camus and rebellion: from solipsism to morality

Camus and Rebellion : From Solipsism to Morality*

R. A . DUFF and S. E. MARSHALL, University ofstirl ing

I

Camus’ reputation is that of a moralist rather than a metaphysician or philosopher:’ he himself abjured the label of ‘philosopher’, and the metaphysical system-building of his contemporaries;’ and he developed his ideas in works which are more readily classed as literary than as philosophical. But he was not only a moralist and didactic litterateur. Any ethic involves a metaphysical account of man and his world, even if it is as sterile as that which informs Utilitarianism, or as inarticulate as those which inform most of our own moral beliefs: Camus’ importance lies partly in the extent to which he makes explicit the metaphysical conceptions which inform his moral ideas (indeed, one literary criticism of his novels and plays is that they consist too much of romans ir clg, whose characters and situ- ation are dominated and distorted by the metaphysical theses which they serve to express).

This paper is concerned with the development of Camus’ metaphysical and moral thought between such early works as The Outsi- der and The Myth of Sisyphus and such later works as The Plague and The Rebel; and particularly with the idea of rebellion, which provides both the focal point of his developed thought and the concept which most clearly connects and distinguishes the earlier and later writings. Both the connections and the differences are important : Camus himself was clear, though his admirers have not always been, that Sisyphus and The Outsider were never more than a starting point - a stage of nihilistic thought through which any honest thinker must pass, but which he must also transcend; his concern was with how, and in what direction, it could be transcended.

‘The Outsider marks absolute zero. As does The Myth. The Plague marks a progress, not from zero towards infinity, but towards a deeper complexity that awaits definition.’ (SEN, p. 210)

*For details of references and abbreviations, see Bibliographical Note at the end.

R . A . Duff and S. E. Marshall 117

The early works serve the destructive task of clearing away the illusions, evasions and false consolations which distort our present understanding of the world and our ethical response to it: but they are also meant to serve the constructive task of providing a positive basis for a more adequate metaphysical and ethical conception of man and his world. We will argue that these two tasks are, as Camus conceived them, incompatible; that the success of the destructive enterprise of Sisyphus would render impossible any positive reconstruction of values.

The metaphysic outlined in Sisyphus, and supposedly exemplified in The Outsider, precludes any ethical stance, including that which Camus himself offers as appropriate to it: the ethic which he develops here, of honesty, rebellion and happiness, requires a metaphysic richer and less solipsistic than he provides. That ethic does contain the seeds of its own development into the concern for justice and individual humanity which is found in his later work: but i t can itself be rendered intelligible, and its development made possible, only by a radical revision of the metaphysic. Camus may have thought that the Sisyphean metaphysic provided the continuing context of a world without meaning in which men must create values for themselves: but we will argue that such a creation, in such a world, is not an intelligible possibility; that the ethical development must be a metaphysical development. No ethic is possible in the sterile world of Sisyphus: for any ethic must be informed by a metaphysic which is itself ethical; which gives us a world, not of bare facts, but of values, meanings, and objects of proper concern. We cannot found an ethic on a non-moral metaphysic: it would be less misleading to say that our moral responses structure our metaphysic than that our non-moral metaphysic determines our ethic.

Our aim then is to show how the metaphysic contained in Camus’ earlier work renders unintelligible even the minimal ethical response he offers there; and how his later ethical development is made possible by an implicit yet radical revision of the Sisyphean metaphysic.

I1

Rebellion requires an object and a reason: in Camus’ early writings the object of rebellion is the universe itself, and the reason is that ‘men die; and they are not happy’ (C, p. 34); that the world does not provide what men want of it. This tension between what men want and what the world offers provides both the central metaphysical idea of the Absurd and the initial basis for an ethic of revolt.

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Sisyphus begins with a Cartesian enterprise of doubt. We begin to question the habitual modes of thought and feeling which structure our lives :

‘But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weari- ness tinged with amazement.’ (MS, p. 10)

Once the ‘why’ arises we must follow it through, and reject all that cannot be rationally established as certain: for we must remain faithful to our human reason, which first generated the ‘why’. De- scartes’ doubt was an academic suspension of judgment which would enable him to uncover the rational foundations of knowledge: it led him, via the ‘Cogito’, to the sure foundations of a rational moral universe. Camus’ doubt was by comparison a genuine scepticism: it led him, not to a sure foundation for the reconstruction of a rational universe, but to the Absurd as his ‘sole datum’, ‘the first of my truths’ (MS, p. 23).3

We want an intelligible world, which we can understand within the unifying categories of our thought; a world of meanings and values, which give a purpose to our lives: but the world is not like that.

