is freedom unlimited? an existential response
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My MA Thesis examines the nihilistic claim to unlimited freedom and attempts to find an existential response from the work of Hanna Arendt and Albert CamusTRANSCRIPT
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Introduction
A state of unlimited freedom exists when human beings withdraw from the world
so that the human mind becomes the sole source of meaning. In withdrawing,
human beings no longer recognise the world as a source of value. In our solitude
our freedom is absolute because inner freedom does not need to recognise
external constraints. No longer experiencing the world directly, man starts to
distrust everything outside his head. He withdraws into a world of his own
creation, thus adopting a nihilistic attitude, which denies the existence of the
world and all value within it. The problem for man is that if there is nothing to
prohibit actions, there is nothing to authorise them either, because no value can
be established outside of man. We must either accept these conditions or else
seek a new absolute within the world.
In this thesis I will show that unlimited freedom is a direct result of
nihilism as a theory and consequently that it leads to historicism1 as a practice. In
Chapter One I will outline the claims of nihilism, which says that man is alone in
the world and all morality is non-existent. I wish to examine further nihilism as a
process of evaluation that calls for ‘freedom from values’ in order for human
beings to be free to revaluate. Chapter Two examines the view that history can be
seen as a process of human self-creation and I will discuss the consequences of
this view of history as a man-made process. In Chapter Three I will provide an
existential response to nihilism and propose values that are trans-historical. I will
1 Historicism is the theory that events are influenced by historical conditions, rather than by people. It claims that history is
composed of an organic succession of developments that are influenced by local conditions and peculiarities and consequently that
social and cultural events are determined by history. As a practice, it places ideas within an historical context.
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show that limits can be found in the world and in the human, which is our
fundamental condition of existence in the world. In Chapter Four I will present
foundations for human freedom which consent to the relativity of our situations
and I will conclude that true freedom requires a constant participation in the
world by human beings and the recognition that every standard of values is
relative to human history. I will ground my argument in the existential value of
the world and human condition, in which human existence is limited by mortality
and bounded by its situation.
Chapter 1: Unlimited Freedom
As a consequence of withdrawing from the world and failing to recognise it as a
meaningful source of value, man removes all external limitations and experiences
the unlimited freedom of solitude. In this condition, nothing provides a limit for
human action except individual self-restraint. But since man has retreated into an
inner world of thought where nothing is prohibited and nothing assured, morality
begins to lose its ontological foundations. Man comes to doubt the validity of the
world and his existence and consequently, adopts the nihilist attitude that since
nothing is absolute and all existence is meaningless, everything therefore is
permitted.
In this chapter is will examine the consequences of withdrawing from the world
and concluding that everything is possible. Section one presents the two major
claims of nihilism, that man is alone and that morality is meaningless. Section
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two describes nihilism as an opportunity which frees man from all previous
values and restraints in order to provide possibilities for new valuation of the
world. In section three I will look at the development of the idea that nihilism can
be identified with the historical process itself, in which nihilism makes its
appearance as a transitional stage in the world for mankind. Finally in section
four I will focus on the problem of finding and maintaining a trans-historical
value, which can allow human beings to place a limit on history and conclude
that the conditions of human existence in the world provide a source of
unchanging value for man.
In Very Little … Almost Nothing, Critchley presents nihilism as a psychological
state, which is attained when we realise that “the categories by means of which
we had tried to give meaning to the universe are meaningless. This does not
mean that the universe is meaningless, but rather that the faith in the categories of
reason is the cause of nihilism. We therefore require new categories and new
values that will permit us to endure the world.”2 Human beings are thrown into
the world, and without those values which were posited in a ‘true’ and ‘eternal’
world, we are thrown back upon ourselves, having nothing but ourselves to guide
our actions. For this reason, with the knowledge that there is nothing beyond this
world, we must attempt to rethink the universe consistently without God. This
world, which is now the only world we have, seems absurd without our
traditional standards of morality, and consequently, each individual action cannot
2 S. Critchley (1997), Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, Routledge, London, p. 49.
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be judged either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. In this sense it appears that everything is
permissible and nothing is limited.
In the wake of nihilism, when all values have been devalued and all
traditional morality gone, unlimited freedom appears as a reality in the world for
the first time. But unlimited freedom brings with it unlimited responsibility.
Therefore every time we act, we must look solely to this world and the conditions
of our existence within it, in order to derive an ethic3 for our actions which can be
recognised by every human being and which defines a limit for our freedom. In
order to understand the source of unlimited freedom we must examine the claims
of nihilism. Without the absolute foundations which had previously provided
security for man, man alone is now the sole creator of his values and purposes.
1.1 The Claims of Nihilism
Nihilism is the situation which is obtained when ‘everything is permitted.’ It
declares the solitude of all earthly creatures and the nothingness of all morality.
There is therefore a greater need for human beings to be able to relate to a
common value. Nihilism is a philosophical position which argues that existence
is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. It is “the inability to
believe in what is, to see what is happening, and to live life as it is offered,”4
which results from valuing higher, metaphysical things (such as God), that do not
in turn, value human or earthly things. However, a person who rejects God and
3 An ethic is a system of principles governing morality and acceptable conduct. It provides a standard for right and wrong behaviour
which guides individual action, or is representative of a specific culture, society, or group. 4 A. Camus (1971) The Rebel, Penguin, London, p. 59.
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the divine may still retain the belief that all earthly or human ideas are still
valueless because they were considered so in the previous belief system. There
are two types of nihilism; One form of nihilism arises from the premise that
‘everything is permitted’ and rejects all moral standards; another form is held by
absolutists who permit any means necessary in the name of some absolute end.
The decline in the authority of higher law, as well as a growing
disillusionment with scientific reason as a means of defining the ethical
foundations of political life, has fostered a growth of relativist, subjective
interpretations of political values. On the one hand it frees man from ideological
traditions but on the other it paves the way for nihilist ideologies. Hoy maintains
that a basic problem for man is “whether or not it is possible to give rational
meaning and value to his existence in an age where there is no longer confidence
that reason can establish absolute or objective truths.”5 It seems to follow that
with the death of God and all transcendent forms, all values are of human
creation, and from that one can conclude that everything is permitted and nothing
is prohibited. The death of God means there is no law superior to or apart from
man. Since nothing was left standing, the solution is either utter nihilism or
reconstruction from scratch. Therefore, it is necessary to create post-Christian
values in order to avoid the dangers of nihilism either by finding a new
transcendent absolute or by recognising the relativity of human values.
One reason to advocate a transcendent absolute is a desire to give a point
or purpose to the world and life. But with the ‘death’ of God man is alone and
without a master. Man must create both himself and his values. If we choose to
5 T. Hoy (Sep., 1960), Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 3, p. 573.
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look solely to man, the question remains: can man alone create his own values?
Nihilists generally assert that everything can be created, and consequently there
can be no innate humanness. Human beings are viewed as purely vital creatures,
driven by necessity and their behaviour. What is needed therefore is a sense of a
shared existence in the world and a common condition to which we can relate.
Myers suggests that the crisis of modern man is that if man creates
himself, then he has no ideal nature to realise. Since man makes himself, it really
does not matter what he does, “if there is no normative human essence, then there
is no moral standard by which individual lives or social structures may be
measured, condemned, or approved. On this view, it must be conceded that
everything is permissible.”6 Man is that being who transforms nature, and in
doing so, continually changes his own nature. If we make ourselves, “we can
undo and remake ourselves.”7 Therefore, if nature is the product of human work,
it cannot serve as the principle, standard, or objective measure for human
behaviour.
Nihilism is the basis of a naturalism which looks upon man as a purely
vital means, endowed with a rationality which is solely instrumental. Gurwitsch
and Hatcher believe that nihilism sees each man as “the product of the conditions
in which he lives” and that the result of “this conditioning is the fact that he holds
to this particular idea and embraces this particular conviction.”8 Hence, every
human activity is considered only in the light of its vital functions. Perceiving
man as a vital being makes it possible to deal with him more or less as one deals
with any other natural object. Men can be persuaded to accept certain ideas with
6 D. B. Myers (Dec., 1976), Marx and the Problem of Nihilism, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 37, No. 2, p. 201. 7 K. Ameriks, ed. (2000), The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, University of Notre Dame, p. 215. 8 A. Gurwitsch and A. Hatcher (Apr., 1945), On Contemporary Nihilism. The Review of Politics. Vol. 7, No. 2. p. 173.
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little or no consideration for the rightness of the actions or the truth of the ideas.
This is simply because one ‘insists on the vital nature of the human being’ and
‘contests the existence of such abstract ideas as truth and justice.’9
Nihilists hold the view that objective morality does not exist. To question
the existence of God leads inevitably to doubts about morality, because how can
there be a just God or an absolute standard for morality if human history is a
seemingly endless procession of injustice? Driver defines moral nihilism as “the
view that there are no moral facts. It is a metaphysical view about what is out
there in the world, about what exists or does not exist. Nihilism holds that moral
facts do not exist.”10 If all morality was merely provisional, Willhoite argues that
this would reinforce the principle that the end justifies the means, because if no
values transcend the flux of history, and if no one knows that history is
proceeding inexorably toward a future incarnation of virtue perfected in all
mankind, “who can adjudge one guilty if he employs any means – murder,
concentration camps, total regimentation of human lives – in passionate
dedication to the consummation of the glorious future?”11 If the only ethical
guide for choosing and justifying the means by which one must act and live is
determined in terms of the future, then history is simply a process of becoming,
directed towards a goal or an ideal. Therefore the good and the true become that
which survives the inexorable process of the history, in other words, the
‘successful’. Nihilism asserts that no action is logically preferable to any other in
regards to the moral value of one action over another.
9 Ibid., p. 183. 10 J. Driver (2007) Ethics: The Fundamentals, London, Blackwell, p. 170. 11 F. H. Willhoite, Jr. (Jun., 1961), Albert Camus' Politics of Rebellion. The Western Political Quarterly. Vol. 14, No. 2, p. 407.
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The practice of nihilism may be defined in effect as “the substitution of
concrete things for abstractions.”12 The nihilist no longer clings to such
abstractions as truth or justice, having substituted things much more concrete,
like biological advantages, needs, desires and utility. The truth of an opinion is
decided by its usefulness and rewards. Therefore, to think like everybody else
becomes almost a moral duty and those who hold sanctioned convictions are
rewarded by society as proof that these convictions are true. In the absence of
morality, existence has no intrinsic higher meaning or goal. With this moral
relativism certain opinions are seen as useful while others are not because the
only interest is with their function. “Since everything is opinion, one opinion is
as good as any other; why not, then, prefer that one which is shared by everybody
… which is favoured by public opinion?”13 Since opinion is interchangeable, then
by acting on the basis of certain ideas one will obtain results. This is the ethic of
adjusting to the milieu, which elevates mediocrity as a measure of humanity.
Camus accuses the nihilists of yielding to death and despair, saying that
they saw “the injustice of our condition to the point of being willing to add to it.”
They never believed in the meaning of the world, and therefore deduced “that
everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to
one’s wishes.” 14 In the absence of any human or divine code, the nihilist readily
accepted despair. If I believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning so that we
can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible. The type of
freedom which comes from this logic therefore, sees the law of the world as
nothing but the law of force. From a nihilistic vision of history there is no kind of
12 Gurwitsch and Hatcher, On Contemporary Nihilism, p. 174. 13 Ibid., p. 175. 14 A. Camus (1961), Resistance, Rebellion and Death, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, pp. 27-8.
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transcendence. It dedicates itself instead to a perpetual struggle for power, which
is carried on through history. But what then is the genuine intellectual attraction
of holding a position that negates everything and affirms nothing?
