Episode #225 ... Albert Camus - The Plague

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So this here is a philosophical companion for reading the book, The Plague by Albert Camus. Heads up, this episode builds off the one we just did before this on his book, The Stranger. So maybe listen to that one before you do this one. That said, coming into this episode, we already know a couple important things about Camus so far in this series. We know that Camus thought of himself as an artist and not a philosopher, that he didn't want to be a philosopher, that philosophers in his eyes are people that build systems out of theoretical abstractions, and that he thinks abstract argument not only misses something deeply important about the human condition, but that it sets a dangerous precedent for people to live their lives believing that philosophy can somehow provide some neat justification for things that go on in the world. But that this is all nonsense for Camus at some level. This is just philosophical suicide. So what we see instead in his work is him not being someone who wrote philosophical works where he might write out propositions and then try to organize them into a system, you know, more classic way philosophers have done things. Camus is much more interested in his work in presenting what he calls images of the human condition. His thinking is that by dramatizing these ideas and creating images, there won't be so much of a temptation for people to try to reduce them into some kind of delusional system of universals. As Camus himself once said, what is a novel, but just a philosophy expressed in images? Well, communicating in images like this is gonna be a big part of this radical project he's embarking on in his career, where he's refusing to ground his positions in theoretical abstractions of any type. Again, he sees himself as an artist and not a philosopher. This is why things like the myth of Sisyphus, famous essay by him. This is why he creates such powerful, memorable images in it. I mean, think about it. A man named Sisyphus that's condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity. Only for when the boulder reaches the top of the hill to have it roll back down, forcing Sisyphus to start again, repeating this until the end of time. This is a powerful image and, fantastic for the glutes, by the way, if you're looking for a nice deep range of motion. But to understand this book we're talking about today, the plague, and why this marks such a major shift in his work, it's gonna be important to understand all that Camus was trying to say here at the end of the myth of Sisyphus with this powerful image he painted in his work. Because as it turns out, there's a really overrated line, I think, from the myth of Sisyphus that basically everyone …