La chute dans la conscience. Animalité, philosophie et cognition dans l’oeuvre de Camus

Abstract

Camus’s work contains « blind and instinctive » aspects that the author himself pointed out as insufficiently considered by the critics. The questioning of conscience from a cognitive and moral point of view runs through his entire production, often trying to situate itself in the uncertain division that separates and brings together the animal and man. This epistemic critical axis – which straddles philosophy and the cognitive sciences – will serve in this article to analyze the articulation between L'Etranger and La Chute that makes Clamence into Meursault’s reverse. The nostalgia for an innocent paradise, the ethical and moral problem of violence and the consideration of death receive in Camus’ thought a cognitive treatment that links the phenomenological phylosophie of his time with the current biology of consciousness or evolutionary anthropology.