Albert Camus (1913 to 1960) was a French-Algerian writer and thinker who held that life is absurd, because we hunger for meaning and the world answers with silence. He refused every escape from that tension, whether into religious hope, into philosophy that leaps to the transcendent, or into political dreams of a perfect future, and called instead for revolt: living fully, lucidly and in solidarity with others, within limits and with a sense of measure. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his refusal of spiritual pain-killers and his loyalty to this world, and differs over the silence, because in animism the world is alive and full of persons.
Who was Albert Camus? #
He was born in 1913 in Mondovi, in French Algeria. His father died of wounds from the Battle of the Marne in 1914, before Albert was a year old, and he grew up in a poor district of Algiers with his partially deaf mother, who worked as a cleaner, in a flat without electricity or running water.1 He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, worked as a journalist, and in 1942 published the novel The Stranger and the essay The Myth of Sisyphus. The Plague followed in 1947 and The Rebel in 1951. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, and died in a car accident in January 1960, aged forty-six.2
What is the absurd? #
The clash between the human need to ask what life means and the impossibility of getting an answer that satisfies. Camus did not say the world is absurd in itself, nor that people are; the absurd is born of the two meeting, our questioning and “the unreasonable silence of the world”. “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide” is the first line of The Myth of Sisyphus. If life has no meaning that can be known, is it worth living? His answer was yes, but only if the absurd is faced and not dodged.3
What did he mean by false consolation? #
Every way of making the absurd go away, rather than living with it. The Myth of Sisyphus is aimed against philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers and Lev Shestov, whom he accused of escaping the absurd by leaping to the transcendent. Kierkegaard, for instance, makes the absurd an attribute of a God he then embraces. Camus called this kind of move philosophical suicide.4
Religious hope was the plainest case. In his early essays, Nuptials (1938), written among the sun, sea and Roman ruins of the Algerian coast, he rejected “the delusions of hope” that draw people away from this life towards another. “The world is beautiful, and outside there is no salvation” is the line that sums up the book. Refusing hope meant refusing any form of consolation, and choosing to live without God, here, in the body, delighting in the physical world.5
What did he mean by revolt? #
Living the absurd with eyes open. In The Myth of Sisyphus revolt is a defiant, lucid way of living without escape, accepting mortality and limits whilst refusing to give in to them. Its emblem is the figure from Greek myth condemned to roll a rock up a hill for ever, only for it to roll down again. Camus ends the essay: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” His awareness of his fate, and his refusal to be crushed by it, is his victory.6
In The Rebel revolt becomes shared. The rebel protests against oppression and injustice, and in doing so discovers something in common with everyone who suffers. Camus turned Descartes‘ “I think, therefore I am” into “I revolt, therefore we are”. Revolt begins with one person saying no, and finds in that refusal a solidarity with others.6
What did he mean by limits? #
That revolt keeps faith with itself only if it respects the limits built into human life. Camus traced how, in the modern age, revolt had turned into revolution, into movements that set out to remake the whole world according to a vision of history’s goal, and that came to justify murder in its name. Against utopian politics he set mesure, measure, a sense of proportion and balance, a willingness to live within the tensions of the human condition rather than abolishing them by force. He called this outlook Mediterranean, tying it to his homeland and its sense of harmony and physical life.7
The argument cost him dearly. The Rebel challenged intellectuals drawn to Communism and to Marxist philosophy of history, among them the philosopher Sartre, and the two friends broke publicly. Camus became a leading anti-Communist voice, Sartre a leading pro-Communist one.7 For the long story of history as progress that both Marxism and its sources drew on, see What did Hegel teach about history, freedom and the state?
Was Camus an existentialist? #
Not by his own account. He is often grouped with Sartre and the existentialists, and he posed one of the questions they made famous, but he denied belonging to the movement, and his rejection of Kierkegaard’s and Jaspers’ leap was a rejection of key existentialist moves.8 Where the existentialists said that we must make our own meaning, Camus was more concerned with how to live honestly when no meaning is given. See What is existentialism, and how does it differ from an animist view of meaning?
How does Camus connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
First, in the refusal of spiritual pain-killers. What Camus attacked, hope in another life and the leap to the transcendent, is not the same thing as spiritual bypassing, but it bears a family resemblance. Spiritual bypassing is using spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid painful feelings and wounds. When a teacher or religion says we need not feel our pain but can simply transcend it, people jump at the offer and swallow the pain-killer instead of facing their demons. The costs are personal, in numbness, ungroundedness and a false sense of spiritual superiority, and social, since turning one’s back on the world to be ‘spiritual’ abandons the real work of easing its suffering, and is “the essence of the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer“.9
Second, in loyalty to this world. Camus’s “outside there is no salvation” is close to the animist refusal to rank another world above this one. The middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer is real, and at one level everything is one whilst at another things are separate; both are true.10 And his measure has a likeness in the old hunter-gatherer way of living within limits. Leavers, in Daniel Quinn‘s word, took only what they needed and left the rest, seeing themselves as belonging to the land, not owning it; Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer takes more than it needs and leaves nothing.11 See What are Taker and Leaver cultures?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Over the silence of the world. For Camus the world does not answer our need for meaning, and the dignity of a human life lies in going on without an answer. In animism everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious; it is just that many people struggle to recognise consciousness in beings very different from themselves.12 The world, on this view, is not silent but full of persons, Animal, Plant and Stone, with whom relationship is possible. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Camus’s hunger for meaning, meeting a world that does not answer, is his own account and stands on its own terms. Alongside it sits a hunger the teaching knows well: the deep ache in modern people, the hole they try to fill with food, drugs, consumer goods, work and screens, is a wound caused by separation, by the loss of the experience of being part of an interconnected web, and it begins to heal through reconnection, above all in the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer.13 Nor is this a return to the consolations Camus refused. Shamanism asks for no belief and no leap of faith. It is the direct, personal experience of Spirit, to be tried and tested for oneself.14
