Albert Camus vs Bertrand Russell on Time
Albert Camus and Bertrand Russell on time, side by side — 4 passages against 4, and what the disagreement is actually about.
Albert Camus and Bertrand Russell both have a great deal to say about time — 4 passages and 4 respectively in thinkr's library — and they do not say the same thing. Setting them side by side is more useful than reading either alone, because the disagreement shows you what each position is actually giving up.
Albert Camus on time
French-Algerian novelist and philosopher of the absurd. The Myth of Sisyphus asks how to live well in a universe without inherent meaning.
“It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.”
“To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”
“Those who need myths are indeed poor. Here the gods serve as beds or resting places as the day races across the sky.”
“What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.”
Bertrand Russell on time
British logician, philosopher, and public intellectual. Co-author of Principia Mathematica, and later a passionate voice for peace and free thought.
“Thee will find out in time that I have a great love of professing vile sentiments, I don't know why, unless it springs from long efforts to avoid priggery.”
“The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.”
“Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.”
“Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.”
Where they part
France/Algeria, 1913–1960 and UK, 1872–1970 are not the same world, and the difference is not only historical. Albert Camus treats time as something to be it takes time to live. Like… — a matter of practice. Bertrand Russell approaches it from another side entirely. Neither is refuting the other; they are answering slightly different questions, and noticing which question you are actually asking is most of the work.