Camus is often classified as an existentialist writer, and it is easy to see why. Affinities with Kierkegaard and Sartre are patent. He shares with these philosophers (and with the other major writers in the existentialist tradition, from Augustine and Pascal to Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche) an habitual and intense interest in the active human psyche, in the life of conscience or spirit as it is actually experienced and lived. Like these writers, he aims at nothing less than a thorough, candid exegesis of the human condition, and like them he exhibits not just a philosophical attraction but also a personal commitment to such values as individualism, free choice, inner strength, authenticity, personal responsibility, and self-determination. However, one troublesome fact remains: throughout his career Camus repeatedly denied that he was an existentialist. Was this an accurate and honest self-assessment? On the one hand, some critics have questioned this “denial” (using the term almost in its modern clinical sense), attributing it to the celebrated Sartre-Camus political “feud” or to a certain stubbornness or even contrariness on Camus’s part. In their view, Camus qualifies as, at minimum, a closet existentialist, and in certain respects (e.g., in his unconditional and passionate concern for the individual) as an even truer specimen of the type than Sartre. On the other hand, besides his personal rejection of the label, there appear to be solid reasons for challenging the claim that Camus is an existentialist. For one thing, it is noteworthy that he never showed much interest in (indeed he largely avoided) metaphysical and ontological questions (the philosophical raison d’etre of Heidegger and Sartre). Of course there is no rule that says an existentialist must be a metaphysician. However, Camus’s seeming aversion to technical philosophical discussion does suggest one way in which he distanced himself from contemporary existentialist thought. Another point of divergence is that Camus seems to have regarded existentialism as a complete and systematic world-view, that is, a fully articulated doctrine. In his view, to be a true existentialist one had to commit to the entire doctrine (and not merely to bits and pieces of it), and this was apparently something he was unwilling to do. A further point of separation, and possibly a decisive one, is that Camus actively challenged and set himself apart from the existentialist motto that being precedes essence. Ultimately, against Sartre in particular and existentialists in general, he clings to his instinctive belief in a common human nature. In his view human existence necessarily includes an essential core element of dignity and value, and in this respect he seems surprisingly closer to the humanist tradition from Aristotle to Kant than to the modern tradition of skepticism and relativism from Nietzsche to Derrida (the latter his fellow-countryman and, at least in his commitment to human rights and opposition to the death penalty, his spiritual successor and descendant).

