Maverick Philosopher

Remembering Albert Camus . . .

. . . and one whose hero he was.

Substack latest.

Albert Camus: He's a Rebel!

You'll enjoy it. If you don't,  you are not MavPhil material.

Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, tr. A. Bower, Vintage 1991, p. 15, French original published by Gallimard in 1951:

Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.

Good advice if one can take it without false heroism and existentialist hyperventilation.

Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, tr. A. Bower, Vintage 1991, p. 15, French original published by Gallimard in 1951:

Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.

Good advice if one can take it without false heroism and existentialist hyperventilation.

Eminent Domain Abuse

Little Pink House, a movie.

The right to private property is another thing leftists don't understand, unless it is their private property. 

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 177:

The Revolution is good.  But why?  One must have an idea of the civilization one wishes to create.  The abolition of property is not an end.  It is a means.

This is foolish. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  The problem is not private property, but too few people owning property, property they have worked for, and thus value and care about.  I include among private property the means for the defense of life, liberty, and property against assorted malefactors from unorganized criminals to rogue elements in the government.  

Virtue and its Exhortation

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 72:

Virtue is not hateful. But speeches on virtue are. Without a doubt, no mouth in the world, much less mine, can utter them. Likewise, every time somebody interjects to speak of my honesty . . . there is someone who quivers inside me.

This entry betrays something of the mind of the leftist. Leftists are deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of 'preaching.'  Theirs is the hermeneutics of suspicion. Nothing is what it manifestly is; there is always something nefarious at work below the surface. Too much enamored of the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, leftists failed to achieve a critical stance toward them where a critical stance allows for a separation (krinein) of the true from the false, the coherent from the incoherent.

Surely Camus goes entirely too far in the above entry. If speeches are hateful, then so are sermons and exhortations. Civilization and its transmission are impossible, however, without appeals to our higher natures.

To a leftist, preaching can only be 'moralizing' and 'being judgmental.'  It can only be the phony posturing of someone who judges others only to elevate himself.   The very fact of preaching  shows one to be a hypocrite.  Of course, leftists have no problem with being judgmental and moralizing about the evil of hypocrisy.  When they make moral judgments, however, it is, magically, not hypocritical.  

And therein lies the contradiction.  They would morally condemn all moral condemnation as hypocritical.  But in so doing they condemn themselves as hypocrites.

We cannot jettison the moral point of view. Marx tried, putting forth his theories as 'science.'  But if you have  read him you know that he moralized like an Old Testament prophet.

True Whether or Not Aristotle (or Camus) Said It

Be skeptical of all unsourced quotations. Where did the Stagirite say this?

Jumping ahead a couple of millennia, one finds the following bogus Camus quotation on several of those wretched unsourced quotation websites:

"I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't, and die to find out there is." ~Albert Camus

Having read and taught Camus, I can assure you that the above is not something he could have said in his own voice.  Did he put these words into the mouth of a character in one his novels or plays?

Paging Dave Lull.

 

UPDATE (5/6)

I had forgotten that I had already asked Dave about this and that he had already replied, in April of 2013:

I find no evidence that a statement of Camus' is translated thusly.  I won't bore you with the things that I did (buoyed by my high tolerance of boring activity) before I finally went to Google Books and did inauthor: "Albert Camus" searches using combinations of various keywords and short phrases from this so-called quotation and got no statement even close.  I even tried using Google Translate to translate it into French and then used combinations of various French keywords and short phrases and also got no statement even close.  I'm not surprised.  How about you?

Our hard-working researcher now provides us with the following:

 

From Giovanni Gaetani, “The noble art of misquoting Camus -- from its origins to the Internet era,” Journal of Camus Studies 2015:

2) Camus a wise gambler after Pascal's example?

‘I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and die to

find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't, and die

to find out there is’. 

Dozens of disoriented readers doubted at first glance of the reliability of this quote, but none of them was capable of solving the enigma: someone assumed that ‘maybe Camus wrote it on some private letters’, few others noticed the similarity with Pascal's wager on the existence of God. Unfortunately, the author of this quote is for sure neither Camus nor Pascal. According to Google, the actual spreading of this quote dates back to the early 2000s, when it firstly appeared in some American Christian sites25. In 2006, the Bishop T. D. Jakes even invented a ‘8 seconds prayer’ chain letter using this quote26. Anyway, I did not manage to understand how and why Camus is considered the author of this quote.

