Camus on happiness and The Stranger

Hello everyone, I’m Stephen West, and this is Philosophize This!

Today we’re going to start talking about Albert Camus and how perfectly he fits into the conversation we’ve been having lately.

Most people have heard of his book The Stranger. It’s one of the most famous books in history, so that’s to be expected. But far fewer people know about something else from him that I think is just as exciting: the novel he wrote right before The Stranger.

It’s a book he chose never to publish during his lifetime for reasons we’ll get into. It was only published after his death by his estate.

Nonetheless, if your goal is to understand Camus as well as you can then reading this book is important for seeing how his thinking was evolving during the late 1930s. It also contains context that’s often missed if you want to understand his full project as a thinker.

The book is called A Happy Death. So I guess it fits that it mostly focuses on the idea of happiness.

Now if that sounds a little confusing given what you already know about Camus, you have every right to be confused.

Why would Camus start, write, and finish a book about happiness, then choose never to publish it, and then make his next published novel about a character who seems to care almost nothing about happiness?

That’s one of the questions I want to answer by the end of this post.

If you’re here because you’re reading The Stranger, even in just the first few pages you’ll notice it’s written from the perspective of a guy named Meursault. A character who is famously indifferent to the world around him.

You’ve probably heard the first line of the novel. Some people practically have a conniption fit over it: “Mother died yesterday, or was it the day before… I can’t remember.”

It’s a famous line for good reason. Just a few words into the book, we already know a lot about who Meursault is as a character.

He doesn’t play the game of society the way other people do. He doesn’t put on any affect just to please people. Meursault represents an indifference to the usual ways people get their meaning in the world, and as a reader you feel like there’s something deeply unrelatable about his experience. What kind of person cares so little about their mother that they don’t even remember what day she died?

When people talk about the book after reading it, you’ll often hear them describe Meursault as some kind of “absurd hero” for Camus. The idea is that by facing the absurdity of the universe and embodying it so completely, he reaches a point at the end of the book, sentenced to death, where he stares the absurdity of the world in the face and is truly happy, feeling a kind of harmony with it. On this reading, Camus is offering Meursault as an example to emulate: we should all seek to be in harmony with the absurd in this way.

But that isn’t the full picture of what Camus was going for with Meursault. For whatever it’s worth, I think there’s a lot missing from that take. A lot of Camus gets lost if you only read the novels. There’s crucial context in the lectures he gave and in the lesser-known essays he wrote over the years.

More than that, I think the symbolism of the sun in The Stranger is often overlooked, and you can really only appreciate it when you understand his interest in the Mediterranean lifestyle during this period of his thought. Even Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote one of the most famous reviews of The Stranger, in my view reads a bit too much of his own work into Camus. I think his review still causes people to misunderstand the novel all these years later.

What I’m saying is that Camus once famously said he was an artist, not a philosopher.

Some people take that as modesty, “Oh no, I’m not a philosopher, my ideas aren’t that good!”, but it was actually a very intentional claim about his work.

He didn’t want to be a philosopher. He thought the philosophers of his time were lost in abstractions, lost in a kind of fatalism and realism that, in his view, helped create the conditions for the rise of Hitler and people like him.

We’ll talk more about this as we paint the bigger picture of Camus’ overall project, but for now the key point is that he refused what he saw as the temptation to become a philosopher, because he disagreed with the entire dangerous game he thought they were playing. And understanding that decision begins with his book A Happy Death, written just before The Stranger. So let’s get into it.

On the surface, A Happy Death shares quite a few similarities with The Stranger. The main character of the book is also named Mersault. Sunlight appears constantly as a symbol. And Mersault, similarly, kills someone on a beach as a major plot point near the beginning of the novel.

But the similarities end there. In A Happy Death, Mersault doesn’t kill someone who’s attacking him with a knife, the way Meursault does in The Stranger. This Mersault kills someone out of mercy. It’s something the two of them make an agreement about.

Zagreus, the man he kills, is very wealthy and disabled. He’s in constant pain and lives a life mostly confined to his home. It’s by no means a happy life, but Zagreus still believes he understands happiness.

In the final moments of his life, he shares his theory of happiness with Mersault. The deal is simple: if Mersault agrees to kill him, he’ll inherit all of Zagreus’s money once he’s gone. Part of the tragedy is that Zagreus just can’t bring himself to pull the trigger on his own.

