Camus on empathy, solidarity, and The Plague

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So this is a philosophical companion for reading the book The Plague by Albert Camus.

Heads up: this post builds off the one we just did on his book The Stranger. So maybe read that one before this. But who am I to tell you how to live your life.

That said, coming into this post, we already know a couple important things about Camus.

We know that Camus thought of himself as more of an artist than a philosopher. We know that he didn’t want to be a philosopher. That philosophers, in his eyes, are people that place too much confidence in systems built out of theoretical abstractions.

And that he thinks abstract argument not only misses something deeply important about the human condition, but it also sets a dangerous precedent. People start living their lives believing that philosophy can provide some neat justification for the things that go on in the world.

We know that Camus thinks all this is nonsense at some level. This is just what he calls philosophical suicide.

So what we see instead in his work is him not being someone who wrote philosophical works in the classic way. He’s not writing out propositions and then trying to organize them all into a system. Camus is much more interested in presenting what he calls “images” of the human condition.

His thinking is that by dramatizing these ideas, by creating images, there won’t be so much temptation for people to try to reduce them to some delusional system of universals. As Camus himself once said: what is a novel but just a philosophy expressed in images?

Well, communicating in images like this is going to be a big part of this radical project he’s embarking on throughout his career.

This is why things like The Myth of Sisyphus, his famous essay, create such powerful, memorable images.

A man named Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity. When the boulder reaches the top, it rolls back down, forcing Sisyphus to start the process again. Repeating this until the end of time.

This is a powerful image. And fantastic for the glutes, by the way, if you’re looking for a nice deep range of motion.

But to understand the book we’re talking about today, The Plague, and why this marks a major shift in his work, it’s going to be important to understand what Camus was trying to say at the end of The Myth of Sisyphus.

Because as it turns out, I think there’s a really overrated line from The Myth of Sisyphus that basically everyone knows. The line is: that we should imagine Sisyphus happy.

And what some people think when they read that is that Camus is saying our lives are essentially like the life of Sisyphus. That life is essentially suffering, and that a great metaphor for continuing to live on is that it’s the equivalent of pushing a boulder up a hill in a completely meaningless, fruitless grind. But that we should just keep pushing the rock, and try to be happy about that somehow, like Sisyphus in the essay.

This is not what Camus was saying with that line though. He’s not saying this is all of what our life looks like.

The image of Sisyphus is partly a metaphor for a specific piece of how our lives may feel at times. Specifically, for our encounter with the absurd when we face it head on.

For that tension between what our nature seems to desire from the universe, and what the universe can actually give to us. That constant tension can sometimes feel like that cycle of pushing the boulder up and having it fall.

But Sisyphus is equally an image being used by Camus to illustrate what our lives are not. To Camus it is also important for us to recognize how much we are not like Sisyphus.

We are not beings condemned by the gods for all eternity. Our lives are not pushing a boulder, enduring constant suffering, with zero redeeming moments.

No, the image of Sisyphus is also supposed to present a contrasting image against a reader’s own life.

Because for Camus the reality of life is: we do have many good moments available to us as human beings. Yes, life is partially suffering to Camus. But life is also partially joy, love, belonging, beauty, excitement.

And look, if you were going to try to affirm life in all that it is, not just merely the moments of suffering, it would require you to understand that these things are an important piece of the immanence of our reality as well.

Now, it may be that you come from a history where you’ve been led to believe that transcendence above this world and its suffering is what you should expect. To live your life implicitly looking for a system of meaning that justifies the suffering you’re in, or makes it go away somehow.

And the thinking from this kind of person will often be like: “Well, how could Sisyphus ever be anything other than miserable when he doesn’t have some way of transcending his reality?”

But the point to recognize for Camus is that it isn’t just a given that Sisyphus would be unhappy.

It’s equally possible that if Sisyphus affirmed his life, if lucidity was his primary goal instead, it’s possible for someone to live their life in a way where life itself is good enough exactly how it is.

We don’t need to transcend it, or get away from it. And we don’t need to make it into something that it’s not, like we’re condemned by the gods for all eternity.

