Camus and the Absurd

John Perry
It’s Philosophy Talk.

The Stranger
Mama died today, or maybe yesterday. I’m not sure.

Ken Taylor
The Stranger

John Perry
The Plague

Ken Taylor
The Fall

John Perry
The Myth of Sisyphus

Ken Taylor
Albert Camus and the Absurdity of Life

Love and Death
What if we’re just a bunch of absurd people who are running around with no rhyme or reason?

Ken Taylor
Camus says life is absurd. So can it be worth living

Albert Camus
The first step for a mind overwhelmed by the absurdity things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared by all men, and that the entire human race suffers from the division between itself and the rest of the world.

John Perry
Is your life just a rock you have to keep pushing up the same hill over and over again so it won’t roll back over you?

Ken Taylor
Our guest is Robert Zaretsky, author of “A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning.”

John Perry
Camus and the Absurd

Ken Taylor
…coming up on Philosophy Talk.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

John Perry
…except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re here at the studios of KALW San Francisco.

John Perry
Continuing conversations that begin to Philosophers Corner at Stanford where Ken is a young, vibrant professor of philosophy and I’m a broken down emeritus professor of philosophy.

Ken Taylor
Today, we’re thinking about the influence of the existentialist philosopher, so called Albert Camus.

John Perry
Camus tackled one of the most fundamental philosophical problems there is: what is the meaning of it all? What’s the meaning of existence?

Ken Taylor
It’s a really deep question. But, you know, commu gave an answer that’s pretty darn depressing. He thought that life has no meaning it could never have any meaning. Nothing we can do could give it meaning be very search for meaning is absurd. Why it kind of had a point, don’t you think? Oh, I don’t think actually what would be the point of living if you actually thought that life is absurd?

John Perry
Spoken like Camus himself. He famously said, “There is only one serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” He decided against it, by the way. He was haunted by the question of whether suicide could be the only rational response to the absurdity of life.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, but let’s suppose we reject the presupposition that life is absurd. Shouldn’t we address that first, don’t you think?

John Perry
Sure, go ahead. Got any good ideas for what could give life meaning? I know you well enough, Ken to think that you’re not going to point to God or religion?

Ken Taylor
No, not for me personally. But whatever floats your boat, whatever you wherever you can find meaning if it’s faith gives you meaning. Go ahead. That’s fine with me.

John Perry
Well, you’re confusing, genuine meeting with comforting illusion. So plenty of those. At least that’s what Khumbu would say. I think if there’s no God, he can no more provide meaning then Santa Claus or the tooth fairy?

Ken Taylor
Yeah, but what if there is a God then can he provide meaning?

John Perry
Well, you know, if God exists, then you know, frankly, he’s he’s a pretty lousy, incompetent God. I mean, just look at all the pain and suffering in the world. If he does exist, he’s either an imbecile or a psychopath. Well, maybe I’m overstating it, but at any rate, his existence could only make life even more absurd. I mean, once this guy got in mind.

Ken Taylor
Okay, let’s not debate that let’s set God aside for a second, however, psychopathic he might be. But there are other possibilities. I mean, think of relationships with other people, family, friends, communities, we love other people, they love us bad we care for them. That’s why we keep going. That’s why we live that’s what gives our existence meaning.

John Perry
Temporary respite. At best, they’re all gonna die. It’s there, they’re gonna die eventually. Can you know that? Nobody likes to think about it, but let’s face it, every single person you know, and love, every single person on earth today is going to die and a lot of them will suffer a lot along the way. How is that anything but absurd?

Ken Taylor
Well you’re in a sour mood today, John. Look, let’s suppose I grant you just for the sake of argument, mind you that life is in fact absurd. I still don’t see how that means that suicide is the answer. But come on, consider Nietzsche thought life was meaningless to Buddy, he thought we could give it meaning that it didn’t otherwise have by embracing illusions. I mean, he that’s what artists do. He said, they know what their trick is to know how to make things beautiful, when they’re not at all beautiful in and of themselves.

John Perry
Well as Ogden Nash said, Nietzsche is peachy, but liquor is quicker. But those are all cowardly and dishonest ways out. The absurd hero, Camus character need take no refuge in the illusions of art or religion. He openly embraces the absurdity of the condition he’s Sisyphus condemned for all eternity to push a boulder up the mountain, only to have a roll to the bottom again and again and again and again. The hero fully recognizes the futility of his task, but he willingly pushes it up each time it rolls down.

Ken Taylor
That is illusion, that’s an answer to the problem of absurdity.

John Perry
Well, at least it’s an honest confrontation with the truth and a defiant refusal to let that grim truth destroy one’s life. At the end of his myth of Sisyphus, Camus says that we have to imagine Sisyphus happy.

Ken Taylor
Happy, really? Maybe I just don’t have enough imagination, but I actually can’t see what keeps Sisyphus going in this story, let alone makes him a happy.

