{"id":36517,"date":"2013-11-18T12:00:39","date_gmt":"2013-11-18T12:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=36517"},"modified":"2015-05-05T22:21:11","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T21:21:11","slug":"albert-camus-at-100-stoic-humanist-and-world-citizen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/11\/albert-camus-at-100-stoic-humanist-and-world-citizen\/","title":{"rendered":"Albert Camus at 100: Stoic Humanist and World Citizen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"albert<\/a>Albert Camus (1913-1960) would have been 100 this November had he lived beyond the car crash which took his life in 1960.\u00a0 Camus, who had been the youngest writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, had chaired the committee of support for Garry Davis\u2019 world citizen efforts<\/a> in Paris and had contributed his writing skills to the statement which Garry Davis and Robert Sarrazac read when interrupting a session of the UN General Assembly meeting in Paris in 1948. Thus it is fitting that a \u201ccoffee table\u201d book with extensive photos of Camus be published to mark the 100 birth anniversary under the title Albert Camus: World Citizen. <\/i>(1)<\/p>\n

In 1948, he was still a highly regarded editorial writer for Combat<\/i>, which began as a clandestine newspaper in 1941 when France was partly occupied by the Nazi troops, and half of France was under the control of the anti-democratic regime of Vichy. Although the Germans occupied Paris, they allowed publishing, theatre and films to continue if the German censors found nothing too overtly oppositional in them. Thus, Camus\u2019 novel L\u2019Etranger <\/i>(The Stranger<\/i>) was published in 1942 by the leading publisher, Gallimard.\u00a0 This short novel is written in a way which owes something to the early style of Hemingway. L\u2019Etranger <\/i>is a cry of revolt against man-made standards of absolute morality \u2014 a theme he develops more fully in his political-philosophical book on the use of violence L\u2019Homme r\u00e9volt\u00e9 (1951) <\/i>translated as The Rebel. <\/i>(2). As he said in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Stockholm \u201cthe nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments: refusal to lie about what we know and resistance to oppression.\u201d<\/p>\n

Camus was born in Algeria, the son of a French father who was killed in the First World War when Albert was only one year old and an illiterate Spanish mother who raised him while working as a cleaning woman. Camus was intellectually stimulated by his father\u2019s brother who read books of philosophy and was active in the local Masonic lodge. Camus\u2019 intelligence was spotted by a secondary school teacher who helped him get a scholarship to the University of Algiers where he studied history and philosophy, writing a master\u2019s thesis comparing the Gnostic ideas of Plotinius and the Christian ideas of St. Augustine.<\/p>\n

Camus was faithful to his Mediterranean roots, and his thinking is largely that of the classic Greek and Roman Stoics, the first to call themselves \u201ccitizens of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Camus is the champion of the \u201cnow\u201d rather than the \u201clater.\u201d \u00a0He is critical of Christian thought which he interprets as \u201cputting up with the injustice of the now in order to be rewarded in heaven later,\u201d along the lines of the satirical song based on a Salvation Army hymn \u201cthere will be pie in the sky by and by.\u201d\u00a0 He was particularly opposed to the \u201cChristian\u201d policy of Franco\u2019s Spanish government, and had been strongly influenced by the struggle of Republican Spain and the Spanish civil war writings of Andr\u00e9 Malraux.<\/p>\n

The same refusal to sacrifice the present for a potentially better future made him a strong opponent of the Stalinist Soviet Union. For Camus, there was no difference between dying in a Soviet camp and dying in a Nazi camp. We should be neither executioners nor victims (the title of one of his most quoted essays.)<\/p>\n

Camus is perhaps more memorable as a great journalist and an editorialist than as a novelist. He had put his reputation on the line in defense of Garry Davis, even being put in jail for a short time for having joined Davis in a street protest in front of a Paris prison where Davis was protesting the conviction of a young man who had refused military service \u2014 a man working to \u201csatisfy the hunger for freedom and dignity which every man carries in his heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Camus expressed his world citizen ethos at the end of The Rebel<\/i>, <\/i>\u201cThe earth remains our first and last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time.\u201d<\/p>\n

NOTES:<\/b><\/p>\n

1) Sophie Doudet et al. Albert Camus\u00a0: Citoyen du Monde <\/i>(Paris\u00a0: Gallimard, 2013, 208pp.)<\/p>\n

2) Albert Camus. The Rebel <\/i>(New York: Vintage Books, 1956, 306pp.)<\/p>\n

_____________________________<\/p>\n

Ren\u00e9 Wadlow, a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and of its Task Force on the Middle East, is president and U.N. representative (Geneva) of the Association of\u00a0World\u00a0Citizens. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 towardfreedom.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Albert Camus (1913-1960) would have been 100 this November had he lived beyond the car crash which took his life in 1960. In 1948, he was still a highly regarded editorial writer for Combat, which began as a clandestine newspaper in 1941 when France was partly occupied by the Nazi troops, and half of France was under the control of the anti-democratic regime of Vichy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36517\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}