## 1. The Paradoxes of Camus's Absurdist Philosophy



There are various paradoxical elements in Camus's approach to
philosophy. In his book-length essay, *The Myth of Sisyphus*,
Camus presents a philosophy that contests philosophy itself. This
essay belongs squarely in the philosophical tradition of
existentialism but Camus denied being an existentialist. Both *The
Myth of Sisyphus* and his other philosophical work, *The
Rebel*, are systematically skeptical of conclusions about the
meaning of life, yet both works assert objectively valid answers to
key questions about how to live. Though Camus seemed modest when
describing his intellectual ambitions, he was confident enough as a
philosopher to articulate not only his own philosophy but also a
critique of religion and a fundamental critique of modernity. While
rejecting the very idea of a philosophical system, Camus constructed
his own original edifice of ideas around the key terms of absurdity
and rebellion, aiming to resolve the life-or-death issues that
motivated him.



The essential paradox arising in Camus's philosophy concerns his
central notion of absurdity. Accepting the Aristotelian idea that
philosophy begins in wonder, Camus argues that human beings cannot
escape asking the question, "What is the meaning of
existence?" Camus, however, denies that there is an answer to
this question, and rejects every scientific, teleological,
metaphysical, or human-created end that would provide an adequate
answer. Thus, while accepting that human beings inevitably seek to
understand life's purpose, Camus takes the skeptical position
that the natural world, the universe, and the human enterprise remains
silent about any such purpose. Since existence itself has no meaning,
we must learn to bear an irresolvable emptiness. This paradoxical
situation, then, between our impulse to ask ultimate questions and the
impossibility of achieving any adequate answer, is what Camus calls
*the absurd*. Camus's philosophy of the absurd explores
the consequences arising from this basic paradox.



Camus's understanding of absurdity is best captured in an image,
not an argument: of Sisyphus straining to push his rock up the
mountain, watching it roll down, then descending after the rock to
begin all over, in an endless cycle. Like Sisyphus, humans cannot help
but continue to ask after the meaning of life, only to see our answers
tumble back down. If we accept this thesis about life's
essential absurdity, and Camus's anti-philosophical approach to
philosophical questions, we cannot help but ask: What role is left for
rational analysis and argument? Doesn't Camus the philosopher
preside over the death of philosophy in answering the question whether
to commit suicide by abandoning the terrain of argument and analysis
and turning to metaphor to answer it? If life has no fundamental
purpose or meaning that reason can articulate, we cannot help asking
about why we continue to live and to reason. Might not Silenus be
right in declaring that it would have been better not to have been
born, or to die as soon as
 possible?[1]
 And, as Francis Jeanson wrote long before his famous criticism of
*The Rebel* that precipitated the rupture between Camus and
Sartre, isn't absurdist philosophy a contradiction in terms,
strictly speaking no philosophy at all but an anti-rational posture
that ends in silence (Jeanson 1947)?



Was Camus actually a philosopher? He himself said no, in a famous
interview with Jeanine Delpech in *Les Nouvelles
Litteraires* in November of 1945, insisting that he did
"not believe sufficiently in reason to believe in a
system" (Camus 1965, 1427). This was not merely a public
posture, since we find the same thought in his notebooks of this
period: he describes himself as an artist and not a philosopher
because "I think according to words and not according to
ideas" (Camus 1995, 113). Still, Jean-Paul Sartre saw
immediately that Camus was undertaking important philosophical work,
and in his review of *The Stranger* in relation to
*Sisyphus*, had no trouble connecting Camus with Pascal,
Rousseau, and Nietzsche (Sartre 1962). After they became friends
Sartre spoke publicly of his friend's "philosophy of the
absurd," which he distinguished from his own thought for which
he accepted the "existentialist" label that Camus
rejected. In the years since, the apparent unsystematic, indeed,
anti-systematic, character of his philosophy, has meant that
relatively few scholars have appreciated its full depth and
complexity. They have more often praised his towering literary
achievements and standing as a political moralist while pointing out
his dubious claims and problematic arguments (see Sherman 2008). A
significant recent exception to this is Ronald Srigley's
*Albert Camus' Critique of Modernity* (Srigley 2011).



This entry will negotiate Camus's deliberate ambivalence as a
philosopher while discussing his philosophy. It is not just a matter
of giving a philosophical reading of this playwright, journalist,
essayist, and novelist but of taking his philosophical writings
seriously--exploring their premises, their evolution, their
structure, and their coherence. To do so is to see that his writing
contains more than a mood and more than images and sweeping,
unsupported assertions, although it contains many of both. Camus takes
his skepticism as far as possible as a form of methodical
doubt--that is, he begins from a presumption of
skepticism--until he finds the basis for a non-skeptical
conclusion. And he builds a unique philosophical construction, whose
premises are often left unstated and which is not always argued
clearly, but which develops in distinct stages over the course of his
brief lifetime. Camus's philosophy can be thus read as a
sustained effort to demonstrate and not just assert what is entailed
by the absurdity of human existence. In the process Camus answers the
questions posed by *The Myth of Sisyphus*, "Why should I
not kill myself?", and by *The Rebel*, "Why should
I not kill others?"


## 2. *Nuptials* and Camus's Starting Point



Camus's graduate thesis at the University of Algiers
sympathetically explored the relationship between Greek philosophy and
Christianity, specifically the relationship of Plotinus to Augustine
(Camus 1992). Nevertheless, his philosophy explicitly rejects religion
as one of its foundations. Not always taking an openly hostile posture
towards religious belief--though he certainly does in the novels
*The Stranger* and *The Plague*--Camus centers his
work on choosing to live without God. Another way to understand
Camus's philosophy is that it is an effort to explore the issues
and pitfalls of a post-religious world.



Camus's earliest published writing containing philosophical
thinking, *Nuptials*, appeared in Algeria in 1938, and remain
the basis of his later work. These lyrical essays and sketches
describe a consciousness reveling in the world, a body delighting in
nature, and the individual's immersion in sheer physicality. Yet
these experiences are presented as the solution to a philosophical
problem, namely finding the meaning of life in the face of death. They
appear alongside, and reveal themselves to be rooted in, his first
extended meditation on ultimate questions.



In these essays, Camus sets two attitudes in opposition. The first is
what he regards as religion-based fears. He cites religious warnings
about pride, concern for one's immortal soul, hope for an
afterlife, resignation about the present and preoccupation with God.
Against this conventional Christian perspective Camus asserts what he
regards as self-evident facts: that we must die and there is nothing
beyond this life. Without mentioning it, Camus draws a conclusion from
these facts, namely that the soul is not immortal. Here, as elsewhere
in his philosophical writing, he commends to his readers to face a
discomforting reality squarely and without flinching, but he does not
feel compelled to present reasons or evidence. If not with religion,
where then does wisdom lie? His answer is: with the "conscious
certainty of a death without hope" and in refusing to hide from
the fact that we are going to die. For Camus "there is no
superhuman happiness, no eternity outside of the curve of the
days.... I can see no point in the happiness of angels"
(*N*, 90). There is nothing but *this* world,
*this* life, the immediacy of the present.



