Of all the things that people have said about happiness over the years, Albert Camus probably had the strangest message - or at least one of the most counterintuitive messages - about it. In any book that you’re likely to find anywhere in the world.
Full stop.
And since happiness is one of the most important concepts to most people, it has had an astronomical amount of strange things written about it.
Still, I classify Camus, the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature award recipient, as the thinker with the strangest insight here. Not only did the life Camus led inform an amazingly straightforward and simple message regarding happiness; it also provided him with the foundation he needed to stand on to get to a powerfully correct formulation.
Like a brilliancy in chess, the philosophy of Camus comes out of left field and hits you, and you just know it was right. This short essay will explain who Camus was and then unpack his philosophy of happiness.
Camus’ Background & Message
Camus was a highly popular philosopher writing in France in the midpart of the twentieth century. The company he kept was elite among the philosophers of his time, including both Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Though he personally resisted being labeled as an Existentialist, he has posthumously been categorized as one. During World War II, Camus was a deeply political figure - he ran a newspaper that was actually illegal. It was a French Resistance newspaper called Combat and as Editor-in-Chief, Camus helped the resistance to organize to resist fascism.
Camus had a very simple thought, regarding happiness: it is inevitable. It finds us all, sooner or later. And, importantly, you’re still likely to feel it even if you’ve suffered a debilitating injury, are very old and infirm, are suffering from a chronic illness (even depression!), or otherwise suffer some sort of major fall from grace, health, or dignity.
The message is one that seems counterintuitive at first because we think of the relationship between health and unhealth or wealth and poverty or any of the other vectors along which a fall from grace can occur, we think of these relationships as a whole when we consider them in the abstract. It is the farthest thing from our minds to realize that what makes us happy in the moment has a lot more to do with the immediately prior moment than with the highest, most abstract levels of things we could think about it.
What is Happiness?
We can begin to understand the message of Albert Camus by first understanding the concepts involved with it. Happiness, in the penetrating insight of the mind of Camus, is understood to be a relationship. The relationship is one which, having lived through the Nazi occumpation, Camus understands to be relative. That is, whether you’re happy right now is deeply dependent upon the state of the world ten minutes ago, a week ago, a year ago, for you.
Say you’re subjected to an external pressure, such as the invasion of your country by a hostile power. Worse, this hostile power is successful - they come in and have an impact and you’re powerless to stop it and you don’t like it.
In the immediate moment, you will probably feel very angry. Then, as time goes by, you’ll slip into more of a depressed state of affairs and generally feel unhappy.
However, even if nothing changes and all of these hostile activities continue to be major contributors to your external environment, you will still end up feeling happy.
Perhaps you find a way to successfully network with others to resist the influence of the hostile foreign power that has overwhelmed the defenses of your nation, like Camus did. Perhaps you’ll be subject to something entirely different, and the analogy to Camus will seem like a stretch.
If we render the idea itself in the abstract, following in Camus’ own footsteps, we will begin to come to understand that what happiness is, at the very heart of the matter, is a relation between the state of the world as you understand it (i.e., your expectations) and the things that you observe actually happening.
Why is Happiness Inevitable?
The move to understanding why it is inevitable that the human mind find happiness in all cases, given enough time, is accomplished simply now: all you have to do is realize that something has gone better than you expected, and you will feel happy. Camus lived through major trauma to himself and those he was close to under the Nazi regime. He surely must have felt so devastated at times that he never thought he would ever “get it back” and feel happy again.
But then the war ended. Suddenly he was a celebrity. Camus’ work at Combat was appreciated, his books sold, and people admired him! What a rush that must have been. Still, the insight did not likely stem from the end of the war and the ascent to fame. Instead, it’s much more likely that the dark days of the Resistance movement were the times when Camus saw the light break the darkness. And thus we can say that the insight of Camus is a powerful beacon to the oppressed, the downtrodden, and those whose hopes have been dashed.
In the darkest times, even when the hope has faded, happiness seeps through. This is the magic of being human.
Conflict: Eudaimonia vs. Camus
I’ve been thinking about the problem set of the philosophy of happiness for about a decade at this point in all sorts of strange situations myself. If you’ve gotten this far in this essay, I bet you think about happiness sometimes too. Maybe you want to be able to create it more easily for and in yourself, maybe you want to find ways to build it up in others. Maybe it's comforting if we frame it as the brain finding its thermodynamic equilibrium again and returning to a state of health, but even as a student of neuroscience myself there's something that's a bit too reductive about this.
