Your impressions of Albert Camus’ The Rebel will mostly depend on how familiar you are with his subject matter. Camus draws heavily on fiction, philosophy, art, and European history since the Enlightenment. The more you know about these, the easier this book will be. It simply is not a book for young and inexperienced readers. Having said that, with a considerable amount of mental discipline and a long attention span, it is something that can be read by novices even if only to grasp the main ideas.
The Rebel was written to be a philosophical companion piece for his novel The Plague. Metaphysical rebellion is the theme. In this philosophical work, Camus moves on from the story of Sisyphus to those of Prometheus and Milton’s Lucifer. He defines metaphysical rebellion as a rejection of the conditions of existence. The rebel is one who simultaneously says “no” and “yes”; they say no to their position of servitude and the suffering of all but also say yes to the prospect of justice and freedom. The rebel is someone whose long term goal is self-actualization, totality, completion, and unity with everything. This latter point is not clear or easy to grasp at first but after he explains the philosophy of Hegel, it makes a lot more sense.
The concept of nihilism is central to this book. Camus goes on to parse and explain its different forms, illustrating its different facets with examples from literature, philosophy, and art. He exemplifies the concept of absolute nihilism with the writings of the Marquis de Sade; this negation of values is purely destructive. It does not create anything from the ruins it leaves behind. Ultimately it leads to contradictions, self-negation, and an inevitable self-destruction. The other side of this is Friedrich Nietzsche who used nihilism as a tool to renounce all of existence. While Nietzsche sought to dismantle all values, his ultimate purpose was to to rebuild a new and higher form of existence. His nihilism was a step along a path to greater ways of living in the future. Finally, the Surrealist art movement is used to show how nihilism and creativity can be combined through art to make something useful and fulfilling out of rebellion. All of these analyses are excellent and Camus had a deep understanding of those intellectual trends which he communicates effectively to those who have already been initiated into those methods of thought. The sequence of introducing those concepts is significant too because it determines the later course of this book.
The theoretical part of The Rebel continues on with an exceptionally good explication of G.W.F. Hegel’s phenomenology. An individual human is validated through recognition by other people. Through self-assertion, an individual achieves self validation by making themselves known, meaning that the more recognizable they are, the more validated they are to themselves. Hegel’s major dilemma is that societies are made up of masters and slaves, the dominators and the the dominated, the managers and the workers, the owners and the owned. A rebel seeks validation by breaking free from their servant status and establishing themselves as a master. This is a movement in the direction of totality and one that seeks increasing validation through increasing domination over others. Taken too far, this leads to tyranny and cruelty, sometimes even destruction and in the worst cases, the totality of destruction can result in self-destruction along with the destruction of everything surrounding the rebel. Camus’ description of Hegel is crystal clear and relatively easy to follow; for this reason, The Rebel is worth reading for the passages on Hegel alone, especially if you have read Hegel and got thoroughly confused by his opaque writing style. That seems to be the case for most people who try to read him.
Hegel’s theory of history was one of dialectics. Political conflicts will continue through a process of evolution, progress, and refinement until the need for conflict no longer arises. Then humanity will unite with God, material and its essence will be one, phenomena and noumena will be perfectly united, and history will end. This idea directly influenced the writings of Karl Marx and led to the establishment of the communist state in Russia with the Hegelian goal of ending history in mind.
While a direct line can be drawn from Hegel to Marx, Adolf Hitler claimed to be a philosophical heir to Nietzsche. Camus, an avid Nietzsche scholar himself, demonstrates how the Nazis deliberately misread and misused the theory of the ubermensch while ignoring more beneficial human concerns in those writings. Camus also succeeds in showing how it would be more accurate to draw an ancestral line from the absolute nihilism of the Marquis de Sade to National Socialism which resulted in the suicidal spasm of an entire nation. Hitler’s plan was for never-ending warfare and his inability to articulate a vision of post-war society led to Nazi defeat and the collapse of the German nation.
Camus’ historical analysis of communism in the Soviet Union takes up most of The Rebel. Camus, in how own way, was reacting against the widespread support for communism and even Stalinism among French intellectuals during the 1950s. His depiction of the Soviet revolutionary government is one of injustice, sterility, and stagnation. Where the Soviets were undoubtedly superior in terms of rationality, they were severely lacking in terms of creativity. This is where Camus brings in the need for art to stabilize society because without art, rebels and revolutionaries will not know when to stop in their quest for totality and absolute freedom. Maybe he is right since communist doctrine ended up having more in common with religion than it did with the sciences it claimed as kin. Without the outsider’s perspective of the artists, there was no way for the Soviets to question their practices or see themselves from alternate points of view.
Camus’ concept of the rebel as artist is probably the most controversial part of this book. He introduces the concept but never fully examines its implications. He does not address the efficacy of the solution he proposes for the conflicts he introduces. It sounds good in theory but now in the 21st century it is obvious that world leaders have no interest in using art for self-reflection so it may not be so sound in practice. Maybe Camus felt like he was cheating his readers for not proposing a solution to his dilemma but, a lot like the concept of God, it seems like a simple solution tacked on at the end of an inquiry to answer an unanswerable problem. Or maybe it is an invitation for future intellectuals to examine the concept on their own.
Overall, The Rebel might be a challenging read but Albert Camus provides a strong defense of his thesis. His concept of rebellion and revolution can be transported from mid-century Europe to probably any other place or time. Not only is it useful for explaining intellectual and political movements but it can also be used as a tool to explain things like counter-cultural movements, social justice activism, and religious institutions like sects and mind-control cults. It can even be applied to mundane affairs like the social dynamics of business, be they small mom-and-pop operations or massive corporations, as well as educational institutions, sports teams, online discussion groups, and mass media outlets. It could be said that the first effective step in rebellion is accurately understanding the mechanisms of power so Camus can certainly be an aid in that endeavor.
Camus, Albert. The Rebel. Vintage Books, New York: 1956.
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