Camus comes to America

he 20th-century French writer Albert Camus remains a living author, a permanent contemporary, in a way that the far more dogmatic and ideological Jean-Paul Sartre does not. The latter provided a caricature of “existentialism,” nihilism dressed up as absolute freedom, beholden to no limits and no enduring truths. In contrast, the author of The Stranger and The Plague rejected Sartre’s facile nihilism, as well as his repellant accommodation with murderous messianism, typically conveyed in fashionable leftist nostrums. The more hopeful side of Camus comes through in his recently re-released Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World.

An entry from his travel notebook from his four-month long trip to New York, the east coast of the US and parts of Canada in the spring and summer of 1946, reveals just how distant Camus had grown from the “official philosophy” of Saint-Germain-des-Près. Indeed, Camus had come to reject completely the cult of ideological revolution inspired by a “messianism” that is indistinguishable from “fanaticism.” This unbeliever, however, refused to reject the sacred tout court. He found himself increasingly attracted to a Greek thinking that was not essentially historical and that affirmed values that “are preexistent.” He forthrightly declared himself “against modern existentialism,” as well as opposed to messianic, totalitarian socialism.

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