John Perry
Well, I guess we ought to know more about Kung Fu, about this thinker and writer. You know, he was often regarded he’s often regarded one of the great existentialist philosophers, although he hated to be called an existentialist or a philosopher.

Ken Taylor
So well who was this guy? Who was the real Albert Camus? We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Shuka Kalantari, to learn more about the man behind works like the stranger and the myth of Sisyphus. She files this report.

Shuka Kalantari
In the early 1940s, during World War Two, France was occupied by the Nazis. German soldiers marched the streets of Paris, train stations were being bombed, cafe doors were shuttered, and Albert Camus was at a house party. Coming would head to a friend’s house to drink, dance and perform live theater with folks like Pablo Picasso. John Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Andy Martin
Theater was one of the things that kept them going, you know, in the midst of Occupied Paris.

Shuka Kalantari
That’s Andy Martin, a Cambridge University professor and author of ‘The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre versus Camus.” He says theater was an outlet for artists and intellectuals during war time

Andy Martin
It was one of those things that you could just about get away with that got past the Nazi censors, particularly if you made it fairly obscure and existentialist. They didn’t really know what it meant.

Shuka Kalantari
But Camus didn’t just perform plays. He also ran a French Resistance newspaper, and was a well known author. In 1942 he wrote ‘”The Stranger,” his ode to absurdism— the belief that life has no inherent meaning. The book is about a French Algerian man who kills an Arab man, for no reason.

The Stranger
I realized that I destroyed the balance of the day, the perfect silence of this speech to write been happy. And I fired or more times and lifeless body, and the bullet sank in without leaving a mark.

Shuka Kalantari
Camus was born and raised in Algeria. He lived alone with his illiterate mother, who cleaned houses to make ends meet. He was a star soccer player as a kid until he got tuberculosis. After that, he focused solely on writing and working for a socialist newspaper. By 1943, Camus was living in Paris, estranged from his wife and Algeria because of the war. That’s when he met Jean-Paul Sartre. They immediately hit it off and would spend hours at Cafe de Flore talking about politics, theater, and the ladies, Camus and Sartre were both kinda playboys. All was well until they both had their eye on the same girl: Wanda Kosakiewicz. Sartre dated her first, and gave her a role in his play “The Flies.”

Les Mouches
Oh, where do you come from? Algiers. Have you left anyone down there? Yes, my wife.

Shuka Kalantari
Then Sartre made the bad decision of asking Camus to direct a play that starred Wanda—bad because even though he was a playboy, he was short, frumpy, and kind of looked like an ogre.

Andy Martin
Like something hanging on the outside of Notre-Dame cathedral, basically, whereas Camus was the Bogart of his generation among French philosophers. And you know, Vogue magazine wanted to photograph him and so on. So he had very much the kind of you know, Hollywood movie star looks.

Shuka Kalantari
Sartre had spent three years trying to seduce Wanda, and then Camus show up and seals the deal in less than an hour.

Andy Martin
You know, right in front of Sartre, she she fell for Camus, in a big way. And this did cause a certain amount of bitterness and resentment on Sartre’s side.

Shuka Kalantari
Martin says war provided a common enemy for Camus and Sartre. But with the Nazis gone, all the two had left were a lot of opposing viewpoints. The final nail in their friendship coffin happened when Camus published a critique of totalitarianism, which Sartre took as a personal attack on his own Marxist beliefs. They never spoke again.

Andy Martin
Well, though they fell out, they remained conscious of what the other one was doing all the time. And I think that’s very often true of, you know, relationships of our own that we break up with someone. But you nevertheless frequently think, “Oh well, what is that person doing or thinking right now?”

Shuka Kalantari
Albert Camus died in a car crash in 1960, at the age of 46. And though they weren’t on speaking terms, it was Jean-Paul Sartre who wrote Camus obituary. He wrote, “Camus and I quarreled, but a quarrel doesn’t matter. It’s just another way of living together without losing sight of one another in the narrow little world that’s alotted us.” Sartre never forgot about Camus, and half a century later, neither have we. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Shuka Kalantar.

John Perry
Thanks, Shuka. We’ve learned a lot about Camus and about Sartre. I mean Camus—hosh, he got a lot done. He dies at 46. When he was my age, he’d been dead almost 25 years. And of course, Ken and I share the burden of being incredibly good looking philosophers. And that makes it hard to focus on the meaningless of life sometimes. I’m John Perry, with my with me is my fellow Stanford philosopher Ken Taylor.

Ken Taylor
And today we’re thinking about the French Algerian writer Albert Camus. We’re joined now by Robert Zaretsky. He’s a professor of history at the Honors College at the University of Houston. He’s author of “A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning.” He’s also author of the forthcoming “Boswell’s Enlightenment.” Rob, wlecome to Philosophy Talk.

Rob Zaretsky
Thanks, Ken. It’s good to be here.

