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.
Join the conversation