The Rebel

This book by Albert Camus I had heard of for years, but always assumed it was a novel, much like The Outsider - which I enjoyed, but it didn't blow me away, so I'd reserved a general apathy towards his other novels. However, since YouTuber unsolicited advice informed me that it was in fact a work of nonfiction - indeed, being a kind of follow-up to The Myth of Sisyphus (which I read before I started this blog but intend to reread soon) - it immediately got shunted to the top of my to-read list.

   While The Myth of Sisyphus famously contends with the philosophical problem of suicide, The Rebel goes on to do so for murder. Camus takes a generous definition of murder - the killing of someone by the state is just as much murder as the killing of someone by someone else, in both cases for whatever given reason. The first chapter is a simple, considerate portrait of 'the rebel' - why does a human rebel, and against what? The second chapter goes on to deal with 'metaphysical rebellion' - that of an individual or group of people rejected the natural order of conditions purportedly ordained by God; his arguments here are some of the most profound insights into the human condition that I have ever read. We live in a world and are told that the God who created it is good, but we perceive things in the world that we feel are unjust - and so we must kill God in our hearts before turning outward to impose, however successfully or arguably reasonably, our own sense of justice onto this broken created order. Chilling stuff. Chapter three (being the meat of the book - about 60% of its total length) is about 'historical rebellion'; how, once one has become a metaphysical rebel, their ideas about righteousness & justice coalesce into ideology, which manifests in direct organization & empowerment of similarly-minded (or convinced, coerced, it matters little in the big picture) rebellious folks into something more - a revolution. Through thorough analysis of the roots, methods, and fallouts of the French 1789 and Russian 1917 revolutions, Camus demonstrates that revolutions can have a nasty tendency to value their own idea of justice above basic respect for the sanctity of God-given life, and will often result in mass murder by the revolutionary state, or whatever power has supplanted that which was revolted against. Chapter four explores how artistic expression can be a means of & model for rebellion; he gives particular attention to the form of the novel as a way by which a creative mind can construct its own distinct, 'good', world. A final chapter then loosely ties up a handful of tangents touched upon in the previous four with a few extra reflections.

   Overall I found this a tremendously politically & religiously humbling book. It has forced me to re-evaluate much of my own ideological positions & how dangerous they might be in power. Though as a Christian obviously the concept of metaphysical rebellion is far from alien to me - but having an existentialist philosopher of immense intellectual sharpness talk about it is a heck of a smack different to having an orthodox theologian talk about it in digestible biblical terms. Anyone interested in the human condition, how freedom & violence interrelate, the ecology of political ideas & the ethics of murder - will get a great deal to chew on from this book. Highly recommended.