Camus is sometimes mistakenly called a "pagan" because he
rejects Christianity as based on a hope for a life beyond this life.
*Hope* is the error Camus wishes to avoid. Rejecting "the
delusions of hope" (*N*, 74), *Nuptials* contains
an evocation of an alternative. Camus relies for this line of thought
on Nietzsche's discussion of Pandora's Box in *Human,
All Too Human*: all the evils of humankind, including plagues and
disease, have been let loose on the world by Zeus, but the remaining
evil, hope, is kept hidden away in the box and treasured. But why, we
may ask, is hope an evil? Nietzsche explains that humans have come to
see hope as their greatest good, while Zeus, knowing better, has meant
it as the greatest source of trouble. It is, after all, the reason why
humans let themselves be tormented--because they anticipate an
ultimate reward (Nietzsche 1878/1996, 58). For Camus, following this
reading of Nietzsche closely, the conventional solution is in fact the
problem: hope is disastrous for humans inasmuch as it leads them to
minimize the value of this life except as preparation for a life
beyond.



If religious hope is based on the mistaken belief that death, in the
sense of utter and total extinction body and soul, is not inevitable,
it leads us down a blind alley. Worse, because it teaches us to look
away from life toward something to come afterwards, such religious
hope kills a part of us, for example, the realistic attitude we need
to confront the vicissitudes of life. But what then is the appropriate
path? The young Camus is neither a skeptic nor a relativist here. His
discussion rests on the self-evidence of sensuous experience. He
advocates precisely what he takes Christianity to abjure: living a
life of the senses, intensely, here and now, in the present. This
entails, first, abandoning all hope for an afterlife, indeed rejecting
thinking about it. "I do not want to believe that death is the
gateway to another life. For me it is a closed door"
(*N*, 76).



We might think that facing our total annihilation would be bitter, but
for Camus this leads us in a positive direction: "Between this
sky and the faces turned toward it there is nothing on which to hang a
mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion--only stones,
flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch" (*N*,
90). This insight entails obstinately refusing "all the
'later on's of this world," in order to lay claim to
"my present wealth" (*N*, 103), namely the intense
here-and-now life of the senses. The "wealth" is precisely
what hope cheats us out of by teaching us to look away from it and
towards an afterlife. Only by yielding to the fact that our
"longing to endure" will be frustrated and accepting our
"awareness of death" are we able to open ourselves to the
riches of life, which are physical above all.



Camus puts both sides of his argument into a single statement:
"The world is beautiful, and outside there is no
salvation" (*N*, 103). Only in accepting death and in
being "stripped of all hope" does one most intensely
appreciate not only the physical side of life, but also, he now
suggests, its affective and interpersonal side. Taken together, and
contrary to an unverifiable faith in God and afterlife, these are what
one *has* and one *knows*: "To feel one's
ties to a land, one's love for certain men, to know there is
always a place where the heart can find rest--these are already
many certainties for one man's life" (*N*, 90).



Only if we accept that Nietzsche is right, that God is dead and there
is only nothingness after we die, will we then fully
experience--feel, taste, touch, see, and smell--the joys of
our bodies and the physical world. Thus the sensuous and lyrical side
of these essays, their evocative character, is central to the
argument. Or rather, because Camus is promoting intense, joyous,
physical experience as opposed to a self-abnegating religious life,
rather than developing an argument he asserts that these experiences
themselves are the right response. His writing aims to demonstrate
what life *means* and *feels like* once we give up hope
of an afterlife, so that in reading we will be led to
"see" his point. These essays may be taken as containing
highly personal thoughts, a young man's musings about his
Mediterranean environment, and they scarcely seem to have any system.
But they suggest what philosophy is for Camus and how he conceives its
relationship to literary expression.



His early philosophy, then, may be conveyed, if not summed up, in this
passage from "Nuptials at Tipasa":



> 
> In a moment, when I throw myself down among the absinthe plants to
> bring their scent into my body, I shall know, appearances to the
> contrary, that I am fulfilling a truth which is the sun's and
> which will also be my death's. In a sense, it is indeed my life
> that I am staking here, a life that tastes of warm stone, that is full
> of the signs of the sea and the rising song of the crickets. The
> breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and
> wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition.
> Yet people have often told me: there's nothing to be proud of.
> Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the
> salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and
> glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need my
> strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I
> surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and
> arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of
> living. (*N*, 69)
> 



The intense and glistening present tells us that we can fully
experience and appreciate life only on the condition that we no longer
try to avoid our ultimate and absolute death.


## 3. Suicide, Absurdity and Happiness: *The Myth of Sisyphus*



After completing *Nuptials*, Camus began to work on a planned
triptych on the Absurd: a novel, which became *The Stranger*, a
philosophical essay, eventually titled *The Myth of Sisyphus*,
and a play, *Caligula*. These were completed and sent off from
Algeria to the Paris publisher in September 1941. Although Camus would
have preferred to see them appear together, even in a single volume,
the publisher for both commercial reasons and because of the paper
shortage caused by war and occupation, released *The Stranger*
in June 1942 and *The Myth of Sisyphus* in October. Camus kept
working on the play, which finally appeared in book form two years
later (Lottman, 264-67).


### 3.1 Suicide as a Response to Absurdity



"There is only one really serious philosophical problem,"
Camus says, "and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life
is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy.
All other questions follow from that" (*MS*, 3). One
might object that suicide is neither a "problem" nor a
"question," but an act. A proper, philosophical question
might rather be: "Under what conditions is suicide
warranted?" And a philosophical answer might explore the
question, "What does it mean to ask whether life is worth
living?" as William James did in *The Will to Believe*.
For the Camus of *The Myth of Sisyphus*, however, "Should
I kill myself?" is *the* essential philosophical
question. For him, it seems clear that the primary result of
philosophy is action, not comprehension. His concern about "the
most urgent of questions" is less a theoretical one than it is
the life-and-death problem of whether and how to live.



Camus sees this question of suicide as a natural response to an
underlying reality, namely, that life is absurd. It is absurd to
continually seek meaning in life when there is none; and it is absurd
to hope for some form of continued existence after death, which
results in our extinction. But Camus also thinks it absurd to try to
know, understand, or explain the world, since he regards the attempt
to gain rational knowledge as futile. Here Camus pits himself against
science and philosophy, dismissing the claims of all forms of rational
analysis: "That universal reason, practical or ethical, that
determinism, those categories that explain everything are enough to
make a decent man laugh" (*MS*, 21).



These kinds of absurdity are driving Camus's question about
suicide, but his way of proceeding evokes another kind of absurdity,
one less well-defined, namely, the "absurd sensibility"
(MS, 2, tr. changed). This sensibility, vaguely described, seems to be
"an intellectual malady" (*MS*, 2) rather than a
philosophy. He regards thinking about it as "provisional"
and insists that the mood of absurdity, so "widespread in our
age" does not arise from, but lies prior to, philosophy.
Camus's diagnosis of the essential human problem rests on a
series of "truisms" (*MS*, 18) and "obvious
themes" (*MS*, 16). But he doesn't argue for
life's absurdity or attempt to explain it--he is not
interested in either project, nor would such projects engage his
strength as a thinker. "I am interested ... not so much in
absurd discoveries as in their consequences" (*MS*, 16).
Accepting absurdity as the mood of the times, he asks above all
whether and how to live in the face of it. "Does the absurd
dictate death" (*MS*, 9)? But he does not argue this
question either, and rather chooses to demonstrate the attitude
towards life that would deter suicide. In other words, the main
concern of the book is to sketch ways of living our lives so as to
make them worth living despite their being meaningless.



