime, and they cast you out into the jungle and say to never come back. Now, when you're out there in the jungle all by yourself, you know, eating leaves, rubbing sticks together, jaguars circling in the background, well, this is not a good feeling. This feeling of exile from the safety of the community you once lived in. You could say this is a type of homelessness you're experiencing here.

That being in exile is a matter of being smacked across the face with the fact that this village you used to be a part of, in terms of it providing security for your life, turns out it's not as solid of an option as you once thought it was. I mean, there was a time when your place in that village felt like it was the absolute truth to you. But now you're starting to realize there's some real limitations to it that make the security that once felt like home start to seem like it was a set of illusions.

For Camus, exile is going to be this state of metaphysical homelessness. It's going to be when we lose a sense of home, usually against our will, but then once we're in this new place without a home, we may long to go back to the way things once were, but exile is going to be where for any number of reasons, we find that it's impossible to go back to the same set of illusions we once lived in. And as you're no doubt guessing by this point, for Camus, this is going to apply to far more areas of our experience than just being physically exiled out in the jungle or something.

Because we aren't just physical creatures to Camus, obviously. An important thing about the environment that we live in is that it also includes this existential tension of the absurd. And at the level of the universe, you are not entitled to a permanent state of anything in this life.

Yeah, when it comes to physical safety, but how about also to knowledge about the world, to love, meaning, beauty, belonging, whatever it is. I mean, any form of these things that you ever experience in your life, Takemu, is strictly provisional. These are subject to change. These are things that need to be revised on an almost everyday basis by you. And to not do that work, to spend your life making arrangements where you see these things as more owed to you or unchanging than they really are,

Well, this is to do what most of us do, and to spend your life on the run from this feeling of exile. And when we encounter these sorts of limitations, and are hit with the fact that our old set of illusions are shattered, and that no matter what it is, that there really is no promised land for us in this life, the realization of that fact, the living immersed in that fact, that feeling of exile for Camus is going to be one of the most important things you can ever experience if you want to do a firm life at a level that few people ever see.

It's something that points the way towards a reintegration with people and the world itself, away from theoretical abstractions. And here's the thing about exile, like I said before, this will be something for him that you ultimately have to experience. It's not something you can get to by just thinking about your thinking. We'll talk about several different examples today of very important ways exile shows up in our lives.

We'll also talk about some common methods people use to run away from it all the time. And Camus was a master, by the way, of spotting exile. Even in the little things that people just explain away. Things people swear to you are just normal ways to behave.

Should be said, though, Camus, you know, doing his best to be an artist in his work and not a philosopher. He's already shown us some pretty beautiful images of exile so far in the work we've already covered. He shows us Sisyphus, clearly in a state of exile as he's alone, pushing his rock up a hill condemned by the gods. This state of exile that he's in leading to the lucid realizations about his life that Camus asks us to imagine. There's also Meursault in The Stranger who's in a state of exile, you know, where he's a stranger within the very society he lives in.

Then there's also his book The Plague we talked about, where Camus shows us a more collective state of exile, where Dr. Ryu, John Tarrou, and others encounter the plague, and then they're quarantined into a state of exile where their city's cut off from the rest of the world. He eventually shows us how it's only through being in this state of exile together that they eventually face the absurd head-on and find solidarity. Exile, again then, becomes the uncomfortable thing that gets them to this deeper understanding of their true connection to others.

And look, if all you had were these really well-known versions of exile from the work of Camus, well, you'd be fine, honestly. Your life would probably still be pretty good, all things considered. But as the resident guy in your life here that spent way too much time reading philosophy in my life, I want to turn you on to another book that Camus wrote later in his career, where it's the most focused effort he ever gives us in his work of creating images of this concept of exile that are highly relatable.

It's a book he wrote in 1957 called Exile and the Kingdom. Six short stories, all of which paint a different image of people caught in a state of exile. And it's usually, by the way, a complicated double form of exile for these characters, as we'll see throughout the book.

