Camus & Existential Views
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1. "Our aim," declares Camus, in a rejection of other views of the problem, "is to shed light upon the step taken by the mind when, starting from a philosophy of the world's lack of meaning, it ends up by finding a meaning and depth in it." Sartre, according to Camus, is too much in love with the philosophical conceit of negating everything from morality to reality to seriously engage depth of meaning. Kierkegaard is too ready to rely on the role of the divine to allow close questioning of the feud between futility and faith. Hegel's ethical, reasonable man is simply uncongenial to Camus. On the other hand, let us explore the validity of Camus's notion of the modernist hero (the absurd man), expressed in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, and again in Gide's The Immoralist, Musil's The Man Without Qualities, and Malraux's The Conquerors. It is really little different from an adumbration of the heroes of classical tragedy or Romantic fiction. Do you agree or disagree? What are the differences between the heroes of Romanticism or Classicism and those of Modernism?2. Camus provides an atheistic, or as he might have it, a non theistic, alternative to Kierkegaard's expression of Christian angst on one hand, and inflects the aggressive atheism of Sartre on the other. Yet in The Stranger, Camus creates an anti hero whose sense of himself is more congenial to Sartre's Being and Nothingness than to his own ideation of Sisyphus. Does that mean Camus is an honest philosophical c
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h modernism as an authentic attempt to find standing for modernism and discuss and understand the way of the world. To put it another way, what do Camus and Sartre, for example, have to say about the problem of evil that Kierkegaard hasn't already covered? If their world view does overtake Kierkegaard's in maturity and scope, on what might they base a claim for the superiority of their rational, moral, and ethical vision?
6. Mann and Musil are in the Germanic Romantic tradition of storytelling, which differs from the French scholastic tradition that informs Camus, and again from the anarchic absurd situation found in the literature of Kafka and the plays of Ionesco. Ionesco's The Bald Soprano is vastly removed in theme, form, and content from The Stranger. Musil's exploration of failed politicization in The Man Without Qualities is as searching as and as different from Malraux's in The Conquerors, and not merely because Musil's work is a total fabrication of circumstance and Malraux's is grounded in the well observed harshness of reality of the Chinese civil war of the 1920s. Yet a consistency of philosophical background can not only be discerned but is decisive for an appreciation of these works. How does this consistency em
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Approximate Word count = 1637
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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