1.2 The Attractions of Nihilism
Arendt sees the decline of tradition as a great opportunity for mankind “to look
upon the past with eyes undistracted by tradition,”15 with a directness which has
disappeared from the world. Nihilism affords us with a chance for revaluation
and with it a great sense of freedom in breaking from the past. Isaac shows how
Arendt welcomes “the demise of the props and crutches that have long sustained
political orders unable to stand without such supports,” but at the same time she
recognises “the need for some anchoring for human freedom.”16 Until new ethical
foundations are laid down, the old traditions become an impediment to new way
of thinking. Both Camus and Arendt saw a pressing need for new positive values
and principles that derive their justification from the world and the conditions of
human existence. Nietzsche too, saw nihilism as an opportunity that impelled
mankind to seek new values because in doing so, the “world might be far more
valuable than we used to believe.”17 For this reason he completely embraced
nihilism in order to bring it out of concealment.
According to Critchley, Nietzsche sees the cause of nihilism as “rooted in
a specific interpretation of the world”, that of Christianity, and that this
15 H. Arendt (2006), Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Penguin, London, p. 28. 16 J. C. Isaac (1992), Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, Yale University Press, p. 105. 17 F. Nietzsche (1968), The Will to Power, (Ed. Kaufmann, Walter), Vintage Books, p. 22.
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“Christian-Moral interpretation of the world is given by a will to truthfulness, but
this very will to truth eventually turns against the Christian interpretation of the
world by finding it untrue.”18 When we come to realise that the Christian-Moral
interpretation of the world is deceptive because it concealed from us that true
origin of our moral values, our initial response is to declare all existence
meaningless, reduce everything to nothing, and start afresh. Nihilism therefore,
provides freedom from old values of society that had previously restricted many
possibilities and alternatives for human action. Without these restraints, human
beings experienced a new sensation of everything being possible.
For Woolfolk, one of the primary functions of culture prior to modernity
was “to close possibilities, to establish constraints upon the freedom of
experience, so as to insure a certain inner distance from the treacherous
involvements of living.” 19 In the initial conditions of nihilism there is a sense of
unlimited freedom. Without any values to define the world and human existence
in it, there seems to be an infinite number of possibilities because there are no
distinctions and no limits are defined. The traditional standards of society
provided a balance between what is forbidden and permitted, thus controlling the
problem of human ambiguity in the face of infinite possibilities.
Isaac shows that in an atmosphere in which all traditional values
evaporated, it became easier for people to accept patently absurd propositions. In
an uncertain climate “it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of
human values, and general amorality, because that at least destroyed the duplicity
18 Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, p. 7. 19 A. Woolfolk, (1986), The Artist as Cultural Guide: Camus’ Post-Christian Asceticism, Sociological Analysis, Vol. 47, No. 2, p.
95.
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upon which the existing society seemed to rest.”20 Those who conceded to
nihilism were oblivious to the practical consequences of their actions. In their
sheer delight they welcomed destruction and flaunted all previous standards,
thereby adding fuel to the fire. For many people, nihilism represented a complete
break from tradition and the prejudices of the past.
The great advantage of these transitional times for Camus is that “nothing
is true” and “everything is permitted”21, however this does not mean necessarily
that nothing is forbidden. On the contrary, the recognition of absurdity
constituted for Camus “a bitter acknowledgement that was binding, not
liberating.”22 Unlimited freedom brings with it, unlimited responsibility and it is
only with a sense of history, “of limits and opportunities, problems and
prospects, [that it is] possible to speak meaningfully about the proper ordering of
political life.”23 Throughout history values have changed according to the projects
and aims of human existence. In order to understand human history one must be
aware that human beings, by their very existence, must constantly evaluate the
world in order to define what we can and cannot do. Without value, the world
would contain no possibilities for becoming.
1.3 Nihilism, History and Values
Nihilism is the conviction that existence becomes meaningless and void when we
come to recognise that the highest values cannot be posited in a ‘beyond’ or an
20 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 95. 21 Camus, The Rebel, p. 58. 22 Woolfolk, The Artist as Cultural Guide, p. 106. 23 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 18.
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‘in-itself’ of things that might be ‘divine’. It is the recognition that the
transcendent24 has lost its power over the determination of man. For Nietzsche, a
nihilist is someone “who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of
the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our
existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of ‘in
vain’ is the nihilists’ pathos – at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the
part of the nihilists.”25 In Nietzsche, Heidegger defines nihilism as “the historical
process whereby the dominance of the transcendent becomes null and void, so
that all being loses its worth and meaning.”26 Ideals, principles, and values that
were set above human beings in order to give being as a whole some sense of
purpose and order, begin to devalue.
There is a three-step process of nihilism which constitutes the movement
of history itself. The first stage is “when we have sought meaning in all events
that is not in them. Thus a precondition for nihilism is that we seek a meaning in
all events; that is, in beings as a whole.”27 In positing a purpose for beings as a
whole, all becoming achieves nothing because it aims at nothing. In response to
this, nihilism’s second stage comes from our need for a sense of higher unity.
However, if underneath all becoming there is no supreme value or totality into
which the individual can submerge, then in order to remain certain of our own
value, man “must posit an uppermost value for beings as a whole. But if belief in
a unity that pervades reality is disappointed, this gives rise to the insight that
24 The transcendent when pertaining to God exalted above the universe, is the highest or uppermost position that is beyond the realm
of the senses. The transcendent is that which is above and beyond comprehension and therefore, free from the constraints of the
material world. 25 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 318. 26 M. Heidegger (1991), Nietzsche Vol. IV, (Ed. Krell, D.F.), Harper Collins, San Francisco, p. 4. 27 Ibid., p. 30.
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nothing is aimed at by any given act or deed.”28 Now only one escape remains for
man that is, “to pass sentence on this whole world of becoming as a deception
and to invert a world beyond it, as the true world.” With this the final stage of
nihilism, a “disbelief in any metaphysical world” emerges, which “forbids itself
any belief in a true world.”29 We are left with no grounds for investing some
value in the world, so we withdraw again and now the world seems valueless.
However, Heidegger shows that with the last stage of nihilism, “a peculiar
transitional stage emerges: first, the world of becoming – that is, life is lived here
and now, along with its changing realms – can no longer be denied as real; but,
second, this world, which alone is real, has at the outset no aims and values and
so is not to be endured.”30 What remains is a feeling of valuelessness, but the
universe of being, which exists in itself, still permits “an investing and
withdrawing of values.”31 With the decline of uppermost values the world itself
does not fall away but is “merely freed from the valuations of prevailing values
and made available for new valuation. Thus nihilism does not lead us into
nothing”32 because it provides mankind with the transition which is needed from
traditional values to the new conditions of human existence. In this way “nihilism
is no longer simply the powerless yearning for nothing … but is the very
opposite”33, calling for a break from traditional values in order for human beings
to be able to revaluate the world.
Nihilism is decisive for the future in the task of new valuation. In its
classical sense, nihilism “calls for freedom from values as freedom for a
28 Ibid., p. 33. 29 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 13. 30 Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol. IV, p. 34. 31 Ibid., p. 43. 32 Ibid., p. 27. 33 Ibid., p. 56.
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revaluation of all (such) values.”34 It is the process of uprooting all previous
values, thus obliterating history through a revision of its basic traits, and breeding
of a new need for values; a new world project. Heidegger recognises the need for
beings themselves to find a “new interpretation through which their basic
character may be defined in a way that will make it fit to serve as a principle for
the inscription of a new table of values and as a standard of measure for suitably
ranking such values.”35 Because the transcendent has been abolished only the
earth remains. It is necessary therefore, to posit a new essence for man. With the
revaluation of all past values, a challenge has been issued to men; that they raise
new standards which accommodate being as a whole.
Isaac asserts that, in “articulating a pervasive sense of the failures of
reason, nihilism’s absolute metaphysical revolt symbolises a crisis of value in the
modern world.”36 Nietzsche claims that morality previously protected life against
despair and the leap into nothing. It was morality which “guarded the
underprivileged against nihilism by assigning to each an infinite value, a
metaphysical value,” and thereby shielded human beings from the most terrible
thought, that is “existence as it is, without meaning or aim.”37 To strengthen mans
voice and thus prevent the most extreme form of nihilism, a sense of an eternally
recurring meaninglessness, social values were erected over man as if they were
commands of God. They were taken as ‘reality’ and the ‘true’ world and
concealed from man “that it was he who created what he admired.”38 Willhoite
suggests that, sensing the explosive impact that a full awareness of this truth
34 Ibid., p. 5. 35 Ibid., p. 6. 36 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 93. 37 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, pp. 35-7. 38 Ibid., p. 85.
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would have upon mankind, Nietzsche sought “to transform the apocalypse which
would result into a renaissance, so that at least some men would respond
affirmatively and creatively to the question: Can one live without believing in
anything?”39
For Heidegger, nihilism is a “process of devaluation, whereby the
uppermost values become valueless”40 precisely because an aim is lacking. It is
the condition that arises when all prior aims of being have become superfluous.
As human beings, we are forever directed in the world towards something in
particular and hold it as an aim if we consider it worthwhile. For this reason, an
object is “capable of being a standard of measure only where such as values are
esteemed and where one values is ranked above or below another. Such
esteeming and valuing occurs where something matters for our behaviour.”41 In
order to define our position in the world, mankind must provide new limits and
possibilities by positing values which are based on an awareness that man is
compelled to perpetually assent to, and rebel against, something which he had no
part in creating. But in the eyes of a condemned man who refuses supernatural
consolation, what values remain?
1.4 History and the Problem of Values
Human beings, in their eternal need for the absolute validity of transcendent,
supra-historical values, turned to the concept of history as a totality in order to
39 F. H. Willhoite, Jr. (1968) Beyond Nihilism: Albert Camus’s Contribution to Political Thought, Louisiana State University Press,
p. 106. 40 Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol. IV, p. 14. 41 Ibid., p. 16.
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escape the ‘relativism’ and ‘nihilism’ of historicism. But if history is an absolute
movement then one phase of human becoming is no better or worse than any
other. When the single overriding value is absolute justice, one is not concerned
about the morality of one’s tactics because the end comes to justify the means.
From this point of view, a provisional ethic can be derived which consists of
nothing more than a doctrine of success, because if history is nothing but chance
and force and nothing has meaning, then any means is justified because the
success of an action is set up as an absolute goal. The only value that can allow
man to judge history, and thereby place a limit on it, must be trans-historical.
Value judgements are ways of summoning other people to take certain
attitudes towards things. They are the most meaningful of statements because
consciousness cannot begin to exist until it sets a limit to an object. “A
consciousness which constitutes everything,” but only as the intelligible structure
of all objects, “remains an abstract and ineffective power, because it has no work
to perform.”42 History determines the time and space of individual events,
because it constitutes “the knowledge of single events, or the development and
description of the ‘because’ of a thing.”43 With the death of God, mankind
remains, and by this we mean the history, which man alone must understand and
shape. For Camus, “history alone offers no hope. It is not a source of values, but
is still a source of nihilism.” There is a possibility however, that man can at least
create values in defiance of history. Camus believes that thought which is derived
from history alone, like thought which rejects history completely, “deprives man
42 M. Merleau-Ponty (2006), Phenomenology Of Perception, Routledge, London, p. 32. 43 A. Stern (1962), Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, Mouton & Co.: The Netherlands, p. 105.
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of the means and the reason for living. The former drives him to the extreme
decadence of ‘why live?’ the latter to ‘how to live?’”44
In history we make choices of what we consider essential to our existence
in order to distinguish what is important and what is irrelevant. In order to do this
we must have a standard of values. But as our projects change, so too do our
values. Stern therefore, presents each individual as having a world of different
values, because the hierarchies of things and ideas conceived by men are
intimately linked with their actions. This inequality of rank among the value of
things is conditioned by the relation of the objects to the appreciating subjects
and the “positing of a value results when our whole personality and, especially,
our faculty of judgement adopts an attitude towards the different feelings inspired
by things and ideas.”45 Values do not exist independently of man. In fact, it is
only through valuing some things over others that history takes on a specific
meaning for human beings.
