Camus on soccer

Albert Camus, commenting on a futbol (soccer) game in Algeria. I have no idea the date of this film. In fact, I never thought before about whether there exists any footage of Camus speaking, so this is fascinating to me. It animates someone whom I feel like I know well but have never heard speak. Thanks to the Camus Society for tipping me off to the fact that this film is out there.

Camus on bicycle

During the German occupation of France, Albert Camus earned hero status among the French for editing the underground newspaper Combat. It wasn’t until the war was over, however, that more than a handful of people knew it was Camus publishing the journal. Nevertheless, he lived at various times in hiding, using false identity papers. As a moral voice in the resistance, his travels had to be simple so as not to draw the unwanted attention of the German army.

Depicting Camus’ travels in the weeks and days leading up to the Allied liberation of Paris, Herbert Lottman writes in his 1979 biography of Camus,

They left Paris on three bicycles — Pierre Gallimard, Janine, Michel, and Camus — Janine riding with the men in turn, although Pierre and Michel didn’t want her to ride with Camus because of the strain it might cause their sickly friend. They went to Verdelot, some fifty-five miles east of Paris on the banks of the Petit-Morin, where Gallimard editor and author Brice Parain had a home.
Meanwhile, Camus alerted fellow Combat conspirators Sartre and Beauvoir, and they took precautions. In her memoirs, Beauvoir describes their somewhat pathetic attempts to take protective cover: first by moving in for a few days with the Michel Leiris; then, by train and by bicycle…And when they heard that the American troops were approaching Chartres, they got back on their bicycles and by the side roads made their way to Paris.
But the news of the Allied advance, the imminent liberation of Paris, drew them (Camus and the Gallimards) back to the city. For the return trip they again rode three bicycles for the four of them, with the same seating arrangements. Peddling (sic) along, they saw planes diving and dropping bombs, Germans taking shelter in the woods along the road. They decided, “idiodically,” that the bombs weren’t meant for them.

While dates for these rides from and back to Paris are hard to nail down, I figure the return bicycle ride was sometime around today, August 24th — sixty-two years ago. So, here’s to Camus, riding a single-speed fifty-five miles through the French countryside back to Paris, dodging bombs and Germans along the way.


(image made with amaztype)

interpreting Zidane’s head

Italy won the World Cup, but thanks to the press building up the final match as Zinedine Zidane’s swan song and their inability to wrap their minds around his senseless overtime headbutt, collective cognitive dissonance is all that remains. Few can stop talking about Zidane, but even fewer are saying anything.

Roger Cohen’s “Camus and Zidane Offer Views on How Things End” is one of the better attempts at interpreting Zizou’s headbutt. He concludes,

Zidane, it seems, lost his head. Or perhaps he kept his head and chose to write a coda to his story that would have all the complexity of a great novel. Perhaps he sought an almost unseen act of anger that would prompt a global, virtual argument about the merits or demerits of a gesture without sense.

Maybe he didn’t want the fairytale ending to his career that the New York Times built up on the Saturday before the Sunday final.

This morning I received by email the following interpretation, which as of yet, is one of the best.

Zidane’s headbutt, as seen by

the Germans

the French

the Italians

the United States

the press

any moral leaders?

The 2004 presidential election season was disappointing for many reasons, but not the least of which was the unprecedented public argument that one’s religion is the only source of morality and personal values. The argument is disappointing because it represents an incomplete view of morality.

Because no counterargument was ever offered, pop culture in the U.S. is left with the impression that religion must be the source of both morality and one’s personal values. This is not a new argument; it’s the default view that students will have when they walk into my ethics class next semester — happens every time.
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albert camus

This category of entries to nicomachus.net is a collection of notes I’ve taken in the course of my study of the Algerian philosopher Albert Camus. For years I’ve debated whether I should compile these notes into a more systematic essay on Camus. Such an essay would cover, among other topics, his moral theory; his political involvement in war-time and post-war Europe; an analysis of (what I believe to be) the dialectical structure of his writings; discussion of the influence of ancient Greek texts on his philosophical development; the complicated role that pacifism played in his life; and an interpretation of what he means by “happiness” in A Happy Death and The Stranger. These topics, though, cover far more than will fit into one essay — maybe that’s why I haven’t been able to write it. My notes are a place to begin.

