Introduction
This video is sponsored by Squarespace. More about them later. Albert Camus is an iconic thinker who created absurdism, coined the phrase "imagine Sisyphus happy," and made philosophers seem cool. The channel has already discussed his works like The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger. Today, we'll focus on his most controversial book, The Rebel, which explores what absurdism can tell us about society, politics, violence, and dictators. This video is a broad overview, and the interpretation is the speaker's own.
Gazing into the Absurd
Before delving into The Rebel, let's recap Camus' thought. The key pillar is the absurd, which is not just the world's meaninglessness but the contradiction between mankind's search for absolute objective meaning and the universe's silence. This tension makes life absurd. Camus' philosophy revolves around the question: How should we react to the absurd? In The Myth of Sisyphus, he outlines three possible answers: not going on living, jumping into a faith-based philosophy, or becoming an absurdist.
The opening of The Rebel picks up where The Myth of Sisyphus left off. While the former dealt with the absurd turned inwards, the latter deals with the absurd turned outwards. Camus frames this as the problem of murder, but it can be considered more broadly as the problem of violence, politics, and social organization in a meaningless universe. He asks how an absurdist, who admits that life is meaningless, can not be silent and inactive in the face of violence and injustice.
The Absurdist Value of Human Life
Camus argues that the absurdist is implicitly committed to the value of human life. This might seem strange, but he thinks it's there in the original absurdist decision to live in spite of the contradiction between their wish for meaning and the universe's meaninglessness. This is a stubborn clinging to life, which expresses that the absurdist holds some value in human existence. This value is not absolute, but if the absurdist did not have it, they would not have chosen to continue living.
Camus also thinks that we naturally care not just about bare life but about a particular kind of dignified life. He's not saying that there is some absolute value in the world that supports caring about dignified living. He just thinks that we unavoidably do value this, just like we value food because of our instinct of hunger. Our personal outrage will not allow us to bear an undignified life if we can help it. In that case, if we can rebel, we will rebel.
The Symbolic Story of Rebellion
Camus begins The Rebel with a symbolic story about a master and a slave. The slave eventually decides to rebel against their master, and in this moment, we see the human wish for a dignified life. Camus thinks that when we rebel in this way, we're not just rebelling on behalf of ourselves but on behalf of all humanity. The slave resisting the master is essentially saying, "You cannot come any further. This is where I draw the line and demarcate my territory." The same reaction can be carried out with every single human being. They might draw the line at different points, but fundamentally we all want to defend some modicum of freedom and dignity.
Camus also thinks that there is even a strange sort of solidarity with whatever force the rebel is resisting. The rebel does not hate the master as a person but as a master. If the master were removed from that position of dominance, then there wouldn't be any quarrel. This gives us one hallmark of Camus' philosophy of rebellion: it's not necessarily totally nonviolent, but it's not vengeful. It doesn't divide people into immutable categories and separate them, but recognizes that we are all facing the absurd together and that any conflict we have with one another is in principle temporary.
Unity as the Key to Resisting the Absurd
Fundamentally, the way Camus thinks we can resist the absurd together and most effectively is through unity. That is a shared recognition of our predicament as human beings stuck in an absurd world with a baseline level of humanist goodwill baked into our worldview. Even when we're defending ourselves or others against other people or are otherwise in the midst of human conflict, Camus thinks that an absurdist must keep this idea forever at the front of their minds. The only value they are already committed to, even if unintentionally, is the value of any human life. This is part of what Camus thinks separates his absurdist philosophy from simple nihilism.
The Nihilistic Revolt
The first major section of Camus' book is entitled "Metaphysical Rebellion" and covers the more general attitude of the rebel towards the world's lack of meaning and the existence of injustice. The character that embodies this most for Camus is Ivan Karamazov from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, who says that he would not consent to live in a utopia if it relied on the suffering of even one innocent child. He rebels not against a particular government or a particular society but against the very state of reality as embodied through an idea of God.
Camus contrasts this with historical rebellion, which was directed at particular social systems. However, the speaker wants to analyze the rebel more through the ways the reactions to the absurd in this work cohere with the two non-absurdist responses that Camus outlined in The Myth of Sisyphus. We'll call them the nihilist approach and the absolutist or faith-based approach.
The epitome of nihilistic rebellion is not found in Ivan Karamazov but in Sade. Sade's philosophy was almost entirely anti-moral and recognized no higher motivation than his moment-to-moment desires. His logic leads him to a lawless universe where the only master is the inordinate energy of desire. He desires not freedom for all mankind and respect for all mankind but freedom only for himself. He has no wish to even acknowledge the wills of others but wants to turn the entire world into an inferno of will against will until there's only ashes and petty kings over those ashes.
