A 20th-century thinker with mixed identities. He was a journalist, political activist, play writer ，and director. Although he does not treat himself as a philosopher, his voices seem to prefer the rationalism approach. Camus is unique among the other continental thinkers; he denies most of the theoretical approaches’ significance. Yet, most of his ideas were expressed through metaphors and political practices. Several of his works have profoundly reflects his assertion of death, including The Stranger, La Mort Heureuse, reflections on Guillotine. Concretely, Camus revealed a triangle relationship between fate, absurdity, and happiness. Although there are various purposes of these works, Camus used metaphors and story constructions to symbolize these ideas.
Camus’s life has thoroughly been covered from World War I to the ending of World War II to address his early life. He was born in November 1913, which is only one year before the war started. Yet his father died in the war before Camus was one year old. Since his mother later found a housekeeper job in (French) Algeria, he followed his mother, and the elder brother moved there. Camus has struggled in arduousness for most of his life. Consequently, such context has a significant impact on his worldview. Although Camus has persuasively denied himself of being an existentialist, his proposition of death’s meaning has strongly indicated an “anti-philosophical approach,” which he applied to oppose existentialism inquiry.
At the opening of the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus puts “There is but one severe philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” By “suicide,” he actually means “suicide to resist the distant external world.” Eventually, his answer to this question is “no.” Simultaneously, as Camus was writing this philosophical essay which was intended to express the idea of absurdity, Camus was also suffering tuberculosis, and his country was facing the war (Kaplan 92). Therefore, although Camus behold absurdity abounds in one’s life, he tries to manage its force in terms of a positive expectation for living. According to the Greek myth, Sisyphus was punished to roll a heavy rock to the top of a mountain and roll it back to the bottom of the hill, which is endless and hopeless. Happiness, as Camus suggests, is such a process of fighting against the absurdity of life while awarding it is permanent and irreparable. “Since existence itself has no meaning, we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness” (Aronson).
With the message that life is absurd in a variety of ways, the meaning of death also penetrates through Camus’s The Stranger; “Camus believed that aside from the limitations of view and the absurdity of life, human could make a decision to get away from misery” (Salsabila and Tjahjani 2). The protagonist in The Stranger Meursault is an affectless person and has a serene lifestyle, as Camus illustrated. He is a person that did not show any sorrow while his mother passed away. Under his friend Raymond’s instigation, he bloodily killed two Arabs while he and Raymond spent their holiday. There are some typical interactions between Meursault and “the sense of death.” When Meursault asked Raymond for a gun initially, despite his safekeeping thought, he perversely perceived a desire of murdering. Therefore, contradictive protagonist’s portraits occur before and after the climax, which is the conflict between them and the Arabs. He eventually felt both the faintness of the anticipation of death and the absurdity of his life. The transformation of one’s sense of fate is thus rapidly occurred, as Camus described. If we then explain his triangle relationship theory, one’s aspiration of death is actually self-determined by the absurdity in one’s life. Whereas happiness, as Camus described, is our discoveries of passions that overcame life’s absurdness. For instance, while Meursault was facing the death penalty, he starts to imagine his future with his girlfriend and how they get married. As he puts it in La Mort Heureuse (Camus’s maiden work), “Happiness and absurd are the two sons of the same earth” (Camus 122).
Additionally, In his other work, The Reflection On Guillotine, Camus also revealed his assertion that government should ban the death penalty by persuading the reason death is not as intimidating as the restraint of the other humanitarian passions. “For capital punishment to be really intimidating, human nature would have to be different; it would have to be as stable and serene as the law itself. But then human nature would be dead” (Camus 9). Although the original purpose of this essay is to fulfill his political assertion, and the application of the “passion argument” is also under another context, Camus revealed the same phase of death and absurdity’s relationship. One’s understanding and contemplation of death would only lead by the extent that one wants to defeat absurdity or how much one enjoyed in one’s life. The magnitude of murders and criminals has not been reduced under death penalties since human nature majorly consists of freewill, lust, and chaos. From Camus’s potion of view, these so-called “passions” are far more desirable than maintaining a tedious and absurd life. Consequently, individuals would more likely exchange such life with their liberties. Yet Camus also seems to contradict himself in-between the dilemma of whether passions would lead to happiness or impulses.
In an overview of Camus’s words of death, he uncovered that the nature of death is desirable since we always derived from the absurdity of this world and tried to defeat it by putting ourselves near an end. While he also suggests there is another route of dealing with nonsense, which is to maintain our lives by passions, it could cause negative consequences from the legal system’s perspective. Camus’s life ends in a car accident in 1960. He was on the trip returning to Paris after the vacation. Based on police records back then, Camus’s vehicle didn’t speeding. The road surface and the landform were just as usual.
Nevertheless, the vehicle served to a tree, immediately killed Camus. Camus witnessed the absurdity of this world undergo his own life. Although his literary career successfully ended World War II, even his death comes absurdly. None can anticipate whether Camus was still eager his wild life before the accident took his life, but he reimagined the significance of death in terms of one’s determinant of fate.
Work cited page
Baker, Carlos. “A Happy Death: By Albert Camus, Translated by Richard Howard New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. 192 Pp. $5.95.” Theology Today 29.4 (1973): 444-45. Print.
Salsabila, Indiana, and Joesana Tjahjani. “Absurdity and The Significance of the Idea of Death in Albert Camus’ L’Étranger.” Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 1st Conference of Visual Art, Design, and Social Humanities by Faculty of Art and Design, CONVASH 2019, 2 November 2019, Surakarta, Central Java, Indonesia (2020). Print.
Kaplan, Alice. “Looking for “The Stranger”.” (2016). Print.
Scherr, Arthur. “Camus and the Denial of Death: Meursault and Caligula.” OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying 69.2 (2014): 169-90. Print.
Camus, Albert. “Réflexions Sur La Guillotine.” (2010). Print.
Marrouchi, Mustapha. “Stirrings Still; Or, The Impossibility of Mourning the Deaths of Edward Said.” College Literature 31.1 (2004): 201-14. Print.
Camus, Albert, and Justin O’Brien. The Myth of Sisyphus. New York: Vintage International, 2018. Print.
“How Did Albert Camus Die?” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Web. 25 June 2021.
Aronson, Ronald. “Albert Camus.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 10 Apr. 2017. Web. 25 June 2021.