And Camus is a rebellious man in an absurd world. Philosophical anatomy of rebellion
Albert Camus
Rebellious man
TO JEAN GRENIER
And heart
Openly gave in to the harsh
Suffering land, and often at night
In sacred darkness I swore to you
Love her fearlessly to death,
Without giving up on her mysteries
So I made an alliance with the earth
For life and death.
Gelderlt "The Death of Empedocles"
INTRODUCTION
There are crimes caused by passion, and crimes dictated by dispassionate logic. To distinguish them, the criminal code uses for convenience the concept of “premeditation.” We live in an era of masterfully executed criminal plots. Modern offenders are no longer those naive children who expect to be forgiven by loving people. These are men of mature minds, and they have an irrefutable justification - a philosophy that can serve anything and can even turn a murderer into a judge. Heathcliff, the hero of Wuthering Heights, is ready to destroy the entire globe just to have Cathy, but it would never even occur to him to say that such a hecatomb is reasonable and can be justified by a philosophical system. Heathcliff is capable of murder, but his thoughts do not go further than this. The strength of passion and character is felt in his criminal determination. Since such love obsession is a rare occurrence, murder remains the exception to the rule. It's kind of like breaking into an apartment. But from the moment when, due to weak character, the criminal resorts to the help of philosophical doctrine, from the moment when the crime justifies itself, it, using all kinds of syllogisms, grows just like thought itself. Atrocity used to be as lonely as a cry, but now it is as universal as science. Prosecuted only yesterday, today the crime has become law.
Let no one be outraged by what was said. The purpose of my essay is to comprehend the reality of logical crime, characteristic of our time, and carefully study the ways of justifying it. This is an attempt to understand our modernity. Some probably believe that an era that in half a century has dispossessed, enslaved or destroyed seventy million people must first of all be condemned, and only condemned. But we also need to understand the essence of her guilt. In the old naive times, when a tyrant for the sake of greater glory swept away entire cities from the face of the earth, when a slave chained to a victorious chariot wandered through foreign festive streets, when a captive was thrown to be devoured by predators in order to amuse the crowd, then in the face of such simple-minded atrocities the conscience could remain calm , and the thought is clear. But pens for slaves, overshadowed by the banner of freedom, mass destruction of people, justified by love for man or craving for the superhuman - such phenomena, in a certain sense, simply disarm the moral court. In new times, when evil intent dresses up in the garb of innocence, according to a strange perversion characteristic of our era, it is innocence that is forced to justify itself. In my essay I want to take on this unusual challenge in order to understand it as deeply as possible.
It is necessary to understand whether innocence is capable of refusing murder. We can only act in our own era among the people around us. We will not be able to do anything if we do not know whether we have the right to kill our neighbor or give our consent to his murder. Since today any action paves the way to direct or indirect murder, we cannot act without first understanding whether we should condemn people to death, and if so, then in the name of what.
It is important for us not so much to get to the bottom of things as to figure out how to behave in the world - such as it is. In times of denial, it is useful to determine your attitude towards the issue of suicide. In times of ideologies, it is necessary to understand what our attitude towards murder is. If there are justifications for it, it means that our era and we ourselves fully correspond to each other. If there are no such excuses, it means that we are in madness, and we have only one choice, either to conform to the era of murder, or to turn away from it. In any case, we need to clearly answer the question posed to us by our bloody, polyphonic century. After all, we ourselves are in question. Thirty years ago, before deciding to kill, people denied many things, even denied themselves through suicide. God cheats in the game, and with him all mortals, including myself, so wouldn’t it be better for me to die? The problem was suicide. Today, ideology denies only strangers, declaring them dishonest players. Now they kill not themselves, but others. And every morning, the murderers, hung with medals, enter solitary confinement cells: murder has become the problem.
These two arguments are related to each other. Or rather, they bind us, so tightly that we can no longer choose our own problems. It is they, the problems, who choose us one by one. Let us accept our chosenness. In the face of riot and murder, in this essay I want to continue the thoughts whose initial themes were suicide and absurdity.
But so far this reflection has led us to only one concept - the concept of the absurd. It, in turn, gives us nothing but contradictions in everything related to the problem of murder. When you try to extract rules of action from the feeling of absurdity, you find that as a result of this feeling, murder is perceived at best with indifference and, therefore, becomes permissible. If you don’t believe in anything, if you don’t see the meaning in anything and can’t assert any value, everything is permitted and nothing matters. There are no arguments for, no arguments against, the murderer can neither be convicted nor acquitted. Whether you burn people in gas ovens or dedicate your life to caring for lepers - it makes no difference. Virtue and malice become matters of chance or caprice.
And so you come to the decision not to act at all, which means that you, in any case, put up with the murder that was committed by another. All you can do is lament the imperfection of human nature. Why not replace action with tragic amateurism? In this case, human life becomes the stake in the game. One can finally conceive an action that is not entirely aimless. And then, in the absence of a higher value guiding the action, it will be focused on the immediate result. If there is neither true nor false, neither good nor bad, the rule becomes the maximum efficiency of the action itself, that is, force. And then it is necessary to divide people not into righteous and sinners, but into masters and slaves. So, no matter how you look at it, the spirit of denial and nihilism gives murder a place of honor.
