Camus lived in the shadow of two ghosts: Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. He read them obsessively, wrestled with their ideas, and ultimately judged himself and his century against their insights. Like Camus, both used fiction and philosophy to confront the moral crises of their time. And like Camus, they asked (in very different ways) how to live without God, how to make meaning without illusions, how to preserve human dignity in a disenchanted world.
Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were also incredibly rich psychological thinkers. Freud once said Nietzsche was the most self-aware human being he’d ever encountered. Nietzsche, in turn, called Dostoevsky the “only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn.” Camus admired them both for this reason: they understood the psychological and cultural depth of nihilism. And much of Camus’ work — his novels, his essays, even his political journalism — can be read as a long and restless dialogue with them.
This series (adapted from my dissertation) is an attempt to trace this dialogue across Camus’ work. I’ll pay particular attention to Camus’ direct references to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky in his notebooks and non-fiction, which often clarify the deeper philosophical currents beneath his fiction.
Alongside the three main stages of Camus’ writing (Sensualism, Absurdity, Revolt), I’ll also be tracking two broader shifts in his thought. In the first phase, Camus is concerned with the metaphysics of absurdity. Here Camus is interested in man’s relation to the world and in deducing the consequences of absurdity for human behavior. These works are more existential than political, more solipsistic than social. Camus’ interaction with Dostoevsky and Nietzsche at this level will be explored mostly through The Myth of Sisyphus, Caligula, The Stranger, and The Misunderstanding. In the second phase, Camus emerges from his absurdist experiment with a positive philosophy of revolt, which maps (or tries to map) the lessons of the absurd onto the social sphere.
As Camus’ attention shifts from the absurd (the psychological) to revolt (the political), his dialogue with Dostoevsky and Nietzsche deepens. Philosophically, it is in The Rebel that Camus responds most directly to Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Here Camus’ thought reflects his postwar concerns and we discover what Thomas Hanna aptly calls a “positive attack on the ethical-political problems of the twentieth century.” And it’s here that Camus starts to break with Nietzsche on ethical grounds. He discovers what anyone who reads Nietzsche long enough finally confronts: a moral and political dead-end.
Where Nietzsche offers a psychological diagnosis, Dostoevsky forces Camus to confront the emotional and spiritual consequences of living without God — in a way Nietzsche never really could. Camus struggles constantly with Dostoevsky’s most essential claim: that without God and belief in immortality life becomes not only impossible to love but “something unnatural, an unbearable nonsense.”
From Nietzsche, Camus draws a broad understanding of nihilism — not just as a personal crisis, but as a cultural condition. Camus’ notebooks show him returning again and again to this idea, and Nietzsche’s fingerprints are all over his diagnosis. His psychological insights, in particular, helped shape Camus’ vision of the absurd, especially in The Myth of Sisyphus.
Alternatively, Dostoevsky awakens Camus to two existential realities. First, Dostoevsky’s Christianity profoundly alters Camus’ beliefs concerning the social utility of unifying ideas (such as the Christ-ideal). While Camus does not accept Dostoevsky’s Christianity, he is clearly affected by Dostoevsky’s understanding of the sources of order in society. Dostoevsky’s vision of suffering and redemption, even when rejected, lingers in Camus’ writing; it’s a counterpoint he can never quite silence. As a result, Camus’ dialogue with Dostoevsky intensifies during the absurd and revolt periods; in works such as The Plague, The Fall, and The Rebel, this is especially apparent.
The second reality to which Dostoevsky awakens Camus is the connection between individual crime and collective revolution. Here’s Camus summing up Dostoevsky argument in one of his notebook entries: “Dostoevsky’s Thesis: The same paths that lead the individual to crime lead the society to revolution.” This insight anchors Camus’ analysis of historical rebellion and it’s central to his conception of revolt.
These twin concerns — the absurdity of human existence and the possibility of foundations without God — ultimately anchor Camus’ dialogue with Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel figure prominently because these are the works in which Camus most forcefully confronts these problems. Both essays ask whether there is a meaningful response to absurdity, one that embraces life, preserves human dignity, and rejects nihilism. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus explores this at the level of the individual and points to Sisyphus as a positive example for mankind. Sisyphus models two crucial moves for Camus: first, he embraces his fate with lucidity, transforming punishment into resistance. Second, he turns fully to the present, refusing consolation and finding freedom in immediacy. It’s a critical gesture but, for Camus, one that must evolve into something more than personal defiance.
