1.

In 1937, while reading Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, Camus wrote in his notebooks: ‘Stupidity of the pattern: Classical times – Middle ages – Modern times’. For Camus, this temporal and linear schema rang false because it abstracted and omitted what was pragmatically a question of non-linear changes occurring among particular bodies within the natural realm, which is primarily spatial and concrete. ‘The whole question: the antithesis between history and nature.’ Even at this early stage, Camus sided with nature and its limits, which grounded and circumscribed history, rather than some abstract notion of History that excluded nature altogether.

After the Second World War, in the immediate post-liberation period, the political battlelines were being drawn in France between a nationalist right and an internationalist left that drew their justifications from God (or that other god, Capital) and History, respectively. ‘We are asked to choose between God and history,’ Camus wrote in his notebooks at the time. ‘Whence this dreadful longing to choose the earth, the world, and trees, if I were not absolutely sure that all mankind does not coincide with history.’ In the same notebooks he cited and commented on Hegel, in remarkably similar terms to how he had earlier described Oran in his 1939 essay, “The Minotaur, or Stopping in Oran”:

Hegel: “Only the modern city offers the mind the terrain in which it can be conscious of itself.” Significant. This is the time of big cities. The world has been amputated of a part of its truth, of what makes its permanence and its equilibrium: nature, the sea, etc.

Hegel against nature. Cf. Logic, 36-40. Why nature is abstract. What is concrete is the mind.

   It is the great adventure of intelligence – the one that eventually kills everything.

During and after the war, while working on the various drafts of The Plague, Camus developed a particular understanding of nihilism. During the war, he wrote in his notebooks:

Modern intelligence is in utter confusion. Knowledge has become so diffuse that the world and the mind have lost all points of reference. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism. But the most amazing things are admonitions to “turn backwards.” Return to the Middle Ages, to primitive mentality, to the soil, to religion, to the arsenal of worn-out solutions. To grant a shadow of efficacy to those panaceas, we should have to act as if our acquired knowledge had ceased to exist, as if we had learned nothing, and pretend in short to erase what is inerasable... Intelligence is in confusion not because knowledge has changed everything. It is because it cannot accept that change.

Several years later, in The Rebel, Camus clarified what he meant by nihilism, especially as he was using the term differently from how it is commonly understood. ‘A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing,’ he wrote, ‘but one who does not believe in what exists.’ Again, nihilism is ‘the inability to believe in what is, to see what is happening, and to live life as it is offered.’

For Camus the missing point of reference between the mind and the world that creates this state of ‘intelligence in confusion’ is that offered by the body and nature. Nihilism, in short, for Camus, is the denial of the human body and the natural world.

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2.

The central argument of The Rebel – which Camus sets against this growing sense of nihilism – is concerned with the reality of limits. But what is still not very much appreciated is that the limits which he argues for in this work are repeatedly, and at almost every juncture, defined in terms of nature. ‘The ancients,’ he writes, ‘even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one’s head against a wall.’ Following this, The Rebel can be read, in no small part, as an anthology of writers and thinkers and political actors, each butting their heads against this wall – when they are not, that is, lining up others against it to be shot.

Early in The Rebel, Camus surveys the field of what he calls ‘metaphysical rebellion’, which he afterwards contrasts with ‘historical rebellion’, which is when these prior ideas are imposed upon the actual world, the first obviously creating the conditions for the latter. This section on ‘metaphysical rebellion’ begins with the Marquis de Sade, then traces through the Romantics, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, and, finally, the Surrealists. A recurring criticism levelled at these figures by Camus is at their misunderstanding, or else denying, the limiting role of nature. The Marquis de Sade, for example, is singled out for attempting to deny God in the name of nature. But Camus is quick to point out that this is based on a distortion of nature: ‘the ideological concepts of his [de Sade’s] time presented it [nature] in mechanistic form – and he makes nature a power bent on destruction. For him, nature is sex; his logic leads him to a lawless universe where the only master is the inordinate energy of desire.’ To clarify, Camus cites Sade directly:

“I abhor nature… I should like to upset its plans, to thwart its progress, to halt the stars in their courses, to overturn the floating spheres of space, to destroy what serves nature and to succor all that harms it; in a word, to insult it in all its works, and I cannot succeed in doing so.”

