Episode 227 - Transcript

Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So listening 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, that 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! Guess that’s what’s been MISSING from my life!

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, lots of people in this village of yours…and lets say one day you do something that makes everyone in the 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 come back. 

Now when you’re OUT there in the jungle by yourself…you know, eating leaves…rubbing sticks together, jaguars circling in the background…well this is not a good FEELING, this feeling of EXILE from the safety of the community you once LIVED in.

You could say this is a type of HOMELESSNESS…you’re experiencing here. That being in EXILE…is a matter of being smacked across the FACE with the fact that this VILLAGE you used to be a part of…in terms of it providing SECURITY, for your LIFE…turns out it’s not as SOLID of an option as you once thought it was. 

I mean there was a time where your PLACE in that village felt like it was the absolute TRUTH to you. But now you’re starting to realize… there’s some real LIMITATIONS to it that make the security that ONCE felt like home…START to seem like it was a set of illusions. 

For Camus…EXILE is gonna BE…THIS state of metaphysical homelessness. 

It’s gonna be when we lose a sense of HOME, USUALLY against our will. Where then once we’re IN this new place WITHOUT a home…we may LONG to go BACK to the way things once WERE…but exile is going to be where for any NUMBER of reasons…we find that it’s IMPOSSIBLE to go back to the SAME set of illusions we once lived in. 

And as you’re no doubt GUESSING by this point…for Camus this is going to apply to FAR more areas of our experience than just being PHYSICALLY exiled out in the jungle or something.

Because we aren’t, JUST physical CREATURES to Camus obviously…an IMPORTANT thing about the environment that we live in… is that it ALSO includes this existential tension of the absurd. 

And at the level of the universe…you are not ENTITLED…to a permanent state of ANYTHING in this life…yeah, when it comes to physical SAFETY, but how about ALSO: to knowledge about the world, to love, meaning, beauty, belonging. WHATEVER it is.

I mean any FORM of these things that you EVER EXPERIENCE in your life to Camus…is strictly provisional. These are subject to change– these are things that need to be REVISED on an almost every day basis BY YOU. And to NOT do that work…to spend your life making ARRANGEMENTS where you SEE these things as more OWED to you or UNCHANGING than they really ARE…well this is to do what MOST of us do, and spend your life on the RUN from this feeling of exile.

And when we ENCOUNTER these sorts of limitations and are HIT with the fact that our old set of illusions are shattered…and that no matter WHAT it is…that there really is no “PROMISED LAND”... for us in this life. The REALIZATION of that fact, the LIVING IMMERSED, IN that fact…that feeling of EXILE for Camus… is going to be one of the most important things you can EVER EXPERIENCE… if you WANTED to affirm life at a level that FEW people ever see. It’s something that points the WAY… towards a reintegration with people and the world itself, AWAY from theoretical abstractions. And here’s the thing ABOUT exile like I said before: this will BE something for him… that you ultimately have to EXPERIENCE…it’s NOT something you can get to by just THINKING about your thinking. 

We’ll talk about SEVERAL, different examples today of very IMPORTANT ways exile shows up in our lives. 

We’ll also talk about some common methods people use to RUN AWAY from it all the time. And Camus was a MASTER of spotting exile even in the little things that people just explain away. Things people SWEAR are just NORMAL ways to behave. 

Should be said though… Camus…you know, doing his best to be an artist in his work and not a philosopher…he’s already shown us some pretty beautiful IMAGES of exile so far in the work we’ve already covered. 

He shows us Sisyphus…clearly in a state of exile as he’s alone, pushing his rock up a hill condemned by the Gods… this state of EXILE that’s he’s in leading to the lucid realizations about his life that Camus asks us to imagine. There’s also Meursault in the stranger who’s in a state of exile, you know, where he’s a STRANGER within the very society he lives in. 

Then there’s also his book The Plague we’ve talked about…where Camus shows us a more collective state of exile. Where Dr. Rieux, Jean Tarrou and others encounter the Plague… and then they’re quarantined into a state of exile, where their city’s cut OFF from the rest of the world. 