In general, Camus will say this point over and over again in his work in different contexts: forget the extremes. Forget the temptation to violently impose yourself onto a problem just to try to get rid of it.

The goal for him is more going to be to find a way of being rooted in the immanence of things. Along the lines of the example he sees set by certain Mediterranean cultures he admires, in the lyrical poetry that he writes.

A way of life more centered on balance. On moderation, measure (specifically defined from the work of St. Augustine, who he admired deeply), and on lucidity towards life as it is.

This is another one of the images Camus paints of the possibilities in the human condition.

And what this will lead to is a very lucid understanding of the fact that challenging moments, like the one Sisyphus is forever trapped in, these are often the places where we form our deepest connections with the people and things around us when we’re open to it.

That lucid revolt also produces a life that’s worth living, as well.

And one place you’ll see this as front and center as it gets in his work is in this book titled, The Plague.

The book begins when people start noticing dead rats showing up all around them.

In the book, these people live in a very small, perfectly normal town on the coast of Algeria. It’s soon realized that a bunch of rats carrying a disease have come off one of the boats docked near the town.

Now, as they’re going about their day, going to the store or going to check their mail, they start to see these dead rats popping up. Rats that clearly have some sort of disease that has killed them.

It soon becomes evident to everybody in this town, at different speeds, that they are now all living in a town that is quickly being infected by the bubonic plague.

A city-wide quarantine and lockdown is going to mean there’s really no hope for any of them to escape this problem. They’re all going to be forced to confront the coming plague as directly as they possibly can.

Camus would later say in an interview about this book that much of the symbolism of the actual plague is pointing to the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, when he was living through it.

Camus was famously a member of what you could call a literary resistance against the Nazis. He was one of the biggest voices in a resistance newspaper called Combat, some of his best writing, I think.

But it should be said, Nazi symbolism aside, the plague in the book also represents a confrontation with the absurd more generally.

Keep in mind where this book, The Plague, fits into the larger project of Camus.

All the books, plays, or essays that we know about from Camus, if you read what he wrote about them in his notes; Camus personally organized his work into what he called five different stages, or cycles. This is how he was thinking about it as he was writing it.

Cycle one for him was the book The Stranger, the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, and his early play Caligula.

And for cycle two: The Plague was the first major book that he thought was a part of it. Which also means it represents a major shift in focus for him.

He goes from these earlier works that focus mostly on the individual, and a personal encounter with the absurd, to cycle two focusing on facing the absurd at the level of community, and our relationships to other people.

So writing a book about a plague that terrorizes a small community is going to be fantastic as another one of these powerful images he likes to create in his work. It explores revolt against the absurd at the level of our commitments to the other people around us.

Now you can think of the characters in this book, and their different responses to the plague, each as individual images presented by Camus as well. Each of them represent some common, very human reaction to when we’re forced to confront the absurd in our lives.

There are common ways people run from the absurd. Or distract themselves away from it. There are common wagers people make with themselves to avoid being lucid about their reality.

Let me give some examples of these characters from the book that you can notice as landmarks of this as you’re reading through it.

The character Father Paneloux, for example, is someone we hear from early on in this book. As a character, a good way to describe him is that he’s one of those fire-and-brimstone religious preacher types.

When the world’s getting shut down in the book and people are starting to die of the plague, what does he do? He gives a sermon saying, look, if any of you are confused about this plague, I know exactly what’s going on here.

This plague, he says, is divine retribution from God.

God has sent this plague to punish the people of this town for all their sinning. He says, more or less, this is just an elaborate ruse by God to get the people coming back to church.

Some people might just put one of those fancy electric guitars in the worship group to boost attendance at their church. Nope. God sends a plague. Lesson of the day: you do something, you do it right, people.

In all seriousness, Father Paneloux represents for Camus the common reaction of a metaphysical form of denial. He uses a story that’s loaded with metaphysics to explain away the absurd events of the world.

And this story conveniently reinforces all his existing views of the world, so there’s no reflection that’s actually required on his part. He has a ready-made form of escapism from the absurd in every moment.

Another minor character we see early on is a guy named Cottard.

