Review of “The Rebel” (1954) by Albert Camus
Published in French as L’Homme Révolté, The Rebel is best remembered for ruining Albert Camus’ friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre. In the 1950s the extent of the Soviet gulag system was becoming more widely known, and the European Left was aflame with discussion on how to best respond to the revelations. Sartre said it should be ignored, so as not to discourage global working-class revolution. Camus said that injustice must be denounced wherever it happens, and the USSR was no exception. By justifying present atrocities in the name of a reconciled future when capital has been overthrown, Camus argued, the USSR had succumbed to the spirit of the Inquisition. Their friendship collapsed, and Camus died in a car crash in 1960.
More than that drama, however, and more than The Stranger or the Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel is Camus’ most profound and possibly underappreciated philosophical text.
The human condition is the condition of rebellion. To become aware is, first, to draw a line between self and not-self; that distinction is a rebellion against the state of affairs, caused by the failure of is to meet ought. When we notice that reality is unsatisfactory and hold in ourselves an inviolable sense of how things ought to be, that is rebellion and awareness in the same moment. But this is not a formula. To become aware of the distinction between self and not-self is to assume an already existing distinction of which we may become aware. Do we create our condition through the development of awareness and self-awareness? Or does our process of awareness merely reflect a given material substrate?
Camus hangs this dilemma on the horns of history and nature. Philosophy is the movement of thought between these two horns, and because the circle can never be closed, rebellion is the fundamental human condition. He provides a theory of human nature as the recursive development of awareness, self-awareness, self-self-awareness, and so forth, motivated by a compulsion to rebel against a given state of affairs. To rebel is to be human.
Grounding these meditations in history and literature, Camus elevates The Rebel from a meditation on rebellion to a philosophical history of European consciousness since the French Revolution. The Rebel is Camus’ Phenomenology of Spirit. If less profound in his knowledge than Hegel, Camus is wiser in his judgments. He does not identify any positive institution with the historical spirit of humanity, as Hegel does with the Prussian State. Camus rises above Hegel’s infamous failure, recapitulated in his time by Jean-Paul Sartre’s silence on the gulag question. Camus shows us what Hegel should have been.
In 1789 the French Revolution overthrew centuries of monarchy, and four years later its Jacobin leaders guillotined King Louis XVI, ending the legitimacy of God’s kingdom on Earth. But they did not mean to destroy the principle of God. They redefined God as Reason and Justice and replaced the King and Church with the People as the voice of the divine.[1]
But the Republic set up by the Jacobins quickly foundered. The People are not a monolith, and factionalism and sophistry quickly troubled the revolutionary government. When the is of the People met the ought of the revolution, the latter rebelled, became oppressive, and betrayed the principles it stood for in the name of those very principles. The French Revolution began with a cry of rebellion against the terrorism of the ancien régime and ended with a cry of rebellion against the terrorism of the revolutionary government. That pattern plays itself out in different forms, not because it must, but because of the influence of Hegelian discourse which emerged partially in an effort to understand the French Revolution.
“For Marx, nature is subjugated in order to obey history; for Nietzsche, nature is obeyed in order to subjugate history” (79). Neither history nor nature can do without the other. Without history, there is no humanity, just the animal species homo sapiens. Without nature, there is nothing out of which history may be constructed. The political consequences of history denial are evident in the Nazi cult of blood and soil, while those of nature denial are evident in the ruthless oppression demonstrated by the Jacobins and Bolsheviks. Either way, the end result is murder.
A principle which reconciles history with nature may exist yet be outside of our capacities for understanding in the same way radio waves are beyond our visual capacities. If there were no such principle, then the tension between nature and history would not be so evident in the first place. It is as though we have two puzzle pieces which outline a larger picture, but because we are missing the third piece, we cannot fully make out how the picture is supposed to look. But through the shape created by the first two pieces in conjunction, we know that a third piece must exist.
Without condemning revolution, Camus throws his support behind rebellion. The inherent refusing tendency, the insistence on establishing a limit, a boundary, is only empowered the more it is provoked. By allying himself with this unquenchable insistence, Camus shows an optimistic and almost utopian belief in humanity’s capacity to overcome oppression that refutes his reputation as a dour existentialist.
The insistence on establishing a limit or boundary is at the heart of critical thinking. The Greek Kri- refers to the act of parsing, distinguishing, and judging. It is from that root that we derive terms such as critical and critique, as explorations of limits, and crisis as a moment when a limit has been reached. It is the task of philosophy to illuminate limits obscured by brute reality. By thinking critically, by drawing distinctions (such as between self and not-self), we create our humanity and rebel against blind nature on behalf of history.
The complement to critical thinking is art. “Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature” (276). What is the proper relationship between art and philosophy? That has been the object of discussion at least since Plato. For Camus, it suffices to note that art and philosophy are the concrete means by which humanity continually creates itself by drawing limits–that is, by rebelling.
In the empty space where a nature and history should reconcile, there is the capacity for humanity to continually re-invent itself. That movement which by turn rebels against nature and history outlines a world where all thought might be elevated to the status of philosophy and all work might be elevated to the status of art. Rebellion is the work at the heart of humanity, and the yearning for universal humanity is the faith at the heart of all rebellion.
End notes:
[1] Contrast this with the Bolsheviks, who openly derided the very idea of morality.