He eventually shows us how it’s only through BEING in this state of exile TOGETHER…that they eventually FACE the absurd head on and find solidarity. Exile, again then, becomes the uncomfortable thing that GETS them to this deeper understanding of their true connection to others.

And if all you had were these well KNOWN versions of exile from the work of Camus…well you’d be fine honestly. I mean your life would probably still be okay. 

But as the resident guy in your LIFE here, that’s spent way too much time reading philosophy in MY life, I wanted to turn you on to ANOTHER book that Camus wrote LATER in his career… where it’s the most focused effort he EVER GIVES us in his work…of creating IMAGES of this concept of exile that are highly relatable. 

It’s a book he wrote in 1957 called Exile and the Kingdom. 

Six short stories…ALL of which paint a different image of people caught in a state of exile– and it’s usually by the way a complicated, DOUBLE form of exile for these characters as we’ll see. 

And these examples are great I think because look: bubonic plagues, mythical figures pushing a rock up a hill, these are WONDERFUL and all…but there’s something about having REAL examples from the lives of PEOPLE… that’ll allow us to unpack EXILE on this episode a lot more effectively than we OTHERWISE would.

So consider the FIRST of these six short stories…it’s a story about a woman named Janine, who finds herself PRESSURED to go on a vacation with her husband… it’s the story that Camus chooses to OPEN the BOOK with and he gives it the title: The Adulterous Woman. 

Now you HEAR that title… and you MAY think this is a woman… who’s going to have an affair with someone in this story…well NOT in the way you may be thinking. 

Should be said… this VACATION, that Janine got pressured to go on…ISN’T, JUST a vacation. 

Her husband’s a salesman, he travels to the Sahara Desert in the country of Algeria to try to sell stuff to people…and he doesn’t want to be on this trip all alone so he asks his wife Janine to go along with him. Let’s go together and just call this whole thing a vacation, he says.  

She admits when she IMAGINED going on this trip up in her head…she thought it was gonna be a bunch of soft sand and palm trees everywhere– PARADISE basically. 

But then she actually GETS there… and she’s soon hit with the REALITY… of being in the desert…the heat, the cold, sand everywhere in your shoes in your hair…rocks and dead grass essentially as far as the eye can see.  

More than just with the landscape though…Janine is SHOCKED when she gets there… by the very different, NOMADIC sort of PEOPLE… that LIVE in this desert region of Algeria. She doesn’t LIKE them that much. She finds the way they act to be ABRASIVE…to the way she’s USED to seeing people act, where SHE comes from in her home country of France. 

Now some important context here about this story and the rest of the book. 

Camus himself…is a man who was BORN in Algeria…and then MOVED to France later ON to further pursue his artistic career. And BECAUSE of this…he’s a man who feels a SPECIAL connection OUTSIDE of writing this book… to BOTH Algeria as a country, and France as a country. He loves BOTH of them.

Now Algeria during this time that he’s writing this…was a COLONY of France, struggling for independence, they’re in the middle of a war FIGHTING with France. And as is the case with MANY colonial situations like this, even if you’re NOT someone actively shooting a gun…there’s horrible violence going on around you, power struggles…I mean, to call it TENSION that exists between the people of Algeria and their French colonizers… would be an UNDERSTATEMENT. 

But REMEMBER though: JANINE in this book… is a woman from France…who's on VACATION in ALGERIA…who’s LOOKING at the people that LIVE there, ANNOYED by many of their differences to her. 

She thinks they’re weird at times… arrogant and inconsiderate at other times…I mean you can imagine this married couple from France in the middle of the desert on vacation…some guy that lives there will walk by them a little too close and her husband is like, who do these people think they ARE?...she’ll be like oh, just let it go honey let’s just get outta here! 

They’re a couple of VERY closed off people, JUDGING everything around them, TRYING to keep their world as small as POSSIBLE. And THIS is Camus’ point here: on THIS particular TRIP…Janine is going to start to notice…that keeping the world small like this… is what they’re DOING when they’re in their marriage together.