I’ve chosen to publish these notes (to the extent that posting on a web site is publishing anything) because sharing them requires me to organize them a little more than the current mess they’re in. I’ve chosen to publish them here because this blog is where I write most often. It is a medium that is ready and waiting for my entries, and blogs do not demand polish (at least not as much polish as a publishing house). Hopefully, the process of organizing and publishing the notes here will result in a more formal analysis… or two, or three.

Originally, I took these notes in a literary journal — a sketch book for jotting down ideas for future writing projects. Much of the other topics on which I’ve written in the journal has been polished and turned into essays. Mostly these works were written to satisfy the hunger of professors of philosophy, though I can’t really say how satisfying to chew on were the arguments contained in them. Writing papers that don’t satisfy is difficult. It bores the writer as well as the reader. But that’s what academia is all about… writing papers that conform someone else’s standards, on someone else’s schedule, on topics that someone else says they care about. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau argued that “there are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.” Thoreau’s words couldn’t be more relevant today. These notes on Camus are in their current unfinished state primarily because all but one of the many professors of philosophy with whom I’ve worked discouraged me from engaging Camus’ works. Camus, in their eyes, made no meaningful contributions to academic philosophy.

Which brings me to why I care enough to study and write about Camus in the first place. I have to agree with my former professors. Camus’ works are no model systematic body of thought, nor did he adhere to the 20th century’s rigorous standards of logical analysis. The analysis in his essays is amateurish — confused at best. Yet they are unquestionably thought- and feeling-provoking. And more importantly, he chose to express his most philosophical thoughts through literature rather than through the traditional analytic essay. It was to his plays, short stories, and especially his novels that Camus devoted most of his attention. He had a remarkable gift of creativity and an uncanny talent for describing feelings of confusion and despair. He was trained in ancient Greek philosophy, and (I think) because of this he was more concerned with living a life of principle than with defining principles.

Thoreau goes on to lament that it was once admirable to live a life according to principles, but that something has changed. Thoreau was sensitive to the professional, academic demands on philosophers and recognized that living according to such demands replaces the philosophical life with the professional one. “To be a philosopher,” he writes, “is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.”

To Thoreau and to you, gentle readers, I submit the life of Albert Camus. I argue that Camus lived as a philosopher more than he wrote as one, and that is perhaps because he lived as a philosopher more than he tried to write as one. I admire Camus for many reasons: I admire his ability to remain committed to moral principles despite being admittedly confused by the intellectual arguments that support (or don’t) those principles. I admire his outspoken stance against the death penalty and the eloquence with which he treated the subject. I admire the way he lived up to his own challenge to artists: to be responsibly engaged socially and politically, not just artistically. I admire the way he spoke through the medium he was most comfortable with. A creative one. He wrote analytic arguments, often at the request of others, but he is not remembered for them. He is remembered because he found his muse and he followed his heart.

nausea

Since Sartre is always lumped in with Camus as one of the great literary figures and moral leaders of war-time and post-war France, I thought I should read more by and about Sartre — if only to learn yet another perspective on Camus. “Pick up some of the easy stuff,” I thought. “I’ll read some of his fiction.” Beginning with some of my favorite provoking lines (where he calls dogs, men, and all living things “flabby masses which move spontaneously”), Nausea lives up to its name as well as its reputation. Not only is the character’s egomania obnoxious, but Sartre’s pedantic emphasis on recording the mundane details of a bourgeois existential crisis, the confrontation with the absurdity of our everydayness, is well done. He seems to have accomplished what he set out to do: he wrote a book that is almost as painful to read is it is to live the protagonist’s life. Being and Nothingness is almost more interesting; almost, though much longer and therefore more painful.

What is most interesting to me is to try and derive moral theory from ostensibly amoral existentialist writings. Sartre restructures morality to issue from the “I” rather than from the “they” or even the “us”. From the realization “that I am myself and I am here,” Sartre thinks that we learn to accept full responsibility for our actions, even if we are not ultimately responsible for the causes of them. I’m not sure whether I agree with his moral psychology, but I do agree with the conclusion that, more often than not, we ought to take responsibility for our actions whether or not we ultimately have the resources to demonstrate our physical (causal) responsibility. It is only by embracing responsibility for our condition and the condition of the world around us that we care enough to improve both.