According to Camus, people commit suicide "because they judge
life is not worth living" (*MS*, 4). But if this
temptation precedes what is usually considered philosophical
reasoning, how to answer it? In order to get to the bottom of things
while avoiding *arguing* for the truth of his statements, he
depicts, enumerates, and illustrates. As he says in *The
Rebel*, "the absurd is an experience that must be lived
through, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence, of
Descartes's methodical doubt" (*R*, 4). *The
Myth of Sisyphus* seeks to *describe* "the elusive
feeling of absurdity" in our lives, rapidly pointing out themes
that "run through all literatures and all philosophies"
(*MS*, 12). Appealing to common experience, he tries to render
the flavor of the absurd with images, metaphors, and anecdotes that
capture the experiential level he regards as lying prior to
philosophy.



He begins doing so with an implicit reference to Sartre's novel,
*Nausea*, which echoes the protagonist Antoine
Roquentin's discovery of absurdity. Camus had earlier written
that this novel's theories of absurdity and its images are not
in balance. The descriptive and the philosophical aspects of the novel
"don't add up to a work of art: the passage from one to
the other is too rapid, too unmotivated, to evoke in the reader the
deep conviction that makes art of the novel" (Camus 1968, 200).
But in this 1938 review Camus praises Sartre's descriptions of
absurdity, the sense of anguish and nausea that arises as the ordinary
structures imposed on existence collapse in Antoine Roquentin's
life. As Camus now presents his own version of the experience,
"the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the
office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal,
sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and
Sunday according to the same rhythm ..." (*MS*,
12-3). As this continues, one slowly becomes fully conscious and
senses the absurd.


### 3.2 The Limits of Reason



Camus goes on to sketch other experiences of absurdity, until he
arrives at death. But although Camus seeks to avoid arguing for the
truth of his claims, he nevertheless concludes this "absurd
reasoning" with a series of categorical assertions addressed to
"the intelligence" about the inevitable frustration of the
human desire to know the world and to be at home in it. Despite his
intentions, Camus cannot avoid asserting what he believes to be an
objective truth: "We must despair of ever reconstructing the
familiar, calm surface which would give us peace of heart"
(*MS*, 18). Turning to experiences that are seemingly obvious
to large numbers of people who share the absurd sensibility, he
declares sweepingly: "This world in itself is not reasonable,
that is all that can be said" (*MS*, 21). Our efforts to
know are driven by a nostalgia for unity, and there is an inescapable
"hiatus between what we fancy we know and what we really
know" (*MS*, 18).



"With the exception of professional rationalists, people today
despair of true knowledge" (*MS*, 18). Camus asserts that
the history of human thought is characterized by "its successive
regrets and its impotences" (*MS*, 18), and that
"the impossibility of knowledge is established"
(*MS*, 25). When writing more carefully, he claims only to be
describing a certain "climate," but in any case his
bedrock assumptions appear again and again: the world is unknowable
and life is without meaning. Our efforts to understand them lead
nowhere.



Avi Sagi suggests that in claiming this Camus is not speaking as an
irrationalist--which is, after all, how he regards the
existentialists--but as someone trying to rationally understand
the limits of reason (Sagi 2002, 59-65). For Camus the problem
is that by demanding meaning, order, and unity, we seek to go beyond
those limits and pursue the impossible. We will never understand, and
we will die despite all our efforts. There are two obvious responses
to our frustrations: suicide and hope. By hope Camus means just what
he described in *Nuptials*, the religion-inspired effort to
imagine and live for a life beyond this life. Or, second, as taken up
at length in *The Rebel*, bending one's energies to
living for a great cause beyond oneself: "Hope of another life
one must 'deserve' or trickery of those who live not for
life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it,
give it a meaning, and betray it" (*MS*, 8).



What is the Camusean alternative to suicide or hope? The answer is to
live without escape and with integrity, in "revolt" and
defiance, maintaining the tension intrinsic to human life. Since
"the most obvious absurdity" (*MS*, 59) is death,
Camus urges us to "die unreconciled and not of one's own
free will" (*MS*, 55). In short, he recommends a life
without consolation, but instead one characterized by lucidity and by
acute consciousness of and rebellion against its mortality and its
limits.


### 3.3 Criticism of Existentialists



In his statement of the problem and its solution, Camus's tone,
ideas, and style are reminiscent of Nietzsche. "God is
dead" is of course their common starting point, as is the
determination to confront unpleasant truths and write against received
wisdom. At the same time Camus argues against the specific
philosophical current with which Nietzsche is often linked as a
precursor, and to which he himself is closest--existentialism.
*The Myth of Sisyphus* is explicitly written *against*
existentialists such as Shestov, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Heidegger,
as well as against the phenomenology of Husserl. Camus shares their
starting point, which he regards as the fact that they all somehow
testify to the absurdity of the human condition. But he rejects what
he sees as their ultimate escapism and irrationality, claiming that
"they deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what
impoverishes them. That forced hope is religious in all of them"
(*MS*, 24).



Sartre, too, is subject to Camus's criticisms--and not just
politically as will be described in the following section. Although
some of the ideas in *The Myth of Sisyphus* drew on
Sartre's *Nausea* (as noted above), in 1942 Sartre was
not yet regarded as an "existentialist". But as
Sartre's philosophy developed, he went on to explore how human
activity constitutes a meaningful world from the brute, meaningless
existence unveiled in his
 novel[2]
 (Aronson 1980, 71-88). In the process, the absurdity of
*Nausea* becomes the contingency of *Being and
Nothingness*, the fact that humans and things are simply there
with no explanation or reason. As Sartre described it, the absurd is
"the universal contingency of being which is, but which is not
the basis of its being; the absurd is the given, the unjustifiable,
primordial quality of existence" (quoted in Sagi 2002, 57).
Having rooted human existence in such contingency, Sartre goes on to
describe other fundamental structures of existence, core human
projects, and characteristic patterns of behavior, including freedom
and bad faith, all of which arise on this basis. The original
contingency leads to our desire to undo it, to the futile project to
"found being," in other words the "useless
passion" of the project to become God.



For Sartre absurdity is obviously a fundamental ontological property
of existence itself, frustrating us but not restricting our
understanding. For Camus, on the other hand, absurdity is not a
property of existence as such, but is an essential feature of our
*relationship* with the world. It might be argued that Sartre
and Camus are really quite similar, and that the core futility of
Sartre's philosophy parallels the "despair" Camus
describes. After all, if Sisyphus's labor is ultimately futile,
so is the project to become God. But Sartre rejects the
"classical pessimism" and "disillusionment" he
finds in Camus and instead possesses an unCamusean confidence in his
ability to understand and explain this project and the rest of the
human world. Camus, on the contrary, builds an entire worldview on his
central assumption that absurdity is an unsurpassable relationship
between humans and their world (Aronson 2013). He postulates an
inevitable divorce between human consciousness, with its "wild
longing for clarity" (*MS*, 21) and the
"unreasonable silence of the world" (*MS*, 28). As
discussed above, Camus views the world as irrational, which means that
it is not understandable through reason.