"No Man is a Hypocrite in His Pleasures"

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 95:

Johnson: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures."

The Johnson in question is Samuel Johnson. Translator Bloom informs us that James Boswell's Vie de Samuel Johnson (Life of Samuel Johnson) was published in France in 1954. So it looks as if Camus was mining it for ideas. 

In a second footnote we read:

Camus adapted this quote into [his novel] The Fall: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures; have I read that or did I think it, my dear compatriot?"

Camus knew the answer, but that didn't stop him from passing on both the thought and its formulation as his own. Is that unseemly for a novelist? Can one plagiarize in a work of fiction? An interesting question.

What the Johnsonian saying means interests me more.  Does it mean that no man preaches a  pleasure he does not practice? An example would be a high school teacher who preaches the pleasures of the life of the mind to his students but spends his leisure hours at the racetrack.  But on this reading the saying comes out false.

Or does it mean that no man indulges in a pleasure that he does not enjoy? This is true, and so this is what I take Johnson to be saying. Consider the pleasure of smoking a fine cigar, a La Gloria Cubana, say. No one indulges in this pleasure if he does not like cigars.

A hypocrite in his pleasures would then be a man who indulged in pleasures he did not enjoy.  But this is much closer to algolagnia than it is to hypocrisy.

Should we say that Johnson's aphorism is flawed? Well, it got me thinking and is insofar forth good.

It got me enjoying the pleasures of the life of the mind which I both preach and indulge in.

Books or Eternal Life?

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 94:

A priest who regrets having to leave his books when dying? Which proves that the intense pleasure of eternal life does not infinitely exceed the gentle company of books.

Come on, Al, be serious. Eternal life is an object of faith and hope, not of knowledge or sure expectation. The good padre regrets leaving the familiar and reliable pleasures that he knows and loves and is practically certain of, pleasures he need not have faith in or hope for, and is anxious over the wrenching transition that will pitch him headlong into Kingdom Come.

There are confirmed worldlings who simply do not understand religion. Camus is one of them.

Depoliticize and Humanize

Reading Notebooks 1951-1959 of Albert Camus, I cannot help but love and sympathize with this sensitive, self-doubting, and tortured soul.

Stages of healing.

Letting volition sleep. Enough of 'you must.'

Completely depoliticize the mind in order to humanize it.

Write the claustrophobic -- and comedies.

Deal with death, which is to say, accept it.

Accept making a spectacle of yourself.  I will not die of this anguish.  If I died from it, the end.  Otherwise, at worst, shortsighted behavior.  It suffices to accept others' judgment.  Humility and acceptance: purely medical remedies of anguish. (p. 203)

Like his hero Nietzsche, Camus had the throbbing heart of the homo religiosus but the bladed intellect of the skeptic: he could not bring himself to believe. Trust in the ultimate sense of things was impossible for this argonaut of the Absurd, as was hope.  Thus humility and acceptance could only be for him "purely medical remedies."  

And how could he completely depoliticize his mind when the only world for him was this miserably political one? If this is all there is, then all of one's hopes and dreams and aspirations for peace and justice have to be trained upon it and its future.  There you have the futile delusion of the 'progressive.'  Rejecting God, he puts his faith in Man, when it ought to be evident that Man does not exist, only men, at each others' throats, full of ignorance and corruption, incapable of redeeming themselves.

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Why do We Obsess Over Ultimate Meaning?

Life Without a View Other than the Immediate One

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 202:

Algerians.  They live in the richness and warmth of friendship and family.  The body as the center, and its virtues -- and its [sic] profound sadness as soon as it declines -- life without a view other than the immediate one, than the physical circle.  Proud of their virility, of their capacity for eating and drinking, of their strength and their courage.  Vulnerable.

The long views of philosophy are not to everyone's taste.  If not bored, many are depressed by the contemplation of death and pain, God and the soul, the meaning or meaninglessness of our lives.  They prefer not to think of such things and consider it best to take short views.  If as Thomas Nagel maintains, the contemplation sub specie aeternitatis of one's daily doings drains them of seriousness, one is under no obligation to take the view from nowhere.

Is it best to take short views? To live in immediacy, immersed in the quotidian and not questioning it?  

Sometimes it is. When the going gets tough, it is best to pull in one’s horns, hunker down, and just try to get through the next week, the next day, the next hour. One can always meet the challenge of the next hour. Be here now and deal with what is on your plate at the moment. Most likely you will find a way forward.