So he says to him, essentially: “Come here, my boy. Before you kill me, sit on my knee. Happiness lies in three things.” First, he says, happiness lies in money.

A lot of people like to morally grandstand here and say that money doesn’t buy happiness. But for Zagreus, it’s no coincidence that the people who talk that way usually already have money. Nobody who has struggled just to eat or find shelter talks about money like that. It’s obviously much easier to find happiness if you have enough money to secure the basics.

That leads to the second thing on Zagreus’s list: time. Once you’ve secured the necessities of life, everyone needs time. Time to pursue your own interests. Time that isn’t completely consumed by working for someone else.

And “time” here also implies having enough health to take advantage of that opportunity in the first place.

The third thing he thinks we need to be happy is solitude. If you’re always distracted, always fulfilling some social expectation, then you never have the space to fully possess yourself. And as he puts it, how can you ever be happy if you’re constantly being something for someone else?

Mersault hears all this, honors Zagreus’s wishes, takes his life and his money, and then spends the rest of the book testing the limits of this theory. And what he finds, speeding things up a bit so we can talk more about The Stranger, is that Zagreus’s theory of happiness, while not stupid or completely unfounded, has some obvious holes in it.

Because while Camus is writing this book, he’s also learning about happiness in his own life. One thing he does is visit a monastery and spend time observing religious monks, paying close attention to how they seem to be achieving happiness.

Watching them, he realizes these monks are happy even though they have almost nothing. In the same way that someone can have all the money, time, and solitude in the world and still be miserable, someone can have practically nothing and yet, if their will toward happiness is there, that will seems to be the primary factor, all things considered.

In an essay called “The Desert” Camus writes that happiness is a kind of harmony between a person and the life they lead.

It’s a beautiful line. It captures something important about what it is to live a life. And for a lot of people, that would just be an inspiring insight. “Wait, I can be happy forever if I just will myself to be happy all the time? Come on, let’s get to work on that!”

But for Camus, in his own development, the reaction is very different.

I can imagine that for him, this insight about happiness triggered a deep skepticism toward happiness as a goal. After all, if happiness is just a matter of will, if it comes down to how we frame our reality, then, hypothetically, the world could be burning down around me, everyone I know and love could be in complete misery, and as long as I frame things in the right way, I can be happy forever.

But what is that, exactly?

If that’s true, is happiness really the ultimate goal of any serious person? It starts to feel like the kind of goal you’d only have if you were very young and trying to avoid responsibility.

For Camus, happiness starts to look like just another set of theoretical abstractions, and then your ability to will yourself to only see those abstractions.

But what about what’s actually happening in the world? Shouldn’t that matter to us too?

It’s almost as if, at this point, Camus has his own version of one of Wittgenstein’s ladders.

There’s a famous metaphor in the history of philosophy: near the end of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein suggests that when philosophy works, you sometimes climb a kind of ladder. You follow a philosophical discussion, arrive at a new insight about the world, and from that new vantage point, when you look back at the conversation that got you there, the whole thing suddenly seems naïve or even silly. The “ladder” was necessary to reach that perspective, but once you’re there, you can kick it away. You don’t need it anymore.

This isn’t an attack on people still having conversations about happiness. Those conversations are probably the only way you ever get to this other place. But it does seem like Camus, at this stage, starts to think of happiness as more a matter of will and focus, and not as the ultimate existential goal we should all be aiming at. To focus exclusively on happiness is to ignore something deeper about the human condition.

This is why the other Meursault, the one at the end of The Stranger, is so important.

When he accepts the absurdity of the world, sees himself within it, and walks toward his execution feeling totally happy, that is not Camus holding him up as a model for how human beings should live. For Camus, Meursault is simply someone who has reached a certain harmony with the particular life he happens to be living.

And you can see that all throughout the book. Meursault is deeply in harmony with his own indifference. He agrees to marry a woman simply because she wants to. He kills a man on the beach because the sun is in his eyes in a tense moment. He helps lure a woman into an apartment where he knows she’s going to be beaten.

And he remains completely indifferent to all of it.

So for Camus, Meursault is a picture of happiness, a kind of harmony with the life he leads. And yet from the very first sentence of the novel, anyone reading this man’s experience can feel that something deeply human is missing in him. The question that starts to form in the reader’s mind is: what exactly is missing from Meursault?

