ALBERT CAMUS

Albert Camus was a French author and philosopher and one of the principal luminaries (with Jean-Paul Sartre) of absurdism. Camus was the second youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (after Rudyard Kipling) when he received the award in 1957. He is also the shortest-lived of any literature laureate to date, having died in a car crash 3 years after receiving the award. He was born on November 7, 1913 in Mondovi, Algeria, he was a French novelist, essayist and playwright, Camus was closely linked to his fellow existentialist JeanPaul Sartre in the 1940s, but he broke with him over Sartre's support to Stalinist politics. Camus died at the age of forty-six in a car accident near Sens, France. Among his best-known novels are The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), The Rebel (1954) and The Myth of

Sisyphus (1955). Camus was killed on January 4, 1960 in a automobile accident while returning to Paris. Two years before his death, he wrote, "I continue to be convinced that my work hasn't even been begun." His most recognized literary works, which are sub-divided depending on the genre of the literary work, are the following:

BOOK WORKS

NOVELS
The Fall The First Man A Happy Death The Plague The Stranger

Betwixt and Between Neither Victims Nor Executioners The Rebel (book) Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

PLAYS

ESSAY WORKS
The Myth of Sisyphus Neither Victims Nor Executioners Reflections on the Guillotine

The Just Assassins The Misunderstanding The Possessed The State of Siege

CONTRIBUTIONS TO ARISTOCENTRIC CLAIMS: ABSURDISM

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. The statement reveals one of the dilemmas of the philosophy of Absurd [also called as Absurdism] which

Camus sought to answer. Absurdism is an off-shoot of Existentialism and shares many of its characteristics. Camus himself was labeled as an Existentialist in his own life, but he rejected this title. He was not the first to present the concept of Absurd but it was owing to him that this idea gained popularity and influence, and it transformed into a proper philosophical movement of Absurdism. The foundations of the concept of Absurd can be traced back to the deeply religious Danish philosopher Sren Kierkegaard, also regarded as the fore-father of Existentialism. Kierkegaard describes the Absurd as a situation in life which all thee rational and thinking abilities of a person are unable to tell him which course of action to adopt in life, but in this very uncertainty he is forced to act or make a decision. He has to do something but his reason offers him no help. He writes in one of his journals: What is the Absurd? It is, as may quite easily be seen, that I, a rational being, must act in a case where my reason, my powers of reflection, tell me: you can just as well do the one thing as the other, that is to say where my reason and reflection say: you cannot act and yet here is where I have to act. Since the beginning, thinkers have strived to find out the meaning to life and have pondered over the purpose and objective of this universe. Either they have concluded that this life is meaningless and purposeless, or they have taken refuge in some faith and religious belief such as the existence of God to make-up for this apparent lack of meaning. Camus believed in the first scenario: a life intrinsically devoid of meaning and purpose. He refuses to accept any meaning that is beyond this existence.