The Philosophy of Camus

Abstract Although Albert Camus is recognized as an important novelist and political commentator, he is often still underrated as a philosopher. This study, focusing on Camus’s explicitly philosophical writings, provides a detailed examination of his intellectual development, and argues that his work constitutes a coherent, carefully argued meditation on central philosophical themes. A systematic comparison of Camus with Søren Kierkegaard provides an interpretive ‘lens’ through which Camus’s central philosophical concerns are brought into sharper focus. Camus’s three thematic ‘cycles’—dealing with Absurdity, Revolt, and Nemesis—are compared and contrasted with Kierkegaard’s three ‘stages’—the aesthetic, ethical, and religious—in order to explicate Camus’s development from a radical amoralism, to an ethical philosophy, and then to the quest for something beyond ethics. Emphasis is placed on Camus’s fragmentary and uncompleted later thoughts, and especially his turn to nature as a source of value. Despite the substantial changes in Camus’s thinking, it is argued that a creative tension between two kinds of religious or quasi-religious sensibility runs through all phases of his work—a pantheistic acceptance of the order of the world and a quasi-Gnostic rebellion against it for the suffering it involves. As well as Kierkegaard, the book brings Camus into conversation with other figures from both the Continental and the analytical philosophical traditions and considers ways in which his arguments might be further developed and explicated.