According to Camus, each existentialist writer betrayed his initial
insight by seeking to appeal to something beyond the limits of the
human condition, by turning to the transcendent. And yet even if we
avoid what Camus describes as such escapist efforts and continue to
live without irrational appeals, the desire to do so is built into our
consciousness and thus our humanity. We are unable to free ourselves
from "this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need
for clarity and cohesion" (*MS*, 51). But it is urgent to
not succumb to these impulses and to instead accept absurdity. In
contrast with existentialism, "The absurd is lucid reason noting
its limits" (*MS*, 49).



Camus clearly believes that the existentialist philosophers are
mistaken but does not argue against them, because he believes that
"there is no truth but merely truths" (*MS*, 43).
His disagreement rather takes the subtler and less assertive form of
an immanent critique, pointing out that each thinker's
existentialist philosophy ends up being inconsistent with its own
starting point: "starting from a philosophy of the world's
lack of meaning, it ends up by finding a meaning and depth in
it" (*MS*, 42). These philosophers, he insists, refuse to
accept the conclusions that follow from their own premises.
Kierkegaard, for example, strongly senses the absurd. But rather than
respecting it as the inevitable human ailment, he seeks to be cured of
it by making it an attribute of a God who he then embraces.



Camus's most sustained analysis is of Husserl's
phenomenology. Along with Sartre, Camus praises the early Husserlian
notion of intentionality. Sartre saw this notion as revealing a
dynamic consciousness without contents--the basis for his
conception of freedom--while Camus is pleased that intentionality
follows the absurd spirit in its "apparent modesty of thought
that limits itself to describing what it declines to explain"
(*MS*, 43). However, Camus criticizes Husserl's later
search in *Ideas* for Platonic extra-temporal essences as a
quasi-religious leap inconsistent with his original insight.


### 3.4 Happiness in Facing One's Fate



How then to remain consistent with absurd reasoning and avoid falling
victim to the "spirit of nostalgia"? *The Myth of
Sisyphus* finds the answer by abandoning the terrain of philosophy
altogether. Camus describes a number of absurdist fictional characters
and activities, including Don Juan and Dostoevsky's Kirolov
(*The Possessed*), theater, and literary creation. And then he
concludes with the story of Sisyphus, who fully incarnates a sense of
life's absurdity, its "futility and hopeless labor"
(*MS*, 119). Camus sees Sisyphus's endless effort and
intense consciousness of futility as a *triumph*. "His
scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won
him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted
toward accomplishing nothing" (*MS*, 120). After the
dense and highly self-conscious earlier chapters, these pages condense
the entire line of thought into a vivid image. Sisyphus demonstrates
that we can live with "the certainty of a crushing fate, without
the resignation that ought to accompany it" (*MS*, 54).
For Camus, Sisyphus reminds us that we cannot help seeking to
understand the reality that transcends our intelligence, striving to
grasp more than our limited and practical scientific understanding
allows, and wishing to live without dying. Like Sisyphus, we are our
fate, and our frustration is our very life: we can never escape
it.



But there is more. After the rock comes tumbling down, confirming the
ultimate futility of his project, Sisyphus trudges after it once
again. This "is the hour of consciousness. At each of those
moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the
lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his
rock" (*MS*, 121). Why use the words
"superior" and "stronger" when he has no hope
of succeeding the next time? Paradoxically, it is because a sense of
tragedy "crowns his victory." "Sisyphus, proletarian
of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his
wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent"
(*MS*, 121). Tragic consciousness is the conclusion of
"absurd reasoning": living fully aware of the bitterness
of our being and consciously facing our fate.



What then is Camus's reply to his question about whether or not
to commit suicide? Full consciousness, avoiding false solutions such
as religion, refusing to submit, and carrying on with vitality and
intensity: these are Camus's answers. This is how a life without
ultimate meaning can be made worth living. As he said in
*Nuptials*, life's pleasures are inseparable from a keen
awareness of these limits. Sisyphus accepts and embraces living with
death without the possibility of appealing to God. "All
Sisyphus's silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to
him. His rock is his thing" (*MS*, 123).



Lucidly living the human condition, Sisyphus "knows himself to
be the master of his days." By becoming conscious of it, Camus
is saying, he takes ownership of it. In this sense Sisyphus reshapes
his fate into a condition of "wholly human origin."
"Wholly" may be an exaggeration, because after all, death
is "inevitable and despicable," but it is the very
condition of living. In acknowledging this, Sisyphus consciously lives
out what has been imposed on him, thus making it into his own end. In
the same way, Meursault, protagonist of *The Stranger*, comes
to consciousness in that book's second part after committing the
inexplicable murder that ends the book's first part. He has
lived his existence from one moment to the next and without much
awareness, but at his trial and while awaiting execution he becomes
like Sisyphus, fully conscious of himself and his terrible fate. He
will die triumphant as the absurd man.



*The Myth of Sisyphus* is far from having a skeptical
conclusion. In response to the lure of suicide, Camus counsels an
intensely conscious and active non-resolution. Rejecting any hope of
resolving the strain is also to reject despair. Indeed, it is
possible, within and against these limits, to speak of happiness.
"Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They
are inseparable" (*MS*, 122). It is not that discovering
the absurd leads necessarily to happiness, but rather that
acknowledging the absurd means also accepting human frailty, an
awareness of our limitations, and the fact that we cannot help wishing
to go beyond what is possible. These are all tokens of being fully
alive. "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill
a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy"
(*MS*, 123).


### 3.5 Response to Skepticism



We can compare his conclusion with Pyrrho's skepticism and
Descartes's methodical doubt. First of all, like Pyrrho, Camus
has solved his pressing existential issue, namely, avoiding despair,
by a kind of resolution entailed in accepting our mortality and
ultimate ignorance. But there are two critical differences with
Pyrrho: for Camus we never can abandon the desire to know, and
realizing this leads to a quickening of our life-impulses. This last
point was already contained in *Nuptials*, but here is expanded
to link consciousness with happiness. For Camus, happiness includes
living intensely and sensuously in the present coupled with
Sisyphus's tragic, lucid, and defiant consciousness, his sense
of limits, his bitterness, his determination to keep on, and his
refusal of any form of consolation.



Obviously, Camus's sense of happiness is not a conventional one
but Sagi argues it may place him closer to Aristotle than to any other
thinker insofar as he is championing the full realization of human
capacities (Sagi 2002, 79-80) Camus is also similar in this to
Nietzsche, who called upon his readers to "say yes to
life," and live as completely as possible at every moment.
Nietzsche's point was that to be wholly alive means being as
aware of the negative as of the positive, feeling pain, not shunning
any experience, and embracing life "even in its strangest and
hardest problems" (Nietzsche 1888/1954, 562). But how is it
possible that, by the end of *The Myth of Sisyphus*, Camus has
moved from skepticism (about finding the truth) and nihilism (about
whether life has meaning) to advocating an approach to life that is
clearly judged to be better than others? How does he justify embracing
a normative stance, affirming specific values? This contradiction
reveals a certain sleight of hand, as the philosopher gives way to the
artist. It is as an artist that Camus now makes his case for
acceptance of tragedy, the consciousness of absurdity, and a life of
sensuous vitality. He advocates this with the image of Sisyphus
straining, fully alive, and happy.