This criticism generalises, with Camus arguing, for example, that Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, by allowing his father to be killed, was launching a ‘direct attack against nature and procreation.’ Likewise, Lautréamont’s Maldoror ‘rejects the earth and its limitations.’

The central concern of The Rebel, however, is on tracing this criticism of ‘metaphysical rebellion’ through to the realm of political thought and action, of ‘historical rebellion’ – to philosophers and political actors who impose these political philosophies on reality. Rousseau, for example, is criticised for distorting nature and conflating it with reason. ‘The Social Contract amplifies and dogmatically explains the new religion whose god is reason, confused with nature, and whose representative on earth, in place of the king, is the people considered as an expression of the general will.’ Camus then follows this logic through to its application during the French Revolution, in which Reason is deified, and referred to as the Supreme Being, which ‘is only the ancient god disembodied, peremptorily deprived of any connection with the earth, and launched like a balloon into a heaven empty of all transcendent principles.’

All of this is only a precursor, however, for political ideas which had a more direct impact upon the 20th century. The central focus here, for Camus, is of the philosophies of history which emerged out of the ideas of Hegel and Marx. We’ve already seen Camus, in his notebooks, distancing himself from Hegel, by arguing that History was conceptualised in opposition to the limits of the natural world. The Rebel expands upon these arguments, while also showing how Christianity first prepared the ground for these modern philosophies of History.

It is easier to understand this dissimilarity by underlining the hostility of historical methods of thought toward nature, which they considered as an object not for contemplation but for transformation. For the Christian, as for the Marxist, nature must be subdued. The Greeks are of the opinion that it is better to obey it. The love of the ancients for the cosmos was completely unknown to the first Christians, who, moreover, awaited with impatience an imminent end of the world.

This impatience was compounded by 20th century Marxists, who attempted to prompt the end of history through revolutionary action. And it was as a by-product of this subjugation of nature, by abstracting it and transforming it into ‘History’, that the death of millions of human beings was justified as the necessary means toward achieving this pre-ordained and revolutionary end. The denial of the limits of the natural world resulted in the denial of the human body as a limit on political action. Political murder became thereby justified.

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3.

For Camus, a corollary to this false view of abstracting and subordinating nature to some philosophy of history was the abstracting and subordinating of human bodies to some racist biological ideology: ‘race has been turned into a special aspect of the species,’ he wrote in a chapter on Nietzsche in The Rebel, ‘and the individual has been made to bow before this sordid god.’ In that book, Camus argued against the misappropriation of Nietzsche by the Nazis: ‘The doctrine of the superman led to the methodical creation of sub-men – a fact that doubtless should be denounced, but which also demands interpretation.’ Here Camus criticised fascism more generally, beginning with Mussolini: ‘When Mussolini extolled “the elemental forces of the individual,” he extolled the dark powers of blood and instinct, the biological justification of all the worst things produced by the instinct of domination.’

Although The Rebel contains a section on Nietzsche, and a chapter on fascism and Nazism (“State Terrorism and Irrational Terror”), it is fair to say that more space in taken with analysing communism, and its historical antecedents. Camus began writing the book during the war – at the same time that he was working on The Plague – but it was not until after the war, in the second half of the 1940s, that the bulk of it was composed. It was written in the shadow of the Soviet Union and the contemporary reality of totalitarianism on the political left. Fascism was by then generally considered to be largely defeated.

That said, it should not be interpreted that Camus thereby thought that his argument against historicism, from the left, was more important than his argument against racism, from the right. Nor that the former was more of a present threat than the latter. Nazism may have been defeated militarily in 1945, but, Camus argued, its underlying cultural conditions remained, and still needed to be confronted.

