Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary

Book excerpt: The standard interpretation keeps repeating that Camus is the prototypical “absurdist” thinker. Such a reading freezes Camus at the stage at which he wrote The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. By taking seriously how (1) Camus was always searching and (2) the rest of his corpus, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary corrects the one-sided, and thus faulty, depiction of Camus as committed to a philosophy of absurdism. His guiding project, which he explicitly acknowledged, was an attempt to get beyond nihilism, the general dismissal of value and meaning in ordinary life. Tracing this project via Camus's works, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary, offers a new lens for thinking about the well-known author.