History cannot be considered a science; it cannot be free from values
because the concept of value enters the very definition of history. If you destroy
all values then all you can do is generalize history, and everything in general
aims at nothing in particular. The generalizing method of natural sciences is
exempt from values, but “the individualizing method of history is only possible
thanks to an evaluating approach to the objects.”46 If there are no supra-historical
truths and values able to serve as standards by which to judge the relative merits
of values created in the course of history, then all ideas and all values created in
44 Camus, The Rebel, p. 215. 45 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 102. 46 Ibid., p. 120.
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the course of history would be justified. It would be impossible therefore to
ascertain any progress in history.
For this reason, Hoy asserts that reducing every value to historical terms
leads to dire consequences, because if “good and evil are reintegrated in time and
confused with events, nothing is either good nor bad, but either premature or out
of date.”47 With this radically temporal view of man and values, history becomes
merely the continual transformation of nature with no standard by which to
measure and evaluate human becoming. Similarly Stern maintains that the
particular can become essential “only with respect to a value; without such a
relation to a value, the particular would lose all its historical interest and would
be nothing but an indifferent element of reality.”48 The identification of values
with the historical process leads to the logic that nature is the raw material of
history, to be worked upon, transformed, and mastered by men. The problem for
human beings is that, in having no absolute and acting into history; the sum of
their acts, they realise that they make themselves and their values through history
and that no trans-historical truths can exist.
Philosophy must deal with the conditions of human beings that are
situated in the world. Each conscious being must accept their mortality and these
basic conditions have not changed throughout history. For this reason, these
values which are linked to the invariable human condition have a claim to
universality. This is because as past evaluations, they will probably be
maintained in the future, and will thus remain trans-historical. It is here that we
may be faced with “a possible limit to historical relativism in the realm of
47 Hoy, Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, p. 577. 48 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 120.
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values,” because vital values, such as ‘health’ or ‘life’ are not due to an
unchangeable human ‘nature’ but rather, they are due to “the human ‘condition’
which remains identical with regard to life and death.” 49
In this Chapter I have shown that the nihilistic claims of unlimited freedom must
acknowledge a source of value in order to be able to begin new valuations. There
is a genuine attraction for nihilism because it provides an opportunity for man to
revaluate the world and discover in it a new, deeper meaning. I have presented
nihilism as a process of revaluation which not only forms the basis of history
itself but also presents a possible limit to history, a limit based on the relationship
between human beings and their values.
Chapter 2: Historicism
But what happens if man refuses to acknowledge the relativity of his values to
history? Man begins to look elsewhere for absolute authority, which is outside
himself but is still in the world. If man turns to history, which is the sum of
human deeds and actions, he threatens to undermine the only means that human
beings have of understanding of the world and the meaning of their actions.
Because human beings make both themselves and their history, there is a danger
that by taking history as an absolute outside the control of man, all that would
remain would be a world seen through the human mind. Therefore, if man
49 Ibid., p. 137.
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proceeds by acting into the world and creating processes, then any hypothesis
will become possible.
In this chapter I will examine the concept of history as a man-made process and
consequently the claim that because men change their environments and in doing
so change themselves, all thought is historical and is unable to transcend history
in order to provide a standard from which to judge history. Section one examines
the relationship between human nature and history, showing that human ‘nature’
is historically emergent and thus no one can give more than the truth of their own
existence. In section two I will focus on Hegel’s contribution to the growth of
history as source of absolute value and that therefore, there can be no extra-
historical authority above history. In section three I look at Marx’s development
of history as a process and his conclusion that the end comes to justify the means
if the future is posited as a goal. In section four I will examine the process
character of history in more detail, focusing on the consequences of man-made
processes and concluding in section five that the danger with the process nature
of action is that the human mind becomes the sole source of meaning, and no
longer relies on the world.
Historicism is the very basis on which we construct our observations of socio-
cultural reality. It is an organically developed basic pattern which came into
being after the religiously determined picture of the world had disintegrated and
the enlightenment had destroyed itself. Throughout history there has been an
assumption that a natural and rational foundation underlies human values. The
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Stoics believed that universal reason was common to all men and that there was a
common understanding of ‘natural right’. In the Middle-Ages natural right was
solidly rooted in the divine law.50 ‘Just’ and ‘unjust’ were moral values because
they constituted the ethical minimum. But if this ethical minimum cannot be
guaranteed by natural right, then ethics is at the mercy of history and forced to
sanction all the values and laws of history. This would mean total victory for
Historicism.
After the climax of the French Revolution there was a reaction by German
Romanticism against the doctrine of natural right, which prepared the way for
Historicism. German Idealism distanced itself from the French Revolution by
attacking the infallibility of the rationality of man.51 It revealed that concepts such
as ‘human nature’, ‘justice’, and ‘reason’ were mere abstractions, detached from
concrete reality. The Idealists advocated the principle of man’s creative unreason
in which the inability to understanding man as a rational being became all
important. In Historicism, the common rational features of mankind that were
“supposed to be eternal, were superseded by those irrational vital forces which
are characteristic of each nation and are the product of a slow historical
revolution, of an organic growth, in the soil of tradition.”52 With the accelerated
change of modern dynamic social and political conditions, philosophy’s
traditional, static view of the world as a cosmos or fixed totality which had
endured since antiquity, collapsed.
However, what remained was a cultural need for orientation in the world,
as man looked to supra-historical ideals to which the secular could be relegated
50 Ibid., pp. 140-2. 51 Ibid., p. 145. 52 Ibid., p. 146.
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to virtual insignificance. It is for this reason that human beings sought out a new
absolute existing outside of man. Ameriks shows that with German Idealism the
meaning of history became fixed to a dogmatic and sacred interpretation. History
came to be seen not as an already established, fixed, reality but as an emerging
and self-ordering whole. God or the absolute was “conceived as nothing outside
or beyond this moral order of the world.”53 Thus the absolute was not seen as an
entity beyond the world, but an idea to be realised through history. This form of
historicism presented the modern concept of history; a process of never-ending
movement. But in order to get a better understanding of Historicism, “one has to
know the thesis which it denies; namely, natural right, and its presupposition, the
concept of a human nature or a human reason considered as unchangeable,
eternal, identical throughout the ages.”54
2.1 Human Nature and History
In the modern age, history has become an absolute authority for mankind. But
since history is the product of human actions in the world, whoever tries to
understand man, must first rid themselves of all stable concepts, and learn how to
think by virtue of dynamic concepts. Therefore, Stern shows that “every concept
which refers to a specifically human life is a function of historical time.” This is
pure Historicism, because “if our concepts are functions of historical time, then
there are no supra-historical stable concepts capable of serving as permanent
53 Ameriks, Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, p. 205. 54 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 139.
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standards of judging the concepts created in the course of history.”55 Having no
human nature, man is nothing but the sum of his acts.
According to Isaac, Arendt makes the distinction between the human
condition and human nature in that “the common condition does not constitute
anything like human nature” because “human existence does have distinguishing,
limiting features.” The conditions to which she refers “do not constitute essential
characteristics of human existence in the sense that without them this existence
would no longer he human.”56 In other words these conditions of human existence
are not essences, and because they are historically emergent, there is no way for
philosophy to fix them once and for all. This does not mean however, that we can
know nothing about ourselves. There are conditions which frame our existence,
that enable and constrain us but which never condition us absolutely.57 Man can
only start from the historical situation into which he finds himself cast, to accept
it voluntarily, instead of allowing himself to be impelled by it or refuse it; “his
history, his previous experiences, together with his circumstances, constitute the
basic limitations of his future possibilities.”58
For Heidegger, there is no essential human nature. ‘Being-in-the-world is
a basic state of Dasein’,59 it is something which has always been experienced
ontically. Man in general does not exist. What exists is the man of a given
historical epoch with his historical and national environment. Stern examines
Heidegger’s claim that man is free, but that his freedom is limited because to be
“cast into the current of historical time is one of the fundamental unalterable
55 Ibid., p. 175. 56 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 108. 57 H. Arendt (1969), The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, p. 11. 58 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 175. 59 M. Heidegger (1962), Being and Time, (Trans. Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E.), Blackwell, Oxford, p. 86.
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features of the human condition. We cannot change this current. We have to
accept the historical conditions of our existence.” We may try to understand and
interpret these conditions, but that is all. Every interpretation is historically
conditioned however, since every truth is relative to existence. “Thus, no thinker
can give more than the truth of his own existence, which is historical. With this,
we have come to the core of Historicism.”60
2.2 Hegel’s Concept of History
History possessed an immanent cumulative significance for Hegel, through
which the individual could approach self-definition. Stern shows how this
interpretation of history “completely eliminated the concept of human nature.
What now appears to be man’s substance is the variable, that which changes in
the course of history.”61 Man has no ‘nature’ but he has a history. Consequently,
all that exists is historical man; a ‘son of his time’. For Hegel, “it is just as foolish
to imagine that any philosophy transcends its present world, as it is to believe
than an individual jumps out of time”62 All philosophy is its time expressed in
thoughts. No philosopher can lay claim to absolute truth because absolute truth
would be the end of history.
In On Revolution, Arendt states that “the most far reaching consequence
of the French Revolution was the birth of the modern concept of history in
Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel’s truly revolutionary idea was that the old absolute of
60 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 173. 61 Ibid., p. 147, quoting from Hegel’s Samtliche Werke, (p. 52). 62 Ibid., p. 157.
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the philosophers revealed itself in the realm of human affairs”63 which had been
ruled out as the source or birthplace of absolute standards. The simple lesson of
history according to Grumley is that, that which “appears to be given, eternal, or
natural is in fact the product of human activity.”64 With the disappearance of the
transcendent values, man realised that he alone was the source of his values. He
is faced with two choices – look to man as the source of values or find a new
absolute outside of man to secure his values.
Hegel sought a new absolute in order to ground human values in a higher
meaning. Left with human existence in the world as a sole value, Hegel simply
proposed to make it absolute. He conceptualised it “in terms of an immanent
processual unity of both the natural and historical world,”65 thereby constructing
a framework which provided him with a coherent account of historic and social
divisions, and allowed him to interpret immanent and rational meaning behind
the appearance of chaos. For Hegel, “the realised purpose, or the existent
actuality, is movement and unfolded becoming; but it is just this unrest which is
the self.”66 Therefore, realisation of spirit’s full self-knowledge came to be
conceived as a single, unified, historical enterprise. In “anticipating radical
historical possibilities,” Hegel projected his vision of a unified and “harmonious
culture into an immediate future within the grasp of the revolutionary present.”67
With this new understanding of historical development he was able to transform,
what appeared to him to be a fragmented and disunited world, into the
progressive unfolding totality.
63 H. Arendt (2006), On Revolution, Penguin, London, p. 42. 64 J. E. Grumley (1989), History and Totality: Radical Historicism from Hegel to Foucault, Routledge, London, p. 19 65 Ibid., p. 19. 66 G. W. F. Hegel (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, Clarendon Press, Oxford, p. 12. 67 Grumley, History and Totality, p. 15.
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By withdrawing from the world and assuming the position of spectator,
Hegel was able to “perceive an essential rationality underlying the apparent
chaos of the new order.” This allowed him “to view diremption not as a
‘distortion’ of some ideal unity but as a moment or a phase in a totalising process
which overcame and encompassed it.”68 Once you look at history in its entirety
everything suddenly made sense. It seems that nature pursues its over-all aims
through men, of which they hardly give higher value to their own existence.
Modern ideological thinking devalues the present at the expense of the future and
for Arendt, this escape into the whole was prompted by the meaninglessness of
the particular.69
Hegel tried to escape the historical relativism resulting from his thesis
statement; that all knowledge is only its time apprehended in thoughts, by trying
to secure the extra-historical character of moral values. He concluded that the self
is “an absolutely free entity” and asserted that the “absolute freedom of all spirits
who bear the intellectual world in themselves, and cannot seek either God or
immorality outside themselves.”70 Therefore, he withdrew morality from history
and consequently history from morality, declaring world-history beyond the
reach of moral judgement and above obligations and self-interest. The result for
Ameriks, was that if the events of world history were understood to be “a
moment of coherent, intelligible, even rationally necessary development,” then
what is actual for Hegel, becomes rational and ‘what is rational becomes
actual.’71 With this conclusion, Hegel drastically opened the doors of Historicism.
