Linda Chesky's List: English 102

• he companion theme to the Absurd in Camus’ oeuvre (and the only other philosophical topic to which he devoted an entire book) is the idea of Revolt. What is revolt? Simply defined, it is the Sisyphean spirit of defiance in the face of the Absurd. More technically and less metaphorically, it is a spirit of opposition against any perceived unfairness, oppression, or indignity in the human condition.

   

  Rebellion in Camus’ sense begins with a recognition of boundaries, of limits that define one’s essential selfhood and thus must not be infringed – as when the slave stands up to his master and says in effect “thus far, and no further, shall I be commanded.” This defining of the self as at some point inviolable appears to be an act of pure egoism and individualism, but it is not. In fact Camus argues at some length to show that an act of conscientious revolt is ultimately far more than just an individual gesture or an act of solitary protest. The rebel, he writes, holds that there is a “common good more important than his own destiny” and that there are “rights more important than himself.” He acts “in the name of certain values which are still indeterminate but which he feels are common to himself and to all men.” (The Rebel, 15-16.)
• After all, “Why rebel,” he asks, “if there is nothing permanent in the self worth preserving?” The slave who stands up and asserts himself actually does so for “the sake of everyone in the world.” He declares in effect that “all men – even the man who insults and oppresses him – have a natural community.”
• the idea that there may indeed be an essential human nature
• rue revolt, then, is performed not just for the self but in solidarity with and out of compassion for others. And for this reason, Camus is led to conclude, that revolt too has its limits. If it begins with and necessarily involves a recognition of human community and a common human dignity, it cannot, without betraying its own true character, treat others as if they were lacking in that dignity or not a part of that community.

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• the cogito an “essay in phenomenological ontology.” Ignoring completely the ontological dimension, Camus is now concerned with immediate issues of human social experience.
• But The Rebel begins with the kind of revolt that rejects oppression and slavery, and protests against the world's injustice.
• now Camus stresses that revolt creates values, dignity, and solidarity. “I revolt, therefore we are” (R, 22) is his paradoxical statement. But how can an I lead to a we? How does “we are” follow from “I revolt”? How can the individual's experience of absurdity, and the rebellion against it, stem from, produce, imply, or entail the wider social sense of injustice and solidarity? The we in fact is the subject of The Rebel, although the title L'Homme revolté suggests that one's original motivation may be individual. Acting against oppression entails having recourse to social values, and at the same time joining with others in solidarity.
• 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
• Camus felt that it was urgent to critically examine these attitudes in a world in which calculated murder had become common. Applying his absurdist ideas and insights to politics, in The Rebel Camus explains what he regards as the modern world's increasingly organized and catastrophic refusal to face, accept, and live with absurdity.
• faced with absurdity and injustice, humans refuse to accept their existence and instead seek to remake the world. 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.
• In place of striving to transform the world, he speaks of mésure—“measure”, in the sense of proportion or harmony—and of living in the tension of the human condition.
• He rejected the Marxist acceptance of violent revolution and the consequentialist maxim that “the end justifies the  means.”^[3]  “In the Marxian perspective,” he wrote sweepingly, “a hundred thousand deaths is a small price to pay for the happiness of hundreds of millions” (Camus 1991, 130). Marxists think this, Camus asserted, because they believe that history has a necessary logic leading to human happiness, and thus they accept violence as legitimate.
• Marxism is not primarily about social change but is rather a revolt that “attempts to annex all creation.” Revolution emerges when revolt seeks to ignore the limits built into human life. By an “inevitable logic of nihilism” Communism climaxes the modern trend to deify man and to transform and unify the world. Today's revolutions yield to the blind impulse, originally described in The Myth of Sisyphus, “to demand order in the midst of chaos, and unity in the very heart of the ephemeral” (MS, 10). As does the rebel who becomes a revolutionary who kills and then justifies murder as legitimate.
• t all what interested Camus), sharply narrowing the inquiry. His shift is revealed by his question: How can murder be committed with premeditation and be justified by philosophy? It turns out that the “rational murder” Camus was concerned with is not committed by capitalists or democrats, colon
• lists or imperialists, or by Nazis—but only by Communists.
• Camus remains relevant for having looked askance at Western civilization, at progress, and at the modern world, but at the heart of his analyses is his ambivalent exploration of what it is like to live in a Godless universe. “When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, the order, and the unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God.
• an underlying sympathy unites Camus to those he opposes, because he freely acknowledges that he and they share the same starting points, outlook, stresses, temptations, and pitfalls. Although in political argument he frequently took refuge in a tone of moral superiority, Camus makes clear through his skepticism that those he disagrees with are no less and no more than fellow creatures who give in to the same fundamental drive to escape the absurdity that we all share.

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