Filozofska istraživanja, Vol. 27 No. 3, 2007.
Conference paper
The Significance of the Mediterranean Questioning of Humanity by Albert Camus
Snježan Hasnaš
Abstract
The cultural, philosophical, historical and artistic heritage of the Mediterranean is a measureless universe of processes, information, syntheses and imaginations. In itself, the Mediterranean portrays a general noun of such scope that it represents a kind in which a large part of general European culture is always but one of its sub varieties. However, this is but an impression, which cannot aspire to become a precisely verifiable or verified statement, or a general observation, which only demonstrates that the idea of penetrating the meaning of the Mediterranean as a heritage or contemporaneity represents an enormous yet never fully completed task.
The Mediterranean space – both the virtual and actual – as a general and widely inclusive toponym has opened its doors to countless exceptional individuals, who point to the particular significance of each. Inevitably, within the context of the Mediterranean space they cannot exemplify more than a particular case that can never embrace the range of the Mediterranean concept as a whole. Yet, what they can do is disclose their own reaches that point to the value of that which is open to them in the Mediterranean realm to be thought, created and lived. A dimension of tension between the general and the particular, between the effort to express the
spirit of time and heritage, one’s agreement and disagreement with it, as well as one’s reflections capable of penetrating the spirit of the given – are invariably present within the context of the Mediterranean. One such philosophical and artistic individual is Albert Camus. As one of the almost forgotten figures of thought and art today, his questioning humanity in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel once left a profound trace. Although he never wrote a letter on humanism as Heidegger did (nor does his writing contain such curious prolepses as Heidegger’s), his work appears to be a special case of a general speech on humanism opposed to even surely the most famed intellectual of his time, Jean-Paul Sartre, the intellectual hegemon of his time. Within this constellation one can easily be tempted to compare Camus with, for example, Stoicism, but by doing so one would fail to answer the question of whether his humanism has the strength to be a contemporary humanism or just a novel interpretation (reading, description, deconstruction, etc.) technique of the same. This paper intends to examine the contemporary possibilities of constructing Camus’s reflections on history, humanism, politics and art, as well as the today distinct shift in relation to the earlier reaches of the studies into ethicality, politics and art within the space of the Mediterranean.
Keywords
Mediterranean; Albert Camus; rebellion and/or revolution; Giorgio Agamben; gesture; historicism
Hrčak ID:
18305
URI
Publication date:
7.12.2007.
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