Shownotes Transcript
Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So this here's a philosophical companion for reading the book The Plague by Albert Camus. Heads up, this episode builds off the one we just did before this on his book The Stranger, so maybe listen to that one before you do this one.
That said, coming into this episode, we already know a couple important things about Camus so far in this series. We know that Camus thought of himself as an artist and not a philosopher, that he didn't want to be a philosopher, that philosophers in his eyes are people that build systems out of theoretical abstractions, and that he thinks abstract argument not only misses something deeply important about the human condition, but that it sets a dangerous precedent for people to live their lives believing that philosophy can somehow provide some neat justification for things that go on in the world.
but that this is all nonsense for Camus at some level. This is just philosophical suicide. So what we see instead in his work is him not being someone who wrote philosophical works, where he might write out propositions and then try to organize them into a system, you know, more classic way philosophers have done things. Camus is much more interested in his work in presenting what he calls images of the human condition.
His thinking is that by dramatizing these ideas and creating images, there won't be so much of a temptation for people to try to reduce them into some kind of delusional system of universals. As Camus himself once said, what is a novel but just a philosophy expressed in images?
Well, communicating in images like this is going to be a big part of this radical project he's embarking on in his career, where he's refusing to ground his positions in theoretical abstractions of any type. Again, he sees himself as an artist and not a philosopher. This is why things like the myth of Sisyphus, famous essay by him, this is why he creates such powerful, memorable images in it. I mean, think about it. A man named Sisyphus that's condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity.
Only for when the boulder reaches the top of the hill to have it roll back down, forcing Sisyphus to start again, repeating this until the end of time. This is a powerful image and fantastic for the glutes, by the way, if you're looking for a nice deep range of motion. But to understand this book we're talking about today, The Plague, and why this marks such a major shift in his work,
It's going to be important to understand all that Camus was trying to say here at the end of the Myth of Sisyphus with this powerful image he painted in his work. Because as it turns out, there's a really overrated line, I think, from the Myth of Sisyphus that basically everyone knows. The line is that we should imagine Sisyphus happy.
And what some people think when they read that is that what Camus was saying there is that our lives are essentially like Sisyphus, that life is suffering, and that a great metaphor for continuing to live on is that it's the equivalent of pushing a boulder up a hill on a completely meaningless, fruitless grind, but that we should just keep pushing the rock and try to be happy about that somehow, like Sisyphus in the essay. But this is not what Camus was saying there. No, he's not saying this is what all of our life looks like.
See, the image of Sisyphus is partly a metaphor for a specific piece of how our lives may feel, specifically for our encounter with the absurd when we face it head on. For that tension between what our nature seems to desire from the universe and what the universe can actually give to us. That constant tension can sometimes feel like that cycle of pushing a boulder up and having it fall. But Sisyphus is equally an image here that's being used by Camus to illustrate what our lives are not.
Because to Camus, it is also important for us to recognize how much we are not like Sisyphus. We are not beings that are condemned by the gods for all eternity. Our lives are not pushing a boulder, constant suffering with no redeeming moments. No, the image of Sisyphus is also supposed to be a contrast against a reader's own life.
Because for Camus, the reality of our life is we do have many good moments that are available to us as human beings. Yes, life is partially suffering to Camus, but life is also partially joy, love, belonging, beauty, excitement. And look, if you're going to try to affirm life in all that it is, well, it's to understand that these things too are an important piece of the eminence of our reality.
Now, it may be that you come from a history where you've been led to believe that transcendence above this world and its suffering is what you should come to expect. That that's the goal while you're here is to create a system of meaning that justifies the suffering you're in or makes it go away somehow.
And I mean, the thinking from this kind of person will often be like, well, how could Sisyphus ever be anything other than miserable when he doesn't have some way of transcending his reality? But the point to recognize for Camus is that it isn't just a given that Sisyphus would be unhappy, that it's equally possible if Sisyphus affirmed his life, if lucidity was his primary goal instead, it's possible for someone to live their life in a way where life itself is good enough exactly how it is.
We don't need to transcend it or to get away from it. And we don't need to make it into something that it's not like we're condemned by the gods for all eternity. Now, in general, Camus is going to say over and over again, all throughout his career in different contexts, forget the extremes, forget the temptation to violently impose yourself onto a problem just to try to get rid of it.