68 Ibid., p. 17. 69 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 83. 70 G. W. F. Hegel (1998), The Hegel Reader, (Ed. Stephen Houlgate), Blackwell Publishers, p. 28. 71 Ameriks, Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, p. 182.
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According to Beiser, “instead of seeing natural law as an eternal law
above the process of history, Hegel historicises it, so that it becomes the purpose
of history itself. This then gives him an absolute standard by which he can
appraise all the different cultures.”72 The concept of ‘right’, when associated with
history, comes to be seen as basically an unwritten law sanctioned by usage. For
Hegel, if there is no human nature invariable throughout ages, then natural right
loses its ontological foundation. From the materialist conception, Sartre shows
that, “man returns to the very heart of Nature as one of its objects and develops
before our eyes in accordance with the laws of Nature.”73
But if Nature has no ‘will’, then consequently it cannot prescribe a
definite kind of conduct for human beings, because in starting from the facts of
what actually is one cannot infer what ought to be. Stern regards this as a serious
problem, because human reason can understand and describe but it cannot
prescribe. Therefore, “the belief that one can find norms for human conduct in
reason is the same illusion as the belief that one can draw such norms from
nature.”74 In history, facts are of interest to us for what they may have in common
with other facts but especially for what is specific and individual in them. The
reason for this is that “historical fact is the carrier of a specific value absent in the
natural facts which repeat themselves.”75
Hegel maintained that if history is the unfolding universal Reason in time,
then what is reasonable is real and what is real is reasonable. Thus ‘the real world
is as it ought to be.’ Here lies the justification for Stern, that “the consecration of
72 Beiser, F. C. Ed., (1993), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, Cambridge University Press, p. 279. 73 J. P. Sartre (2004), Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. I, Verso, London, p. 27. 74 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 152. 75 Ibid., p. 112.
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all that history has brought forth” that what is real is “rationally necessary, and,
therefore, it does not need any further justification, be it a moral one or any
other.”76 Hegel’s dictum that universal history is the universal tribunal is the
keystone of Historicism. If there is no extra-historical authority above history,
then history is the supreme judge of all truths and all values. In this way history
results in complete amoralism, condemning to oblivion the very truths and values
it has produced.
According to Willhoite, in Hegel’s thought, all values lose eternal status
and are wholly incorporated into the flux of history, into the ‘becoming’ rather
than the ‘is’. But Hegel also asserts that “these principles will ultimately come to
full realisation in the course of the historical process; thus they become absolute
ends or goals and no longer serve as regulative criteria of means in the historical
present.”77 Hegel therefore, makes moral judgement in principle, impossible. For
him the good and true are only that which survives the inexorable dialectic
movement of history; in effect the successful. In saying that all morality is
provisional, Isaac shows that Hegel’s thought becomes “a form of nihilism,
embracing the destructive march of reason through human history and claiming a
privileged standpoint – the end of history”78 from which to judge it after the fact.
If one believes that history is proceeding toward a future incarnation of freedom,
then any means is justified which seems necessary in the present for the ultimate
realisation of man’s glorious destiny.
For Ameriks, a great deal in Hegel’s project depends on understanding
that the issue of objectivity, for “the problem of actual content, has ceased to be
76 Ibid., p. 159. 77 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 114. 78 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 81.
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an issue about the correct (clear and distinct) grasping”, and has become a
problem of legality, “of our being bound by a rule of some sort that prohibits us
from judging otherwise.”79 Nothing about our desires count as responsible for an
action occurring and if they do count, it is only because the subject has taken
them to count. It seems then that all decisions can be made completely
independent of the world. Throughout his work, Hegel often refers to objective a
priori judgements as ‘self-determining’, “as if any thinker’s attempt to represent
an object can be said to set its own rules.”80 Hegel calls this ‘free judgement’, in
which matter has its substance outside itself, “spirit, on the other hand, is self-
sufficient being, which is the same thing as freedom. For if I am dependent, I am
beholden to something other than myself, and cannot exist without this external
point of reference.”81 Intelligence for Hegel, is the mind “that withdraws into
itself from the object”82 and recognises its inwardness as objectivity.
2.3 Marx’s Concept of History
According to Marx, Hegel’s Phenomenology contained “all the elements of
criticism concealed, often already prepared and elaborated in a way that far
surpasses Hegel’s own point of view.”83 In an attempt to find a supra-historical
value by which to judge the unfolding of history, Marx replaced Hegel’s spiritual
essence with the notion of human essence. This historical realisation of human
essence would culminate in the attainment of a universal value perspective from
79 Ameriks, Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, p. 186. 80 Ibid., p. 187. 81 Hegel, The Hegel Reader, p. 401. 82 Ibid., p. 316. 83 K. Marx (1977), Selected Writings, (Ed. David McLellan), Oxford University Press, London, p. 100.
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which to judge and condemn all existing social conditions. Grumley shows that
Marx constantly reiterated the view that human essence and human activity are
essentially historical because they are both “shaped by the reigning socio-
historical forms.”84
For Marx, human essence was the sum of productive forces inherited by
contemporaries as a legacy of humanity’s historical development and continuity.
The difference between Hegel’s idea of totality and Marx’s emphasis on the
dynamism of practical totalisation is the difference between the philosophical
assertion of “a meaning to history as a whole and the concrete strivings of a class
as they modified inherited social institutions and meanings,” 85 who make
conscious decisions about their present historical situation from the perspective
of its current social possibilities. Marx denounced the ideological character of
historical closure and posited the practical necessity of an unending struggle
leading to emancipation in the future as the goal of human history.
The limitations of Hegel for Marx, was that self-conscious man had
recognised the spiritual world “as self-externalisation and superseded it,” but had
nevertheless confirmed it again in this externalised form and declared it “to be
his true being,”86 thus restoring it. Mankind had tried to disguise from itself, that
it is man which is the sole creator of his values and purposes, simply because
such an acknowledgement would make man solely responsible for his actions.
Although Marx criticises Hegel for escaping into an absolute, he still preserved
Hegel’s progressive understanding of history. He adopted the view that the
totality of social relations is the bearer of a human essence that is fixed in its
84 Grumley, History and Totality, p. 45. 85 Ibid., p. 49. 86 Marx, Selected Writings, p. 106.
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social and cultural objectification. It was in so doing, that Marx disentangled his
philosophy from the existing world and established in it a future perspective.
Marx’s philosophy is seen by Ameriks as “taking over the most
fundamental philosophical project of German Idealism: the glorification of
human history as having a thoroughly dialectal shape in its development as the
complete and immanent fulfilment of self-consciousness.”87 He bestows upon
mere time-sequence an importance and dignity it never had before. Marx argues
that every process must have an agent; a subject, but this “subject only comes
into being as the result; this result, the subject knowing itself as absolute self-
consciousness, is therefore God, absolute spirit, the idea that knows and
manifests itself.”88 In this way, Marx presents human consciousness as a
completely self-knowing activity, which is capable of determining its own future.
Progress carried for Marx “a substantial prospective significance”, which is
derived from “a practical historical reflection primarily motivated by an
orientation to the future.”89
Arendt asserts that the danger of transforming the unknowable higher aims
into planned and willed intentions “was that meaning and meaningfulness were
transformed into ends.” When Marx took the Hegelian meaning of history as a
totality, freedom came to be seen as the “progressive unfolding and actualisation
of the idea of Freedom – to be an end of human action.”90 However, meaning can
only rise out of human deeds after action has come to an end, and therefore the
aim of today becomes the means of tomorrow. In this way, we overlook the need
87 Ameriks, Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, p. 273. 88 Marx, Selected Writings, p. 109. 89 Grumley, History and Totality, p. 55. 90 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 78.
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for valuation in the here and now; the only hope for a life that is meaningfully
human. The chief characteristic of mean-ends category when it is applied to
human affairs is that the end is always in danger of being overwhelmed by the
means, which it justifies and which are needed to reach it. Since human action
can never be reliably predicted, the means used are often of greater relevance to
the goal of the future world than the present.
The turning point of world history for Arendt, is that “for the first time,
the history of mankind reaches back into an infinite past to which we can add at
will an into which we can inquire further as it stretches ahead into an infinite
future.”91 History, by stretching into the twofold infinity of past and future, seems
to be able to guarantee immortality on earth. The great advantage to this concept
of the historical process is that it makes the very notion of an end inconceivable.
In its search for a strictly secular realm of enduring permanence, mankind
discovered a source of potential immortality, in which permanence is entrusted to
a flowing structure.
2.4 The Process of History
In Between Past and Future, Arendt claims that in the modern age history
emerged as something it had never been before. It was no longer composed of
human deeds, nor did it tell “the story of events affecting the lives of men.” It
had become “a man-made process, the only all-comprehending process which
91 Ibid., p. 68.
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owed its existence exclusively to the human race.”92 The emphasis shifted from
knowledge of individual things to entire processes because nothing had meaning
in and by itself, not even history or nature.93 The concept of process implies “that
the concrete and the general, the single thing or event and the universal meaning,
have parted company. The process, which alone makes meaningful whatever it
happens to carry along, has thus acquired a monopoly of universality and
significance.”94 The experience which underlies the modern age’s notion of
process sprang from the despair of never experiencing and knowing adequately
all that is given to man and not made by him.
The experiences of inner freedom always presuppose a retreat from the
world, where freedom is denied, into an inwardness to which no other has access.
Inwardness is seen as a place of absolute freedom. The Christian tradition
equated freedom with free will; a freedom between me and myself. The presence
of freedom was experienced in complete solitude, independent of the world and
others. Man began to distrust his senses when he withdrew from the world. He
concluded that in order to prove the physical, he would have to make it. Thus
knowledge began to be associated with man-made processes, rather than objects
or events in themselves.
Arendt insists that the first result of men’s acting into history is that
history becomes a process and by starting natural processes, “we have begun to
92 Ibid., p. 58. 93 In “Authority in the Twentieth Century”, Arendt examines totalitarian movements in greater detail, focusing on the movements
understanding of freedom. She says that “what they have in mind when they talk about freedom is the freedom of a process, which
apparently needs to be liberated from the meddlesome interfering activities of men, and what we have in mind is freedom of people,
whose movements need protection by fixed and stable boundaries of laws, constitutions and institutions.” (Pg. 409) According to
Arendt in “Ideology and Terror”, totalitarian societies do not operate without guidance of law, but instead dispense with human will
to action altogether and replace it with the law of permanent movement. Totalitarianism “executes the law of History or of Nature
without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behaviour.” (Pg. 307) 94 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 64.
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act into nature as we used to act into history.”95 Process is the inevitable result of
all human action, and like human action, it can never be entirely predicted or
controlled. We have manifestly begun “to carry our own unpredictability into
that realm which we used to think of as ruled by inexorable laws.”96 By carrying
our own actions into nature, we have blurred the boundaries and limits for human
action in the world.
Though one cannot know truth as something given and disclosed, man can
at least know what he makes himself. The mind can only know that which it has
itself produced in some sense within itself. In The Human Condition, Arendt
examines the process character of action, saying that as human beings, we
prescribe “man-made conditions to natural processes and force them to fall into
man-made pattern.”97 This enabled man to carry it, as it were, “within himself
wherever he went and thus freed him from given reality altogether – that is, from
the human condition.”98 For a moment we rejoice in a rediscovered unity of the
universe, but with the suspicion that we deal only with the patterns of our own
mind, which prescribes its laws to nature. According to Arendt, “what men now
have in common is not the world but the structure of their minds”99 and wherever
we go in the world we encounter only ourselves. How then are we to understand
the meaning of our actions through the course of history?
95 H. Arendt (Oct., 1958), The Modern Concept of History, The Review of Politics, Vol. 20, No. 4, p. 586. 96 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 61. 97 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 231. 98 Ibid., p. 285. 99 Ibid., p. 283.
