Episode #227 ... Albert Camus - On Exile
4/18/202534 min
Today we talk about the concept of exile from the work of Camus. We focus on a couple stories from his book Exile and The Kingdom. We talk about why Camus insists that true lucidity can only arise from the jarring lived experience he calls “exile,” not from armchair reflection. We talk about Janine’s desert epiphany in “The Adulterous Woman.” We talk about school‑teacher Daru in “The Guest,” trapped between France and Algeria, whose double exile shows how history can choose for us. We talk about the everyday escape hatches—nostalgia, comfort contracts, curated news bubbles—that let people dodge exi...
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsStephen West· Host0:00
Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This! So listen to these last three episodes we've done recently on Albert Camus. You can hear some of the terms he's been throwing around, like solidarity, rebellion, lucidity. You can hear these things and be on board with what he's saying in theory, but it's quite another thing to be able to apply these things to your life in any sort of real way. I mean, you can theoretically understand, you could be looking at the world in a more life-affirming way. But look, you can't just all of a sudden be like, "Oh, I get it now. I just gotta be more lucid about stuff. That's what's been missing from my life this whole time." No, to Camus, you don't just think your way into a more lucid framing of your reality. This is something that in many ways a person has to arrive at through lived experience. That much like in the work of Dostoevsky or the religious mystics we've talked about, or even certain lines of Zen Buddhism on the podcast lately, there's certain insights about what it is to be a human being that can only be arrived at by experiencing them directly. And to Camus, one of these important experiences that you gotta have in your life, but that a lot of people spend most of their lives running away from, is what he's gonna call the experience of exile. Now, just to understand what he's talking about here, let's start with an example of exile that's far too extreme, and then we'll readjust from there. Imagine being a member of a village deep in the jungle somewhere, you know, lots of people in this village of yours. And let's say one day you do something that makes everyone in this village really mad at you. They all decide they've had enough of your genius behavior for one lifetime, and they cast you out into the jungle and say to never