The real Camus.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: I applaud the intent of Russell Blackford's article (October 2003), that the ideas of Albert Camus are both "attractive and liberating", and still provide a "challenge for more traditional worldviews"; but I feel the reason Camus's ideas are not taken more seriously (he is more famous nowadays for his novels) is because the commentary surrounding his work is still labouring under a number of misconceptions. Dr Blackford's article, unfortunately, perpetuates two of them.

The first misconception is that Camus was an existentialist. As Camus asserted himself, in 1945:

 
   No, I am not an existentialist. 
   Sartre and I are always surprised 
   to see our names linked ... Sartre 
   and I published all our books, 
   without exception, before we had 
   ever met. When we did get to 
   know each other, it was to realise 
   how much we differed. Sartre is 
   an existentialist, and the only 
   book of ideas that I have 
   published, The Myth of Sisyphus, 
   was directed against the so-called 
   existentialist philosophers. 

The climate of thought Camus criticises in this work is one in which the absurdity of existence is taken as a conclusion: where to live "authentically" (a concept of Sartre's, borrowed from Heidegger, and never used by Camus) was to live in accordance with the meaninglessness of life. In opposition to this, Camus took the absurd as a point of departure and argued that, although living with its awareness, one must not give in to it, but should rather rebel ceaselessly against it.

The distance between Camus and existentialism was increased by the publication, in 1951, of his second book of ideas, The Rebel. At this, Sartre publicly ended his friendship with Camus, which in private had long since cooled. And he did so on political grounds (Camus criticises communism at the same time that Sartre was hailing it as the potential saviour of France); while on a philosophical level, the gap between the two men also became more pronounced. The basic postulate of existentialism--that "existence precedes essence"--argues for the absence of any fixed human nature, in which value is created as a consequence of human action, rather than as an impetus for it; while the basic premise of The Rebel, summed up in its opening pages, argues the complete opposite:

 
   Analysis of rebellion leads at 
   least to the suspicion that, 
   contrary to the postulates of 
   ...