‘Of whom and what indeed can I say: “ I know that”? This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction.’ (MS, p. 14)

‘. . . you give me the choice between a description that is sure but teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teach me but that are not sure.’ (MS, p. 15)

Cartesian doubt without a Cartesian God leads Camus to an atomistic universe, empty of reason and value.4 For an empiricist the basis of all knowledge - all that we really know - is a series of discrete atomic sense-data, given by introspection and sensory experience: any other knowledge or understanding we claim must be constructed out of these. For Camus at this stage all we know is OUI

immediate physical environment, including our bodies and those around them : the Sisyphean world is an atomistic world of episodic sense-experience. The reality of the material world is not doubted; i t is the only reality: but any thought which takes us beyond preseni experience is no more than uncertain, and unjustified, construction and hypothesis. It is futile to search for rational patterns of explanation in the world, for values or a meaning to our lives: for we could think that we have found these only if we abandon thai human reason which motivates, and must govern, our search.

I t may be objected that such a sceptical metaphysic precludes not

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only the kinds of consolatory belief which Camus wishes to deny, but also the very enterprise of describing the metaphysic itself for it destroys the possibility of a language in which the sceptic can think and express his own claims; in stating his scepticism the sceptic re- futes h im~el f .~ Taken to its conclusion a Sisyphean scepticism, like other kinds of scepticism, must reduce us to silence: it must remain incomplete, and thus incoherent, if we are to say anything. But we will not pursue this radical objection here: our aim is rather to show, more modestly, how such a metaphysic precludes the ethical response which Camus offers to the Absurd; and thus how the ethic which he later develops requires, not a new construction on the same sceptical foundation, but a quite different metaphysic which rejects this earlier atomism. We can best do this by examining The Outsider: for Meursault’s life, a t least in the major part of the book, accords as closely as a human life could accord with a Sisyphean metaphysic; but, we will argue, it is neither a life lived in the light of such a metaphysic, nor a life which could be informed by the ethical responses of Camus’ absurd hero.

Camus presents Meursault as a man who will not lie:6 like the lover, the actor, the adventurer of Sisyphus he ‘plays the absurd’; he does not surrender to ‘the illusions of the everyday or the idea’ (MS, p. 67). And it is true that his is a life without those constructions and connections which the Sisyphean rnetaphysic denies. Both the style and the content of The Outsider show it to be a life of discrete and episodic e~per ience .~ Reality is the immediate, the present, the physical : his pleasures are limited to this category - sleeping with Marie, swimming, drying his hands, running for a lorry. What is absent, spatially or temporally, has no such reality for him: thus awaiting execution in prison, he thinks of Marie :

‘She hadn’t written for ages; probably, I surmised, she had grown tired of being the mistress of a man sentenced to death. Or she might be ill, or dead. After all, such things happen. How could I have known about it, since, apart from our two bodies, separated now, there was no link between us, nothing to remind us of each other?’ (0, p. 1 13)8

His is an atomistic life of discrete and disconnected episodes: for within his world there are no values, only pleasant and unpleasant experiences ; no emotions, only episodic feelings ; no interests, only habits and impulses; no future or past, only the present. Of course, his life exhibits regularities: he goes to work every day; he has friends, or people who call themselves his friends, and a lover, or a girl who calls herself that; there are things he enjoys doing, and does regularly. But these regularities are not structured by the notions of

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value, emotion and interest which provide the connections, and the unity, in other lives, since such notions have no place in his life: their basis is habit, or recurrent and episodic enjoyments, or simply the fact that he sees no reason to do anything else.’

His world is also solipsistic. He is of course aware of the existence of other people: he is not the kind of solipsist who reduces others to literal automata or illusions, just as he is not the kind of sceptic who reduces material objects to sense-data. But his conception of their reality, like his conception of the reality of the world, is strictly limited (as, consistently, is his conception of his own reality). He has no understanding of that dimension of their lives (lacking in his own life) which is informed by values, emotions and interests: he sees that they attach importance to certain things - to career, friendship, love - and that they find his attitudes and reactions aberrant, but he has no understanding of how or why this should be s0.l’ Insofar as a person is a rational being with interests and concerns, capable of a variety of relationships with, and significance for, other people, Meursault fails to recognise the reality of other people: he also fails to recognise (or perhaps lacks) his own reality as a person.

We should note that these interconnected deficiencies in Meur- sault’s life and understanding - the lack of any dimension of interest, emotion, or value in his own life; his inability to grasp the role played by such notions in the lives of others” - make it difficult even to see him as an agent, except in the sense in which animals and natural objects may be agents. Things happen to him; he responds to immediate impulses and stimuli; he does what others suggest, since he can usually see no good reasons for or against it:” but in the absence of the kinds of interest and value which connect a rational agent to his actions it is hard to apply to him the categories of intention and purpose which are central to the notion of rational agency.I3 He comes close to the condition which Camus describes as an impossible deal :

‘If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this problem would not arise for I should belong to this world. I should be this world . . .’ (MS, p. 38)

For Camus such a life is impossible because ‘this ridiculous reason . . . sets me in opposition to all creation’ (MS, p. 38): for Meursault it fails because of the demands that others make of him.