Now, Cottard is a criminal in the book.

He starts out as someone that’s always looking over his shoulder, worried the police are about to come and arrest him. So when the plague breaks out, all of a sudden the police don’t have the resources to come after him anymore.

The plague, in other words, becomes an opportunity for this guy, Cottard. It becomes a way to take advantage of people’s fears and lack of resources.

So he organizes a black market, smuggling things in and out of the city, and makes a lot of money from it. And all of this is an effort to use the absurdity of the world to further ingratiate himself. Yet another common reaction leaders and individuals utilize that Camus wants to put on display.

In other words, Cottard is meant to represent the person who encounters the absurd and then only thinks of themselves.

And as a reader, you’re left looking at his example and you can’t help but feel like something’s missing here. Like, is this an authentic reaction from Cottard to all that’s going on around him? Or is this just another clever way of denying pieces of the world around you?

Seeing Cottard’s example is an important moment, because for the main characters of the book, Camus has them respond to the absurd in a way that doesn’t only think about themselves.

And first up, to explain this point is the main character of this book: a man named Dr. Bernard Rieux.

Because I think his personal arc in the book is a great case study. He goes from, at first, a denial of the absurd, to developing a lucid revolt against it. And I think if we can see that clearly with him, it makes it easier to look at all the other characters and how their approaches function.

So Dr. Rieux is, obviously, a doctor in this small coastal town we’ve been talking about.

He’s one of the first people that hears about the plague when it’s starting. He’s one of the only medical professionals around. So he starts running tests on these rats that are dying, trying to figure out what this is.

And after he finds out it’s the bubonic plague they’re dealing with, he very briefly gets involved with some of his colleagues in trying to develop a serum. Something they can just give to people and it will cure them.

In other words, his first instinct when he encounters the absurd is to do what many of us do in our own lives. We retreat into a kind of problem-solving mode, and we make the mistake of thinking we can get away from it.

For Dr. Rieux it’s a kind of scientific cocoon, trying to come up with a cure. But any one of us might also see the absurd and think of it as a problem that needs to be solved with our own personal skillset.

This is, of course, an understandable reaction. But for Dr. Rieux, it’s something he’s forced to outgrow pretty quickly.

Because very soon in the book he realizes the plague is not going anywhere. There’s no magic serum that’s going to cure everyone. There’s no getting rid of the plague entirely.

And when he realizes this his goal changes. He goes from a denial of the absurd to a stance of revolt against it.

Dr. Rieux starts to feel that if he wants to be a lucid, authentic person, someone not in denial of what’s actually going on around him, then the only response that really makes sense is solidarity with his fellow people.

Meaning, in a very quiet, measured way, his choice is to keep going about his life caring for all the people who are suffering from the plague around him.

He runs tests. He checks vitals. He gives medication. Dr. Rieux chooses to put his head down and keep on living in spite of the senseless death that’s taking over the town.

For Albert Camus, solidarity like this with our fellow people is going to be an everyday form of revolt that we can embody against the absurd.

Dr. Rieux becomes a character not interested in grand theories about the plague. Not interested in trying to beat the absurdity of the plague. He’s driven toward solidarity with others by a sense of personal duty and empathy.

Now somebody could say back to this, “Ha! I knew it! I knew you were gonna do this at some point here, Camus! Look at you now, smuggling in a system of morality yourself. Things like duty. Things like empathy. You know what? You’re no different than one of those philosophers you claim to not want to be like!”

But this is why it’s important to understand that for Camus, solidarity like this is not an ethical rebellion that he’s presenting. This is a metaphysical rebellion.

Remember last post, when we described this lucidity as a descriptive claim that he’s making, and not a normative one.

Lucidity we said was to be a creature that affirms its own nature, and the nature of the universe. To strive for meaning in a universe that can’t give it to us. To strive for knowledge in a universe where there are many things we can’t know. To live in this metaphysical posture toward what things are is the essence of lucidity.

And for Camus, just descriptively, that is an act of revolt against the absurd.

See, this isn’t him saying this is how you should behave. It’s him saying that once you truly affirm the world, then anything you do after that, just in the business of continuing on living…that defaults into an act of revolt.

