The Ethical Pragmatism of Albert Camus: Two Studies in the History of Ideas

In what, since the age of its Enlightenment, the West has perceived to be an absurd universe, it has had continually to choose between two ways of life as consequences of that perception and of the movement which gave it rise: these are the way of ethics and the way of modern historicist ideology, the way of a moral imperative without God and that of the will to become God in His place. The first is illogical, but the second is irrational, -la predication de la surhumanite, – as Camus says, -aboutissant a la fabrication methodique des sous-hommes.- The way of ethics or of man as an end in himself is the way of Camus as well, and one the reflection of whose origins and raison d’etre in his own thought is the subject of the two studies in the present essay.”