Anyone working on Camus in the context of contemporary philosophy is all too familiar with the experience of having to justify one’s reasons for doing so—Camus ‘the philosopher’ has long gone out of fashion in academic philosophy. Numerous commentators portray him as a romancier/moraliste whose ideas nevertheless lacked philosophical depth (e.g . Bronner 1999; Sherman 2008). Walter Kaufmann writes, ‘Camus is a fine writer, but not a philosopher’ (Kaufmann 1959, 90), while Tony Judt nicknames him ‘Camus the Just’ (Judt 1998, 100). As Jacob Golomb puts it, ‘Of the few scholars still interested in Camus, most esteem his literary genius but denigrate his importance as a philosopher’ (Golomb 1994, 268). Such pervading approaches can be traced all the way back to Camus’ famous spat with Sartre, who was perhaps the first to draw attention to what he saw as Camus’ ‘philosophical incompetence’. Sartre asked of him:

What if your book simply shows your philosophical incompetence? What if it is made up of second-hand knowledge, hastily collected? … And if your reasoning is inaccurate? And if your thoughts are vague and banal? … You hate difficulties of thought and you hastily decree that there is nothing to understand, in order to avoid reproaches of not having understood things. (In Heims 2003, 48)

As such, those working on Camus in philosophy often feel the need to argue the case for him to be considered a philosopher at all, such as Jane Duran, who dedicates an entire article to the task. She tells us, ‘There is a genuinely philosophical side to Camus, and that side is worthy of commentary’, even if, as she puts it, ‘Camus is most frequently mentioned in literary contexts, even when the label ‘existentialist’ is applied to him, or even when his work is cited in the same phrase as that of Sartre and Beauvoir’ (Duran 2007, 365–371). Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, also coming to his defence, states, ‘If being a philosopher is to ask all these questions—not in theoretical, abstract, conceptual form, but … through characters who refuse to be superhuman, through adventures that are played out in everyday real life—then yes, Camus, in his novels as in his essays, was a philosopher’ (Lévi-Valensi 1997, 32).¹

This book will inevitably follow suit to a certain degree, as the need to justify revisiting the philosophy of Albert Camus is ever present,² but I shall do this with a view to suggesting something more radical: that it is precisely Camus’ philosophical innovations that lead him to be overlooked by contemporary philosophy. Camus does philosophy differently, and the significance of his radical experimentation with form is often lost in the contemporary environment of analytic philosophy.³ Within more literary Camus scholarship, these stylistic innovations have of course not gone unnoticed. Thomas Hanna suggests that the ‘interplay between the philosophical and literary concerns of Camus is largely responsible for the richness and value of his writings’ (Hanna 1958, 35), and this is certainly true. Peter Roberts goes further still, suggesting that:

Camus’ distinctive blending of the literary with the philosophical prompts readers to reflect on themselves, their motivations and commitments, their relationships with others, and the very process of reflection itself. (Roberts 2008, 875)

Here, Roberts has hit on something which is at the very heart of the current book: the ways in which literary engagement might enrich philosophical understanding. While Roberts does not examine this possibility in any great detail himself, his emphasis on introspection and relations with the Other points towards a further dimension to what I will be arguing for in this book—that is, the creative methods such as those utilised by Camus are particularly well suited to moral philosophy. The ambiguity often entailed in moral life is undoubtedly what is most compelling about many great works of literature (such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir), but such ambiguity is precisely what moral philosophy often tries to eliminate.⁴ Hanna sees Camus as ‘one of the most prophetic, persuasive, and hopeful moral philosophers of the mid-20th century’ (Hanna 1958, viii)—I hope to show that his experimentation with genre is in fact his greatest contribution to moral philosophy. In a sense, this is a claim about the methodology of moral philosophy, but as we will see, the methodological choices Camus makes have implications on moral content as well as philosophical form.

Thus, this book is concerned with the genre (or genres) of moral philosophy and to what extent literary writings such as Camus’ can be considered within this bracket. In this introductory chapter, I will therefore begin by raising some questions as to the importance of the role of style in philosophy, followed by a contextual analysis of the relationship between literature and philosophy, and some conditions for the success of literary philosophy. I will also spend some time engaging with the two most fundamental concepts of Camus’ philosophy (i.e. ‘the absurd’ and ‘revolt’), but I won’t do this extensively here, as these two concepts will crop up again and again in later chapters, when I will apply them to particular case studies of Camus’ philosophical and literary writings. Towards the end of this chapter, I will demonstrate the struggle with rhetorical form which is so central to Camus’ contribution to moral philosophy. I suggest that Camus saw the relationship between form and content as essential to philosophical understanding, so an examination of the efforts he made towards interweaving the two is in itself facilitative in our ability to grasp his vision of the relationship between literature and philosophy.

The question of progress in philosophy is the subject of many a wry joke. Despite the thousands of years which have elapsed, we seem to still be asking ourselves the same questions: how does one live well? What separates humanity from the rest of nature? Is there such a thing as a transcendent being? Philosophers today are still searching for solutions to the same problems that plagued Aristotle or Confucius millennia ago. In the last century, however, there is one fundamental change in (at least Anglo-American) philosophy which certainly gives the illusion of progress: the way we communicate our ideas. A look back at the history of philosophy reveals myriad modes of philosophical expression; from poems and aphorisms to dialogues and confessions, the incredible diversity of philosophical writing is apparent. However, from the twentieth century, particularly in the analytic school, contemporary philosophers (following the lead, it has to be said, of a narrowly selected band of canonical authors from the past) have moved away from these ambiguous modes of expression, towards something which is clearer, more precise, and on the whole more uniform. The philosophical treatise, provided it is grounded in strict reasoning and clear argumentation, has become the gold standard for contemporary academic philosophy, a fact which led Arthur C. Danto to remark that ‘textual innovativeness has abated in philosophy and all texts are pretty much alike’ (Danto 1984, 19). Another commentator on the apparent ‘homogeneity’ of current philosophical style, Jon Stewart, writes, ‘This form of writing has come to dominate the field of academic philosophy so much that for anything to be accepted as genuinely philosophical, it must be written in this fashion’ (Stewart 2013, 1). Thus, the plethora of earlier genres of philosophical writing has all but become extinct: we study them as relics from a different time, decoding and paraphrasing them to meet our current standards.

While the methods of analytic philosophy certainly seem to yield a degree of clarity and rigour which it might otherwise be difficult to achieve, one cannot help but wonder if it...