And these examples are great, I think, because, well, look, bubonic plagues, mythical figures pushing a rock up a hill, these are all wonderful and all. But there's something about having real examples from the lives of people that'll allow us to unpack exile in this episode a lot more effectively than we otherwise would. So consider the first of these six short stories. It's a story about a woman named Janine who finds herself pressured to go on a vacation with her husband and

It's the story Camus chose to open the book with, and he gives it the title The Adulterous Woman. Now you hear that title, and you may think this is a woman that's going to be having an affair with someone in this story. Well, not in the way you may be thinking. Should be said, this whole vacation that Janine got pressured to go on isn't just a vacation. Her husband's a salesman in the book. He travels to the Sahara Desert in the country of Algeria to sell stuff to people.

And he doesn't want to be going on this trip all alone, so he asks his wife Janine to go along with him. Let's go together and just call this whole thing a vacation, he says. She admits when she imagined going on this trip up in her head.

She thought it was going to be a bunch of soft sand and palm trees everywhere. Paradise, basically. But then she actually gets there and she is soon hit with the reality of being in the desert. The heat, the cold, sand everywhere in your shoes and your hair. Rocks and dead grass essentially as far as the eye can see is what she has to work with.

But more than just with the landscape though, Janine is shocked when she gets there by the very different nomadic sort of people that live in this desert region of Algeria. She doesn't like them that much. She finds a way they act to be abrasive to the way she's used to seeing people behave where she comes from in her home country of France. Now, some important context here about this story and about the rest of the book. Camus himself is a man who was born in Algeria and then moved to France later on to further pursue his artistic career.

And because of this, he's a man who feels a special connection, outside of writing this book, to both Algeria as a country and France as a country. He loves both of them. Now, Algeria, during this time that he's writing this, was a colony of France struggling for independence. They're in the middle of a war fighting with France.

And as is the case with many colonial situations like this, I mean, even if you're not someone that's actively shooting a gun, there's horrible violence going on around you, power struggles. I mean, to call this a tension that exists between the people of Algeria and their French colonizers would be an understatement.

But remember though, Janine in this book is a woman from France who's on vacation in Algeria who's looking at the people that live there annoyed by many of their differences to her. She thinks they're weird at times, arrogant and inconsiderate at other times. I mean, you can imagine this married couple from France in the middle of the desert on vacation. You know, some guy that lives there may walk by them a little too close for their liking and her husband's like, oh, who do these people think they are? Janine's like, oh, honey, just let it go. Let's get out of here away from them.

In other words, these are a couple very closed off people that judge everything around them, constantly trying to keep their world as small as possible. And this is Camus' point here. On this particular trip, Janine is going to start to notice that keeping the world small like this is what they're doing when they're in their marriage together. She starts by taking a long look at her husband,

And she just sees through the game they've both been playing more than she ever has before. Here's the way he's talking to people, as he's trying to sell stuff to them. Where he has this really obvious set of tactics he's using to just try to get something from people. It's a bit cringe from her perspective.

More than that, though, she looks at him and she sees how he just starts complaining the second things get immediately outside of his comfort zone. She starts thinking about him more as a partner. You know, 25 years ago, they got together. He was a law student. She was a young woman. And he asked her to marry him. They agreed to be the thing for each other that was always going to be there no matter what happens when the world gets too hot or cold or sandy. Yeah.

when there's these annoying nomadic people that start coming around them a bit too close. Let's make an arrangement, they said, so that we never have to deal with any of this stuff alone facing it head on. And look, she doesn't hate the guy. He has good qualities. He's generous with her, she says. When she really asks him to do something, he'll always do it.

But there's things about the way they talk to each other in this marriage that show her something important about this whole arrangement they have. He'll say things like, look, don't worry. You know, if I ever die in some kind of accident, I've made sure you're going to be financially taken care of. Don't worry. And she hears that and she's like, OK, that's it's great and all. But it's also, in another sense, a really fearful thing for someone to say. I mean, to say something like that is completely missing something important about what life is, isn't it?

