Placeholder Image

字幕列表 影片播放

  • Albert Camus was an extremely handsome,

  • mid 20th century French Algerian philosopher and writer

  • whose claim to our attention is based on three novels:

  • The Outsider, The Plage, The Fall and two philosophical essays:

  • The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel.

  • Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957

  • and died at the age of 46, inadvertently killed by his publisher Michelle Gallimard

  • when his Facel Vega sports car they were in crashed into a tree.

  • In his pocket was a train ticket he had decided not to use last-minute.

  • Camus' fame began with and still largely rests upon his novel of 1942:

  • The Outsider. Set in Camus' native Algiers,

  • it follows the story of a laconic detached ironic hero called Meursault.

  • A man who can't see the point of love or work or friendship,

  • and who one day, somewhat by mistake, shoots dead an Arab man

  • without knowing his own motivations and ends up being put to death

  • partly because he doesn't show any remorse but not really caring for his

  • fate one way or the other.

  • The novel captures the state of mind, defined by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, as

  • "Anomie,"

  • a listless, affectless, alienated condition where one feels entirely cut off from others

  • and can't find a way to share their sympathies or values.

  • Reading The Outsider has long been a well-known

  • adolescent rite of passage among french and many other teenagers,

  • which isn't a way of doing it down for a lot of the greatest themes

  • are first tackled at 17 or so.

  • the hero of The Outsider, Meursault,

  • cannot accept any of the standard answers for why things are the way they are.

  • He sees hypocrisy and sentimentality everywhere and can't overlook it.

  • He's a man who can't accept the normal explanations

  • given to explain things like the education system, the workplace,

  • relationships or the mechanism of government

  • He stands outside normal bourgeois life

  • highly critical of its pinched morality and narrow concerns for money and family.

  • As Camus put it in an afterword he wrote for the American edition of the book:

  • "Meursault doesn't play the game. He refuses to lie..."

  • "...he says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings..."

  • "...and so society immediately feels threatened."

  • Much of the unusual mesmerizing quality of the book comes from the coolly

  • distant voice in which Meursault speaks to us, his readers.

  • The opening is one of the most legendary in twentieth-century literature, and sets the tone.

  • "Aujourdhui, maman est morte.

  • Ou peuttre hier, je ne sais pas."

  • The ending is a stark and is defiant.

  • Meursault condemned to death for a murder committed almost off hand,

  • because it could be interesting to know what it's like to press the trigger,

  • rejects all consolations and heroically accepts the universe's total

  • indifference to human kind.

  • "My last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution..."

  • "...and that they should greet me with cries of hatred."

  • Even if we're not killers, and we'll ourselves be really quite sad when our mother dies,

  • the mood of The Outsider is one we're all liable to have some experience of.

  • When we have enough freedom to realize where in a cage but

  • not quite enough freedom to escape it. When no one seems to understand and

  • everything appears a little hopeless, perhaps in the summer before we go to college.

  • Aside from The Outsider, Camus' fame rests on an essay published the same

  • year as the novel

  • called The Myth of Sisyphus. This book, too, has a bold beginning:

  • "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem..."

  • "...and that is suicide."

  • "Judging whether life is or is not worth living,"

  • "...that is the fundamental question of philosophy."

  • The reason for this stark choice is in Camus' eyes because

  • as soon as we start to think seriously, as philosophers do,

  • we will see that life has no meaning and therefore we will be compelled to wonder

  • whether or not we should just be done with it all.

  • To make sense of this rather extreme claim and thesis,

  • we have to situate Camus in the history of thought, his dramatic

  • announcement that we have to consider killing ourselves because

  • life might be meaningless, is premised on a previous notion

  • that life could actually be rich in god-given meaning.

  • The concept which will sound remote to many of us today

  • and yet we have to bear in mind that for the last two thousand years in the West

  • a sense that life was meaningful was a given,

  • accorded by one institution above any other - The Christian Church.

  • Camus stands in a long line of thinkers, from Kierkegaard

  • to Nietzsche,

  • to Heidegger and Sartre

  • who wrestle with a chilling realization that there is in fact no preordained

  • meaning in life.

  • We're just biological matter spinning senselessly on a tiny rock,

  • in a corner of an indifferent universe. We were not put here by a benevolent deity

  • and asked to work toward salvation in the shape of the Ten Commandments,

  • there's no roadmap and no bigger point and, it's this realization that lies at the heart

  • of so many of the crises reported by the thinkers we now know

  • as the existentialists.

  • A child of despairing modernity,

  • Albert Camus accepts that all our lives are absurd in the grander scheme

  • but, unlike some philosophers, he ends up resisting utter hopelessness or Nihilism.