Therefore, if we want to accept the concept of the absurd, we must be prepared to kill in obedience to logic, and not to conscience, which will appear to us as something illusory. Of course, murder requires some inclination. However, as experience shows, they are not so pronounced. Moreover, as is usually the case, there is always the possibility of committing murder by someone else's hands. Everything could be settled in the name of logic, if logic were really taken into account here.
But logic has no place in a concept that alternately makes murder acceptable and unacceptable. For, having recognized murder as ethically neutral, the analysis of the absurd ultimately leads to its condemnation, and this is the most important conclusion. The final result of the discussion of the absurd is the refusal to commit suicide and participation in the desperate confrontation between the questioning person and the silent universe. Suicide would mean the end of this confrontation, and therefore reasoning about the absurd sees suicide as a denial of its own premises. After all, suicide is an escape from the world or getting rid of it. And according to this reasoning, life is the only truly necessary good, which alone makes such a confrontation possible. Outside of human existence, an absurd bet is unthinkable: in this case, one of the two parties necessary for the dispute is missing. Only a living, conscious person can declare that life is absurd. How, without making significant concessions to the desire for intellectual comfort, can one preserve for oneself the unique advantage of such reasoning? Recognizing that life, while it is good for you, is also good for others. It is impossible to justify murder if you refuse to justify suicide. A mind that has internalized the idea of the absurd unconditionally accepts fatal murder, but does not accept rational murder. From the point of view of the confrontation between man and the world, murder and suicide are equivalent. By accepting or rejecting one, you inevitably accept or reject the other.
Therefore, absolute nihilism, which considers suicide a completely legal act, recognizes with even greater ease the legality of murder according to logic. Our century readily admits that murder can be justified, and the reason for this lies in the indifference to life inherent in nihilism. Of course, there were eras when the thirst for life reached such strength that it resulted in atrocities. But these excesses were like the burn of unbearable pleasure; they have nothing in common with the monotonous order that compulsory logic establishes, putting everyone and everything into its Procrustean bed. Such logic has nurtured the understanding of suicide as a value, even reaching such extreme consequences as the legalized right to take a person’s life. This logic culminates in collective suicide. Hitler's apocalypse of 1945 is the most striking example of this. Destroying themselves was too little for the madmen who were preparing a real apotheosis of death in their lair. The point was not to destroy ourselves, but to take the whole world with us to the grave. In a certain sense, a person who condemns only himself to death denies all values except one - the right to life that other people have. Proof of this is the fact that a suicide never destroys his neighbor, does not use the disastrous power and terrible freedom that he gains by deciding to die. Every suicide is done alone, unless it is done in revenge, in a generous way, or filled with contempt. But they despise for the sake of something. If the world is indifferent to a suicide, it means that he imagines that it is not indifferent to him or could be so. A suicide thinks that he destroys everything and takes everything with him into oblivion, but his death itself affirms a certain value that, perhaps, deserves to be lived for. Suicide is not enough for absolute denial. The latter requires absolute destruction, the destruction of both oneself and others. In any case, you can live in absolute denial only if you strive in every possible way towards this tempting limit. Murder and suicide represent two sides of the same coin - an unhappy consciousness that prefers the dark delight in which earth and sky merge and are destroyed to endure the human lot.
Albert Camus is one of the most famous philosophers and writers, whose theories have found their way into many practical programs and emerging ideologies. Camus's works were republished several times during the author's lifetime and gained incredible popularity in certain circles. In 1957, the novelist was awarded the Nobel Prize for his literary achievements.
“Rebel Man,” despite its impressive length, is structured more like an essay than a treatise, describing the historical predisposition of man to any kind of rebellion and confrontation.
Taking the concepts of Epicurus, Lucretius, Hegel, Breton and Nietzsche as a basis, Camus derives his own theory of human freedom on their basis.
The work has become quite famous among people who are adherents of existentialism and its varieties.
Biography
Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913 in Algeria, the son of an Alsatian father and a Spanish mother. From childhood, even in preschool age, Camus was forced to do a variety of jobs to help his family survive. The work of a handyman was poorly paid, and so the mother decides to send her son to primary school. Camus displays an amazing thirst for knowledge and demonstrates remarkable abilities. Teachers note Albert’s innate talent and convince his mother to allow her son to continue studying. Louis Germain, one of the teachers at the school where Camus studied, not only personally prepared him for the lyceum entrance exams, but also helped the boy financially, securing a scholarship for Albert and paying his running expenses from his own pocket.
early years
In 1932, Albert Camus entered the University of Algiers, where he paid great attention to the study of theoretical psychology and philosophy, and also became a listener of lectures on cultural studies, aesthetics and history. The knowledge gained pushed the young philosopher to create his own works in diary form. In his diaries, Camus recorded personal observations and analyzes of various philosophical concepts, simultaneously trying to develop his own based on them.
The young Camus did not ignore politics either, having managed to be an active member of several political parties. However, by 1937, he was finally disillusioned with the pseudo-diversity of political views and accepted the attitude that a person will always be only himself, regardless of ideological, racial or sexual differences.
Philosophy
Albert Camus in “The Rebellious Man” defined himself as a thinker, without attributing his beliefs to any of the existing philosophical concepts. In part, the writer’s philosophy is still depressive, but the writer himself considered this to be a consequence of a long illness and difficult childhood and did not in any way connect this with the modern trends fashionable in educated society towards artificial melancholy and spiritual decline.
Camus accepts the “absurdity of the world” as a given, without looking for ways to get rid of it in his works. In “The Rebellious Man,” Camus briefly outlines the theory of the meaninglessness of many human actions, which only complicate his already short and not very joyful life.