Think of the kind of person you'd have to be to hear that and to just be completely relieved where running from the volatility of life is one of your biggest concerns every day when you think about what your partner provides to you. And look, don't get her wrong. She appreciates that her husband would do this for her. But there's a whole other way of looking at life here where financial hardship like that, having to start over, having your back up against a wall sometimes...

is just a part of what it is to be a human being. I mean, what person structures their life around being able to run from life all the time? This goes beyond just a marriage for Camus, though. I mean, imagine if any time life came your way like this, where you're about to have to face something difficult head on. Imagine if you always had someone to bail you out so you never had to experience the hardship fully.

Now, you wouldn't resent the support system. Of course not. But to structure your life in this way, that would be in denial of something important about what life is. And the inverse of this is a bit strange, too, if you think about it. Imagine someone who has a really bad string of luck in their life. They lose everything. And then imagine if someone's choice was to just give up on life altogether.

Both of these responses would be them staying safe in denial of something important about a lucid take of what human existence is sometimes. In other words, this would be a way to avoid exile. And when it comes to Janine and her marriage, how much of this whole arrangement that they have with each other is just to avoid this feeling of exile? There's a sense in which she's not even sure if her husband even loves her anymore.

But at the same time, she wonders, sadly, does it even really matter if he does or not, given the nature of this service that they provide each other that helps them keep their world mutually small? Now, noticing this, Janine finds herself in what you could call a double state of exile. On the one hand, she doesn't feel at home even in her own marriage. It feels like she sees beyond the set of illusions she used to live in that allowed her to deny some aspect of her life.

But then she also doesn't feel at home when she's not in her marriage, or when she's out in the desert of Algeria around all these people that don't play the same set of social games that she does, and so their existence becomes an affront to her and her husband.

And it's this metaphysical homelessness she's in, combined with the inability to ever go back to the way she used to see things. This puts her in a place that is very uncomfortable, where it drives her to move forward in her life in a transformative way. In other words, exile here becomes a catalyst for finding a way to relate to her existence and the people around her in a more lucid way. And what she starts to get drawn to in the story, it turns out, is the desert itself, which is

just beautiful work by Camus here, to have the desert be the thing that she has a love affair with. Again, the adulterous woman as a title is not referring to her cheating on her husband with another person. She cheats on the set of cold, shallow arrangements they have with each other that ground the very essence of their marriage. See, because they're walking around one day in this story, and someone recommends to them that they climb up on top of this fort and go check out the view of the desert that's all around them. It's beautiful, they say.

Janine suggests they do it. Her husband's like, "Why? Come on, why?" Janine says, "Please, can we go?" He says, "Okay, fine. Let's just go for a minute." So she gets up on top of this fort, you know, looks out at the expanse of the desert shooting out in all directions. And in this moment, she starts to just feel overwhelmed by how connected to this place she feels. As she looks out, she can't help but think that this desert, while it's very empty, you know, some might even call it a barren landscape,

But on some other level, she says, the desert is also a place that's very free. She even sees some of the nomadic people in the distance that are living their lives in the desert. You know, they have no idea who she even is, probably never will. In other words, the desert becomes a place for her that's unrestricted by a bunch of the normal hallmarks of civilization. Things that are usually built in an attempt to try to protect people from the sun and the elements and all the problems that come with the freedom of a place like the desert.

These people in the desert to her become people that are, quote, possessing nothing but serving no one. They are the destitute and free lords of a strange kingdom, end quote.

And if you listen to the last few episodes we've done on Camus, you'll no doubt see where he's going here. This whole scene clearly represents some of the symbolism we've talked about all throughout his work. The desert represents the absurd, where on one hand, yes, it's an empty void, but on the other hand brings a person a new level of freedom. The sun represents the imminence of reality and the Mediterranean spirit outside of the typical abstractions people live in. There's also the intense weather of the desert that represents what we sometimes have to face while affirming the world in our own existence.

