Camus: A Critical Examination

by David A. Sprintzen

Offers a comprehensive analysis of the thought of Albert Camus from a philosophical perspective. This book shows how Albert Camus' analysis of political action offers a radical and nondogmatic perspective from which contemporary struggles can gain significant illumination.

Genres: Philosophy

261 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1988

Reviews

[Brendan Boylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an excellent analysis of the philosophical and literary works of Albert Camus, one of the foremost existentialists of the postwar era and the progenitor of absurdism. This admiring overview of the metaphysics, politics, and influences of Camus’ works richly interweaves his whole repertoire of plays, novels, and essays and provides an opportunity for Camus followers and existentialists to reckon with the “post-Christian, post-ideological” western world that is marred by the hypocrisies of polite, liberal bourgeois society and the horrors of increasingly totalitarian and anti-intellectual trends that are the result of, in my view, the dying system of capitalist-imperialism. Camus calls us to address the questions of physical and philosophical suicide and the conditions that lead to it, and in this study Sprintzen outlines the influences of Nietzche, Dostoevsky, Kafka and others on Camus’ artistic view of human nature, our tendency toward deification of ideas, others, and ourselves, and demands that we find a new way that rejects both the “leap of faith” that is belief in God as well as the blackhole of nihilism, all against the backdrop of a meaningless and indifferent universe. This work also expertly reviewed the dialectics between freedom and justice, revolt and rebellion, unity and totality that permeated Camus’ philosophical arguments, and it rightfully critiqued the limitations of Camus’ worldview as a French-Algerian colonist who, I believe, too flippantly rejected Marxism outright in reaction to the excesses of Stalinist totalitarianism. The spirit of the book matched the driving force of Camus’ life (cut all too short when he was killed in a car accident in 1961), which was his unrealized desire for a renaissance of human creativity and living, and it reaffirms the role of the artist and the responsibility of creatives to commit to working toward that which ultimately matters and that which will ensure the reification of our shared humanity: truth and freedom.