Writing a book
Returning to Paris in the winter of 1950, Camus moved into his old apartment, trying to straighten out his own views on human psychology. The previous fragmentary concept previously used by the writer no longer satisfied him. Camus wanted something more than just analysis; he wanted to find out the hidden, subconscious reasons for various types of human behavior. By early February 1950, Camus was ready to put his still-forming views on paper. Having drawn up a detailed plan, to which he often made adjustments, the writer began to work.
Camus's philosophy in "The Rebellious Man" had a pronounced character of existentialism. The writer for a long time did not dare to admit this side of his beliefs, nevertheless positioning the essay he was writing as “neo-existentialism.”
In March 1951, Albert Camus completed work on the draft text of the book. After several months of revision, the philosopher decides to publish some chapters in journals in order to assess the reaction of thinking sections of society to his new work. The success of the chapters on Friedrich Nietzsche and Lautréamont was so stunning that Camus immediately took the full text of the essay to the Gallimard publishing house.
What is this book about?
The philosopher believes that rebellion is a natural reaction to the strangeness and absurdity of existence, caused by a strong concentration of these phenomena in the life of a particular individual. When awakening, the subconscious activates a person’s self-awareness, which leads to his desire to change reality.
An analysis of Camus's "Revolting Man" shows that the purpose of rebellion is not destruction, but the creation of a new one, changing the existing order for the better, transforming chaos into an orderly system understandable to the human mind.
main idea
Developing the concept of rebellion in the human mind, the philosopher identifies three types of resistance occurring in the human subconscious.
- Metaphysical revolt. In Man Rebel, Camus compares this type of resistance to the enmity between slave and master. Despite hating the master, the slave not only acknowledges his existence, but also agrees with the social role assigned to him, which already makes him a loser. Metaphysical rebellion is an individual rebellion, a personal rebellion of each person against society.
- Historical revolt. This type includes absolutely all the prerequisites for uprisings, the purpose of which was to establish freedom and justice. Historical rebellion is very similar to the moral demands and voice of every person's conscience. In “The Rebellious Man,” Camus expresses the position of a person who also carries out such a rebellion by the very fact of writing this essay.
- Revolt in art. This type of resistance is considered by Camus as a type of complete freedom of human self-expression within certain “permitted” limits. On the one hand, the creative vision denies reality, but on the other hand, it only transforms it into a form acceptable to the creator, since a person cannot create something that has never existed in the global consciousness.
Looking at the summary of “The Rebel Man” by Albert Camus, we can say with confidence that the only main idea of the work was the thesis that any rebellion is useless due to too much effort spent on it, as well as the incredibly short duration of human life.
Criticism
In order to protect his work from senseless or malicious criticism, Camus repeatedly noted in the text of the essay that he was not a real, professional philosopher, but in fact, he simply published a book of reasoning about human psychology.
The bulk of the critical comments from fellow writers fell on those chapters of Camus’s work where he described conceptual analysis. Philosophers believed that Albert did not give precise definitions of various psychological phenomena and, even more so, inaccurately described the concepts of thinkers of the past, changing quotes from ancient speakers in his favor, adjusting them to his own views on the theory of human freedom.
However, despite the large number of inaccuracies and flaws in Camus’s book “The Rebellious Man,” critics noted the innovation of thought, the uniqueness of the author’s concept presented and a detailed analysis of the nature of human resistance.
Philosophers who consider themselves to belong to the traditional, academic school noted the high intuitiveness of Camus's reasoning, which often lacks logical justification.
Confession
The popularity of Camus's "The Rebel Man" was not at all what the author expected. It turned out that for the majority of young people interested in philosophy, the book became not a kind of encyclopedia of human feelings, but rather a fashionable attribute indicating that the owner belonged to a special caste of existentialist intellectuals, who were characterized by depressive moods.
Camus's "Rebel Man" gave birth to the subculture of existentialism, giving food for thought to thousands of young people who recognized Albert as their leader and gathered in special cafes where the ceiling and walls were hung with black fabric. Such cafes served as a refuge exclusively for supporters of the “depressive philosophy of alienation.” The author himself spoke contemptuously about young people who waste their lives in meaningless, sad thoughts instead of accepting the reality around them and learning to live in it.
In Russia
Camus's "The Rebel Man" was published by several Russian publishing houses at the end of the eighties. Along with the works of many other Western philosophers, the works of Albert Camus were warmly received by domestic cultural scientists and psychologists.
Edition "A. Camus “The Rebel Man” (Moscow, 1990), which became the philosopher’s most popular publication in Russian, included not only his essays, but also part of his diary entries and the full texts of notebooks from the period 1951-1959.
The theme of the absurd and the theme of rebellion is discussed by Albert Camus in his book “The Rebel Man.” Man is the bearer of reason, writes Camus. The mind encourages him to set certain goals and try to achieve them. It encourages him to look for logic and meaning in the world. Trying to understand the world. And the world, by and large, turns out to be alien to these efforts. A person can never reduce reality to his own thinking; there is always a gap, a discrepancy. The world is irrational.
"For what? and why?" - these are human questions with which he approaches the world, but in the world outside of man there is no purpose or meaning. While living, he creates them for himself, but the biggest nonsense is that man is mortal, and death nullifies any projects of existence.
