21/12/2006 - Philosophy - from 'The Rebel' by Albert Camus
Albert Camus (1913-1960) is one of the best known French writers of the 20st century. In 1957 he received the Nobel Prize for literature. His work seemed almost forgotten, but the last years were marked by a renewed interest in his work. The following text is a paragraph from his 1951 Essay 'The Rebel':
'Likewise, absolute nihilism, which is willing to justify suicide, advances even more easily to logical murder. If our time admits with equanimity that murder has its justification, this is because of the indifference to life which is the mark of nihilism. Certainly there have been periods in which the passion for living was so strong that it too rushed into criminal excesses. But these excesses were the outcome of a terrible enjoyment. They were not the monotonous course of events, set in motion by a compulsive logic, in whose eyes everything is equal. This logic has carried those suicidal values on which our era was nurtured to their final consequence, which is the legitimatisation of murder. Likewise, it culminates in collective suicide. The most striking demonstration was furnished by the Hitlerian apocalypse of 1945. Self-destruction meant nothing to those madmen who, in their bomb-shelters, arranged their own death and apotheosis. The important thing was not to die alone, and simultaneously to destroy a whole world. In a way, the man who kills himself in solitude still recognizes a value, since, manifestly, he claims no right to the lives of other people. The proof of this is that he never uses, in order to dominate others, the terrible strength and freedom which he gains from his decision to die; every act of solitary self-destruction, when it does not proceed from passion, is in some way generous or scornful. But one is scornful on behalf of something. If the world is a matter of indifference to the suicide, this is because he has an idea of something which is not or could not be indifferent to him. One thinks that one will destroy everything or take everything along with one; but from this very death a value arises which would, perhaps, have justified existence. Absolute negation is therefore not achieved by suicide. It can be achieved only by absolute destruction, of both oneself and everybody else. Or at least it can be experienced only by striving toward that delectable end. 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.'
Albert Camus - The Rebel (1951), Author’s Introduction, p.14-15. (Penguin Classics)
My renewed interest in French writer/philosopher Albert Camus (whose books I hadn’t read for about two decades) made me read the English edition of his 1951 essay The Rebel. This book marked the definite split between Camus and Jean Paul Sartre (and Simone de Beauvoir).
After World War II, Camus wanted to see France united and striving towards a new (democratic-socialist) society, away from the pre-war ‘bourgeois’ situation, but also steering away of the communists, who had played such an essential role in the French resistance. Even though Camus had been a member of the Communist Party since his early twenties, the existence of Stalin’s gulags, a fact the West started to get more and more informed about, made him break with the party.
In The Rebel Camus opposes Stalin’s camps and as such he was an object of scorn for Sartre and De Beauvoir, both of whom turned a blind eye, as the gulags would ultimately lead to a ‘better’ (read: bolshevist) society. (They made the same mistake in the next decades when they wholeheartedly supported Mao’s ‘cultural revolution‘, which culminated in at least 60 million deaths, which made Mao the biggest mass murderer of the 20th century). It is striking that the attitude of Sartre and De Beauvoir was the general attitude of the Western so-called ‘intellectuals’ in the fifties. (One often wonders what exactly was so ‘intellectual’ about them, other than a well-played game of political opportunism). Camus was looked upon with disdain. How did he dare betray the ‘revolutionary ideals‘?
When I read this part of the Author’s Introduction, I was struck by the relevance of this text for today’s situation. I don’t have to go into detail, everybody knows about those who use the nihilistic method of suicide to create mass murder. I also don’t have to stress how many present day ‘intellectuals’ wholeheartedly side with the nihilists, this without the slightest touch of criticism about their methods. The name of British MP George Galloway comes to mind, but his name is only one of many.
For me Camus is a beacon of dignity and decency, of calm, rational thinking in a world that by the minute turns more and more insane. The Rebel is only one of his works that shows how relevant he can still be for any real intellectual discussion in our times.
KC
Most of the works of Albert Camus are available in Penguin Classics.
For more on Camus, please see entry 18/11/2006
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