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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize this. So this is part three of this series we've been doing on the work of Albert Camus. Consider listening to the last two before this one, but you know I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. Solidarity was the concept that Camus laid out in his book the Plague, where he says that affirming life as it is means affirming that other human beings live in the same world that you do, and that when the absurd comes knocking at your door, whatever it is, solidarity means to affirm that these people face a similar set of existential dilemmas that you do as a being, that to ignore the people around you or to justify their suffering with reasons for why they deserve it. Well, to Camus, this is fundamentally to deny something important about the reality that you live in. Now, as we know, none of this is grounded for him in a philosophical system. As we've talked about, this emerges for him simply from a lucid affirmation of our own nature and the nature of the universe, the tension between those two. And as I teased at the end of last episode, this concept of solidarity will become the foundation for extending what he thinks we can say from this place of lucid revolt. Solidarity is going to allow him to make a case for justice. But it can be confusing to hear that at first. Like, how in God's name is he going to pull something like this off? Justice requires Laws. Laws are theoretical abstractions. Camus, the kind of guy on Halloween that'll steal candy from someone dressed up as a theoretical abstraction. He doesn't like them, certainly not when they claim to be universal. He lays out his case for this justice of his in a very long essay he wrote in 1951 called the Rebel. It should be said the same way Dostoevsky might be most famous for writing Crime and Punishment, but that super fans of his always have one of his other books as their top favorite. Camus may be most known for writing the Stranger or the Mythosisyphus, but this essay, the Rebel's the one that people really serious about his work, will often say contains his biggest contribution to human thought. Just saying, this is a highly respected book we're talking about today. Camus starts the Rebel coming out swinging. He's got no time to lollygag around anymore, not in a world that has no theory of justice yet. He's got to do something. And immediately he gives us one of those powerful images he's known for in his work. He gets us to picture a slave who spent their whole life taking orders, and. And they suddenly decide they're not going to obey some new order they've been given. They say no to the master that's trying to force them to do something. Well, Camus asks in the first line of the essay, what is a rebel? A rebel is a person who says no, but like this slave, it's a person whose refusal does not imply a renunciation because the slave is also a person, he says, who, when they say no, is also a person saying yes to something very important from the moment they make that first gesture of rebellion. Let's break down exactly what he's saying here. What is the slave saying when he says no to the master there? Well, to Camus, he's saying something along the lines of this far, but no farther, or, I've done this for a while, but I'm not going to do it anymore, Mr. Slave Driver. No, I'm not going to do it. In other words, the slave saying no there implies a borderline for Camus, that as human beings, it just seems to be the kind of creatures that we are, that as a person, there are things you can do to me where it is a line that you are crossing that I am not cool with. You'll notice this is a similar move to the one we've seen him make in the last two episodes, grounding this in a lucid experience and not a system. And what you'll Also notice is that this is one of those common feelings in a human experience that while it's not universal to him, it more or less functions just like a universal to Camus because of how common it is. And when it comes to this kind of borderline, we're talking about it. Here's the important thing. For Camus, it doesn't really matter where that line specifically is. Doesn't need to be the same line for everyone. The point here is there is a line where I say this far and no farther. Where to cross that line would be a violation of my human dignity. Now, saying no, acknowledging that line is not a renunciation of anything for Camus. In fact, if you think about it, it's an affirmation of two things really, for him. One, it's an affirmation of that borderline that exists in my own experience. But two, it affirms the borderline that exists in the experience of others. Because for any human on this planet who shares the same feeling I have, where they have certain lines that can't be crossed, I affirm the legitimacy of their line by affirming the legitimacy of my own by saying no. And look, maybe you're someone who doesn't have a line. Maybe you're the kind of person, someone could come up and kill you and you wouldn't even see it as a violation. Heck, maybe you're listening to this and you're just a sculpture made out of play. D'oh. Sitting on a kid's bookshelf somewhere. Think. By the way, thanks for listening. I'll take it. The point is to make a judgment like this, where you're saying no to something. You have to have an orientation of care towards the things around you. In fact, to even find your voice and say anything at all to Camus is to desire and to judge towards a value. To breathe is to judge, he says in one really cool line in the book. Which means every act of saying no then tacitly invokes