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2.5 A Limit for History
For Arendt, if we assume that something like “an independent realm of pure
ideas exists, all notions and concepts cannot but be interrelated, because then
they all owe their origin to the same source: a human mind seen in its extreme
subjectivity.”100 In this way, thought can remain completely unaffected by
experience and hold no relationship to the world at all. What really undermines
the whole modern notion that meaning is contained in the process as a whole is
the fact that “we can take almost any hypothesis and act upon it, with a sequence
of results in reality which not only make sense but work.”101 No question exists at
all which does not lead to a consistent set of answers. In this sense everything
which is ‘permitted’ in theory can now be actualised through history and made
‘possible’ in reality.
The observable fact is that the single occurrence has ceased to make sense
without a universal process. Any order, any necessity, any meaning that human
beings wish to impose will do. “It is as though men were in the position to prove
almost any hypothesis they might choose to adopt.” The paradox however, is that
man, whenever he tries to learn about things which “neither are himself nor owe
their existence to him, will ultimately encounter nothing but himself, his own
constructions, and the patterns of his own action.”102 In the course of consistently
guided action, any hypothesis will become actualised as factual reality. From the
100 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 69. 101 Ibid., p. 87. 102 Ibid., p. 86.
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moment it starts, the process of action will proceed to create a world in which the
assumption becomes self-evident and true.
For Arendt, “the modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to
a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the
processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-
made or as potentially man-made. These processes, after having devoured, as it
were, the solid objectivity of the given, ended by rendering meaningless the one
over-all process,”103 history, which originally was conceived in order to give them
meaning. Thinking in terms of processes; we know only what we have made
ourselves, results in the insight that we can choose whatever we want and some
kind of meaning will always be the consequence. However, Arendt shows that
“the world of experiment seems always capable of becoming a man-made
reality” and this “unfortunately puts man back once more – and now even more
forcefully – into the prison of his own mind, into the limitations of patterns he
himself created.”104
If there are no limits or moral boundaries to define a process of becoming,
all that remains is an endless natural cycle without any individual meaning. The
world in itself, without the limits and possibilities defined by freedom, would be
nothing more than an amorphous and unnameable mass. Merleau-Ponty claims
that freedom arranges for there to be possibilities and obstacles, but “it does not
draw the particular outline of the world,” it merely “lays down its general
structures.” It is freedom therefore, which “brings into being the obstacles to
103 Ibid., p. 89. 104 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 288.
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freedom, so that the latter can be set over and against it as its bounds.” 105 If
freedom conditions the structure of what ‘is’, it is present wherever these
structures arise. When freedom is devoid of any project and faced with unknown
obstacles, there is no possibility of choice and absolute freedom cannot choose
since it allows itself to be drawn in all directions. Merleau-Ponty therefore
concludes that it is not ‘outside ourselves that we find a limit for our freedom.’106
With history as a process, there is a greater insistence on an unbroken
continuity to history, however past values are not present values, and cannot
truthfully be understood from the premises of the present. As human beings we
are able make the reality “only from the viewpoint of possible fulfilment and
continued enhancement of the complex structure of already historically attained
human needs and capacities.”107 To make history is to impose upon reality the
preconceived meaning and law of man. Sartre in The Critique of Dialectical
Reason says that “consciousness can see the strict necessity of the sequence and
of the moments which gradually constitute the world as a concrete totality,
because it is consciousness itself which constitutes itself for itself as absolute.”108
At every moment of history, we can only have a historically conditioned view or
perspective of the mind’s systematic structure, because “in order to be able to
ascertain and to measure progress, one must have set up a standard of values.”109
In history every standard is determined by the point where the subject is
situated and it is from there that it originates. If we recognise that all values are
relative to our epoch then there appears to be no unquestionable standards by
105 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology Of Perception, p. 510. 106 Ibid., p. 511. 107 Grumley, History and Totality, p. 55. 108 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, p. 22. 109 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 166.
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which to gauge our actions and consequently, we prepare the way for nihilism.
However, Stern believes that we do not need absolute values to escape nihilism,
because “we live in the present epoch and not in eternity”, and therefore, we may
“be satisfied with values valid for the present epoch.”110 Each new collective
project gives birth to a new code of values. By giving themselves new projects
and by imposing new norms upon themselves, a nation is able to create new
codes of values. It is the intrinsic directive value, “that is, the ideal affirmed in a
collective project,” which determines the whole system of “a nation’s radiated
values, gives a definite orientation to its instrumental values and impresses a
certain style on the evaluations of its members.”111 The most fundamental and
universal project which exists is the project of living. It is more fundamental than
all other projects because unlike them, “the human project of living does not
depend upon history but solely on the human condition, which is trans-
historical.”112 If we recognise that the human project of living is the a priori
condition of all other projects then we avoid Historicist nihilism. History can be
seen as the manifestation of a sequence of clashes between collective projects
and codes of values bound up in them.
The recognition of the human condition provides a limit for Historicism.
Stern suggests that there is no necessity for us to live without a belief in our
truths and values as long as we recognise our own standards as being relative to
our own epoch, because “it is in the very name of Historicism that we can insist
on the validity of our standards for our epoch and for our civilization.”113 Each
110 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 186. 111 Ibid., p. 226. 112 Ibid., pp. 242-3. 113 Ibid., p. 189.
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epoch creates its own standards and ideals, which open up roads of new
possibilities yet unrealised in history. The standards of values by which progress
is measured “have not stopped changing. They take the form of ideals, of
directive values and norms, which we carry in front of us while marching
through history. Mobile as ourselves, these standards always precede us.”114
Despite the plurality of the human condition, we have a deeper consciousness
which unites us and this in turn implies certain specific values. The human
condition is a constant in history – as long as men accept the conditions of their
existence they maintain certain fundamental evaluations of the world.115 They
hold values that are affirmed intrinsically in existence itself and in the project of
living common to all men. This establishes an objective limit to Historicism.
In this Chapter I have shown that by defining ourselves and our actions through
history, our human ‘nature’ can be seen as historically emergent and if man
becomes immersed in a totality of history, objective morality cannot be defined.
If human beings look to the process of history as absolute and outside
themselves, all that remains is a closed process, which functions independently of
the world and human deeds. With an escape into the absolute, the particular
becomes meaningless, because single events can no longer be understood in
isolation from history. It is the process as a whole which becomes meaningful.
114 Ibid., p. 193. 115 In “Practical Foundations and Political Judgement”, Biskowski focuses on the importance of the world in providing human
beings with orientation and meaning, saying that “the world provides action with context, meaning, a space to appear, and the
possibility of remembrance, as well as a common point of reference and orientation. When we lose contact with the world, for any
reason, we lose our sense of reality and our orientation in it.” (p. 881).
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Chapter 3: The Existential Response
In a world divested of a divine authority we have only our own existence to
ground us. We must look to this world and our human condition for the new
evaluation necessary to define the limits of our freedom. True freedom requires
the recognition that we are in the world and that there are definite things that we
can and cannot do. Maintaining an awareness of the conditions of our existence
and recognising that man alone gives value and meaning to the world is crucial to
our understanding of freedom.
This chapter focuses on the Existential reaction against a concept of history that
tries to dissolve the individual into a totality. In section one I will examine the
claim that man makes himself and his history and consequently, that man alone
can therefore define a limit for history. Section two looks at the sources of
meaning that remain for human beings after they have refused a higher
transcendent world, by focusing on their present situation in the world and their
adherence to the limits of their condition. In section three I will present the
argument that the conditions of existence in the world provide an unchanging
standard for human action. Finally in section four I will suggest that in focusing
on its affirmation of life and its perpetual struggle against death and injustice,
rebellion proves to be an enduring source of value for human beings.
The relationship of the individual to history is crucial to a fuller understanding of
freedom in the world. Olafson describes Existentialism as “a philosophy which
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[refused] to dissolve the individual,” and arose in response to Historicism. It was
Kierkegaard’s direct reaction against Hegel, whose modern concept of history
absorbed “every revolt and conflict and assertion of individual freedom into an
over-all, logical and necessary development.”116 Existentialism is a philosophy
which holds that the individual is defined or defines himself solely through the
free choices they make. It is the awareness of the absurdity of man’s situation,
which arises when man as an active being, confronts a world in which no over-all
rational pattern can be found. Nevertheless man is obliged by his ontological
structure to choose and act in the absence of any guiding principle to guide his
choice other than just the fact itself of being free.
Durfee emphasises that man asserts his presence in the world, that history
may set limits on man, “but it is also true that man in rebellion sets some limits
upon history.”117 For Camus, the act of rebellion is man’s “refusal to be treated as
an object and to be reduced to simple historic terms.” History is one of the limits
of man’s experience, but by rebelling, man “imposes in his turn a limit to history
and at this limit the promise of a value is born.”118 Camus asserts that he who
“dedicates himself to this history dedicates himself to nothing and, in his turn, is
nothing. But he who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house he
builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself to the earth and reaps from
it.”119 Camus believes that as human beings, we must recognise that life has an
intrinsic value that must be defended at all costs.
116 F. A. Olafson (Jan., 1955), Existentialism, Marxism, and Historical Justification, Ethics, Vol. 65, No. 2, p. 127. 117 H. A. Durfee (Jan., 1958), Albert Camus and the Ethics of Rebellion, The Journal of Religion, Vol. 38, No.1, p. 35. 118 Camus, The Rebel, p. 216. 119 Ibid., p. 266.
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Camus’s idea of rebellion affirms this value of existence, which is
recognised by every human being as a fundamental human value. “In rebellion
there is always one’s existence which is the very foundation for the rebellious
spirit.”120 It is precisely for this reason, that rebellion cannot offer a formal rule to
balance the insanity of history. The moral value brought about by rebellion is no
further above life and history than history and life are above it. It assumes no
reality in history until man gives his life for it or dedicates himself entirely to it.
However, the rebel is still able to set a limit on history, because in the act of
revolt, the rebel defies his unjust and incomprehensible condition and in doing so
affirms that life has a value for all people.
However, we cannot look on the invariable human condition as an
absolute limit for Historicism. For Stern, the human condition is “not a human
nature. While the latter was supposed to contain the universal, trans-historical,
eternal standards of all truths, all values, and all principles of right and morals,
the acceptance of the human condition by all men only throws into relief some
isolated trans-historical standards.”121 There exists therefore a human solidarity
which is opposed to death and suffering. A solidarity which is built around the
project of living that is common to all men. If we call this code of values basic
human ethics, it is because it refers only to the basic values of human existence:
life and health. These values are intrinsic to human existence and since they are
fundamental to human ethics they can also be seen as existential values.
Stern shows how Sartre’s Existentialism places two significant limits on
Historicism. First, that Sartre admits a kind of human universality under the name
120 Durfee, Albert Camus and the Ethics of Rebellion, p. 35. 121 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 202.
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of ‘condition’, by which, Sartre “understands, with other thinkers, the totality of
a priori limits which circumscribe the fundamental situation of man in the
universe. The historical situations vary. What never varies is the necessity for
man to be in a world, to live, to act in order to maintain himself in existence.”122
Despite the non-existence of a human nature in the midst of a constantly
changing history, the human condition allows us to preserve enough human
principles to understand any human project. Even through the diversity of human
actions, each individual project is an attempt to overstep the limits of the human
condition and thereby motivated by the same aim. In asserting that the choice of
a free project is always socially and historically conditioned Existentialism finds
a second limit for Historicism. Stern believes that “our freedom in choosing our
projects, on which Existentialism insists so strongly, can be carried out only
within the framework of the naturally, economically, and historically given
possibilities.”123 By changing the present to build a new future, we create a new
history which situates us and envelops us. Essence is a timeless abstraction, but
existence is basically historical and therefore is always situated historically.
Jenkins sees the existential man as a creature that must “satisfy the
objective conditions of life, but who encounters real subjective alternatives in the
way he can satisfy them.” In this way “values become both reports of conditions
that life imposes and expressions of the individual’s response to these
conditions.”124 If we look for a general overall meaning for the world, a meaning
that is not motivated by any particular project, we will be unable to find a
specific aim. Meaning can only mean something for an individual in a particular
122 Ibid., p. 178. 123 Ibid., p. 180. 124 I. Jenkins, (Sept. 1950), The Present Status of the Value Problem, The Review of Metaphysics, p. 109.