Meursault’s world approximates to a genuinely nihilistic world, empty of meaning and value (though that he can describe it at all renders the nihilism incomplete) ; and it is true that Camus recom- mends a life outwardly resembling Meursault’s as an appropriate


response to the Absurd. I t is not true, however, that Meursault exhibits either an awareness of the Absurd as Camus delineates it or the kind of response to the Absurd which Camus outlines in Sisyphus: the revolt, freedom and passion which he commends (MS, p. 47) or that struggle which :

‘implies a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature unrest)’ (MS, p. 23)

And this is not true just because his life is so nearly nihilistic, and approximates so nearly to that of ‘a tree among trees, a cat among animals’. For an understanding of the Absurd, and the kind of response to it which Camus outlines (which Meursault does reveal at the end of The Outsider in a way which is, we will argue, inconsistent with his earlier life), require an understanding of and participation in that very dimension of thought, feeling and experience which Meursault lacks.

To recognise the Absurd we must realise that the world fails to satisfy certain demands we make of it, certain standards we apply to it: we must see the world in the light of standards of rational intelligibility, of justice and happiness, and judge that it fails to satisfy them. Without a grasp of these concepts and standards we could neither judge the world to be lacking nor recognise the disparity between what men demand and what the world offers; we could not understand, and thus could not see to be unsatisfied or illusory, the expectations and concerns which men have. But Meursault is aware of no lack in the world, of no disparity between what there is and what we want. His life may be free from ‘the illusions of the everyday or the idea’: but this is not because he has seen through the illusion^;'^ it is the freedom of incomprehension, not that of clear knowledge and understanding. The Absurd involves a conflict between what man demands and what he sees to be the case: but Meursault cannot realise this conflict, since he makes no demands.

Furthermore, the Sisyphean response to the Absurd is a moral response of rebellion: the conflict is not just between what the world offers and what we want, but between what it offers and what it ought to offer. As Camus himself points out (R, ch I) , rebellion is essentially resistance to something, whether a human power or the universe, seen as unjust, not simply as unpleasant or unwanted: we assert against it not our wants but our rights. Sisyphean revolt is a response to a world seen through moral categories, which fails to satisfy our moral demands for justice and happiness, and which con-

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tains the moral evils of suffering, pain and death. The Absurd can have the significance which Camus claims for it only if it is seen in such moral terms: but Meursault lacks these terms. We may compare Meursault with Caligula : for Caligula’s understanding of the world is a moral understanding. ‘Men die; and they are not happy’ is not just a neutral comment on the human condition: it is a cry of moral protest against a universe which fails to provide what men have a right to expect. But Meursault makes no protest, for himself or for others. Only one who can understand, as Meursault cannot, that dimension of human thought in which concepts of value have their life can either claim to see through our illusory concerns to the reality which makes them illusory or protest against that reality: neither this insight nor this protest are possible for Meursault.

A recognition of the Absurd and a response to it must involve moral concepts and criteria of value which are unavailable to Meur- sault, and to any genuine nihilist. One fundamental value which is assumed, and never questioned, in Sisyphus is that of honesty or in- tegrity: it is honesty, and the modesty and humility which honesty requires, which first generate the idea of the Absurd, since this arises from a clear and stubborn understanding of the nature of the world and the limits of human reason; it is honesty which forbids us, having recognised the Absurd, to evade it by false hope or philosophical suicide :

‘If I hold to be true that absurdity that determines my relationship with life, if I become thoroughly imbued with that sentiment that seizes me in the face of the world’s scenes, with that lucidity imposed on me by the pursuit of a science, I must sacrifice everything to these certainties and I must see them squarely to be able to maintain them. Above all I must adapt my behaviour to them and pursue them in all their consequences. I am speaking here of decency.’ (MS, p. 16)

‘There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always a prey to his truths.’ (MS, p. 24)

A life of illusion denies the consciousness which makes man what he is :

‘For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth any- thingexcept through it.’(MS, p. 10)

We must live without illusions to be true to ourselves and what we can know: only in the light of this moral demand can we reject, as illusory, the concerns and values with which others fill their lives, and refuse, on our own behalf and on theirs, a life of illusory hope and expectation. But such a concern for the truth can have no place

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in Meursault’s life, nor in a Sisyphean world in which there are no values.