John Perry
So Rob, as we learned from chukars report, there’s plenty in Camus’ life to make him interesting to anybody. But in your particular case, what got you interested in Camus?

Rob Zaretsky
It was something much more banal than than his life. In fact, John, I found a copy of “The Stranger” in my brother’s bedroom when I was a teenager. And I picked it up, less to read than to impress the girls with and I would carry it around with me. And I didn’t succeed in impressing the girls, but the book impressed me I would read it, and not quite grasp what it was that the story was relating. And, but I kept at it, not just when I found it in my brother’s bedroom, but over the course of my life, I kept on returning to cameo. And I had the sense when I first picked it up and open the pages, that he was speaking to me, not at me, down to me, but that there was an urgency in his voice, something that even to a 16 year old, had something just deeply human and deeply close. And, and I’ve never put him aside. As a graduate student. And as a professor, I keep returning to Camus, not just for my teaching, but for trying to make sense of my own life.

John Perry
Well, that that’s that’s quite a story. I didn’t come across Camus til I was in college. I mean, I did search my brother’s bedroom, and I found a copy of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” a much more temporary influence, I’m afraid.

Rob Zaretsky
There were copies of Playboy in my brother’s bedroom too, but.

John Perry
Butyou went straight for the Camus. Now that’s that’s impressive. We’ve talked a little bit about Camus’ claim that there’s something fundamentally absurd about existence. So before we in this first segment, just tell us exactly what does he mean by absurd?

Rob Zaretsky
Well, he means something quite particular. For Camus, the absurd is not something that exists in and of itself in the world. The absurd is the consequence of a world which is silent, which does not offer any response to the question posed by human beings, namely, what is the meaning of it all? Why are we here? And this desperate longing for clarity, for meaning posed by human beings is never answered by the world, and that the result is for Camus absurdity.

Ken Taylor
So it’s not in the world itself. It’s not in us alone. It’s in us in the world. It’s in the relationship between us in the world because we have these. That’s what I hear you saying, I just want to clarify, because we have these longings or desires are something that the world doesn’t answer. Is that right?

Rob Zaretsky
Precisely.

Ken Taylor
Well, we’ll have to, you know, one of the thing questions I want to ask you in the next segment is whether there could be a world that answered to these longings. So is it just a contingent fact about the world or is the world like necessarily the kind of thing that couldn’t possibly answer to our long knees? But we’ll get to that question. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about Albear kung fu with Robert Zaretsky from the University of Houston.

John Perry
Is there something absurd about our need to find meaning in the cold, meaningless world? Is a world truly silent to our quest? Or is there some way of finding meaning in existence?

Ken Taylor
The quest for meaning a meaningless universe and the absurd—when Philosophy Talk continues

Leon Russell
Stranger in a strange land.

John Perry
We may all be strangers in a strange land. I mean, indeed, America’s getting positively weird. But setting that aside, we’re discussing the thinker who wrote “The Stranger,” Albert Camus. I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor.

John Perry
Our guest is Robert Zaretsky. He’s the author of “A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning.” Now you can join Rob for a live chat on our online community of thinkers on Friday, March 6, at 12 noon Pacific, be part of the online chat by going to philosophytalk.org.

Ken Taylor
So I want to get to this deeper question of whether the world might be such that you know, there wouldn’t be any absurdity. But I want to know what Camus arguments are first, for thinking that life is truly absurd. What reasons did he give for thinking that?

Rob Zaretsky
Well, Ken he doesn’t have arguments, he makes it very clear in his essays, both the myth of Sisyphus and the rebel. What he’s an fact that’s the very meaning of the notion essay. He chose that genre deliberately. He was a great fan of Michel de mon 10. And as the French word essay suggests, these were trials on a groping a probing but not a series of arguments. And so what he offers rather than arguments are illustrations, depictions suggestions, to point to something that he believes is humankind’s common experiences.

Ken Taylor
So the myth—so for example, the myth of Sisyphus isn’t so much an argument that there isn’t so much an argument that human life is, in some way deeply like that, but just we’re supposed to see, read the myth, understand the myth and just take Oh, that’s what life is like, Is that is that the idea? I mean, how am I supposed to be moved to the thought, Yes, life is absurd, if not by an argument in Camus.

Rob Zaretsky
The same way that a novelist or a poet would move you to, to come to that conclusion, or at least see the possibility of that reality. Now, he was a great fan of the Greek tragic poets, Sophocles, in particular in escolas. And they don’t provide arguments for situations a lot for humankind a lot. They present a picture. And Comey was much more comfortable with words and with images than with thoughts. And this is one of the things that he himself admitted, distinguished his work from Sage on Pawsox software was not a very good storyteller, but he’s a very good thinker. Whereas Ken, we’ve always insisted that he was a much better storyteller than a thinker.