And the goal for him is more going to be to try to find a way of being more rooted in the eminence of things along the lines of the example he sees set by certain Mediterranean cultures he admires in the lyrical poetry that he writes. A way of life more centered on balance, on moderation, on measure from the work of Saint Augustine, who he admires deeply, and on lucidity towards life as it is. This is one of the images Camus paints of the human condition as well.
And what this will lead to is a very lucid understanding of the fact that challenging moments, like the ones Sisyphus is forever trapped in,
These are often the places where, when we're open to it, this is sometimes where we form our deepest connections with the people and things around us. That lucid revolt also produces a life that's worth living as well. And we'll see that front and center in this book, The Plague, basically right from the start. The book begins when people start noticing dead rats showing up all around them. In the book, these people live in a very small, perfectly normal town on the coast of Algeria.
And it's soon realized by them that a bunch of rats carrying a disease have come off one of the boats that are docked near the town. And now as they're going about their day, you know, they're going to the store, going to check their mail, they start to see these dead rats popping up that clearly have some sort of disease that has killed them.
Soon becomes evident to everybody in this town at different speeds that they are now all living in a town that's quickly being infected by the bubonic plague and that a citywide quarantine and lockdown is going to mean for them that there's really no hope of any of them escaping this problem. They're all going to be forced to confront the coming plague head on.
Camus would later say in an interview about this book that much of the symbolism of the actual plague is pointing to the Nazi occupation of France during World War II when he was living through it. Camus was famously a member of what you could call a literary resistance against the Nazis. He was one of the biggest voices in a resistance paper called "Combat." Some of his best writing, I think, for whatever it's worth. But it should be said, Nazi symbolism aside here, the plague in the book also represents a confrontation with the absurd more generally.
Keep in mind where this book, The Plague, fits into the larger project of Camus. See, little known fact here, all the books, plays, or essays that we know about from Camus, if you read what he wrote about them in his personal notes, Camus personally organized his work into what he called five different stages, or series, or cycles. This is how he was thinking about it.
Cycle 1 for him was the book The Stranger, the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, and his early play Caligula. And for Cycle 2, well, The Plague was the first major book he thought was a part of Cycle 2, meaning it represents a major shift in focus for him in his work, where he goes from these earlier works that focus mostly on the individual and a personal encounter with the absurd, to Cycle 2 focusing on facing the absurd at the level of community or our relationships to other people.
So, writing a book about a plague that terrorizes a small community, well, this is going to be fantastic as one of these powerful images that he creates that explores revolt against the absurd at the level of our commitments to other people. Now, you can think about the characters in this book, in their different responses to the plague, as more of these images presented by Camus, where each of them represents some common reaction to when we're forced to confront the absurd in our lives.
That there's common ways people run from the absurd or distract themselves away from it. That there's common wagers people make with themselves and others to avoid being lucid about their reality. Let me give some examples of these characters from the book that you can notice as landmarks of this as you're reading through it. The character Father Panalu, for example, is someone we hear from early on in this book. And he's one of these fire and brimstone religious preacher type of guys that when the world's getting shut down in the book and people are starting to die of the plague...
Well, what does he do? He gives a sermon. He says, look, if any of you out there are confused about this plague in any way, well, I know exactly what's going on here. This plague, he says, is divine retribution from God.
God has sent this plague to punish the people of this town for all their sinning. He says, more or less, this is just an elaborate ruse by God to get people to start coming back to church. You know, some people might put one of those fancy electric guitars in the worship group. That would draw attendance. Nope, God sends a plague, which, lesson of the day, if you're going to do something, you do it right, people.
In all seriousness, Father Panalu represents for Camus the common reaction of a metaphysical form of denial. He uses a story that's loaded with metaphysics to explain away the absurd events of the world, and it's a story that conveniently reinforces all his existing views of the world, so there's no reflection that's actually required on his part. He has a ready-made form of escapism from the absurd in every moment.
