Albert Camus’The Plague, paired with Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics

In Chapter 4 of the first book, Aristotle raises the principal question of the Nicomachean Ethics: What is the highest of all goods that can be attained through action? Aristotle notes that everyone agrees that the name for this highest good is ‘happiness’, even if they disagree about what happiness is. This fact generates a series of related questions: What constitutes happiness? Is happiness the same as living well or doing well?

In chapter 5, he reviews the various concepts of happiness common in his time. Aristotle is chiefly concerned to examine whether any of these concepts of happiness is reasonable. In other words, he is interested the arguments for or against a given proposal for the highest good achievable in action for human beings. He poses a series of questions: Which of the common conceptions of happiness are reasonable? Is happiness identical with the life of pleasure? Is happiness identical with the life dedicated to moral excellence? Is happiness identical with the life dedicated to making money and wealth?

In this selection of Camus’ The Plague, Rieux is a doctor who has been organizing the city’s medical response as it tries to care for citizens who have been infected with the plague. Many have died. Many of those they are currently caring for will likely die at some point in the near future. The plague has been a relentless adversary. At this point in the story, all of the main characters who, together as a group of friends, have been battling against the plague are now exhausted. In addition to feeling physically worn out, they no longer feel the keen emotional attachment they once did to the ups and downs of each day. Rather, they are feeling numb, and Rieux realizes that, beneath the surface of his collected manner, his emotions are brittle and about to break. One would think that, amist all of the suffering and death, that Rieux and his friends are quite miserable. Is that the case? Or, is happiness something that is connected quite essentially to the kind of life one is leading in the longer term?

We tend to think that our happiness varies by the hour of the day. Sometimes we are up and feeling quite a lot of happiness, and other times we are down and feeling considerable sadness. While it is true that, at this point in their battle against the plague, they are no longer feeling the kinds of daily pleasures they once felt, it appears that Camus wants to stress the longer term commitments that are now guiding them as they try to make it through these tough times. Rieux is a model of many virtues, including courage and patience, and his ability to weather these difficult times is a result of the dispositions of character that he has cultivated over the course of his life. Is happiness a matter of way one feels on a given day or week, or is happiness a kind of flourishing that one manifests over the course of one’s life? What is the role of friendship in our ability to flourish in the face of difficult circumstances.

Throughout September and October the town lay prostrate, at the mercy of the plague. There was nothing to do but to "mark time," and some hundreds of thousands of men and women went on doing this, through weeks that seemed interminable.

Mist, heat, and rain rang their changes in our streets. From the south came silent coveys of starlings and thrushes, flying very high, but always giving the town a wide berth, as though the strange implement of the plague described by Paneloux, the giant flail whirling and shrilling over the housetops, warned them off us. At the beginning of October torrents of rain swept the streets clean.

And all the time nothing more important befell us than that multitudinous marking time.

It was now that Rieux and his friends came to realize how exhausted they were.

Indeed, the workers in the sanitary squads had given up trying to cope with their fatigue. Rieux noticed the change coming over his associates, and himself as well, and it took the form of a strange indifference to everything. Men, for instance, who hitherto had shown a keen interest in every scrap of news concerning the plague now displayed none at all. Rambert, who had been temporarily put in charge of a quarantine station, his hotel had been taken over for this purpose, could state at any moment the exact number of persons under his observation, and every detail of the procedure he had laid down for the prompt evacuation of those who suddenly developed symptoms of the disease was firmly fixed in his mind. The same was true of the statistics of the effects of anti-plague inoculations on the persons in his quarantine station. Nevertheless, he could not have told you the week's total of plague deaths, and he could not even have said if the figure was rising or falling. And meanwhile, in spite of everything, he had not lost hope of being able to "make his get-away" from one day to another.

As for the others, working themselves almost to a standstill throughout the day and far into the night, they never bothered to read a newspaper or listen to the radio. When told of some unlooked-for recovery, they made a show of interest, but actually received the news with the stolid indifference that we may imagine the fighting man in a great war to feel who, worn out by the incessant strain and mindful only of the duties daily assigned to him, has ceased even to hope for the decisive battle or the bugle-call of armistice.

Though he still worked out methodically the figures relating to the plague, Grand would certainly have been quite unable to say to what they pointed. Unlike Rieux, Rambert, and Tarrou, who obviously had great powers of endurance, he had never had good health. And now, in addition to his duties in the Municipal Office, he had his night work and his secretarial post under Rieux. One could see that the strain was telling on him, and if he managed to keep going, it was thanks to two or three fixed ideas, one of which was to take, the moment the plague ended, a complete vacation, of a week at least, which he would devote, "hats off," to his work in progress. He was also becoming subject to accesses of sentimentality and at such times would unburden himself to Rieux about Jeanne.

Where was she now, he wondered; did her thoughts sometimes turn to him when she read the papers? It was Grand to whom one day Rieux caught himself talking, much to his own surprise, about his wife, and in the most commonplace terms, something he had never done as yet to anyone.

