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

by Albert Camus

We shall know nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. In that every action today leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether or why we have the right to kill.

If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.

In terms of the encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe, murder and suicide are one and the same thing, and must be accepted or rejected together.

Zen

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion. A slave who has taken orders all his life suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command.

Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right.

Scheler is also right in saying that resentment is always highly colored by envy.

Important psychological observatuon

According to Scheler, resentment always turns into either unscrupulous ambition or bitterness, depending pending on whether it is implanted in a strong person or a weak one.

The slave protests against the condition in which he finds himself within his state of slavery; the metaphysical rebel protests against the condition in which he finds himself as a man.

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.

He attacks a shattered world in order to demand unity from it.

He established, by his protest, the existence of the master against whom he rebelled.

at the same time he demonstrated that his master’s power was dependent on his own subordination and he affirmed his own power: the power of continually questioning the superiority of his master.

Thus rebellion affirms that, on its own level, any concept of superior existence is contradictory, to say the least.

The rebel defies more than he denies.

When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God.

...God is Dead...

no misfortune can fall upon me that I have not myself already foreseen”),

“But when a man appears who has the necessary character … he will escape, he will trample on our formulas, our magic spells, our incantations, and the laws, which are all, without exception, contrary to nature. Our slave has rebelled and has shown himself to be the master”—

A god who does not reward or punish, a god who turns a deaf ear, is the rebel’s only religious conception.

why should evil be punished when we can easily see, here on earth, that goodness is not rewarded?

Nietzsche believes that God is dead in the souls of his contemporaries. Therefore he attacks, like his predecessor Stirner, the illusion of God that lingers, under the guise of morality,

In that Christ had suffered, and had suffered voluntarily, suffering was no longer unjust and all pain was necessary.

Every ethic based on solitude implies the exercise of power.

Lots of truthiness to this...

his hatred for the death penalty is at first no more than a hatred for men who are sufficiently convinced of their own virtue to dare to inflict capital punishment, when they themselves are criminals. You cannot simultaneously choose crime for yourself and punishment for others.

The reality of capital punishment

An existentialist in a platonic paradigm

what does becoming God mean? It means, in fact, recognizing that everything is permitted and refusing to recognize any other law but one’s own.

From the moment that man submits God to moral judgment, he kills Him in his own heart.

“Our atheists,” says Stirner, “are really pious folk.” There is only one religion that exists throughout all history, the belief in eternity.

Atheism as a religion.

To dedicate oneself to humanity is no more worth while than serving God.

What, according to Stirner, is good?

“Everything of which I can make use.” What am I, legitimately, authorized to do? “Everything of which I am capable.”

Unless we accept death, we must be willing to kill in order to be unique.

“You [the German nation] will be struck down. Soon your sister nations will follow you; when all of them have gone your way, humanity will be buried, and on its tomb I, sole master of myself at last, I, heir to all the human race, will shout with laughter.”

And so, among the ruins of the world, the desolate laughter of the individual-king illustrates the last victory of the spirit of rebellion.

“We deny God, we deny the responsibility of God, it is only thus that we will deliver the world.”

“To raise a new sanctuary, a sanctuary must be destroyed, that is the law.”

This position one becomes the unmoved mover

“The only excuse for God is that he does not exist.”

The essence of His doctrine is summed up in total consent and in nonresistance to evil. Thou shalt not kill, even to prevent killing. The world must be accepted as it is, nothing must be added to its unhappiness, but you must consent to suffer personally from the evil it contains. The kingdom of heaven is within our immediate reach. It is only an inner inclination which allows us to make our actions coincide with these principles and which can give us immediate salvation. Not faith but deeds—

The idea of judgment, completely foreign to the teachings of Christ, and the correlative notions of punishment and reward.

Platonism

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:

“Alas, grant me madness.… Unless I am above the law, I am the most outcast of all outcasts.”

Nietzsche saw clearly that humanitarianism was only a form of Christianity deprived of superior justification, which preserved final causes while rejecting the first cause.

“History is governed by laws, which are conditioned by the cowardice of individuals.”

The rebel does not ask for life, but for reasons for living.

To fight against death amounts to claiming that life has a meaning, to fighting for order and for unity.

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.

Apparently there are rebels who want to die and those who want to cause death. But they are identical, consumed with desire for the true life, frustrated by their desire for existence and therefore preferring generalized injustice to mutilated justice.

“One must be just before being generous, as one must have bread before having cake.”

But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence.

In theory, the word revolution retains the meaning that it has in astronomy. It is a movement that describes a complete circle, that leads from one form of government to another after a complete transition.