BERT CAMUS sought, in TheMlyth of Sisyphus, to establishthe absurdity of the humancondition.2 There and in The Rebel hefurther sought to derive an ethic fromthat condition-the ethic of the absurdman. Here we shall see that in thesecond task he failed completely, while,in the first, partial success is purchasedat the price of triviality and, even so,rests on .paradoxical ambiguities in hisnotion of "absurdity."To grasp Camus's notion of the ab-surd, one must juxtapose it against abackground of the philosophical ideasof the Greek Neo-Platonist, Plotinus.Plotinus envisioned the world as a"chain of Being." That is, he conceivedof reality as a hierarchical arrangementof different sorts of entities culminatingin the One or Absolute. Embracing theeternal and unchanging Platonic ideas,or essences, as a pattern for "explain-ing" or "accounting for" the varied andchanging world of ordinary experience,Plotinus felt that the Platonic formsthemselves required an explanation. Hedid so primarily from one of the mostbasic and pervasive motives that hasentranced philosophers from the days ofthe Greeks to the present-the idea thatdiversity has to be explained in termsof some ultimate unity. For, where dis-tinctions remain, the monist feels thatthe relationships among the diversethings require explanation. The searchfor an explanation, on this pattern, canonly come to rest in some all-embracingunity, which, allowing of no distinctionswithin itself, somehow accounts for allthe diversity that there is and, in turn,requires no explanation. It is, in itsway, the old idea of the one and themany. Plato sought to account for themany particulars of a certain kind interms of the universal form in whichthey all participated. But, for Plotinus,the Platonic forms, being many, couldnot then be the ultimate source of ex-planation and, hence, of reality. The ul-timate sources of explanation and realitycoalesce, since to explain a thing is toaccount for its being in terms of someother entity. Thus the explanatory orderreflects the "chain of Being." The ulti-mate level of explanation and source ofreality could then only be some absoluteunity. Being the source of the Platonicforms, the One was not, in turn, a formor idea itself. Since the ideas or formsalso functioned as the objects andmeans of rational thought, the One washeld to be incapable of being rationallycomprehended. Another line of reason-ing led to the same conclusion. Rationalthought, for Plotinus, inescapably in-volved two dualisms: that of knowerand known and that of subject andpredicate. First, in thought there wasthe distinction between the knower andthe object of knowledge and, second,judgments involved ascribing a predi-cate to a subject. Rational thought,involving such dualisms, was thus heldto be incapable of comprehending abso-lute unity. The comprehension of theOne must then go beyond rationalthought and beyond all dualisms. Pla-8788 ETHICStonic rationalism, pushed to this ex-treme, lapses or, perhaps, leaps intomysticism. In the mystic experience theOne is finally reached and grasped. Butthe diversity characteristic of reasonand ordinary experience must be avoid-ed, hence the soul, in experiencing andcomprehending the Absolute, becomes"one with the One." The mystic finallyescapes diversity and gains comprehen-sion by being absorbed into the Abso-lute.By providing the ultimate explana-tion for, and source of, all things, theOne constitutes the productive cause ofall else. The pattern of Plotinus thusprovides a dividend, for not only doesthe soul fulfil its desire to comprehendin the obliterating mystical experience,but it attains the very source and causeof its existence. In reaching the One, itjoins the highest link in the chain ofbeing and, consequently, achieves salva-tion. Starting out to explain the ordi-nary world, one thus ends by discoveringits insignificance and the need to fleefrom it to something higher. The Abso-lute provides a haven as well as anexplanation. By so doing, it gives manan end or destiny, union with it, as wellas an ethic. One's life is to be lived soas to prepare for salvation. This is aunion not only with the ultimate sourceof reality but with the absolute good,for the One, as man's final end, is theultimate source of value. The "chain ofbeing" is simultaneously a "chain ofvalue," and something is good insofaras it is real. If one then asks how evilcan come from the ultimate source ofall, which is the absolute good, one istold that evil is simply the absence ofgoodness or reality and, as such, is non-being. The further one gets from theAbsolute, the lower one sinks on thechain of being and of value. Since theordinary world is the lowest link, toflee it is to flee from a lesser state ofbeing and of value to the highest ofboth-to the true, the good, and thebeautiful.One can see, on the basis of the pre-ceding sketch of Plotinus' view, someof the things that would appeal toChristians eager to find a metaphysicaldefense for their faith. However, thereare pitfalls. One is the so-called prob-lem of evil. Unlike Augustine, some mayfeel that there is still a puzzle in recon-ciling the absolute goodness of God withthe evils of the world. The contrastseems, if we may anticipate, "absurd."A second problem is found in the deter-ministic element of Plotinus' worldview. The Absolute is not modeled ona mind confronted with choices aboutwhich it exercises its free will. Thethings of this world are explained by theAbsolute's being their necessary groundor condition. Hence all flows from it asrigorously as theorems from axioms indeductive systems. Orthodox Christian-ity obviously cannot make its peacewith such a theme. In part the issueerupted in the Middle Ages in the scho-lastic attempts to reconcile a personalGod's "knowledge" of all with man'sfreedom to create the future. For, somewondered, in what sense does man free-ly create what God knew he would do?These problems are not confined toChristians. They will bother anyonesimultaneously intoxicated with thePlotinian pattern, man's freedom, andevil. Camus is such a one. Around thesethemes he attempts to construct anethic