It is a position Camus first outlined in 1946, in his lecture, “The Human Crisis”, presented to an audience in America:

It is too easy, on this point, simply to accuse Hitler, and to say that the snake having been crushed, the poison is gone. For we know perfectly well that the poison is not gone, that we all bear it in our very hearts, as can be seen from the residue of anger present in the way nations, parties and individuals continue to regard one another. I have always believed that a nation is answerable for its traitors as well as for its heroes. But so is a civilization, and the civilization of the white man in particular is surely as answerable for its perversions as for its glories. From this point of view we are all responsible for Hitlerism, and we ought to search out the more general causes of this hideous disease which has so eaten away the face of Europe. (emphasis added)          

In The Rebel, Camus attempted to outline these ‘more general causes’ in the sections analysing racism, the abstracting and subordinating of human bodies to some racist biological ideology – in effect, the denial of human beings. He also ensured that the analysis didn’t appear as if it were contained only to Fascists and Nazis, and thereby had somehow ended with their defeat. Variations of this ideology had killed and humiliated millions of individuals even before Fascism appeared on the political stage, when it resulted in the loss of millions more. Camus was also quick to point out how this underlying ideology was also continuing to do harm.

In a pointed note in The Rebel, for example, after describing the irrational methods of Nazism, exemplified by case of the Lidice massacre of June 1942, Camus compared these methods to European colonialism, referencing the massacre at Setif, Algeria, in 1945: ‘It is striking to note that atrocities reminiscent of these excesses were committed in colonies (India, 1857; Algeria, 1945; etc) by European nations that in reality obeyed the same irrational prejudice of racial superiority.’ It was these massacres, and the general condition of French colonialism, which Camus explicitly compares here with Nazism, in the wake of which, it may be recalled, Camus published a series of articles in Combat in 1945, the year before “The Human Crisis” lecture was delivered. In those articles, Camus attempted to overturn certain ‘prejudices’ held by the French, undergirded by this sense of denial and abstraction. ‘To begin with, I want to remind the people in France of the fact that Algeria exists...’ he wrote; adding: ‘As for the political dimension, I want to point out that the Arab people also exist...’

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4.

Nihilism was, for Camus, the immediate consequence of ideology, regardless of its source or intent. Nihilism, not the belief in nothing, but the denial of what exists, differs only in kind, whether it be the denial of nature, found in ideologies of history, or the denial of the human body, found in ideologies of race. But it differs little in effect, leading inexorably toward what Camus referred to as either ‘biological or historical Ceaserism’. That he considered these twin ideologies as somehow connected can be seen in the final instalment of “Letters to a German Friend”, written in July 1944, one month prior to the liberation of Paris, but with the Nazi defeat already anticipated. Here Camus develops an idea which he found in the work of Brice Parain, regarding the deification of history, as a process of smuggling the ideal into the material, what Camus referred to in a 1943 essay on Parain’s work as introducing ‘our abstractions right into the heart of concrete things.’

This is a point Camus develops, a year later, in this fourth letter. ‘For a long time we both thought that this world had no ultimate meaning and that consequently we were cheated. I still think so in a way,’ he writes. ‘But I came to different conclusions from the ones you used to talk about, which, for so many years now, you have been trying to introduce into history.’ For Camus, the taproot for both these ideologies – of History or racism – predicated upon a process of nihilism, which undergirds all ideologies, is the very denial of a shared human nature.

‘Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed,’ Camus wrote in The Rebel: ‘Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving?’

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5.

Camus was often criticised during this period – and these criticisms still colour present misunderstandings of his work – as being somehow unrealistic in his eschewing of various ideologies predicated upon God or History, capitalism or communism, right or left. He was accused of avoiding politics. But from Camus’ perspective it is these ideologies which are unmoored from reality – from the limits of the body and nature – and it is their protagonists who are not only avoiding politics, but worse, are avoiding responsibility for the consequences of their thinking on the body politic: where death and injury and humiliation result from trying to force reality into conforming to these ideologies, and where the clash between opposing ideologies – and the methods of violence and domination that are deployed in doing so – are justified as being a necessary means toward achieving these ideal ends.