And this discrepancy between human expectations of purpose and meaning—the meaninglessness of the world—is what Camus calls “absurd”: “The world itself is simply unreasonable, and that’s all that can be said about it. The clash between irrationality and the frenzied desire for clarity, the call of which reverberates in the very depths of the human soul, is absurd.».
Camus views the problem of suicide as a fundamental philosophical problem. A person who commits suicide does not do it under the influence of passion (some strong experience can, perhaps, serve as the “last straw”), by his act he admits that life was not worth living, that human existence is meaningless.
The suicide understands the absurdity of human existence and comes to terms with it. He says, “yes, life was not worth living,” and removes the absurdity by eliminating his own existence. The suicider admits defeat.
Camus contrasts the position of a suicide riot. Camus' "Rebel Man" also knows that the world is irrational and his existence absurd (his mind is awakened enough to realize this; he does not live out of habit; and he does not try to remove this absurdity in any imaginary way). But he does not agree with the absurdity.
The revolt that Camus speaks of means life with a consciousness of the absurd(a glaring discrepancy between my mind’s claim to meaning and the meaninglessness of reality itself). To live and be able to enjoy life, despite the absurdity that is impossible to come to terms with. " For a man without blinders,- Camus writes, - there is no more beautiful spectacle than the struggle of the intellect with a reality that surpasses it».
A. Camus, “Absurd Reasoning” (chapter from the book “The Rebel Man”).
_____________________________________________________________________________
Subject another in existentialism.
Existentialism views man (and man's world) as based on himself. Excluding any pre-given points of view (considered as objective, that is, absolute), he considers man as a subject creating his own world, inventing his own project of being.
And therefore (in a sense) the existentialist person remains alone, closed within the framework of his thinking, his constitutive, world-mastering activity.
Earlier it was said that this loneliness of an existentialist person does not mean arbitrariness, about how he overcomes this loneliness with his mind, building a certain rational model of humanity, presupposing his own good and evil. But only with the mind.
Can a person crawl out of the shell of his own subjectivity and break through, in fact, to another? The most obvious answer is: no, it can't.
But with all this, Sartre notes that another plays an irreducible role in my creation of myself as a bodily being actually existing in the world. To constitute myself I need another's gaze.
My model of the world, as I create it as a subject, presupposes me, seen from the outside. In the absence of an absolute point of view (God, as has been said, is absent), the other knows who I am. The other holds the secret of who I really am. For me to really exist, another must confirm my existence.
And at the same time, I am aware that, just as the other is given to me primarily as a certain body (thing, object), which can threaten me or interfere with me, which I can use in one way or another, in the same way I am (first of all) given to another.
That's why people are embarrassed. A person feels naked and defenseless before the gaze of another person, because he understands that the other may not recognize for him the unconditional and enduring significance that he assumes for himself.
You can remain for him just a thing, a means, while you would like the other to recognize your irreducible significance. This, writes Sartre, is the meaning love(as one of the projects of human existence): you need another to love you, to recognize you as the center and highest value of the universe. To love means to want to be loved (this is a paradox and a contradiction). /After all, a lover, wanting to “make another fall in love” with himself, does not intend to fall in love with him and become part of his project/.
At the same time, the lover himself embarks on an adventure: he tries to seduce, he risks becoming an object for another (an object of admiration), so that he may recognize for him the importance of the central, constitutive subject of the world. The lover wants to become a deity for the beloved, giving him his world; in this act of giving he would find himself.
The lover needs the loved one to do this voluntarily, but at the same time not entirely voluntarily. He wants to be chosen, and, at the same time, necessarily and unconditionally chosen. After all, the “key” to his own existence lies with someone else. If he changes his mind, he will disappear. /He needs to voluntarily bind his loved one to himself so that he does not change his decision/.
This is impossible? Yes. In this sense, the project called "love" always fails. Because even if now the other recognizes this central significance for me, then in the future he may change his mind. He is free (and if his choice were not free, it would have no constitutive value).
That is, with the help of the “love” project, a person fails to finally affirm (protect from all worldly, random circumstances) the truth of his existence. However, one should not be deceived by Sartre’s attitude towards this “failure”. It is worth considering that the existentialist Sartre deals with contradictions not like Hegel (with Hegel all contradictions should be removed), but like Kierkegaard: if we were to follow the further logic of “Being and Nothingness,” we would see that he describes human existence as stretching from one irremovable contradiction to another.
The third part of Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” is dedicated to this topic (the part is called “For the Other”).
“...we, in fact, attribute as much reality to the body-for-others as to the body-for-us. More precisely, the body-for-another is the body-for-us, but incomprehensible and alienated. It appears to us when another performs for us a function of which we are not capable and which, however, lies with our responsibility: to see ourselves as we are.” J. P. Sartre, “Being and Nothingness,” part 3, “The Third Ontological Dimension of the Body.”
“Thus, it seems to us that loving is in its essence a project of making oneself love. Hence a new contradiction and a new conflict; each of the lovers is completely captivated by the other, since he wants to force himself to be loved to the exclusion of everyone else; but at the same time, each demands from the other love, which is not at all reducible to the “project of being loved... Love demanded in this way from the other cannot demand anything; it is pure involvement without reciprocity. But precisely this love could not exist otherwise than as a requirement of the lover..." J. P. Sartre. "Being and Nothingness", part 3, "The first attitude towards the other: love, language, masochism."