EXISTENTIALISM AND DEATH*Existentialism is not a doctrine but a label widely used to lump together several philosophers and writers who are more or less opposedto doctrines while considering a few extreme experiences the beststarting point for philosophic thinking. Spearheading the movement,Kierkegaard derided Hegel's system and wrote books on Fear andTrembling (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), and The Sickness unto Death, which is despair, ( 1849). Three-quarters of a centurylater, Jaspers devoted a central section of his Psychology of Weltanschauungen (1919) to extreme situations (Grenzsituationen),among which he included guilt and death. But if existentialism iswidely associated not merely with extreme experiences in generalbut above all with death, this is due primarily to Heidegger whodiscussed death in a crucial 32-page chapter of his influential Beingand Time (1927). Later, Sartre included a section on death in hisBeing and Nothingness (1943) and criticized Heidegger; and Camusdevoted his two would-be philosophic books to suicide (The Mythof Sisyphus, 1942) and murder (The Rebel, 1951).It was Heidegger who moved death into the center of discussion.But owing in part to the eccentricity of his approach, the discussion influenced by him has revolved rather more around histerminology than around the phenomena which are frequently referred to but rarely illuminated. A discussion of existentialism anddeath should therefore begin with Heidegger, and by first givingsome attention to his approach it may throw critical light on muchof existentialism.2Heidegger's major work, Being and Time, begins with a 40-pageIntroduction that ends with "The Outline of the Treatise." Weare told that the projected work has two parts, each of whichconsists of three long sections. The published work, subtitled "FirstHalf," contains only the first two sections of Part One. The"Second Half" has never appeared.* This essay was written for The Meaning of Death, edited by Herman Feifel,to be published by McGraw-Hill in 1960.75Of the two sections published, the first bears the title, "Thepreparatory fundamental analysis of Being-there." "Being-there"(Dasein) is Heidegger's term for human existence, as opposed tothe being of things and animals. Heidegger's central concern iswith "the meaning of Being"; but he finds that this concern itselfis "a mode of the Being of some beings" (p. 7), namely humanbeings, and he tries to show in his Introduction that "the meaningof Being" must be explored by way of an analysis of "Being-there."This, he argues is the only way to break the deadlock in the discussion of Being begun by the Greek philosophers?a deadlock dueto the fact that philosophers, at least since Aristotle, always discussed beings rather than Being.1 To gain an approach to Being, wemust study not things but a mode of Being; and the mode of Beingmost open to us is our own Being: Being-there. Of this Heideggerproposes to offer a phenomenological analysis, and he expresslystates his indebtedness to Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological school (especially on p. 38). Indeed, Being and Timefirst appeared in Husserl's Jahrbuch f?r Philosophie und ph?nomenologische Forschung.It is entirely typical of Heidegger's essentially unphenomenological procedure that he explains "The phenomenological method ofthe inquiry" (?7) by devoting one subsection to "The concept ofthe phenomenon" and another to "The concept of the Logos," eachtime offering dubious discussions of the etymologies of the Greekwords, before he finally comes to the conclusion that the meaningof phenomenology can be formulated: "to allow to see from itselfthat which shows itself, as it shows itself from itself" (Das was sichzeigt, so wie es sich von ihm selbst her zeigt, von ihm selbst hersehen lassen). And he himself adds: "But this is not saying anythingdifferent at all from the maxim cited above; 'To the things themselves!'" This had been Husserl's maxim. Heidegger takes sevenpages of dubious arguments, questionable etymologies, and extremely arbitrary and obscure coinages and formulations to say in abizarre way what not only could be said, but what others beforehim actually had said, in four words.1 My suggestion that the distinction between das Sein and das Seiende be rendered in English by using Being for the former and beings for the latter hasHeidegger's enthusiastic approval. His distinction was suggested to him by theGreek philosophers, and he actually found the English "beings" superior to theGerman Seiendes because the English recaptures the Greek plural, ta onta. (Cf.my Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, p .206.) All translations from theGerman in the present essay are my own.76In Being and Time coinages are the crux of his technique. Hecalls "the characteristics of Being-there existentials [Existenzialien].They must be distinguished sharply from the determinations of theBeing of those beings whose Being is not Being-there, the latterbeing categories" (p. 44). "Existentials and categories are the twobasic possibilities of