## 4. Camus and the World of Violence: *The Rebel*



This meditation on absurdity and suicide follows closely on the
publication of Camus's first novel, *The Stranger*, which
also centered on individual experience and revolves around its
protagonist's senseless murder of an Arab on a beach in Algiers
and concludes with his execution by guillotine. And it is often
forgotten that this absurdist novelist and philosopher was also a
political activist--he had been a member of the Algerian branch
of the French Communist Party in the mid-1930s and was organizer of an
Algiers theater company that performed avant-garde and political
plays--as well as a crusading journalist. From October 1938 until
January 1940 he worked on *Alger republicain* and a
sister newspaper. In June 1939 he wrote a series of reports on famine
and poverty in the mountainous coastal region of Kabylie, among the
first detailed articles ever written by a European Algerian describing
the wretched living conditions of the native population.



After the start of World War II, Camus became editor of *Le Soir
republicain* and as a pacifist opposed French entry into
the war. The spectacle of Camus and his mentor Pascal Pia running
their left-wing daily into the ground because they rejected the
urgency of fighting Nazism is one of the most striking but least
commented-on periods of his life. Misunderstanding Nazism at the
beginning of the war, he advocated negotiations with Hitler that would
in part reverse the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles. His
pacifism was in keeping with a time-honored French tradition, and
Camus nevertheless reported for military service out of solidarity
with those young men, like his brother, who had become soldiers.
Intending to serve loyally and to advocate a negotiated peace in the
barracks, he was angered that his tuberculosis disqualified him
(Lottman, 201-31; Aronson 2004, 25-28).



These biographical facts are relevant to Camus's philosophical
development after *The Myth of Sisyphus*. Moving to France and
eventually becoming engaged in the resistance to the German
occupation, in two "Letters to a German Friend" published
clandestinely in 1943 and 1944, Camus pondered the question whether
violence against the occupiers was justified. He spoke of the
"loathing we [French] had for all war," and the need
"to find out if we had the right to kill men, if we were allowed
to add to the frightful misery of this world" (*RRD*, 8).
Despising war, suspicious of heroism, he claimed that the occupied
French paid dearly for this detour "with prison sentences and
executions at dawn, with desertions and separations, with daily pangs
of hunger, with emaciated children, and above all, with humiliation of
our human dignity" (*RRD*, 8). Only when we were
"at death's door," and "far behind" the
Germans, did we understand the reasons for fighting, so that
henceforth we would struggle with a clear conscience and "clean
hands." In other words killing was morally permissible only
within strict limits and after great provocation. Our moral strength
was rooted in the fact that we were fighting for justice and national
survival. The subsequent letters continued to contrast the French with
the Germans on moral grounds drawn directly from Camus's
evolving philosophy, and suggested the transition from *The Myth of
Sisyphus* to *The Rebel*: if both adversaries began with a
sense of the world's absurdity, Camus claimed that the French
acknowledged and lived within this awareness, while the Germans sought
to overcome it by dominating the world.



Camus's anti-Nazi commitment and newspaper experience led to him
succeeding Pia in March 1944 as editor of *Combat*, the main
underground newspaper of the non-Communist left. During this period
Camus worked on *The Plague* which, as he later said,
"has as its obvious content the struggle of the European
resistance movements against Nazism" (*LCE*, 339). The
novel, begun during the war, describes an epidemic of the bubonic
plague in the small Algerian city of Oran, which transforms every
aspect of daily life and shuts off the city from the surrounding
world. The only possible response besides quarantine is refusing to
passively accept disease and death and to actively organize
"sanitary squads" to combat it. *The Plague*philosophically anticipates *The Rebel*: despite
individuals' most ambitious goals, for example of Tarrou who
seeks to end the death penalty and Father Paneloux, who demands that
the people of Oran embrace their guilt and God's love, the
actual situation calls for a very limited and specific activity.
Individuals must act without fanfare or heroics and above all, in
solidarity with each other in seeking to limit the effects of the
plague. Like Sisyphus, they act in full consciousness of their limits,
except now as a we. The Plague depicts a collective and nonviolent
resistance to an unexplained pestilence, and thus quite deliberately
does not raise the tactical, strategic, and moral issues built into
the struggle of the Resistance against human occupiers (*LCE*,
340-1). If readers did not see this as an issue in 1947, it
became contentious as the political climate changed, and the novel was
attacked by Roland Barthes and later by Sartre (Aronson 2004,
228-9). In point of fact, after the Liberation the question of
violence continued to occupy Camus both politically and
philosophically. In 1945 his was one of the few voices raised in
protest against the American use of nuclear weapons to defeat Japan
(Aronson 2004, 61-63). After the Liberation he opposed the death
penalty for collaborators, then turned against Marxism and Communism
for embracing revolution, while rejecting the looming cold war and its
threatening violence. And then in *The Rebel*, Camus began to
spell out his deeper understanding of violence.


### 4.1 Absurdity, Rebellion, and Murder



At the beginning of *The Rebel*, Camus picks up where he left
off in *The Myth of Sisyphus*. Writing as a philosopher again,
he returns to the terrain of argument by explaining what absurdist
reasoning entails. Its "final conclusion" is "the
repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter
between human inquiry and the silence of the universe"
(*R*, 6). Since to conclude otherwise would negate its very
premise, namely the existence of the questioner, absurdism must
logically accept life as the one necessary good. "To say that
life is absurd, consciousness must be alive" (*R*, 6, tr.
changed). Living and eating "are themselves value
judgments" (*LCE*, 160). "To breathe is to
judge" (*R*, 8). As in his criticism of the
existentialists, Camus advocates a single standpoint from which to
argue for objective validity, that of consistency.



At first blush, however, the book's subject seems to have more
of a historical theme than a philosophical one. "The purpose of
this essay is ... to face the reality of the present, which is
logical crime, and to examine meticulously the arguments by which it
is justified; it is an attempt to understand the times in which we
live. One might think that a period which, in a space of fifty years,
uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings should be
condemned out of hand. But its culpability must still be
understood" (*R*, 3).



Do such questions represent an entirely new philosophy or are they
continuous with *The Myth of Sisyphus*? The issue is not
resolved by the explanations that Camus gives for his shift in the
first pages of *The Rebel*--by referring to the mass
murders of the middle third of the twentieth century. "The age
of negation," he says, once fostered a concern for suicide, but
now in "the age of ideologies, we must examine our position in
relation to murder" (*R*, 4). Have the "ages"
changed in the less than ten years between the two books? He may be
right to say that whether murder has rational foundations is
"the question implicit in the blood and strife of this
century," but in changing his focus from suicide to murder, it
is also clear that Camus is shifting his philosophical optic from the
individual to our social belonging.



In so doing Camus applies the philosophy of the absurd in new, social
directions, and seeks to answer new, historical questions. But as we
see him setting this up at the beginning of *The Rebel* the
continuity with a philosophical reading of *The Stranger* is
also strikingly clear. Novelist Kamel Daoud, retelling The
*Stranger* from the point of view of the victim, correctly
calls the murder of his Arab "kinsman" a
"philosophical crime" (Daoud 19). At the beginning of
*The Rebel* Camus explains:



> 
> Awareness of the absurd, when we first claim to deduce a rule of
> behavior from it, makes murder seem a matter of indifference, to say
> the least, and hence possible. ... There is no pro or con: the
> murderer is neither right nor wrong. We are free to stoke the
> crematory fires or to devote ourselves to the care of lepers. Evil and
> virtue are mere chance or caprice. (*R*, 5)
> 



If historically "murder is the problem today" (*R*,
5), the encounter with absurdity tells us that the same is true
philosophically. Having ruled out suicide, what is there to say about
murder?