For all these reasons, The Myth of Sisyphus (and the absurd more generally) is the point of departure for Camus’ mature thought. It is Camus’ answer to the question of whether life is worth living in the first place, and it contains in embryo his concept of revolt, which, as Thomas Hanna notes, “later becomes the central moral principle of Camus’ thought.” The Rebel begins where The Myth of Sisyphus ends; it assumes that life is absurd but worth living and then seeks a worldly (experiential) foundation for action. With The Rebel, then, Camus connects absurdist themes to his analysis of revolt, and historical action is understood as a manifestation of metaphysical rebellion.
The Ghosts in His Study
Among the many reasons for Camus’ attraction to Nietzsche was Nietzsche’s peculiar place in the history of philosophy. Neither an academic philosopher nor a conventional writer, Nietzsche spent the bulk of his productive life in solitude, critiquing his age and culture from afar. He was also a radically engaged thinker who refused to shrink from the crisis of his time: nihilism.
Nietzsche’s often dismissed as a nihilist by people who have clearly not read him closely. The reality is that he wasn’t celebrating or endorsing nihilism; he was diagnosing it. Camus understood this well and praised Nietzsche for accepting “the entire burden of nihilism.” His philosophical courage was a kind of model for Camus:
It is said that Nietzsche, after breaking with Lou, entered into a final solitude, walked at night in the mountains that dominate the Gulf of Genoa and lit immense fires there that he watched smolder. I’ve often thought of these fires and their gleam has danced behind my entire intellectual life. So even though I’ve sometimes been unjust toward certain thoughts and certain men whom I’ve met in this century, it is because I’ve unwillingly put them in front of these fires and they were promptly reduced to ashes.
As an intellectual influence, Dostoevsky was equally important to Camus. With Dostoevsky, however, there are some biographical parallels that help to explain Camus’ interest in Dostoevsky. Both experienced comparable intellectual evolutions over the course of their lives. In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested and exiled in Siberia for conspiring with members of the Petrashevsky Circle, a literary group of progressive intellectuals. Dostoevsky’s memories of this period would later serve as the basis for his political novel The Possessed. Camus similarly joined (albeit reluctantly and not for long) the Communist Party during his college years in Algeria. Shortly after joining, however, both Camus and Dostoevsky rejected the doctrinal inflexibility of these movements.
Dostoevsky was plagued by doubt his entire life. Indeed the most powerful arguments in Dostoevsky’s novels are often the ones with he disagrees. Camus shared Dostoevsky’s self-questioning nature. Born a French Algerian, Camus struggled to reconcile his European and Mediterranean identities. This cultural ambivalence runs through all of Camus’ work. His dissertation and first formal philosophical work tries to integrate Greek and Christian thought. And just as Dostoevsky’s Christianity existed in perpetual tension with doubt, Camus’ secular humanism was shrouded in Christian symbolisms. The abundance of aporias in their work is a key point of convergence. On the one hand, it directly reflects their resistance to absolutism. But it also explains their preference for art and fiction. Formal philosophy demands order and coherence. However, Camus and Dostoevsky wanted their art to reflect the bumpiness of reality.
Camus never resolved the tensions he inherited from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky — and he didn’t want to. For him, the challenge was to live honestly in full view of those contradictions, without retreating into ideology or despair. That’s where we’ll go next: to The Myth of Sisyphus, where Camus lays out his theory of the absurd and begins to sketch a morality built on lucidity, revolt, and limits.
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Thank you. This beautifully traces how Camus carried his philosophical ghosts, but I wonder if he was still fighting battles that didn't need to be fought. The piece shows Camus evolving from absurdist solitude to social revolt, yet both phases maintain what feels like an adversarial stance toward existence—whether through Sisyphean defiance or rebellious engagement.
What strikes me is how Camus inherited not just Nietzsche's diagnosis of nihilism and Dostoevsky's spiritual wrestling, but also their shared assumption that life's lack of predetermined meaning creates a problem requiring heroic response. The "failure anxiety" runs deep here: if there's no cosmic playbook, we must either despair or defiantly create our own.
But what if the absence of that playbook isn't a cosmic slight requiring revolt? What if recognizing that everyone—including Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Camus himself—was fundamentally improvising dissolves the tension entirely? The exhausting "self-evaluation" you describe in Camus' work might stem from still believing there's a right way to respond to absurdity, rather than seeing improvisation as the natural condition of all existence.
Camus' dialogue with his ghosts was profound, but perhaps what he needed wasn't better answers from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky—it was permission to stop treating their uncertainty as a philosophical crisis and start seeing it as an invitation to natural, authentic participation.
I’m really enjoying this series! Could you expand a little on what you mean by this phrase?
“how to make meaning without illusions”