But as we see him setting this up at the beginning of The Rebel the continuity with a philosophical reading of The Stranger is also strikingly clear. At the beginning of The Rebel Camus explains:. Having ruled out suicide, what is there to say about murder?
Starting from the absence of God, the key theme of Nuptials , and the inevitability of absurdity, the key theme of The Myth of Sisyphus , Camus incorporates both of these into The Rebel , but alongside them he now stresses revolt. The act of rebellion assumes the status of a primary datum of human experience, like the Cartesian cogito taken by Sartre as his point of departure. Camus first expressed this directly under the inspiration of his encounter with Being and Nothingness.
But how can an I lead to a we? Acting against oppression entails having recourse to social values, and at the same time joining with others in struggle. On both levels solidarity is our common condition. In The Rebel Camus takes the further step, which occupies most of the book, of developing his notion of metaphysical and historical rebellion in opposition to the concept of revolution.
And now, in The Rebel , he describes this as a major trend of modern history, using similar terms to those he had used in The Myth of Sisyphus to describe the religious and philosophical evasions.
What sort of work is this? In a book so charged with political meaning, Camus makes no explicitly political arguments or revelations, and presents little in the way of actual social analysis or concrete historical study. The Rebel is, rather, a historically framed philosophical essay about underlying ideas and attitudes of civilization.
David Sprintzen suggests these taken-for-granted attitudes operate implicitly and in the background of human projects and very rarely become conscious Sprintzen , Camus felt that it was urgent to critically examine these attitudes in a world in which calculated murder had become common. The book provides a unique perspective—presenting a coherent and original structure of premise, mood, description, philosophy, history, and even prejudice.
These certainly reached back to his expulsion from the Communist Party in the mids for refusing to adhere to its Popular Front strategy of playing down French colonialism in Algeria in order to win support from the white working class.
Then, making no mention of Marxism, The Myth of Sisyphus is eloquently silent on its claims to present a coherent understanding of human history and a meaningful path to the future. Validating revolt as a necessary starting point, Camus criticizes politics aimed at building a utopian future, affirming once more that life should be lived in the present and in the sensuous world. He explores the history of post-religious and nihilistic intellectual and literary movements; he attacks political violence with his views on limits and solidarity; and he ends by articulating the metaphysical role of art as well as a self-limiting radical politics.
In place of argument, he paints a concluding vision of Mediterranean harmony that he hopes will be stirring and lyrical, binding the reader to his insights. As a political tract The Rebel asserts that Communism leads inexorably to murder, and then explains how revolutions arise from certain ideas and states of spirit. Furthermore, Camus insists that these attitudes are built into Marxism. Marxists think this, Camus asserted, because they believe that history has a necessary logic leading to human happiness, and thus they accept violence to bring it about.
As does the rebel who becomes a revolutionary who kills and then justifies murder as legitimate. According to Camus, the execution of King Louis XVI during the French Revolution was the decisive step demonstrating the pursuit of justice without regard to limits.
It contradicted the original life-affirming, self-affirming, and unifying purpose of revolt. Camus focuses on a variety of major figures, movements, and literary works: the Marquis de Sade, romanticism, dandyism, The Brothers Karamazov , Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, surrealism, the Nazis, and above all the Bolsheviks. Camus describes revolt as increasing its force over time and turning into an ever more desperate nihilism, overthrowing God and putting man in his place, wielding power more and more brutally.
Historical revolt, rooted in metaphysical revolt, leads to revolutions seeking to eliminate absurdity by using murder as their central tool to take total control over the world.
Communism is the contemporary expression of this Western sickness. We might justly expect an analysis of the arguments he speaks of, but The Rebel changes focus. His shift is revealed by his question: How can murder be committed with premeditation and be justified by philosophy? He does not address the Holocaust, and although his had been a voice of protest against Hiroshima in , he does not now ask how it happened.
As a journalist he had been one of the few to indict French colonialism, but he does not mention it, except in a footnote. How was it possible for Camus to focus solely on the violence of Communism, given the history he had lived, in the very midst of the French colonial war in Vietnam, and when he knew that a bitter struggle over Algeria lay ahead? It seems he became blinded by ideology, separating Communism from the other evils of the century and directing his animus there.
But something else had happened: his agenda had changed. Absurdity and revolt, his original themes, had been harnessed as an alternative to Communism, which had become the archenemy. The philosophy of revolt became Cold-War ideology.
Because The Rebel claimed to describe the attitude that lay behind the evil features of contemporary revolutionary politics, it became a major political event. Readers could hardly miss his description of how the impulse for emancipation turned into organized, rational murder as the rebel-become-revolutionary attempted to order an absurd universe. In presenting this message, Camus sought not so much to critique Stalinism as its apologists. His specific targets were intellectuals attracted to Communism—as he himself had been in the s.