She STARTS by taking a long look at her husband…and she just SEES THROUGH the GAME they’ve both been playing more than she ever HAS before. 

She hears the way he’s TALKING to people as he’s trying to SELL stuff to them…where he has this really obvious set of TACTICS he’s using just to GET something from people…it’s a bit cringe from her perspective. More than that though: she looks at him…and she SEES how he just starts complaining the SECOND things get IMMEDIATELY outside of his comfort zone. She starts thinking about him more as a partner: you know, 25 years ago they got together…he was a law student, she was a young woman, and he asked her to MARRY him. 

They agreed to BE the thing for each other that was ALWAYS going to be there no matter what happens. When the world gets hot or cold or sandy…when these annoying NOMADIC people start coming AROUND them getting a bit too close…let’s MAKE and ARRANGEMENT they said…so that we never have to deal with ANY of this stuff alone, facing it head on. 

And look she doesn’t HATE the guy. He has good qualities. He’s generous with her she says. When she really ASKS for something he’ll always DO it. 

But there’s THINGS about the way they talk to each other in this marriage… that SHOW her something IMPORTANT about this arrangement they have. He’ll say things like: don’t worry, if I ever die…I’ve made sure you’re gonna be financially taken CARE of. 

And she HEARS that…and she’s like, okay…that’s GREAT. But it’s also in another sense…a really FEARFUL thing to say. To say something like that… is completely MISSING something IMPORTANT about what life IS isn’t it? 

I mean think of the kind of person you’d have to be to HEAR that… and to be just completely relieved. Where RUNNING from the volatility of life…is one of your biggest CONCERNS every day when you think about what your partner PROVIDES to you. 

Look don’t get her wrong: she APPRECIATES that her husband would do this for her…but there’s a WHOLE other way of LOOKING at life here…where financial hardship like that…having to start over…having your back up against a wall sometimes…is just PART of what it IS to be a human being. 

What person structures their life… around being able to RUN from life all the time? 

This goes BEYOND just a marriage for Camus though: I mean imagine if any time LIFE like this came your way and you were about to have to FACE something difficult head on…imagine if you always had someone to bail you out…so that you never had to experience the hardship fully. 

Now you wouldn’t RESENT the support system, of COURSE not…but to STRUCTURE your LIFE this way…that WOULD be in denial of SOMETHING about what life is. And the INVERSE of this is a bit strange TOO…imagine someone who has a really bad string of luck…they lose EVERYTHING in their life…and then imagine if someone’s choice was to just give UP on life altogether. 

BOTH of these responses…would be them staying safe, in DENIAL of something IMPORTANT about a LUCID take on what human existence IS sometimes. In other words: this would be a way to avoid EXILE. 

And when it comes to Janine and her marriage: how much of this whole… ARRANGEMENT that they HAVE as a couple…is JUST to try to AVOID this feeling of exile? 

There’s a sense in which she’s not even sure if her husband even LOVES her anymore. But at the SAME time she wonders, sadly: does it even really MATTER if he does or NOT…given the nature of this SERVICE that they provide each other that helps them keep their world mutually small? 

Now NOTICING this…Janine finds herself in what you could call a DOUBLE, state of exile. 

On ONE hand she doesn’t feel at home even in her own MARRIAGE… and feels like she sees BEYOND the set of illusions she used to live in that allowed her to DENY some aspect of her life. But then she ALSO doesn’t feel at home… when she’s NOT in her marriage… or when she’s out in the desert of Algeria, around all these people that don’t play the same set of social games that SHE does… and so their existence is an AFFRONT to her and her husband. 

And it’s this metaphysical homelessness she’s in… combined with the inability to go BACK to the way she USED to see things…this puts her in a place that is VERY uncomfortable…where it DRIVES her to move FORWARD in her life in a transformative way. In other words: exile here…becomes a CATALYST…for finding a way to RELATE to her existence and the people around her in a more lucid way. 

And what she starts to get DRAWN to in the story it turns out…IS the desert itself. Which is just BEAUTIFUL work by Camus here… to have the DESERT be the thing that she has a LOVE affair with.