But, speaking for myself, a life without long views would not be worth living. I thrill at the passage in Plato’s Republic, Book Six (486a), where the philosopher is described as a "spectator of all time and existence." And then there is this beautiful formulation by  William James:

The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. (Pragmatism, Harvard UP, 1975, p. 56)

I wrote above, "speaking for myself." The expression was not used redundantly inasmuch as it conveys that my philosopher’s preference for the long view is not one that I would want to or try to urge on anyone else. In my experience, one cannot argue with another man’s sensibility. And much of life comes down to precisely that -- sensibility. If people share a sensibility, then argument is useful for its articulation and refinement. But I am none too sanguine about the possibility of arguing someone into, or out of, a sensibility.

How argue the atheist out of his abiding sense that the universe is godless, or the radical out of his conviction of human perfectibility?  How argue me out of my deep conviction that the pursuit of name and fame, land and loot, is base and pointless?

If the passages I cited from Plato and James leave you cold, how could I change your mind? If you sneer at my being thrilled, what then? Argument comes too late. Or if you prefer, sensibility comes too early.

One might also speak of a person’s sense of life, view of what is important, or ‘feel for the real.’ James’ phrase, "feel seriously," is apt. To the superior mind, ultimate questions "feel real," whereas to the shallow mind they appear pointless, unimportant, silly. It is equally true that the superior mind is made such by its wrestling with these questions.

Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.

Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine,Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.) 

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Private Property

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 177:

The Revolution is good.  But why?  One must have an idea of the civilization one wishes to create.  The abolition of property is not an end.  It is a means.

This is foolish. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  The problem is not private property, but too few people owning property, property they have worked for, and thus value and care about.  I include among private property the means for the defense of property against assorted malefactors from unorganized criminals to rogue elements in the government.  

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Remembering Albert Camus

Venice in August

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 163:

Venice in August and the swarms of tourists, who flock to St. Mark's Square at the same time as the pigeons, peck at impressions, and give themselves vacations and ugliness.

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Camus on Crybullies, Safe Spaces, and Trigger Warnings

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, p. 73:

Too much security for the child's heart, and the adult will spend his life demanding this security from people -- even though people are only opportunities for risk and freedom.

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Of Socialism, Violets, and Asphalt

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 61:

Socialism, according to Zochtchenko, will be when violets grow on asphalt.

Bernie Sanders take note.

Translator's footnote: Mikhail Zochtchenko (1895-1962), Soviet writer and humorist persecuted by Stalin.

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Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

This is one of the books I am reading at the moment.  Tr. Ryan Bloom.  First appeared in French in 1989 by Editions Gallimard, Paris, English translation 2008, first paperback edition 2010 (Ivan R. Dee, Chicago).

Some good stuff here, but some nonsense as well, for example:

A priest who regrets having to leave his books when dying?  Which proves that the intense pleasure of eternal life does not infinitely exceed the gentle company of books. (94)

It proves no such thing, obviously.  Our literary man is confusing the thought of eternal life with the experience of eternal life.

The trouble with too many French philosophers is they cannot decide whether they want to be clever literary scribblers or actual philosophers.  It is often difficult to dress up the plain truth in fine phrases.  

One of the temptations we philosophers face is that of allowing style to dictate substance.  A temptation to be resisted.

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'Religion of Peace' is not a Harmless Platitude

Remembering Albert Camus

Albert Camus, one of the luminaries of French existentialism, died on this day in 1960, in a car crash.  Not tragically, straining hubristically against limits, but absurdly, a passenger in a recklessly-piloted vehicle. "In his coat pocket was an unused train ticket. He had planned to travel by train with his wife and children, but at the last minute he accepted his publisher's proposal to travel with him.^[15]" (Wikipedia)

Camus was 46, in the middle of the middle decade of middle age.  Here is a review of A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, Robert Zaretsky, Belknap Press, 240 pages.

Here I remember my former colleague, Xavier Ortiz Monasterio, whose philosophical hero was Camus and who also, curiously enough, died on January 4th (2011).

Die Like a Man

Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, tr. A. Bower, Vintage 1991, p. 15, French original published by Gallimard in 1951:

Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.

Good advice if one can take it without false heroism and existentialist hyperventilation.

The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu

I have been re-reading Thomas Nagel's seminal paper, "The Absurd," which originally appeared in The Journal of Philosophy, October 1971, and is collected in Nagel's Mortal Questions (Cambridge UP, 1979, 11-23.)  Damn, but it is good.  Nagel is one of our best philosophers.  He's the real thing.