See, Janine feels the spirit of this lucid revolt calling to her in a sense here. And experiencing the desert fully like this wakes her up into a feeling of deep longing that she has. A longing for something that has no object really, but is absolutely there. But still, as Janine's looking out at the desert and her husband's complaining and wanting to go back to the hotel, he's calling her silly. Why are we looking off into the horizon right here? What are we doing?

Still, she can't help but feel that this moment she's having is one that is shattering a set of illusions that she will never be able to go back to. And once they get back to the hotel in the book, and she's feeling sick that night, and they decide to go to sleep. The room is cold. Again, sand is blowing everywhere. It's a horrible hotel room for whatever it's worth. But they're snuggling in bed next to each other, and she can't help but notice how easy it would be

to just do what they've always done, to go to sleep, to keep each other warm at night, to wake up the next day and live yet another day in the same exact way they always have.

But on this particular night, with her husband asleep, she sneaks out of the room into the cold and she runs back to the spot where she saw the desert earlier that day and she decides to take it all in again, this time by herself. And after she returns back to the room, she crawls back into bed. Her husband wakes up in the morning, walks over to the sink to get his water like he normally does. And as he's doing it, he notices that his wife's crying about something. He asks her what's wrong. She says, oh, it's nothing, dear. Don't worry about it. And that's where the story ends.

Now, the similarities here to the behavior of someone that's having a different kind of affair are deliberate. And the ending of the story being so ambiguous is also very deliberate. See, to Camus, to be in a state of exile is not to arrive at some neat end to the story, and it's not to have perfect information about what exactly is going to be happening next. See, this is a really important detail about exile that Camus wanted to get across in this story. Exile, when you pay attention to it,

exile is often the price someone has to pay for being honest about their existential condition. And for Camus, it's like, look, choosing to spend your life on the run from exile like this, well, this is a recipe for two things that you're going to start to see more of in your life for him. One, you're never going to be fully appreciating things like love, belonging, or meaning as much when you do provisionally have them. You'll always, to a degree, be taking them for granted in your life, like you've arrived at them.

And two, it's a recipe for being absolutely blindsided when the events of your life inevitably show you the limitations of the set of arrangements you have. Notice how Janine could live her life for 25 years in a set of arrangements that were masquerading as love and belonging, only to be blindsided during one moment of lucid reflection that all of this was an attempt to deny certain realities about what her life is.

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See, when she looks back 25 years in the story, thinking back to a time when her life made more sense to her, nostalgia like this. To Kemu, this is a very predictable response that people often have when they're hit with a state of exile.

Because think of what nostalgia is. It's a type of metaphysical homelessness at the level of time. Nostalgia is feeling so not at home during the current moment that you're living in that you run from that feeling and then harken back to a time when things were more meaningful or things were better. Nostalgia is a response to exile for Camus. And consider how a point like this makes this entire project of his so unique.

I mean, so many people alive today, if you asked them, what is nostalgia? These days, it's popular to come up with a kind of psychological explanation for it. That's the hallmark of our times. What is nostalgia? Well, you seek nostalgia all the time, you see, because you have some insecure attachment that wasn't formed properly in your childhood. So now you long for this other time that you used to be living in.

Or how about nostalgia is a maladaptive avoidance behavior you've developed that distorts your view of the past and the present, by the way, and then fuels this depression that we've been trying to heal in you all this time. How about any psychological narrative where we simply explain our behavior in terms of how it connects to some rational set of protocols? See, Camus would be very skeptical of this approach as being the final word on any of this stuff.

And of course, he wouldn't be saying that we should stop doing psychology, but he would see it as incredibly valuable that we not lose sight of the permanent set of existential tensions that we're always having a psychological experience within. You know, he'd invite people to see their own experience as not just a problem to be solved. He'd invite them to try to be in their experience more fully and to not try to just rationally subordinate it by linking it to a set of theoretical abstractions like this.

that part of affirming the absurdity of existence fully for him is knowing that there are certain things about it that exceed rational explanation like this.