characteristics of Being. The beings that correspond to them demand different modes of asking primary questions: beings are either Who (existence) or Which (Being-at-handin the widest sense)" (p. 45).It has not been generally noted, if it has been noted at all, thatwithout these quaint locutions the book would not only be muchless obscure, and therefore much less fitted for endless discussionsin European and South-American graduate seminars, but also afraction of its length?considerably under 100 pages instead of438. For Heidegger does not introduce coinages to say briefly whatwould otherwise require lengthy repititions. On the contrary.While Kierkegaard had derided professorial manners and concentrated on the most extreme experiences, and Nietzsche wroteof guilt, conscience, and death as if he did not even know ofacademic airs, Heidegger housebreaks Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche'sproblems by discussing them in such a style that Hegel and Aquinasseem unacademic by comparison. The following footnote is entirelycharacteristic: "The auth. may remark that he has repeatedly communicated the analysis of the about-world [Umwelt] and, altogether, the 'hermeneutics of the facticity' of Being-there, in hislectures since the wint. semest. 1919/20" (p. 72). Husserl is alwayscited as "E. Husserl" and Kant as "I. Kant"?and his minions dutifully cite the master as "M. Heidegger."How Kierkegaard would have loved to comment on Heidegger'soccasional "The detailed reasons for the following considerationswill be given only in . . . Part II, Section 2"?which never saw thelight of day (p. 89). Eleven pages later we read: "only now thehere accomplished critique of the Cartesian, and fundamentally stillpresently accepted, world-ontology can be assured of its philosophicrights. To that end the following must be shown (cf. Part I, Sect.3)." Alas, this, too, was never published; but after reading the fourquestions that follow one does not feel any keen regret. Witnessthe second: "Why is it that in-worldly beings take the place ofthe leaped-over phenomenon by leaping into the picture as theontological topic?" (I.e., why have beings been discussed insteadof Being?) Though Heidegger is hardly a poet, his terminology77recalls one of Nietzsche's aphorisms: "The poet presents his thoughtsfestively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could notwalk" (The Portable Nietzsche, p. 54).If all the sentences quoted so far are readily translatable intoless baroque language, the following italicized explanation of understanding (p. 144) may serve as an example of the many more opaquepronouncements. (No other well-known philosophic work containsnearly so many italics?or rather their German equivalent whichtakes up twice as much space as ordinary type.) "Understandingis the existential Being of the own Being-able-to-be of Being-thereitself, but such that this Being in itself opens up the Where-at ofBeing with itself" (Verstehen ist das existenziale Sein des eigenenSeink?nnens des Daseins selbst, so zwar, dass dieses Sein an ihmselbst das Woran des mit ihm selbst Seins erschliesst). The following sentence reads in full: "The structure of this existential mustnow be grasped and expressed still more sharply." Still more?Heidegger's discussion of death comes near the beginning of thesecond of the two sections he published. To understand it, two keyconcepts of the first section should be mentioned briefly. The firstis Das Man, one of Heidegger's happier coinages. The German wordman is the equivalent of the English one in such locutions as "onedoes not do that" or "of course, one must die." But the Germanman does not have any of the other meanings of the English wordone. It is therefore understandable why Das Man has been translatedsometimes as "the public" or "the anonymous They," but sinceHeidegger also makes much of the phrase Man selbst, which means"oneself," it is preferable to translate Das Man as "the One." TheOne is the despot that rules over the inauthentic Being-there of oureveryday live

Ms. Jones, who had previously edited translations of the French philosophers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, the Child book opened a new career path, editing culinary writers: James Beard and Marion Cunningham on American fare, Madhur Jaffrey (Indian food), Claudia Roden (Middle Eastern), Edna Lewis (Southern), Lidia Bastianich and Marcella Hazan (Italian), and many others.

According to Albert Camus, the world or the human being is not in itself absurd. The concept only emerges through the juxtaposition of the two, where life becomes absurd due to the incompatibility between human beings and the world they inhabit.[

1 Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: "Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours." That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday

it is in the power of man, by his own pains and industry, to forward the perfection of-his nature.

if to do thatis human, if that's what it tak§, tnen I am a human being after all. 'Fully, freely, gladly, for tneficst time.