Well, let’s talk about how this ladders up from the individual, personal revolt to one that involves solidarity with others.

At the level of the individual, there’s of course always a way you can get lost in endlessly questioning whether or not things really matter. You can spend every day of your life agonizing over whether or not you have the right set of abstractions that ground the value of these things in a universal.

But as we’ve been talking about a lot in these posts lately through the work of Dosotevsky, Keiji Nishitani, and others: there’s also this more pre-theoretical experience that Camus is very aware of, where things in the world just matter to you.

Where you have an orientation of care toward the things directly in your vicinity.

You care whether the floor is there to walk on or not. You care about getting your next meal. These things have value to you.

And for Camus, that value isn’t grounded on any set of theoretical abstractions. Saying nothing about universals, it just seems to be that the kind of creature that I am is one that has an orientation of care about the physical space I’m in.

This is a pretty uncontroversial statement for Camus. And remember, part of what he’s trying to do here is start from extremely uncontroversial claims that don’t have to be grounded in a particular system.

Well, if we’re the kind of beings that just care about the things in the world around us, how would that not extend into a care we have toward the other people around us?

I mean, if I’m walking along one day and I see a child drowning inside of a big puddle, I do not stand there stone-faced, feeling nothing inside, watching as the child slowly dies.

No, when we affirm the kinds of creatures we seem to be, Camus thinks we often default to a type of empathy and solidarity toward the people that are suffering immediately around us.

We do this, Camus thinks, because to not do it would be a contradiction.

I, myself, know what navigating a human existence is like at times. I know what it feels like to suffer.

So in the example of The Plague: when I look around me and I see other people in the same existential dilemma that I face. When I see other beings who are like me and we all have no idea what this disease even is. We don’t know if we’re all gonna be dead in a week. We all just want to run and get out of this horrible situation, but none of us can. For Camus: to be fully lucid toward a world where people on the daily are suffering against the absurd like this is to acknowledge a common set of existential problems that we all face. A common struggle, where we all need to find some way to keep on living in spite of it.

And his point is that when you fully affirm this common set of existential problems we all face…empathy and solidarity seem to be the default stances to take.

In fact, if you think about it, to Camus it’s only when we have a set of theoretical abstractions that frames the people around us as the enemy, or as less human, that is typically the only way people can rationalize to themselves why it’s okay that people around them are suffering.

“Oh, it’s because these people deserve it. It’s because these people had it coming!”

And this is why, to him, propaganda of any type, if you pay attention to it, always tries to put up barriers between people.

They try to silence the group of people that are suffering. They try to limit communication between people. They demonize them. They present people in a way that’s very narrow, making us not be able to lucidly see them in their full existence.

On a smaller scale, this is also why abusive people often want to limit who the victims of their abuse can talk to about it. They don’t want someone talking to their friends, or an advocate somewhere. That might take them out of the narrow framing they need them to stay in, for the abuse to keep on working.

Picture a really restrictive totalitarian state with a population essentially being held captive. Now imagine what would happen if tomorrow everybody woke up, for some reason, and just stopped playing the game that the state requires for it all to keep going.

Silence is the enemy to lucidity for Camus.

Camus says in one of his speeches called The Crisis of Man, a famous speech he gave after World War Two, that wherever you see injustice in the world, you will also see silence. Barriers that have been set up to prevent people from truly knowing each other.

This is why free speech, for him, is one of the natural positions that emerges out of this commitment to lucidity.

And it’s not him saying that free speech is an unalienable right that’s granted to us by God in heaven. No. He doesn’t ground this in a right.

He’s skeptical of rights as a framework, obviously. He’s a lot like Simone Weil in this way.

No, he’s saying that for any setup that wants to promote people affirming reality as it is, open communication between people is the only way that’s going to get done.

And that’s not grounded in some cosmic right I’m pretending to declare. That’s just the policy that lets people actually be in contact with the things in the world around them as they are.

See, it’s only when you start layering on abstractions about the world, abstractions that are usually claiming to be getting us to a more “moral” place, that most of the stuff we see as immoral can even start to make sense to people as something that’s justified.