Further value is found in the happiness of a life lived in the light of the Absurd. The criterion of quantity of experience which Sisyphus offers is at best obscure: but it is clear from Camus’ lyrical essays, and, for instance, from Martha’s ideal of a life by the sea in Cross Pu~pose , ’~ that men can to some extent still hope to share in that kingdom of happiness from which they are exiled. Much has been written about the continuing importance for Camus of the natural environment of his native Algeria: it is in the appreciation of, and participation in, the immediate natural world that happiness is to be found. But this conception of happiness is unavailable to Meur- sault, or to a man grasped by the Sisyphean metaphysic: for it involves not just the idea of enjoyable sensation (which that atomistic world does allow), but an aesthetic, almost religious,I6 dimension of understanding, of which Meursault is incapable, and for which a Sisyphean metaphysic has no room.

For most of The Outsider Meursault lives a life which comes close to genuine nihilism but which for that very reason cannot exhibit either that awareness of the Absurd or that moral response to it which Sisyphus explicates. But at the end of the book he is given a realisation of the Absurd - in particular of the significance of death; and he rebels both against this and against the illusions which the priest tries to force on him: his attitude is now that of the Sisyphean hero. But this revelation is inconsistent with his life up to that point: we cannot read back into his earlier life the significance which he now ascribes to it, nor find in the earlier part of the book the understanding, passion, or revolt which the revelation requires; the book is to that extent a literary failure.”

There is a tension within Sisyphus between its explicitly nihilistic metaphysic, within which Meursault lives, and the moral metaphysic which informs Camus’ reponse to the Absurd ; a tension between a genuine nihilism which is, like Meursault, psychopathic and solipsistic, and an embryo moral revolt against an indifferent universe and against human illusions:. for the revolt is incompatible with the nihilism. Meursault is true to the explicit metaphysic of Sisyphus - though it is not a truth which he could realise or articu- late for himself but he lacks the understanding and the passion of an absurd hero, whose nihilism’ involves not the denial of all


values, but the denial of false values and consolations in the light of a moral conception of, and concern for, the truth.’*

His revolt is not yet a fully moral revolt, and his position is one which Camus must transcend: for once we see that his response involves an appeal to values whose possibility his avowed metaphysic denies we must either fall back into the silence of solipsism or seek a more adequate metaphysic, which will also render intelligible a more developed moral response.

We should emphasize here the three particular respects in which the Sisyphean metaphysic, and the absurdist ethic, require and will receive revision.

First, we have argued that the claim that there are no values in the world involves an equivocation which vitiates many nihilistic arguments. I t may amount to the kind of moral scepticism which denies the possibility of applying moral categories to our lives - a position familiar in, if not outside, philoso hical discussions. We may doubt the intelligibility of such a claim:” but the point here is that this is not Camus’ claim - though much of what he says in Szyphus suggests that it is. For his revolt is founded on the claim that the world does not satisfy certain requirements of value.

‘Our time is dying from having believed in values and that things could be beautiful and cease being absurd.’”

But this is not to deny the reality of values: it is to make a moral comment on human life and its possibilities in the light of standards of justice, honesty and worth. These standards, these moral categories through which the world is seen, are not themselves open to question, though other values by which we live are to be questioned and criticised by reference to them: in this sense values still exist - as standards of assessment; as categories through which we see the world. Only if we allow (as a Sisyphean metaphysic cannot allow) that values exist in this sense can Camus’ account of and response to the Absurd be intelligible.

Secondly, in Szsyphus Camus is clearly prepared, like many philos- ophers, to deny the reality of values if they cannot be justified by pure reason : if reason cannot reveal them as part of the fabric of the universe, and if we refuse the blind faith in a rationally inaccessible realm of value which he counted as philosophical suicide, then we must deny them. But it is equally clear that the atomistic metaphysic to which reason leads him has no room for values. He failed in Szsyphus to carry through the denial of values to which the metaphysic should commit him : the alternative, which he later pursued, is to suggest that the metaphysic itself, and the conception of reason


which informs it, are mistaken; that such a reductionism leaves out those categories of value and meaning which are central to our experience and understanding of the world, and which need no further foundation, since they are the foundations of all thought and experience.