Another minor character we see early on is this guy named Cotterd. Now, Cotterd is a criminal in the book. He starts the book as someone always looking over his shoulder, wondering if the police are about to come and arrest him. So when the plague breaks out, well, all of a sudden, the police don't have the resources to come after him anymore. The plague, in other words, becomes an opportunity for this guy, Cotterd. It becomes a way to take advantage of people's fears and lack of resources. So when he organizes a black market of smuggling things in and out of the city and makes a lot of money doing it,
All of this is an effort to use the absurdity of the world to further ingratiate himself. This is yet another common reaction to the absurd in the world that Camus wants to put on display here. In other words, Cotter is a character that's meant to represent the person who encounters the absurd and then only thinks of themselves. And as a reader, you're left to look at his example and you can't help but feel like something's deeply missing here.
Like, is this an authentic reaction from Cotard to all that's going on around him? Or is this just another clever way of denying pieces of the world? Well, seeing Cotard's example is an important moment in the book because for the main characters of this book, Camus has them respond to the absurd in a way that doesn't only think about themselves. And first up, to be able to explain this point, let's talk about the main character of this book,
It's a man named Dr. Bernard Ryu. I think by talking about his personal arc that he goes through in the book, of going from at first a denial of the absurd and developing into a lucid revolt against it, I think using him as a case study here will help us more be able to look at all the other main characters and their approaches more easily. So Dr. Ryu, well, he's obviously a doctor in this small coastal town we've been talking about.
He's one of the first people that hears about the plague when it's starting. He's one of the only medical professionals around, so he starts running tests on these rats that are dying to see if he can figure out what this is. And after finding out that this is the bubonic plague they're dealing with, he then, very briefly, is involved with some of his colleagues in trying to develop a serum for the plague that hopefully they can just give to people and it'll cure them.
In other words, his first instinct when he encounters the absurd is to do what many of us do in our own lives. We retreat into a kind of problem-solving mode where we make the mistake of thinking that we can get away from it. For Dr. Ryu, it's a kind of scientific cocoon he makes for himself, trying to come up with a cure.
But any one of us might also see the absurd and think of it as a problem that needs to be solved by our own personal skill set. Now this is of course an understandable reaction he has, but again for Dr. Ryu, this is something he's forced to outgrow pretty quickly. Because very soon in the book he realizes that this plague is not going anywhere. There's no magic serum that's going to come along and cure everyone. There's no getting rid of the plague entirely.
And upon realizing this, his goal changes from a denial of the absurd to a stance of revolt against it. Dr. Ryu starts to feel that to be a lucid, authentic person that's not in denial of what's actually going on around him, the only response that really makes sense in this moment is solidarity with his fellow people. Meaning in a very quiet, measured way.
way. His choice is to just keep on going about his life, caring for all the people who are suffering from the plague around him, running tests, checking vitals, giving medication. Dr. Ryu chooses to just put his head down and keep on living in spite of all the senseless death that's starting to take over the town.
For Albert Camus, solidarity like this with our fellow people is going to be an everyday form of revolt that we can embody against the absurd. Dr. Ryu becomes a character not interested in making grand theories about the plague, not interested in trying to beat the absurdity of the plague, but someone driven towards a solidarity with others by a sense of personal duty and also empathy.
Now, somebody can say back to all this. Oh, hold on. I knew it. I knew you were going to do this at some point, Camus. Look at you smuggling in a system of morality yourself. Things like duty, things like empathy. God, you know what? You are exactly like all those philosophers you claim to not want to be like, Camus.
But this is why it's important to understand that for Camus, solidarity like this is not an ethical rebellion that he's presenting. This is a metaphysical rebellion. Remember last episode when we described this lucidity by him as a descriptive claim that he's making and not a normative one.
That to be a creature that affirms its own nature and the nature of the universe, you know, to strive for meaning in a universe that can't give it to us, to strive for knowledge in a universe where there's many things we just can't know, to live in this metaphysical posture of lucidity towards what things are is descriptively an act of revolt against the absurd for Camus.
So this isn't him saying that this is how you should behave. It's him saying that for you to keep on living, doing anything in this world, after truly affirming it, that thing you're doing there defaults into an act of revolt. Well, let's talk about how this ladders up from the individual personal revolt to one where it involves solidarity with others.