a value. And if the value of saying no is a preservation of limits where human dignity cannot be violated, then every act of rebellion like this, simply by engaging in it, is an affirmation of the existence of this borderline for the kinds of creatures we are collectively. So to say no for Camus is also to say yes to this collective human dignity. And this is what is meant by him in his famous reformulation of the line from Descartes. Instead of I think, therefore I am, he says, I rebel, therefore we exist. Now, what we've done here in Case you missed, it is, is we've just set up a line of human dignity that cannot be crossed, and we've done this without grounding its legitimacy in theoretical abstractions. This justice, then, is not only like the concept of solidarity from last time. Solidarity and justice are connected. One necessarily implies the other. For Camus, meaning justice is not a system of ethics. It's not an external set of norms or rules. Justice is an internal metaphysical posture towards the world. It's once again, something descriptive, not normative. It's something embodied, not abstract. And it's a posture that, for the rest of the book, he's going to be calling rebellion. Now, much of this book, the rebel is going to be Camus making a case for how we got to a type of modern ideological extremism that claims to preserve human dignity by trampling all over this line we just set up. In other words, there's a difference, he says, between true rebellion, genuinely aimed at human dignity, that goes on within certain real limits. And there's a difference between that and when rebellion turns into revolution, something you see in the gulags and labor camps of Stalinism, something you see in the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. But don't stop yourself just at the examples during Camus time. Picture anything going on during your own time, not even necessarily political, that starts as one thing that's clearly intended to preserve human dignity, but then transforms into something else in the name of a higher ideal or a cause or a set of abstractions of some type. Picture things that remove these limitations on rebel in ways that are contradictory. And for Camus, there is no better, more public, more commonly accepted version of this contradiction than in the death penalty. His essay Reflections on the Guillotine is one of the most cited things in history on capital punishment. And it should be said he understands where people are coming from when they support something like the death penalty. You know, find me the most disgusting crime you possibly can where somebody completely ruins many different lives while doing it, and then tell me you have sympathy for anything that happens to that person. Tell me that. Tell me when we're looking at the terrible consequences of what they did. Looking at the kids in the face, that your priority right now is to think about their rights. I mean, you could say, look, these people forfeited any right they have to life the second they violated that other person's right to life so much. To Camus, they'll say this kind of stuff like such a sentimental, confident idiot, like anybody thinking about anything deeper than their initial anger towards Something must be on the side of murderers. But to Camus, this person's already shown their hypocrisy, just in the way they've described this so far. He might start by saying, so you mean to tell me that in the name of protecting the sanctity of life, you're going to kill this person against their will? Do you realize that the move you're making there is the exact same move that extremist ideologies make? When they trample on people's rights in the name of a cause, they become the oppressors that they claim to be trying to stop. They make exceptions for themselves. They turn their enemies into not human beings anymore, but just little rational cogs that don't have rights that fit into some abstract system that solves the absurdity of the world for them, makes it into a nice, neat, philosophically just gift wrapped up for them. Oh, boy. Camus has a line in the opening paragraph of the introduction of the rebel. He says, quote, there are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined. But the penal code makes the convenient distinction of premeditation. We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults, and they have the perfect alibi philosophy which can be used for any purpose, even for transforming murderers into judges. End quote. His point is a criminal, at least sometimes has an explanation that they just did something stupid in a moment. It was because of love that I did it or because of anger. It was a crime of passion. I wasn't thinking very clearly. But no matter how premeditated a criminal can get, it pales in comparison to the level of premeditation, justification, and planning that goes on in a legal system that hands out the death penalty. Consider for a second that there is a room out there called a courthouse with judges and lawyers and gavels and big Corinthian columns and all this pomp and circumstance that goes on where the entire point of it all is to carry out a ceremony where, on behalf of our cause of justice, based on our set of theoretical abstractions, we have decided that we are justified in killing you. Camus says this is essentially human sacrifice dressed up in a bunch of legal niceties. That this is a hangover from a more primitive form of justice that we maybe only could have justified a long time ago, and that in reality, this is one of the most premeditated forms of murder that he can possibly imagine. He says, for what they're doing with the