John Perry
So So the myth of Sisyphus, I mean, it’s very powerful. But sometimes in these writings, he doesn’t talk about the myth of Sisyphus to get the point across, he talks about the daily grind of someone who has a you know, a nine to five or a six job, and so forth and so on. But there seems to be a big difference between them. I mean, a system is pushes this thing all the way up the hill for No, for no reason. Then it rolls back down. Now, suppose he was pushing it up the hill because it was was full of food. And he stopped every every roller to and gave a kid a treat. Or suppose every time it rolled back down, he got he got 100 100 bucks, or whatever the currency is in hell to send to his wife, I mean, the mythicist. I mean, since this is really quite unlike the guy who does a nine to five or eight to six job in Paris, to feed his children and make his wife happy.

Rob Zaretsky
My sense is that for Camus, they are fundamentally the same. It’s not the fact that it’s a huge boulder, that specificity is pushing up the slip of that mountain. It’s the repetition of the Act, and the fact that he will be doing this act and nothing but this act for all of time. And the nine to five job, of course, in Camus case, it’s not nine to five, there’s a two hour break for lunch.

John Perry
My point exactly.

Rob Zaretsky
But it’s it’s the sheer repetition of the task, a task that has no forgive me for using the word transcendental significance remaining. That underscores the absurdity of it for Camus, but I should I should make this just one more point that for Camus, there are really two pints of absurdity. There’s what I guess we can call metaphysical absurdity, which is what we’ve been discussing, but there’s also political absurdity. And the two are deeply entwined for for Camus.

Ken Taylor
But what’s political you made a distinction so and you tease me tease does with that distinction? So what’s the political absurdity? What do you mean?

Rob Zaretsky
Well, the political absurdities what we’ve just heard on the newscast, for example, both 10s of 1000s of people who are now marching in, in St. Petersburg and Moscow to protest the assassination of Boris Nemtsov. This for Camus is a classic case of rebellion and what does the rebel do? He protests the outrage when a state insists on giving meaning to enact that is murderous, just justifying murder, premeditated murder. And that would be and political absurdity for Camus is that here is a people, the Russians who are being denied their dignity, their integrity, their freedom to speak their freedom to think and you reach a tipping point of critical mass where at a certain point, individuals say I rebel Therefore we are they suddenly find that they’re not alone. But there they are in a squared of 10s, of 1000s of others.

Margo True
So wait a minute, though see that? I’m not quite sure I follow Kumu Are you speaking in his voice, that thing within the rebel who says, I reject this thing that you throw on me, I reject this meaning that you, you try and pose on me, that shows something about one might think in a Kantian mode, say that shows something about the absolute dignity of a human being that refuses to be oppressed, that has that is an autonomous end in itself and, and demands that it be regarded as an end in itself. Creatures that we can regard themselves as ends in themselves, as Kant would put it, and can that demand of others that they regard them as ends? That’s not meaningless. That’s absurd. That’s that’s human dignity. That’s absolute moral worth inviolable moral worth. So I don’t get how that has a, I mean, sure, you’re trying to impose something on me, but the very voice in me that can say no, that’s the human self declaring its dignity. Not it’s absurdly not despair it?

Rob Zaretsky
No, no, the absurdity is not in the response. The absurdity is in the effort being made by the government, by this regime to do what it’s been doing. And it’s living through that experience. So this is the difference, I believe, between, say, a cunt, on the one hand, a philosopher, and a Camus or a tragic poet. On the other hand, I think, for example of Martha Nussbaum and her claim that when it comes to contra Aristotle, it’s not as if they are speaking to, they don’t really when we read them, we don’t see ourselves in situations or in the words that they offer us. It’s not as if our lives are the puzzles that they present be a counter Aristotle, and that old, the only thing that’s missing is one piece, and suddenly the puzzle will be resolved. It’s something far more complicated. It’s something that has come you tells us, we have to live through we have to experience in order to understand the absurdity of it.

John Perry
But with regard with regard to the political absurdity and rebellion, I mean, I’m a bit of a dilettante when it comes to commu. But as I remember, like in thought in the meridian, he’s he’s a very unusual rebel. It’s the act of rebellion that has all the meaning he’s not in favor of murdering anyone. He doesn’t have any I mean, start was a Marxist but Khumbu doesn’t seem to think that any political systems going to be that much better than any other. It’s, I mean, isn’t the whole point the act of rebellion, not the result of rebellion, which is usually just one more god awful your system of government?

Rob Zaretsky
No, you’re spot on there, John on Khemu was in he had a tragic sense of life. And he, he knew that whatever system replaces the unjust one that now exists, will sooner or later either become no less unjust, or sort of degrade into a kind of mediocrity. He was fully aware of that. When it came to politics. Those sought, like George Orwell was very much on the left. He was a particular kind of left, he was really an anarchist. He was very close to syndicalist circles in France during his lifetime. He wrote for them pro bono on in their, in their obscure, barely known journals. And a bit like Jacques Pia pro Dune, on the ideal society for for Camus was one of worker cooperatives. With no overarching government.