Doubtful how far he could trust his wife's telegrams, their tone was always reassuring, he had decided to wire the house physician of the sanatorium. The reply informed him that her condition had worsened, but everything was being done to arrest further progress of the disease. He had kept the news to himself so far and could only put it down to his nervous exhaustion that he passed it on to Grand. After talking to the doctor about Jeanne, Grand had asked some questions about MmeRieux and, on hearing Rieux's reply, said: "You know, it's wonderful, the cures they bring off nowadays." Rieux agreed, merely adding that the long separation was beginning to tell on him, and, what was more, he might have helped his wife to make a good recovery; whereas, as things were, she must be feeling terribly lonely. After which he fell silent and gave only evasive answers to Grand's further questions.

The others were in much the same state. Tarrou held his own better, but the entries in his diary show that while his curiosity had kept its depth, it had lost its diversity. Indeed, throughout this period the only person, apparently, who really interested him was Cottard. In the evening, at Rieux's apartment, where he had come to live now that the hotel was requisitioned as a quarantine center, he paid little or no attention to Grand and the doctor when they read over the day's statistics. At the earliest opportunity he switched the conversation over to his pet subject, small details of the daily life at Oran.

More perhaps than any of them, Dr. Castel showed signs of wear and tear. On the day when he came to tell Rieux that the anti-plague serum was ready, and they decided to try it for the first time on M. Othon's small son, whose case seemed all but hopeless, Rieux suddenly noticed, while he was announcing the latest statistics, that Castel was slumped in his chair, sound asleep. The difference in his old friend's face shocked him.

The smile of benevolent irony that always played on it had seemed to endow it with perpetual youth; now, abruptly left out of control, with a trickle of saliva between the slightly parted lips, it betrayed its age and the wastage of the years. And, seeing this, Rieux felt a lump come to his throat.

It was by such lapses that Rieux could gauge his exhaustion. His sensibility was getting out of hand. Kept under all the time, it had grown hard and brittle and seemed to snap completely now and then, leaving him the prey of his emotions.

No resource was left him but to tighten the stranglehold on his feelings and harden his heart protectively. For he knew this was the only way of carrying on.

In any case, he had few illusions left, and fatigue was robbing him of even these remaining few. He knew that, over a period whose end he could not glimpse, his task was no longer to cure but to diagnose. To detect, to see, to describe, to register, and then condemn, that was his present function. Sometimes a woman would clutch his sleeve, crying shrilly: "Doctor, you'll save him, won't you?"

But he wasn't there for saving life; he was there to order a sick man's evacuation. How futile was the hatred he saw on faces then! "You haven't a heart!" a woman told him on one occasion. She was wrong; he had one. It saw him through his twenty-hour day, when he hourly watched men dying who were meant to live. It enabled him to start anew each morning. He had just enough heart for that, as things were now. How could that heart have sufficed for saving life?

No, it wasn't medical aid that he dispensed in those crowded days, only information. Obviously that could hardly be reckoned a man's job. Yet, when all was said and done, who, in that terror-stricken, decimated populace, had scope for any activity worthy of his manhood? Indeed, for Rieux his exhaustion was a blessing in disguise. Had he been less tired, his senses more alert, that all-pervading odor of death might have made him sentimental. But when a man has had only four hours' sleep, he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are; that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice, hideous, witless justice. And those others, the men and women under sentence to death, shared his bleak enlightenment. Before the plague he was welcomed as a savior. He was going to make them right with a couple of pills or an injection, and people took him by the arm on his way to the sickroom. Flattering, but dangerous. Now, on the contrary, he came accompanied by soldiers, and they had to hammer on the door with rifle-butts before the family would open it. They would have liked to drag him, drag the whole human race, with them to the grave. Yes, it was quite true that men can't do without their fellow men; that he was as helpless as these unhappy people and he, too, deserved the same faint thrill of pity that he allowed himself once he had left them.

Such, anyhow, were the thoughts that in those endless-seeming weeks ran in the doctor's mind, along with thoughts about his severance from his wife. And such, too, were his friends' thoughts, judging by the look he saw on their faces. But the most dangerous effect of the exhaustion steadily gaining on all engaged in the fight against the epidemic did not consist in their relative indifference to outside events and the feelings of others, but in the slackness and supine-ness that they allowed to invade their personal lives. They developed a tendency to shirk every movement that didn't seem absolutely necessary or called for efforts that seemed too great to be worth while. Thus these men were led to break, oftener and oftener, the rules of hygiene they themselves had instituted, to omit some of the numerous disinfections they should have practiced, and sometimes to visit the homes of people suffering from pneumonic plague without taking steps to safeguard themselves against infection, because they had been notified only at the last moment and could not be bothered with returning to a sanitary service station, sometimes a considerable distance away, to have the necessary instillations. There lay the real danger; for the energy they devoted to righting the disease made them all the more liable to it. In short, they were gambling on their luck, and luck is not to be coerced.