To anyone who hasn't read Camus: I cannot recommend reading The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus enough. They are probably the two most influential books in regard to my outlook on life.
Can you elaborate on how The Stranger influenced your outlook on life?
I ask because the person who recommended it to me saw the protagonist as a hero -- someone inspiring.
I read it as a cautionary tale. It showed me one could be apathetic to a fault in regards to their fate. The only thing he seemed to care about was actively not caring about his or others' lives.
I had a pretty troubled childhood, and I surrounded myself in an armor of logic. I acted a bit like Spock, I guess. I tried to reject emotion and act only on logic. This did lead me to develop early mathematical and programming skills, but hindered a healthy worldview. I was firmly convinced that the universe was based in logic and that the meaning and reason of everything could be derived by logical thinking.
When I got older and moved away from home, I began to better understand "The Absurd" that Camus talks about. I had been struggling with the idea that I sought a logical reason for absolutely everything, but was unable to find one in many cases.
The acceptance of "The Absurd" allowed me to deal with the fact that meaning is often obscured or unattainable. I find it much easier to accept the world as it is without burdening myself with attempting (futilely) to logically explain everything. Things just are.
That being said, I don't reject logic at all; a question I was struggling with was "logically, why should I value logic?" Camus helped explain to me the absurdity of this question, and existence, and to accept that it would remain unanswered.
Camus also helped me to find joy in struggle. He says "The struggle to the summits suffices to fill the heart of man. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." I now accept that there isn't any deeper meaning to struggle and it's important to live in the moment. Everyone is struggling in their own way. Everyone is struggling for their own desires, and at the deepest level, there is no reason for it.
Another book I recommend for the same reasons as above is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
If you haven't already, I'd recommend reading some of Camus's political essays, -most notably 'Letter to a German friend.' That essay in particular is breathtaking in its sheer emotion and morality, and while not contradicting them, an interesting departure from his most popular works. It is literally the only political essay that stirred enough emotion in me to make me cry.
The essay is especaially poignant and rather sad for me as a US citizen in the wake of 9/11. It has to do with the moral use of force in retaliation and rebellion.
I relate to your description growing up quite a bit. To be honest, getting older I've become very disappointed by the world and its imperfections. In any case, I don't know if talking about me is interesting to anyone.
However, I have to disagree with your conclusion (based on Camus) that questions remain unanswered. I think that's a failure -- Camus's failure as well as yours. It's easy to throw up your hands and say "I don't know. It is what it is." This is precisely the reason why I think "The Stranger" is a book with a lot of potential but ends up a failure. I suspect leaving things in limbo at the end is often masking the writer's (or director's) shortcomings.
You're probably happy with your life as a result, but you're taking the easy road and that road leads to nowhere.
In the meantime, I'll continue to stay unhappy and flabbergasted by the discrepancy between logic and fairness on one side and society on the other.
The way you talk about "the easy road" implies that you think that their are "roads" to begin with. While you think how I live is an "easy road", that is only your view with the value you have assigned to actions. Camus would posit (and I would agree with) that from a universal perspective, there is no easy road or hard road. There are no roads. Nothing has intrinsic meaning and the universe doesn't care what you do. As far as I'm concerned, a rock sitting at the bottom of a ditch is taking the "hard road" and Gandhi took the "easy road".
You have to ask yourself why you perceive one road as being better or more noble than another. Once you reach the root of this question, I believe you will find that you have no reason to believe that one is better than the other and you have your beliefs for no other reason that "it is what it is."
As Wittgenstein said:"At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.”
IMO The Stranger becomes more enlightening if you view it as a n examination of human nature. Following this line of thought, the main question should be: Would you consider the protagonist "human"?
I'd also recommend his collection of short stories (Exile and the Kingdom), though I suppose it would depend on the translation - much of the depth of Camus is in the poetic and carefully chosen words. He's technically a very interesting writer, and I think his stories capture a certain existential ache that everyone feels at some point in their life, observing how absurd and cruel the world can be without trying to offer answers. Not really sure they should be set as school texts though, as it ruins them for a lot of people.
