If major principles have no foundation, if the law expresses nothing but a provisional inclination, it is only made in order to be broken or to be imposed. Sade or dictatorship, individual terrorism or state terrorism, both justified by the same absence of justification, are, from the moment that rebellion cuts itself off from its roots and deprives itself of any concrete morality, one of the alternatives of the twentieth century (R, 131-2; L’HR, 165).
9. “The rebel, who at first denies God, finally aspires to replace Him. . . . Nietzsche’s message is that the rebel can only become God by renouncing every form of rebellion. . . . ‘If there is a God, how can one tolerate not being god oneself?’ There is, in fact, a god—namely, the world. To participate in its divinity, all that is necessary is to consent. … To say yes to the world, to reproduce it, is simultaneously to recreate the world and oneself. . . . Nietzsche’s message is summed up in the word creation . . . replacing critical values by creative values; by respect and admiration for what exists. . . . Nietzsche thought that to accept this earth and Dionysos was to accept his own suffering. And to accept everything was to be king of all creation” (R, 73-4).
10. “What is the profoundly corrupt addition made by Christianity to the message of its Master? The idea of judgment, completely foreign to the teachings of Christ, and the correlative notions of punishment and reward” (R, 69). “If he attacks Christianity in particular, it is so only so far as it represents morality. . . . ‘Basically,’ he writes, ‘only the God of morality is rejected.’ Christ, for Nietzsche as for Tolstoy, is not a rebel. The essence of His doctrine is summed up in total consent and in non-resistance to evil. Thou shalt not kill, even to prevent killing. The world must be accepted as it is; nothing must be added to its unhappiness, but you must consent to suffer personally from the evil it contains” (R, 68). This is where Father Paneloux arrives at the time of his second sermon, having moved from the bastardized Christianity of judgment and reward and punishment to the person of Christ for whom “only an inner inclination
. . . allows us to make our actions coincide with these principles and … can give us
immediate salvation” (R, fi8).
11. The Inihis ni Camus’s consideration oi Nietzsche should be noted He is
concerned in The Rebel only with the doctrine that is to be found in The Will to Power. It is now known, as it was not in Camus’s time, that this book is not a work of Nietzsche’s, but rather a selection from, and ordering of, his notes by his sister, a noted German nationalist and rabid anti-semite, both of which “diseases” Nietzsche detested. One must therefore take analyses drawn from this work with a great deal of caution. That need not, of course, affect an analysis of the historical significance of his work, since, for the period in question, all readers of Nietzsche were ignorant of the source of this volume. I should also note here the tension in Nietzsche’s work between the doctrine of the ubermensch and that of the eternal recurrence. Camus senses this. Much of Camus’s analysis hinges upon a contradiction related to this tension. But he, like most students of Nietzsche, fails to grasp the dramatically developing tension by which these doctrines struggle with one another, with the latter doctrine, in the image of the snake slowly dominating that of the eagle. An appreciation of this development would have strengthened Camus’s own interpretation. I am much indebted to my friend and colleague Professor James Edwards of Nassau Community College for his analyses of these issues. Professor Edwards incisively suggests that Nietzsche’s failure resides in his inability to break out of his loneliness and to establish solidarity, thus suggesting the linking in Nietzsche’s own life of two of Camus’s themes: the experience of exile and the longing for the earthly kingdom.
12. “Human insurrection, in its exalted and tragic forms, is only, and can only be, a prolonged protest against death, a violent accusation against the universal death penalty. . . . The [metaphysical] rebel does not ask for life but for reasons for living. … In the eyes of the rebel, what is missing from the misery of the world, as well as from its moments of happiness, is some principle by which they can be explained.
The insurrection against evil is, above all, a demand for unity. . . . He is seeking, without knowing it, a morality or a sacred” (R, 100-1; L’HR, 128-9).
13. Often, notes Camus, the effort is made to save the person of Christ from these attacks by treating Him as a simpleton. Consider the efforts of Dostoevsky in The Idiot, for example.
CHAPTER 10
1. “It is worth specifying that productivity is only injurious when it is considered as an end, not as a means, in which case it could have a liberating effect” (R, 218).
2. Here is the dynamic behind Camus’s story of “The Renegade” in Exile and the Kingdom.
3. Kojeve, spiritual godfather to French Hegelianism, situates the source of this legacy: “What then is the morality of Hegel? . . . What exists is good inasmuch as it exists. All action, being a negation of the existing given, is therefore bad, or sinful. But sin may be forgiven. How? By its success. Success absolves the crime because success is a new reality that exists. But how can success be estimated? Before this can be done, History must have conic to an end” (Kojeve, 95).
4. “The City of God will coincide with the city of humanity and universal history,
sitting in judgment on the world, will pass its sentence by which good and evil will be justified. The State will play the part of Destiny and will proclaim its approval of every aspect of reality on ‘the sacred day of the Presence'” (R, 142).
5. “From the moment that productivity is developed to enormous proportions, the division of labor, which Marx drought could have been avoided, became inevitable. Every worker has been brought to the point of performing a particular function without knowing the over-all plan into which his work will fit. Those who coordinate the individual work have formed, by their very function, a class whose social importance is decisive” (R, 214-5).
6. For Camus’s evaluation of the Marxian inversion of Hegel, cf., for example, R, 197-8.
7. “What remains true in [Marx’s] vision of the economic world is the establishment of a society more and more defined by the rhythms of production. But he shared this concept. . . with bourgeois ideology.
The bourgeois illusions concerning science and technical progress, shared by the authoritarian socialists, gave birth to the civilization of machine-tamers, which can, through the stresses of competition and the desire for domination, be separated into enemy blocs, but which on the economic plane is subject to identical laws: the accumulation of capital and rationalized and continually increasing production. The political difference, which concerns the degree of omnipotence of the State, is appreciable, but can be reduced by economic evolution. Only the difference in ethical concepts—formal virtue as opposed to historical cynicism—seems substantial. But the imperatives of production dominate both universes and make diem, on die economic plane, one world” (R, 218).
8. To give but one example. In one sentence on page 107 he claims, “Total revolution ends by demanding . . . the control of the world.” In the following paragraph he observes, “All revolutionaries finally aspire to world unity and act as though diey believed that history was concluded.” As a complete analysis of all historical revolutions, the latter would not only be false, but worse, it would clearly lead, in accord with Camus’s own argument, to a total condemnation of the revolutionary attitude and the project of revolution. But in the context of the argument in the text and pursuant to its logic, all that is being said is a development of the argument in the previous paragraph. For the English-speaking world the problem is made infinitely worse by the poor and biased Bower translation. One example should suffice. Where Camus, underlining the always relative and temporally open nature of rebellious activity, speaks of rebellion as being “without issue,” Bower’s translation refers to it as a “fruitless struggle” (R, 106; L’HR, 126). But a struggle that may be without definitive result as far as the ultimate is concerned, that might even be termed “fruitless” from that perspective, clearly has a different meaning both for Camus and for the engaged rebels when we attend to its concrete significance. To call it “fruitless” caters to an interpretation of Camus’s work that would have it taking pride in the impotence of rebellion. That, I hold, is quite far from the truth.