For Camus, the answer is revolt against the absurd.

But to understand revolt, we first have to talk a bit more about the absurd itself, and how it fits into Camus’s larger project.

Camus is an absurdist. You may have heard the usual definition: the absurd is the tension created by our natural desire for meaning and the meaninglessness of the universe. The collision of those two things creates a permanent conflict, and that conflict is what he calls the absurd.

That’s not wrong, but for Camus it goes a little further. Meaning is a very common way people encounter the absurd, but in the context of everything we’ve been talking about in these posts, the absurd for Camus appears any time there’s something that seems built into our nature as humans, and we then collide with a world that cannot provide it.

Seen this way, it doesn’t just apply to meaning; it also applies to our desire for knowledge. In theory, we’d love to know everything about the world around us. But part of affirming the world as it actually is means recognizing our own limitations: the limits of our tools, of our senses, of our tiny sample of experience, of our capacity to reason, of theoretical abstractions as a way of framing reality.

For Camus, the existential problem isn’t just that we live in a world where a lot of things are still unknown. That would be one thing. The deeper problem is that, given the kind of limited creatures we are, some things are always going to be unknowable to us with the tools we have.

That, too, is a brutal encounter with the absurd. And once you see it there, you can see it in ethics. You can see it in our relationship to death.

It’s uncomfortable to live in that space. It’s a form of suffering.

And as it turns out, another feature of the kind of creatures we are is that we strive to avoid suffering.

For Camus, it’s this drive to avoid our own suffering, this part of what we are, that gives rise to the “game” he thinks philosophers and religious people are playing. They construct elaborate systems out of abstractions or grand religious narratives, and these systems are, in his view, transparent attempts to escape this uncomfortable tension, to avoid facing the world as it is.

Philosophers and religious thinkers generally treat this tension as a problem to be solved.

Camus asks: what if you didn’t try to solve it? What if the goal isn’t to encounter the absurd and then hurry to build a system of meaning that lets you escape it?

What if meaning, like happiness, is not the ultimate goal?

What if someone made lucidity their primary focus, seeing the world as it is?

How would that change the shape of their life?

This becomes Camus’s unique way of affirming reality without idealizing it, demonizing it, or building rational abstractions that demand the universe be something it’s not. He wants to avoid the temptation, even among philosophers, to construct systems that ultimately let them run away from the absurd.

And it’s this commitment to lucidity that leads him to a move similar to what we’ve been exploring lately on the podcast: stripping away abstractions from his view of reality, which eventually lands him in an experience that looks a lot like an embodied present moment. But his version of that present-moment experience is very different from anything else we’ve seen in this series so far.

Since we’re here, it’s worth saying: Camus was very aware of the broader conversation we’ve been having.

This is a guy who once called Dostoevsky a prophet of the 19th century. He spent significant time and money trying to get Dostoevsky’s Demons turned into a stage play. And for anyone coming fresh off that series we just did, you know Demons, of all his novels, is probably the one where you really have to be a Dostoevsky superfan to fully understand and appreciate what’s going on.

More than that, Camus was one of the people who personally spent time and money to make sure the work of Simone Weil was preserved after she died. We might not have her writings in the form we do today if it weren’t for him. He once said she was the closest thing to a living saint he had ever seen in his lifetime.

What I’m getting at is this: Camus understands and deeply appreciates the kind of religious self-emptying we’ve been talking about. He’s not ignorant of it, and he’s not dismissing it out of hand. He just ultimately doesn’t accept it for himself. In fact, he’s very suspicious of it. You can almost hear him saying: how convenient.

How convenient that the primary existential dilemma we face as human beings is this longing for some unifying sense of connection, and how convenient that you’ve found it.

I think he’d say: look, it doesn’t matter how intelligent your religious move is. It doesn’t matter how much reading it took to arrive there, or how much daily effort you put in to honor the unity you think you’ve discovered. At bottom, for Camus, it’s still the same attempt to manufacture unity out of the absurd. It’s the same move.

And while he has enormous respect for many of these religious and philosophical thinkers, he ultimately believes the stakes of making that move, of giving in to the temptation to become a philosopher or a religious follower in this sense, are just too high.

