He was a guy who escaped poverty in Algeria by the recognition of a Primary School teacher who encouraged him to apply for a scholarship. The academic life suited him and he fell in with Jean Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir and other Parisian intellectuals.
He embraced existential philosophy but fell out with Sartre over his commitment to pacificism.
The Myth of Sisyphus is a bit of a downer. The first chapter deals with suicide, reasons for, reasons why despite those reasons people continue to live their lives.
The timing for reading about suicide is not great given that a family member recently took his own life.
I had forgotten that the futility of life was a bit of a theme to writers like Camus. He opposed nihilism and fell out with Sartre over their different philosophical theories.
Maybe I will read his short stories first. Exile and the Kingdom was recommended to me by someone who wrote her master’s dissertation about Camus and his secular canonisation.
I am collecting Albert Camus’ seminal work The Myth of Sisyphus from Waterstones bookshop today. I’m hoping that it will give me some insights into his famous quote about integrity.
I read his novels The Plague and The Stranger when I was a teenager because that’s what my older brother had been reading. At school I was studying Cider with Rosie and Lark Rise to Candleford, very different literary styles from Camus.
As a teenager at a public school in the depths of the Sussex countryside 1968 wasn’t quite as revolutionary as left bank Paris or as counter culture as liberation struggles in the USA. Admittedly I was eligible to be conscripted into China’s Red Army,, but that was the price I was expected to pay for my free copy of Chairman Mao’s little red book.
Our rebellious attitude was directed at the petty rules and restrictions of boarding school life. To find out what that was like, watch Lindsay Anderson’s brilliant film If.
Camus’upbringing couldn’t have been more different to my own. His father had been killed in WWI, he was raised by his mother in Algiers in a working class district along with his older brother, grandmother and paralyzed uncle. His primary school teacher, Louis Germain,recognised his talent and encouraged him to gain a scholarship to the lycee. Tuberculosis interrupted his university studies at the University of Algiers where he was studying Philosophy.
His writing earned him a Nobel Prize and he credited his old teacher, Louis Germain, in his acceptance speech.
His career as a journalist and author was cut short aged 49 in a car crash. His ideas on truth, justice, morality, humanitarianism and existentialism live on in his published works.
Sisyphus was a well known trickster who tricked Death once by chaining him up so that nobody died. Ares forced Sisyphus to unchain Death. When he died he told his wife not to perform the usual sacrifices and not to bury him. When he reached the underworld he was allowed to return to punish his wife for the omissions.
He lived to a ripe old age but as a punishment for trying to cheat Death he was forced to roll a huge boulder up a steep hill incessantly.
I have yet to read Albert Camus’ classic essay The Myth of Sisyphus that deals with the absurdity of life, but I have reserved it at my local library.
I will be starting a level 2 undergraduate course in October studying Philosophy. There is a forum for those interested in philosophy on the OU students’ website.
Because there has been sustained interest in Albert Camus’ quotation on my blog, I have posted ‘Integrity has no need of rules’ on the OU forum to see what people make of it.
Albert Camus put forward the idea that those whose integrity was beyond reproach had no need of society’s strictures.
This premise assumes that there are those who are capable of self regulation. It is a bit elitist to think that a small group of individuals do not need to conform because they are better able to control their baser desires.
As rational human beings we like to think of ourselves as self sufficient entities. But our lives have very little meaning without our interaction with others.
Those interactions whether they be commercial, spiritual or social have evolved with conventions that smooth the passage of profit making, worship of deities and celebrations with family and friends.
To say that integrity does not need to be confined is less problematic. It is not the limits of integrity that need to be defined, but the acceptance that rules have a purpose and apply equally to all members of society.
Many of my readers have read the blog Integrity has no need of rules. Albert Camus put forward the idea that integrity could trump morality. In other words, the individual can build a set of principles that are unique to that individual and that in so doing there is an integrity distinct from morality.
This has been hard to debate philosophically. How does integrity differ from a set of moral choices? Can the conflict between morality and integrity be resolved?
It seems hard to fit integrity into Ethics and Morality. If one tries to establish universal truths but admits exceptions, you get a watered-down truth. If we interpret integrity as it applies to data, the emphasis is on the lack of corruption.
Perhaps a lack of corruption could help us understand personal integrity, but how does it differ from ethical choices adhering to a moral code?
Philosophers are having a hard time with the concept of integrity. One assumption may be that integrity is an adherence to moral values, but integrity might not necessarily conform to morality. Integrity implies a wholeness with everything intact. With that in mind, there is little flexibilty or adjustment to utilitarian principles or Kantian morality.
So does integrity have any place in the philosopher’s lexicon? If moral imperatives have motivation, what is the motivation for integrity? If it is an amalgam of ethical principles, does it have any meaning on its own?
Definitions and rules give structure to concepts, but is it possible that integrity exists without clear boundaries? Can we envisage a human being who lives by his own principles that do not conform to societal norms, and who is not motivated to do good for utilitarian reasons?
Albert Camus provokes interesting debates about the individual and life’s purpose. If, as he contends, life is meaningless but suicide is not the logical response, then some aspect of human fortitude must carry us forward. If we bundle up the desire to live a good life according to one’s own lights and the rejection of blind adherence to conventional strictures, perhaps integrity is that driving force that sustains us through human existence.
I first read Monsieur Camus when I was 15 Possibly a bit young for Camus’ worldview, but I copied my older brother’s choice of paperback literature unashamedly.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Colin Wilson et al played a part in my understanding of the world outside a rural English public school.
Albert Camus’ conjecture that life has no order or meaning appealed to me at the time. Meursault’s senseless kiliing of the Arab man on the beach in “The Stranger” demonstrated this sense of futility. One could either shoot or not shoot, it made no difference.
I am intrigued by my readers’ choice of blog posts. Heidegger and Schrödinger have been popular over the years and stirred me to write a fictional account of their cats’ lives during the Nazi era.
Albert Camus is a rich source of quotations. I posted a blog about his proposal that integrity has no need of rules, and it has been a popular blog post.
That ideal of a quality so pure that you do not have to constrain it, is problematic. If I live solely by my own lights I risk offending others. Some might say that giving offence is no reason to change one’s behaviour, if one acts with integrity.
I’m not so sure. A bit of give and take is the best way to keep the peace. If everyone digs their heels in and refuses to bend on every occasion, no matter how little the cost, you have the setting for everyone being offended. You only have to skim the comments on social media to see how quickly offensive remarks are exchanged.
What about the freedom to express ideas and opinions? Are all freedoms absolute? If a film, book, newspaper article, cartoon or blog contains material that is offensive to one section of society, how should we respond? There are laws against hate speech, so why should the haters have the satisfaction of seeing how offensive their comments have been?
The alternative response adopted by some people who have been trolled, is to seek out the individual who has made their life miserable and expose them. Anonymity is the shield most haters hide behind. But it takes a brave person to confront the weirdo who has spewed their filth onto the internet.
If the writer, blogger or film maker has integrity and has not expressed hatred, perhaps the reader or viewer should show equal integrity in accepting the diversity of our cultures, opinions and moral positions.
Perhaps the message about integrity is more about the aspirations and character of the individual. If we develop as caring human beings with a set of humanitarian principles we try to live by, there would be no need for external regulation governing our actions.
Here’s another quote from the great writer who died too young “We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.“