Nagel's central contention is that human existence is essentially absurd.  Thus the absurdity of our predicament is not in any way accidental or contingent or due to some remediable (by God or man) disproportion or 'disconnect' between the demands of the human heart and mind for meaning and intelligibility, on the one hand,  and the world's 'indifference' to our concerns, on the other.  In this regard Nagel's position is far more radical than Camus' as the latter presents it in The Myth of Sisyphus.  For Camus, something is dreadfully wrong:  the world ought to meet our demands for meaning and intelligibility but it doesn't.  For Camus, absurdity is rooted in the discrepancy  between demand and satisfaction, a demand that in some way ought to be satisfied and therefore in some sense could be satisfied.  (The 'ought' in question is non-agential; here is some discussion of such oughts.)

Camus protests that things are not the way they are supposed to be, but they are, alas, the way they are, and so all we can do is shake our fists at the universe in defiance.  Nagel's posture is less heroic and more ironic. 

For Nagel there is no non-agential ought to have been otherwise or could have been otherwise with respect to the meaning of human existence: our lives are necessarily absurd because there is in us a conflict that is unavoidable, a conflict between our limited, perspectival, situated, individual  points of view and the transcendental point of view from which we observe ourselves  and everything else sub specie aeternitatis.  The general and philosophical sense of absurdity arises when these two points of view come into conflict.  Nagel speaks of "the collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpretual possibility of regarding everything about which which we are serious as arbitrary or open to doubt." (13) 

Immersed as I am in in my quotidian toilings and moilings, I take my life and its projects with utmost seriousness.  For example, the other day I went back into my archives to correct a minor mistake I had made in a post from years ago.  But while I was very concerned to make this correction and make it right, I was also aware of the 'absurdity' of being worried about such a bagatelle.  Who cares?   As transcendental spectator even I don't much care.  It is easy to detach oneself in thought from one's projects and purposes and very life and see them as arbitrary, contingent, and without objective meaning or purpose or significance.  What matters greatly from our situated perspectives can seem to matter not at all when we ascend to the transcendental perspective.    But of course I am not just a transcendental spectator of "all time and existence" (Plato, Republic) but also this here measly chunk of animated aging flesh with a very personal history and fate and a reputation to maintain. 

It is most marvellously true that I am a conscious and self-conscious being, projective of plans and purposes, sensitive to reasons as opposed to causes, and alive to the full range of the normative; but I am also an embodied conscious and self-conscious being with all that that entails: I can be crushed, blown apart, invaded by microorganisms, . . . .  Human existence cannot be reduced to the existence of specimens of a highly evolved zoological species, but I am a specimen of such a species.  Thus when we ask about the meaning of life we are really asking about the meaning of embodied consciousness.  I believe this is a very important point.  For it implies that the question cannot be addressed in a a wholly objectifying manner.

As I read him, Nagel is telling us that the root of absurdity is in us as embodied consciousnesses, not in the world or in any disproportion between us and the world.  It is an ineradicable root.  Both POVs are available to us -- and we must avail ourselves of both if we are to live fully human lives -- but they are necessarily in conflict.  Or so it seems.  If I am to live my life with zest and passion and commitment, then I cannot live the detached life of the transcendental ego who merely observes while his physical vehicle negotiates the twists and turns of this gnarly world.  (This is a deep and complicated theme requiring much more discussion.)  Borrowing some Heideggerian jargon we can say that for Nagel the sense of the absurd is constitutive  of human Dasein.  To be a fully awake human being, one who avails himself of both POVs, is to live with the sense of the absurd.  The only way to escape our absurd predicament would be by causing the cessation of embodiment (suicide) or by somehow-- via meditation perhaps-- emptying the 'I' out into something pre- or non-egoic.

I think it is important to point out that for Nagel and in truth the absurd exists only as the sense of the absurd.  This is another way of saying that the absurdity of the human predicament is not a merely objective fact if it is a fact: it involves consciousness/self-consciousness.

