The political instability of our moment feeds in part on a widespread sense of personal unease, particularly among the young. The philosophic foundation of that unease is the experience definitive of existentialism—the sense of “an absolute rift between man and that in which he finds himself lodged,” as Hans Jonas put it. This course will explore two alternative accounts of this existential condition and the proper human response to it.

Blaise Pascal, the great 17th-century polymath sometimes called “the first existentialist,” powerfully depicted the human experience of dislocation within the “eternal silence of the infinite spaces” described by modern science. He found in this experience of cosmic “thrownness” the deepest impetus for man’s search for the transcendent yet personal God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Centuries later, Albert Camus would ask the question of how human beings could affirm life in the face of its intrinsic godlessness and meaninglessness, and sketch a form of existential heroism that managed to say “yes” to life in spite of its absurdity. Our exploration of these two authors is intended to help students with their own efforts to live dignified lives in a world so many find unsettling.

Image: Paul Klee, Glance of a Landscape, 1926

Ben Storey & Thomas Chatterton Williams on Pascal & Camus

This course is offered by Humanities at Hertog. It takes place weekly on Mondays, via Zoom, from 3:30 PM to 5:30 PM ET. Fellows will receive a $150 stipend contingent upon participation in the course and completion of a brief response paper. All course materials will be provided.

Faculty

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a Visiting Professor of Humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a visiting fellow at AEI. He was previously a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a Columnist at Harper’s.

Benjamin Storey

Benjamin Storey is a senior fellow in Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and co-director of AEI’s Center for the Future of the American University. He is concurrently an SNF Agora Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and a research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

Preview the Syllabus by Week/Session

Readings:

  • Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism as a Humanism”
  • Chateaubriand on Pascal
  • Etienne Périer, “Plan of the Thoughts”
  • Blaise Pascal, Pensées (pp. 1–24)

Discussion Questions:

  1. How did Pascal imagine his audience for his project for a book on religion, the materials for which his friends and family would later collate and publish as the Pensées? How did he seek to reach that reader? What journey did he intend his reader to experience through his book?
  2. Why does Pascal believe it would be wrong for anyone to become attached to him?
  3. What is the relation between religion and self-knowledge?
  4. Why do human beings despise religion, according to Pascal? How does he aim to make it venerable and attractive?
  5. Why does Pascal—one of the greatest scientific minds in human history—think the sciences are “vain”?
  6. What does Pascal mean when he says “the imagination disposes of everything?” What does he mean when he says “we never keep to the present time?”
  7. What, for Pascal, is tyranny?
  8. Do we know natural law, on Pascal’s understanding?
  9. Why is Pascal “frightened and astonished” when he contemplates the human condition?
  10. What does boredom tell us about ourselves?

Readings:

  • Pascal, Pensées (pp. 24–64)

Discussion Questions:

  1. How does respect relate to inconvenience?
  2. What are the two extremes of knowledge, and how do they meet?
  3. What is the relationship between justice and might?
  4. What are the different ways in which we know truth?
  5. What does Pascal mean when he says that “man’s greatness is so obvious that it can derived even from his wretchedness”?
  6. What does Pascal seek to both “humble” and “exalt” his readers?
  7. How does Pascal present the argument between dogmatists and skeptics, here, and what does he mean when he says that “there has never been a truly effective skeptic”?
  8. “Man’s unhappiness arises from one thing alone: that he cannot remain quietly in his room.” Comment.
  9. What are the three kinds of concupiscence, and how are they reflected in three schools of philosophy
  10. How has God “temepered” his appearance to men?
  11. What are the “three kinds of people,” for Pascal?
  12. How do the qualities of skeptic, geometer, Christian, submission, and doubt fit together
  13. Why does Pascal discount what he calls “metaphysical proofs of God”?
  14. What does Pascal mean by man’s “disproportion”?
  15. In what does human dignity consist?

