Review: The Rebel by Albert Camus
Political instinct and philosophic imagination are strange bedfellows.
In The Rebel, Albert Camus unites them in his endeavor “to understand the times” by examining liberty and terror in Europe across the centuries. In doing so, he defies the dual quintessence of postwar French intellectual life — on the one hand, an outright condemnation of America, and on the other hand, a tacit condonation of totalitarianism.
“I revolt, therefore we are” Camus writes to lay out the paradox that underlies his thesis. The paradox poses two central questions: (1) how does a collective existence emerge from an individual’s rebellion?; and (2) how does the act of revolt give rise to a human-centric universe?
As to the first question, the answer lies is what the individual rebels against: absurdity. For Camus, absurdity is a sorry condition wherein we are blessed with wonder about the universe and the meaning of our existence in it, but helpless to solve that grand mystery.
From the shared crucible of absurdity comes the “we,” the subject of The Rebel. If “we” are the subject in Camus’ scheme, then the world’s injustice — oppression and slavery, particularly Soviet — is the object of our ire.
“Rebellion, through apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive…” Herein lies the second question posed by Camus’ underlying paradox. With God overthrown, the onus of creating order falls on the rebel, to create from nothing “the empire of Man.”
In this act of earthly creation, the rebel finds herself a reason to withdraw from hermitage, a reason to act, a reason to be. For Camus, an act of “rebellion is not, essentially, an egoistic act…as he identifies himself with a natural community.” Although we do not talk much of metaphysics in popular culture, for Camus, it is an active reality. In the act of defying injustice, Camus sees transcendent, human solidarity.
To develop the next segment of his argument, Camus relies on Russian literature and German philosophy — perplexing as they can be daunting. “Nietzsche knew that freedom of the mind is not a comfort, but an achievement to which one aspires and at long last obtains after an exhausting struggle.” From the necessity of the struggle for dignity, Nietzsche reasoned that if eternal lawfulness does not assure freedom, neither does absolute lawlessness. Freedom and law then become indivisible, and chaos itself is a form of bondage.
All of this (and this is abridged by three hundred or so pages), is to arrive at the junction that divides positive rebellions from the nihilistic. Creation, after all, is a violent affair. In nihilistic rebellion, the rebel demands totality, unconditional loyalty, and utter unity. The result is always the same: delusion sold at the price of sorrow and torment.
The times Camus sought to understand were filled with the technical advances and horrors that typify much of modernity, not the least of which were the Holocaust and two world wars. For Camus, the rationale (not excuse) for the horrors, at least in part, was the haughty belief that humans could achieve totality, could achieve not only self-mastery, but mastery over the universe — in short, could become God.
Camus explores the roots of humanity’s culpability and blazes a trail out from the abyss of denying absurdity to embracing and mastering it. Camus provides a political prescription for rebels that keeps them from lapsing into a foolhardy and murderous hunt of totality: “If men cannot refer to common value, recognized by all as existing in each one, then man is incomprehensible to man.” He makes no explicit political argument, however. He professes no position or policy, nor does he support any individual or party. Confined to abstraction, his prescription can appear useless. In fact, it is flexible.
“The rebel,” he writes “wants it to be recognized that freedom has its limits…the limit being precisely the human beings’ power to rebel.” In today’s political debates, from abortion to gun-control, Camus’ prescription can be taken to mean that “winning” outright is not the proper goal, for it leads only down the path totality, to what Richard Hofstadter called the “fundamentalist mind” that accepts neither moderation of its principles, nor compromise in its practices. In order to avoid the fundamentalist mindset, avoid pitting absolute good versus absolute evil, and focus first on common rather than controversial values.
The human response to absurdity, and Camus’ “final conclusion,” is to accept the “desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe.”
It is not the silence of the universe with which we contend today. Camus’ was the age of negation to the point of oblivion, the age of absolutist ideologies that led to the momentary expiry of free-thought. Ours, by contrast, is an age of information. The symbols we employ to represent information have become more complex than ever before, their velocity so swift as to overwhelm our means of making sense of them, obliterating gradation in our discourse to the point of distorted crudity.
If we can endeavor to think and argue without falling back on our nihilistic impulse, we might come to the happy resolution of Camus’ paradox. The challenge of our age lies not in the breaking the silence of the universe, but in identifying the signals in the noise of so very many vociferous, conflicting and even sometimes outright fabricated voices.
Consider Illinois Representative Daniel Lipinski’s recent victory. Marie Newman, a progressive Democrat, challenged Lipinski from the left. Newman tried to stoke voters’ progressive spirits using what David Axelrod charitably called “stridency.” That political proposition failed. Camus’ baroque style, typical of French intellectuals of his vintage, can be forbidding and difficult to penetrate. Once you do, though, you see the singular forcefulness of his logic that culminates inevitably with the need for intellectual and stylistic temperance in rebellion — a lesson lost on Newman.
The rebel “is not only the slave against the master, but also the man against the world of master and slave.” In our time, The Rebel is more than a way of understanding; it is a philosophical blueprint for action.