That it is part of the kind of creature that you are to want more out of life than life can give you. And what if exile is not just some epiphenomenon of some underlying complex you've developed over your life? What if exile is a fundamental existential condition of the kinds of creatures we are? If you spent 20 years in therapy and you feel less anxious on the other side of it,

Is that because you have a narrative that helps you rationally explain your anxiety now? Or is that because you've had to face more exile head-on in your life over all those years? This existential framing from Camus is important to consider as well.

Let's talk about another story in this book that shows more sides of what Camus called exile. Totally different characters in this one, but the story is still set in Algeria. The title of this story is The Guest. The main character of the story is a school teacher named Daru. Now, Daru is a guy that is ethnically French, but is born and raised in Algeria. And for most of his life, he lives in a schoolhouse on top of a big hill. And his life is to teach the Algerian children that are in the surrounding villages around this hill. They all come there and he teaches them.

And Daru, for whatever it's worth, loves his life as a school teacher. He doesn't want anything other than what he has. So if you're somebody out there that enjoys your own life, you may be able to relate to him as a character here because he's extremely frustrated in the book when this war breaks out in Algeria between the indigenous population and the French colonial rule. This is rather inconvenient to him as someone that feels like a citizen of both these countries. He sees it from both sides, doesn't really want to pick a side,

And the whole situation gets even more inconvenient for him when he looks out his window one day and sees a French colonial guard leading a prisoner with his hands bound up this giant hill to a schoolhouse with no idea what any of this is all about. The French guard arrives and tells Daru that he's being commissioned by the state to deliver this prisoner to be executed, that there's a town several miles away where the authorities are there waiting for him. And Daru, after the weather calms down, it's snowing at the time, he's being commanded to walk this prisoner to that town and hand him over.

Now, of course, Daru wants nothing to do with this. He tells the guard he's not going to deliver. He refuses to take a side, to which the guard says, look, I'm going to leave you to do whatever it is you're going to do here. But for whatever it's worth, you've insulted me here today. Good, sir. And then he leaves and doesn't say anything else. Daru, waiting for the weather to calm down, spends all night hoping that this prisoner is just going to make a run from it, you know, change the situation for him so he doesn't have to make a choice.

But the next morning, weather's cleared up, he wakes up, feeds the prisoner, starts walking him toward this town he's got to turn him into, and as he's leaving his house, he hears something behind him move, like a little rustle of the leaves behind him. He looks back, sees nothing, and decides to keep going. Later on, when they're only a couple miles away from the town in the middle of the desert, Daru stops the prisoner from walking, and at this point he gives him a choice. He gives him some money and some food, and he tells him there's two paths for you to take from this point on. You follow this road to the left...

And it's going to take you to that town. You can turn yourself in, face your execution, go that direction. But this other road to the right, he says, will take you to a group of nomads. You can live your life going on with them and you'll probably never have to face the French authorities. Daru, at this point, starts walking back to his house and the prisoner just stands there. He's just, he's shocked. He doesn't know what to do.

And as Daru gets close to where he's going to be out of eyeshot on the horizon, curiosity gets the better of him. He turns around and he sees the prisoner made the choice to go to the town and turn himself in after all. Daru goes back to the schoolhouse. He opens the door, happy to be done with all this. And when he gets back, he sees written on the blackboard of the school a message that was left for him while he was gone. Scribbled in chalk on the blackboard, it says, "'You turned in our brother. You will pay.'"

Clearly a message that was written by the surrounding Algerians that he teaches that were watching the whole thing go down and got the wrong idea about what happened. Now again, the story ends right here, right at the point where we don't know exactly what's going to happen next. But let's talk about the state of double exile that this character Daru was living in because it's similar to a state of exile that Camus faced during his own lifetime. Daru looks around him at the political options that are available to him during his time

And he's someone who doesn't feel like either side really represents how he feels about the situation. And by the end of the story, he's clearly someone who's disliked by both sides of this conflict. The French people can't trust him, and the Algerian people think he just turned their guy in.

