Upcoming Video Premiere - Albert Camus, An Absurd World, and Resistance to Evil

Earlier this month, I gave a talk on the French philosopher, novelist, and playwright Albert Camus.  We recorded the talk, and for all of my subscribers, viewers, followers, and anyone else interested in seeing it, it will premiere this coming Saturday at 12:00 PM Central Time.  You can join us and watch it anywhere in the world on YouTube Live right here (where you can also set a reminder for yourself).

This talk runs a little over an hour, and discusses Camus' life, key ideas, commitments, and involvement in the historical situation of the bloody 20th century.  It is session number twelve in the quarterly series, "Philosophers in the Midst of History," a set of talks given at the Frank Weyenberg Library

Each year, I pick four philosophers from ancient, medieval, early modern, and late modern periods, and discuss how their ideas are formed and and responsive to their historical situation.  Each of of these philosophers also contributes in significant ways to reflecting upon, and even shaping that very history.

Happy Birthday, Albert Camus

Very early on in my philosophical formation -- long before I had any idea that I might study, let alone go on to become a professor in that field -- I first encountered the work of Albert Camus, in the form of a paperback, The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays.  I had just started high school, and we were on one of our many visits from Wisconsin, where my mother and father had settled in the family's exodus out of Chicago, gone down I-65 into rural Indiana, where my grandparents and great-aunts and -uncles had built the complex of little pre-fab Wausau  houses, facing each other on a common driveway, two of them connected in their basements by a cinderblock garage -- a time and place of sand and sun, snow and wood-burning stoves, oaks and sandburrs, trails, freedom, work, card games and quiet affection that to me, in my childhood was perhaps an image of what paradise could be.  My uncle Aime lived there, in a room partitioned off from the rest of his parents' basement, and I would visit with him in that room where he slept, listened to and reflected on radio programs, and read the books stacked in neat piles, but at casual angles and locations. 

Camus' volume held the top place that day on one of the stacks.  I recognized the name Sisyphus from my readings in Greek mythology, so I picked it up to page through it.  Seeing my interest in it, Aime told me it was worth reading, and asked me if I wanted to take it, so I did, and tried to puzzle my way through the not-entirely-for-beginners prose in the main essay.  Trying to remember back to that time, I can't be sure I really understood much of what now, nearly thirty years later, seems clear enough that I've recently shot several video lectures (one, two, and three) discussing the work.  What I recall is being struck by the boldness of Camus' formulations, an enjoyment arising from turning over the paradoxical phrases, and the feeling that if I just dug at it tenaciously enough, I'd come away from reading equipped with something novel, exciting, something I could integrate within my own life and developing thought.  For me, its fitting that, in celebration of his birthday, I focus mainly on that early work in which I first encountered his intransigent thought, his resolve to live "without appeal."