Again The Adulterous Woman as a title… is NOT referring to her cheating on her husband with another PERSON…she cheats on the set of cold, shallow arrangements that they HAVE with each other…that GROUND the very essence of their marriage. 

See cause: they’re walking around one day in the story… someone recommends to them that climb up on top of this fort and go check out the view of the desert that’s all around them. It’s BEAUTIFUL they say. 

Janine suggests they do it. Her husband says why, come on, what are we even DOING here? Janine says PLEASE can we go, he says OKAY fine lets go for a minute. So she gets UP on the top of this fort, looks out at the EXPANSE of the desert shooting out in all directions…and in this moment she starts to just feel overwhelmed… by how CONNECTED to this place she feels. 

As she looks out she can’t HELP but think that the desert…while it’s very EMPTY, some might even call it a barren landscape…but on some OTHER level the desert is also a place that’s very free. She even SEES some of the nomadic people in the distance that are LIVING in the desert. They have no idea who she even IS, probably never WILL. 

In other words the desert becomes a PLACE for her… that’s unrestricted by a bunch of the normal hallmarks of civilization…things that are USUALLY built in an attempt… to try to protect people from the sun and the elements and all the PROBLEMS that come with the FREEDOM of a place like the desert. These people IN the desert to her…BECOME people that are, “possessing nothing, but serving NO ONE, they are the destitute and free lords of a strange kingdom."

And if you’ve listened to the last few episodes we’ve DONE on Camus you will NO doubt see what he’s DOING. This WHOLE SCENE…CLEARLY represents some of the symbolism we’ve talked about all THROUGHOUT his work. The desert representing the absurd…where on one hand yes, it's an empty void, but on the other hand BRINGS to a person a new level of freedom. The sun represents the immanence of reality and the mediterranean spirit OUTSIDE of the typical ABSTRACTIONS people live in. There’s also the intense WEATHER of the desert…that represents what we sometimes have to FACE while affirming the world and our own existence. 

See Janine FEELS the SPIRIT of this lucid revolt…CALLING to her in a sense here. And experiencing the desert FULLY like this… wakes her UP into a feeling of deep LONGING that she has, a LONGING for something that has no object, but is absolutely there.

But still, as Janine’s looking out at the desert, and her husband’s complaining and wanting to go back to the hotel…and he’s calling her silly and asking her what she’s even DOING staring off into the HORIZON…still she can’t help but feel that this moment…is one that is SHATTERING a set of illusions… that she will NEVER be able to go back to. 

And once they get BACK to the hotel in the book, and she’s feeling sick and they decide to go to sleep for the night, the room is cold, again sand is everywhere, it’s a horrible hotel room…but they’re snuggling in bed next to each other… and she can’t help but notice how EASY it would be… to just do what they’ve ALWAYS done: to keep each other warm, wake up the next day and live yet another day the same way they ALWAYS have. 

But on THIS particular night, with her husband asleep, she sneaks out of the room, into the cold…she RUNS BACK to the spot where she saw the desert earlier that day… and she decides to take it all in AGAIN this time all by herself. 

After she returns back to the room, she crawls back in bed, her husband wakes up, walks over to the sink to get some water like he normally does, and he notices that his wife’s crying. He asks her what’s wrong. She says, oh it’s nothing dear, don’t worry. And that’s where the story ends. 

Now the SIMILARITIES here…to the behavior of a person having a DIFFERENT kind of affair are deliberate. And the ending of the story being so ambiguous is ALSO very deliberate. To Camus: to BE in a state of exile… is NOT to arrive at some neat end to the story…and it’s NOT to have perfect information about what EXACTLY is going to be happening next. 

See this is a REALLY important detail about exile…that Camus wanted to get across in this story…exile, when you PAY ATTENTION to it…exile is OFTEN the price someone has to pay for being HONEST, about their existential condition. 