Third, the notion of revolt which Sisyphus and Meursault’s final revelation explicate is itself morally inadequate. We noted above that revolt, as distinct from the rejection of something we dislike, involves an appeal to values - to the claim that what I am suffering is unjust; revolt is justified by standards of value independent of the agent himself and his desires. But it follows from this that no revolt can be purely egocentric, concerned only with myself: for the values to which I appeal - of honesty, justice and happiness - are values for all men; values which require me to recognise and care about the sufferings of others as much as my own. A rebellion founded on such values, even if practically and immediately directed only at my own condition, must be a rebellion on behalf of all men, involving a concern that they too should see the truth, and be happy. Camus later explicates in detail the moral implications of this notion of rebellion: but in these early works his rebels are, and cannot but be, egocentric. But this is to say that the meaning and implications of the values which generate their revolt have not yet been realised; and they cannot be realised within a metaphysic which denies any room either for notions of value or for that sense of human community which, as Camus later points out, is required for and im- plied by both these values and the very existence of human language (though we may note that Meursault’s revelation at the end af T&e Outsider brings with it an understanding of, and concern for, other people which was hitherto unavailable to him).”

These features of his early thought are substantially modified in the later work: only through such a modification can he develop his ethical views. Its basis is laid in his fourth Letter to a German Friend.

‘You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one’s wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of the animal world - in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed, that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his only morality, the realism of conquests. And to tell the truth I, believing I thought as you did, saw no argument to answer you except a fierce love of justice which, after all, seemed to me as unreasonable as the most sudden passion.


Where lay the difference? Simply that you readily accepted despair and I never yielded to it. Simply that you saw the injustice of our condition to the point of being willing to add to it, whereas it seemed to me that man must exalt justice in order to fight against eternal injustice, create happiness in order to protest against the universe of unhappiness. Because you turned your despair into intoxication, because you freed yourself from it by making a principle of it, you were willing to destroy man’s works and to fight him in order to add to his basic misery. Meanwhile, refusing to accept that despair and that tortured world, I merely wanted men to rediscover their solidarity in order to wage war against their revolting fate.’ (LGF, pp. 20-21)

We find here the assertion of an ideal ofjustice against an actuality of injustice; a recognition of the fundamental, non-derivative, nature of this ideal as a standard of assessment and action (though it appears here rather as a passion which Camus finds himself unable to resist than as a moral ideal whose rational force he recognises) ; and a concern for humanity, not just myself. These themes are more fully developed in The Rebel and in such works as The Plague and The Just. We will argue that, although they form a rational and necessary development of the moral views adumbrated in Sisyphus, they, like those moral views themselves, are radically at odds with the Sisyphean metaphysic; that what Camus in fact does in these later works is not to draw new implications from, or find new possibilities within the Sisyphean metaphysic, but rather to develop a new and richer metaphysic along with the more developed ethic.

IV

We have suggested that Camus’ early work reveals a tension between a genuine, and non-moral, nihilism and an embryo moral rebellion. For Meursault, living unself-consciously within a Sisyp- hean world, there is no question of revolt until, at the end, he comes to grasp the inevitability and significance of death; for revolt at least requires an awareness of some conflict between what I want and what I actually receive. But the bare fact of such a conflict, and a refusal to accept or consent to a world in which my wishes are thwarted, does not yet constitute revolt: for revolt has a moral dimension lacking in the petulant cry of one whose wishes are frus- trated. Indeed, while a refusal to consent to an unjust world may form the basis of an intelligible moral position, there is little sense in a refusal to consent to the inevitable frustration of my wishes.

The Absurd is discovered in the tension between what men want


and what the world offers. Some of these wants may be purely self- directed, with no moral dimension - a desire for happiness, for con- tinued life, for security and the absence of uncertainty and anxiety: and we can imagine various responses to the realisation that these wants are doomed to frustration - that we can believe them to be satisfied or satisfiable only if we live in illusion. One response is suicide; another is a life which externally resembles the absurd life which Camus outlines - a life lived strictly for the moment, in and for each passing experience, in which we strive for and are happy with whatever we can still get in an indifferent universe; another is to dive back into the illusions from which the realisation of the Absurd threatens to drive us - to shy away from intimations of absurdity, and bury ourselves in the consoling illusions which accord with our wishes. From a realisation of a Sisyphean metaphysic anything follows, which is to say that nothing follows: within such a world any life, any response, is equally rational, since in that world notions of value and rationality have lost their meaning.

Camus wishes to identify an appropriate or rational response to the Absurd: but the metaphysic of the Absurd, which denies both moral values and the possibility of any rational criteria for action, makes talk of a rational response (as distinct from a description of how people in fact respond) meaningless. The Sisyphean metaphysic, we have argued, allows no room for the moral concepts of justice, honesty and happiness which inform Camus’ response to the Absurd; and a recognition of these values is incompatible both with the absurd lives described in Sisyphus and The Outsider and with the conception of man implicit in those works.