death penalty, for a criminal to have done something equivalent to that, the criminal would have to decide they're going to commit the crime, then warn the person they're going to hurt about the exact date they were going to do the thing, then confine the person for months in a small space at their house, just feeding them, letting them out into the backyard for a while, just taking their time, deciding how and when they were actually going to kill them. He says, quote, such a monster is not encountered in private life. This issue was so important to him that he'd been talking about it for several books by this point in his career. Remember the character of Meursault from the Stranger? The murder he commits wasn't premeditated. No, he just shoots a man on a beach because the sun was in his eyes and the guy had a knife. But when you compare that to his trial, you know, when you picture the mob of clapping seals that decide that this man represents their deepest fears, well, there's a sense in which he was dead before he even stood trial. The trial was just an elaborate theater where these people could sit around rationalizing their decision to kill this guy and make it legal. But whenever rebellion or the genuine attempt to protect human dignity crosses this line and starts making exceptions for itself, that is the moment in a movement when something fundamentally changes about that movement. For Camus, he says, you can see this all throughout history. The French Revolution started with a genuine attempt to secure liberty, equality, and fraternity for people. But, he says, the moment when that rebellion decided it was justified to kill Louis XVI and his ministers, that's when the rebellion transformed into the Reign of Terror. Another example, communism, which starts with the philosophy of Marx and Engels, for them, genuinely rooted in trying to preserve the sanctity of the individual liberty. But the second that movement decides it's justified to kill the oppressors in the name of bringing about a better society, that's the switch in thinking that enables the gulags to come. The barriers between people with propaganda, the reduction of people to just rational cogs. This is how it happens to Camus. There's a fantastic image that he paints of this in one of his plays called the Just Assassins. Around this time. Sometimes the play is just called the Just. Point is, it's centered around justice, much like this essay, the Rebel, for some context here, just because people have been saying they appreciate hearing about Camus work in terms of these five cycles or series that he laid out in his personal notes. Cycle one was the Stranger Mythosisophus, Caligula, focusing on the individual confrontation with the absurd. Cycle two is thought of as the Plague, the Rebel and the Just Assassins, focusing primarily on solidarity and justice. Anyway, that's the reason why this play, the Just Assassins, will be filled with these dramatic images of people trying to understand the limits of justice. You know, how do we genuinely embody metaphysical rebellion at this level without falling into abstractions? The play centers around a group of Russian revolutionaries who are planning to assassinate a duke. And for whatever it's worth, this duke is a pretty terrible person. Done a lot of bad stuff in the name of his own country, there's no doubt about it. And one of the main characters, they call him Janek in the play as a nickname. He makes the plan to kill this Grand Duke Sergei by throwing a bomb at his carriage. As he goes to a theater on the day of the assassination, he sets up on the street ready to throw the bomb. He sees the Duke's car coming down the street, he's just ready to throw it, when suddenly he sees the Duke's niece and nephew, just small children at the time, that are unexpectedly in the car with him. He doesn't throw the bomb that day. Instead, he goes back to his revolutionary friends and tells them he couldn't do it if there were going to be innocent children that are killed. One of the revolutionaries named Stepan gets really angry at Jannik. See, he's a bit more entrenched into this revolutionary movement here. And he comes back to him and says, look, stop being such an idiot. You claim to care about children so much. How many children has this duke killed in cold blood? Just up until this point, he says, are our own moral scruples more important than the cause itself? Look, for the sake of the future of justice, Stepan says, we have to be willing to kill innocents as well. Otherwise the Duke could just in theory, wrap himself in innocence as a human shield and we'd never really be able to kill him. To which Jannik replies, back to Stepan, look, some people love justice so much that they refuse to become murderers for it. Camus once said the big question that he wanted to answer in Cycle one of his work was his classic line of whether or not to commit suicide. Well, Cycle two, what we're talking about here is focusing on the natural follow up question to that. Whether or not to commit murder. Is murder ever something that can be done coherently in the name of justice? Well, the short answer to that question is never say never. I mean, for Camus to Say never would almost start to sound like he's trying to declare universals. He acknowledges at one point in his work that, yes, we do live in a very violent world at times, and that there may be moments where a genuine act of rebellion has to kill someone in self defense. But if a rebel did this, it would absolutely be a last resort kind of thing for him, to which anybody who's part of one of these revolutions he mentions can say back to him, well, what do