But it also reflects his capacity for interpreting a specific disagreement in the broadest possible terms—as a fundamental conflict of philosophies. They are studded with carefully composed topic sentences for major ideas—which one expects to be followed by paragraphs, pages, and chapters of development but, instead, merely follow one another and wait until the next equally well-wrought topic sentence.
The going gets even muddier as we near the end and the text verges on incoherence. However the strain stems from the fact that he is doing so much more. Rebellion, Camus has insisted, will entail murder.
He has said that death is the most fundamental of absurdities, and that at root rebellion is a protest against absurdity. Thus to kill any other human being, even an oppressor, is to disrupt our solidarity, in a sense to contradict our very being.
It is impossible, then, to embrace rebellion while rejecting violence. There are those, however, who ignore the dilemma: these are the believers in history, heirs of Hegel and Marx who imagine a time when inequality and oppression will cease and humans will finally be happy. For Camus this resembles the paradise beyond this life promised by religions, and he speaks of living for, and sacrificing humans for, a supposedly better future as, very simply, another religion.
Moreover, his sharpest hostility is reserved for intellectuals who theorize and justify such movements. Accepting the dilemma, Camus is unable to spell out how a successful revolution can remain committed to the solidaristic and life-affirming principle of rebellion with which it began. In addition, as Foley points out, Camus attempts to think through the question of political violence on a small-group and individual level. Both in The Rebel and in his plays Caligula and The Just Assassins , Camus brings his philosophy to bear directly on the question of the exceptional conditions under which an act of political murder can considered legitimate.
Furthermore, because the killer has violated the moral order on which human society is based, Camus makes the demand that he or she must be prepared to sacrifice his or her own life in return. But if he accepts killing in certain circumstances, Camus rules out mass killing, indirect murder, killing civilians, and killing without an urgent need to remove murderous and tyrannical individuals.
In The Rebel, a complex and sprawling essay in philosophy, the history of ideas and literary movements, political philosophy, and even aesthetics, Camus extends the ideas he asserted in Nuptials and developed in The Myth of Sisyphus : the human condition is inherently frustrating, but we betray ourselves and solicit catastrophe by seeking religious solutions to its limitations.
Our alternatives are to accept the fact that we are living in a Godless universe—or to become a revolutionary, who, like the religious believer committed to the abstract triumph of justice in the future, refuses to live in the present.
Having critiqued religion in Nuptials , Camus is self-consciously exploring the starting points, projects, weaknesses, illusions, and political temptations of a post-religious universe. He describes how traditional religion has lost its force, and how younger generations have been growing up amid an increasing emptiness and a sense that anything is possible.
He further claims that modern secularism stumbles into a nihilistic state of mind because it does not really free itself from religion. Our modern need to create kingdoms and our continuing search for salvation is the path of catastrophe.
Thus in the twenty-first century Camus remains relevant for having looked askance at Western civilization since classical times, at progress, and at the modern world.
At the heart of his analyses lie his ambivalent exploration of what it is like to live in a Godless universe. But to restrain oneself from this effort is to feel bereft of justice, order, and unity. Camus recognizes that hope and the revolutionary drive are essential directions of the post-classical Western spirit, stemming from its entire world of culture, thought, and feeling.
Trying to justify this life by pointing to the next one is just another way to deny the meaninglessness of life, no matter how you phrase it. Can we find a meaning of life that can satisfy our need for one? We are still living here and now and have every ability to enjoy ourselves. Life is worth living and should be embraced as it is. While it is difficult to face meaninglessness without retreating into the loving arms of religion, science, society, or even producing meaning ourselves, Camus encourages us to bravely face the absurd with a smile on our face.
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Like Sisyphus, we continue to ask about the meaning of life, only to find our answers tumbling back down. The philosopher asserts that we should embrace the absurdity of human existence and take on the purpose of creating value and meaning. Efforts and resilience — not suicide and despair — are the appropriate responses. Camus argued that Sisyphus is happy and that we must emulate his resilience.
The Greek hero is admirable for he accepts the pointlessness of his task, and instead of giving up or committing suicide, he has risen above his fate by deliberate choice and toils on.
This notion of the absurd can also be found in his other masterpiece, The Plague , in which human aspirations and happiness are undermined by the plague. Set in the town of Oran which is overcome by the deadly epidemic, the novel is an allegory of German occupation of France; the plague is a metaphor for fascism and a totalitarian regime, Nazism. Camus examines human responses to random evil and human solidarity in the face of an indifferent universe.
His political philosophy finds its expression in The Rebel , which examines the notion of rebellion in opposition to the concept of revolution. Responding to the political climate of the time in Europe, Camus made a critique of communism and denounced the idea of revolution because of its tendency to transform into totalitarianism and collapse into terror, such as Nazism and Stalinism.
