I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one. This world has at least the truth of man, and our task is to provide its justification against fate itself (RRD, 22, my italics).
With this “because” Camus has transformed the problem, opening up the possibility of developing a dialectical defense of justice and rebellion. He has also suggested the theoretical task to which he was to devote himself during the following years.
13. Cherea makes clear when he joins the Patricians in their revolt against Caligula that he does not do so for the same reasons. “If I am with you, I am not for you. . . . You credit him with trivial motives, when he has only the most grand. … I will thus not serve any of your interests, wishing only to regain peace in a world which once again obtains its coherence” (TRN, 34-5; CTOP, 20-2).
14. No one better incarnates this hypostatization of the traditional than the Old Patrician, who mouths one cliche after another: Nature is a great healer (l’age efface tout); there’s no smoke without fire (il n’y a pas de fumee sans feu) (TRN, 8; CTOP, 4-6).
15. It is one of the aims of The Fall to dramatize this attitude.
16. Camus had written in 1937, “Men of action must also be men of ideals and industrial poets. We must live our dreams—and act on them” (TRN, 1734).
CHAPTER 6
1. Suggesting the perspective that underlies this work, Camus writes in The Rebel, “Every equivocation, every misunderstanding, leads to death. Only clear language and direct speech can save us from this death” (E, 350; R, 283)
2. In addition, the image of prison plays an important role in any concern with politics, as Tarrou’s discussion makes clear. This concern reverberates through all the works that follow The Plague: “The State of Siege,” “The Just,” The Rebel, The Fall, even Exile and the Kingdom.
3. Paneloux: “pan” = whole; “loux” = praise; that is, Father Praise-the-Whole.
4. Tarrou summarizes Paneloux’s dilemma as an all or nothing that puts the foundation of his faith in question; cf P, 207.
5. See Camus’s 1946 essay “Neither Victims nor Executioners” for his presentation of a political position motivated by these moral concerns. The issue is discussed at length in Chapter 13.
6. See Camus’s remark in Combat on die death sentence meted out to the collaborationist Pierre Pucheu, for example.
CHAPTER 7
1. For the classical statement of the nihilist’s attitude toward die natural, see Bazarov in fathers and Sons.
2. Camus’s public argument with Gabriel Marcel on the role of the Catholic Church during the Spanish Civil War resulted from this paragraph. Cf. “Why Spain” in RRD.
CHAPTER 8
1. The emergence of fascism served only to underscore its historical significance. Camus’s Letters to a German Triend testifies to the personal bearing of this philosophical problem, which found dramatic expression in The Plague, “The State of Siege,” and “The Just.” Throughout these works is woven, like Ariadne’s thread, Camus’s effort to find a way out of the dead end of nihilism which does not itself lead to the legitimation of murder. In part at least, the continual reworking of “Caligula” can also be attributed to this need to make clear why Caligula’s path was not the right one.
2. For the most part, the opening section of The Rebel appeared as a separate article published in 1945 under the title Notes on Revolt. While the order of exposition undergoes transformation, the basic ideas that explain the transition from absurd to revolt are the same. Cf. “Remarque sur la Revoke,” E, 1682-97.
3. For a more detailed discussion of the nature of mindscapes and cultural drama see my The Drama of Thought.
4. “Everything that separates, horrifies me,” wrote Camus in 1956 (in Lottman, 572). In a 1946 interview with the New York Post he had spoken of four series of his work: absurd, revolt, we are, and love. Cf.
Lottman, 393-4.
5. With the development of the feminist movement, itself a form of rebellion, we hear far less of that far less satisfying response I” oppression, bitchiness.
6. By “origins” Camus means nothing from which anything can be deduced. If time is taken seriously, origins are never definitive of a problem, but simply initiative, originating. They can give rise to a mode of thinking, and thus set the conditions
of, and hint at, the problem’s solution. They function in Camus’s thought like an impulse, called forth by, and erupting into, a habitual pattern. An investigation is bound up with its origins, then, as the intelligent search for means is bound up with the impulse that initiates if. One neither denies an impulse, nor deduces from it the end that may serve as its fulfillment. One seeks, rather, to direct the impetus toward a course of action that may transform both impulse and situation. The aim should be to correct creation in such a way as to do justice to the original yet inarticulate demand. And so with origins.
Camus never says that one cannot deny the origins of one’s thought. In fact, if they are definitive as to conclusions only in deductive schemes, then certainly one may deny the force of their suggestions elsewhere. Camus seeks only to show that these origins have almost always been denied—with results that are the direct consequences of that denial.
If the importance of origins is seen in this light, one can draw the thematic of the inquiry from an understanding of the boundary conditions that the origins of revolt imply, as well as of the direction toward which the original movement has pointed; but one cannot reasonably return to the origins as grounds upon which to rest one’s case. Origins justify nothing, though they may rule out certain modes of action as inappropriate, inadequate, or irrelevant. When, on the other hand, the products of thought are investigated and studied simply on their own terms, and then used to determine a line of conduct, we become the victims of ideology.
7. Thody reports a January 1946 comment by Camus expressing an opinion of Hegel’s philosophy that sheds light on the position he eventually develops in The Rebel: “When one believes, like Hegel and the whole of modern philosophy, that man is made for history and not history for man, one cannot believe in dialogue: one believes in efficacy and in the will to power. Ultimately, one believes in murder” (Thody, 105).
8. Cf. note 2 to Chapter 2.
9. “The idea of messianism [is] at the base of all fanaticisms” (AJ, 49).
CHAPTER 9
1. Cf. note 2 to the Preface. The contrast between Greek and Judeo-Christian sensibility is also relevant here.
2.I refer to the Christian cosmic drama when emphasizing the modern world and to the Judeo-Christian when speaking of the origin and sources of our history.
3. See the writings of Mircea Eliade, for example.
4. “If we add . . . that Marx owes to the bourgeois economists the idea which he made his own of the exclusive part played by industrial production in the development of humanity, and that he took the essentials of his theory of labor value from Ricardo . . . our right to say that his prophecy is bourgeois in content will doubtless be recognized” (L’HR, 242-3; R, 196-7).
5. For the discussion of St. lust’s project in which “the religion of reason quite
naturally establishes the Republic of law and order,” cf. K, 122 3.
6. Note this emerging theme also in “The Just,” The Fall, and “The Renegade.”
7. “Profligate, like all people without a rule of life, he is coherent as an actor. But an actor implies a public; the dandy can only play a part by setting himself in opposition. He can only be sure of his own existence by finding it in the expression of other’s faces. Other people are his mirror. A mirror that quickly becomes clouded, it is true, since human capacity for attention is limited. It must be ceaselessly stimulated, spurred on by provocation. The dandy, therefore, is always compelled to astonish. . . . Perpetually incomplete, … he compels others to create him, while denying their values. He plays at life because he is unable to live it. . . . More than a century of rebellion came to fulfillment in these audacities of’eccentricity'” (L’HR, 72-3).
8. Commenting upon St. Just, Camus had noted, “His principles are not in accord with what is. Things are not what they should be. The principles are thus silent, isolated, and rigid. To abandon oneself to them is, in truth, to die, and to die of an impossible love which is the opposite of love” (R, 129; L’HR, 164). St. Just dies a self-defeating death, that of absolute commitments to the transcendent.