Revolutions Eat Their Own; John Pistelli on Camus' The Rebel

Let me admit that I have not re-read Albert Camus' The Rebel in the more than 40 years since I finished the book. Too bad for me, it might have saved me from descending into nihilism. Then, again, since the nihilism followed me succumbing to what was diagnosed as severe depression, it might have only shortened the fall. 

All the same, its ideas have been on my mind since I started recovering from my depression. I hope keeping it closer to the front of my brain, I will not return to where I was 15, 16, years ago.

Working on something else, I ran across Albert Camus, The Rebel from John Pistelli. This is the second time in a month to have run into something he has written; the first was worth my time, so I read this piece tonight.

Much of what Mr. Pistelli writes is applicable today for the wider world.

Hegel is the most totalizing of modern thinkers, his system a complete answer to the question of what we are to do with ourselves if there is no transcendent God nor any transcendent values such a God could support. If his system is irredeemably corrupt because Hitler and Stalin are already coiled in its deep structure, where is Camus to go if he does not go back to God? He seeks two places of intellectual refuge.

First, he claims, we must have recourse to nature, as the Greeks did. If we abandon the idea that there is a universal human nature, then the human being is only clay to be molded by Hegel’s new gods in the bureaucracy of the administrative state. This is a common position on the political right today, but the left—to include liberals—have necessarily abandoned it in the wake of postmodernism; even a brief contemplation of contemporary progressive thought about gender, to take the most salient example, should suffice to show why.

Camus’s second recourse is to art: “Rebellion can be observed [in art] in its pure state and in its original complexities.” In rejecting given reality for a created one, the artist is the prototypical rebel. But the artist cannot be a nihilist, dismissing the real in its entirety, the way anarchist terrorists or Hegelian historicists can. Silently following Aristotle, for whom art was mimesis, Camus argues that the artist is always representing reality so as to give it a shape it does not possess in its unmediated state: “To create beauty, [the artist] must simultaneously reject reality and exalt certain of its aspects,” which leads the artist to imagine a “living transcendence” (as opposed to the merely ideal transcendence of monotheism and the deadening immanence of Marxism and related ideologies).

Camus singles out the novel, because it is the literary form that coincides with the modern era of rebellion; prior literature tended toward what Camus calls “consent” to the status quo, whereas the novel, with its restive protagonists, answers the “metaphysical need” of rebelling by giving ethical form to experience, which form in turn tempers the rebellion so that it does not spin off into totalitarianism. Camus further argues that contemporary literature must go beyond the psychological novel, with its treatment of private passions, to attempt to control “collective passions and the historical struggle.”

Camus notes that “all revolutionary reformers” must show “hostility” to art, because it demonstrates forces of nature and beauty beyond their puritanical control. The danger to art in the 20th century is found on two sides, two versions of nihilism: either an over-stressing of mimesis, as in Marxism’s exaltation of realism, or an over-emphasis on form, as in the abstractions of the avant-garde, neither capable of creating a living art that holds reality and form in vital tension.

I do not recall Camus addressing Hegel. That may be due to my bias against Hegel. I can regret not reading Kant, but never have I regretted not reading Hegel.

I have seen ugliness, going so far to wallow in it. That was my nihilism - nothing mattered, all was foul. I started writing again to make sense of my life and my place in the world; I keep writing to fight the ugliness.

Whether what I write is worth reading I leave to others. It is the act itself that matters. Creating is a blow for the beauty of humanity against the ugliness of humanity. Creativity is the anchor keeping the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune from sweeping us into the abyss.

Once more from Pistelli:

 It is when he champions art and the novel that Camus speaks for durable and still relevant values. I myself am only qualified to rebel through the exercise of the artistic intelligence; that Camus reconciles me to this fate is doubtless why he has, in some quarters, a reputation for bourgeois cowardice and mediocrity, but all the same it is a good thing to find a philosophical warrant to go on with one’s life. Moreover, today’s much-remarked upsurge of neo-fascist and neo-Stalinist thinking is enough to convince me that Camus’s controversial advocacy for balance and caution, even in the face of real oppression, might not be amiss. Unfashionable as it may be, The Rebel is a book to read.

I agree wholeheartedly.

sch 11/14