Starting from the absence of God, the key theme of *Nuptials*,
and the inevitability of absurdity, the key theme of *The Myth of
Sisyphus*, Camus incorporates both of these into *The
Rebel*, but alongside them he now stresses revolt. The act of
rebellion assumes the status of a primary datum of human experience,
like the Cartesian cogito taken by Sartre as his point of departure.
Camus first expressed this directly under the inspiration of his
encounter with *Being and Nothingness*. But in calling it
"revolt" he takes it in a direction sharply different from
Sartre, who built from the cogito an "essay in phenomenological
ontology." Ignoring completely the ontological dimension, Camus
is now concerned with immediate issues of human social experience.
Revolt, to be sure, still includes the rebellion against absurdity
that Camus described in *The Myth of Sisyphus*, and once again
he will speak of rebelling against our own mortality and the
universe's meaninglessness and incoherence. But *The
Rebel* begins with the kind of revolt that rejects oppression and
slavery, and protests against the world's injustice.



It is at first, like *The Myth of Sisyphus*, a single
individual's rebellion, but now Camus stresses that revolt
creates values, dignity, and solidarity. "I revolt, therefore we
are" (*R*, 22) is his paradoxical statement. But how can
an *I* lead to a *we*? How does "we are"
follow from "I revolt"? How can the individual's
experience of absurdity, and the rebellion against it, stem from,
produce, imply, or entail the wider social sense of injustice and
solidarity? The *we* in fact is the subject of *The
Rebel*, although the title *L'Homme
revolt**e* suggests that one's original
motivation may be individual. Acting against oppression entails having
recourse to social values, and at the same time joining with others in
struggle. On both levels solidarity is our common condition.



In *The Rebel* Camus takes the further step, which occupies
most of the book, of developing his notion of metaphysical and
historical rebellion in opposition to the concept of revolution.
Applying his philosophical themes directly to politics in the years
immediately after the Liberation of France in 1944, Camus had already
concluded that Marxists, and especially the Communists, were guilty of
evading life's absurdity by aiming at a wholesale transformation
of society, which must necessarily be violent. And now, in *The
Rebel*, he describes this as a major trend of modern history,
using similar terms to those he had used in *The Myth of
Sisyphus* to describe the religious and philosophical
evasions.



What sort of work is this? In a book so charged with political
meaning, Camus makes no explicitly political arguments or revelations,
and presents little in the way of actual social analysis or concrete
historical study. *The Rebel* is, rather, a historically framed
philosophical essay about underlying ideas and attitudes of
civilization. David Sprintzen suggests these taken-for-granted
attitudes operate implicitly and in the background of human projects
and very rarely become conscious (Sprintzen 1988, 123).



Camus felt that it was urgent to critically examine these attitudes in
a world in which calculated murder had become common. Applying his
absurdist ideas and insights to politics, in *The Rebel* Camus
explains what he regards as the modern world's increasingly
organized and catastrophic refusal to face, accept, and live with
absurdity. The book provides a unique perspective--presenting a
coherent and original structure of premise, mood, description,
philosophy, history, and even prejudice.


### 4.2 Against Communism



Camus's hostility to Communism had its personal, political, and
philosophical reasons. These certainly reached back to his expulsion
from the Communist Party in the mid-1930s for refusing to adhere to
its Popular Front strategy of playing down French colonialism in
Algeria in order to win support from the white working class. Then,
making no mention of Marxism, *The Myth of Sisyphus* is
eloquently silent on its claims to present a coherent understanding of
human history and a meaningful path to the future. His mutually
respectful relations with Communists during the Resistance and the
immediate postwar period turned bitter after he was attacked in the
Communist press and repaid the attack in a series of newspaper
articles in 1946 entitled "Neither Victims nor
Executioners" (Aronson, 2004, 66-93).



In *The Rebel* Camus insisted that both Communism's
appeal and its negative features sprang from the same irrepressible
human impulse: faced with absurdity and injustice, humans refuse to
accept their existence and instead seek to remake the world.
Validating revolt as a necessary starting point, Camus criticizes
politics aimed at building a utopian future, affirming once more that
life should be lived in the present and in the sensuous world. He
explores the history of post-religious and nihilistic intellectual and
literary movements; he attacks political violence with his views on
limits and solidarity; and he ends by articulating the metaphysical
role of art as well as a self-limiting radical politics. In place of
striving to transform the world, he speaks of
*mesure*--"measure", in the sense of
proportion or balance--and of living in the tension of the human
condition. He labels this outlook "Mediterranean" in an
attempt to anchor his views to the place he grew up and to evoke in
his readers its sense of harmony and appreciation of physical life.
There is no substantive argument for the label, nor is one possible
given his method of simply selecting who and what counts as
representative of the "Mediterranean" view while excluding
others--e.g., some Greek writers, not many Romans. In place of
argument, he paints a concluding vision of Mediterranean harmony that
he hopes will be stirring and lyrical, binding the reader to his
insights.



As a political tract *The Rebel* asserts that Communism leads
inexorably to murder, and then explains how revolutions arise from
certain ideas and states of spirit. But he makes no close analysis of
movements or events, gives no role to material needs or oppression,
and regards the quest for social justice as a metaphysically inspired
attempt to replace "the reign of grace by the reign of
justice" (*R*, 56).



Furthermore, Camus insists that these attitudes are built into
Marxism. In "Neither Victims nor Executioners" he declared
himself a socialist but not a Marxist. He rejected the Marxist
acceptance of violent revolution and the consequentialist maxim that
"the end justifies the
 means."[3]
 "In the Marxian perspective," he wrote sweepingly,
"a hundred thousand deaths is a small price to pay for the
happiness of hundreds of millions" (Camus 1991, 130). Marxists
think this, Camus asserted, because they believe that history has a
necessary logic leading to human happiness, and thus they accept
violence to bring it about.



In *The Rebel* Camus takes this assertion a further step:
Marxism is not primarily about social change but is rather a revolt
that "attempts to annex all creation." Revolution emerges
when revolt seeks to ignore the limits built into human life. By an
"inevitable logic of nihilism" Communism climaxes the
modern trend to deify man and to transform and unify the world.
Today's revolutions yield to the blind impulse, originally
described in *The Myth of Sisyphus*, "to demand order in
the midst of chaos, and unity in the very heart of the
ephemeral" (*MS*, 10). As does the rebel who becomes a
revolutionary who kills and then justifies murder as legitimate.



According to Camus, the execution of King Louis XVI during the French
Revolution was the decisive step demonstrating the pursuit of justice
without regard to limits. It contradicted the original life-affirming,
self-affirming, and unifying purpose of revolt. This discussion
belongs to Camus's "history of European pride,"
which is prefaced by certain ideas from the Greeks and certain aspects
of early Christianity, but begins in earnest with the advent of
modernity. Camus focuses on a variety of major figures, movements, and
literary works: the Marquis de Sade, romanticism, dandyism, *The
Brothers Karamazov*, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, surrealism, the
Nazis, and above all the Bolsheviks. Camus describes revolt as
increasing its force over time and turning into an ever more desperate
nihilism, overthrowing God and putting man in his place, wielding
power more and more brutally. Historical revolt, rooted in
metaphysical revolt, leads to revolutions seeking to eliminate
absurdity by using murder as their central tool to take total control
over the world. Communism is the contemporary expression of this
Western sickness.