Readings:

  • Pascal, “Conversation with de Saci”
  • Pascal, Pensées (pp. 91–94, 103–08, 142, 149, 157, 198–99, 207–08, 211–24, 265–68)

Discussion Questions:

  1. How does Pascal understand philosophy? What does he learn from the Epictetus and the Stoics, and what from Montaigne and the skeptics? How does he understand the relation between Christianity and philosophy as represented by these two schools?
  2. What does Pascal mean when he suggests that the heart and the mind are of different orders, which respond to different proofs?
  3. In what sense is Christianity “strange”?
  4. What is a “body of thinking members”?
  5. What does Pascal think is wrong with Montaigne’s argument that customs should be followed just because it is custom?
  6. How can true virtue consist of hating ourselves? And how can he say that, and then say, a few sentences later, that “the universal good is within us”?
  7. What is “hateful” about the self?
  8. Why do we want “to have an imaginary life in the minds of others”?
  9. What is the difference between the geometric and intuitive minds?
  10. What does Pascal mean by saying that “wagering” on this existence of God “is not optional”?
  11. What should we do if we follow Pascal’s logic but do not thereby come to believe?
  12. Why does Pascal call God “hidden”?
  13. What is “extravagant” about religious indifference?
  14. In what sense does our imagination “enlarge the present”?
  15. What is the difference between the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God of philosophers and scholars?

Readings:

  • Albert Camus, The Stranger (in its entirety)
  • Jean-Paul Sartre, “A Commentary on The Stranger,” Existentialism as a Humanism (recommended)

Discussion Questions:

  1. What, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s words, are we to make of “this character [Meurault] who, on the day after his mother’s death, ‘went swimming, began a pointless affair, went to the movies to see a comedy,’ killed an Arab ‘because of the sun,’ claimed, on the eve of his execution, that he ‘had been happy and still was,’ and hoped there would be lots of spectators around the scaffold ‘to welcome him with cries of hatred?’”
  2. How does Meursault exemplify Camus’s notion of “the absurd man”?
  3. In what ways does Camus show us our customs and habits work to conceal life’s inherent meaninglessness?
  4. Why can’t Meursault make satisfactory judgments?
  5. What was Meursault’s true crime?
  6. Why did Meursault shoot the Arab man on the beach?
  7. For the absurd man, what is the ideal? Is it nostalgia for the past, hope for the future, or lucid resignation to the present?
  8. What does it mean to think of Meursault as innocent?
  9. How does Camus’s prose style and form align with or mirror the content of the story and the philosophical ideas he’s trying to convey?

Readings:

  • Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (pp. 70–116, 117–20)
  • Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine”

Discussion Questions:

  1. What is Camus’s central moral argument against the death penalty?
  2. What are the ethical contradictions in state-sponsored execution?
  3. Given Camus’s emphasis on the absurd, how does this essay inform or deepen your understanding of The Stranger?
  4. In what sense does a death sentence represent the superlative—or most extreme— version of the human condition writ large?
  5. On what basis does Camus claim, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide”?
  6. What does Camus mean when he says “the divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity”?
  7. How is suicide “a confession”?
  8. Is suicide logical? What is “an absurd reasoning”?
  9. Camus published The Stranger and quickly followed it with The Myth of Sisyphus. How are the two works complementary? How does the former generate a feeling of the latter?
  10. Why is Sisyphus the absurd hero?
  11. What does Camus see in Sisyphus’s plight that encapsulates the human condition? When does “the hour of consciousness” occur?
  12. Why must we “imagine Sisyphus happy”?

Readings:

  • Camus, The Rebel (pp. 91–94, 103–08, 142, 149, 157, 198–99, 207–08, 211–24, 265–68)
  • Susan Sontag, “The Ideal Husband”

Discussion Questions:

  1. What does Camus mean by “rebellion”? And how does he distinguish “metaphysical rebellion”? How is rebellion an affirmation? In other words, what does the rebel say “yes” to insofar as he says “no”?
  2. Why does Camus think rebellion is only really possible in the West? Why is it practically inconceivable in societies in which inequality is great?
  3. What function does art play in Camus’s theory of rebellion?
  4. Camus has a favorite formulation that he has used throughout his life, in his notebooks and in many of the It can be summed up as “creation corrected.” What does he mean by this?
  5. Why does rebellion require limits? What is the key distinction between rebellion and revolution?
  6. What is the crux of Sontag’s critique of Camus? Do you find it persuasive?

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