See, at the level of the individual, sure, there's a way you can get lost in endlessly questioning whether or not things really matter. You can spend every day of your life agonizing over whether or not you have the right set of abstractions that ground the value of these things in a universal. But as we've been talking about a lot lately on this show, there's also this more pre-theoretical experience that Camus is very aware of in his work where things in the world just matter to you.
That you have an orientation of care towards the things in your direct vicinity. You care whether the floor is there to walk on or not. You care about getting your next meal. And these things have value to you that isn't grounded on any set of theoretical abstractions for Camus, but it just seems to be that the kind of creature you are is one that has an orientation of care about the physical space you're in. This is a pretty uncontroversial statement to make for Camus,
And remember, part of what he's trying to do here is to start from these extremely uncontroversial claims that don't have to be grounded in a particular system. Well, for the kind of beings that care about the things in the world around us, how would that not be something that extends into a care we have towards the other people who are around us? I mean, if I'm walking along one day, I see a child drowning inside of a big puddle,
I do not have the experience where I just stand there stone-faced, feeling nothing inside, just watching as this child slowly dies in front of me.
No, when we affirm the kinds of creatures we seem to be, to Camus we find that we often seem to default to a type of empathy and solidarity towards people that are suffering immediately around us. We do this, Camus thinks, because to not do it would be a contradiction. I know what navigating a human existence is like at times. I know what it feels like to suffer. When I look around me and I see other people that are in the same existential dilemma that I face,
For the example of the plague, when I see other beings like me where we all have no idea what this disease even is at first, we don't know if we're all going to be dead in a week, we all just kind of want to run away and get out of this horrible situation, but none of us really can. To be fully lucid towards a world where people on the daily are suffering against the absurd like this is to acknowledge a common set of existential problems that we all face and a common struggle we all face where we all need to find some way to keep on living in spite of it.
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quince.com slash pt and now back to the podcast in fact if you think about it to camu it's only when people have a set of theoretical abstractions that frames the people around them as the enemy or as less human or something that is typically the only way that people can rationalize to themselves why it's okay that the people around them are suffering horribly oh it's because these people deserve it uh it's because these people had it coming
And this is why to him, propaganda of any type, if you pay attention to it, always tries to put up barriers between people. They try to silence the group of people that are suffering. They try to limit communication between people. They demonize them, try to present people in a way that's very narrow, making us not able to lucidly see them in their full existence. You know, on a smaller scale, this is also why an abusive person will often want to limit who the victims of their abuse can talk to about it.
They don't want someone talking to their friends or to an advocate somewhere. That might be someone that takes them out of the narrow framing they need them to stay in to keep going along with their abuse. Picture a really restrictive totalitarian state with a population of people that's essentially being held captive. And now imagine what would happen if tomorrow, for some reason, everybody woke up and just stopped playing the game that the state requires for it to all keep going. Silence is the enemy to lucidity for Camus.
Camus says in one of his speeches called The Crisis of Man, famous speech he gave right after World War II, he says,
And it's not him saying, you know, free speech is an inalienable right that's given to us by God in heaven. No, he doesn't ground this in a right. He's very skeptical of rights as a framework, obviously. He's a lot like Simone Weil in this way. No, he's saying that for any setup we have that wants to promote people affirming reality as it is,
Open communication between people is the only way that's ever going to get done. And that's not grounded in some cosmic right I'm pretending to declare. That's just the policy that lets people actually be in contact with the things in the world around them as they are. See, it's only when we start layering on abstractions about the world that are usually claiming to get us to a more moral place. Well, that's when most of the stuff we see as immoral can even start to make sense to people as something that's justified.
So what is truly the enemy of us living in a more moral world? Is it not having abstractions about morality? Or is it having them? Now, this is probably a good spot to bring back that criticism of Kemu we talked about. This is all from him grounded in far too little. The idea is, look, I get it. You're trying to avoid abstractions here. And I'll grant you the point that these are dangerous sometimes.
