The existentialism of Albert Camus is based on his view of life as the Absurd. This sense of the Absurd derives from the realization that man is destined to die, as if being punished for a crime he never committed. There is no reprieve, and this makes life absurd. There is no God in Camus's conception, and those who hope for an afterlife are thus to be disappointed. The fact that there is no God also means that there is no meaning or purpose to life outside of life itself, and that is destined to end. The one saving grace in the world seems to be the fact that while there is no God on which man can depend, man can live as if he can depend on his fellow man, even though he and they will all die. This is another absurdity, but it is based on the fact that the individual has come to understand the absurdity of life and that this realization liberates him. The individual faces death, knowing that he will lose, but acting as if his life ultimately does matter. The works of Albert Camus fall into three categories, aside from his work as a journalist: literary, political, and philosophical. This is an arbitrary division, since he generally mixes these elements in his work and his thought in some degree. An examination of his life and his work will show the evolution of his philosophical thought and how he expressed his conceptions to the world.
Albert Camus was born in 1913 at a village in Algeria where his father worked on a grape farm helping in the manufacture of wine. Camus was proud to be of mixed racial descent, with his father French and his mother Spanish. The father died in World War I, so Camus knew little of his father. The family moved to the Algerian region of Belcourt, where Camus learned to fend for himself on the streets. Camus would later be proud of his working-class family and would see a virtue in their lives, though it may be that he was seeing his past through nostalgic eyes and that he painted too rosy...