____________________________________________________________________________
Page 12 of 15
"Rebel Man"
"Rebel Man" is the story of the idea of rebellion - metaphysical and political - against the injustice of the human lot. If the first question of The Myth of Sisyphus was the question of the admissibility of suicide, then this work begins with the question of the justice of murder. People have always killed each other - this is the truth of the fact. Anyone who kills in a fit of passion is brought to justice, sometimes sent to the guillotine. But today the real threat is not these criminal loners, but government officials who coldly send millions of people to their deaths, justifying mass murder in the interests of the nation, state security, the progress of mankind, and the logic of history.
Man of the 20th century found himself faced with totalitarian ideologies that justified murder. Even Pascal, in his “Provincial Letters,” was indignant at the casuistry of the Jesuits, who permitted murder contrary to the Christian commandment. Of course, all churches blessed wars and executed heretics, but every Christian still knew that “thou shalt not kill” was inscribed on the tablets, that murder was the gravest sin. On the tablets of our age it is written: “Kill.” Camus, in Man Rebel, traces the genealogy of this maxim of modern ideology. The problem is that these ideologies themselves were born from the idea of rebellion, transformed into a nihilist “everything is permitted.”
Camus believed that the starting point of his philosophy remained the same - it is an absurdity that calls into question all values. The absurd, in his opinion, prohibits not only suicide, but also murder, since the destruction of one’s own kind means an attack on the unique source of meaning, which is the meaning of each person. However, rebellion that asserts the self-worth of the other does not follow from the absurd setting of “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The rebellion there attached value to individual life - it is “a struggle of the intellect with a reality that surpasses it,” “a spectacle of human pride,” “a refusal of reconciliation.” The fight against the “plague” is then no more justified than Don Juanism or the bloody self-will of Caligula. Subsequently, Camus changes the very content of the concepts “absurd” and “rebellion”, since it is no longer an individualistic rebellion that is born, but a demand for human solidarity, a common meaning of existence for all people. The rebel gets up from his knees, says “no” to the oppressor, draws a line that must now be respected by those who considered themselves masters. The rejection of slavery simultaneously affirms the freedom, equality and human dignity of everyone. However, a rebellious slave can himself cross this limit; he wants to become a master, and the rebellion turns into a bloody dictatorship. In the past, according to Camus, the revolutionary movement "never really broke away from its moral, evangelical and idealistic roots." Today, political rebellion has combined with metaphysical rebellion, which has freed modern man from all values, and therefore it results in tyranny. In itself, metaphysical rebellion also has justification, as long as rebellion against the heavenly omnipotent Demiurge means a refusal to reconcile with one’s destiny, an affirmation of the dignity of earthly existence. It turns into a denial of all values and results in brutal self-will, when the rebel himself becomes a “man-god”, inheriting from the deity he rejected everything that he hated so much - absolutism, claims to the last and final truth (“there is one truth, there are many errors”), providentialism, omniscience, the words “make them come in.” This degenerate Prometheus is ready to force himself into the earthly paradise, and at the slightest resistance he is ready to inflict such terror, in comparison with which the fires of the Inquisition seem like child's play.
This combination of metaphysical rebellion with the historical was mediated by “German ideology.” In the midst of writing “The Rebellious Man,” Camus said that “the evil geniuses of Europe are named after philosophers: their names are Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche... We live in their Europe, in the Europe they created.” Despite the obvious differences in the views of these thinkers (as well as Feuerbach, Stirner), Camus unites them into the “German ideology”, which gave rise to modern nihilism.
To understand the reasons why these thinkers were included in the list of “evil geniuses”, it is necessary, firstly, to remember the socio-political situation, and secondly, to understand from what angle their theories are viewed.
Camus wrote Man in Revolt in 1950, when the Stalinist system seemed to have reached the apogee of its power, and Marxist teaching had become a state ideology. Political trials were underway in Eastern Europe, information about millions of prisoners came from the USSR; As soon as this system spread to China, the war began in Korea - at any moment it could break out in Europe. Camus's political views changed by the end of the 40s; he no longer thinks about revolution, since in Europe he would have to pay for it with tens of millions of victims (if not the death of all humanity in a world war). Gradual reforms are necessary - Camus remained a supporter of socialism; he equally valued the activities of trade unions, Scandinavian social democracy and “libertarian socialism”. In both cases, socialists strive to free the living person, and do not call for sacrificing the lives of several generations for the sake of some kind of earthly paradise. Such a sacrifice does not bring closer, but moves away the “kingdom of man” - by eliminating freedom and imposing totalitarian regimes, there is no access to it.
Camus admits many inaccuracies in the interpretation of the views of Hegel and Marx, but the vision of the classics is quite understandable. He examines precisely those ideas that entered the Stalinist “canon”, were propagated as the only true teaching, and were used to justify bureaucratic centralism and “leadership.” In addition, he conducts a polemic with Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, who undertook to justify totalitarianism with the help of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit,” the doctrine of the “totality of history.” History ceases to be a teacher of life; it becomes an elusive idol, to which more and more sacrifices are made. Transcendental values dissolve in historical formation, the laws of economics themselves draw humanity to earthly paradise, but at the same time they demand the destruction of everyone who opposes them.
What is a rebellious person like? This is the person who says no. But, while denying, he does not renounce: he is a person who already says “yes” with his first action. A slave, who has carried out his master's orders all his life, suddenly considers the last of them unacceptable. What is the content of his “no”?