But this whole thing from you is based on what? A feeling of care that you have? Your experience of this moment? Well, look, what are your reasons for why we should even be trusting that feeling? I mean, what if this experience of yours is deceiving you? Or what if important parts of that experience are just being dictated by someone else? To which Camus would have a lot to say back to that. But first, maybe he'd say, can we just take a moment to appreciate here that
how much of an obsession you have with needing to validate even your own experience in these theoretical abstractions. Like, it seems the abstraction has become more real to you than the lived experience that lies underneath. The number on the scale means more to you than how you feel. The light count on the post means more to you than whether you're really feeling it. Or how about the one my friend Dave likes to use all the time, that the abstraction of 76 degrees feels more real to you than the actual experience of 76 degrees.
Camus might say, "If I'm feeling viscerally against sitting by watching a child drown in a puddle, why is my lucid experience of that moment not enough of a ground for you?" I mean, sure, it doesn't provide ultimate meaning, but I'll tell you what it does provide. It does provide a kind of provisional meaning, you could say. A type of meaning that's grounded in nothing other than a lucid reflection on this moment.
And it's meaning that comes preloaded with the full expectation that this will be revised as future moments come about. Why is that not valid? But still, someone could say back to this, well, what about sociopaths? What about horribly selfish people? Those people exist out there too, right? I mean, what if someone looks at the child drowning and genuinely doesn't care? You can't morally condemn that person. What are you going to do then, Camus? To which he might say, yeah, you're right. This isn't a moral universal.
But that sociopath watching the child die there? That is by far the exception to the rule. I mean, I'd much rather have to deal with the very occasional person that doesn't feel the same way as most of us. We can deal with that case by case. But I'd much rather deal with that problem than to accept the set of premises we currently live under, where people by the millions feel emboldened by these fake moral universals that end up causing things like fascism and totalitarianism.
What he's saying is that even though provisional meaning like this is not universal, when it comes to certain things that seem to be common to almost all human beings, things like working together, justice, safety for the average person, things of this general class, because these are such common feelings, even though these are not universals, these more or less functioned like universals, but without all the abstractions that get brought along as baggage. So now that we have a pretty deep knowledge of why solidarity makes sense to Camus,
Let's take a closer look at some more examples of this solidarity that you can expect to see in symbolism from this book, The Plague. The main character, Dr. Ryu, as we said, he becomes a symbol of a sort of ordinary, everyday, absurd hero for Camus. Now, what exactly is meant by this term, absurd hero? Well, when the absurd comes knocking at your door each day, as it will, it may be tempting for us to go out and try to be a superhero about it, to go out and try to save the world.
But for Camus, if you're not trying to do good in the world that you're ultimately capable of succeeding at, then you may just be mistaking movement for progress. I mean, the mistake in thinking of a totalitarian or a fascist, part of it to Camus, is that it lacks proportionality. This is a violent, extreme way of imposing yourself onto a problem in the world that you can't actually solve with a set of abstractions.
It, in other words, is a lack of lucidity. This is, in a sense, a denial of the absurd and a denial of your own abilities within the limits of your own station, as Camus says. So instead of Bernard Rieu trying to be a superhero doctor, no, this is a man who understands that heroism is often something that's found in the everyday. In fact, in some sense, even calling this heroism is missing the point. He says in the book, there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency.
He says later, "The only means of fighting a plague is common decency." And again, by doing these house calls, taking vitals, giving medication, by putting himself at risk out of compassion for the common existential problem the whole town is facing,
The idea is, look, the plague may be a kind of senseless destruction that's going on in this world, but I am not going to let this cause me to deny what truly matters to me. I'm going to keep on living in the most measured, balanced way I can from within the limits of my own station, lucidly approaching the world.
Anyway, there's more than one image that Camus paints in the book of the absurd hero. There's another character in the book by the name of Raymond Rombert. Now, Rombert is a journalist in the book. He came to this small town to research a story he was doing when all of a sudden the plague starts breaking out all around him. Horrible timing by him.
Now, his first response, like others here, is to deny the absurd. He tries to justify why this plague isn't even really his problem. He says, look, you guys don't understand, all right? I don't even live here. I didn't sign up for this. This is the problem with the people in this city. I'm not one of you. He says, there's a woman I'm in love with back in France. That's my person. She's waiting for me.
And he says he's willing to do anything, legally, illegal, just to get out of the city to get back to her. I mean, that's his perspective. I'm not on this planet to save the world from plagues, to solve other people's problems. I'm just here to be a journalist and to love a woman, he says. That's what human life is all about, Charlie Brown. It's not about obsessing over other people's problems.