  • He argues that we have to live with the knowledge that our efforts will be

  • largely futile,

  • our lives soon forgotten, and our species irredeemably corrupt and violent

  • and yet we should endure nevertheless.

  • We are like Sisyphus,

  • the Greek figure ordained by the Gods to roll a boulder up a mountain,

  • and to watch it fall back down again in perpetuity.

  • But ultimatelly, Camus suggests we should cope as well as we can

  • at whatever we have to do, we have to acknowledge the absurd background to existence,

  • and then triumph of the constant possibility of hopelessness.

  • In his famous formulation "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

  • This brings us to the most charming and seductive side of Camus,

  • the Camus wants to remind himself and us of the reasons why life can be

  • worth enduring,

  • and who in the process writes with exceptional intensity and wisdom

  • about relationships, nature, the summer, food, and friendship.

  • As a guide to the reasons to live, Camus is delightful.

  • Many philosophers have been ugly and cut off from their bodies,

  • think of sickly Pascal,

  • crippled Leopardi,

  • sexually unsuccessful Schopenhauer or

  • poor peculiar Nietzsche.

  • Camus was by contrast very good-looking, extremely successful with

  • women for the last ten years of his life,

  • he never had fewer than three girlfriends on the go, and wifes as well

  • and had a great dress sense, influenced by James Deen and Humphrey Bogart

  • It isn't surprising that he was asked to pose by American Vogue.

  • These weren't all just sylistic quirks, once you properly realize that life is absurd

  • you're on the verge of despair perhaps, but also compelled to live life more

  • intensely.

  • Accordingly Came grew committed to and deeply serious about the pleasures

  • of ordinary life.

  • He said he saw his philosophy as

  • "A lucid invitation to live and to create in the very midst of the desert."

  • He was a great champion of the ordinary

  • which generally has a hard time finding champions in philosophy

  • and after pages and pages of his dense philosophy, one turns with relief to

  • moments when Camus writes with simplicity in praise of sunshine, kissing

  • or dancing.

  • He was an outstanding athlete as a young man, once asked by his friend Charles Poncet

  • which he preferred, football or the theater.

  • Camus is set to have replied: "Football, without hesitation."

  • Camus played as goalkeeper for the junior local Algiers team

  • Racing Universitaire de Algier, which won both the North African Champions Cup

  • and the North African Cup in the 1930's.

  • The sense of teamspirit fraternity and common purpose,

  • appeal to Camus enormously.

  • When he was asked in the 1950s by a sportsmagazine

  • for a few words regarding his time with football, he said:

  • "After many years during which I saw many things..."

  • "what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man..."

  • "I owe to sport."

  • Camus was also great advocate of the Sun, his beautiful essay Summer in Algiers

  • celebrates the warmth of the water and the brown bodies of women.

  • He writes "For the first time in two thousand years the body has appeared

  • naked on beaches,

  • for twenty centuries men have striven to give decency to Greek

  • insolence a naiveité to diminish the flesh and complicate dress

  • but today young men running on Mediterranean beaches

  • repeat the gestures of the athletes of Delos." He spoke up for a new

  • paganism, based on the immediate pleasures of the body.

  • This extract from Summer in Algiers:

  • "I recall a magnificent, tall girl who danced all afternoon. She was wearing a

  • jasmine garland on her tight blue dress

  • wet with perspiration from the small of her back to her legs

  • she was laughing as she danced and throwing back her head

  • as she passed the tables she left behind her a mingle scent of flowers and flesh."

  • Camus railed against those who would dismiss such things as trivial and longed

  • for something higher, better, purer.

  • "If there is a sin against this life..." he wrote,

  • "it consists perhaps not so much into sparing of life,"

  • "as in hoping for another life and eluding the quiet grandeur of this one."

  • In a letter he remarked:

  • "People attract me insofar as they are impassioned about life and avid for happiness..."

  • "There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for."

  • Camus achieved huge acclaim in his lifetime, but the Parisian intellectual

  • community was deeply suspicious of him.

  • He never was a Parisian sophisticate, he was a working-class Pied-Noir,

  • that is someone born in Algeria but of European origin,

  • whose father had died of war-wounds when he was an infant, and whose mother was a cleaning lady.

  • It isn't a coincidence that Camus' favorite philosopher was Montaigne,

  • another very down to earth frenchmen,

  • and someone one can love as much for what he wrote, as for what he was like.

  • Someone one would have wanted as a wise and a life-enhancing friend.

  • This, too, is what philosophy is about.

Albert Camus was an extremely handsome,

字幕與單字

單字即點即查 點擊單字可以查詢單字解釋

B1 中級

哲學--阿爾伯特-加繆 (PHILOSOPHY - Albert Camus)

  • 172 34
    VoiceTube 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
影片單字