“No” can, for example, mean: “I’ve been patient for too long”, “so far so be it, but then that’s enough”, “you’re going too far” and also: “there’s a limit that I can’t cross.” I will allow” Generally speaking, this “no” asserts the existence of a border. The same idea of a limit is found in the rebel’s feeling that the other “takes too much upon himself,” extends his rights beyond the border, beyond which lies the area of sovereign rights that put a barrier to any encroachment on them. Thus, the impulse to revolt is rooted simultaneously in a decisive protest against any interference that is perceived as unacceptable, and in the rebel’s vague conviction that he is right, or rather, in his confidence that he “has the right to do this and that.” . Rebellion does not happen if there is no such sense of rightness. That is why the rebellious slave says both “yes” and “no” at once. Together with the mentioned border, he affirms everything that he vaguely senses in himself and wants to preserve. He stubbornly argues that there is something “worthwhile” in him and it needs to be protected. He contrasts the order that enslaved him with a kind of right to endure oppression only to the limit that he himself sets.
Along with the repulsion of the alien in any rebellion, a person immediately becomes fully identified with a certain side of his being. Here a value judgment comes into play in a hidden way, and, moreover, so fundamental that it helps the rebel to withstand the dangers. Until now, at least, he had remained silent, plunged into despair, forced to endure any conditions, even if he considered them deeply unfair. Since the oppressed person is silent, people assume that he does not reason and does not want anything, and in some cases he really does not want anything anymore. Despair, like absurdity, judges and desires everything in general and nothing in particular. Silence conveys it well. But as soon as the oppressed person speaks, even if he says “no,” it means that he desires and judges. The rebel makes a roundabout turn. He walked, driven by his master's whip. And now she stands face to face with him. The rebel opposes everything that is valuable to him with everything that is not. Not every value causes rebellion, but every rebellious movement tacitly presupposes some value. Are we talking about value in this case?
In a rebellious impulse, a consciousness, albeit unclear, is born: a sudden, bright feeling that there is something in a person with which he can identify himself, at least for a while. Until now the slave had not really felt this identity. Before his rebellion, he suffered from all kinds of oppression. It often happened that he meekly carried out orders much more outrageous than the last one, which caused the riot. The slave patiently accepted these orders; deep down, he may have rejected them, but since he was silent, it means that he lived with his daily worries, not yet realizing his rights. Having lost patience, he now begins to impatiently reject everything that he previously put up with. This impulse almost always backfires. Rejecting the humiliating command of his master, the slave at the same time rejects slavery as such. Step by step, the rebellion takes him much further than simple disobedience. He even oversteps the boundaries he has set for his opponent, now demanding to be treated as an equal. What was previously the stubborn resistance of man becomes the whole of man, who identifies himself with the resistance and is reduced to it. That part of his being, for which he demanded respect, is now dearer to him than anything else, dearer even to life itself; it becomes the highest good for the rebel. Having hitherto lived by daily compromises, the slave suddenly falls into irreconcilability - “all or nothing” (“because how could it be otherwise…”). Consciousness arises along with rebellion.
This consciousness still combines a rather vague “everything” and “nothing,” suggesting that for the sake of “everything” one can sacrifice a person. The rebel wants to be either “everything,” completely and completely identifying himself with the good that he unexpectedly realized, and demanding that in his person people recognize and welcome this good, or “nothing,” that is, to be defeated by a superior force. Going to the end, the rebel is ready for the final lawlessness, which is death, if he is deprived of that only sacred gift, which, for example, freedom can become for him. It's better to die standing than to live on your knees.
According to many recognized authors, value “most often represents a transition from fact to law, from what is desired to what is desired (usually through what is desired by everyone).” As I have already shown, in rebellion there is an obvious transition to law. And equally, the transition from the formula “it would be necessary for this to exist” to the formula “I want it to be like this.” But, perhaps even more important, we are talking about the transition from the individual to the good that has now become universal. Contrary to the current opinion about rebellion, the appearance of the slogan “All or nothing” proves that rebellion, even if it originates in the depths of a purely individual, calls into question the very concept of the individual. If an individual is ready to die and, in certain circumstances, accepts death in his rebellious impulse, he thereby shows that he is sacrificing himself in the name of a good that, in his opinion, means more than his own destiny. If a rebel is ready to die rather than lose the right he defends, this means that he values this right higher than himself. Consequently, he acts in the name of a still unclear value, which he feels unites him with all other people. Obviously the affirmation contained in every rebellious action extends to something superior to the individual insofar as this something relieves him of his supposed loneliness and gives him a reason to act. But now it is important to note that this pre-existing value, given before any action, comes into conflict with purely historical philosophical teachings, according to which value is won (if it can be won at all) only as a result of action. An analysis of rebellion leads at least to the conjecture that human nature does exist, in accordance with the ideas of the ancient Greeks and contrary to the postulates of modern philosophy. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in yourself that is worthy of being preserved? If a slave rebels, it is for the good of all living. After all, he believes that in the existing order of things, something is denied in it that is not inherent only to him, but is something common in which all people, and even the one who insulted and oppressed the slave, have a pre-prepared community.
This conclusion is supported by two observations. First of all, it should be noted that, in its essence, the rebellious impulse is not an egoistic mental movement. There is no doubt that it can be caused by selfish reasons. But people are rebelling not only against oppression, but also against lies. Moreover, at first, a rebel acting from selfish motives in the very depths of his soul does not value anything, since he puts everything at stake. Of course, the rebel demands respect for himself, but only to the extent that he identifies himself with the natural human community.
