Art, in a sense, is a revolt against everything fleeting and unfinished in the world. Albert Camus (1913-1960).

From the first, his writings appear as a succession of explosions--the explosions of a human mind in anxiety and revolt before a world that does not hear, a universe that is indifferent to our demands. Camus expressed both the horror of living during Hitler's rise and World War II and the desire to establish a meaningful life in a meaningless world of war and futile conquest. Not content with the nihilism of his age and unable to ignore the catastrophe of modern life, he developed two related concepts, "the absurd" and "revolt" into a significant philosophy of life. And it was his insistence that an authentic revolt against the human condition had to be a revolt in the name of "the solidarity, of man with man" that has kept the questions--and the implicit hope--of Albert Camus alive.

It was with the novel of his generation, The Stranger, that Camus burst upon literary Paris in 1942. This was the story that struck a chord in so many young people in Europe, and later in America. They found it understandable, and they were sympathetic to it. A symbolic portrayal of alienation, this is the story of a dazed and benumbed young man named Mersault, a victim of a world lacking the sustenance of any belief that recovery was possible. It is only when he is faced with extermination that Mersault's apathy turns to a violent outburst and he begins his long journey toward a sense of "consciousness." He is then forced to justify what he has been and done. He is thus on trial as a human being.

Further probing brings Camus to grips with the most vital question: whether it makes any sense to go on living once the absurdity of human life is fully understood and assimilated. In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, he thus poses for consideration the problem of suicide as the only serious philosophical problem, and he answers with a rejection of suicide as an adequate response. "Suicide," says Camus, "is an admission of incapacity." Such an admission is inconsistent with the human dimension to which he openly appeals. "Only by going on living in the face of their own absurdity, and only by the conscious espousal of human purpose and action, can human beings achieve their full stature."(2) Camus's response is a moving acceptance of the human condition on its own terms: "revolt," "liberty," and "passion."

Camus interpreted Nazism as one reaction to the very nihilistic vision of the world that he himself had come to accept. But he went on to condemn Nazism in the severest terms for its denial of human fraternity. So that, early in the development of his thought, Camus already insisted that an authentic revolt against the human condition had to be a revolt in the name of "the solidarity of man with man."