Like Rieux and Paneloux, Kaliayev and the Grand Duchess cannot communicate; their revolts arc on different planes. For her, “God reunites”; for him, by “dying, I shall keep the agreement I made with those I love . . . and it would be betraying them to pray” (CTOP, 289-90).
As he mounted the gallows Kaliayev is reported to have said: “Death will be my supreme protest against a world of tears and blood. … If I have proved equal to the task assigned, of protesting with all the manhood in me against violence, may death consummate my task with the surety of the ideal that inspired it!” “Yes,” utters Dora, “it was the purity he longed for. But oh the cruelty of that consummation” (CTOP, 294).
Commenting on his intent in his preface, Camus observes: “My admiration for my heroes, Kaliayev and Dora, is complete, I merely wanted to show that action itself had limits, there is no good and just action but what recognizes those limits and, if it must go beyond them, at least accepts death” (CTOP, x). To which Dora may be heard to respond: “Sometimes when I hear what Stepan says, I fear for the future. Others, perhaps, will come who’ll quote our authority for killing; and will not pay with their lives” (CTOP, 296).
The problem of The Rebel has been posed.
8
Revolt and History
I realize that it is not my role to transform either the world or man: I have neither sufficient virtue nor insight for that. But it may be to serve, in my place, those few values without which even a transformed world would not be worth living in, and man, even if “new,” would not deserve to be respected (A/I, 206).
FROM THE ABSURD TO REVOLT
“The important thing now … is not to go to the root of things, but, the world being what it is, to know how to live in it. In the age of negation, it might have been useful to reflect upon the problem of suicide. In the age of ideologies, it is necessary to come to terms with murder” (R, 4; L’HR, 14). Theoretically, The Rebel picks up where The Myth left off. “The absurd, considered as a rule of life, is . . . contradictory” (R, 9). “When we first claim to deduce a rule of behavior from it, [awareness of the absurd] makes murder seem a matter of indifference. … If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance” (R, 5). However, “after having rendered the act of killing at least a matter of indifference, absurdist analysis . . . finally condemns it.” With its repudiation of suicide, absurdist thought, in affirming “the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the world,” “admits that life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes the encounter possible” (R, 6; L’HR, 16-7).
“This basic contradiction, however, cannot fail to be accompanied by a host of others from the moment that we claim to remain firmly in the absurdist position and ignore the real nature of the absurd, which is that it is an experience to be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent in existence of Descartes’s methodical doubt” (R, 8). “It is obviously impossible to formulate an attitude on the basis of a specially selected emotion” (R, 9). “If it was legitimate to take absurdist sensibility into account, to make a diagnosis of a malady to be found in ourselves and in others, it is nevertheless impossible to see in this sensibility, and in the nihilism it presupposes, anything but a point of departure, a criticism brought to life. . . Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley” (R, 10).
“The first and only evidence that is supplied to me, within the terms of the absurdist experience, is rebellion.” But rebellion confronts a world without preestablished order. It says no to the outrage, but how and to what does it say yes? “Its pre-occupation is to transform. But to transform is to act, and to act will be, tomorrow, to kill, and it still does not know whether murder is legitimate. Rebellion engenders exactly the actions it is asked to legitimate. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that rebellion find its reasons within itself, since it cannot find them elsewhere” (R, 10).
Thus is situated the problem of The Rebel as legated to it by The Myth’s analysis of our contemporary condition.1 Echoing the Letters, he observes, “Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is. The problem is to know whether this refusal can only lead to the destruction of himself and of others, whether all rebellion must end in the justification of universal murder, or whether, on the contrary, without laying claim to an innocence that is impossible, it can discover the principle of reasonable culpability” (R, 11). With The Rebel Camus seeks “once again to face the reality of the present, which is logical crime, and to examine meticulously the arguments by which it is justified; it is an attempt to understand the times in which we live” (R,3).2
FRAMING THE ANALYSIS
Before proceeding to a detailed analysis of this work, however, it is impor-tant to underscore both its very personal origins and its precise and limited objectives. Whatever may have been the misunderstandings occasioned by its style of expression or the historical context of its publication, The Rebel is not offered as a comprehensive or universal theory of human nature, or of politics and social theory, nor does it attempt to present any precise pro-gram of action. Rather its aim is diagnostic, attending to what Camus feels to be a pathology of the Western mind prevalent for the last 150 years. Of course, references had to be made to prior times, to other places, as well as to events that were not solely influenced by the way people think. But that must not mislead the reader. Camus believes that the way people think affects the way they act. Even more, he believes that there are certain very fundamental concerns that tend to condition a wide range of thought and action. These concerns, metaphysical in nature, bear upon human destiny as cultural and historical forces have contoured the terms in which such issues find expres-sion. He writes that, having “lived for a long time without morality, like many men of my generation, having in effect given expression to nihilism without always having been aware of it, I finally understood that ideas were more than
pleasing or emotionally moving games, and that, in certain circumstances, to accept certain thoughts is equivalent to accepting murder without limits” (E, 704).
In Camus’s view this pathology of the intellect pervades the thought and hence the experience of the modern world. This “partly explains the direction in which our times are heading and almost entirely explains the excesses of our age” (R, 11). One might well pause before the scope of the latter claim— and I will have something to say about it further on—but the former seems reasonable enough. At issue here is the view that thought has at least a relative autonomy with respect to the myriad forces that influence events, and that it is of some consequence to the direction of events to understand the way people think. While one may certainly question both his “working hypothesis” and the significance he attaches to it, he certainly seems on solid ground when he suggests that, if true, that hypothesis contributes to understanding the flow of contemporary events.
And what is that “working hypothesis” that admittedly “is not the only one possible” and “is far from explaining everything”? It is “the astonishing history . . . of European pride” (R, 11) by which human beings have turned toward historical revolution to compensate for the loss of trans-historical salvation. “Twentieth century marxists (and they arc not the only ones) find themselves at the extremity of this long tragedy of contemporary intelligence which could be summed up by writing the history of European pride. . . . What is at issue is a prodigious myth of the divinization of man, of domination, of the unification of the universe by the power of human reason alone. What is at issue is the conquest of totality” (A/I, 194—5).
Camus’s thesis can initially be set forth briefly. In the post-enlightenment Western world, people no longer believe in God. Having lost faith in the vertical transcendence of the divine, they have turned toward history for salvation. Since they seem unable to do without an absolute, horizontal transcendence emerges as compensation, holding out the promise of the “end of history,” by which the sufferings of this life will be overcome. From the perspective of this historicized absolute, values become gauges of efficacy. The end justifies the means—any means.