Albert Camus’s Call to
Courage in a Hard Time

Sixty-five years after his untimely death at age 46, Albert Camus remains one of the leading lights of existentialism, a philosophy that has its roots in the 19^th century’s version of dark brooding intellectuals—names like Kierkegaard, Neitszche, and Dostoevsky. But existentialism really hit its stride in Post-World War II Europe, and the Algerian-born, French-identified Camus was and arguably remains its most eloquent spokesperson.

Camus was born in 1913 in Algeria when it was still under the colonial rule of France. His father was a peasant fieldworker who died in battle in World War I when Camus was just a year old. He was raised by his mother in Algiers. She was an illiterate and deaf housecleaner who retreated ever more deeply into her shell as Camus grew up.

So Camus came of age in a poor country that was, like all colonies, heavily exploited by the ruling class. It was the foundation of his lifelong appreciation for oppressed populations everywhere.

He loved Algiers—its sun and beaches and smells from the open air markets, its languid pace of life. He had a profound appreciation for beauty and the life of the body, along with a questing philosophical mind unafraid to ask the Big Questions.

Reconciling these elements via philosophy, literature and political action became his life’s work.

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Physical debility was another formative influence. He was a fine goalie for his university soccer team but contracted tuberculosis at 17 years old, which left him bedridden for months and too scarred ever to resume the sport.

But rather than beating his breast over his misfortune, Camus used it probe into the nature of human existence. It’s long been my contention that illness and tragedy make philosophers of us all, though mostly of the armchair kind. Camus took the route of earning his graduate philosophy degree from the University of Algiers.

You can’t kill someone for the cause of universal brotherhood. You can’t allow the innocent to suffer for the greater good of capitalism or communism or some Dear Leader you have made into an idol.

He became a Communist Party member in 1935, an idealistic 21-year-old attracted to the party’s rhetoric on justice for the working class. It didn’t take him long to run into trouble with the communists, though.

They expelled him when they came out against Algerian independence and Camus dared to question their stance.

This scenario was repeated years later, after the Second World War, when Stalin was exterminating some 40 million of his own people in the Soviet Union.

Camus wrote a book of essays called “The Rebel,” which, among other things, called out Stalin and the communists for betraying virtually every ideal of the revolution.

The book caused a huge stir in left-leaning France, with Camus’s mentor and friend, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, bitterly denouncing Camus’s counter-revolutionary ways. Sartre and many of his peers in post-war Europe excused Stalin’s genocide as just the cost of revolution: you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.

But Camus was having none of it, even though he was deeply hurt by the desertion of his former friends. He insisted on viewing all ideologies and individuals with the clear-headed analysis he thought they deserved.

He hated dogma, whether from the left or right. In “The Myth of Sisyphus,” about which I wrote here nearly 11 years ago, Camus addressed an ancient fable of a man condemned by the gods to forever roll a rock uphill only to watch it roll down again. He wrote:

“I understand then why the doctrines that explain everything to me also debilitate me at the same time. They relieve me of the weight of my own life, and yet I must carry it alone.”

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Existentialism emphasizes the living, breathing and pondering human subject. The intrinsic value of every human being, and their right and even responsibility to shape their own lives. For Camus, individual life could never be sacrificed for an abstraction.

You can’t kill someone for the cause of universal brotherhood. You can’t allow the innocent to suffer for the greater good of capitalism or communism or some Dear Leader you have made into an idol.

“No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people,” he wrote in his “Notebooks: 1942-1951.”

This indictment of terrorism and violence stands as true today as it did when Camus used it to try forging a middle path, a third way, during the Algerian Revolution that began in 1952. France, the colonial power, was being besieged with terrorist attacks by Algerian nationalists seeking independence.

Camus’s heart was with  Algeria, and he identified with the nationalist cause. But he could not accept indiscriminate violence. It became a core conviction of his: The political can never be allowed to overrun the personal.

In one memorable exchange at a public forum with an Arab student who was denouncing his moderate stance, Camus finally became exasperated and declared:

“I have always condemned terror. But I must also condemn terrorism that strikes blindly in the streets of Algiers, and which might strike my mother and family. People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.”

So he was attacked by the revolutionaries for selling out, and regarded as a deluded Arab sympathizer by the ruling French.

This was the cost of rolling that rock up the hill in an absurd universe, making his meaning in the face of public vilification and many threats on his life.

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Existentialism is often confused with nihilism, which posits that since there is no inherent meaning to life, nothing matters.

Camus suggested otherwise: that since there is no inherent meaning to life, everything matters—or at least everything you do as an autonomous individual. And that failing to act on behalf of that autonomy makes us complicit in oppression—ours and everyone’s.

He actually began the Second World War as a pacifist. Peace-making and disarmament were his natural inclinations. He regarded war as the ultimate triumph of the absurd, an assault on human dignity and self-determination.

But living in Algiers early in the war, his tuberculosis flared up and doctors told him to seek refuge in the mountains of France. On the way, he found himself witnessing the Nazis executing a French resistance fighter in the public square

There went his pacifism.

Pacifism was an idea; this executed human being was concrete reality. Camus spent the rest of the war working for the French underground in Paris, launching a resistance newspaper called “Combat,” his life in danger all the while.

So: committed to pacifism but then fighting the Nazis. First embracing communists but then vociferous in his protests.  Later siding with Algerian independence efforts until the rebels became as oppressive and cruel as their oppressors.

What is the unifying element here? Courage, I think.

The courage to assess each person and each situation on their own merits, and to change one’s mind as the facts change.

Never to be merely reflexive, lapsing into the same old mindset you’ve always had, placing every situation into the same old box, with your same predictable response. That’s the lazy person’s way. Camus never took the lazy person’s way.

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The cross we bear as thinking animals, programmed for sheer survival like the lowliest worm yet bequeathed with soaring imaginations and capacity for love and sacrifice, never ceased to fascinate Camus.

He embodied many of those contradictions in his own life. “I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist,” he proclaimed. Unlike many atheists who reject not only the notion of God but all religious sensibility whatsoever, Camus’s was a cool and studied rather than strident atheism. What he was hugely passionate about was life itself.

He accepted the absence of God in a tragic and duty-bound way, but he never scorned believers like many of our modern atheists. He instead went searching for a sense of purpose and wholeness within his own soul, within his quest for justice, within his immersion in the physical world.

For Camus, courage and action to right the many wrongs of life are the only acceptable—maybe “necessary” is a better word— responses to an unjust, finite world.

“He who despairs of the human condition is a coward,” he wrote. “But he who has hope for it is a fool.”

Yet he never abandoned hope; don’t let that line above suggest otherwise.

More telling is this observation from a friend of his: “Camus continues to think despair. Even to write it. But he lives hope.”

Between that rock and hard place, Camus always managed to wriggle free and stand on his own two feet, firmly planted toward a future he would not live to see.

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True to the absurdity he chronicled so well, Camus died in an automobile wreck on his way to Paris from his home in the south. His friend and publisher had been driving, and Camus’s body was found with a train ticket in his coat pocket. At the last minute, he had been persuaded to go by car.

What should we make of Camus today? What would he make of us?

I suspect he’d say something along the lines of, “Same old human condition…”

And then urge us to get busy improving some aspect of it, however small it may seem.

To get busy with our compassion and concern and put it to work. Though we don’t know how the human story will ultimately turn out, we do know that we can dedicate our short lives, in our tiny corner of the world, to help make a difference.

Jaded, we can regard that sentiment as foolish and delusional. Living in hope, it becomes shot through with courage.

The courage to stand at the bottom of every hill, pushing against the rock, resolute.

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