And for Camus it’s like look: CHOOSING to spend your life on the RUN from exile like this…well this is a recipe for TWO things that you’re gonna start having more of in your life for him, one: you’re gonna not fully APPRECIATE things like love, belonging, meaning as much when you DO provisionally have them, you’ll ALWAYS to a degree be taking them for granted in your life like you’ve ARRIVED…and two: it’s a recipe for being absolutely BLINDSIDED… when the EVENTS of your life inevitably SHOW you the limitations OF this set of arrangements you have. Notice how Janine could live her life for 25 YEARS in a set of arrangements that were MASQUERADING… as love and belonging…only to be BLINDSIDED during ONE MOMENT of lucid reflection that ALL of this… was an attempt to DENY certain realities about what her life IS. 

See when she looks back 25 years in the story…thinking BACK to a time when her life made more SENSE to her…NOSTALGIA like this…to Camus this is a very PREDICTABLE RESPONSE that people often have when they’re HIT with a state of exile. 

Because THINK of what nostalgia IS: it’s a type of metaphysical HOMELESSNESS…at the level of TIME. 

Nostalgia… is feeling SO not at home during the CURRENT moment that you’re living in…that you RUN from that feeling… and then harken BACK to a time when things were more MEANINGFUL or things were BETTER. Nostalgia is a RESPONSE to EXILE for Camus.

And consider how a POINT like this…makes this entire PROJECT of his so unique. I mean SO many people alive today: if you asked them, what is nostalgia? THESE days it’s popular to come up with some kind of PSYCHOLOGICAL explanation for it. 

THAT’S the hallmark of our times. What is nostalgia? Well you seek nostalgia all the time…because you have some insecure attachment, that wasn’t formed properly in your childhood…so now you LONG for this other time you used to live in…or how bout: nostalgia is a maladaptive, avoidance behavior you’ve developed over time, that DISTORTS your view of the past AND the present… and then fuels this DEPRESSION that we’ve been trying to heal in you…how bout ANY psychological narrative where we simply EXPLAIN our behavior… in terms of how it connects to a set of protocols.

Camus would be VERY SKEPTICAL… of this approach being the final WORD on any of this. And of COURSE he wouldn’t say that we should STOP doing psychology…but he would see it as INCREDIBLY valuable to NOT lose sight… of the PERMANENT set of tensions that we are ALWAYS having a psychological experience WITHIN. 

He’d invite people to SEE their own experience… as NOT just a problem to be SOLVED. He’d invite them to try to BE in their experience…MORE fully. To not to try to rationally subordinate it by LINKING it to a set of theoretical abstractions like this. 

That part of affirming the absurdity of existence fully for him…is knowing there are THINGS about it… that EXCEED rational explanation like this. That it is part of the KIND of creature that you ARE… to WANT more out of life than life can GIVE you. And what if exile…is not just some, epiphenomenon…of some underlying COMPLEX you’ve developed over your life. What if Exile is a fundamental, existential condition of the KINDS of creatures we are? 

If you spent 20 years in therapy and you feel LESS ANXIOUS on the other side of it. Is that because you have a narrative that helps you rationally EXPLAIN your anxiety now? Or is that because you’ve just had to FACE more EXILE, head ON… IN your life over those years?

Let’s talk about ANOTHER story in this book that shows MORE sides of what Camus called exile. TOTALLY different characters in this one, but the story’s STILL set in Algeria…the title of the story is: The Guest.

Main character of the story… is a schoolteacher named Daru. 

Now Daru is a guy that is ethnically French, but is BORN and raised in Algeria. And for most of his life he LIVES in a schoolhouse, on TOP of a big hill… and his life is to TEACH the Algerian children that are IN the surrounding villages AROUND this hill he lives on. 

And Daru for whatever it’s worth…LOVES his LIFE as a schoolteacher. He doesn’t want ANYTHING other than what he has. 

So if you’re someone that enjoys your OWN life, you may be able to RELATE to him as a character…because he’s extremely frustrated in the book…when this WAR breaks out in Algeria between the indigenous population and the French colonial RULE. 

