ALBERT CAMUS AND LUCIDITY

Camus' The Stranger certainly belongs to the narrowest circle of novels that marked the 20th century, above all testifying to his ideological, philosophical and spiritual identity.

 In his 1957 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Albert Camus explained the essential meaning of The Stranger: "I had a precise plan when I began my work: I wanted, above all, to express negation."

 The meaning of The Stranger is close to the meaning of the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, which Camus published only six months later.  The essay on absurdity is based on man's inability to determine the meaning of life and set firm and unquestionable values ​​in it.  According to Camus, the universe is not absurd for a tree, but it is absurd for a man who is tormented by nostalgia for unity and hunger for the absolute.  Nostalgia is sadness for the homeland or longing for something that has passed.  However, for Camus' absurd man, the homeland he longs for is an environment in which one knows the meaning of human life and the undoubted values ​​in it.

 The main character Meursault, with his life and actions, represents the embodiment of the absurd (although Camus did not like this term, nor that he was considered an existentialist), and his destiny in life is the philosophy of an absurd man translated into life, into concrete situations, into relationships with other people.

For a deeper understanding of this novel, it is necessary to connect it with other works of Camus.  One term - lucidity - particularly inspires his thought.  It is the tendency to see things as they are.

 He, devoid of religious prejudices, realizes that reality is not in accordance with man's aspirations.  The world was not made for us.  It is not a plant that some divine gardener systematically waters and nurtures. 

At the same time, Camus does not claim that man is essentially an absurd being.  Because how else could a person feel the dissonance between himself and the world?  In fact, the concept of absurdity is not equated with either man or the world.  But if this is not in man or in the world, the absurdity is in their mutual contact.  Just as the flame is neither in the flint nor in the stone, but in the friction created by their mutual contact. 

Therefore, according to Camus, it cannot be said that the world is absurd.  The world is simply not rational, and the experience that is born in our encounter with it is absurd.

 However, Camus does not think that man is a rational being and that his rationality is what causes the absurd.  If man is not a rational being, then we must find a way to interpret the absurd as a dissonance between man and the world, without it being at the cost of illusions about human nature. 

Albert Camus elegantly removes this difficulty by confronting the world not with man's rationality, but with man's "nostalgia," man's "demand," man's "desire" for the rational.  In this way, a person cannot be rational and still comes into conflict with the irrational world, because the demand for rationality and rationality are not the same.  Absurdity is then the contrast between man's desire for the rational and the world that does not correspond to that desire.