If such values are to play a significant role in our lives, our conception of ourselves and others must be richer than the conception which Meursault reveals: for we could not ascribe the kind of significance which these values demand to the beliefs, interests and happiness of beings as limited and etiolated as those he recognises; men’s happiness, their freedom from illusion and oppression, can matter only if we can find in their lives, and in our own, that dimension of reason, emotion, value and interest which Meursault cannot grasp and which the Sisyphean metaphysic denies. Furthermore, Meursault could not, in the light of these values, justify his killing of the Arab, or claim that it did not matter that:

‘I’d passed my life in a certain way, and I might have passed it in a different way, if I’d felt like it . I’d acted thus, and I hadn’t acted otherwise; I hadn’t done x, whereas I had done y or z’ (0, p. 118)

Camus himself offers an argument along these lines in the first two

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chapters of The Rebel. An ‘absurdist analysis’ generates a moral con- tradiction on the question of killing : for

‘The sense of the absurd, when one first undertakes to deduce a rule of action from it, makes murder seem a matter of indifference, hence, permissible. If one believes in nothing, if nothing makes sense, if we can assert no value whatsoever, everything is permissible and nothing is important.’ (R, p. 13)

But

‘(T)he absurdist analysis, after having shown that killing is a matter of indifference, eventually, in its most important deduction condemns killing. The final conclusion of the absurdist process is, in fact, the rejection of suicide and persistence in that hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silence of the universe. Suicide means the end of this encounter, and the absurdist position realises that it could not endorse suicide without abolishing its own foundations. It would consider such an outcome running away or being rescued. But it is plain that absurdist reasoning thereby recognises human life as the single necessary good, because it makes possible that confrontation, and because without life the absurdist wager could not go on. To say that life is absurd, one must be alive. How can one, without indulging one’s desire for comfort, keep for oneself the exclusive benefits of this argument? The moment life is recognised as a necessary good, it becomes so for all men. One cannot find logical consistency in murder, if one denies it in suicide.’ (R, p. 14)

Camus’ Cartesian method in Sisyphus led him to the Absurd as his sole datum. But his development of this datum now leads to a con- tradiction: so he must begin again, with a different, and richer, basis of certainty:

‘I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my own proclamation and I am compelled to believe, at least, in my own protest. The first, and only, datum that is furnished me, within absurdist experience, is rebellion.’ (R. p. 16)

This rebellion is now clearly a moral response to ‘the spectacle of the irrational coupled with an unjust and incomprehensible condition’ (R, p. 16); and Camus goes on to explicate the content, presuppositions and ethical implications of such a rebellion. Rebel- lion must rest on an appeal to some value which, transcending the individual himself, provides both reasons for action and a recognition of human community: it affirms, not an individual’s own wishes. but the rights of all men. And it is on this moral basis of


community and value that we can construct, or, more accurately, within this moral basis that we can find, that humanistic ethic of justice, honesty, respect for life, and moderation which Camus goes on to develop. We will not be concerned here with the details of this development, or with Camus’ account of the dilemmas which arise when we realise that, in fighting for justice or human life, we will inevitably involve ourselves in killing and in injustice: our interest is rather in the nature of this new ‘first, and only, datum’ which makes such a development possible.

This development involves, not the construction of a more adequate moral response to the Sisyphean universe, but the provision of a more adequate metaphysical view of the universe itself: for the conception of man and his world is now set in moral terms for which there is no logical space within the atomistic nihilism of Sisyphus. The Sisyphean world is empty of values, of reasons, of people (in that world, as in Meursault’s, neither I nor others have the kind of substantial reality and significance which belong with the concept of a person): but the world of The Rebel is seen and judged through moral categories; it is a world of people, with whom the rebel recognises his common humanity - a world in which the notion of a common humanity makes sense. This world cannot be constructed on the basis of a Sisyphean atomism, any more than our human world can be constructed on the basis of a philosophical atomism: for the moral and human concepts in terms of which the rebel’s world is understood are not constructed out of his atomic experience, but form a set of fundamental concepts through which he can understand his experience. Nor can we separate the moral concepts which now play a central role from the conception of man which goes with them: the rebel does not create his values, on the basis of his new metaphysic; he discovers these values in the movement of rebellion, and he discovers his conception of man in that same movement and those same values. The values require, for their sense, this conception of man: and this conception of man, of a humanity united by its common fate, requires these values. The ethic and the metaphysic are one.