The radical nature of Camus’ rejection of the death penalty and political violence – which we have already examined at length here – and its broader implication for re-imagining politics, has not been adequately appreciated. Nowhere in The Rebel, for example, is Max Weber – or his 1918 lecture “Politics as a Vocation” – cited. But there is no need, for Weber’s fundamental claim in that lecture – that ‘a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ – had by then become an unquestioned convention, and it is this conventional view of politics that is directly challenged by Camus. For Weber, the ‘state is considered the sole source of the “right” to use violence.’ But for Camus, any state, predicated upon violence, is illegitimate. This led Camus to emphasise the saving of bodies, arguing for this to be the guiding principle for our individual thoughts and our collective actions. It is the principle of non-violence that legitimises a political community.

For Weber – who, incidentally, died as a result of the Spanish flue pandemic in 1920 – the claim to violence is used to support a hierarchical social structure: ‘the state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered legitimate) violence.’ For Camus, a political community that is legitimated by the saving of bodies – by arguing against the false legitimacy of violence – is a community predicated upon non-domination. In Weber’s statement regarding the state monopoly of violence, a crucial qualification, not often included when quoted, is the final phrase: ‘within a given territory.’ To emphasise this point the next sentence adds: ‘Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state.’ Camus also emphasises this characteristic, but informed by his ecological imagination, with this ‘territory’ being grounded in and surpassed by the limits of the natural world. And as the natural world provides the very ground for the human body, so too, the principles of non-violence and non-domination are extended at this point to also safeguard against the domination and negation of nature.

For Camus, any community subordinate to an ideology, supported by violence and domination, becomes divided into victims and executioners. A competing ideology – even if aimed at replacing that initial ideology – only compounds this situation – based upon what Camus called ‘a casuistry of blood’ – and does nothing to alleviate it. For Camus, a community opposed to all ideologies, from either the left or the right – one that finds its legitimacy in the saving of bodies and the limits of the natural world – is one in which each citizen is neither a victim nor an executioner. In that, Camus provides both a goal, but more importantly, a method, for approaching politics, in both thought and deed. 

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6.

In the final pages of The Rebel, Camus offers the following description, as a way to retrieve an understanding of actual history from the abstract ‘History’ of political philosophy, the better to ground our sense of the political:

If the duration of history is not synonymous with the harvest, then history, in effect, is no more than a fleeting and cruel shadow in which man has no more part. 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 the harvest that sows its seeds and sustains the world again and again.

Remarkably, this transposes, into ecological terms, the fundamental insight, which Camus first noted many years earlier – and which we have already examined here – before he had begun writing his major works:

Thought is always out in front. It sees too far, farther than the body, which lives in the present.

   To abolish hope is to bring thought back to the body. And the body is doomed to perish.

Here ‘thought’ has been rendered ideological, the historical mind, and the associated abstractions and nihilism which such a mind is subject to; and ‘the body’ is extended to incorporate also ‘the earth’, which the historical mind fancies it sees father than, and in the process, denies. ‘To abolish hope’ is to bring the historical mind back within the limits of ‘the body’ and ‘the earth’. ‘And the body is doomed to perish’ becomes not an absolute end, but a prerequisite for the birth of new generations which, preserving these limits, ‘sustains the world again and again’.

And it is this modest – but far reaching – aim which motivates, in one form or another, each the main characters in The Plague. That novel can, in this respect, be read, in part, as an attempt to retrieve the human body and the natural world from this process of nihilism and domination. And it prompts the reader’s imagination to consider this possibility in reality: a politics, the legitimacy of which, is predicated upon non-violence and non-domination. 

Next week we will examine how this resistance to nihilism and ideology plays out in The Plague.

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