This is rather INCONVENIENT to him… as someone who FEELS like a citizen… of BOTH these countries. He SEES it from both sides…doesn’t really want to PICK a side. And the whole situation gets even MORE inconvenient for him…when he looks out his window one day and sees a French colonial guard, leading a prisoner with his hands bound UP this giant hill to his schoolhouse…with NO idea what any of this is all about. 

The French guard arrives and tells Daru…that he’s being commissioned by the state to deliver this prisoner to be executed. That there’s a town several miles away where the authorities there are waiting for him…and Daru, after the weather calms down, he’s being commanded to walk this prisoner TO that town and hand him over. 

Now of COURSE Daru wants nothing to DO with this. He TELLS the guard he’s not gonna deliver him… and that he REFUSES to take a side. To which the guard says, look I’m gonna leave you to do whatever it is you’re gonna do here…but for whatever its worth you’ve INSULTED me here today good sir. Then he leaves. 

Daru spends all night hoping the prisoner will just make a run for it…CHANGE the situation so he doesn’t HAVE to make a choice. 

But the next morning, he wakes up, feeds the prisoner, starts walking him toward the town he’s gotta turn him into…and as he’s leaving his house he hears something behind him move, little rustle of the leaves…he looks back, sees nothing, decides to keep going. 

Later on, couple miles away from the town in the middle of the desert… Daru stops the prisoner from walking and gives him a choice. He gives him some money and some food…and he tells him there are two paths here for you to take. Follow THIS road to the left and it will take you to the town…you can turn yourself IN and face your execution. This other road to the RIGHT will take you to a group of nomads…they’ll welcome you in and protect you from the French authorities, you can LIVE your life going on with THEM. 

Daru starts walking back to his house and the prisoner just STANDS there. And as he gets close to where he’s gonna be out of eyeshot, curiosity gets the better of him, he looks back…and SEES the prisoner chose to GO to the town and turn himself IN. 

Daru goes BACK to the schoolhouse, opens the door, happy to be done with it all…when he sees written on the BLACKBOARD of the school… a MESSAGE that was left for him while he was gone. Scribbled in chalk on the blackboard it says: “You turned in our brother. You will pay.” Clearly a message WRITTEN by the surrounding Algerians that he teaches… that were WATCHING the whole thing go down, and GOT the wrong idea. 

Now again: the story ENDS right here…RIGHT at a point where we DON’T know exactly what is going to happen next. 

But let’s talk about the state of double exile that this character Daru was living in– because it’s SIMILAR to a state of exile that Camus faced during his OWN life. 

Consider the story: Daru looks around him at the political options that are available to him during his time…and he’s someone who doesn’t feel like EITHER side, really represents how he feels about the situation. And by the END of the story he’s CLEARLY someone who’s disliked by BOTH sides of the conflict. The French people can’t TRUST him…and the Algerian people think he just turned their GUY in. 

This metaphysical HOMELESSNESS…where Daru would LOVE to HAVE a side…OR he’d love for everyone to just leave him alone in his schoolhouse everyday so he never has to TAKE a side…Camus is showing us a character here where COMPLETELY against his will…he is being FORCED into a state of EXILE from BOTH of the places he once thought of as home, despite being PHYSICALLY right in the MIDDLE of them.

He’s forced to CONFRONT the fact… that the illusions he was once living in…you know the illusion of PEACE…that once went ON between colonized and colonizer in the state of Algeria…well that WASN’T EVER, a real state of peace in the FIRST place. 

And for Daru…even when he tries his hardest to NOT make a choice in the story…Camus is showing here how sometimes in the eyes of the people who are around you, constantly judging your actions…sometimes making a choice… isn’t even something of your own doing. Sometimes the CHOICE has already been made FOR you BY the EVENTS of the world… and that there’s NOTHING you can DO about it…except FACE the exile head on. 

And like I said: Camus definitely put a lot of HIMSELF… into this character of Daru. Not ONLY was he also French Algerian…but the political events of his time…ALSO, PUT him in a similar situation to this. 

