Introduction
Summary
It is essential for us to know whether man, without the help of the eternal or of rationalistic thought, can unaided create his own values… the uneasiness that concerns us belongs to a whole epoch from which we do not want to dissociate ourselves…. We know that everything is not summed up in negation and absurdity. But we must first posit negation and absurdity because they are what our generation has encountered and what we must take into account.
(Albert Camus, “Le Pessimisme et le Courage”, Combat 3 November 1944)Despite his popular image, strictly speaking Camus was not an existentialist. His first major philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), was explicitly intended as a critique of existentialism, especially the Christian existentialist tradition of Kierkegaard, Jaspers and Chestov. According to Camus, starting from the premise that nothing in the world has meaning or depth, existentialists proceed, through a leap of irrational faith, to find meaning and depth in it. He thus criticizes representatives of the philosophical movement with which he is most closely associated for “deify[ing] what crushes them and find[ing] reason to hope in what impoverishes them” (MS: 35; E: 112). Moreover, although in France in the 1940s and 1950s to be an existentialist was, most probably, to be a follower or admirer of Sartre's atheistic existentialism, we find in this period both Sartre and Camus repeatedly insisting that Camus was definitively neither an existentialist nor a Sartrean.
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- Albert CamusFrom the Absurd to Revolt, pp. 1 - 4Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2008