As a pacifist, he advocated a humanistic, ethical, and social upheaval to achieve justice. He was also against the death penalty and was one of the few who spoke out against the United States dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Every scientific endeavour necessarily ends up in abstraction, metaphors and meaninglessness.
In emphasizing the absurdity of human existence, Camus though insisting that the world is meaningless, and yet maintains that he is very sure of something that has meaning in it. This something is no other than man, as man is the only creature that persistently insisting on having meaning.
Seeing the background that cannot be explainable in human terms, we say that absurd is unintelligible and irrational. As such, the limitations of human reason stand bare to us. Since it means that man cannot account for certain phenomenal manifestations in his spatio-temporal existence, he sees himself perhaps; looking like stranger in his own abode, where he should be in charge of what happens.
The idea of absurdity is that it hinders the smooth flow of reason. So long as the mind keeps silent in the motionless world of its Hope, everything is reflected and arranged in the unity of nostalgia.
But with its first move, the world cracks and tumbles, an infinite number of shimmering fragments is offered to the understanding. We must despair of ever reconstructing the familiar calm surface which would give us peace of heart Camus, Reflecting on the above passage, the idea of the world being in the working order until human mind is exercised, by itself seems absurd.
To the question of what part is essentially absurd, Camus thus emphasizes:. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said.
But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is what links them together. It binds them one to the other as only hatred that weld two creature together Camus, From this, the absurdity jumps out and it is not the universe or man. The concept of absurd as that which cannot be comprehensible is seen in the finality of man which is death.
For man in every era has been haunted by the terrifying possibility of total extinction as he lives in a constant presence of the inevitability of death.
Death is therefore seen as that which is related to the meaning of life. It is one of those things that is bound to happen sooner or later. For whenever it is used, it is in reference to life. He who is without negating it does nothing for the eternal. In the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus espoused the futility of human labour which was well represented by Sisyphus who was condemned by the gods to the meaninglessness and futile endeavour of rolling a rock to the apex of a mountain, whereby the rock rolls back to its base.
This he does constantly with every effort and energy, but each time he succeeds in rolling it up, the rock goes back and he starts again unendingly. Hence, Human labour is but a pointless and futile venture, for nothing has changed, the same thing every day. This shows the futility of human labour on two grounds: it is completely monotonous and it is purposeless. So all human endeavours for Camus, is but a futile task since at the end death will eventually strike.
For Albert Camus, life is full of absurdity. Nevertheless, the realization of the meaninglessness and absurdity of life does not necessarily require suicide. Eventhough much of human existence on earth is grounded on the hope of tomorrow, yet this tomorrow comes only to bring about our nearness-ness to the grave, which is the final enemy of earthly life. Albert Camus, hereby, maintained that resorting to suicide as a means of escaping the absurdity of life will surely imply a total failure on the part of the individual person.
This then will amount to surrendering to absurdity instead of bringing meaning to life. Camus, therefore, resisted existentialist interpretations of his philosophy. This might be as a result of the fact that Camus, unlike existentialists, did think that there were times when circumstances or situations in life actually do force our actions.
However, his position is surely very controversial. Nevertheless, for Camus, the awareness that life is absurd is already a move towards overcoming the meaninglessness of life.
As absurd has no meaning, man must firmly hold himself against and apart from it and revolt against it in all its entirety. Man can be able to hold himself apart from the absurd because he has the freedom to choose not to succumb to the absurdity or meaninglessness of life.
With that freedom, man should possess some grace that will enable him give some sort of meaning to his existence. Freedom, for Camus, is unachievable beyond what the absurdity of existence permits: however, the nearest one could approach being absolutely free is by way of accepting the absurd Camus, In world devoid of higher meaning, the human nature becomes as close to absolutely free as is humanly possible Camus, The absurd binds us to its terms and we protect ourselves from the temptation of treating sources of meaning or values as absolute Brad, Baggin speaking on this freedom, holds that we find ourselves in a universe we did not create, subject to conditions we did not choose, and vulnerable to injury, loss and death.
However, we equally know ourselves as capable of creating beauty, developing deep and loving relationships, of finding nature that is intelligible and glorious, and seeing the possibility of some fuller existence beyond the limit of time and circumstances.
In this regard, therefore, he holds that our possibility is that life has meaning to the extent that we give it such Wikipedia, The question at this point is: Is there any purpose in human life? Is it worth living?
These two kinds of meaning are very prominent in human existence. First, there is that of all living things, each of which can be assessed against a specific developmental order. Secondly, there is meaning that life acquires as it unfolds as a story built up out of episodes, sequences, sections and chapters. This is a matter of dramatic meaning in relation to which we are author, actor and audience: sometimes shaping events, sometimes living them and sometimes, observing them with amusement or edification.
With this Baggini supported Camus and borrowed his view on freedom.
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