Impressions
My first thought, after finishing this book, was how beautifully written it was. Camus’s passion for its topic is so palpable, so enviably sincere, that I was right there with him, listening to him plead to the stoic judges of rebellion, crying out for them to make space for empathy in their unjust, uncaring ideological world. There were flourishes of language so evocative that I feel they were almost wasted on a philosophical essay when they could better serve prose or poetry, but I know that fictionalising them would lose the earnestness that seeps from every phrase, and The Rebel would be lesser for it.
My second thought, though? I have no bloody idea what point he was trying to make.
No, I’m being facetious.
The gist, as I gathered it, was that ideologically driven murder has a coldness to it, a callousness of principle, that set it in opposition with the “typical” form of murder. Camus argues that it is easier to forgive a violation if the violation is committed from an outpouring of emotion, as it is performed in service to no higher cause, and it ends with the individual. However, those who commit murder in the name of virtue are lost, as they are consumed by the growing, self-proclaimed necessity of evil means justifying virtuous ends. A true rebel, in contrast, is someone who defines themselves by opposition, by seeing evil and denying it, rather than someone who commits evil and sanctifies it; the latter leads only to oppression, totalitarianism, and endless suffering.
Pinning him down on any details beyond this, however, is more difficult for me. Much is made of the death of God and the deification of humanity to take His place, and how Man can understand himself in history. Much is also made of the rejection of nihilism and existentialism and absurdism, and all of those other schools of thought, and how many of them march themselves to the concentration camps of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.
However, as thick as the hazy cloud of terminology is, concrete facts are hard to find within it, especially when compared to the numerous vague generalisations; the most specific he gets is in his regurgitation of ethnic stereotypes, which I can’t take any more seriously than astrological predictions.
All of his most compelling thoughts seem to be sourced mostly from fiction, in fact. He draws heavily on novelists like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and de Sade, discussing their characters as if they were historical figures whose qualities could be extrapolated to shine a light on some innate human nature. His analysis of them is fascinating, and I would love to read his literary commentaries, but it’s all solidly fictional. He touches upon this himself in the final third of the book, when he discusses with himself the relationship between art and reality, and puts forth the idea that art, in setting itself against the world it depicts, is a form of rebellion. As an artist himself, there is no doubt some bias involved in his saying so, but he writes a compelling case regardless.
Do I recommend this book?
It is a hard read, to be sure, but ultimately? Yes, I recommend it. Easily.
I have read many philosophical works that have more clarity than this, more academic rigour than this, more tied to reality than this, and, ultimately, were more persuasive in their arguments than this, but none have I enjoyed more than this. It reads like a man trying to make sense of a world that has proven itself nonsensical; to live embroiled in uncertainty, in a world so recently ravaged by the two great wars, ravaged still by colonialism and totalitarianism, I find myself compelled by his need to find a hope for humanity amidst atrocity.
To adapt Camus’s own quote of Lermentov, The Rebel is a man trying to unite his tempestuous heart with the tempest of his times, and that is something I wish more philosophical writers could claim.