you call what we're doing, Stepan from the Just Assassins could say, look, this is a last resort. Louis XVI has to go. The Grand Duke Sergei has to go. The oppressors are in charge right now, murdering people, and we got to get rid of them. But is this truly a last resort, Camus would ask, or is this just your set of theoretical abstractions, removing the limits that are in your way and making exceptions just for you? Because ultimately, for Camus, that's the problem here. If you had to break down what's going on. The problem begins when rebellion no longer has the limits built into it that it does at the level of an individual's lucid engagement with reality. Philosophical, abstract systems allow these limits to be thrown out, and then it's only a matter of time before people that were otherwise committed to helping others have their effort channeled towards a sort of idealism that denies important details about the messiness of what life really is. And this happens in many ways, he thinks these systems often pretend to transcend the lived experience of individual people, which then makes the followers of him claim to know more about what's best for people than they do. These systems silence the idea of measure and proportion altogether, often claiming things like, yeah, look, this definitely looks bad, but this is the only possible way to actually get things done. Really. There's. There's no middle ground. These systems exist in denial of a lucid take on reality for Camus, because they claim to have some universal solution to the problem, which then flattens the ambiguity of the world into a dogma. And then lastly, and this is where the work he did in the Plague will come into this, these systems are based on a total and flat out rejection of the idea of solidarity. And just so we don't gotta interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I wanna thank everybody that goes through the sponsors of the show today.
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Full terms@mintmobile.com and now back to the podcast. Because when individuals are no longer seen as people sharing a common set of existential conditions, you know, as people sharing a kind of fr. Dignity that we only preserve together, throwing out that limit of respect towards each other is the only way these people then become pawns to carry out some grand vision. And it's the only way people are seen as just deserving whatever they get, even if it's death. And when you're no longer looking at people as full human beings anymore, worthy of dignity, all this is not rebellion anymore. To Camus, this is transformed into a type of revolution and ideological extremism. This is how Camus father we talked about last time. Great guy, apparently could ever support the death penalty, even in theory. You know, in theory he loves the idea of killing someone in the name of a good cause, especially if they're really bad. But when he actually has to look at the guy's head getting lopped off in a public square, the distance that abstractions usually allow for people to live at gets cut down quite a bit. Much harder to say you believe in a cause when you actually have to carry it out yourself. It kind of reminds me of eating meat and the difference between shopping for these red cubes at the supermarket versus actually having to kill the animal. See, the point is there's built in limitations to these kinds of activities that get removed at the level of theory. And if the problem here is a removal of limits, then to Kamut, we have to find a way to reinstate these limits somehow on our efforts towards justice in real time. And he has several of these that he suggests we pay attention to throughout his work. One example he gives is if you're some person that makes the claim we need to kill somebody in the name of preserving human dignity, if that's the kind of stuff you're going to say, and you're saying it's truly a last resort here. Well, in that case, he says not only do you need to be the one that's willing to do the killing there, but you also probably need to be willing to die as a consequence of having made that Choice. This can sound weird at first, but just think of what he's getting at. How common is it to see someone in power sitting behind a desk ordering the killing of other people in the name of freedom or something? And then after they give that order, they get to just sit back in total safety, not even having to witness all the horrible stuff they're ordering. And look, you can see this is just one case of many, where someone has ordered violence in the name of justice. And then there's some crucial limitation that's been lifted here at scale, where not having it creates a bad set of deterrents that, again, rebellion always needs to remain rooted in a lucid experience of an individual. For Camus, this is why he's eventually going to propose a philosophy of limits on rebellion, where we can't just have a world where people go around in a totally unmoderated way, ripping out all the wires of society, avoiding this more balanced, measured, lucid confrontation with the world as it actually is. But before we get to his limitations, another very important piece of this whole argument is how do we get to this place Camus was speculating about anyway? I mean, if you're going to say that the way we're doing it is wrong, Camus, how do we find an example of something that reimagines the world in a new image but still respects the limits of lucid human existence? Camus might respond to that question by saying, consider for a second the similarities between rebellion, when it's done genuinely, and art when it's done genuinely. Think about