Episode #227 ... Albert Camus - On Exile

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. So listen to these last three episodes we've done recently on Albert Camus. You can hear some of the terms he's been thrown around, like solidarity, rebellion, lucidity. You can hear these things and be on board with what he's saying in theory, but it's quite another thing to be able to apply these things to your life in any sort of real way. I mean, you can theoretically understand. You could be looking at the world in a more life affirming way. But look, you can't just all of a sudden be like, oh, I get it now. I just gotta be more lucid about stuff. That's what's been missing from my life this whole time. No. To Camus, you don't just think your way into a more lucid framing of your reality. This This is something that in many ways, a person has to arrive at through lived experience. That much like in the work of Dostoevsky, or the religious mystics we've talked about, or even certain lines of Zen Buddhism on the podcast lately. There's certain insights about what it is to be a human being that can only be arrived at by experiencing them directly. And to Camus, one of these important experiences that you gotta have in your life, but that a lot of people spend most of their lives running away from, is what he's gonna call the experience of exile. Now just to understand what he's talking about here, let's start with an example of exile that's far too extreme, and then we'll readjust from there. Imagine being a member of a village deep in the jungle somewhere, you know, lots of people in this village of yours. And let's say one day you do something that makes everyone in this village really mad at you. They all decide they've had enough of your genius behavior for one lifetime, and they cast you out into the jungle and say to never come back. Now when you're out there in the jungle all by yourself, you know, eating leaves, rubbing sticks together, jaguars circling in the background, well, this is not a good feeling. This feeling of exile from the safety of the community you once lived in. You could say this is a type of homelessness you're experiencing here. That being in exile is a matter of being smacked across the face with the fact that this village you used to be a part of, in terms of it providing security for your life, turns out it's not as solid of an option as you once thought it was. I I mean, there was a time when your place in that village felt like it was the absolute truth to you. But now you're starting to realize there's some real limitations to it that make the security that once felt like home start to seem like it was a set of illusions. For Camus, …