This metaphysical homelessness, then, where Daru would love to have a side, or he'd even love for people to just leave him alone in a schoolhouse every day so he'd never have to take a side. Camus is showing us a character here where, completely against his will, he's being forced into a state of exile from both the places he once thought of as home, despite, you know, physically being right in the middle of them.

He's forced to confront the fact that the illusions he once was living in, you know, the illusion of peace that once went on between colonized and colonizer in the state of Algeria,

well, that wasn't ever a real state of peace in the first place. And for Daru, even when he tries his hardest to not make a choice in the story, Camus is showing here how sometimes in the eyes of the people who are all around us, constantly judging our actions, sometimes making a choice isn't even something of your own doing. Sometimes the choice has already been made for you by the events of the world, and there's nothing you can really do about it except face the exile head on.

And like I said, Camus definitely put a lot of himself into this character of Daru. Not only was he also French-Algerian, but the political events of his time also put him in a similar situation to this one. See, very early on in his life, Camus was part of an upstart communist movement of people. And look, once he did that, any right-wing person from there on out was always going to despise Camus.

But then later in his life, after he condemns the violence that's being carried out by the totalitarian left after World War II, well, even those people, some of them his closest friends at the time, rejected him for being too moderate, for not standing up sufficiently to all the evils that were going on in the world during his time. Now, we know, by this point in the series, why Camus and his work tried to be so moderate, measured, and balanced in his approach.

But regardless, during his time, he found himself living in a world where the events around him forced him into a state of double exile, with the only two options that seemed available if you wanted people on your team. And this brings me to another very important point about exile that Camu wanted to talk about in this book. Exile is almost always something where you have to be forced into it if you ever want to experience it fully.

This can sound kind of weird at first, because, I mean, exile, at least on the surface, seems like a pretty voluntary thing to do. I mean, if I can theoretically put myself in a place where I see through the illusions I was once living in, aren't I putting myself in a state of metaphysical homelessness simply through my own will? I mean, why shouldn't that be possible?

But the way Camus talks about exile, it just seems like sometimes to get the full effect of it, it needs to go on beyond some point of no return where we as people don't really have full control over what's going on. And it's interesting because there's other philosophers from around this time that talk about similar things in their own work. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Nietzsche, all these people used to put themselves out in the wilderness, away from the world, into their own kind of irreversible exile.

Simone de Beauvoir has another example of this. I mean, she used to go out on these really long hikes that she'd write about in her diaries. She used to put herself out in the woods, far away from other people. And for her, it was a matter of getting away from the typical boxes society tells people to fall into. In Camus' language here, the abstractions that simplify who we are too much.

But she talks about it. She says, you know, not only do hikes like this get you back into your body in a big way, you know, into the present moment, thinking about things like the strength of your legs, she says, the air in your lungs. Not only was it about that.

But she says it also puts you in a place where you're forced to recognize just how much you are the one that's responsible for every step you take going forward. I mean, you go off the side of a cliff, you know, you get eaten by a bear on one of these hikes. That's on you when you're out in the woods. Now, here's the thing. For Simone de Beauvoir, this was not just her strolling around the lake for a couple miles feeding the ducks along the way.

No, she'd put herself 25 miles out in the middle of the woods with nothing but a bottle of wine and some wicker non-hiking shoes. I'm not even kidding about that. This is what she did. People that hike would pass her on the trail and just be like, what are you doing? And her reasoning for it was along these same lines we're talking about. That once you get 20 miles out into the woods like that,

Look, even if you wanted to get out at that point, it's going to be at least another 20-mile hike in the other direction just to get you back to where you started. There's a leap of faith going on there, a point of no return, where by surrendering the control you usually have over your situation, it puts you in a place where you're forced to learn things about your existence that you can't get to without surrendering that control.