The way I look at it, a lot of well-developed modern sciences end up with a bifurcation. In physics this has to do with the quantum and the Newtonian: quantum behavior is expected to violate the norms of Newtonian mechanics that visible objects observe. The study of happiness is no different, as the oldest ideas seem white-glove tailored for aristocrats and kings while modern thinking increasingly revolves around the ordinary citizen. Add in the learnings of the past forty or so years from cognitive neuroscience, and you can end up with all sorts of strange and occasionally contradictory "good" ways of thinking about the phenomena we observe in the wild--parts of Aristotle's philosophy remain extremely strong even as modernity forces us to reinterpret them to account for our own experiences. Camus' philosophy of happiness represents a sea change in the way people are thinking about these issues, an entirely new layer of philosophical reflection becomes possible if we read him correctly.
In the philosophy of happiness, mostly everything stems from an ancient thinker - not Isaac Newton, but Aristotle. Aristotle’s work denotes a form of happiness that’s prized above all others, known as eudaimonia, which is an activity that we can participate in after we succeed in doing the right thing at the right time for the right reason consistently enough to build the life we want to live. Then, just living and occasionally reflecting on the state of affairs we’re subject to is a very good experience for us.
The problem is that, for Aristotle, a lot of people can never be happy. Their lives are too hard. Their luck is too bad. And in Ancient Greece, where the population was divided into slaves and free people, perhaps the idea really was just kind of “oops, sorry about yah!” if you didn’t happen to fall into one of the lucky or useful cliques in society. In fairness, most if not all civilizations suffer from this quirk of social reality.
The Value of Camus-style Happiness
Camus did something wonderful in recognizing the absurdity of modern life. Being part of a modern culture means embracing contradictions and, even if we accept that on the face of it, objectively, reaching eudaimonia is a worthy goal, Camus’ keen insight gives us the truth of the matter: this is not the only sort of happiness. It may not even be the only sort of happiness worth having.
In my past few years on this earth, I’ve been put through the wringer. Cancer, money troubles, social isolation - my whole family has been suffering and struggling to adjust to the post-pandemic world, which seems dead set on killing us. I’ve seen the Camus form of happiness, and the way it looks from here, I’m not at all ready to say that it’s less good than eudaimonia.
It may be fair to call eudaimonia something like “the practice of high happiness” and refer to the built-in variety of happiness Camus spoke of “low happiness” but I don’t think so.
I think that the Camus variety of happiness is the source from which all good things, including eudaimonia, flow. I think the highest good of the human being is our resolve to protect the things we love, to sacrifice our comforts in the name of doing right, and our resiliency in the face of hardship. I would bet money that that thought makes you think of an example of this phenomenon in your own life. Because Camus was right, and most of us know it before we begin. It’s why we are willing to take the social risks we take.
In the end, the message Camus leaves us is one of hope. You can do what you want to do and, even if it works out badly, or even if you lose something/someone you love dearly, the thing you can count on the most is that before you die, you will again find happiness.
Reconciliation?
I want to speculate a bit about the space between Camus and Aristotle. Aristotle’s concept, eudaimonia, goodness of spirit, involves an action that needs to be taken - at the right time, for the right reason, in the right manner - to achieve the effect. It’s like casting a magic spell. You spend years of your life doing things that help others and make you feel good and you don’t do things to hurt people unless you’re convinced that it’s justified and then, at the end of it, after following all of these rules, you have an opportunity to take stock. When you do, *bam!* - eudaimonia.
Camus rejects all of this. Camus says live your life, even if you do things wrongly or something awful happens, you will still find happiness. But where’s the recipe? How do we find this happiness? Aristotle gives us something like an instructions manual, whereas Camus sees no need to do any such thing because happiness is, to him, a built-in mechanism that is just part of our experience. Hit rock bottom? *bam!* Happiness comes back to you like a lucky penny.
What if the psychological techniques people were using today had bearing here? What if we could combine the Camus (modern egalitarian) view with the Aristotelian (ancient aristocratic) view of happiness?
Well, in this case, I think you’d say that the recipe is to detach - just a little! You want to stay engaged! - from your expectations. Getting what you want is nowhere near as important as you probably think it is. Instead of feeling down when things don’t go your way, face it. Sit with it. Recognize it, look it in the eyes, and shake hands with it. Then, keep going. Keep your eyes open.
The next thing that’s going to make you happy always comes after something that makes you sad. You can rest assured that this is the case, because it’s a deep truth of human nature not only for you but for everyone alive. It’s the beating heart of what it means to be human. You can believe in this. And perhaps there’s a little magic here, too - because once you know to look for it, your attention will naturally orient forward. This breaks up the routine of rumination and really does help us to imagine alternatives to our traumas and think about our goals to move forward.
If we can truly reconcile Camus’ insights with the Aristotelian foundation of modern philosophy, the insight should give us a path of action that can help us to maximize our happiness by staying present instead of ejecting when things become unpleasant or disagreeable.
Bibliography
- Camus, A. (1942). The stranger (S. Gilbert, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published as L'Étranger)
- Camus, A. (1942). The myth of Sisyphus (J. O'Brien, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published as Le Mythe de Sisyphe)
- Camus, A. (1947). The plague (S. Gilbert, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published as La Peste)
