It is indeed quite absurd – but not in the sense which Albert Camus deemed philosophically interesting. In 2017, the works of philosophers Baruch Spinoza and Albert Camus were reportedly confiscated from Turkish public libraries because they were labelled as active members of a terrorist organisation. Their names were mentioned in the notebooks of a journalist who was brought to court for membership in a terrorist organisation. According to a Deutsche Welle report in November 2017, owning and reading books by Spinoza or Camus was apparently, and however briefly, an arrestable offence.

If true, that is absurd. After all, Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He wrote literature about real human conflict, and about the importance of loyalty. His novels are preoccupied with the most extreme situations (such as in The Plague) as well as the everyday. They provide close studies of personality as well as revelations of historical worlds. Camus’ novels are also concerned with how to be together in the midst of moral dilemmas – existence, after all, is full of them.

Camus says about the absurd: “The absurd is an experience that must be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence, of Descartes’s methodical doubt” (The Human Being in Revolt). The absurd can lead us into philosophy. Camus was most comfortable leading us into philosophy through literature. His novel L’étranger raises one of the most important topics of our times: the concept of the stranger. The stranger is the one who is puzzled by existence, cannot or can no longer take it for granted, and therefore opens the door for philosophy as born from reflection. Philosophy is born from wonder, which can be wonder inspired by an encounter with strangeness.

Literature is particularly suitable for an encounter with strangeness because it allows us to take the kind of distance from the everyday that is normally missing. In the midst of everyday existence, we are so closely embedded in the world that we cannot reflect on it. In the everyday mode, we do not realise that existence means being-in-the-world (as the philosphers Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty put it). The world is so closely pressed on us, so immediately around us and even within us, that we cannot describe it; cannot even get a sense of it. Literature thusly allows for a kind of alienation. This strange encounter provides crucial openings for philosophy, particularly where the philosophy of existence is concerned.

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"Accusations that Existentialism would lead to solipsism or to an ethics of ‘everything goes’ are absurd — the more we explore our existence in this world, the more we come to realise that how we act towards one another is what matters the most."

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Existence — from the Latin ex-sistere — means literally standing out; namely, stepping out from nothing, or into an absurd world. Doing this together with others as a colloborative undertaking is our only consolation and remedy. Camus’ literature not only teaches us about the world we live in, but also about ourselves and who we are as humans: embodied creatures, and vulnerable in our corporeality. The Plague is an acknowledgement of our human vulnerability and the dependence on others. Being with others and for others is ultimately what this existence is about.