The Rebel by Albert Camus

The Rebel by Albert Camus is an examination of metaphysical, historical and literary rebellion. In creating and validating relative principles through rebellion, the rebel creates values for mankind. The only real value is to mitigate suffering through moral revolt, the means by which man transcends the absurdity of his existence and affirms life for all. -Glen Brown

“[T]he movement of rebellion is founded simultaneously on the categorical rejection of an intrusion that is considered intolerable and on the confused conviction of an absolute right which, in the rebel’s mind, is more precisely the impression that he ‘has the right to…’” (13).

“Rebellion… is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended” (19).

“Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil” (24).

“From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes ‘responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.’ It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order” (70).

“Human insurrection, in its exalted and tragic forms, is only, and can only be, a prolonged protest against death, a violent accusation against the universal death penalty. In every case that we come across, the protest is always directed at everything in creation which is dissonant, opaque, or promises the solution of continuity. Essentially, then, we are dealing with a perpetual demand for unity. The rejection of death, the desire for immortality and for clarity, are the mainsprings of all these extravagances, whether sublime or puerile. Is it only a cowardly and personal refusal to die? No, for many of these rebels have paid the ultimate price in order to live up to their own demands. 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; everything that dies is deprived of meaning. To fight against death amounts to claiming that life has meaning, to fighting for order and for unity” (100-101).

“In the eyes of the rebel, what is missing from the misery of the world, a well as from its moments of happiness, is some principle by which they can be explained. The insurrection against evil is, above all, a demand 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. He is seeking, without knowing it, a moral philosophy or a religion. Rebellion, even though it is blind, is a form of asceticism. Therefore, if the rebel blasphemes, it is in the hope of finding a new god” (101).

“’I rebel, therefore we exist’… ‘And we are alone’” (104). “Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being… The revolutionary spirit thus undertakes the defense of that part of man which refuses to submit” (105).

“From the moment that eternal principles are out in doubt simultaneously with formal virtue, and when every value is discredited, reason will start to act without reference to anything but its own successes… The regicides of the nineteenth century are succeeded by the decides of the twentieth century, who draw the ultimate conclusions from the logic of rebellion and want to make the earth a kingdom where man is God. The reign of history begins and, identifying himself only with his history, man, unfaithful to his real rebellion, will henceforth devote himself to the nihilistic revolution of the twentieth century, which denies all forms of morality and desperately attempts to achieve the unity of the human race by means of a ruinous series of crimes and wars” (132).

“Apparently, the world today can no longer be anything other than a world of masters and slaves because contemporary ideologies, those that are changing the face of the earth, have learned from Hegel to conceive of history in terms of the dialectic of master and slave.” (134). “The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power. It is, in its essence, imperialist” (139).

“Mediocre minds… are content, in the name of formal principles, to find all direct violence inexcusable and then to sanction that diffuse form of violence which takes place on the scale of world history. Or they will console themselves, in the name of history nothing but a continuous violation of everything in man which protest against justice. This defines the two aspects of contemporary nihilism, the bourgeois and the revolutionary” (169).

“All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State. 1789 brings Napoleon; 1848, Napoleon III; 1917, Stalin; the Italian disturbances of the twenties, Mussolini; the Weimar Republic, Hitler… [T]he strange and terrifying growth of the modern State can be considered as the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions, foreign to the true spirit of rebellion, but which nevertheless gave birth to the revolutionary spirit of our time” (177).

“The will to power came to take the place of the will to justice, pretending at first to be identified with it then relegating it to a place somewhere at the end of history, waiting until such time as nothing remains on earth to dominate. Thus, the ideological consequence has triumphed over the economic consequence: the history of Russian Communism gives the lie to every one of its principles. Once more we find, at the end of this long journey, metaphysical rebellion, which, this time, advances to the clash of arms and the whispering passwords, but forgetful of its real principles, burying its solitude in the bosom of armed masses, covering the emptiness of its negations with obstinate scholasticism, still directed toward the future, which has its only god, but separated from it by a multitude of nations that must be overthrown and continents that must be dominated” (225-6).

“’I rebel; therefore, we exist’ and the ‘We are alone’ of metaphysical rebellion: rebellion at grips with history adds that instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are” (252). “It is not sufficient to live, there must be a destiny that does not have to wait for death” (262).

“Every rebel solely by the movement that sets him in opposition to the oppressor, therefore pleads for life, [and] undertakes to struggle against servitude, falsehood, and terror…” (284). “The logic of the rebel is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness” (285). “His only virtue will lie in never yielding to the impulse to allow himself to be engulfed in the shadows that surround him and in obstinately dragging the chains of evil, with which he is bound, toward the light of good” (286).

“We all carry within our places of exile our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world, it is to fight them in ourselves and in others” (301). “[T]he only rule of life today: to learn to live and to die, and, in order to be a man, to refuse to be a god” (306).

Camus, Albert. The Rebel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1956