heart of the ephemeral. It cries out, it demands, it insists that the scandal cease and that what has, up to now, been built upon shifting sands should henceforth be founded upon rock” (R, 10; L’HR, 21-2).
Rebellion is thus a living answer to the temptations of nihilism. In a world without transcendent values, rebellion attests to our willingness to put our lives on the line for what matters to us.
The French resistance bore witness to that. “Insurrection is certainly not the sum total of human experience. But history today, with all its storm and strife, compels us to say that rebellion is one of the essential dimensions of man.” It bears witness to an often inarticulate demand for meaning, thus offering the promise of an articulate value by which we may still be able to give meaning and direction to our lives. “Not knowing more or being better aided, I had to try to draw a rule of conduct and perhaps a first value from the only experience with which I was in accord, which was our revolt” (E, 1705). For revolt “is our historic reality. Unless we choose to ignore reality, we must find our values in it. Is it possible to find a rule of conduct outside of the realm of religion and its absolute values? That is the question raised by rebellion” (R, 21). And also its promise.
THE SOURCES OF REVOLT
“What is a rebel?” asks Camus. “A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes. … In other words, his no affirms the existence of a borderline…. Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right” (R, 13). Rebellion is thus grounded in, and seeks to make explicit, the experience of a value.
At the same time that there is a rejection of the intrusion, there is in all rebellion a complete and instantaneous identification of man with a certain part of himself. He thus implicitly brings into play a value judgment which is so little gratuitous that he defends it in the midst of danger. . . . This value which preexists all action contradicts purely historical philosophies. . . . The analysis of revolt leads at least to the suspicion that there is a human nature, as the Greeks thought, and in contradiction to the postulates of contemporary thought. Why rebel if there is
nothing permanent in oneself to preserve? (R, 13-4, 16; L’HR, 26, 28).
This analysis of rebellion should first be placed within its appropriate theoretical frame. We are social as well as natural animals. We live in groups. We may be tempted on occasion by the lure of solitude, as was Camus in A Happy Death, for example. Cut-off from others, however, we are anguished and spiritually impoverished. If the movement from the absurd to revolt means anything, it refers to our need for others in the face of the metaphysical
solitude that is our natural condition. Both by origins and by need, therefore, we live among others and, even more, need to live with others. We need others to be there for us, when and as we need them. And we often want to be there for others. “Being-with” another seems so necessary to our experiential fulfillment that Camus’s thought was drawn toward it as if by magnetic attraction. Whether in friendship, comradeship, community, or love, being-with stands out as the envisioned consummation of myriad practical struggles. At the deepest level, this need seems to constitute who we are.4 How we envision our most intimate relations speaks volumes as to our character and the structure of our world. To be human is to be a part of a collectivity. Human groups are organized patterns of action and expectation. They are governed by norms, both explicit and implicit. Norms exist. They control the operation of institutions.
We assume our place within the institutions, living more or less in accord with their norms, even if we have never thought about them. And we know others do likewise—and they know that we know.
Often, nay inevitably, such normal situations are less than fulfilling. Sometimes they are downright degrading and oppressive. There are many ways of responding to dehumanization, oppression, or humiliation: internal withdrawal, such as schizophrenia; external withdrawal, such as migration; subsurface resentment, such as bitchiness; abstract activity, such as pure mathematics; location of a substitute enemy, such as displacement; or confrontation, the no of the rebel: so far but no farther.5
Rebellion says no to the continuation of an intolerable situation, asserting the rebel’s right to a limited social space and personal integrity. At the core of the rebellion that asserts a limit to humiliation lies a passionate commitment to life and to the dignity and self-respect without which that life would be felt to be without meaning.
The immediate occasion may be trivial or traumatic. It may be a demand lor a fair share in distribution or a refusal to submit to an insult. It may be phrased in very personal terms, or it may invoke the language of rights. At its root, however, the rebel’s outrage gives expression to the sense that one’s integrity has been violated. This does not mean that all outraged sensibility is justified. Each act of rebellion must be examined with respect to the world it assumes, the ontology of need it expresses, and the future it envisions. Nevertheless, beneath the specifics lies a common root. We feel that our integrity has been violated in such a way that it is all but impossible to bear the affront. Our integrity holds us together, making us able to survive as an individual, at the biological as well as the psychic level. The rebel’s no to the intrusion upon his or her living space would seem to be but an expression— however historically specific in form and occasion—of the organism’s need to preserve its vital integrity. This seemingly pervasive or universal need may well be continuous with the organism’s defense against alien intrusions, so well expressed by the immunological system’s way of repelling foreign bodies. Here, too, at this root biological level, the organism seems to be saying: so far, but no farther; my survival is threatened by the intrusion into my personal (biological) space of this alien body.
To ground rebellion in the rejection of a violation of the individual’s integrity, however continuous that may be with the universal biological basis of the species, is not, it must be repeated, to claim any universality in the articulation of the rebellious outrage. Nor is it to give approval to all acts of rebellion, however much it suggests an initial sympathy with the individual who feels the need to rebel. But it is to claim that rebellion attests to a fundamental human demand that is always worthy of respect. This demand suggests the existence of a human nature to be defended. And this nature roots the sense of value that finds expression in the demand for justice, whatever the historical and cultural determinations of its formulation might be.
The demand for justice is the usual form in which the initial outrage gives itself expression. In fact, the demand may be so passionate, the commitment to the struggle so intense, that rebels often feel there is no dignity in a life without redress. Thus they are often willing to risk their prior status or position, perhaps even their lives, within normal society, for this value of which they feel the need.
In short, rebellion attests to the demand for the preservation of one’s integrity, often expressed in terms of the demand for justice or the maintenance of dignity. It is implicitly a claim, as yet inarticulate, that the human being must have, and has a right to have, sufficient space for action. Whatever the explicit justification of the act of rebellion, implicitly it attests to this need and to the feeling that “one has a right” to its being respected. By saying that this situation or act is unjust, it implicates a universal value. Not, of course, asserting that all hold to this value, but rather that the scope of this claim is universal. Camus’s claim amounts to the assertion that at the core of the act of revolt is this claimed universal right.
To rebel is to put oneself at risk. Each revolt is a break from the normal, challenging the status quo with demands for a new order. The nature and scope of the risk is defined by, and defines, the significance of the value to the rebel and the degree of his or her commitment to it. Rebellion thus attests to the existence of a value that transcends the immediate situation—and, at the risk of death, transcends the individual’s life. It asserts, at least in degrees, that life itself is not the only or exclusive end, but that meaningful life, a life worth living, is demanded. “The rebel does not ask for life, but for reasons for living” (R, 108). By insisting that the outrage be stopped, the movement of rebellion effects the transition from the realm of facts and norms to that of values. “Not every value entails rebellion, but every act of rebellion tacitly