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A review by cryo_guy
The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt by Albert Camus
4.0
Camus!
I'm proud to have finally read this book after so many years of claiming Camus as one of my favorite philosopher/writers. And he really did not disappoint. But I'm going to keep this review brief because I'm a little behind in my reading schedule.
There's lots of great historical, literary, and sociocultural analysis. In fact, that's what most of the book is. One might even say that's its methodology. But Camus does pop in with a few positive/constructive philosophical conclusions from time to time to keep you going. I'll admit it gets a bit dry in parts, but that might be mostly my fault for not being more familiar with the texts analyzed. I found that I really needed to focus on reading this book by itself, and set aside my habit of reading multiple books sporadically.
In sum, we are picking up from The Myth of Sisyphus were we established humanity's absurd existence, that means no meaning (ABSOLUTELY NONE). Well, none worth much of anything ha! So we make our own and must imagine Sisyphus having a jolly old time rolling that boulder up the hill cuz life is full of suffering. It's not particularly uplifting as a conclusion, but I'd argue it is an uplifting book to read, for the average "existentialist" thinker (Who among us doesn't exist?). At any rate, no meaning leads to a discussion about well us getting that long-sought after meaning. Unfortunately, The Rebel is not a book about how Camus constructs that. It's a book about how humanity has continuously *tried* to construct that ever since the ancients had a decent but altogether different perspective on life (let's not get into cyclical versus linear conceptions of time).
Fortunately, since The Rebel is a book about how humanity has continuously tried to construct meaning, we get a nice review of how royally we've fucked it up (COUGH Christianity COUGH). We bounce around from poets to historians to philosophers, disagreeing with Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, and more (and finding a few things to agree with them about), but mostly providing in no uncertain terms the dreadful consequences in logic that arise from certain ways of looking at things or applying reason.
This is what I really love about Camus (and as I told my good friend Nick many times, because its Platonic): rather than merely looking at what people say, he derives why they are saying it and ultimately the lengths they are willing to go to achieve their ends. And that is pretty much where the problem starts.
But let's skip to the end: justice can be cruel and pretensions toward rational dispensation always fail or entail condoning the death of innocents, rebellion is good as a historical response to oppression but it, too, when over-rationalized fails. So the only real way to be a proponent of life is to rebel with moderation, knowing that people on both sides will always rationalize the cruelty and violence that they (and their means) inevitably engender.
So that's what Camus is about. He doesn't love non-violence because power will always take advantage of it, but he's a philosopher of life. He hates the death penalty, he hates murder, and when searching for the ultimate premise of an argument, he always returns to: can we do it without the death of innocents or being complicit in their deaths. Which, as far as a reason for doing something, seems pretty good to me. You might say, "but Anders you ridiculously naive fool don't you realize that if we are to get anything done, we are going to have to kill a few people" or perhaps even you might slide into folksy euphemisms and say "You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet." Well that may be true! But it isn't *necessarily* true, its simply true as a matter of expediency. And it may be that by the time I'm done thinking about how I might orient my thoughts to this principle Camus pursues so doggedly of avoiding the death of innocents, I'll be dead, but I wager that it will be more worthwhile in the end and that it will lead to better thoughts and conclusions even if I don't transcend this mortal realm and float up into the aether to join the host of Olympus.
Camus is a philosopher of life but he's also a philosopher of self-examination and this book approaches that task for but a portion of the whole of humanity. I've always wondered what the next book would have been like.
I'm proud to have finally read this book after so many years of claiming Camus as one of my favorite philosopher/writers. And he really did not disappoint. But I'm going to keep this review brief because I'm a little behind in my reading schedule.
There's lots of great historical, literary, and sociocultural analysis. In fact, that's what most of the book is. One might even say that's its methodology. But Camus does pop in with a few positive/constructive philosophical conclusions from time to time to keep you going. I'll admit it gets a bit dry in parts, but that might be mostly my fault for not being more familiar with the texts analyzed. I found that I really needed to focus on reading this book by itself, and set aside my habit of reading multiple books sporadically.
In sum, we are picking up from The Myth of Sisyphus were we established humanity's absurd existence, that means no meaning (ABSOLUTELY NONE). Well, none worth much of anything ha! So we make our own and must imagine Sisyphus having a jolly old time rolling that boulder up the hill cuz life is full of suffering. It's not particularly uplifting as a conclusion, but I'd argue it is an uplifting book to read, for the average "existentialist" thinker (Who among us doesn't exist?). At any rate, no meaning leads to a discussion about well us getting that long-sought after meaning. Unfortunately, The Rebel is not a book about how Camus constructs that. It's a book about how humanity has continuously *tried* to construct that ever since the ancients had a decent but altogether different perspective on life (let's not get into cyclical versus linear conceptions of time).
Fortunately, since The Rebel is a book about how humanity has continuously tried to construct meaning, we get a nice review of how royally we've fucked it up (COUGH Christianity COUGH). We bounce around from poets to historians to philosophers, disagreeing with Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, and more (and finding a few things to agree with them about), but mostly providing in no uncertain terms the dreadful consequences in logic that arise from certain ways of looking at things or applying reason.
This is what I really love about Camus (and as I told my good friend Nick many times, because its Platonic): rather than merely looking at what people say, he derives why they are saying it and ultimately the lengths they are willing to go to achieve their ends. And that is pretty much where the problem starts.
But let's skip to the end: justice can be cruel and pretensions toward rational dispensation always fail or entail condoning the death of innocents, rebellion is good as a historical response to oppression but it, too, when over-rationalized fails. So the only real way to be a proponent of life is to rebel with moderation, knowing that people on both sides will always rationalize the cruelty and violence that they (and their means) inevitably engender.
So that's what Camus is about. He doesn't love non-violence because power will always take advantage of it, but he's a philosopher of life. He hates the death penalty, he hates murder, and when searching for the ultimate premise of an argument, he always returns to: can we do it without the death of innocents or being complicit in their deaths. Which, as far as a reason for doing something, seems pretty good to me. You might say, "but Anders you ridiculously naive fool don't you realize that if we are to get anything done, we are going to have to kill a few people" or perhaps even you might slide into folksy euphemisms and say "You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet." Well that may be true! But it isn't *necessarily* true, its simply true as a matter of expediency. And it may be that by the time I'm done thinking about how I might orient my thoughts to this principle Camus pursues so doggedly of avoiding the death of innocents, I'll be dead, but I wager that it will be more worthwhile in the end and that it will lead to better thoughts and conclusions even if I don't transcend this mortal realm and float up into the aether to join the host of Olympus.
Camus is a philosopher of life but he's also a philosopher of self-examination and this book approaches that task for but a portion of the whole of humanity. I've always wondered what the next book would have been like.