John Perry
Well, well, speaking of worker cooperatives, we’ve got email from John in Berkeley.

Ken Taylor
The land of workers.

John Perry
I’m teaching this semester in Berkeley but I’m almost certain This isn’t me this John in Berkeley, which was committed against having hope in the deep content sense as in what can we hope? Or, or the Jesse Jackson political slogan sense of keep hope alive? But also in the ordinary way, we might hope that Aunt Bessie has a good flight home.

Ken Taylor
This this, this is a good question. It’s related to the question I asked at the end of the first segment. That is, could the world be so I mean, okay, sure that we’re alienated from the world we occupy maybe. And there’s an absurdity in the relationship between us because our aspirations, but could there be a world? I mean, hope is the possibility of a world that actually does answer to our aspirations. I want Aunt Betty to get home safely. She can get home safely, my hope is satisfied. I want there to be justice for all there could be justice for all my hope is my desire satisfied. I mean, is it like a world is bound to disappoint our hopes or what? And why does he think it’s bound to disappoint our hopes? If he thinks that.

Rob Zaretsky
First on the on the issue of hope and to address the question asked by the emailer. There is no hope, according to Camus, but as he goes on to say, that’s not a reason for despair. We continue to struggle, we continue to maintain our dignity, we continue to insist upon our integrity, we continue to insist upon those fundamental qualities that we share with other human beings now.

Ken Taylor
But to what end, to what end, we continue to insist, but with the hope that we might remake the world to match our, our deepest aspirations.

Rob Zaretsky
No not at all. That’s what a revolutionary does, according to Kambou can, that’s not what a what a rebel does a rebel is, most deeply a rebel is a moderate a double is somebody who’s aware that it’s an act of really of, of equipoise, or self restraint, because a rebel is aware that at any moment, her act of rebellion, can spill over into revolution. And Camus was all too aware of the consequences of revolution in the 20th century. And it’s something that he really does want to avoid. So it’s not so much a question of making the world a better place, though, of course, as a political activist, that’s something that can be does not lose sight of. But at a deeper level, it’s simply a question of resisting of maintaining a kind of balance between the way the world is, and the way the world ought to be.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about Camus, with our guests, Robert Zaretsky from the University of Houston.

John Perry
So Rob, I mean, I like the idea of the rebel of resistance of refusing what the world foist upon us, but there’s many forms that might take. And my sense is that commu would approve of Summit more than others. I mean, I mean, the people out in Moscow, I think he would approve of that. The person who says, screw the world, I’m going to be selfish and just make as much money as I can. He might not approve of that so much. What’s the difference?

Ken Taylor
Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Now maybe you’re right about commu. But Simone de Beauvoir, in at the ethics of ambiguity, kind of implicitly criticizes what seems to be Camus view, that Camus existentialist hero is what she calls a mere adventurer who only cares about his own self declaration his own projects and is indifferent to the outcome of those projects is indifferent to who he tramples, then he thinks she seems to think that Camus formula is itself going to lead to a kind of tyranny. I bet you think that’s an unfair criticism of Camus?

Rob Zaretsky
Well, it’s unfair Ken, on because it is, in a sense, a historical De Beauvoir, in the ethics of ambiguity, Ford is mostly focused on the stranger and the myth of Sisyphus, in other words, to the three works that constitute what Kevin called his cycle of absurdity of surd. But Camus moves on from that, by 1942, in the midst of Frances occupation by Nazi Germany, he writes in his journal, the absurd teaches nothing, he realized that he had to move beyond the figure of Sisyphus that it simply didn’t serve as an inspiration or as a guide for what to do in France and occupied France at that moment. And what I found interesting is that in the the the presentations, the beginning of the program, much was said about Khemu, being in Paris, and hobnobbing with the intellectuals on the left bank. But nothing was said about the most formative period of his life and occupied France, that purity spent in shambles, selenium, in south eastern France, Shawn Bond was a town, a Protestant village that over the course of the war, hid and saved the lives of about two to 3000 Jewish children. And Camus, as a cure for his Tuberculosis was living in a farmhouse just outside of the village. And he was surely aware of what was taking place. But And much of what took place actually spills into his novel “The Plague,” which was published in 1947.

John Perry
No, I love “The Plague” and I love the point you’re making but but still, you might say, well, Camus had a philosophy and he had a life and we admire him for his life. We admire him for his instincts. But this is philosophy really explain why we admire him. More than say, Heidegger whose response to Nazism was much different or to the slug who just went to the bar in that same town and said, Hmm, too bad for all those miserable people. Give me another drink.