So what is truly the enemy of us living in a more moral world? Is it not having abstractions about morality, or is it having them?

Now this is probably a good spot to bring back that criticism of Camus, that this is all grounded on far too little.

The idea is: “Look, I get that you’re trying to avoid abstractions here. I’ll accept the point that they’re dangerous sometimes. But this whole thing from you is based on what? A feeling of care that you have? Your experience of this moment?

Well what are your reasons for why we should even be trusting that feeling? What if that experience of yours is deceiving you? Or what if important parts of that experience are just being dictated by someone else?”

To which Camus would have a lot to say back, but maybe first he’d say: can we just take a moment to appreciate how much of an obsession you have with needing to validate even your own experience in these theoretical abstractions?

It seems like the abstraction has become more real to you than the lived experience that lies underneath.

The number on the scale means more to you than how you feel. The like count on the post means more to you than whether you’re really feeling it.

Or how about the one my friend Dave uses all the time: 76 degrees feels more real to you than the actual experience of 76 degrees.

Camus might say: if I’m feeling viscerally against sitting by watching a child drown in a puddle, why is my lucid experience of that moment not enough of a ground for you?

Sure, it doesn’t provide ultimate meaning. But I’ll tell you what it does provide. It provides a kind of provisional meaning, you could say.

A type of meaning grounded in nothing other than a lucid reflection on this moment. Meaning that comes loaded with the full expectation that it’ll be revised as future moments come about.

Why is that not valid?

But still, someone could say back to this: “Well what about sociopaths? What about horribly selfish people? Those people exist out there too, right? I mean, what if someone looks at the child drowning and genuinely doesn’t care? You can’t morally condemn that person. What are you gonna do then?”

To which Camus might say: yeah, you’re right. This isn’t a moral universal.

But that sociopath watching the child die is by far the exception to the rule here. We will always have to deal with the very occasional person that doesn’t feel the same way as most of us. We can deal with that case by case.

But I’d much rather deal with that than accept the set of premises we currently live under: where people by the millions feel morally justified to do whatever they want by these fake moral universals created out of abstractions. The kind that end up causing things like fascism and totalitarianism.

What he’s saying is: even though provisional meaning like this is not a universal, when it comes to certain things that seem to be common to almost all human beings, things like working together, justice, safety for the average person, things of this class, because these are such common feelings…even though they’re not universals, they more or less function like universals. Just without the grand philosophical system that gets brought along as baggage.

So now that we have a pretty deep knowledge of why solidarity makes sense to Camus, let’s take a closer look at some more examples of this solidarity you can expect to see in the symbolism of his book The Plague.

The main character, Dr. Rieux, as we said, becomes a symbol of a sort of ordinary, everyday absurd hero for Camus.

But what exactly is meant by this term “absurd hero”?

Well, when the absurd comes knocking at your door each day, it may be tempting to go out and try to be a superhero about it. To go out and try to save the world.

But for Camus, if you’re not trying to do good in the world that you’re ultimately capable of succeeding at, then you may just be mistaking movement for progress.

For Camus, part of the mistake in the thinking of totalitarianism or fascism is that it lacks proportionality. It’s a violent, extreme way of imposing yourself onto a problem in the world that you can’t actually solve with a set of abstractions.

In other words, it’s a lack of lucidity. It’s a denial of the absurd, and a denial of your own abilities, “within the limits of your own station”, as Camus says.

So instead of Bernard Rieux trying to be a superhero doctor; no this is a man who understands that heroism is often found in the everyday.

In fact, in some sense, even calling it heroism is missing the point.

He says in the book: “there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency.” Then he says later, “the only means of fighting a plague is common decency.”

And again, by doing house calls, taking vitals, giving medication, by putting himself at risk out of compassion for the common existential problem the whole town faces, the idea is that the plague may be a kind of senseless destruction that’s going on in this world. But I’m not gonna let this cause me to deny what truly matters to me.

I’m going to keep on living, in the most measured, balanced way I can, from within the limits of my own station.

But there’s more than one image that Camus paints of the absurd hero. There’s another character by the name of Raymond Rambert.