how similar an artist is to what Camus said about the rebel at the beginning of this book. Like the Rebel, the artist starts any art project that they do by saying a kind of no. Because to Camus, to do art is, at least at some level, to not accept the world purely as it is. Art always comes with the implication that something new needs to be brought into existence. But more than that, just like the Rebel, by saying no, an artist is also saying a kind of yes to some alternative universe being brought into view. Or, as he says, the artist rejects the world on account of what it lacks and. And the name of what it could be. One of the key points to consider here is to think about the vibe that an artist brings towards the world all the time. Think of the metaphysical posture they're always more or less positioned in as artists. It's not passivity, but it's also not trying to impose themselves onto the world without regard as to what it is. Because to Camus, an Artist, even at the most avant garde, you know, revolutionized art itself sort of level. An artist still never completely smashes the rules and forms of a genre to nothing. There's always a respect that they have for certain constraints or boundaries that make this still someone engaging in art, as opposed to just creating chaos. For example, you could be a really revolutionary author that rethinks the entire way that language is used to tell a story, but at the end of the day, you are still using language. That's a constraint that you stick to out of respect to the entire process you're engaged in. A great painter, no matter how chaotic your work may be, it may look like Jackson Pollock hadn't slept in two weeks and just started slapping paint on there. It is still always painting your work within the constraints of a particular frame. The point for Camus, an artist can't simply just detach themselves from reality and produce total randomness. No, an artist always takes on a kind of responsibility to communicate truth or at the very least, to strive for sincerity. So the point is that carries with it a set of limits that any piece of artwork has to operate within. Now, at the same time, an artist also doesn't just paint by numbers. They don't just follow some rigid set of rules given to them that supposedly defines what their genre is. That wouldn't be very artistic either. Well, consider how similar this is to the traps the rebel has to avoid falling into as well. He'll take some time in this book to lay out examples of characters from Dostoevsky's novels and that illustrate this point he's making. Now, I know not everyone listening to this will have listened to the Dostoevsky series we just did. So I'm going to try to find a balance here. Not taking too long going into this out of consideration to everyone, but just know there's a ton more to talk about here. A ton of really interesting crossover between Dostoevsky and Camus. But again, the abridged version of this is, as we already know, during his time, Camus is opposing the nihilism and the fatalism that he sees dominating the philosophy. And Dostoevsky coming just before Camus time. Look, Camus thinks this is a guy that clearly saw what was about to go down in the world. And through the characters in his novels, he dramatizes this internal tension in the spiritual crisis of the time that leads to things emerging later, like World War II. Consider, for example, the character of Ivan in the Brothers Karamazov. He has a famous line where the way it's often paraphrased is if there is no God, then all is permitted. And Ivan in the book wrestles with this reality when he considers the possibility that it's true. Even as the very thoughtful, rational character in the book, even he finds it to be overly nihilistic. I mean, what does it mean for the world if we can't find genuine moral leadership in the abstract realm of philosophy anymore? But then, on the other hand, Dostoevsky presents the character of Kirillov from his book Demons. Kirilov, if you remember, was the character that didn't believe in God or any collective causes necessarily. So what he believes is that the ultimate act of expression for an individual while they're here is to sacrifice themselves in the name of their own cause. That as long as the cause is ultimate enough, and as long as I'm the one really choosing it, then nothing can be a greater act of self realization for Kirillov than to die in the name of my own values. Well, to Camus, Dostoevsky really shows his genius here. It's just such a perfect character, he thinks, to illustrate not self realization, but self deification. Because to be willing to deny life like that in the name of an abstract cause like this is the very problem that lies at the heart of modern fatalism, fascism, totalitarianism, even something like the death penalty, like we talked about, is based on this same internal logic. And then to consider the fact that in the book Demons, a charismatic dude like Pyotr, the leader of the revolution, just ultimately convinces Kirillov that his revolution is the one to sacrifice him himself for. I mean, when we think about our own world, what else might people with just a bit of charisma be able to convince people to do, when the game so many people are playing is to outsource their views of rebellion to some unlimited set of abstractions? Once again, we can see the problem here for Camus is that this rebellion needs to be something grounded in the limits of the individual. Because here's his biggest point. Ultimately, Camus thinks Dostoevsky's work, the great arguments in it, the beautiful presentation of it, his work in practice, is one part of the many cultural