Rob Zaretsky
I don’t know think about Heidegger. In a way his thought and his life do mesh, unfortunately, that you can read his thought as an apology for Nazi ism. Certainly several philosophers far more qualified than I have seen it in just that light. Now we can say the same thing about Khemu that his thought and his life mesh, they’re seamless, and yet we admire him in ways that we despise Heidegger for that same seamlessness of thought in life.

Ken Taylor
I think you may be I think this is possibly right. But I think there’s an intellectual gap between the, the excess, the quasi existentialist theorizing and the life he lived. And I think that’s what John is getting. And I think that’s a really important gap. But you know, we’ll, we’ll take that up some more after the break. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about Albert Camus, with Robert Zaretsky from the University of Houston.

John Perry
If life is truly absurd, what’s the answer? Can there be any point to living or should we just all end it all?

Ken Taylor
How to live with the absurdity of life—when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Fugs
Thursday for a change a little more nothing, Friday once more nothing.

John Perry
That’s the Fugs, that great rock group, the precursors of punk rock can’t understand why that isn’t an all time hit, single the fugs and nothing a whole lot of nothing. pretty absurd. I’m sure Khumbu would have loved that song. Actually, I’m not sure of anything. But anyway, I’m John Perry. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. I’m Ken Taylor, I guess is Robert Zaretsky author of “A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning.” Robert will be part of a live chat and our online community of thinkers on Friday, March 6, that 12 noon pacific time, I hope you can join us at philosophytalk.org.

John Perry
Rob, Camus rejects religion, science, reason and suicide as possible answers to the absurdity of life. So what’s left? What is his solution to kind of continue what we’re talking about at the end of the last segment?

Rob Zaretsky
Well, if we limited to the myth of Sisyphus, what we’re left with is the boulder. And, of course, it’s big. It’s extremely difficult to push up the hill and then time upon time, we have to trudge back down the hill in order to gather it and push it back up again. The reason why Camus wants us to imagine Sisyphus happy is because to the very end Sisyphus remains defiant in the face or in the eyes of the gods who have condemned him to this punishment through all of time. In effect, what he does is that he makes the task his own, he claims ownership of that boulder, and by doing so, he remains his own person or he reaffirms his dignity.

Ken Taylor
So, I get that and I guess I want to go back to the De Beauvoir kind of criticism of that early kind of thought of Camus, I’m not sure she was explicitly addressing Camille, but it seems to to directly apply to that, you know, she worried that existentialism, it had two problems. It was threatened with what she called a sterile solipsism. And on the one hand, and an empty formalism, on the other hand, the external solipsism had to do with I only matters what I make of my life. Whatever anybody else throws on me, I can throw it off. So what I make of my life is all that matters. There’s no trends I need, I don’t need to look to any universe to confirm or verify or validate what I do or desire. That’s the pointless task and the empty formalism. She said, Well, the only thing that existentialism says to do is to be free, do it freely, and that will do what freely kill freely Rob freely. So she really worried about whether existentialism could have an ethics could have a morality. And I think she thought that the Khumbu is kind of thought had no answer to either of these things. But you seem to suggest that he came to see that himself. And that later on, he developed some kind of plausible thought about these two worries that some existentialist had about existentialism itself, right that it couldn’t really direct us how to live our lives, and how to relate to others.

Rob Zaretsky
If he does offer something of an answer, he does move on from that first cycle to the second cycle, which you call the cycle of rebellion. But the answers he offers can in that second cycle are provisional. I do think they are They they respond to de Beauvoir’s critique. I should say that of course, the true solipsist was not Camus. It was Simone de Beauvoir remarkably so.

Ken Taylor
You mean psychologically?

Rob Zaretsky
Psychologically there’s just no comparison between the two. But that’s, that’s neither here nor there. But when but, but, you know, I mean, can be well understood from the very beginning in fact, in 1938, when he was working for a small newspaper in Algiers, and he reviewed softs, nausea, and then his collection of short stories under the title The wall, he admired Sartre tremendously, but he also worried about softs take on human existence he thought that for for Sartre at least in these stories, life is tragic because it’s wretched. And that’s simply not the case for Camus. It was always the case that life is tragic because it is magnificent. Its glorious. He loved the world, the physical world in ways that Simone de Beauvoir and John Paul sought can never begin to fall.

Ken Taylor
I know I’m not a big scholar of these these folks. But I think of them as having these deeply intertwined intellects and lives and personal relationship and all this sort of stuff. Now I gather that their falling out wasn’t really about that actress, but it was about it was about a review that Khumbu wrote of sod that incense art and it had nothing to do with freedom or something like that.

Rob Zaretsky
It’s more complex what happened in 1952, following the publication of “The Rebel,” Sartre—well, Camus was waiting for the most important literary and political magazine of his time later, more than modern times to run a review of it. And this was the journal that was edited by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. And Weeks, months past there was nothing and then finally, there was a review not by sock but by one of his staff members, Francis Johnson. And the review was, was appalling. Not just from an intellectual perspective, but also from a personal it was largely ad hominem attacking kemu the man and not just Camus the thinker. And can you refer back to, not to Johnson and not to the journal, but to Sartre in which he took sock to task for allowing this review, to appear in print in the pages of this journal. And that’s when sought responded by one of the most extraordinarily violent but at times very telling responses to Camus’ work as well as the man.

