I just finished reading a book by Michel Onfray entitled L’Ordre Libertaire: La vie philosophique d’Albert Camus, it is a philosophical biography about the person and the development of his thoughts throughout his life. It is a really great concept, I find that this is always a question that we ask ourselves when we read the great minds of our times or the past, did they actually live their philosophy? Camus lived his philosophy and always stayed true to who he was. The poor boy from the neighbourhood of Belcourt in Alger, was a “pieds noirs” by definition but lived the life of a Muslim Algerian much more than his European brothers and sisters, the boy of a poor illiterate cleaning lady widowed during the First World War, used literature as a way to escape the strict and stern grandmother that would beat him on a regular basis at home, and found a way out of the only world that he knew, one of poverty and suffering. He didn’t have the privilege of being raised in the same circle as Jean-Paul Sartre and the others of the St-Germain des Pres group, who were raised in a family of privilege and surrounded by books and the best of ivy schools. Camus saw philosophy and literature as a way out, his philosophy always reflected the life that he lived and he made it a point to always stay true to his beliefs no matter what the subject was. Because of his upbringing, he did not approach philosophy the same way, he was more of a non-philosophers philosopher, living the Nietzschean ‘Yes’ at all times. He lived a philosophical life until his untimely death in 1960, where we found the manuscript to The First Man and The Gay Science by Nietzsche.
What exactly is a philosophical life? How can we think of a man’s existence, his engagement in the world, his outlook on the work, as clear and singular. Michel Onfray would respond that the philosopher thinks that to live and live better, he must reflect on what drives his actions, meditate on the goal and draw an existential map, he reads, writes, in order to organize the chaos that is categorised by a certain verb. For Camus, his verb is action. During this work, Onfray takes all the writings from, whom some would call the James Dean of philosophy, and does not distinguish them, his novels, essays, theater plays, correspondences with friends, notebooks, and treats them as a continuous work. But who is Camus? Michel Onfray describes the philosopher as sensitive and affectionate, generous and loyal, sometimes fragile, hesitant, not sure of himself. Camus wrote to be read and understood, this is what helped him to exist. Thus, who is the real Albert Camus? Philosopher, author, journalist, the creator of a new language, passionate reader, freedom-loving positive anarchist, anticolonial thinker, no ones disciple. Onfray says that Camus was a hedonist philosopher, pagan, pragmatic, Nietzschean, and he was the son of the poor and he remained loyal to them his whole life.
What this book made me realize was that Camus had a different approach to his colleagues, he commented on Being and Nothingness by stating that it was a strange mistake in our lives that we try to feel our lives from the outside. It is this fidelity to the interior life that Camus builds his philosophical and political sensibilities. It is thanks to this fidelity that he speaks in the first person, just like Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. It is in this fidelity to the basic values (honour, dignity, simplicity, fraternity) that he is able to describe the emotions and perceptions from Algeria: the sounds of the city that enters the homes through the balconies, the smells of restaurants in the small side streets, the light from the bay in Alger, the freshness of the evenings with their gentle perfumes. Noces was written for the hedonists and The Rebel for anarchist thought.
I must admit that I really enjoyed Onfray’s study of anarchy and Camus’s lifelong relationship to it. The Rebel is a text that I have always admired, for many reasons, but one that I truly connected to is the fact that Camus knew that this book would not be well received by the public. He, however, stayed true to who he was and wrote a book that was antitotalitarian, antifascist, anti-capitalist, Camus the libertarian, defends pacificism and the right to criticize. The reception of the book, as we all know, started a war between the intellectual elite against the poor farmer’s son from the poor neighbourhood of Belcourt as being a philosopher for the bourgeois, seeing as he condemned the Soviet regime once it was discovered the existence of the Gulags (very reminiscent of the concentration camps that had happened not that long ago). I always found this argument hard to follow, that Sartre justifies the work camps in the ultimate goal of the communist regime in Russia is fine by me, but how is he the philosopher of the people (a bourgeois by every sense of the word) and that Camus was not with the people. We all remember the series of articles that he published in Alger Republicain at the age of 25 about the situation and suffering in Kablylie in 1939. He defended the arab and muslim minorities, criticized colonialism and its mechanics, avid opponent of classism, and opponent of the death penalty and bloody revolutions. He also stated that the rise in Algerian nationalism was due to the accumulation of the humiliations, frustrations, and exploitations that the people endured. I find that this book was maybe not read with the attention that it deserved, The Rebel is still relevant today and thanks to the clarity and insight that Camus brings, it will always be a reference for our world.
Camus had only one wish, ” Je demande une seule chose, et je la demande humblement, bien que je sache qu’elle est exorbitante : être lu avec attention.” Roughly translated it says that he asks for one thing, and he asks humbly, even if he knows that it is exorbitant: to be read carefully. I think that we owe that much to him.
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Massagesessel…
Aw, this was an extremely nice post – Albert Camus: The words that may have cost his life | The Book Haven. Finding the time and actual effort to create a very good article… but what can I say… I procrastinate a lot and never seem to get nearly any…