What is it that is unjustifiable about condemning a person to death, especially an enemy who was aiming to put you to death, and whose death would have been legitimate had it occurred on the battlefield in the heat of combat? Here we get to the core of the Camusian ethic, which he was struggling with in Letters to a German Friend, and which finally found expression in The Rebel. Values are human values. Only the human being “has a meaning . . . because he is the only creature to insist upon having one” (RRD, 22). What Camus is there struggling to say is that the source of value lies in the implicit community of men in the face of an alien or indifferent world. Revolt makes appeal to that community, seeking to give form and expression to human values. That is what sustains and justifies the rebel. Condemning another to death fundamentally violates the integrity of that community. What could justify such an act but an appeal to something higher than, or beyond, the human community? Precisely because such transcendent values are “absent or distorted in contemporary Europe,” there can be no rational justification of the act by which one puts another to death. All such acts violate the implicit integrity of the human community, which is the only source for the rebel’s values in an age without transcendent appeal. Having overstepped the bounds of the human community, such rebels can be absolved only by accepting their own death. This is a sort of purgation by which the community reaffirms itself and binds up the wounds that the murder had rent in its fabric.
On the level of the absurd . . . murder would only give rise to logical contradictions; on the level of rebellion it is inner laceration. For it is now a question of deciding if it is possible to kill someone whose resemblance to ourselves we have at last recognized and whose identity we have just consecrated. When we have only just conquered solitude, must we then re-establish it definitively by legitimating the act that isolates everything? (R, 281; L’HR, 347).
It should be understood that the solitude in question is metaphysical solitude in the face of a universe indifferent to human concerns. It is the human community that sustains us in that universe, thus giving a ground to human values. “If a single master should, in fact, be killed, the rebel, in a certain way, is no longer justified in using the term community of men from which he derived his justification. If this world has no higher meaning, if man is only responsible to man, it suffices for a man to remove one single human being from the society of the living in order for him to be excluded himself from it.” The key is that “from the moment that he strikes, the rebel cuts the world in two. He rebelled in the name of the identity of man with man and he sacrifices this identity by consecrating the difference in blood” (R, 281; L’HR, 347-8). “On the level of history, as in individual life, murder is thus a desperate exception or it is nothing.”
But all this only addresses the question of murder, the willful killing of another. That is not justified, as Kaliayev understood. “If he himself finally kills, he will accept death” (R, 296; L’HR, 353), torn as he is by an agonized consciousness of injustice, and an impotence to do anything constructive about it. But this dilemma faced by the isolated individual is not to be identified willy-nilly with the situation of an individual or group under attack or struggling for its rights and dignity.
Absolute non-violence is the negative basis of slavery and its acts of violence; systematic violence positively destroys the living community and the being we receive from it. To be fruitful, these two ideas must find their limits. In history, considered as an absolute, violence finds itself legitimized; as a relative risk, it is the cause of a rupture in communication. It must therefore preserve, for the rebel, its provisional character as a violation, and must always be bound, if it cannot be avoided, to a personal responsibility and to an immediate risk. . . . Just as the rebel considers murder as the limit that he must, if he is carried to it, consecrate by dying, similarly violence can only be an extreme limit which opposes itself to another violence, as for example in the case of an insurrection. If the excess of injustice renders the latter impossible to avoid, the rebel refuses in advance violence in the service of a doctrine or as a reason of state (R, 291-2; L’HR, 360).
There is, of course, a real problem in the application of such a guideline. It may be clearly applied when my life is directly threatened. But what of the situation of one who sees the lives of others being directly threatened, thus, perhaps, legitimating killing in self-defense on their part, but where “noble” rebels could themselves go off and lead lives free from such pressure, perhaps even well-off lives? We might think of the case of “the just” or of a middle-class revolutionary such as Lenin. Camus’s response at this point is not completely clear, not to say convincing. The line seems, at best, quite vaguely drawn—with his leaning in the direction of “erring” on the side of caution and restraint—as is perhaps fitting for one whose personal circumstances were increasingly “comfortable” and removed from the direct heat of
oppression (not to speak of the vulnerability of his family in Algiers). But this is not the strength of his position. His views here are less important for the answers they give, or fail to give, than for the concerns they insist must be expressed or the issues that must be raised. To demand that those involved in rebellious activity be highly sensitive to, and continually critical of, the justification of their efforts and the actions that such justifications invite is to contribute significandy to the legitimation of rebellion—and thus to the enhancement of human living, which, Camus clearly feels, depends in great measure on saving rebellion from its own perversion and degeneration. The greatest argument for the status quo, Camus suggests, is often the threat to human dignity posed by rebellion’s perversions.
What then is the frame of that constructive position, the concrete details of which still remain to be delineated?
I will add, in conclusion, that to separate liberty from justice ends by separating culture and work, which is the social sin par excellence. The disarray of the worker movement in Europe partially derives from the fact that it has lost its true homeland —wherein it renewed its strength after every defeat—which was the faith in liberty. But the disarray of European intellectuals similarly derives from the fact that the double mystification—the bourgeois and the pseudo-revolutionary—has separated them from their only source of authenticity, namely work and the suffering of all. It has cut them off from their only natural allies, the workers. … I have never recognized any but two aristocracies, that of work and of intelligence. I now know that it is mad and criminal to wish to subordinate one to the other. I know that the two of them together constitute a single nobility; that in union lies their truth and especially their efficacy; and that separated they can be whittled away one by one by the forces of tyranny and barbarism, but, on the contrary, united they will constitute the law of the world (A/II, 168-9).
THE PSYCHIC SUBSOIL
With The Rebel the second stage in the development of Camus’s thought has come to a close. Out of these two stages, a conception of revolt has begun to emerge in which it is seen initially as the reaction of reflective natural beings occasioned by their desire to live freely in the face of natural and social forces seeking to deny them that right. The force of this conception arises out of Camus’s passionate attachment to the virile strength and beauty that may be the offering of the natural world, and to the shared suffering and quiet dignity that may be attested to by the human world. In short, the qualities of ordinary experience remain the touchstones of the Camusian world.
This commitment to the priority of the reflective natural being as the original and ultimate framework of constructive endeavors is what Camus is referring to when he speaks of innocence. It should be emphasized that
this priority is not definitive of an end, but indicative of a policy; if it is the human being who is seeking to work out his or her destiny, reflection must not deny what is essential to that being. The all-pervasive moral dimensions of Camus’s thought radiate from this initially simple and immediate demand to live, which is implicitly identical with the feeling of innocence.
Revolt is simultaneously the assertion of the immediate value of living (which is the quality of active innocence in its purest state, for example, in Meursault) and the refusal to join in complicity with evil (as, for example, with Tarrou or Rieux). This latter refusal can of course take place on many levels, the two main ones being the human suffering occasioned by the physical universe (as in The Myth, “Caligula,” and The Plague) and by the social universe (as in “The State of Siege,” “The Just,” and The Rebel).