Pursuant to the logic of totality, Nietzsche moves from the rejection of transcendent belief to the affirmation of the value of immanence. From the view that one cannot take a critical standpoint toward the existence of the world in totality, he concludes that one cannot adopt a critical standpoint toward existence at all. Once again, the implicit demand for an absolute system ends in deification.9
Thus emerges his amor fati and its companion doctrine the “eternal re-currence.” Nietzsche’s opposition to Christianity is revealed as essentially an opposition to its dogma; the person of Christ is not condemned.10
With this deification of immanence, “the movement of rebellion, by which man demanded his own existence, disappears in the individual’s absolute submission to the inevitable. Amor fati replaces what was an odium fati” (R, 73). “In a certain sense, rebellion, with Nietzsche, ends again in the exaltation of evil” (R, 74). The doctrine of the ubermensch may commence
as a demand to overcome the stifling of life by a herd morality. But with the affirmation that is the meaning of the doctrine of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche relinquishes the possibility of rejecting any expression of the will to power, however perverse or degraded. “Is there nothing in his work that can be used in support of definitive murder?” asks Camus. “The answer must be yes. From the moment that the methodical aspect of Nietzschean thought is neglected (and it is not certain that he himself always observed it), his rebellious logic knows no bounds…. To say yes to everything supposes that one says yes to murder” (R, 76).
From the rejection of transcendence to the deification of the present, Nietzsche becomes the accomplice of servile repression against his most profound inspiration.
There is a freedom at midday when the wheel of the world stops spinning and man consents to things as they are. But what is becomes what will be, and the ceaseless change of things must be accepted. . . . Then history begins again and freedom must be sought in history. . . . The rebel whom Nietzsche set on his knees before the cosmos will, from now on, kneel before history. . . . Nietzsche, at least in his theory of superhumanity, and Marx before him, with his classless society, both replace the Beyond by the Later On. In that way Nietzsche betrayed the Greeks and the teachings of Jesus, who, according to him, replaced the Beyond by the Immediate (R, 78, 79).
By losing critical perspective through their implicit demand for an absolute, the rebellions of Marx and Nietzsche “merge into Marxism—Leninism. . . . The fundamental difference is that Nietzsche . . . proposed to assent to what exists and Marx to what is to come. For Marx, nature is to be subjugated in order to obey history; for Nietzsche, nature is to be obeyed in order to subjugate history. It is the difference between the Christian and the Greek” (R, 79). Unfortunately, however, and instructively, it comes to the same thing: the same betrayal of the origins of revolt.
Metaphysical rebellion, in its initial stages, was only a protest against the lie and the crime of existence. The Nietzschean affirmative, forgetful of the original negative, disavows the ethic that refuses to accept the world as it is. . . . Nietzsche is . . . the most acute manifestation of nihilism’s conscience. . . . He compelled rebellion to . . . jump from the negation of the ideal to the secularization of the ideal. Since the salvation of man is not achieved in God, it must be achieved on earth. Since the world has no direction, man . . . must give it one (R, 77—8).
But what was required, according to Camus, was for rebellion to hold its ground within the relative space circumscribed by the yes and the no. If it attests to the impossibility of ultimately grounding its evaluations, it
must seek relative guidelines for conduit within our condition. A dialectic
of immersion and evaluation is called for. Nietzsche through his amor fati simultaneously rejects the initial form of his rebellion and affirms the values of that detested herd morality. His rebellion turns on itself.
Even more, he gives ideological justification to the nihilism it was his deepest desire to transcend. Camus concludes: Placed in the crucible of Nietzschean philosophy, rebellion, in the intoxication of freedom, ends in biological or historical Caesarism. The absolute negative had driven Stirner (and Sade) to deify crime simultaneously with the individual. But the absolute affirmative leads to universalizing murder and mankind simultaneously. Marxism—Leninism has really accepted the burden of Nietzsche’s will. . . . The great rebel thus creates with his own hands, and for his own imprisonment, the implacable reign of necessity. Once he had escaped from God’s prison, his first care was to construct the prison of history and of reason, thus putting the finishing touch to the camouflage and consecration of the nihilism whose conquest he claimed (R, 79-80).11
FROM REBELLION TO REVOLUTION
To recapitulate. The problem of The Rebel begins where the concerns of The Myth left off: with a world that lacks transcendent significance and needs a rule of conduct that can give direction to human efforts.
Camus finds in revolt a reaffirmation of human dignity joined with a passionate rejection of its violation.
In assigning a limit to oppression within which begins the dignity common to all men, rebellion defined a primary value. It placed first in its frame of reference an obvious complicity among men, a common texture, the solidarity of chains, a communication of being with being which renders men similar and bound together. To the mind at grips with an absurd world, rebellion thus helped it take a first step forward (R, 281; L’HR, 347).
More than simply rebelling against oppression, however, metaphysical rebellion must bear the burden of an age that denies us the comfort of the sacred. “Decrying the human condition and its creator, [these rebels] have affirmed the solitude of man [in the universe] and the nonexistence of any kind of [transcendent] morality” (R, 100, italicized words added by me for precision). “To the ‘I rebel, therefore we exist’.
. . they add . . . ‘And we are alone'”(R, 104). 12
But protest is not enough. Life requires action. The metaphysical rebel must address what is to be done. Whether as an individual or as a member of a collectivity, whether in the imagination, in one’s personal life, or in the public realm, the logic of rebellious negation leads directly to positive
and practical affirmation. While the initial rebellion is propelled by value and outrage, it is often tempted by the extent of the suffering, the lack of practically available alternatives, or the scope of its demands, to exaggerate one side of its experience at the expense of the rest. Most clearly, for Camus, Western belief systems tend to codify and absolutize the frame of reference within which the issue of the rebellion is joined. Our particular historical danger arises in this movement from metaphysical rebellion to the demand for a complete metaphysical revolution.
An increasingly agonized sense of the injustice of the human condition precipitates an attack on the source of that injustice, which, in a Judeo-Christian world, must ultimately be the divine order of things. Since God is responsible, He must either be evil or impotent.13
Even more, to deny God is to leave a void. How natural then to yearn for a replacement: a new god or a new sense of the divine order or both. It is this that Camus has in mind when he observes that “the bitter end of metaphysical rebellion . . . [is] metaphysical revolution. The master of the world, after his legitimacy has been contested, must be overthrown. Man must occupy his place” (R, 58).
Metaphysical revolution as a style in art is one thing. As a practical program it is something totally different. And yet the imagination so easily suggests paths of action, especially when concerned with the effort to make sense of the human condition. Even more so in the context of the disintegrating sacred world of Judeo-Christianity. Marching forth “from appearance to action, from dandy to revolutionary,” “human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution” (R, 100, L’HR, 128).
With the throne of God being overthrown, the rebel now recognizes that it is up to him to create . . . this justice, this order, this unity . . . and, by doing so, to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime if necessary, the empire of man (R, 25; L’HR, 41-2).
From impotence to practical action, “the spirit of metaphysical revolution openly joins forces with revolutionary movements” (R, 103).
But if the divinization of man is to replace the divinization of God, by what principle is man to rule? And to what end? Nature is the answer Sade and St. Just offer, but seen in diametrically opposed lights. For Sade liberation of the individual’s biological urges is to become the new law of creation, and the passions of the self are to know no bounds. For St. Just nature is reason and virtue, not sex and power. To obey nature is to obey reason and thus bring about the eternal reign of virtue.