This becomes painfully clear to him when he watches his generation more or less roll over and allow Adolf Hitler to emerge and do what he did in the world. From Camus’s perspective, the weak utilitarian arguments offered by philosophers didn’t work against Hitler. The fatalism of the era made people passive, sitting around waiting for the “end of history.” And a certain kind of realism made people nihilistic, unable to act on anything at all.

These philosophers, supposedly the moral leadership of their time, faced the absurd, felt uncomfortable, and then built systems of moral universals. And yet, when it actually mattered, they couldn’t get the job done. Why?

Because when you strip it all down, Camus thinks they’re still wrapped up in the same twisted game we play with philosophy and politics.

To see what he means, imagine someone pushing back on Camus here.

They might say: Okay, Camus, you’re criticizing philosophers. Fair enough. But what are you doing to oppose Hitler? What’s your alternative?

All we’ve heard from you so far are these basic claims about what kind of creatures we are. We seem to avoid suffering. We seem to seek meaning. But what foundation do you have for any of that? You’ve given no justification, built no system, and yet you criticize philosophy.

And as someone who seems to be basing a lot of his thinking on what he “naturally feels,” can you really condemn Hitler and what he did? What if Hitler just naturally feels like he wants to invade France?

Camus might respond to these one at a time.

You asked what justification I have for saying this is the kind of creature we are. If what you’re really asking is whether I’m willing to play the same game you do, pretending I’ve created a system that gives me a clean philosophical justification that always makes things right, whose rules apply neatly to every possible situation, then no. I’m not playing that game. That’s exactly the kind of game that helped get us into this mess in the first place.

If we’re willing to acknowledge that we live in an absurd universe, and that no approach to human behavior will ever solve everything, then which is more dangerous? Not having a ready-made counter-system to throw in Hitler’s face? Or continuing this mass delusion that philosophy can provide a final justification for people’s actions?

For Camus, that’s the real mistake, and it’s more dangerous, because it keeps people living as though these justifications are actually possible.

What he wants to do in his work is more radical. He wants to find a way of being that doesn’t require constantly grounding itself in abstract systems about the world.

In the years leading up to The Stranger, he becomes fascinated with an example he thinks gets fairly close to this: what he calls the “Mediterranean spirit,” or Mediterranean way of being. He even gives a famous speech about it in 1937.

This isn’t some doctrine he wants people to adopt. It’s more of a sensibility. He thinks that people who’ve lived in certain Mediterranean cultures, when you look at their way of life, their art, have found a way of living where it’s not that they don’t think deeply, or that they’re ignorant, but they simply value different things than most Europeans typically do.

If in Europe it’s common to live with a kind of guilt about the body, or to seek transcendence beyond this world, as in Christianity and German Idealism, then the Mediterranean spirit is one that values joy, the physical world, the landscape itself.

He thought there was an immanence to the way these people experience their lives. They seem far less interested in spending their time chopping the world into abstractions and manipulating it, and far more interested in being embodied and present.

To Camus, these are people better able to notice and enjoy something as simple as the sun on their face or the wind in their clothes, and more capable of truly feeling that life itself, experienced in this way, is enough.

An important detail to note is that this is not an ethics where Camus is saying, “This is how you should live.”

In fact, for most of the Europeans he’s speaking to, living like this would actually require stripping away many of the ethical systems they’re already imposing on reality.

In his novels, one way to read the sun (whenever it shows up) is as a symbol of this, or at least of a possible way of being that resembles the Mediterranean spirit. The sun becomes a kind of looming invitation to the characters: an alternative way of life centered on immanence.

You can see this in several moments in The Stranger. Early in the book, when Meursault’s mother dies, there’s a stretch of time where he notices how hot it is outside. It’s so hot that he has to rush the funeral arrangements, because her body is already beginning to decay.

Here, the sun almost becomes another character. It stands there, overseeing the events of the novel. When Meursault could otherwise detach from reality the way he usually does, or when a more typical person might need time to rationalize or emotionally process their mother’s death, the heat represents the relentless process of immanent reality, the ongoing affirmation of the world as it is.

Point is whether you’re ready to acknowledge that your mother is gone or not, the bodies are still decaying, Meursault.

A little later in the book, at his mother’s funeral, there’s a scene where the sun is beating down on Meursault as he stands near the service. He is so detached from what’s happening that, in the inner monologue we’re reading, he’s paying more attention to how hot it is outside than to his own mother’s funeral.

