METAPHYSICAL REBELLION
“Metaphysical rebellion is the movement by which man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation. It is metaphysical because it contests the ends of man and of creation. . .. The metaphysical rebel protests against the condition in which he finds himself as a man” (R, 23).
No minor problem this. Like Hamlet, the rebel feels that something is rotten in the world around him. But unlike Hamlet, he sees the problem not primarily as a failure of individuals or even of a social system. Rather, the essentials of existence arc in question. “Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil” (R, 24). It is the scope of the revolt that makes it metaphysical.
Why is Being thus, rather than other? And why is the thus so inconsiderate of our deepest desires and values? This rebel is offended by an order of things that is experienced as a violation of personal integrity and as essentially unjust.
All this, no doubt, invokes the perspective of the rebel. In a sense, this is the old problem of the absurd reborn. The problem with the world emerges because it fails to live up to the rebel’s demands. The rebel makes a claim. Give up that claim, reject those demands, and the world no longer appears unjust. Rebellion would be pointless and would not even arise. One path to the resolution of the rebel’s outrage is thus suggested.
On the other side, a vision of the world is invoked. The rebel sees the world as inadequate, pervaded by evil and death. But he may be mistaken. Evil may be only an illusion of inadequate or partial perception. Death may be but a seeming affair whose eternal compensation requires different senses
to perceive. Thus a very different strategy is possible in response to the rebel. Metaphysical rebellion therefore clearly has its theoretical premises. The world must be seen as less than it might have been, and the individual or group must feel it has the right to something better. Camus addresses the first issue by noting that “it would be possible to demonstrate . . . that only two possible worlds can exist for the human mind: the sacred (or, to speak in Christian terms, the world of grace) and the world of rebellion” (R, 20—1). In the sacred world our place is ordained by divine dispensation; to question it is prideful or demonic. As folk wisdom would have it, if God had wanted us to fly, He would have given us wings. Thus statuses and roles are eternally fixed. Our place, our obligations and responsibilities, our means and ends are not open to question. The purpose of life is given and determining; the place of politics is ethically prescribed and circumscribed. And it is usually assumed —certainly in the West—that there is a goodness to this cosmic order, which assures that justice will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
But before mail accepts the sacred world and in order that he should be able to accept it—or before he escapes from it and in order that he should be able to escape from it —there is always a period of soul-searching and rebellion. The rebel is a man who is on the point of accepting or rejecting the sacred and determined on laying claim to a human situation in which all the answers are human—in other words, formulated in reasonable terms (R, 21).
This is our reality, feels Camus, which 150 years of Western history have written in blood: our collective struggle out of, and perhaps back into, a sacred world.1
But were there no revolts prior to the last 150 years? Surely Camus cannot mean that revolt and revolution are recent historical phenomena? Of course not. He suggests so much with his references to the Reformation, to the revolt of Prometheus, to Lucifer and Cain, and most explicitly in his discussion of the slave rebellion led by Spartacus. “When a slave rebels against his master,” asserts Camus, “the situation presented is of one man pitted against another, under a cruel sky, far from the exalted realms of principles” (R, 108). Such rebellions may “advance the concept of a principle of equality,” thus expressing “the transition from fact to right . . . analyzed in the first stage of rebellion” (R, 108, 109). But they go no further. They contest the right of one individual to rule, or challenge the practical morality of a group. They demand better, fairer, more equitable treatment for themselves or others. But they do not question the structure of the world. Rather, they often invoke that structure as justification of their right to challenge the present rulers as usurpers. Such was the nature of the Reformation— a “rebellion inside Christianity” (R, 111). In fact, most prior revolutions
refused to call themselves such. They claimed to be the legitimate upholders of the eternal verities, which the present rulers were violating, having usurped the levers of office, or misused the functions they had a right to exercise. In the case of Spartacus, Camus suggests that this inability even to conceive of an alternative order of things was the cause of his humiliating defeat. “At the decisive moment . . . within sight of the sacred walls [of eternal Rome], the army halts and wavers, as if retreating before the principles, the institutions, the city of the gods” (R, 109).
Thus what Camus means to suggest is that prior to the last 150 years in the West a sense of a cosmic order was taken as given. It was sacred. It defined the place of humans. No doubt, it evolved over time. But its changes were less the result of rational and explicit interrogation than of unarticulated accommodations to changing conditions. At any specific moment, the order was lived as unquestionable. In fact the issue did not even arise. Revolts took place within the metaphysical contours laid out by this cosmic order. They were rarely directed at the order itself. This did not make them less violent or destructive, simply less metaphysical. They were not challenging one unity with another. When this did happen, it was usually the case of two groups, such as distinct tribes, each with its own gods and its unquestioning belief in its own sacred world, confronting one another. Quite a different matter indeed from the internal disintegration of the sense of the cosmic order that has been the pervasive metaphysical reality of our times, the implications of which Camus wishes to bring to our attention.
Before turning to our specific historical reality, a word about the second of these previously noted theoretical premises. “The spirit of rebellion can exist only in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities” (R, 70). Thus when Camus speaks of rebellion as “the act of an educated man who is aware of his own rights” (R, 20), he is not emphasizing education so much as he is stressing the importance of an explicit sense of having a right to better than one is receiving. It is not simply suffering that generates metaphysical rebellion, but suffering joined to a conscious appre-ciatian of rights. “Poverty and degeneration have never ceased to be what they were before Marx’s time,” observes Camus, criticizing Marx’s concept of the “mission of the proletariat,” “factors contributing to servitude not to revolution” (R, 214). Further, the rights in question are not primarily individual rights, in the bourgeois sense, as Camus makes clear by his insistence upon the sense of solidarity that often generates revolt and sometimes sustains it. Such is clearly the case when the being of the rebel is not directly threatened by the injustice that generates outrage.
In short, “not every value entails rebellion,” but “every act of rebellion tacitly invokes a value” (R, 14). The value in question is justice, rooted in the demand for the preservation of human integrity. At issue is the metaphysical
base of the rebel’s sense that he has a right. This is the soil that nurtures the sense of dignity. That is why Camus can call rebellion “the movement that enlists the individual in the defense of a dignity common to all men” (R, 18). “It would therefore be impossible to overemphasize the passionate affirmation that underlies the act of rebellion . . . [revealing] the part of man which must always be defended” (R, 19).
THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN LEGACY
However universal the demand for integrity, the Western sense of the individual’s uniqueness and rights to relatively fair and equal treatment has given a special poignancy to our emerging sense of justice. With the development of the Judaic view of God’s concern for His people into the Christian univer-salization of the dignity of the person, mediated by the Greco-Roman sense of reason and the individual, a philosophical vision of “the rights of man” has emerged that gives particular force to the claims of rebellion. “The problem of rebellion seems to assume a precise meaning only within the confines of Western thought” (R, 20), because of the confrontation of a “theoretical equality” with “great factual inequalities.” In the context of the rights of man, what must one feel about an order of things that plays havoc with individual destiny?