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situation. Stern claims that by starting with existing man, “Existentialism has
been forced into Historicism,” because existential man always exists at a certain
moment. By insisting that man is in the world and thus always existing at a
certain place and always situated historically, Existentialism defies the classical
concept of man in general who is “timeless, spaceless, extra-historical man, a
man without a world: in short, an abstraction.”125
Lichtheim says that philosophy must think about man and his position in
the world, because “man is an historical being, and his situation is constantly
changing; hence the only kind of thinking that can interpret his role is historical
thinking, which however is itself subject to change and cannot rise above the
horizon of its particular epoch.”126 Here Existentialism comes into its own,
because the historical process itself is the process of man’s self-creation, and
therefore, what man experiences in history is simply his own being as it comes
back to him mediated by the time-sequence. The same thinking that reveals the
logic of history at the same time makes transparent the ontological structure of
human existence. In the same act, man creates both himself and his world. For
this reason, there is nothing behind history, neither God nor Nature and therefore,
all that is needed for a better understanding of history “is the awareness that it
has the world of history and can never cease to project itself forward in an
endless quest for a union that cannot be attained.”127
Consciousness represents the element of freedom, because through it the
future is already present inasmuch as men are able to throw off the deadweight of
past historical accretions. Lichtheim declares that “we anticipate the future by
125 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, pp. 172-3. 126 G. Lichtheim No. 2, (1963), Sartre, Marxism, and History, History and Theory, Vol. 3, p. 244. 127 Ibid., p. 245.
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shaping our circumstances in accordance with our desires. The element of
freedom – deliberate choice – is embedded in the time-sequence inasmuch as
men relate themselves consciously to their future as well as to their past.”128 Man
defines himself by his projects and these acquire a practical content if it can be
shown that the historical process is kept going, by a dialectic ends and means that
is both imposed and willed. In this way, all action must conform to some degree
with our estimates of the future otherwise it would be utterly irrational and
chaotic.
In Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre states that “if God does not exist,
everything would be permitted.” This is the starting point for existentialism,
because without the existence of God or any transcendent absolute, we are not
provided with any values or commands to legitimise our behaviour. “Thus we
have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means
of justification or excuse. We are left alone, without excuse.129
Likewise, Wood
maintains that men make their own history, “but they do not make it just as they
please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under
circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”130
Human beings create themselves and their values through history, shaping the
world through their projects and providing a limit for their actions by drawing
from the world. In this way, they define the world and give it meaning.
128 Ibid., p. 231. 129 J. P. Sartre (1989) Existentialism and Humanism, (Trans. Philip Mairet), Methuen, London, pp. 33-4. 130 P. Wood (1985), Sartre, Anglo-American Marxism, and the Place of the Subject in History, Yale French Studies, No. 68, p. 15.
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3.1 Sources of Meaning
The absurd situation arises out of the polarity between man and the universe. It
arises out of man’s desire to give meaning to the world and the awareness that
the universe in itself is without point or purpose. It is the awareness that there is
no final resolution, because man is always in the process of becoming. Realising
that no final synthesis is an attainable, the act of rebellion becomes the only
meaningful course of action for human beings. In rebelling against the absurd
condition of their existence, human beings are able to find a source of meaning in
the world.
Without rebellion, the absurd condition can lead to nihilistic conclusions.
As Camus writes in The Rebel, “if one believes in nothing, if nothing makes
sense, if we can assert no value whatsoever, everything is permissible and
nothing is important.” The sense of the absurd makes murder seem a matter of
indifference and hence, permissible. Indifference to life is a mark of nihilism and
having no higher value to direct our action, human beings aim at efficiency,
because since nothing is true or false, good or bad, human ‘principles will
become that of showing ourselves to be the most effective.’131
Camus presents the human condition as an encounter with absurdity and
concludes therefore that life provides an absolute value, since the preservation of
life is necessary to maintain the absurd polarity between man and the world.
Willhoite however, shows that the absurd condition was “always nothing but a
point of departure” for Camus; “a place where, bereft of convincing transcendent
131 Camus, The Rebel, p. 13.
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meanings or imperatives, he felt compelled to take his stand before setting out to
chart a path to authentic human existence.”132 For Hoy, Camus is led to the
recognition that “from the moment that life is recognised as good it becomes
good for all men.” Human life is the only good, since “it is precisely life that
makes the absurdist logic possible, and since without life, the absurdist wager
would have no basis.”133 It is the world which provides a source of meaning for
human action, because to be human is “to experience and to defy absurdity, to
demand that the world be intelligible, that it affirm a sense of meaning.”134
For Camus the act of rebellion is a demand for meaning in an unjust and
irrational universe. Confronted with an incomprehensible condition, it is “a
demand for clarity”, in which the rebel expresses an aspiration for order by
attacking “a shattered world to make it whole.”135 Rebellion for Goodwin is the
demand of human beings for “order in the midst of chaos.”136 In his perpetual
demand for unity, the rebel’s fight against death amounts to claiming that life has
a meaning. “Every rebel therefore pleads for life and affirms that rebellion is the
only value which can save them from nihilism.”137 This passion for order
disclosed in the act of rebellion, sets a limit to man’s acceptance of oppression by
disorder or injustice. It involves not only the rejection of the lack of order of the
world, but it also conserves and augments other aspects of reality, such as the
common human dignity disclosed by the rebellion. In this way, it is the existing
conditions of the world which determine its new meaning.
132 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 27. 133 Hoy, Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, p. 577. 134 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 120. 135 Camus, The Rebel, p. 29. 136 Ibid., p. 16. 137 G. A. Goodwin (Mar., 1971), On Transcending the Absurd: An Inquiry in the Sociology of Meaning, The American Journal of
Sociology, Vol. 76, No. 5, p. 838.
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Hochberg suggests, that since “the world is the only one Camus
comprehends and its joys and values the only ones he grasps, he can only be
satisfied with giving the world, somehow, an intrinsic value.”138 For Camus, man
comprehends only what he experiences, therefore he must seek some means of
anchoring his values in the world of experience. Values must come about from
the factual condition of the world as it is and without the otherworldliness of
transcendent values, man is left with this world and this life as sole possible
sources of value. Throughout his life, Camus maintained the simple position of
attempting to remain faithful to the concrete foundations motivated by human
existence in the world.
There is a discernible development throughout Camus’s life in his
understanding of the human condition. For him, the world remains the sole
source of meaning, and because of this, he maintains a total adherence to the
‘this-worldliness’ of life. This can be seen in man’s constant rebellion against
suffering and death. Throughout his work, the fundamental value of life remained
the sole value. Camus maintained that there is no superhuman happiness or
eternity outside of time where man can possess ideal truths. Because of his
intense existential concern with his own knowable bodily existence, Camus
refused to believe in the reality of any life other than the present earthly
existence. There is a certain ‘pointlessness’ to the problem of immortality
because for him, human beings are only interested in their destiny before, not
after.
138 H. Hochberg (Jan., 1965), Albert Camus and the Ethic of Absurdity, Ethics, Vol. 75, No. 2, p. 90.
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For Camus, a “purely historical absolute is not even conceivable” in
reality, since man lives in the midst of this totality he cannot grasp it. For this
reason, history as an entirety can only exist “in the eyes of an observer outside it
and outside the world.”139 Thought is always out in front and sees further than the
body, but the body lives in the present and is determined by its finite situation.
for this reason, Camus does not want to turn his back on his present riches. He
refuses all the ‘later ons’ of the world insisting that “even if I wished it, what
have I to do with any truth that does not decay? It isn’t cut to my dimensions.”140
In the refusal of the future, accepting of the present becomes all important, but
only on condition that man should always remain faithful to the present and
endure each experience with complete lucidity.
Hoy maintained that Camus’s argument remained quite simple: “We must
live with what we know. We cannot escape into faith.” Because of this, we are
called upon “to adopt the logic of the absurd man, who is conscious that reason
cannot give him certainty, but also insists that he must live without appeal.”141 If
we decide to live, it is because we find some positive value in our personal
existence. In each case however, the values are not given and have to be deduced
from the conditions of living. Camus denied all transcendent sources of value and
found instead “a basic value, one created by man.” With this value he attempted
“to construct an ethic and repudiate nihilism.”142 This life is all we have and
139 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 109, quoting from Camus’s The Rebel (p. 189). 140 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 21. 141 Hoy, Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, p. 580. 142 Hochberg, Albert Camus and the Ethic of Absurdity, p. 93.
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because of that, the rebel’s ethic must be one of ceaseless opposition against the
absurd world, through which ‘the absolute value becomes opposition to death’143
Life itself proposes an ethics of choice and limitation. If a limited future
does not render life meaningless, it is because Camus is a man of the present. He
realises that “real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.”144
His attitude comes from nothing more that a total and uncompromising
adherence to the sole dimension of time we have elected. Far from being an
ethics of passivity, it demands a constant awareness to the present. For Camus, a
threatened future adds all the more value to present life. In Letters to a German
Friend, he states that he chose justice in order to remain faithful to the world,
saying: “I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I
know that something in it has meaning and that is man, because he is the only
creature to insist on having one. This world has at least the truth of man, and our
task is to provide its justification against fate itself. And it has no justification but
man.”145
3.2 A Sense of Limits
Since human beings are left with the world only as their sole source of meaning,
they must find and define the limits of that world. Camus claims that in the past,
the Greeks took refuge behind the conception of limits, in which they negated
nothing and thereby never carried anything to its extremes. Modern day Europe,
143 Ibid., p. 99. 144 Camus, The Rebel, p. 268. 145 Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death, p. 28.
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on the other hand, “negates whatever she does not glorify. And through all her
diverse ways, she glorifies but one thing, which is the future rule of reason. In
her madness she extends the eternal limits.”146 Willhoite appears to agree with
Camus in saying that it was Christianity which “turned man away from the
world” and reduced him “to himself and to his history.”147 Human beings, in no
longer sharing the world, extended their thought beyond the limits of immediate
experience and began to make the demands of nihilism. This is because when
reason is “released from ascetic limitations in the personality”, it edges towards
“an inner world in which everything is possible and nothing is true.”148
Camus possesses a strong sense of the limits and a clear understanding of
individual human responsibility, because for him “the absurd does not liberate; it
binds. It does not authorise all actions.”149 He rejects all moral absolutes because
he does not view the present as a corrupt and incomplete moment which points to
something beyond itself. Willhoite examines Camus’s denial of ‘a life beyond
earthly existence’, which allows him to set forth “a new system of beliefs and
acts of faith. Far from negating all transcendence, he gives back a structure to a
sunken world limited by man, but a place wherein things take on meaning.”150
Roth claims that “the root of the matter lies for Camus in the self-discovery by
the individual that his claim is not for total liberty” but that “there is in each of us
a consciousness of limit, a limit which we cannot overstep without contradicting
146 A. Camus (1975), The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Penguin, London, p. 167. 147 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 116. 148 Woolfolk, The Artist as Cultural Guide, p. 107. 149 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, pp. 98-9. 150 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 52.
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our nature.”151 The freedom asserted by rebellion is always a never wholly
successful attempt to liberate oneself from necessity.
For both Arendt and Camus it is human existence which presents the most
profound limits. They argue for an ethical and political conduct which is
constrained by our existence because it is our ‘common human condition, which
makes a politics of human rights imperative.’152 The conditions of human
existence are inherently limited because all life is bounded by birth and death.
The frailties of the human condition can either be exploited by ideologies that
seek forcibly to transcend human limits or can be sustained by healthy, self-
limiting forms of individual and collective autonomy.
