But,” writes Camus, “he lived only for what is not of this world, and his proud search for the absolute is precisely what removed him from the world of which he loved no part” (R, 59). He could not himself transcend the standpoint requiring the possibility of making life meaningful by bringing to it an explanation grounded elsewhere. He rebelled in the name of a concrete value and its experienced transgression; yet he was unable to maintain this standpoint in his attempt to come to grips constructively with the human condition defined by this suffering. He could not ground his meaning in that condition, but felt driven to demand transcendent support. Ivan denies God in the name of justice, but, as Camus notes, resuming the challenge Sade leveled at St. Just and his followers,
the master of the world, after his legitimacy has been contested, must be overthrown. .. . “As God and immortality do not exist, the new man is permitted to become God.” But what does becoming God mean? It means, in fact, recognizing that everything is permitted and refusing to recognize any other law but one’s own (R, 58-9).
As with the French Revolution, justice itself is ungrounded and Ivan’s rebellion turns on its origins. Ivan’s revolt has turned into metaphysical revolution with a vengeance: The order of creation is to be overthrown, as the individual becomes God. Ivan rebelled against a condition that was intolerable because it was unjust. God, if there is such a being, is impotent, indifferent, or malicious. These are the limits as revolt encounters them. But
in metaphysical revolution the individual seeks to rewrite the human condition, in this case, to become God and to dictate the law—the providential design it found to be lacking.
The real problem of rebellion is found in the question, “Can one live and stand one’s ground in a state of rebellion?” (R, 58). Ivan’s answer is no. Beginning with the assertion of a limit, his inability to live without transcendent values and a solution to his quest for unity brought him, through an ineluctable dialectic, to the assertion that everything is permitted. And “with this .
. . the history of contemporary nihilism really begins” (R, 57).8
NIETZSCHE
“From the moment that man submits God to moral judgment, he kills Him in his own heart. And then what is the basis of morality? God is denied in the name of justice, but can the idea of justice be understood without the idea of God?” (R, 62). For Ivan, clearly not. He went mad, thus suggesting a path for our century. Nietzsche faces this problem head on. “With him,”
Camus observes, “nihilism becomes conscious for the first time” (R, 65). Nietzsche begins where Ivan left off, thus constituting an advance in rebellious thought. It was “not by choice, but by condition, and because he was too great to refuse the heritage of his time,” that he saw himself becoming Europe’s first complete nihilist. Camus writes: Contrary to the opinion of certain of his Christian critics, Nietzsche did not form a project to kill God. He found Him dead in the soul of his contemporaries. He was the first to understand the immense importance of the event and to decide that this rebellion on the part of men could not lead to a renaissance unless it was controlled and directed. Any other attitude . . . must lead to the apocalypse (R, 68).
Thus if Nietzsche is a nihilist, his aim is constructive, not destructive: “to transform passive nihilism into active nihilism” (R, 68), to unmask the inability to believe in what is, which often masquerades as faith in morality and religion, in order to make possible a creative assumption of the possibilities of what can be. “Instead of methodical doubt, he practiced methodical negation, the determined destruction of everything that still hides nihilism from itself, of the idols that camouflaged God’s death. ‘To raise a new sanctuary, a sanctuary must be destroyed, that is the law'” (R, 66).
The sanctuary that must be destroyed is Christianity. “Christianity believes that it is fighting against nihilism because it gives the world a sense of direction, while it is really nihilism itself in so far as, by imposing an imaginary meaning on life, it prevents the discovery of its real meaning” (R, 69). If nihilism is the inability to believe, then its most serious symptom is not found in atheism, but in the inability to believe in what is, to see what is happening, and to live life as it is offered. This infirmity is the root of all idealism. Morality has no faith in the world.
For Nietzsche, real morality cannot be separated from lucidity” (R, 67). Thus traditional “morality is the ultimate aspect of God which must be destroyed before reconstruction can begin” (R, 66).
Like Dostoevsky, Nietzsche can see in socialism “only a degenerate form of Christianity” because it “preserves a belief in the finality of history which betrays life and nature, which substitutes ideal ends for real ends, and contributes to enervating both the will and the imagination” (R, 69). Both socialism and Christianity express the nihilism that Nietzsche is dedicated to annihilating, the commitment to a telos, to a purpose transcendent to life. “A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who docs not believe in what exists” (R, 69). All such telic views are nihilistic, and must be ruthlessly destroyed, if creativity, the only path to the renaissance, to the ubermensch, is to be possible. ” ‘Every Church,’ asserts Nietzsche, ‘is a stone rolled onto the tomb of the man-god; it tries to prevent the resurrection, by force'” (R, 69). Hence “Nietzsche’s supreme vocation [is] … to provoke a kind of crisis and a final decision about the problem of atheism” (R, 66).
But liberation from the dead weight of a nihilist tradition does not come easily. Its shock waves are everywhere—certainly throughout Nietzsche’s thought and life. He recognizes, From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes “responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.”
It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, “the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?” (R, 70).
With Nietzsche, “The ‘can one live as a rebel?’ becomes . . . ‘can one live believing in nothing?’ His reply is affirmative … if one accepts the final consequences of nihilism” (R, 66). And what are those consequences?
Deprived of the divine will, the world is equally deprived of unity and finality. That is why it is impossible to pass judgment on the world. . . . Judgments are based on what is, with reference to what should be—the kingdom of heaven, eternal concepts, or moral imperatives. But what should be does not exist; and this world cannot be judged in the name of nothing. “The advantages of our times: nothing is true, everything is permitted” (R, 67).
Thus it would seem that Nietzsche has been led back to the same conclusion as Ivan. With no guides to conduct, no rules by which life may find direction and at least a modicum of order, chaos is inevitable. “The essence of his discovery consists in saying that if the eternal law is not freedom, the absence of law is still less so” (R, 71). To be free may be “to abolish ends,” but a world without order and values is clearly not a liberating world. “That is why he understood that the mind only found its real emancipation in the acceptance of new obligations” (R, 70-1; L’HR, 94).
Recognizing that total freedom is not liberation but a new form of servitude, Nietzsche feels the need for a source of values without transcendent purpose. ” ‘If we fail to find grandeur in
God,’ says Nietzsche, ‘we find it nowhere; it must be denied or created.’ To deny it was the task of the world around him, which he saw rushing to suicide. To create was the superhuman task for which he was willing to die” (R, 71-2). But if creation alone can save us, it is possible only through fidelity to this world and this life. “Nietzsche cries out to man that the only truth is the world, to which he must be faithful and in which he must live and find his salvation” (R, 72).
But—and here we enter onto perilous ground—if the world is our only home and cannot be judged on the basis of any nonexistent other, then, Nietzsche concludes, we cannot pass judgment on the world.
From the moment that it is admitted that the world pursues no end, Nietzsche proposes to concede its innocence, to affirm that it accepts no judgment since it cannot be judged on any intention, and consequently to replace all judgments based on values by absolute assent, and by a complete and exalted allegiance to this world. Thus from absolute despair will spring infinite joy, from blind servitude, unbounded freedom. To be free is, precisely, to abolish ends. The innocence of the ceaseless change of things, as soon as one consents to it, represents the maximum liberty. The free mind willingly accepts what is necessary. . . . Total acceptance of total necessity is his paradoxical definition of freedom (R, 72).