Someone who has studied existentialism is David E. Cooper, author of Existentialism (Blackwell, 1990, 1999) and he has this to say:
“… there is at least one writer who, although he is often included does not really belong on the list [of existentialists] – Albert Camus… One reason for excluding Camus is that, unlike the rest of our writers, it is not his aim to reduce or overcome a sense of alienation or separateness from the world. In the attitude of Meursault, The Outsider, we find a defiant pleasure taken in our alienated condition. Sisyphus, the ‘absurd hero’, feels a ‘silent joy’ in living in a world where ‘a man feels an alien, a stranger… his exile… without remedy.’ Camus wants to invert Merleau-Ponty’s dictum into ‘The world is wholly outside me, and I am wholly inside myself.’ Moreover Camus was, by his own admission or boast, not interested in the weighty philosophical topics which occupied his Parisian friends, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – the nature of consciousness and perception, the mind-body relation, the problem of ‘other-minds’ and so on. Existentialism, as treated in this book, is not a mood or a vocabulary, but a relatively systematic philosophy in which topics like these are duly addressed. I shall have rather little to say about those, like Camus, who make a virtue out of being neither a philosopher nor systematic.” |
Cooper obviously would not consider Camus an existentialist. Equally as obvious is that he hasn’t read Camus as closely as he ought to. Let’s hear from someone else. Stephan Eric Bonner, author of Camus Portrait of a Moralist (Uni. Minnesota Press, 1999) writes:
“[The Stranger] never explicitly denies the need for a moral form of social conduct, which would increasingly concern Camus as he grew older, but it clearly highlights a bohemian individualism that the author would never fully relinquish. The conflict between them remains, and as a consequence Meursault becomes both an exemplary and a cautionary figure. Continued... |
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