In Siyphus moral values, and our conception of ourselves and others as human beings, were thought to need justification - a justification which must be founded in the only recognised basis of certainty, that of atomistic experience : inevitably, given such a view, they were seen to be unjustified. In the Letter to a German Friend certain values were reasserted, but as yet only as ‘a fierce love of justice which . . . seemed to me as unreasonable as the most sudden Dassion.’ But in the The Rebel the movement of rebellion is seen to


involve a moral and humanistic metaphysic which needs no justification, but is itself the unquestioned basis of all further argument and justification. Thus Meursault’s solipsistic nihilism is transcended towards a moral understanding of the world :

‘In our daily trials, rebellion plays the same role as does the “cogito” in the category of thought: it is the first clue. But this clue lures the individual from his solitude. Rebellion is the common ground on which every man bases his first values. I rebel - therefore we exist.’ ( R , P. 28)

In discovering his community with other men, and the values which such community involves; in thus discovering the reality of others: the rebel is not finding new features of the Sisyphean world, but a new world. For the ‘we’ who are now seen to exist are not the ‘we’, or a multiplication of the ‘I’, who exist in the Sisyphean world. Camus’ argument that, since man is ‘the one creature whose desire (for value and meaning) is constantly thwarted in the world’, it follows that ‘man himself possesses value and meaning’,22 or that ‘it is plain that absurdist reasoning thereby recognises human life as the single necessary good’, is misleading: for it suggests that we can find such value and meaning in Sisyphean man. We would rather say that the account Camus gives of the human side of that conflict between man and the world which creates the Absurd, and the implications he draws from this conflict, involve a conception of human life, as an intelligible locus of value and meaning, which is radically at odds with the Sisyphean metaphysic. There can be no value or meaning in human life within a Sisyphean world - there can be no human life within such a world; the rebel’s world must be a non-Sisyphean world in which we can talk of value and meaning; of passion and truth; of men’s humanity and their souls.

V

We have argued that the ethical development in Camus’ work must also be a metaphysical development; that a recognition of the values to which he appeals in T h e Rebel requires a recognition that there is more to the world, and to man, than a Sisyphean metaphysic allows. But we should not exaggerate the change: some ele- ments of the Sisyphean view still find expression in the rebel’s world. Man is still in conflict with his world, which still fails to provide the security and happiness which man demands of it;23 Camus still rejects the consolations of religious or any other kind of Utopianism, and insists on remaining true to the life and humanitv that he

R . A . DuffandS. E. Marshall 131

knows - though his conception of what can be known is now more generous.

One theme which is preserved, though modified, in the later work is that of the present or immediate. In Sisyphus the only reality, and thus the only possible object of concern, is the present moment, the immediate experience: in the later work there is an analogous em- phasis on the importance of the present and particular, as against the future and universal; what matters is human happiness and suffering now, and the individuals who live and suffer. Camus will not sacrifice present individuals to any future universal utopia : hence his rejection both of Christianity as he understood it and of all totalitarian creeds - a rejection which is both moral and metaphysical. The future is too unreal, too uncertain, to allow such calculations; if we are to stay true to the limits of our human reason, we must limit our concerns to what is before us. This humility, this concern ‘to learn to live and to die, and in order to be a man, to refuse to be a god’, involves a metaphysical and ethical conception of the limits of human capacities and of the significance of the present: the Christian and the totalitarian have not just a difference ethic, but a different metaphysic from Camus ; their moral differences are the expression of more profound differences in their respective conceptions of human beings and their world.

We could also suggest that Rieux and Tarrou in The Plague are engaged in a struggle which ‘implies a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair), a continual rejection (which must not be confused with renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature unrest)’. In the novel Camus exhibits a range of responses to the affliction which has struck the city: and though the plague cannot serve as a complete analogue either of the Nazi occupation (since that involved a human, not a natural enemy, which changes the character of the moral dilemmas raised by the struggle) or of the human condition (since in The Plague we have, as in the world as a whole we do not, a contrast between those within the plague-stricken city and those safely without it), the responses of the central characters exemplify possible responses to the world of The Rebel. Tarrou, Rieux, and Grand see the world through the moral categories of The Rebel, as an irrational world in which men inevitably suffer and die. Rieux and Grand see that their job in such a world is to do what they can, what is set before them, without heroics; to fight the plague, to reduce suffering and postpone death: they have no grand conception of what they can achieve; it is simply what they have to do. Tarrou’s response is more complex, but it is a moral response set in


the same categories as theirs: though he faces acute moral perplexities, there is no doubt about the moral demands which he recognises as binding on him; it is these demands, of honesty, justice, humility and compassion, which he shares with others, which generate his perplexities.

