Episode #224 ... Albert Camus - The Stranger

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So today, we're gonna start talking about Albert Camus and how perfectly he fits into this conversation we've been having lately. So when people talk about Camus, a lot of people know about his book, The Stranger. I mean, it's one of the most famous books in history. It's expected. But not as many people know about something else that's exciting from him, which is a book he wrote just before he wrote The Stranger. It's a book that he chose to never publish during his lifetime for reasons we'll see. It It was only published after his death by his estate. But nonetheless, if your goal was to understand Camus the best you could, then reading this book in particular is gonna be important for knowing how his thinking was evolving during the late nineteen thirties. And this book has context in it that's often missed if you want to understand his full project as a thinker. The book is called A Happy Death, and it's a book that, surprisingly, of all things, mostly focuses on the idea of happiness. Now if you're confused here a little bit, you have good right to be. I mean, why would Camus start, write, and finish a book about happiness, then choose to never publish it, than to only have his next book be written about a character who seems to care almost nothing about happiness? But we'll understand why by the end of this here today. I mean, if you're reading The Stranger, if that's the reason you came to this episode, just in the first few pages of this book, you'll notice it's written from the perspective of a guy named Meursault and that this guy Meursault is a character that's famously indifferent to the state of the world around him. You've no doubt heard the first line of this book. People will have a a conniption fit talking about it. Mother died yesterday, or was it the day before? I can't remember. All over the world, conniption fits happen every day about this line because this is great writing from Camus. Just a few words into the book, we already know quite a bit about who Meursault is as a character. He doesn't play the game of society like other people do. He doesn't put on any affect just to please people. In fact, Meursault represents an indifference towards the typical ways that people get their meaning in the world that, to a reader, makes you feel like there's something deeply unrelatable about his experience. I mean, what person doesn't care about their mother to the point they don't even know what day she died? And when people comment on this book after reading it, you'll often hear them say about Meursault that he's some kind of an absurd hero for Camus. That by facing the absurdity of the universe and by embodying it to this level, that at the …