According to Hochberg, the human condition of mortality sets a limit to
our existence and it is for this reason that Camus aims to face the actuality of the
present, in order to recognise in it all its possibilities and limitations without
reverting to faith in transcendent and absolute values. For Willhoite, an absolute
unshakable foundation is meaningless for human beings, simply because each
man is imprisoned in the conditions of his own existence. The question of the
meaningfulness of life as a whole is pointless because a man who is “indifferent
to imposed meanings and ignorant intellectual puzzles finds a strange immediate
communion with an impenetrable and equally indifferent world.”153 Metaphysical
freedom is of no concern to the absurd man. Because it “is irrelevant to one who
believes neither in a God who controls his actions nor in an after-life in which he
will be judged according to the use he has made of his capacity for free
151 L. Roth (Oct., 1955), A Contemporary Moralist: Albert Camus, Philosophy, Vol. 30, No. 115, p. 301. 152 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 11. 153 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 43.
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choice.”154 Though we can’t escape death, we should not accept it and for this
reason we should rebel. In refusing to evade the reality of our fate and our
condition we are drawn nearer to the world.
For Camus, the rebel rejects the consequences implied by death because in
rebelling, he does not ask for life but only for reasons for living. “If nothing lasts,
then nothing is justified: anything that dies has no meaning. To fight against
death amounts to claiming that life has a meaning, to fighting for order and for
unity.”155 For the rebel, what is missing from the suffering and happiness of the
world is some principle by which that can be explained and justified. With an
existential awareness of death, there is no point in living for some future reward,
for the ‘later ons’ of the world. Under the weight of such awareness, human
beings have a need to take an unjustified leap into some transcendent principle in
order to give life the appearance of meaning. An absolute provides man with a
means of comprehending the absurd and giving life an overall coherent aim.
According to Nietzsche, “the nihilistic question of ‘for what?’ is rooted in
the old habit of supposing that the goal must be put up, given, demanded from
outside – by some superhuman authority. Having unlearned faith in that, one still
follows the old habit and seeks another authority that can speak unconditionally
and command goals and tasks.”156 Human beings have a constant need to ground
their values in some form of unquestionable absolute, in order to provide them
with meaning and orientation in the world. Willhoite warns against this tendency,
saying that “those who set out the premise of a limitless human freedom … seek to
154 Ibid., p. 32. 155 Camus, The Rebel, p. 73. 156 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 16.
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actualise their boundless freedom by aligning themselves with a movement
which claims the authorisation of history for it exercise of total freedom.”157
Camus was unable to discern a divine order outside of existence that could
provide a transcendent meaning and make human life ultimately coherent. He
concluded therefore that there were “no laws or norms accessible to man through
revelation or from nature to govern the manifold complexities of his existence.”158
This does not mean however, that there are no valid standards for the conduct of
life discernible to man. According to Peyre, one must accept the unintelligibility
of the world and pay attention to man in order to lead into a realm of human
significance. But the question remains; “What are the positive values which
persist in this world of mortals sentenced to death?”159
3.3 Sources of Value
Camus’s concept of rebellion reinforces his fidelity to the human condition, and
it is this that remains a fundamental value for him. Each man must be
continuously aware that life has no significance that transcends the particular
moments in which he lives it. Thus, by being fully involved and committed to the
world, the rebel is able to respond to each situation in which he finds himself.
Willhoite shows that rebellion “keeps continuously alive an awareness of the
absurd,” which requires a wholehearted “embracing of life, a perpetual struggle
157 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 92. 158 Ibid., p. 49. 159 H. Peyre (1960), Camus the Pagan, Yale French Studies, No. 25, p. 25.
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against death.”160 In doing so, it provides a standard of value for Camus because
of its intensely personal reaction to the existentially realised fact of mortality.
Rebellion must embrace life as its only foundation because without it, the rebel
would be unable to assert any principles.
The act of rebellion affirms values while limiting reality. The slave in
rebelling defines a limit for suffering and in so doing he discovers something of
value within himself which is identical with something of value within other
men. There is universality to cultural values in that, “what is historically essential
must not only be essential for this or for that individual, it must be important for
all.”161 The act of revolt appears to precede the conscious formulation of values,
because in his refusal, the rebel affirms certain human rights and values that must
be defended.
According to Durfee there is a common humanity implicit in the act of
rebellion which is always a value. Rebellion offers “a rule of conduct which does
not need to be endlessly projected into the future; nor is the rule merely a formal
ethical principle without immediate relevance to the historical situation.”162 As a
value it exists here and now and provides the basis of our protest against
injustice. The act of revolt uncovers this universal value which is crucial for a
shared understanding of the world. Roth shows that for Camus, “if men cannot
refer themselves to a common value, then man is incomprehensible to man. The
rebel demands that this value be clearly recognised in himself because he
160 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 37. 161 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 122. 162 Durfee, Albert Camus and the Ethics of Rebellion, p. 36.
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suspects, or knows, that, without this principle, disorder and crime would reign
over the world – it is the aspiration to an order.”163
In this Chapter I have provided the Existential response to Historicism, which
asserts that man makes himself and his history and therefore, it is man alone than
provide a limit and a meaning for history. Existentialism agrees that human
nature is historically emergent, however it maintains that if man looks to his
present situation in the world, to the ‘here and now’, and continues to remain
faithful to the origins of rebellion, then he is able to derive an ethic from his
actions.
Chapter 4: The Foundation of an Ethic
In this chapter I will examine the foundations that are necessary for freedom to
appear in the world, emphasising that these conditions must remain continuously
open to the future and consent to the relativity of human existence. Section one
focuses on the Existential response to the nihilistic claim that man is alone in the
world, which emphasises the importance of human participation in the shared
struggle against death. Section two presents the claim that, in realising that
human beings make themselves, man becomes solely responsible for his actions
and decisions because there is no transcendent principle in which he can take
refuge. In section three I will focus on a conception of limited freedom,
presenting the claim that although everything is permitted, it is only by accepting
163 Roth, A Contemporary Moralist, p. 299.
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new obligations and maintaining a fidelity to the world that we derive a sense of
freedom and that this involves making choices and limiting our options.
What then is needed for forging a more just and meaningful life? Isaac says that
“we need, in short, to ground, and thus to limit, our conduct, seeking foundations
at the same time that we acknowledge their provisional character.”164 Therefore,
there must be an awareness that human values are relative to the conditions of
existence and likewise that the foundations that arise must accommodate the
dynamic nature of human beings. Stern claims that “if all values, all norms and
standards were trans-historical and eternal, this would be tantamount to a total
inertia of mankind’s axiological consciousness.”165 Human beings by their very
nature are constantly involved in the world, and history is that constant process
of valuation and revaluation by human beings, according to their ever-changing
aims and projects. Values are appreciated throughout history and each one makes
its claim for universal validity, however, the individual that acts and the history
which gives an account of him “cannot be understood without the relativity of
values.”166 Since no values appear to be free from these historical conditions,
there can be no trans-historical standards that allow us to judge the truths and
values created throughout history.
For Camus, the world appears meaningless because there is no absolute,
but in another sense, there can be no absolute since such a thing would be
meaningless to the conditions of the world. Nietzsche supports this view by
saying that “the unconditional, representing that highest perfection, cannot
164 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 110. 165 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 194. 166 Ibid., p. 137.
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possibly be the ground of all that is conditional.”167 Existence in the world invites
human beings to act but it also makes the future indeterminate and the ultimate
consequences of their acts unknowable. Arendt likewise, reinforces this view by
saying that “laws residing on human power can never be absolute.”168 The
‘inauthoritive authority’ of rebellious politics places it on shifting sands rather
than solid rock. It still remains a stable and lasting authority however, because it
is grounded in our timeless condition of being rebellious and limited creatures.169
According to Goodwin, “the absurd is never overcome – all that occurs is
the creation of new theses which in turn have their own contradictions. A
meaningful existence, then, could become one of continual rebellion.”170 The
continual fight for order and unity is testimony that life has meaning, and for this
reason, Camus sought to derive an ethic from rebellion because it defines the
limits beyond which we cannot go. Because of this, it is absolutely necessary that
rebellion derive its justifications from itself; to study itself in order to learn how
to act. Through rebellion we may perhaps discover the rule of action which the
absurd could not give us. By Camus’s reasoning, it is not the knowledge of the
absurd that distinguishes man, but rather the rules of life and of action that he
derives from this truth. “Unless we ignore reality, we must find our values in it.
Is it possible to find a rule of conduct outside the realm of religion and of
absolute values? That is the question raised by revolt.”171
167 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 15. 168 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 132. 169 For further discussion on the topic of freedom and foundations, see Keenan’s “Promises, Promises: The Abyss of Freedom and
the Loss of the political in the Work of Hannah Arendt”, which examines the possibility that “freedom can only gain a foundation or
a space, or become a law for a particular group of people, by taking on a specific, limited form; the foundation, to make certain
options possible, will have to close down certain others: future possible new beginnings will be restricted and others ruled out
entirely.” (Pg. 315) 170 Goodwin, On Transcending the Absurd, p. 837. 171 Camus, The Rebel, p. 27.
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For Camus, the rebel slave says yes and no at the same time. “He affirms
that there are limits and also that he suspects – and wishes to preserve – the
existence of certain things beyond those limits.”172 Thus in the act of rebellion,
the rebel implicitly brings into play a standard of values that he is willing to
preserve at all costs. The moment he rebels, he begins to consider things in
particular and his situation becomes defined by new values. In order to exist, man
must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits
where minds meet. Camus presents rebellion as the common ground on which
every man bases his first values. In saying ‘I rebel – therefore we exist,’173 he is
led to an ethic of openness and participation in the world with others. Rebellion,
though it springs from an individualist impulse, questions the very idea of the
individual through the rebel’s willingness to subordinate his personal life to a
common good. Therefore, the act of revolt provides us with a ground for human
ethics because in our awareness of the common condition of men, we derive a
minimal evaluative standpoint from which to establish a stable foundation.
For Willhoite, before ever reflecting on the most fruitful ethic for action,
human beings must first fully and openly encounter life in existential awareness
and find it to be essentially good and meaningful. Otherwise, “ethics can all too
easily become a closed system increasingly isolated from experience and inspire
fanatical efforts to crush human realities inconsistent with the reign of abstract
ideals.” One must love life before loving meaning because “when the love of life
disappears, no meaning consoles us for it.”174 Critchley agrees that one must
embrace life here and now, otherwise in our solitude and isolation, the highest
172 Ibid., p. 19. 173 Ibid., p. 28. 174 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 99.
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thing upon which we can contemplate is nothing more than the “empty and pure,
naked and mere ego, with its autonomy and freedom.” 175 Left with nothing more
than ‘rational self-contemplation,’ rationality becomes a curse and we come to
deplore our existence.
4.1 Solitude and Participation
It is for this reason that Isaac emphasises the movement beyond solitude which is
entailed in rebellion and consequently, that dialogue and communication become
central to the formation of human values. Human freedom requires that
communities “establish conditions whereby ethical standards and public policies
can be collectively agreed upon rather than arbitrarily imposed.”176 However,
these foundations can only ever be provisionally given. For this reason these
conditions are forever dissonant and strange because “between the certainty I
have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will
never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.”177 Human natality and
rebellion furnishes us with the first principles of ethical construction, because
they always remain open and alive to the continuous process of revision,
responding to the changes of each situation in the world.
For Isaac, Camus saw rebellion as the “passionate affirmation of human
value” because it referred “the exercise of human freedom, to the fact that
humans are agents always capable of surpassing or at least distancing themselves
175 Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, p. 4. 176 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 124. 177 Ibid., pp. 124-5.
