The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (Vintage International)

by Albert Camus

Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition.

Therefore it is absolutely necessary that rebellion find its reasons within itself, since it cannot find them elsewhere. It must consent to examine itself in order to learn how to act.

The transition from facts to rights is manifest, as we have seen, in rebellion. So is the transition from “this must be” to “this is how I should like things to be,” and even more so, perhaps, the idea of the sublimation of the individual in a henceforth universal good.

We see that the affirmation implicit in every act of rebellion is extended to something that transcends the individual in so far as it withdraws him from his supposed solitude and provides him with a reason to act.

it can often happen that we cannot bear to see offenses done to others which we ourselves have accepted without rebelling.

When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men and so surpasses himself, and from this point of view human solidarity is metaphysical.

Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.

The spirit of rebellion can exist only in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities.

If men cannot refer to a common value, recognized by all as existing in each one, then man is incomprehensible to man. The rebel demands that this value should be clearly recognized in himself because he knows or suspects that, without this principle, crime and disorder would reign throughout the world. An act of rebellion on his part seems like a demand for clarity and unity. The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration to order.

Christ came to solve two major problems, evil and death, which are precisely the problems that preoccupy the rebel.

The law of this world is nothing but the law of force; its driving force, the will to power.

Fate does not allow judgments of value. It replaces them by the statement that “It is so”—which excuses everything,

“I was conscious of my power and I was conscious of my chains” (Petrus Borel). But these chains are valuable objects. Without them it would be necessary to prove, or to exercise, this power which, after all, one is not very sure of having.

The dandy creates his own unity by æsthetic means. But it is an æsthetic of singularity and of negation. “To live and die before a mirror”: that, according to Baudelaire, was the dandy’s slogan. It is indeed a coherent slogan.

The dandy rallies his forces and creates a unity for himself by the very violence of his refusal. 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 up in opposition. He can only be sure of his own existence by finding it in the expression of others’ faces. Other people are his mirror. A mirror that quickly becomes clouded,

Perpetually incomplete, always on the fringe of things, he compels others to create him, while denying their values. He plays at life because he is unable to live it. He plays at it until he dies, except for the moments when he is alone and without a mirror. For the dandy, to be alone is not to exist.

The blasphemy is reverent, since every blasphemy is, ultimately, a participation in holiness.

Ivan’s most profound utterance, the one which opens the deepest chasms beneath the rebel’s feet, is his even if: “I would persist in my indignation even if I were wrong.”

Rebellion wants all or nothing. “All the knowledge in the world is not worth a child’s tears.” Ivan does not say that there is no truth. He says that if truth does exist, it can only be unacceptable.

Why? Because it is unjust. The struggle between truth and justice is begun here for the first time; and it will never end.

If he had faith, he could, in fact, be saved, but others would be damned and suffering would continue. There is no possible salvation for the man who feels real compassion.

But to live is also to act. To act in the name of what?

Socrates, Jesus, Descartes, Hegel, all the prophets and philosophers, have done nothing but invent new methods of deranging what I am,

That is why it is impossible to pass judgment on the world. Any attempt to apply a standard of values to the world leads finally to a slander on life. Judgments are based on what is, with reference to what should be—the kingdom of heaven, eternal concepts, or moral imperatives. But what should be does not exist; and this world cannot be judged in the name of nothing.

If nihilism is the inability to believe, then its most serious symptom is not found in atheism, but in the inability to believe in what is, to see what is happening, and to live life as it is offered.

this rebellion on the part of men could not lead to a renaissance unless it was controlled and directed. Any other attitude toward it, whether regret or complacency, must lead to the apocalypse.

Christianity believes that it is fighting against nihilism because it gives the world a sense of direction, while it is really nihilist itself in so far as, by imposing an imaginary meaning on life, it prevents the discovery of its real meaning:

nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists. In this sense, all forms of socialism are manifestations, degraded once again, of Christian decadence. For Christianity, reward and punishment implied the existence of history.

A profounder logic replaces the “if nothing is true, everything is permitted” of Karamazov by “if nothing is true, nothing is permitted.” To deny that one single thing is forbidden in this world amounts to renouncing everything that is permitted. At the point where it is no longer possible to say what is black and what is white, the light is extinguished and freedom becomes a voluntary prison.

The world is divine because the world is inconsequential. That is why art alone, by being equally inconsequential, is capable of grasping it. It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it—just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations.

he was set up, thirty-three years after his death, by his own countrymen as the master of lies and violence, and his ideas and virtues, made admirable by his sacrifice, have been rendered detestable. In the history of the intelligence, with the exception of Marx, Nietzsche’s adventure has no equivalent; we shall never finish making reparation for the injustice done to him.

Since the salvation of man is not achieved in God, it must be achieved on earth. Since the world has no direction, man, from the moment he accepts this, must give it one that will eventually lead to a superior type of humanity.

Nietzsche undoubtedly hated freethinkers and humanitarians. He took the words freedom of thought in their most extreme sense: the divinity of the individual mind. But he could not stop the freethinkers from partaking of the same historical fact as himself—the death of God—nor could he prevent the consequences being the same.

In order not to be overcome with self-hatred, one’s innocence must be proclaimed, an impossibly bold step for one man alone, for self-knowledge will prevent him. But at least one can declare that everyone is innocent, though they may be treated as guilty. God is then the criminal.

of rediscovering order by means of disorder and of voluntarily loading oneself down with chains still heavier than those from which release was sought,

Every genius is at once extraordinary and banal. He is nothing if he is only one or the other. We must remember this when thinking of rebellion.

To be nothing—that is the cry of the mind exhausted by its own rebellion.

“What is good? What is ugly? What is great, strong, weak …? Don’t know! Don’t know!” These parlor nihilists were obviously threatened with having to act as slaves to the strictest orthodoxies.

“Must we abandon all hope at that particular point?”

Surrealism wants to find a solution to this endless anxiety.

Surrealism, the gospel of chaos, found itself compelled, from its very inception, to create an order.

The essential thing is that every obstacle should be denied and that the irrational should be triumphant.

In that they could not have the best, they still preferred the worst. In that respect they were nihilists.

The renegades of surrealism were faithful to most of the principles of nihilism. In a certain way, they wanted to die. If André Breton and a few others finally broke with Marxism, it was because there was something in them beyond nihilism, a second loyalty to what is purest in the origins of rebellion: they did not want to die.

Revolution consists in loving a man who does not yet exist.

In reality, revolution for André Breton was only a particular aspect of rebellion, while for Marxists and, in general, for all political persuasions, only the contrary is true. Breton was not trying to create, by action, the promised land that was supposed to crown history. One of the fundamental theses of surrealism is, in fact, that there is no salvation.

Essentially, then, we are dealing with a perpetual demand for unity.

The rebel does not ask for life, but for reasons for living. He rejects the consequences implied by death. If nothing lasts, then nothing is justified; everything that dies is deprived of meaning. To fight against death amounts to claiming that life has a meaning, to fighting for order and for unity.

It is not the suffering of a child, which is repugnant in itself, but the fact that the suffering is not justified.

To kill God and to build a Church are the constant and contradictory purpose of rebellion.