The Rebel

by Albert Camus

Suicide and murder are thus two aspects of a single system, the system of an unhappy intellect which rather than suffer limitation chooses the dark victory which annihilates earth and heaven.

Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.

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 revolt can only exist in a society where a theoretic equality conceals great factual inequalities.

for the Inca and the pariah the problem of revolt never arises, because for them it has been solved by tradition before they had time to raise it – the answer being that tradition is sacrosanct. If, in the sacrosanct world, the problem of revolt does not arise, it is because no real problems are to be found in it – all the answers having been given simultaneously.

Rebellion is the common ground on which every man bases his first values. I rebel – therefore we exist.

The metaphysical rebel is, therefore, certainly not an atheist, as one might think him, but inevitably he is a blasphemer. He simply blasphemes, primarily in the name of order, by denouncing God as the origin of death and as the supreme disillusionment.

When the throne of God is overthrown, 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.

Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

Chaos is also a form of servitude. Freedom only exists in a world where what is possible is defined at the same time as what is not possible. Without law there is no freedom.

‘If we fail to find grandeur in God,’ says Nietzsche, ‘we find it nowhere; it must be denied or created.’ To deny was the task of the world around him which he saw rushing towards suicide. To create was the superhuman task for which he was willing to die.

Damocles never danced better than beneath the sword.

The Nietzschean experiment, which is part of the recognition of fatality, ends in a deification of fate. The more implacable destiny is, the more it becomes worthy of adoration.

‘Every individual collaborates with the entire cosmos, whether we know it or not, whether we want it or not.’

The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore. But at least he who consents to his own return and to the return of all things, who becomes an echo and an exalted echo, participates in the divinity of the world.

Dionysos, the earth-god, shrieks eternally as he is torn limb from limb. But at the same time he represents the agonized beauty which is the result of suffering.

Nietzsche proposed that man should allow himself to be engulfed in the cosmos in order to rediscover his eternal divinity and to become Dionysos himself.

Nietzsche at least foresaw what was going to happen: ‘Modern socialism tends to create a form of secular Jesuitism, to make instruments of all men,’

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: anything that dies has no meaning. To fight against death amounts to claiming that life has a meaning, to fighting for order and for unity.

The more extensive the revolution the more considerable the chances of the war that it implies. The society born of the revolution of 1789 wanted to fight for Europe. The society born of the 1917 revolution is fighting for universal dominion.

principles wage war at a distance

Consciousness of self, to be affirmed, must distinguish itself from what it is not. Man is a creature who, to affirm his existence and his difference, denies.

The only thing in the world that is distinct from nature is, precisely, self-consciousness. Therefore desire must be centred upon another form of desire, self-consciousness must be gratified by another form of self-consciousness. In simple words, man is not recognized – and does not recognize himself – as a man as long as he limits himself to subsisting like an animal. He must be acknowledged by other men. All consciousness is, basically, the desire to be recognized and proclaimed as such by other consciousnesses. It is others who beget us. Only in association do we receive a human value, as distinct from an animal value.

When poverty is abolished, when historic contradictions are resolved, ‘the real god, the human god, will be the State’. Then homo homini lupus becomes homo homini deus.

The divinity of man is still on the march, and will only be worthy of adoration at the end of time. This apocalypse must be promoted and despite the fact that there is no God, at least a Church must be built.

If everything is logical, then everything is justified.

The individual cannot accept history as it is. He must destroy reality, not collaborate with it, in order to affirm his own existence. ‘Negation is my god, as reality formerly was. My heroes are the destroyers of the past: Luther, Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, the Terrorists, Byron in Cain.’

The group known as The Will of the People therefore elevates individual terrorism into a principle and inaugurates the series of murders which continued until 1905 with the revolutionary socialist party.

Mussolini is a disciple of Hegel and Hitler of Nietzsche; and both illustrate, historically, some of the prophecies of German ideology. In this respect they belong to the history of rebellion and of nihilism.

This first attempt to found a Church on nothingness was paid for by complete annihilation.

As for Socialism, apart from the lessons, which for the most part contradicted its doctrines, that it could draw from the French Revolution, it was obliged to speak in the future tense and in the abstract. Thus it is not astonishing that it could blend in its doctrine the most valid critical method with a Utopian messianism of highly dubious value.

the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow ceased, in 1935, the publication of the complete works of Marx while more than thirty volumes still remained unpublished: doubtless the content of these volumes was not ‘Marxist’ enough.

It can be said of Marx that the greater part of his predictions came into conflict with facts as soon as his prophecies began to become an object of increasing faith. The reason is simple; the predictions were short term and could be controlled. Prophecy functions on a very long-term basis and has, as one of its properties, a characteristic which is the very source of strength of all religions: the impossibility of proof.

How could a so-called scientific socialism conflict, to such a point, with facts? The answer is easy: it was not scientific. On the contrary, its defeat resulted from a method ambiguous enough to wish to be simultaneously determinist and prophetic, dialectic and dogmatic.

Socialist doctrine supposes a scientific basis which only the intellectuals can give it. When he says that all distinctions between workers and intellectuals must be effaced, what he means is that it is impossible to be proletarian and know better than the proletariat what their interests are.

Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.

Freedom, precisely, cannot even be imagined without the power of saying clearly what is just and what is unjust, of claiming all existence in the name of a small part of existence which refuses to die.