Is the absurdity of human existence a problem to be solved?  It cannot be a problem that we can solve since it arises necessarily from the collision of the two POVs both of which are essential to being human.  If the problem arises for a person, then that person cannot both solve the problem and continue to exist.  (This is not to say that the problem must arise for every person since not everyone exercises his capacity to reflect on matters under the aspect of eternity.)  Nor is absurdity a predicament.  To call a state of affairs a predicament is to suggest the possibility of extrication.  But there is no escape from absurdity.  So it is neither a problem nor a predicament. What is called for is not the defiant posturing of an Algerian existentialist but irony:  "If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair." (23)

As for Peter Lupu, he seems to be maintaining  the exact opposite of what Nagel maintains.  Peter's thought seems to be that the meaning of an individual life is constituted  by the power to reflect.  Every agent of a life has this power essentially even if not all choose to exercise it.  Meaning is therefore not bestowed by the agent upon himself or by something or someone outside the agent such as God.  Existential meaning inheres in the agent's power to reflect on his life, his values, desires, and purposes.  For Lupu, meaning is not subjective .  Nor is it externally objective, imposed from without.  Every life is meaningful just in virtue of the agent's power to reflect.

I questioned whether existential meaning could be both objective and subjectively appropriable by all.  Lupu thinks he can answer this by saying that meaning is objective albeit internally objective in virtue of every agent's having essentially the power to reflect; but meaning is also subjectively appropriable by each agent if he chooses to actualize his power to reflect.  Here again is my aporetic tetrad:

A. If life has a meaning, then it cannot be subjective.

B. The meaning of life must be subjectively appropriable by all.

C. There is no meaning that is both nonsubjective and subjectively appropriable by all.

D. Life has a meaning.

Lupu solves my tetrad by rejecting (C) while accepting the remaining limbs.  Nagel, I would guess, would solve the tetrad by rejecting (D) while accepting the other limbs.

There are several questions I need to pose to Lupu, but for now let me just pose a Nagelian question/objection.  Nagel is surely on to something when he underscores the power of reflection to undermine the seriousness of our projects and make them appear arbitrary, contingent, and dubious.  When this power is exercised it collides with our tendency toward straighforward unreflective living under the guidance of taken-for-granted norms and values imbibed uncritically from the circumambient culture.  How can Lupu accommodate Nagel's point?  Is it not more plausible to hold that it is absurdity, not meaning, that is the upshot of reflection? 

Bogus Camus Quotation

One finds the following on several of those wretched unsourced quotation sites:

"I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't, and die to find out there is." ~Albert Camus

Having read and taught Camus, the above is not something he could have said in his own voice.  Did he put these words into the mouth of a character in one his novels or plays?

Paging Dave Lull.

Camus and Shestov

Albert Camus is a frustrated rationalist. He values reason and wants  the world to be rationally penetrable, but he finds that it is not. What he calls the Absurd consists in the disproportion between the human need for understanding and the world's unintelligibility, "the unreasonable silence of the world." (Myth of Sisyphus, Vintage 1955, p. 21, tr. Justin O'Brien)

Lev Shestov, on the other hand, is an irrationalist. He delights in  what he takes to be reason's impotence.

Such wild diversity in the life of the mind and spirit does not delight me, but it does fascinate me and serve as a goad to struggle on, day by day, for as much light as can be attained in these inasuspicious circumstances until the curtain falls -- or lifts.

Was Camus Contemplating Baptism?

Albert Camus, one of the luminaries of French existentialism, died on this day in 1960, in a car crash.  He was 46.  Had he lived, he might have become a Christian. Or so it seems from Howard Mumma, Conversations with  Camus. This second-hand report is worth considering, although it must  be consumed cum grano salis. See also Camus the Christian?

Czeslaw Milosz on Simone Weil and Albert Camus

Czeslaw Milosz, "The Importance of Simone Weil" in Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision (University of California Press, 1977), p. 91:

Violent in her judgments and uncompromising, Simone Weil was, at least by temperament, an Albigensian, a Cathar; this is the key to her thought. She drew extreme conclusions from the Platonic current in Christianity. Here we touch upon hidden ties between her and Albert Camus. The first work by Camus was his university dissertation on St. Augustine. Camus, in my opinion, was also a Cathar, a pure one, ['Cathar' from Gr. katharos, pure] and if he rejected God it was out of love for God because he was not able to justify Him. The last novel written by Camus, The Fall, is nothing else but a treatise on Grace — absent grace — though it is also a satire: the talkative hero, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, who reverses the words of Jesus and instead of "Judge not and ye shall not be judged: gives the advice "Judge, and ye shall not be judged," could be, I have reason to suspect, Jean-Paul Sartre.