Let us also note that it is not only the oppressed who becomes a rebel. A revolt can also be raised by those who are shocked by the spectacle of oppression of which another has become a victim. In this case, he identifies himself with this oppressed person. And here it is necessary to clarify that we are not talking about psychological identification, not about self-deception, when a person imagines that he is being insulted. It happens, on the contrary, that we are not able to calmly watch as others are subjected to the same insults that we ourselves would endure without protesting. An example of this noblest movement of the human soul is suicide out of protest, which Russian terrorists decided to do in hard labor when their comrades were flogged. This is not about a sense of common interests. After all, we may consider injustice even to our opponents outrageous. Here, only the identification of destinies and joining one of the parties occurs. Thus, the individual in itself is not at all the value that he intends to protect. This value is made up of all people in general. In rebellion, a person, overcoming his limitations, draws closer to others, and from this point of view, human solidarity is metaphysical in nature. It is simply about solidarity born in chains.
The positive aspect of the value implied by every revolt can be clarified by comparing it with the purely negative concept of bitterness, as Scheler defines it. Indeed, the rebellious impulse is something more than an act of protest in the strongest sense of the word. Bitterness is perfectly defined by Scheler as self-poisoning, as a destructive secretion of prolonged impotence, occurring in a closed vessel. Rebellion, on the contrary, breaks into existence and helps to go beyond its limits. It turns stagnant waters into raging waves. Scheler himself emphasizes the passive nature of embitterment, noting how large a place it occupies in the mental world of a woman, whose fate is to be an object of desire and possession. The source of rebellion, on the contrary, is an excess of energy and a thirst for activity. Scheler is right when he says that bitterness is strongly colored by envy. But they envy what they do not have. The rebel defends himself as he is. He demands not only goods that he does not possess or which he may be deprived of. He seeks recognition of what is already in him and which he himself in almost all cases recognized as more significant than the object of probable envy. Riot is not realistic. According to Scheler, the embitterment of a strong soul turns into careerism, and that of a weak soul into bitterness. But in any case, we are talking about becoming something other than what you are. Bitterness is always directed against its bearer. A rebellious person, on the contrary, in his first impulse protests against attacks on himself as he is. He fights for the integrity of his personality. At first he strives not so much to gain the upper hand as to force him to respect himself.
Finally, bitterness seems to revel in advance the torment it would like to inflict on its object. Nietzsche and Scheler are right in seeing a beautiful example of this feeling in that passage of Tertullian, where he tells his readers that it will be the greatest delight for the blessed inhabitants of paradise to see the Roman emperors writhing in the flames of hell. Such is the delight of respectable ordinary people who adore the spectacle of the death penalty. The rebel, on the contrary, is fundamentally limited to protesting against humiliation, not wishing it on anyone else, and is ready to endure torment, but only not to allow anything offensive to the individual.
In this case, it is not clear why Scheler completely equates the rebellious spirit with bitterness. His criticism of the bitterness in humanitarianism (which he interprets as a form of non-Christian love for people) could be applied to some vague forms of humanitarian idealism or the technique of terror. But this criticism misses the mark as far as man's rebellion against his lot is concerned, the impulse that raises him to defend the dignity inherent in everyone. Scheler wants to show that humanitarianism goes hand in hand with hatred of the world. They love humanity in general, so as not to love anyone in particular. In some cases this is true, and Scheler becomes clearer when one considers that humanitarianism for him is represented by Bentham and Rousseau. But the attachment of a person to a person can arise due to something other than the arithmetic calculation of interests or trust in human nature (however, this is purely theoretical). The utilitarians and Emil's educator are opposed, for example, by the logic embodied by Dostoevsky in the image of Ivan Karamazov, who begins with a rebellious impulse and ends with a metaphysical rebellion. Scheler, being familiar with Dostoevsky's novel, sums up this concept this way: “There is not enough love in the world to spend on anything other than a person.” Even if such a summary were true, the bottomless despair that lies behind it deserves something better than disdain. But it, in fact, does not convey the tragic nature of the Karamazov rebellion. Ivan Karamazov's drama, on the contrary, consists of an overabundance of love that does not know on whom to pour out. Since this love is not used, and God is denied, the decision arises to bestow it on a person in the name of noble compassion.
However, as follows from our analysis, in a rebellious movement a certain abstract ideal is chosen not out of mental poverty and not for the sake of fruitless protest. In a person one must see that which cannot be reduced to an idea, that heat of the soul that is intended for existence and for nothing else. Does this mean that no rebellion carries with it bitterness and envy? No, it doesn’t mean that, and we know this very well in our evil age. But we must consider the concept of bitterness in its broadest sense, because otherwise we risk distorting it, and then we can say that rebellion completely overcomes bitterness. If in Wuthering Heights Heathcliff prefers his love to God and asks to be sent to hell, only to unite there with his beloved, then here it is not only his humiliated youth that speaks, but also the painful experience of his whole life. Meister Eckhart experienced the same impulse when, in a startling attack of heresy, he declared that he preferred hell with Jesus to heaven without him. And here is the same impulse of love. So, contrary to Scheler, I insist in every possible way on the passionate creative impulse of rebellion, which distinguishes it from embitterment. Seemingly negative because it creates nothing, rebellion is actually deeply positive because it reveals something in a person that is always worth fighting for.