Ken Taylor
Were these guys just childish?

John Perry
I suspect if the actress wasn’t at the bottom of it all, she had a little icing on the cake.

Rob Zaretsky
Well, yeah, but John, you’re onto something very important there because I think from and I don’t want to psychologize these men, I’m in no position to do it. But as your reporter mentioned, salt was not a terribly attractive man. And he always envied Camus ability. I mean, just his his ease, not just the fact that he was handsome, but that he was a terrific dancer, that he was, you know, he was a wonderful comic he the way he would mimic the other voices of people from from from Algeria from Algiers, but he also envied the fact that kemu was not like him, a member of the Parisian bourgeoisie Kambou was from the working class. His his background was an impoverished one. And, and in a way, saut de Beauvoir, I mean that entire circle of left wing intellectuals on the left bank envied can move for being the real thing.

John Perry
So Rob, that’s really intriguing and and I had no idea that was true, but I want to get back to the theoretical issues as we draw to a close my sense in in, you know, the little bit of reading I’ve done for the show my memories about my existentialist years. It seems to me that kumbu what, let me put it this way. Kullu although he didn’t like to be called floss, he read a lot of philosophy. He quotes Heidegger he quotes he Aspers he quotes all kinds of people, but I don’t ever remember a quote from him. I think he would have been better off spending some time with Hume because it sounds like from what you describe as his years in southern France, that he had that natural sympathy for others. That you know, the the spark that we would now traced evolution and for Hume was just a wonderful mystery. That I would think is what gives meaning You know, how can you raise children or feed children or deal with hungry children, and not have some sense that what you’re doing matters? So it sounds like he was able to close the circle between specificity and meaning in his life, but but he never figured out theoretically how to do it?

Rob Zaretsky
Well, you know, it’s interesting, the comparison with David Hume John, I’d like that a lot. I think they do have, I don’t think can ever read you. But I do think they have a great deal in common beginning with their skepticism. And also this notion that there’s this, we have this this this capacity for compassion, it’s just part of our of our being. Now, I don’t think he closes it theoretically come in, and he doesn’t close the circle. But I do think he closes it in terms of narrative. And again, we see it in the rebel, and we see it in the plague. He is working towards this, he understands that this experience of, of being in the same situation, either under oppressive regime or under an oppressive Cosmos brings us together and brings out the best in us. Nothing is clear, as a moral or as a lesson than that, in his novel, The plague. But again, don’t look to him for a theoretical closing of the circle. He’s not a theoretician. He’s a novelist. He’s a storyteller. And that’s where he’s attempting to do it.

John Perry
So we’ve got some email that kind of follows up on what we’ve been talking about. Can you ask the guests to say something about Camus Algerian background, and the influence it had on his philosophical thinking? You’ve told us about the influence it had on the on the Parisian people who kind of admired his richer life. But tell us a little more about his Algerian upbringing.

Ken Taylor
Be brief. I kno, you could tell us a lot but tell us just the highlights.

Rob Zaretsky
Well, then, actually let rather than telling you about his Algerian background, let me tell you about something specific to his Algerian background, namely, his relationship with his mother. His mother, Catherine syntes, was a typical Algerian In other words, she was an immigrant, she came from the island of Majorca. Catherine Cintas was illiterate. She was partly death, and mostly mute, she had a vocabulary for a few 100 words. And one of the most important influences on Camus life was living in the world of silence created by his mother, his entire life, he spent trying to make sense of that silence and of his relationship to his mother. Um, I should mention that his grandmother, who also raised him, was illiterate, as well. And so here’s Camus, in a way struggling to find meaning in this universe that is constituted by his mother. Now we can speak more broadly about his Algerian experience that I think added to his sense of the absurd when you think about the fact that he lived in a nation where nine tenths of its inhabitants were denied the rights and the privileges of French citizenship, something that he was acutely aware of and protested his entire life.

Ken Taylor
You know Rob, thisCamus sounds like a really not just he’s not I’ve been familiar with his thought. He’s a fascinating thing. He feels he sounds like a fascinating man. And the combination of the man and the thought is even more fascinating. And I gotta tell you, this has been an absurdly fun conversation, but I got to end it. And thank you for joining us.

Rob Zaretsky
Oh, listen, thanks for having me. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Margo True
Our guest has been Robert Zaretsky. He’s a professor of history at the Honors College at the University of Houston. He’s author of “A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning” and also author of the forthcoming “Boswell’s Enlightenment.” So, John, you got any absurdist thoughts?

