“An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched.”
Albert Camus
Yes, the Algerian-born, Albert Camus, the youngest philosopher to win the Nobel Prize, did indeed say that!
Camus’ compact aphorism captures a familiar Western ideal, that of the thinker as a divided subject, reflexively observing inner life. When Camus insists that the intellectual’s mind “watches itself,” he names a psychological stance — self-scrutiny, skepticism, and an almost theatrical self-reflexivity that refuses to settle into comforting certainties. The watcher/watched polarity implies a durable tension, that of the thinker who diagnoses, and the thinker who is diagnosed; the critic, and the critiqued. Camus, writing in his Carnets (Notebooks), locates intellectual responsibility in holding both roles, accepting doubt as a lived condition rather than a failure to act. That posture coheres with existential motifs in his work — the refusal of illusions, the insistence upon lucid attention to contingency and moral ambiguity. Camus celebrates a thinking that is self-observant and, crucially, split — a split that yields both critique and ethical vigilance.
Witness-consciousness in Advaita, and Krishnamurti’s dissolution of the split
Eastern traditions, by contrast, give us powerful counter-models to the watcher/watched duality. Advaita Vedanta, for example, speaks of atman or pure awareness as the sakshi — the witnessing consciousness that is not merely a faculty observing mental contents, but the very ground that illumines subject and object alike. In classical Advaita, the witness is not an “I” who surveys thoughts; it is the nondual substratum in which distinctions dissolve; Atman is Brahman, not an observing ego but undifferentiated, self-luminous consciousness. This claim reframes self-reflection; instead of an inner spectator, awareness is the unobjectifiable ground of all experience.
Jiddu Krishnamurti — a twentieth-century voice bridging Indian and global publics — famously said “the observer is the observed.” Far from endorsing an inner split, Krishnamurti asked thinkers to notice how the very act of separating “watcher” and “watched” reproduces conflict and conditioning; to see that division is an artefact of memory, habit and thought. In his teaching the breakthrough is not better self-observation by an ego, but the radical insight that collapses the division: when observation is truly whole, the duality ceases and a different kind of intelligence — non-reactive, immediate — appears. That lesson resonates structurally with Advaita’s nonduality even though Krishnamurti refused institutional labels.
Resonances and tensions: What “watching oneself” reveals
Juxtaposing Camus with Advaita and Krishnamurti sharpens both affinities and differences. Camus’ watcher/watched is a moral posture born of modern anxieties, that is, a reflective distance that safeguards critique and responsibility. It is invaluable for ethical deliberation in a plural, contingent world. Yet this posture can also harden into alienation — a spectator’s stance toward one’s own life.
Eastern nondualism and Krishnamurti invite a different corrective; not more refined self-surveillance but a transformation of the very conditions that make surveillance necessary. Where Camus accepts and inhabits the split, Advaita argues that ultimate insight dissolves it; Krishnamurti shows a practical way of uncovering the split in everyday thought. Both suggest that the “mind watching itself” can become an endless loop unless it is accompanied by insight that unbinds the observer from its past. In practice, Western reflexivity and Eastern witnessing can be complementary; reflexive critique exposes power, ideology and ethical blindspots; nondual witnessing undermines reactivity and the ego-driven repetitions that sustain suffering.
For contemporary thinkers this means a hybrid practice, that of keeping Camus’ ethical lucidity — the courage to name doubt and contradiction — while cultivating a discipline of attention that weakens the ego’s compulsion to objectify itself. In public life, an intellectual who watches their mind (Camus) and is also willing to see that the observer may be an effect of conditioning (Krishnamurti, Advaita) can hold critique without recrimination, speak truth without reproducing the very domination they oppose. The watcher and the watched need not be eternal antagonists. Brought together, they can become a conduit for both moral scrutiny and transformative insight.
Arup K. Chatterjee 