But you can see what Camus is going for there. This is him actively creating a bridge between cycle one of his work that focuses on the individual revolt against the absurd, and he's showing a character here in "Rambert" that gives a set of common excuses that any of us might give, by the way, for why the people around him are not really his problem, how they're somehow part of a totally different world than the one he's living in. Eventually, Rambert in the book, after seeing Dr. Ryu and others risk their lives daily to fight against the plague,
eventually he starts to see what's going on as a fundamentally human crisis that's happening. One that we're bound in together simply by our shared existential condition. And again, it's not because he finds God or finds some set of moral abstractions where now he knows what the right thing to do is. No, it's the removing abstractions. It's just through being forced to lucidly look at what's going on around him that he realizes this is ultimately his problem too. Another very important main character in the book is a guy named Jean Taroult.
Jean Taru is a character that has been opposing the absurdity of the world for most of his entire life. He's a true activist, somebody that really acts on it. He describes himself towards the end of the book as someone that wants to be a saint without God.
I guess that doesn't need much of an explanation with all we've already said about Camus. But for much of the book, he's a very important character because he embodies a different kind of approach to the task of being an absurd hero. He's the one in the book that sees the plague, or plague as he calls it, as something that's far larger than just an epidemic that's going around. Plague is something that we all will always be fighting against as humans.
As Dr. Ryu says towards the end of the book, even if we eradicate this plague from this particular town, plague is something that will always come back unexpectedly, looking a little different than last time, but still in many ways the same thing. There's a sense in which Camus uses something naturally occurring like a plague here as a metaphor, as a warning to future generations, that when it comes to the type of thinking that leads to plague, this stuff is always going to be a possibility. We should always be keeping our eyes open for it.
Now, one issue that really defines Jean Theroux in his fight against absurdity is how he's strongly against the death penalty. And for Camus himself, the issue of the death penalty was one of the things he was most vocal about in his entire lifetime. He gives multiple speeches talking about it. He writes one of the most cited essays in history that talks about the death penalty called Reflections on the Guillotine. We're going to talk about it in detail next time as a compliment to his views on justice that he lays out in his essay The Rebel.
And it's interesting, how does this case he's making for solidarity and empathy for others ladder up into a point that we can make about justice? I mean, how does he do that? Justice. It's usually something that's centered around laws and norms. The very sorts of abstractions that his whole project seems to be moving away from. Well, the death penalty becomes a striking image that he paints of where he's going.
You know, he tells a story once of when he was young. His father was apparently a really solid guy, you know, cared a lot about the people around him in a similar sort of way that we just talked about in The Plague. And part of caring about those people led his father to want to participate in the politics of his time that was going on around him. So one day Camus' father decides to go and see a public execution. I mean, for him, he's for the death penalty, right? At least when it comes to these really horrible people that do heinous stuff, they gotta die.
Time to go see where all my tax dollars are going to. And Camus writes about how this was an image that's burned into his head that forever changed him. Camus was sitting at home as a kid. His father goes out to go see someone get executed. And he says he'll never forget it. He came home, immediately excused himself into the bathroom, and then vomited uncontrollably at what he had just witnessed go on. See, it turns out that there's a difference between people linking themselves to a theoretical conversation about what they want done...
and the reality of violating a boundary that's so deeply important to us all. The entire process of the death penalty for Camus is rooted in hypocrisy. Next episode, we'll find out why he thought that way. And for whatever it's worth, as we continue, and you see what Camus had planned for cycle five of his work, which, by the way, he died in a car crash in the middle of writing cycle four.
It's very interesting to speculate what this man would have had planned had he lived long enough to develop his thinking in that direction. I mean, all we have is mostly speculation, mostly just titles that he wrote in the margins of his notes. Apparently the title of the major book in Cycle 5 was going to be called The System. Seems pretty ironic. There was another giant essay that he planned in Cycle 5 called Creation Corrected. It was maybe what he intended to be the culmination of his work.
Anyway, we'll speculate on it by the end of this, but still much more to talk about to understand the work we do have available to us. Thank you for listening today. If you value this show as an educational resource, check out patreon.com slash philosophize this. And as always, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.