In the figure of Sade, we see the tension between two human priorities: freedom on the one hand, which broadens what we can do, and justice on the other hand, which sets limits on what we can do and limits on what others can do to us. Sade sacrifices any and all justice on behalf of total unfettered freedom, which is in effect then the freedom of the wolf to devour the sheep and the freedom of the master to beat the slave.
Camus thinks this is an unsatisfactory approach to the absurd for two reasons. The first is that it's self-contradictory. Eventually, Sade will find himself on the receiving end of a more powerful person, and so he will become the slave and be crushed under their feet. Thus, Sade will be destroyed in pursuit of his own philosophy. The second is that it ignores the human desire for unity. We are social creatures and the vast majority of us want some kind of caring community around us.
At the political level, Camus identifies fascism and specifically Hitler with this more nihilistic approach to the absurd. Just as Sade had a philosophy entirely geared around his personal freedom, including his freedom to harm and dominate others, Mussolini and Hitler geared their national regimes around a kind of group-based version of this. For Camus, the axiom of their approaches was "we and our nation will do whatever it likes regardless of the cost to others."
The nihilistic revolt in The Rebel corresponds with the nihilist in The Myth of Sisyphus who decides that their life is of no value and so resolves to end it. The similarities are there in two ways. The first is that both of them repudiate in the strongest possible terms any kind of value for human life, even relative or provisional value. The second is that they are both destructive and self-destructive attempts to confront the absurd.
Faith, the Absolute, and Terror
In existential philosophy, we talk a lot about the troubles of having no meaning. But it is the characteristic contribution of Camus to point out not just where meaninglessness brings disaster but where too much meaning or perhaps excessive confidence in a particular meaning can be just as destructive. Camus mainly talks about this in his chapter entitled "Historical Rebellion," which focuses on the French Revolution and Stalin's regime in the USSR as two examples of absolute meaning managing to bring terror in its wake rather than human fulfillment or dignity.
For Camus, movements like the French Revolution or Stalin's USSR eventually replace the idea of God with some other no less absolute value and in doing so made it possible to sacrifice real human lives on mass so that this absolute value might be achieved. They thus replicated what he thought were the worst aspects of religious thinking.
Take the French Revolution for example. While he praised their rebellious spirit, Camus thought that the revolutionaries eventually replaced God with the idea of the people as the grounding for absolute value. However, the idea of people's self-determination was quickly replaced by the much more abstract idea of the general will of the people. The figure he uses to exemplify this is Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, a major figure in the French Revolution. While Camus admired him in many ways, he also thought that Saint-Just became more interested in promoting an abstract idea of a virtuous society and creating a virtuous populace than in representing the genuine will of the people.
The other example Camus draws upon very heavily is the USSR and specifically Stalinism. Camus has a long critique of Hegel and Marx, but he's not so much attacking their particular philosophies but rather how they've been used by others. In effect, Camus charges Stalin's USSR and its defenders in France of having a worldview that would justify almost any atrocity as long as it was in the name of advancing towards a near-utopian society.
Camus argues that the notion of a future society was all well and good as an ideal to get closer to but became dangerous when treated as a prophecy that had to be fulfilled. The idea that dialectical conflict within societies would one day draw to a close and that this would lead to eventual undisturbed harmony struck Camus as an act of unjustified faith.
Absurdist Moderation
The Rebel is primarily a critical work. Camus only gives provisional answers to what a positive absurdist society would look like. But characteristically, what he does say is defined by a series of contradictions kept in permanent tension.
Firstly, there is the tension between freedom and justice. Camus says the absurdist must recognize that there just is an inherent opposition here. To prize freedom is to give people license against a strict moral code. On the other hand, a sense of justice is needed in order to defend people from the freedom of others.
Secondly, Camus' rebel has a healthy dose of doubt in their own judgment and their own actions, especially when those actions could hurt the people around them. The idea here is to balance another pair of contradictory aims: being confident enough to act and being doubtful enough to ward off dogma with all of its potentially oppressive tendencies.
Thirdly, the absurdist rebel should never lose sight of the common thread that binds humanity together: our shared struggle against the absurd and against suffering. The rebels ultimate foe is not any individual but death and suffering itself. They only fight against people when those people are causing suffering and death.
Camus calls this absurdist philosophy a philosophy of limits. This is because the rebels task is to continually negotiate the limits of these contradictory properties: to balance freedom with justice, doubt with action, and conflict with universal solidarity.
Conclusion
The Rebel is Camus' most controversial book. The speaker asks for the viewers' thoughts on how often people go too far in pursuit of absolute meaning and lose sight of humanity in the process, how realistic this more tension-based approach is, and whether we can get this much humanism out of the initial absurdist premise.