THE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY OF ALBERT CAMUS and yet we have to bear in mind that for the last
yet we have to bear in mind that for the last two thousand years in the West
by The School of Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQOfbObFOCw
1. Watch the video. What are the main premises of Albert Camus’
philosophy in terms of:
- existence
- happiness
2. Watch the video again and complete the gaps with the items you hear.
Albert Camus was an extremely handsome,
mid 20th century French Algerian philosopher and writer
whose claim to our attention is based on ______________ ______________ :
The Outsider, The Plague, The Fall and two philosophical essays:
The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel.
Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957
and died at the age of 46, inadvertently killed by his publisher Michelle Gallimard
when his Facel Vega sports car they were in crashed into a tree.
In his pocket was a train ticket he had decided not to use last-minute.
Camus' fame began with and still largely ______________ ______________ his novel of
1942:
The Outsider. Set in Camus' native Algiers,
it follows the story of a laconic detached ironic hero called Meursault…
3:14 => skip to 7:25
"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem..."
"...and that is ______________ ."
"Judging whether life is or is not worth living,"
"...that is the ______________ ______________ of philosophy."
The reason for this stark choice is in Camus' eyes because
as soon as we start to think seriously, as philosophers do,
we will see that life has no meaning and therefore we will be compelled to wonder
whether or not we should just be done with it all.
To make sense of this rather ______________ ______________ and thesis,
we have to situate Camus in the history of thought, his dramatic
announcement that we have to consider killing ourselves because
life might be meaningless, is premised on a previous notion
that life could actually be rich in ______________ (hyphenated) meaning.
The concept which will sound remote to many of us today
a sense that life was meaningful was a given,
accorded by one institution ______________ ______________ other - The Christian
Church.
Camus stands in a long line of thinkers, from Kierkegaard
to Nietzsche,
to Heidegger and Sartre
who wrestle with a chilling realization that there is in fact no preordained
______________ ______________ ______________ .
We're just biological matter spinning senselessly on a tiny rock,
in a corner of an indifferent universe. We were not put here by a benevolent deity
and asked to work toward salvation in the shape of the ______________ ______________ ,
there's no roadmap and no bigger point and, it's this realization that lies at the heart
of so many of the crises reported by the thinkers we now know
as the existentialists.
A child of despairing modernity,
Albert Camus accepts that all our lives are absurd in the grander scheme
but, unlike some philosophers, he ends up resisting ______________ ______________ or
Nihilism.
He argues that we have to live with the knowledge that our efforts will be
largely futile,
our lives soon forgotten, and our species irredeemably corrupt and violent
and yet we should endure nevertheless.
We are like Sisyphus,
the Greek figure ______________ by the Gods to roll a boulder up a mountain,
and to watch it fall back down again in perpetuity.
But ultimately, Camus suggests we should cope as well as we can
at whatever we have to do, we have to ______________ the absurd background to
existence,
and then triumph of the constant possibility of hopelessness.
In his famous formulation "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
This brings us to the most charming and seductive side of Camus,
the Camus wants to remind himself and us of the reasons why life can be
______________ ______________ ,
and who in the process writes with exceptional intensity and wisdom
about relationships, nature, the summer, food, and friendship.
As a guide to the reasons to live, Camus is delightful.
Many philosophers have been ugly and cut off from their bodies,
think of sickly Pascal,
crippled Leopardi,
sexually unsuccessful Schopenhauer or
poor peculiar Nietzsche.
Camus was by contrast ______________ ______________ , extremely successful with community was deeply ______________ ______________ ______________ .
women for the last ten years of his life, He never was a Parisian sophisticate, he was a working-class Pied-Noir,
he never had fewer than three girlfriends on the go, and wives as well that is someone born in Algeria but of European origin,
and had a great dress sense, influenced by James Dean and Humphrey Bogart whose father had died of war-wounds when he was an infant, and whose mother was a
It isn't surprising that he was asked to pose by ______________ ______________ . cleaning lady.
These weren't all just stylistic quirks, once you properly realize that life is absurd It isn't a coincidence that Camus' favorite philosopher was Montaigne,
you're on the verge of despair perhaps, but also compelled to live life ______________ another very ______________ (hyphenated) Frenchmen,
______________ . and someone one can love as much for what he wrote, as for what he was like.
Accordingly Came grew committed to and deeply serious about the ______________ Someone one would have wanted as a wise and a life-enhancing friend.
of ordinary life. This, too, is what ______________ is about.
He said he saw his philosophy as
"A lucid invitation to live and to create in the very midst of the desert."
He was a great champion of the ordinary Vocabulary:
which generally has a hard time finding champions in philosophy Discuss the meanings of the highlighted vocabulary items in their context.
and after pages and pages of his dense philosophy, one turns with relief to
moments when Camus writes with simplicity in praise of sunshine, kissing Discuss:
or dancing.
 Is it possible to achieve happiness through difficulty?
He was an ______________ ______________ as a young man, once asked by his friend
Charles Poncet  Can struggle play a positive role in one’s life?
which he preferred, football or the theater.
Camus is set to have replied: "Football, without ______________ ."
Camus played as goalkeeper for the junior local Algiers team
Racing Universitaire de Algier, which won both the North African Champions Cup
and the North African Cup in the 1930's.
The sense of team spirit fraternity and common purpose,
appeal to Camus enormously.
When he was asked in the 1950s by a sports magazine
for a few words regarding his time with football, he said:
"After many years during which I saw many things..."
"what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man..."
"I owe to sport."

Camus railed against those who would dismiss such things as trivial and longed
for something ______________ , ______________ , ______________ .
"If there is a sin against this life..." he wrote,
"it consists perhaps not so much into sparing of life,"
"as in hoping for another life and eluding the quiet grandeur of this one."
In a letter he remarked:
"People attract me insofar as they are impassioned about life and avid for happiness..."
"There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for."
Camus achieved huge acclaim in his lifetime, but the Parisian intellectual