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from their existing circumstances.”178 He makes the transition from solitary revolt
to a shared struggle because the act of revolt implicitly affirms a shared value
and dignity. Willhoite also shows that Camus saw with increasing clarity that
being human “requires broadening one’s rebellion so that it encompasses
resistance to forces which threaten the lives of [other] men and not merely
oneself.”179 For this reason, through rebellion, Camus places a greater emphasis
on participation instead of solitude, thus shifting from a primary concern with the
situation of the lone individual to that of the community.180
Honeywell shows that Camus, in his focus on rebellion, moves beyond
mere personal experience to a fuller understanding of freedom that requires the
shared participation of society. In this way “unity among men exists as a tension
or balance maintained by the mutual limitation of freedom and justice; it thus is
based on a freedom and a justice which are always relative, never absolute.”181
Rebellion is never a claim to absolute unity because it only ever aspires to the
relative. The freedom to rebel requires that no one system of justice is taken as
final or absolute. It emphasises a type of unity that involves plurality, because it
“provides a framework within which each man’s passion for order, operating in
its unique perspective, can contribute to the whole, thus a framework in which
rebellion can result in fruitful action – the creation of order out of disorder by
each man, the activity which marks his human nature.”182
Rebellion is the recognition of the positive value of creative freedom
while at the same time, recognising the limits of this freedom. This limit comes
178 Ibid., p. 73. 179 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 51. 180 For a more detailed discussion on the importance of participation and its relationship to freedom in the world, see Kateb,
“Freedom and Worldliness in the Thought of Hannah Arendt”. 181 J. A. Honeywell (Jul., 1970), Revolution: Its Potentialities and Its Degradations, Ethics, Vol. 80, No. 4, p. 256. 182 Ibid., p. 257.
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from an awareness of other human beings and their capacity to rebel. For Hoy,
rebellion “supposes a limit at which the community of man is established. Its
universe is the universe of relative values.”183 Rebellion therefore provides human
beings with a freedom which is relative, both to the world in which we live and
the conditions that we share. According to Durfee “man’s solidarity is founded
upon rebellion, and rebellion can only be justified by this solidarity, [because]
with rebellion this estrangement of the self from the world is seen as a collective
experience.”184 Thus there is a need for human beings to find a common value in
their existence that can be maintained and defended.
In The Rebel, Camus asks the question ‘why would a person rebel if there
is nothing worth preserving in themselves?’ For him, it is a question of whether
or not a human ‘nature’ can exist, since rebellion, though “apparently negative
since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man
which must always be defended.”185 The individual is not the embodiment of the
values they defend. All humanity is needed to comprise those values and
therefore, when man rebels he comes to identify himself with other men. Thus
the ‘All or Nothing’ attitude of rebellion undermines the very conception of the
individual, who actually consents to die and be sacrificed for the sake of a
common good which he considers more important than his own destiny. The
rebel acts therefore, “in the name of certain values which are still indeterminate
but which he feels are common to himself and to all men.”186
183 Hoy, Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, p. 578. 184 Durfee, Albert Camus and the Ethics of Rebellion, p. 33. 185 Camus, The Rebel, p. 25. 186 Ibid., p. 21.
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Man’s values appear therefore to be derived from his essence rather than
his existence. Like Camus, Hochberg holds that there is a human essence which
is presupposed by the rebel’s value and that this value emerges from man’s
existential condition. Both universals and values are spoken of as “transcending
individuals”, which provides part of “the bridge whereby Camus proceeds from
the premise that one rebels for values to the conclusion that there is a universal
human nature.”187 Likewise, Roth asserts that we rest in the position that there is a
limit in all things, and that “there is a limit restraining the relations between man
and man. For the limit we recognise in our own selves we recognise to exist in
others, so that we see in them too, just as in ourselves, a limit beyond which they
may not be pushed.”188 Consequently we dare not do unto others what we would
not have others do unto us. This limit of human endurance holds for others as
well as for ourselves and so declares the common nature of us all.
4.2 Human Nature and the Human Condition
As long as there is human consciousness in the world, there will always be
subjectivity. And with this subjectivity it becomes impossible to establish and
maintain absolute and permanent modes of authority. Human existence is
bounded by mortality and situated within the history of the world. Arendt states,
that “the human condition does not constitute anything like human nature”
because it is highly unlikely that we, “who can know, determine, and define the
natural essence of all things surrounding us, which we are not, should ever be
187 Hochberg, Albert Camus and the Ethic of Absurdity, p. 98. 188 Roth, A Contemporary Moralist, p. 302.
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able to do the same for ourselves – this would be like jumping over our own
shadows.”189 Sartre likewise declares that man has no other nature than the one he
has made, building up his own essence which is preceded by his existence. He
denies that man’s essence precedes his historical existence, writing that “man as
the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is
nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of
himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a
conception of it.”190
Killinger claims, that in rejecting the concept of human nature, Sartre is
lead to declare that “man is freedom” because of his openness to possibilities for
the future through his indeterminate potentiality. Existentialism tries to return
man to himself as freedom, because it insists that “existence precedes essence.
Because man can choose, within the limits of his finitude, how he shall live, his
existence occurs before his essence is determined.”191 As an existentialist, Sartre
is dedicated to the reawakening of the individual consciousness and the innate
freedom of man. If existence really does precede essence, then “there is no
explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other
words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom.”192 But his freedom
does not come cheaply. The possibility of becoming gives a greater dignity to
man, but it also brings an individual responsibility for each choice and ultimately
for all men.
189 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 10. 190 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, pp. 27-28. 191 J. Killinger (May, 1961), Existentialism and Human Freedom, The English Journal, Vol. 50, No. 5, p. 304. 192 Ibid., p. 313.
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Absolute responsibility for Sartre, means saying that “I am thus
responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man
as I would have him be. In fashioning myself I fashion man.”193 The existential
man is thereby ‘condemned to be free.’194 This new freedom, for which man alone
is responsible for defining, is a terrifying freedom. Many people would rather
live life as an object, than face the consequences of self-determinism, because
there is nowhere to hide from responsibility and no absolute to secure the voice
of man. Existentialism denies that the individual values which we posit by our
evaluations are determined by essences or general norms existing before those
values. In this way, Existentialism denies the existence of a transcendent absolute
above and beyond the world.
For Sartre, freedom is “the only foundation of values, and nothing,
absolutely nothing justifies me in adopting this value rather than that, this
hierarchy of values rather than another.”195 The values emerging in the course of
history are the only values in the world. There is no supra-historical value
allowing us to judge these historical values. Stern reinforces this view of freedom
by stating that likewise, there is no human nature if there is no God to conceive
it. Thus, “man is nothing but what he makes himself in the course of history. If
there is no human nature hovering above history as a supra-temporal essence,
then there is no universal man, no archetype-man who could serve as a standard
by which to judge the different types of men emerging in the course of
history.”196 This activity of making ourselves through history, without any
193 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, p. 30. 194 Ibid., p. 34. 195 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 177. 196 Ibid., p. 177.
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reliance on previous standards, gives us a sense of unlimited freedom. What is
needed then is a concept of freedom which is limited to the World
4.3 Limited Freedom
For Arendt, freedom is conceived in the world “not as an inner human
disposition but as a character of human existence in the world.” Therefore, man
does not possess freedom, but rather “his coming into the world, is equated with
the appearance of freedom in the universe; man is free because he is a beginning
and was so created after the universe had already come into existence.”197
However in the case of the human condition, there is forever a ‘necessity which
prevents us from doing what we know or will’, which arises from the world,
from our own bodies, and is ‘bestowed upon man by birth.’198 Therefore, we are
constantly trying to get beyond this necessity and this struggle constitutes the
whole of human history.
The nihilist erroneously concludes that if God is dead, everything is
permitted because no values can be affirmed outside the realm of the
transcendent. But Willhoite shows that the absence of an eternal law does not
mean that there is no law of any kind, because “if nothing is prohibited eternally,
neither is anything permitted apart from human denial or permission. No liberty
is possible except in a world where both the permitted and the prohibited are
defined.”199 To have unbridled freedom would be to suffer a new form of anguish
and a new form of happiness. Camus says, that “from the moment that man
197 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 165-6. 198 Ibid., p. 158. 199 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 106.
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believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes responsible for
everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer
from life.” Freedom of the mind is not a comfort but an achievement. There is a
great risk in wanting to consider oneself above the law. That is why the mind
only finds “its real emancipation in the acceptance of new obligations.” 200
Freedom for Camus, can only exist in a world where “what is possible is
defined at the same time as what is not possible.”201 Camus reasons that although
it is not possible to define human existence in terms of objective or
transcendental values, this does not justify nihilist reasoning that anything is
possible, but on the contrary, it “leads to a respect for human dignity and limited
freedom.”202 Absolute liberty, which is the aim of rebellion, eventually becomes a
prison of absolute duties and collective asceticism. If the world is without a
higher order and nothing is therefore true, then nothing is forbidden because in
order to prohibit an action there must first be a standard of values. However, this
also means that nothing can be authorised, because there must also be values and
aims in order to choose the correct course of action. Therefore, at the conclusion
of complete liberation Nietzsche chooses complete subordination, because for
him rebellion ends in ascetic renunciation; “If nothing is true, nothing is
permitted.”203
Willhoite shows that for Camus, “Nietzsche’s nihilism implies that man
lives without restraints, except those he places upon himself; that he can re-create
200 Camus, The Rebel, p. 62. 201 Ibid., p. 62. 202 Hoy, Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, p. 579. 203 Camus, The Rebel, p. 63.
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the world in whatever image he desires.”204 Therefore Camus presents, in the
figure of the rebel, an individual of integrity who chooses self-renunciation in the
face of opportunity. Even though the individual inhabits a moral universe in
which everything is permitted, he chooses instead a narrower and more defined
sense of self. Camus sees our existence as a liberating condition, because “not
only does it free us from a transcendent absolute, but it frees us in smaller ways.
For just as we lose our freedom with a transcendent absolute that defines our
purpose, we tend to lose it by thinking in terms of the future. We propose roles
for ourselves and hence limit our freedom by living within these roles.”205
Because of this, Camus imagines a culture freed from all commanding
values and creeds, but which favours inhibition over impulse. For Camus,
genuine character represents an internalisation of limits, a repression of
possibilities in the personality. Therefore it is necessary that the broadening
experience of sympathetic understanding “have limits in order to protect the
capacity of the personality to reject”206 some aspect in order to accept others. One
must maintain fidelity to the limits of the world around us and to the limits of
ourselves. Without the protection of an ascetic discipline, man can resist no
opportunity.
In this Chapter I have shown that the conditions of freedom must be relative,
continual, open, and shared. I have presented the existential claim that we make
ourselves and therefore we have absolute responsibility for our actions and
decisions. Everything is permitted and choice is unlimited in general, but it is
204 Willhoite, Albert Camus' Politics of Rebellion, p. 405. 205 Hochberg, Albert Camus and the Ethic of Absurdity, p. 94. 206 Woolfolk, The Artist as Cultural Guide, p. 96.
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only be accepting new obligations and closing off certain possibilities that we
define the world and make is mean something in particular. As human beings
situated in the world we have a duty to maintain our awareness of our limits and
our place in that world.
Conclusions
The modern conception of freedom; of humans as makers of their own destinies,
is a powerful one. There is a sense of rebelliousness, of pushing up against the
limits. As Isaac puts it; “it is essential for us to know whether men, without the
help of either the eternal or rationalist thought, can unaided create their own
values.” Everything can not be reduced to negation and absurdity. But we must
first “posit negation and absurdity because they are what our generation has
encountered and what we must take into account.”207 Both Arendt and Camus
arrive at a similar vision of freedom; one which refuses to privilege any form of
human authority.
Without God, man is left with two choices: either seek out a new absolute
and posit his values there, or look to what remains and derive his values from
that. If man chooses the first option, he withdraws from the world even though he
is in it. If he makes history his absolute then he has an absolute of eternal
movement and no way of stabilizing his values. But if man chooses the second
option, he remains faithful to all he has – the world and the conditions of his
207 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 11.
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existence. He acknowledges the relativity of his standards both to himself and his
history and in so doing, finds a new limit for freedom in the world.
In this thesis I have asked the question; ‘Is freedom unlimited?’ I have shown
that there is unlimited freedom but that this kind of freedom, without any
recognition of limits, leads ultimately to meaninglessness. I conclude that man
alone as sole creator of his values and purposes, is left with a choice – ignore the
world and choose unlimited freedom or choose a limited freedom and accept life
and its conditions. We are always in the process of becoming and we must define
our existence by what we can and cannot do.
~ 71 ~
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