My high school French teacher had us read Camus and Sartre, and my German teacher had us do post-War literature, some of which was dark e.g. Draußen vor der Tür. I'm not sure i got any of it at the time, especially since they're nontrivial in original language, I'll have to cover those again.
I just recommended someone on HN a book by Camus. The First Man.
I read your other comment about your having a troubled childhood. I can relate.
When I was 14 I started reading everything Camus ever published. I became very withdrawn. My family became very concerned. I wrote important phrases by Camus and stuck them on my wall. Pretty soon my entire wall had Camus phrases. My dad's psychologist (and my family) recommended I should 'explore' other types of literature. It was a very tough time. Except for me, I viewed my depression as crippling.
Yes, I was a very logical child, as yourself, but, as Camus suggests, viewing life as absurd leads to a very morose nihilism. I skipped school and was about to fail secondary school. I didn't care. I didn't excel at school, I excelled at philosophy, but that didn't really matter in secondary.
Every single book I read by Camus influenced me and was a stab to the heart. He sometimes wrote on the troubling matter of adults not willing to understand adolescents, and I felt very much misunderstood. Plus, I was also torn between two cultures; one rooted in tradition and another which was very progressive.
The Myth of Sisyphus has references which might help to know or understand before jumping into it. The Stranger is definitely more accessible and, for obvious reasons, it is his most widely read book. But the protagonist in that book is a bit of a character study. I think at one point I related to him, but stopped saying so, because a lot of people interpret Meursault as a sociopath. I don't think I was a sociopath, but was deeply confused about the world in which I lived and distanced/detached myself from everything to understand my world better. It's hard to explain, especially here.
The First Man was the first book that ever made me cry. I never really knew my mother, and this book is about a boy named Jacques, and his relationship with his mother. It is also about a boy's reservations about living in poverty, and living with a poor family (and everything that entails), which I got to experience very early in my life. But it is also a metaphor for cultures colliding: Spanish (which also happens to be my grandparents' culture) and a more 'modern' one, French (in my case, English-speaking North American). Of course, it has Algerian references, as well.
I highly recommend Camus. For those who've never read him, I would recommend these, in this order:
A Happy Death
The Stranger
The First Man
Exile and the Kingdom
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death
I would place The First Man first, but it is a very different book from everything else Camus has written (except his diaries, I guess). My favourite Camus book is definitely The First Man.
If I had heros, Camus would be one of my few heros. The idea that life is not just meaningless, but rather absurd is quite a relief. What I like about him is that in his writings, he does not offer any solace. He does not promise that we will magically become satisfied with life and existence, rather he writes about the confusion between living and suicide, and interestingly, he argues that both choices are equally absurd. He does argue for morality. The reader is thrown into that dizzying choice where no option is preferential, so the choice to live is rather arbitrary. The realization that life is absurd freezes you for a moment. Though, since life is rather meaningless, I feel it also unchains a person from all those pressures and norms set by society, religion and family. The thought represents true freedom.
Camus also seems to be one of the philosophers who actually looked cool.
I think that rather than trying to discover the meaning of life while we're busily burning fossil fuels on a single planet that we'd be better off punting on the issue until life in general, and humans in particular, have managed to sustainably spread beyond Earth (and of course demonstrate better care-taking of the world we do have). Until we achieve that end, Camus' philosophy is useless, and in some cases actively harmful.
(Once we're on a few tens of planets, navel-gaze all you want.)
" Encumbered, he cannot move and is stuck in this pose. Then an official painter, who paints his portrait, arrives, then a second painter, who paints a portrait of the first painter painting the hero, then a third, and so on. Everyone chatters in the light, the ribbons, the dogs, the easels. With great pageantry, somebody brings the painter a mirror so that he may gaze at himself. "
Beautiful. I've never heard of this one, though I'm a french native speaker and was quite interested in post-ww2 literature during my twenties.