Rambert is a journalist in the book. He came to this small town to research a story he was doing, when all of a sudden a plague starts breaking out all around him. Horrible timing.

Now his first response, like others here, is to deny the absurd. He tries to justify why this isn’t even his problem.

He says something to the effect of: You guys don’t understand. I don’t even live here! You can’t quarantine the place. This is the problem of the people in this city. I’m not one of you.

He says there’s a woman I’m in love with back in France. She’s waiting for me. And he’s willing to do anything, legally or illegally, just to get out of the city to get back to her.

I mean, his perspective is: I’m not on this planet to save the world from plagues.

I’m just here to be a journalist, and to love a woman. That’s what human life is all about, not obsessing over other people’s problems.

But you can no doubt predict what Camus is going for there.

This is him actively creating a bridge between cycle one of his work, which focuses on the individual revolt against the absurd, and cycle two. He’s showing a character here that gives a set of common excuses any of us might give for why the people around him are not his problem. How they’re somehow part of a totally different world than the one he’s living in.

Eventually Rambert, after seeing Dr. Rieux and others risk their lives daily to fight against the plague, he starts to see what’s going on as a fundamentally human crisis. One we’re bound in together by our shared condition.

And again it’s not because he finds God, or finds some set of moral abstractions where now he knows what the right thing to do is.

No, it’s through the removal of abstractions if anything. It’s through being forced to lucidly look at what’s going on around him, that he realizes this is ultimately his problem too.

Another very important main character in the book is a man named Jean Tarrou.

Jean Tarrou is a character that has been opposing the absurdity of the world for most of his entire life. He describes himself toward the end of the book as someone that wants to be a saint without God. Doesn’t need much of an explanation with all that we’ve already said about Camus.

But for much of the book, he’s an important character because he embodies a different kind of approach to the task of the absurd hero.

He’s the one that sees the plague, or “plague” as he calls it, as something far larger than just an epidemic that’s going around.

Plague is something we will always be fighting against, he thinks.

As Dr. Rieux says toward the end of the book, even if we eradicate this plague from this particular town, plague is something that will always come back. Unexpectedly. Looking a little different than last time, but still, in many ways, the same thing.

There’s a sense in which Camus uses something naturally occurring like a plague as a metaphor, as a warning to future generations.

When it comes to the type of thinking that leads to plague, this stuff is always a possibility. We should always be keeping our eyes open.

One issue that really defines Jean Tarrou in his fight against absurdity in the book is that he’s strongly against the death penalty.

And for Camus himself, the issue of the death penalty was one of the things he was most vocal about in his entire lifetime.

He gives multiple speeches talking about it, and he writes one of the most cited essays in history about the problem with the death penalty, called Reflections on the Guillotine.

We’re going to talk about it in detail next time, as a complement to his views on justice that he lays out in his essay The Rebel.

Which instantly presents a mystery if you’re closely reading Camus for the first time: how does this case he’s making for solidarity and empathy for others ladder up into a point we can make about justice?

I mean, justice, with it being something that seems centered around laws and norms, those seem to be the very sorts of abstractions his whole project is moving away from, how is Camus going to do this?

Well, the death penalty becomes yet another striking image he paints of where he’s going.

He tells a story once from when he was young.

His father was apparently a really solid dude, cared about people in a similar kind of way that we just talked about in The Plague. And part of caring about those people led him to want to participate in the politics of his time.

So one day Camus’ father decides to go and see a public execution. I mean, he’s all for the death penalty, at least when it comes to really horrible people that do heinous stuff. Time to go see where my tax dollars are going.

And Camus writes about how this is an image that forever changed him.

Camus was sitting at home. His father goes to see someone get killed. And he says he’ll never forget it.

His father came home, immediately excused himself into the bathroom, and then vomited uncontrollably at what he’d just witnessed.

See, it turns out there’s a difference between people linking themselves to a theoretical conversation about what they want done, and the reality of violating a boundary that’s so deeply important to us all.

The entire process of the death penalty, for Camus, is rooted in hypocrisy. Next episode we’ll find out why.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you next time.