They inhabit a common moral universe which, while it denies the certainties which Paneloux recognises, had its own more humble certainties: but how different their universe is from that of Sisyphus, of Meursault, or even of Cottard in the same book. I t is a world of values and moral requirements, a world of people, of friendships, of passions, far removed from the empty universe of Sisyphean man, and from the self-centred world of Cottard (though he at least is close enough to that world for criticism to be possible2*). The contrast between the world of The Plague and that of The Outsider, between the world of The Just and that of Cross Purpose (and between the way in which the central killing is seen in each), between the world of The Rebel and that of The Myth of Sisyphus, is not just a moral contrast: it is a contrast betwen an enriched and an impo- verished metaphysic; and our aim in this paper has been to point out this difference, and its essential connection with the moral differen~e.’~

Department of Philosophy, The Universit_v, Sterling, Scotland. FK9 4LA

Bibliographical Noh

The relevant editions of Camus’ works, and the abbreviations by which they are cited in the text, are: Le Mythe de Siryphe translated as The Myth of Siyphus by J . O’Brien Random House (New York) 1955 cited as: MS

L‘Etranger translated as The Outsider by S. Gilbert Penguin (Harmondsworth) 1961 cited as: 0 Caligula @ Le Malentendu translated as Caligula & Cross Purpose by S . Gilbert Penguin (Harmondsworth) 1965 cited as: C, CP Letters 21 un Ami Allemand translated as Letters to a German Friend by J. O’Brien in Resistance. Rebellion and Death


Hamish Hamil ton (London) 1964 cited as: LGF La Peste translated as The Plague by S . Gilber t Penguin (Harmondswor th) 1970 cited as : P Les Justes translated a s The Just by H. Jones Penguin (Harmondswor th) 1970 L’Homme Riuolti translated as The Rebel by A. Bower Penguin (Harmondswor th) 1962 cited as : R Selected Essays & Notebooks edited and translated by P. Thody Penguin (Harmondswor th) 1970 cited as: SEN

FOOTNOTES

‘See J. Cruickshank, Alberf Camus and fhc Liferafure ofRevolf (OUP, London, 1970), p vii: ‘He embodied the French moral conscience at its most pure and most per- suasive’.

* See J. Onimus, A l h Camus and Chrirtianity (MacMillan, London, 1970) pp 3-4: he quotes Camus as saying, in an interview in 1945, ‘I am not a philosopher, 1 do not have enough faith in reason to believe in a system’.

’Compare, on the same page: ‘If I wish to limit myself to facts, I know what man wants, I know what the world offers him, and now I can say that I also know what links them. I have no need to dig deeper. A single certainty is enough for the seeker. He simply has to derive all the consequences from it.’

41t is important to notice that what is doubted here is not just the possibility of values, but also the possibility of rational explanation.

’Compare Wittgenstein’s arguments against solipsism in Philosophical Inuesfigafionr; also P. F. Strawson, Individuals, ch 3.

61n an Avant-Propos written for The Outsider in 1955. ’See J-P Sartre, ‘An Explication of the Stranger’, in G Br6e (ed.), Camus

(Prentice-Hall, 1962), pp 108-121. 81t is interesting to compare the quite different significance which separation, from

each other, from the past and the future, is given in The Plague: cf P, pp 148-152. ’See S R Sutherland, ‘Imagination in Literature and Philosophy’, British Journal of

Aesfhefics, X, 3, July 1970, pp 261-274; R A Duff, ‘Psychopathy and Moral Under- standing’, American Philosophical Quarterly, XIV, 3 , July 1977, sections 111-V.

“See especially 0 pp 40, 47-48. “On the connections between these deficiencies, see Duff, op cif , section V. 12See 0, pp 40,48. ‘%ee Sutherland, op cif. ‘*Meursault himself claims to have seen through certain illusions: ‘As a student

I’d had plenty of ambition of the kind he meant. But, when I had to drop my studies, I very soon realised all that was pretty futile’ (0, p 48). Our claim is that he cannot understand, and thus cannot be said to see through, such concerns.


"See CP pp 105 ('I'm eager to be in that country, where the sun kills every

'%ee Onimus, op cit, ch 1. "See Sutherland, op c i f , on the close connection between the philosophical and

"Compare R F Holland, 'Moral Scepticism', Proceedings .f fhc Aristofeliun Society,

"See Holland, op cif. z°Cumets, p 43, quoted by Onimus, of t i t , p 65. "See 0, p 120, talking of his mother: 'And now, it seemed to me, I understood

why at her life's end she had taken on a 'fianci' -- why she'd played at making a fresh start . . .'_

''Quoted by J Cruickshank in his Introduction to Cufigula B CrosJ PurpoZe, p 17. 23We should note here, though we will not discuss, one obvious objection to the

ethic of the rebel: that i t makes little sense to make such moral demands of the wortd or the universe, or to criticise or rebel against i t for failing to meet them.

question. I don't belong here.'), 122, 127, 147-8.

literary tasks which Camus faces in The Outsider.

S ~ p p VOI XLI, 1967,pp 185-198.

24See P, p 247. 25We would like to thank Stewart Sutherland for his valuable comments on an

earlier draft of this Daoer.

camus and rebellion: from solipsism to morality

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