In other words, you might hear all this from Kemba and think, hey, if exile is such an important thing, then why don't I just put myself in a state of exile every day and it'll be part of some existential anime training montage for my life. But it's funny. It's almost a paradox. You can't put yourself into a state of exile, you know, by just pushing yourself on the elliptical at the gym or something.

No, because there's no real point there where you feel like there's no way that you can possibly go back. Your car is always 50 feet away in the parking lot when you're at the gym. But there's something to exile for Camus, that for us to get the full experience of it, it needs to be something that we can't go back on, where we have to find a way to remain in this new place we find ourselves in, a place where our old set of illusions are useless to us now. See, in a way, it brings us right back to that hypothetical village that we started this episode with.

Where that village in the middle of the jungle somewhere can function to someone like it's a kingdom. A kingdom that keeps them safe from all the realities of living out in the middle of the jungle. And people often create these kingdoms all over the place in their experience of the world. Kingdoms that keep them safe from pain, from hot, cold, sandiness in the desert. Kingdoms that promise them meaning, love, belonging in a way that's completely permanent for them.

But in this book, Exile in the Kingdom by Camus, the point that he's making is that if there is actually a kingdom that's to be had out there, then that kingdom is always going to be something that is provisional. And it's not ever going to be something that's made in an attempt to avoid something about our reality. See,

See, what he's getting at is picture someone who hears this whole series by Camus we've done and then just projects their own meanings onto the terms he's using. Someone could say, look, I get it, right? The absurd tension between my existence and the universe is always going to be there. Because of that, life is suffering. I need to learn to look at that suffering more lucidly. And then what that means is I need to band together with other people around me in solidarity where together we can make it a bit easier for each other to handle this absurdity of the universe.

But look, if somebody said it like this, Kemu would probably be very cautious. I mean, this has to be a real solidarity that they're talking about, not just banding together for the sake of escaping something about their reality or avoiding moral accountability. And I mean, not only is something like that possible for someone to do these days, we are living during a time when it has never been more easy for someone to structure their life in this way. Think of all the ways to distract yourself from the limitations of the set of abstractions you see everything through.

Think of how easy it is to surround yourself with only friends who agree with you, or to only consume media that reinforces the bias you currently have.

When Dr. Ryu and others in the plague leave their lives in solidarity with the people that are suffering around them, that is not something that's rooted in the idea that life is hard, so let's make it easier for each other to live in it. No, their solidarity is almost the opposite of that. This is about facing life head-on together, but starting from a place of respect towards the boundaries of the existential condition we share together.

is an important detail of Camus. Real solidarity is a kind of provisional kingdom that we create and recreate together every single day. But when we truly recognize this point from Camus, that life is not like the promises that you might read about in the Bible, that there is no promised land for us in this life when it comes to anything, when we face something like exile head-on in our lives, we come to appreciate the provisional forms of love, meaning, and belonging that we actually do have access to.

See, in a sense to Camus, there is no kingdom out there where pain and suffering are never going to exist again. That the real world is made up of people that learn to integrate this pain and suffering, the sandiness of the desert you could say, they learn to integrate this kind of stuff into their approach that they have towards the world. Now, over the course of this series, Camus has given us some pretty incredible images of the human condition.

And if you're someone who was looking for other artists that Camus respected for presenting images like him, then one name that Camus had a ton of nice things to say about during his life is the author Franz Kafka. Kafka's work is going to be incredibly important for you to read if you wanted to raise more of these questions that might lead to this feeling of exile. Camus once described Kafka's work as a perpetual summons to reread his work.

Because each image in Kafka, he says, opens onto another image, quote, like rooms in a corridor whose end we never reach, end quote. And I'm very excited to introduce you to the philosophical themes of that corridor on the next episode of this podcast next week. Patreon.com slash philosophize this if you value the show as a resource in the world. Thank you to everybody for all the nice comments, by the way. They mean a lot. And they also help me decide where to go next, as you know. Anyway, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.