In the twentieth century, Camus claims, murder has become
"reasonable," "theoretically defensible," and
justified by doctrine. People have grown accustomed to "logical
crimes"--that is, mass death either planned or foreseen,
and rationally justified. Thus Camus calls "logical crime"
the central issue of the time, seeks to "examine meticulously
the arguments by which it is justified" (*R*, 3), and
sets out to explore how the twentieth century became a century of
slaughter.



We might justly expect an analysis of the arguments he speaks of, but
*The Rebel* changes focus. Human reason is confused by
"slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by
philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman" (*R*,
4)--the first two refer to Communism, the third to Nazism. In the
body of the text, Nazism virtually drops out (it was, he says, a
system of "irrational terror"--not at all what
interested Camus), sharply narrowing the inquiry. His shift is
revealed by his question: How can murder be committed with
premeditation and be justified by philosophy? It turns out that the
"rational murder" Camus was concerned with is not
committed by capitalists or democrats, colonialists or imperialists,
or by Nazis--but only by Communists.



He does not address the Holocaust, and although his had been a lone
voice of protest against Hiroshima in 1945, he does not now ask how it
happened. As a journalist he had been one of the few to indict French
colonialism, but he does not mention it, except in a footnote. How was
it possible for Camus to focus solely on the violence of Communism,
given the history he had lived, in the age of nuclear weapons, in the
very midst of the French colonial war in Vietnam, and when he knew
that a bitter struggle over Algeria lay ahead? It seems he became
blinded by ideology, separating Communism from the other evils of the
century and directing his animus there. Camus's ideas, of
course, had developed and matured over the years since he first began
writing about revolt. But something else had happened: his agenda had
changed. Absurdity and revolt, his original themes, had been harnessed
as an alternative to Communism, which had become the archenemy. Even
as he rejected its violent confrontations, the philosophy of revolt
became Cold-War ideology.



Because *The Rebel* claimed to describe the attitude that lay
behind the evil features of contemporary revolutionary politics, it
became a major political event. Readers could hardly miss his
description of how the impulse for emancipation turned into organized,
rational murder as the rebel-become-revolutionary attempted to order
an absurd universe. In presenting this message, Camus sought not so
much to critique Stalinism as its apologists. His specific targets
were intellectuals attracted to Communism--as he himself had been
in the 1930s.



One of these targets was Jean-Paul Sartre, and toward the end of
*The Rebel* Camus now took aim at his friend's evolving
politics. Camus focuses on "the cult of history" against
which the entire book is directed and his belief that "the
existentialists," led by Sartre, had fallen victim to the idea
that revolt should lead to revolution. Within Camus's framework,
Sartre is challenged as trying, like the predecessors criticized in
*The Myth of Sisyphus*, to escape the absurdity with which his
own thinking began by turning to "history," that is to
Marxism. This is a bit of a stretch because Sartre was still several
years from declaring himself a Marxist, and it shows Camus's
tendency towards sweeping generalization rather than close analysis.
But it also reflects his awareness that his friend was determined to
find a meaning in the world even as he himself foreswore doing so. And
it shows his capacity for interpreting a specific disagreement in the
broadest possible terms--as a fundamental conflict of
philosophies.


### 4.3 Violence: Inevitable and Impossible



The concluding chapters of *The Rebel* are punctuated with
emphatic words of conclusion (*alors*, *donc*,
*ainsi*, *c'est pourquoi*), which are rarely
followed by consequences of what comes before and often introduce
further assertions, without any evidence or analysis. They are studded
with carefully composed topic sentences for major ideas--which
one expects to be followed by paragraphs, pages, and chapters of
development but, instead, merely follow one another and wait until the
next equally well-wrought topic sentence.



As often in the book, the reader must be prepared to follow an
abstract dance of concepts, as "rebellion,"
"revolution," "history,"
"nihilism," and other substantives stand on their own,
without reference to human agents. The going gets even muddier as we
near the end and the text verges on incoherence. How then is it
possible that Foley judges *The Rebel* philosophically as
Camus's "most important book" (Foley 55)?



In these pages Camus is going back over familiar ground, contrasting
the implicit religiosity of a future-oriented outlook that claims to
understand and promote the logic of history, and justifying violence
to implement it, with his more tentative "philosophy of
limits," with its sense of risk, "calculated
ignorance," and living in the present. However the strain stems
from the fact that he is doing so much more. As he tries to bring the
book to a conclusion he is wrestling with its most difficult
theme--that the resort to violence is both inevitable and
"impossible." The rebel lives in contradiction. He or she
cannot abandon the possibility of lying, injustice, and violence, for
they are part of the rebel's condition, and will of necessity
enter into the struggle against oppression. "He cannot,
therefore, absolutely claim not to kill or lie, without renouncing his
rebellion and accepting, once and for all, evil and murder." In
other words, to not rebel is to become an accomplice of oppression.
Rebellion, Camus has insisted, will entail murder. Yet rebellion,
"in principle," is a protest against death, just as it is
a source of the solidarity that binds the human community. He has said
that death is the most fundamental of absurdities, and that at root
rebellion is a protest against absurdity. Thus to kill any other human
being, even an oppressor, is to disrupt our solidarity, in a sense to
contradict our very being. It is impossible, then, to embrace
rebellion while rejecting violence.



There are those, however, who ignore the dilemma: these are the
believers in history, heirs of Hegel and Marx who imagine a time when
inequality and oppression will cease and humans will finally be happy.
For Camus such a hope resembles the paradise beyond this life promised
by religions. Living for, and sacrificing humans to, a supposedly
better future is, very simply, another religion. Moreover, his
sharpest hostility is reserved for intellectuals who theorize and
justify such movements. Accepting the dilemma, Camus is unable to
spell out how a successful revolution can remain committed to the
solidaristic and life-affirming principle of rebellion with which it
began. He does however suggest two actions which, if implemented,
would be signs of a revolution's commitment to remain
rebellious: it would abolish the death penalty and it would encourage
rather than restrict freedom of speech.



In *The Rebel* Camus extends the ideas he asserted in
*Nuptials*, developed in *The Myth of Sisyphus*, and
then foreshadowed in *The Plague*: the human condition is
inherently frustrating, indeed absurd, but we betray ourselves and
solicit catastrophe by seeking solutions beyond our capacity.
"The rebel obstinately confronts a world condemned to death and
the impenetrable obscurity of the human condition with his demand for
life and absolute clarity. He is seeking, without knowing it, a moral
philosophy or a religion" (*R*, 101). The book sets out
the alternative: to accept the fact that we are living in a Godless
universe and rebel against this within limits as do most of the
members of the "sanitary squads" in *The Plague*
- or to become a revolutionary, who, like the religious believer
committed to the abstract and total triumph of justice, refuses to
accept living in the present.



