Are these critics right? If so, is any constructive action to address our collective ills left to Camus? And if the critics are wrong, how can we account for the misreading? What are we to understand as Camus’s position? Finally, what is the practical upshot of these discussions? What is the path out of our present historical dead end toward that renaissance to which so much of Camus’s effort was explicitly dedicated?
Camus himself is not without reponsibility for this controversy. His penchant for dramatic phrasing and symmetrically counterposed alternatives often subordinates necessary qualifications to stylistic concerns. Even more, he often fails to maintain the clarity required to keep distinct the different levels upon which his analysis moves. With respect to the present issue, for example, this is particularly significant—for he can move from a discussion of total or metaphysical revolution to a consideration of historical or political revolutions without making the transition clear. This allows for a gross misreading of his intent.8 What then is this rebellion that is, “at first, limited in scope”?
It is only a non-coherent act of bearing witness. Revolution, on the contrary, begins with the idea. It is . . . the insertion of the idea into historical experience, while revolt is only the movement that leads from individual experience to the idea. While even the collective history of a rebellious movement is always that of an engagement without issue in deeds, of an obscure protest which involves neither systems nor reasons, a revolution is an attempt to model action in accord with an idea, to shape the world into the frame of theory (R, 106; L’HR, 136).
It must be noted here that the relation between revolt and revolution places emphasis on both the distinctive origins as well as the ongoing structure of their engagements. Further, it suggests a developmental rather than polarized relation between them.9
To appreciate the problem as Camus sees it we must recall the metaphysical situation that pervades modern attitudes. The disintegration of a transcendent perspective for living having provided the backdrop for contemporary struggles, Camus sees humans turning toward an absolutization of history. This “historicism,” in rejecting the appeal of any values not proven by their historical efficacy, ends up as a doctrine of success at any cost, in which the ends justify the means and the winners write the moral manuals —all in the name of human salvation. Only by keeping this context in mind can the analysis Camus offers be put in perspective. “The logic of history, from the moment that it is totally accepted, gradually leads it, against its most passionate convictions, to mutilate man more and more and to transform itself into objective crime” (R, 246, my italics).
Nothing remains for us . . . but to be reborn or to die. If we are at this moment in which rebellion has come to the point of its most extreme contradiction by denying itself, then it must either perish with the world it has created or find a new fidelity and a new burst of energy. Before going further, it must at least make this contradiction clear. It is not well defined when one says, as do our existentialists for example (themselves subject, for the moment, to historicism and its contradictions), that there is progress in the movement from revolt to revolution and that revolt is nothing if it is not revolutionary. The contradiction is, in reality, much tighter. The revolutionary is at the same time a rebel or he is no longer a revolutionary, but a policeman or a functionary who turns against the revolution. So much so that there is no progress from one attitude to the other, but coexistence and continually increasing contradiction. Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic. In the purely historical universe that they have chosen, revolt and revolution end up in the same dilemma: either the police or madness (R, 249; L’HR, 305—6, my italics).
To lose sight of the context of this analysis, namely the metaphysical world defined by historicism, is inevitably to misinterpret Camus’s analysis as an all-out attack on revolutionary movements, which it most emphatically is not.
At this level, history … is not a source of values, but only of nihilism. . . . The thought which constitutes itself solely with history, just like that which turns itself away from history, deprives man of the means or the reason for living. The first drives him to the despair of the “why live”; the second, of the “how live.” History, necessary but not sufficient, is therefore only an occasional cause. It is not an absence of value, nor value itself, nor even the material of value. It is the occasion, among others, in which man can experience the still confused existence of a value which allows him to judge history. Revolt itself makes us the promise of it (R, 249—50; L’HR, 306).
“Certainly, the rebel does not deny the history which surrounds him; it is within it that he tries to affirm himself. But he finds himself before it like an artist before reality, he rejects it without removing himself from it. But not for a second does he make of it an absolute” (R, 290; L’HR, 358). “In reality, the purely historical absolute is not even conceivable. The thought of Jaspers . . . underlines the impossibility of man’s grasping the totality since he finds himself in the midst of this totality. History, as an entirety, would only be able to exist for an observer exterior to itself and to the world. In the final analysis, there is history only for God” (R, 289; L’HR, 357).
Having thus placed Camus’s critique of revolution in the context of his critique of historicism, we can better appreciate the way that critique seeks to reveal the destructive dialectic of totality in order to prepare the way for the reconstitution of rebellious thought in the service of human enablement.
Absolute revolution . . . supposes the absolute malleability of human nature and its possible reduction to the condition of a historical force. But rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced simply to historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men which escapes the world of power. History, certainly, is one of the limits of man. In this sense, the revolutionary is correct. But man, in his revolt, poses in his turn a limit to history. At this limit is born the promise of a value. … In 1950, and provisionally, the fate of the world is not being played out as it appeared, in the struggle between bourgeois production and revolutionary production. Their ends will be the same. It is being played out between the forces of rebellion and those of caesarian revolution.
“I rebel, therefore we exist,” said the slave. Metaphysical rebellion then added the “we are alone,” by which we are still living today. But if we are alone under the empty sky, if therefore we must die forever, how are we really able to be? Metaphysical revolution then tried to construct being out of appearances. After which, purely historical thought came to say that being was doing. We were not, but were to be by any means necessary. Our revolution is an attempt to conquer a new being by doing, outside of all moral rules. That is why it condemns itself to live only for history, and in a reign of terror. Man is nothing, according to it, if he does not obtain in history . . . unanimous consent. At this precise point, the limit is surpassed, revolt is first betrayed, and then logically assassinated, because it never affirmed, in its purest movement, anything other than precisely the existence of a limit, and the divided being that we are. . . . When rebellion in rage or intoxication, passes to the all or nothing, to the negation of all being and of all human nature, at this point it denies itself. Only total negation justifies the project of a totality to be conquered. But the affirmation of a limit, of a dignity and of a beauty common to men . . . entails the necessity of. . . advancing toward unity without denying the origins of rebellion. Rebellion’s demand is for unity, historical revolution’s demand is totality. . . . Revolution . . . cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history. Undoubtedly, it has nothing but scorn for the formal and mystifying morality that it finds in bourgeois society. But its folly has been to extend this scorn to every moral demand. Rebellion, in fact, says … to revolution that it must try to act, not in order to come into being one day in the eyes of a world reduced to acquiescence, but in terms of this obscure being which is already revealed in the movement of insurrection (R, 249-52; L’HR, 305-9).