Lyrical and Critical Essays

"The next book I want to pick is an anthology: it’s The Lyrical and Critical Essays. This is a series of his political and literary essays that give you a sense both of who he was as a critical writer, as an essayist, and as a journalist, but also ties into his philosophy and the ideas that he was trying to make sense of. No. He was alive at the time of publication for this collection and the preface he wrote for it in 1958 alone justifies adding this to the list because he is at his most direct and confessional about what he hopes to accomplish. The Lyrical and Critical Essays is one of my favourites because it contains one of my all-time favourite essays by him, which is ‘The Almond Trees’. There’s a passage that is just so beautiful and really encapsulates what I think he’s working towards. In it he says, “We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness and meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task, but ‘superhuman’ is the term for tasks men take a long time to accomplish. That’s all.” Yes. That’s right. I think it was Nietzsche who said that all philosophy is biography . It makes sense that the philosophy that resonates with you is the philosophy that comes closest to the view of the world that you have. I think that’s absolutely correct. For me, it is in Camus’ writing very often that I find passages that are helpful in trying to make sense of a world that, quite frankly, is so absurd that the question of how to go on living in it can consume all our attention. I completely agree. One of the limitations with philosophy, at least as it’s practised most commonly in academic philosophy, is that it’s written in such a way that people don’t want to read it. It’s difficult, it’s challenging, and in many ways that’s to its credit. The rigour is important for filtering out the nuance that we need in order to understand these complicated issues. But it’s off-putting and doesn’t pull in regular people, whom philosophers should be trying to reach if the goal is not to just understand the world, but to change it. And Camus definitely thought the world should be changed. Yes. He’s got an essay in here called ‘The Wrong Side and the Right Side’ about a woman who uses a small inheritance to buy a funeral plot and spends the rest of her days tending to her investment. One day she sees that someone, seeing her gravesite empty, has left her flowers and she realizes that to the world she is already dead. It is, I think, an injunction not to sleepwalk through our lives and live while we can. “It makes sense that the philosophy that resonates with you is the philosophy that comes closest to the view of the world that you have” Also, ‘Prometheus in the Underworld.’ Camus is perhaps most famous for his use of Sisyphus as a metaphor, but it’s Prometheus, his humanism, and his open rebellion against the gods that Camus saw as a much more fruitful model for human behaviour. That is correct. His punishment is one of the most gruesome in Greek myths. He’s chained to a rock where, each morning, an eagle tears out his liver. To aid mankind, to take them out of the darkness the gods would have condemned them to. Yes. I would argue that Jean Tarrou in The Plague is someone whom Camus would think of as a modern-day rebel or Prometheus, taking on these enormous risks, not for his own benefit, not for this notion of heroism, but just for the simple reason of wanting to save as many souls as he can. That’s certainly my interpretation of Camus. There’s a line at the very end of The Plague where he writes that though a final victory and sainthood are impossibilities, it is enough to refuse “to bow down to pestilences and strive their utmost to be healers.” Yes, very much so. And I think that distinction is part of what led to the feud between Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, because Camus was adamant that the idea was not just merely to turn the weapons back on those who would harm us."