John Perry
Well, not too many absurdist thoughts. I mean, I was really fascinated to learn something I hadn’t known the jealousy or envy that the French the Parisian thinkers had for commu as opposed to you know, just thinking. I mean, there’s a little analogy with Hume there to Hume came from the, from Scotland and this and so did Boswell who who’s the subject of of our guests newest book, and they had a lot of trouble getting accepted, partly because of their Scottish birth, even from the highlands in London. So that’s, that’s fascinating.

Margo True
You know, if you look at a picture, there’s a picture of cuckoo And Rob’s book, he really was quite a handsome guy. I mean, he and John Paul suck, look like some kind of gnomes. You know, there’s more to philosophy than meets the eye. So that’s what I take.

John Perry
Or more than doesn’t meet the eye.

Margo True
But again, I really think he’s a fascinating guy. I really recommend Rob’s book. It’s it’s a great read. But you know, this conversation continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers where our motto is Cogito ergo blogo, I think, therefore, I blog and you too can and become a partner in that community by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org. And please join us at the community on Friday March 6 at 12 noon Pacific for a live online chat with today’s guests Robert Zaretsky.

John Perry
And now man of absurdly fast speech, it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Existentialist.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… The absurd doesn’t have the panache it did back in the nineteen sixties, but then again Camus doesn’t have the panache he once did. We don’t follow the myth of Sisyphus rolling a boulder up hill all day, only to have it roll down again at night. Today, thanks to that great thinker Ayn Rand, we believe that we can get that rock up the hill and keep it there – once we get big government off our backs. In France, where meaninglessness first reared its ugly head, people had gone through two world wars, and things were pretty torn up and depressing. In America though, we were complacent and well off. Something for young people to rebel against! Thank you existentialism! If life is absurd, who needs a job! Let’s invent album oriented rock! Let’s get stoned and have sex! Which was pretty much what young Camus and Sartre wanted, near as I could tell. Oh, also to create a more perfect world using only their words. Camus was an Algerian born Frenchman, but during the war, he got stuck in Paris, away from his wife and kids, and became friends with Sartre. As a matter of fact, Camus was set to play the lead in the first production of Sartre’s NO EXIT. But that fell through. Camus edited an underground resistance publication called COMBAT. He actually sent Sartre to New York to write about it. Sartre viewed New York as too big and anonymous: He wrote, “In the numerical anonymity of roads and avenues. I am just anybody, anywhere.” He also thought that Americans created their own prisons, of conformity. And he thought of skyscrapers as ancient ruins, ripe to be torn down. Camus, on the other hand, who went to New York in 1946, loved it. Didn’t pay much attention to the skyscrapers, liked taking taxis, Broadway, ice cream, shopping. He also had sex with young women while he was there. So had Sartre, but he was not as fun loving. He complained to his French lover, Simone De Beauvoir, “I am killed by passion and lectures.” Which is creepy on several levels. What did young Camus get from Sartre? Thanks to existentialism, the personal meets the historical. You don’t know how history will work out, but you can act like you do. He’s like a really depressing motivational speaker. You can be whatever you want to be! And then die. In the mud. Alone. But in 1951 they had a falling out. Sartre believed that a writer should be an engaged revolutionary. You might not get the rock up the hill, but history will. So kill anybody that gets in the way. Camus wrote MAN IN REVOLT, which argued against the idea of mass murder for noble ideas. In HIS literary magazine, Sartre had a subordinate review the book. And it was nasty. Camus got mad, and wrote Sartre directly, implying that Sartre was the director of his reviewer’s opinions. Sartre wrote back, hinting that Camus’ thinking was muddled and banal. Upshot: the two never spoke again. When Camus later won the Nobel Prize, he was asked about his friendship with Sartre, and said, “The relationship is outstanding, because the best relationships are those in which we do not see one other.” He died in 1960 at 46 in a car crash, and Sartre died in 1980. The bloom had pretty much come off his rose. His consistent non-judgmentalism towards the many crimes of the Soviet Union rankled many, and others were rankled when he chose to visit members of the Baader Meinhof Gang in prison. Remember who they were? No? Good. There’s one stone you don’t have to roll up hill any more. I gotta go.

John Perry
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of Ben Manila productions and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, opyright 2015.

Margo True
Our executive producer is David Demarest.

John Perry
The program is produced by Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our director of research. Our marketing director is Dave Millar.

Ken Taylor
Thanks also to Ted Muldoon, Muro Kessler, Erica Topete, and Mark Stone.

John Perry
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and the partners at our online community of thinkers.

Ken Taylor
And from the members of KALW San Francisco, where our program originates.

John Perry
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University, or of our other funders.

Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers.

John Perry
I’m John Perry.

Margo True
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

John Perry
And thank you for thinking.

Seinfeld
I think we really got something here. What do we got? An idea! What idea? An idea for the show! I still don’t know what the idea is! It’s about nothing!