But aren't both rebellion and the value it carries relative? The causes of rebellion seem to have varied with eras and civilizations. Obviously, the Hindu pariah, the Inca warrior, the Central African native, or the member of the first Christian communities had different ideas about rebellion. It can even be argued with high probability that in these specific cases the concept of rebellion does not make sense. However, the ancient Greek slave, serf, condottiere of the Renaissance, the Parisian bourgeois of the Regency era, the Russian intellectual of the 1900s and the modern worker, while differing in their understanding of the causes of the rebellion, would unanimously recognize its legitimacy. In other words, we can assume that the problem of rebellion has a certain meaning only within the framework of Western thought. One can be even more precise by noting, along with Max Scheler, that the rebellious spirit found expression with difficulty in societies where inequality was too great (as in the Hindu castes), or, conversely, in those societies where absolute equality existed (certain primitive tribes) . In society, a rebellious spirit can arise only in those social groups where theoretical equality hides enormous actual inequality. This means that the problem of rebellion only makes sense in our Western society. In this case, it would be difficult to resist the temptation to assert that this problem is connected with the development of individualism, if previous reflections had not warned us against such a conclusion.
What can be clearly deduced from Scheler's remark is that in our Western societies, thanks to the theory of political freedom, a high concept of man takes root in the human soul and that, due to the practical use of this freedom, dissatisfaction with one's situation grows accordingly. Actual freedom develops more slowly than a person's ideas about freedom. From this observation we can only deduce the following: rebellion is the work of an informed person who firmly knows his rights. But nothing gives us reason to talk only about individual rights. On the contrary, it is very likely that, thanks to the already mentioned solidarity, the human race will become more and more fully aware of itself in the course of its history. Indeed, among the Incas or Pariahs the problem of rebellion does not arise, since it was solved for them by tradition: even before they could pose the question of rebellion, the answer to it was already given in the concept of the sacred. In the sacralized world there is no problem of rebellion, just as there are no real problems at all, since all the answers are given once and for all. Here the place of metaphysics is taken by myth. There are no questions, there are only answers and endless comments on them, which can also be metaphysical. But when a person has not yet entered the sphere of the sacred or has already left it, he is questioning and rebelling, and he questions and rebels in order to enter this sphere or leave it. A rebellious person is a person who lives before or after the sacred, demanding a human order, in which the answers will be human, that is, rationally formulated. From this moment on, every question, every word is a rebellion, whereas in the sacralized world every word is an act of grace. It could thus be shown that only two universes are accessible to the human spirit - the universe of the sacred (or, to use the language of Christianity, the universe of grace) and the universe of rebellion. The disappearance of one means the emergence of another, although this can occur in puzzling forms. And here we again encounter the “All or nothing” formula. The relevance of the problem of rebellion is determined solely by the fact that today entire societies seek to isolate themselves from the sacred. We live in a desacralized history. Of course, man is not reduced to rebellion. But today's history with its strife forces us to recognize that rebellion is one of the essential dimensions of man. He is our historical reality. And we need not to run away from it, but to find our values in it. But is it possible, staying outside the sphere of the sacred and its absolute values, to find a rule of life behavior? - this is the question posed by the riot.
We have already had the opportunity to note a certain indefinite value that is born at the limit beyond which the uprising occurs. Now it is time to ask ourselves whether this value is found in modern forms of rebellious thought and rebellious action, and, if so, to clarify its content. But before we continue our discussion, let us note that the basis of this value is rebellion as such. The solidarity of people is determined by a rebellious impulse, and this, in turn, finds justification only in their complicity. Consequently, we have the right to declare that any rebellion that allows itself to deny or destroy human solidarity, therefore ceases to be a rebellion and in fact coincides with a deadening conciliation. In the same way, human solidarity, deprived of sanctity, finds life only at the level of rebellion. In this way, the true drama of rebellious thought manifests itself. In order to live, a person must rebel, but his rebellion must not violate the boundaries opened by the rebel in himself, the boundaries beyond which people, united, begin their true existence. Rebellious thought cannot do without memory; it is characterized by constant tension. Following her in her creations and actions, we must ask each time whether she remains true to her original nobility or has forgotten about it out of fatigue and madness - in the intoxication of tyranny or servility.
In the meantime, here is the first result that the rebellious spirit achieved thanks to reflection, imbued with absurdity and a sense of the obvious futility of the world. In the experience of the absurd, suffering is individual. In a rebellious impulse, it realizes itself as collective. It turns out to be a common fate. The first achievement of a mind shackled by alienation is to understand that it shares this alienation with all people and that human reality suffers in its integrity from separateness, alienation in relation to itself and to the world. Evil experienced by one person becomes a plague that infects everyone. In our daily trials, rebellion plays the same role as the cogito plays in the order of thought; rebellion is the first obvious thing. But this evidence brings the individual out of his loneliness; it is the common thing that underlies the first value for all people. I rebel, therefore we exist.
1 Lalande. Vocabuiaire philosophique.
2 The community of victims is a phenomenon of the same order as the community of victim and executioner. But the executioner does not know about this.
3 L'homme du ressentiment.
4 Of course, the emergence of Christianity was marked by metaphysical rebellion, but the resurrection of Christ, the proclamation of his second coming and the Kingdom of God, understood as the promise of eternal life, are answers that make rebellion unnecessary.