Having critiqued religion in *Nuptials* and *The
Plague*, Camus is self-consciously exploring the starting points,
projects, weaknesses, illusions, and political temptations of a
post-religious universe. He describes how traditional religion has
lost its force, and how younger generations have been growing up amid
an increasing emptiness and a sense that anything is possible. He
further claims that modern secularism stumbles into a nihilistic state
of mind because it does not really free itself from religion.
"Then the only kingdom that is opposed to the kingdom of grace
must be founded-namely, the kingdom of justice-and the human community
must be reunited among the debris of the fallen City of God. To kill
God and to build a church are the constant and contradictory purpose
of rebellion" (*R*, 103). If rebellion spills over its
limits and is given free rein, our modern need to create kingdoms and
our continuing search for salvation is the path of catastrophe.
"When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that
it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, the order, and
the unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this
way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to
create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of
man" (*R*, 25). But to restrain oneself from this effort
is to feel bereft of justice, order, and unity. Camus recognizes that
hope and the revolutionary drive are essential directions of the
post-classical Western spirit, stemming from its entire world of
culture, thought, and feeling. This is the path of the metaphysical
rebel, who does not see that "human insurrection, in its exalted
and tragic forms, is only, and can only be, a prolonged protest
against death" (*R*, 100).


## 5. The Fall



We have been exploring one of the most interesting and perplexing
aspects of Camus's thought: his determination to criticize
attitudes that he finds to be natural and inevitable. For one, the
possibility of suicide haunts humans, and so does the desire for an
impossible order and an unachievable permanence. Existentialist
writers had similar insights, but Camus criticizes their inability to
remain consistent with their initial insight. Similarly, he insists
throughout *The Rebel* that the metaphysical need he sees
leading to Communism's terror is universal: he describes it and
its consequences so that we can better resist it in ourselves as well
as others. His reflexive anti-Communism notwithstanding, an underlying
sympathy unites Camus to those revolutionaries he opposes, because he
freely acknowledges that he and they share the same starting points,
outlook, stresses, temptations, and pitfalls. Although in political
argument he frequently took refuge in a tone of moral superiority,
Camus makes clear through his skepticism that those he disagrees with
are no less and no more than fellow creatures who give in to the same
fundamental drive to escape the absurdity that we all share. This
sense of moral complexity is most eloquent in his short novel *The
Fall*, whose single character, Clamence, has been variously
identified as everyman, a Camus-character, and a Sartre-character. He
was all of these. Clamence is clearly evil, guilty of standing by as a
young woman commits suicide. In him Camus seeks to describe and indict
his generation, including both his enemies and himself.
Clamence's life is filled with good works, but he is a hypocrite
and knows it. His monologue is filled with self-justification as well
as the confession of someone torn apart by his guilt but unable to
fully acknowledge it. Sitting at a bar in Amsterdam, he descends into
his own personal hell, inviting the reader to follow him. In telling
Clamence's story, Camus was clearly seeking to empathize as well
as describe, to understand as well as condemn. Clamence is a monster,
but Clamence is also just another human being (Aronson 2004,
192-200). Beyond the character and actions of Clamence, *The
Fall* demonstrates a unique message at the heart of Camus's
writing. Life is no one single, simple thing, but a series of tensions
and dilemmas. The most seemingly straightforward features of life are
in fact ambiguous and even contradictory. Camus recommends that we
avoid trying to resolve them. We need to face the fact that we can
never successfully purge ourselves of the impulses that threaten to
wreak havoc with our lives. Camus's philosophy, if it has a
single meaning, is that we should learn to tolerate, indeed embrace
the frustration and ambivalence that humans cannot escape.


## 6. Philosopher of the Present



Well into the twenty-first century, the career of Camus's
thought, like that of his onetime friend Jean-Paul Sartre, has been
remarkable. Two generations after his death, his complex and profound
philosophical project, as discussed by Srigley, is very much with us
because it seeks not only to critique modernity but reaches back to
the ancient world to lay the basis for alternative ways of thinking
and living in the present. Thus, if in some respects he anticipated
the postmodernists, he retained a central metaphysical concern with
such ideas as absurdity and revolt. Unlike postmodernism, Camus was,
as Jeffrey C. Isaac says, a "chastened humanist" who
remained deeply attached, as was Hannah Arendt, to "the language
of right, freedom, and truth" (Isaac 244).



Camus's ideas and name have come up again and again during the
twenty-first century, not only among philosophers and literary
scholars, among specialists in a wide variety of fields, in the press
and among political writers, and in conversations among the general
public who read his books or have heard about his ideas. First, his
exploration of living in a Godless universe has led to his name being
mentioned often in discussions about religious nonbelief (Aronson
2011). Yet unlike the "new atheists" the great nonbeliever
Camus was never assured enough to declare that God does not exist and
was not militantly opposed to religious belief and practice (Carlson
2014). Even as Camus presents in *The Plague* a profoundly
critical picture of Father Paneloux's sermons describing the
plague first as a punishment for human sin and then as a call to
embrace the divine mystery, for a time the priest nevertheless humbly
joins the collective project of the "sanitary squads."



Second, after the 9/11 attack and during the "war on
terror," Camus's writings on violence became much
discussed. For example *The Rebel* was explored anew for hints
about the motivations behind twenty-first century terrorism. Paul
Berman deployed Camus in his justification for the "war on
terror" against Islamic "pathological mass
movements" (Berman 2003, 27-33). Foley, on the other hand,
devoted attention to the actual relevance of Camus's attempts to
think through the question of political violence on a small-group and
individual level. He shows how, both in *The Rebel* and in his
plays *Caligula* and *The Just Assassins*, Camus brings
his philosophy to bear directly on the question of the exceptional
conditions under which an act of political murder can considered
legitimate: (1) The target must be a tyrant; (2) the killing must not
involve innocent civilians; (3) the killer must be in direct physical
proximity to the victim; and (4) there must be no alternative to
killing (Foley 2008, 93). Furthermore, because the killer has violated
the moral order on which human society is based, Camus makes the
demand that he or she must be prepared to sacrifice his or her own
life in return. But if he accepts killing in certain circumstances,
Foley stresses that Camus rules out mass killing, indirect murder,
killing civilians, and killing without an urgent need to remove
murderous and tyrannical individuals. These demands rest on the core
idea of *The Rebel*, that to rebel is to assert and respect a
moral order, and this must be sustained both by clear limits and by
the murderer's willingness to
 die.[4]



During the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, sales of
*The Plague* exploded and interest was so great that the
*New York Times* republished its original 1948 review by
Stephen Spender. Hundreds of articles were written about it in all
languages - by bloggers, artists, cartoonists, journalists,
Camus specialists, medical practitioners, scholars from every
conceivable discipline - and philosophers. Camus's work
was being mined for what it had to teach about living in and coping
with the pandemic, including such topics as: functioning amidst the
absurdity of a disease that appeared for seemingly no reason at all
(de Botton 2021); the similarities and differences between his plague
and ours (Aronson, 2020); living and working within the paralyzing
existential fear imposed by the pandemic (Farr 2021); retaining hope
amidst catastrophe (Kabel & Phillipson 2020); and the solidarity
among members of the "sanitary squads" doing so (Illing
2020). In the face of absurdity and mass death many writers extolled
the modest and self-limiting philosophy behind *The Plague*,
rooted in *The Myth of Sisyphus* and further developed in
*The Rebel*: one must act, with others, wherever one happens to
be, by simply doing one's job. As Rieux says:
"there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a
matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make some
people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is -
common decency" (*P*,
 150).[5]