See, very early ON in his life Camus was part of an upstart, Communist movement…and look once he did that… ANY right wing person from there on out was ALWAYS going to despise the guy. But then LATER in his life, after he CONDEMNS the violence that’s being carried out by the totalitarian LEFT after WW2…well, even THOSE people… some of them his CLOSEST FRIENDS at the time…REJECTED him for being too moderate. For not STANDING up sufficiently…to all the EVILS that were going on in the WORLD during his time.

Now WE know…by THIS point in the series…WHY Camus in his work tried to be so moderate, measured, and balanced in his approach…but regardless DURING HIS TIME… he FOUND himself living in a WORLD…where the EVENTS AROUND him…FORCED him into a state of double exile with the only two options that seemed available if you wanted people on your TEAM. 

Look: does anyone out there… know what it feels like…to truly LOVE your country and feel a REAL sense of belonging TO it…but then to ALSO… feel APPALLED at some of the moral realities of the things that it’s doing? This is a state of EXILE that you’re in. 

And this brings me to another, VERY important point about EXILE that Camus wanted to talk about with this book: exile is almost always something…where you have to be FORCED INTO it…if you EVER want to EXPERIENCE it fully. 

This can sound kind of weird at first because exile…at least on the surface…SEEMS like a pretty voluntary thing to do. 

I mean if I can theoretically PUT myself in a place where I SEE THROUGH the illusions I once was LIVING in…aren’t I PUTTING myself in a state of metaphysical HOMELESSNESS simply through my own will? I mean why shouldn’t THAT be possible?

But the way Camus talks about exile…it just SEEMS like sometimes…to GET the full EFFECT of it…it NEEDS to go on BEYOND some point of no return– where we, as people, DON’T really have full CONTROL over what’s going on.

And it’s interesting because there’s other PHILOSOPHERS from around this time that TALK about similar things in their OWN work. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Nietzsche…ALL these people used to put themselves out in the wilderness, AWAY from the world, into their OWN kind of irreversible exile. 

Simone De Beauvoir, as ANOTHER example of this…she used to go on these really long HIKES that she would write about in her diaries. She used to PUT herself OUT in the woods, FAR away from other people…and for HER it was a matter of getting AWAY from the typical BOXES society tells people to fall INTO– in Camus’ language: the ABSTRACTIONS that SIMPLIFY our lives.

But SHE talks about it she says not only do hikes like this get you back INTO your body in a big way…you know INTO the present moment, thinking about things like the strength of your legs, the AIR in your lungs, not ONLY was it about THAT…but she says it ALSO puts you in a place where you are FORCED to RECOGNIZE…how much YOU are the one that’s RESPONSIBLE…for every STEP you take going FORWARD. You go off the side of a cliff, you get eaten by a bear…that’s on YOU…out in the woods. 

Now here’s the thing: for Simone de Beauvoir…this was not just her strolling around a lake for a couple miles feeding the ducks along the way…no, she’d put herself 25 miles OUT into the middle of the woods… with nothing but a bottle of wine and some wicker non hiking shoes. I’m not even kidding. This is what she DID. And her REASONING for it was along these same lines we’re TALKING about.

That ONCE you get 20 miles into the woods…even if you WANTED to get out at that point…it’s gonna be at LEAST ANOTHER, 20 mile hike in the OTHER direction, JUST to get you back to where you STARTED. There’s a leap of FAITH going on there…a POINT of no return…where by surrendering, the control you usually HAVE over your situation…it PUTS you in a place where you LEARN things about your existence…that you CAN’T GET to WITHOUT surrendering that control. 

In other words: you might hear all this from Camus and think HEY, if exile’s so important…why don’t I just PUT myself in a state of exile every DAY… and it’ll be part of some existential, anime TRAINING montage for my LIFE…but it’s funny: it’s almost a paradox. You can’t PUT yourself into EXILE…but just pushing yourself on the ELIPTICAL at the gym or something. No, because there’s no POINT there…where you truly FEEL like there’s no going BACK…your car… is always fifty feet away in the PARKING lot. 

That there’s something TO EXILE…that FOR us to GET the full experience of it…it needs to BE something that we CAN’T go BACK ON– where we have to FIND a way to REMAIN in this NEW place we find ourselves in, a place where our OLD set of illusions are USELESS to us now. 