forces in the 20th century that made people feel justified surrendering to a religious unity. But it's more than that. Ultimately, the work of Nietzsche, he thinks, contributes to and fuels the nihilism and fascism of the 20th century. Ultimately, the work of Hegel fuels and contributes to the fatalism of the 20th century. But here's the thing about all these thinkers. To Camus none of these takes on their work are real. These aren't based on accurate readings of the points they were trying to make. Like Hegel didn't believe in some passive acceptance of absolute knowledge we were going to arrive at at the end of history. That's just not what he said. For Nietzsche supposedly contributing to nihilism, well, he of course spends most of his entire career refuting nihilism in various ways. And Dostoevsky, as we know, was rooted in such a complex, existential, tragic form of the Christian faithful that to call his work an excuse for religious unity is just missing something deeply important about it. But that's the point to Camus. Even in these extreme cases, even the most brilliant, self aware thinkers who dedicated much of their work to opposing the very kinds of abstractions that lead to mass political apathy or violence, even their work becomes co opted and used for things like the events of the 20th century because of this larger game we're playing where rebellion becomes rooted in something. Unlimited abstractions as the basis for our rebellion in the world just reliably end up doing this to people over and over again. So when it comes to laying out his case for what a philosophy of limits might look like in practice, well again, of course we know this wouldn't actually be a philosophy for Camus. The more accurate way to see it for him is that it's just a lucid acknowledgment of something and then, like the artist, respecting certain boundaries that are built into that authentic engagement with the world. First point he'd probably want to stress here, calling back to when we were asking if political violence is truly a last resort or not, is to say that even if you can ever find a situation where doing violence was absolutely the only move that preserved human dignity, someone truly rooted in rebellion for him could never feel good about that violence. They'd never call it virtuous, they'd never claim it's the logical move. You start using language like that and it's very telling about the place you're in as you're doing these things. Camus conclusion here is often compared to Kant's philosophy, for whatever it's worth, where the sort of natural ethos that emerges for him in all this is that we should never be treating people as just a means to an end, that to see human beings as ends in themselves is to be seeing the world as it is. Second limit he'd want to set is if you're seeking rebellion, seek rebellion as much as is necessary, but make sure you don't go even one step further than that. And this is a crucial one for Camus. Live your life recognizing how easily we become co opted by these sorts of abstract narratives. And always try to be on top of honestly looking at your behavior so that you might catch this going on before it goes too far. See? On that note, this final section of the book, by the way, is called Thought at the Meridian. Meridian in that title, representing the midday sun. Yet another reference for Camus to the Mediterranean sun in his work. His point is, it's a call for us to live our lives in a way where we avoid the extremes, avoid being nihilistic, avoid being fatalistic, don't be cynical and sit around doing nothing. But also don't become the oppressor that you're trying to rebel against in the first place. No. Through balance, moderation, measure and lucidity, through solidarity with the dignity of those around us and sticking to what we can do from within the limits of our own station in life, this is how we can truly be as sure as we can that our rebellion stays in the spirit of rebellion that it began in. We don't want to ever become like one of those charities that starts in the right place but then becomes something terrible over time. Anyway, there's a theme that runs all throughout the work of Camus that we haven't actually even discussed once yet. That theme is the importance of exile, both personal exile and collective exile. And I think next time it'll be a really nice combo with a couple more important things from his work. One, some deeper analysis of his book the Fall. Obviously going into it more than we did just a couple years ago when we went over the basics of it. And number two, Exile is going to pair perfectly with looking into the last book that he ever wrote. He never finished the last book that he wrote. In fact, when he died in the car accident that day, a version of the incomplete manuscript of this book was found in the car with him. And it was a strange book for Camus to be writing at all. People said he told his romantic partner at the time she tells this story after he's dead. He told her that he felt there was something missing from his work, that he needed to rediscover something about himself. So his plan was to explore his own past, his childhood, in a level of depth that he never really had before. So what he started writing was something very autobiographical, deeply exploring the concepts of belonging and love. We'll talk about it next time. But this was a book he titled as he was writing it the first man. Patreon.com philosophizethis if you value the show as an educational resource, thank you for contributing and as always, thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.
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