Camus and the Passion of Humanism

In the world of literature it often happens that great men have profound feelings and superficial thoughts; the most able do not let matters rest there but go on to dramatize the feelings, out of which they elicit another kind of thought that results in an art which is anything but superficial. It was not not always so, however, and there are many instances of failure. Good novelists, like Mann, wrote such bad philosophy, and good philosophers, like Santayana, such bad novels. Each had a field of competence on which he could fall back in case of trouble: Mann was an important novelist and Santayana an important philosopher. If we try to judge Camus from the same point of view and with identical canons, we experience considerable difficulty. Camus was responsible for a kind of literary philosophy and for vaguely philosophical novels in such equal amounts that it is difficult to say in which category he belongs. In his novels he borrowed plentifully from others: Defoe, Simenon, Gide, Kafka, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Except for The Plague, his novels are quite short and unpretentious, more like novelle or long short stories, and do not seem either original or impressive. In his philosophy he relied upon existentialism, particularly upon the version advanced by his contemporary, Sartre, with whom he broke personally and from whom he thought he had departed doctrinally. He was neither a great novelist nor a great dramatist; his work is too non-specific and undramatic. For the most part, he was rational but at the same time superficial, often reasoning closely about what hardly matters, pages which sometimes give off the appearance of philosophy but deal with trivial generalities, the finished work amounting only to weak philosophical essays and glimpses of plans for fiction. It is difficult to see anything of permanent worth in all of this if we confine our judgment strictly to his writings in their proper categories. Camus did not advance the cause of either the novel or philosophy, and these are the two fields to which he devoted most of his attention. And yet there is a tremendous value in Camus which is worth recognizing and saving.

Perhaps, for clues, we may best look to the philosophical movement in which he awoke to find himself immersed. It would not have been easy to escape the influence of existentialism. At once we find differences in the way Camus interpreted what he found. For he was the only positive existentialist who did not understand existentialism in Christian terms. The existentialists are either positive and religious, like Marcel and Tillich, or negative and atheistic, like Heidegger and Sartre. Heidegger comes closer perhaps to making a contribution in positive terms, for Heidegger is a philosopher while Camus was not. Heidegger’s contribution is theoretical, as any philosopher’s usually is. The most notable exception is that of Socrates, who was able both to expound his philosophy and to live by it. The contribution of Camus was made in action and expression, both concrete—as concrete as they could be made. The example of a man of action who can also dramatize his values, because he is something of an artist, and set them forth in theory, because he is something of a thinker, ought to be tremendous. He leaves us in no doubt as to what the values mean as well as to what impact they can have. His hope evidently was to represent the essence of what the Western culture has stood for and what ought to be saved in it.