Again, the sun is almost like an extra character in the book. It’s as if Camus is quietly asking: what if, instead of detaching, Meursault actually paid attention to what was really happening around him? What if he committed himself to lucidity at his mother’s funeral?

How different might his experience of that funeral be? Is there another, more affirmative version of that moment available to him? In the book, it’s as though the possibility of recognizing this immanence is right in front of him the whole time, but he never actually sees it.

Another example is when he kills the man on the beach, and the sun glints off the knife and blinds him in this really irritating way. So he shoots the guy. That’s literally the reason he gives at his trial. They ask why he killed the man, and he says, “because the sun was in my eyes.” Everyone laughs.

But this is the literary equivalent of the sun, as a character, hauling back and smacking Meursault in the face. The possibility of affirming reality more fully, of affirming the life of the man he’s about to kill, is right there. The sun is practically begging him in that moment to engage more deeply than his usual level of detachment. And yet he doesn’t. He stays inhuman. In a sense, what leads him to commit this murder is a failure to fully embrace what the sun symbolizes here.

Now of course, there’s other symbolism at work in Meursault that’s better known. Meursault is very clearly meant to be a human embodiment of the absurd.

The whole process of Meursault killing someone, then being sentenced to death by a jury of people who don’t like him, don’t understand him, and ultimately want him found guilty is obviously, for Camus, a picture of how society indicts the absurd whenever it appears. We’re always running from it, putting it on trial, finding ways to get rid of it so we don’t have to look at it. At bottom, society cannot tolerate people who refuse to conform to its emotional expectations.

But even with all this layered symbolism, the key thing to remember is that Meursault is not meant to be an instruction manual for how to live.

He is the absurd. He even explicitly says he finds himself in the absurd in the book. And the point for Camus is that to be human and to be reading this novel is, at some point, to feel that you do not relate to Meursault and the way he feels. That gap is intentional.

Because this brings us back to the earlier point: what’s missing in Meursault, as a human being, is what Camus calls revolt against the absurd.

Now you might want to say: hold on, Camus. You are not about to start giving me moral instructions for how to live after you just finished trashing every philosopher who tries to do that, right?

To which Camus would say: right. I’m not doing that.

A crucial thing to keep in mind is that when Camus says something is missing from Meursault’s behavior, he’s not making an ethical claim; he’s making a descriptive one.

We already know that affirming the absurd means affirming the tension between our desire for meaning and the reality that the universe doesn’t have it to give.

To live authentically in that tension doesn’t mean you stop desiring meaning. It means you keep living with that desire, fully aware that the universe never has and never will provide it.

To affirm reality, then, is to acknowledge: the universe doesn’t care, but I do.

I am the kind of creature who cares about the things around me.

And Camus’s point is that when you stop trying to run away from that fact, when you instead try to live as lucidly as possible inside it, anything genuinely authentic you do beyond that point is, by default, an act of revolt against the absurd. Descriptively, that’s just what’s happening there.

This is why Camus begins this line of thinking with his famous question that he says everyone must confront: whether or not to commit suicide. His answer, of course, is that you shouldn’t. And the next step is that you also shouldn’t commit philosophical suicide.

What he means by that is fascinating. To affirm reality means you don’t need a grand philosophical justification to help you escape it. You don’t need a religious unity or some overarching narrative. To live authentically, as in the Mediterranean way of life, is to find life itself enough.

And more than that: when it comes to my obvious experience of caring about things in the world, why wouldn’t that be enough to ground whether something is worth doing?

You don’t need to ground life in fake moral universals that keep people living in moral delusion.

So this revolt against the absurd, without committing philosophical suicide, becomes the background that Meursault’s character is meant to contrast with. It also becomes the starting point for Camus’s later works, like The Rebel and The Plague.

And it’s the launchpad for a pretty radical project he pursues for the rest of his career: what does genuinely life-affirming behavior look like if you start from a place where you refuse to rely on abstractions?

Is that even possible? That’s the question Camus chooses to wrestle with for his entire life. It’s worth it to him. Because while it’s a hard question, and it doesn’t make him the poster child for happiness all the time, the alternative of sliding back into cheap fatalism or realism, or committing philosophical suicide, is unthinkable.

He was about to find out what it would mean to move through the world as an artist, and not as a philosopher.