See in a way it brings us back to that hypothetical village that we STARTED the episode with. 

That village in the middle of the jungle somewhere…can FUNCTION to someone…like a kingdom. A kingdom that keeps them SAFE from all the REALITIES of living in the middle of the jungle. 

And people often CREATE kingdoms…ALL OVER the place in their EXPERIENCE of the world. Kingdoms that keep them safe from pain, hot, cold, sandyness in the desert…kingdoms that promise them meaning, love, belonging, in a way that’s completely permanent. 

But in this book exile and the kingdom by Camus…the point HE’S making: is that IF there IS ACTUALLY a kingdom that’s to be HAD out there…a kingdom based in a LUCID confrontation with reality…then that kingdom is always going to be provisional, and it’s NOT something that’s being made in an attempt to AVOID ANYTHING… about our reality. 

See picture someone who HEARS this whole series about Camus… and then just projects their own meanings onto the terms he’s using. Someone could say I GET it! The absurd tension between my existence and the universe is always there…BECAUSE of that life is suffering…I need to learn to LOOK at that suffering more LUCIDLY…and what THAT means is that I need to BAND together with OTHER people around me in SOLIDARITY…where TOGETHER we can make it a bit EASIER for each other… to HANDLE the absurdity of the universe. 

But look: this HAS to be REAL solidarity…not just BANDING TOGETHER for the sake of ESCAPING something about reality. Or avoiding moral accountability. And I mean not ONLY is this something that’s POSSIBLE for someone to do…we are living during a time when it has NEVER been more easy for someone to structure their LIFE in this way. 

Think of all the ways to DISTRACT yourself from the limitations of the set of abstractions you see everything through. Think of how easy it is to surround yourself with only friends who agree with you…or to only consume media that ONLY reinforces the bias you currently have. 

When Dr. Rieux and others in The Plague…LIVE their lives in solidarity with the people suffering around them. That is NOT something rooted in the idea that life is hard, so let’s make it EASIER for each other to LIVE it…no, it’s almost the opposite of that: this is about FACING life HEAD ON TOGETHER…but STARTING from a place of RESPECT towards the BOUNDARIES of the existential condition we SHARE together. That’s an important DETAIL. 

REAL solidarity…is a kind of provisional KINGDOM, that we create and RECREATE together every single day. Where when we TRULY recognize this POINT from Camus…that life is NOT like the promises you hear about in the Bible…that there IS no PROMISED land, FOR us in this life when it comes to ANYTHING.

But when we FACE something like exile head ON in our lives…we come to APPRECIATE the provisional forms of love, meaning and belonging that we DO have access to. 

In a sense to Camus: there IS no kingdom out there where pain and suffering DON’T exist…and that the REAL world is made UP of people that learn to INTEGRATE this pain and suffering, the sandiness of the desert you could say…they learn to INTEGRATE this kind of stuff INTO their approach that they HAVE towards the world. 

Now Camus’ given us some pretty incredible IMAGES of the human condition over the course of this series…and if you were someone looking for OTHER artists Camus respected for PRESENTING images of the absurd in a way that INVITES a confrontation with your self…then one name that Camus had a TON of nice things to say about during his life…is the author Franz Kafka. 

Kafka’s work is going to be INCREDIBLY important to read… if you wanted to raise more questions that might LEAD to this feeling of exile. Camus once DESCRIBED Kafka’s work as a perpetual summons to reREAD the work. Because each IMAGE in his work…opens onto another image, “like rooms in a corridor whose end we never reach.” Excited to introduce you to the philosophical themes of that corridor…on next episode.

Patreon.com/philosophizethis if you value the show as a resource in the world. Thank you to everyone for all the nice comments, they mean a lot, and help me decide where to go next. Shoutout to Wisecrack by the way…their channel ended this last week, they’ve always been really nice people in all the different iterations over the years. Just mad respect for the work they’ve done, it’s the end of an era. Makes me grateful to still be here. 

Anyway thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.