Summary: Camus’s “Rebellion and Art”
In “The Rebel,” Albert Camus expands upon his contemplation of the absurd which he began in his fictional work, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” He moves beyond the individual’s metaphysical response to the absurd to those sociopolitical responses which have occurred individually and collectively throughout history. He describes revolution and rebellion as two very different historical phenomena born out of the same thing: humanity’s rejection of normative justice which is always perceived by its victims as absurd yet worthy of insurrection. After a colorful and extensive evaluation of European revolutions, Camus concludes that at their heart, all revolutions fundamentally deny transcendental values (injustice in its many incarnations) and history. In all cases, they have arrogantly sought to impersonate God, to build perfection from the ground up. Through a particular political, social, or economic system, all revolutions have aimed to reach the point in humanity’s sociocultural evolution at which no more progress can be made, at which history has ended (if such a point even exists). But most importantly, all revolutions have ended, invariably, in terror, decadence, and decay according to Camus. Rebellion, on the other hand, is the fight for transcendental values that concedes the ultimate imperfection of the human condition and the absence of definite meaning in life, yet believes unwaveringly in itself, in its life-affirming purpose. Rebellion, both the process and its results, promotes sanity and unity according to Camus. Rebellion is the meaning of our meaningless lives.
So how can one rebel and what does it feel like to do so? According to Camus, creativity is the real spirit of rebellion (that’s quite a Romantic notion) and art, whose central objective is to establish unity and coherence, plays a large role in societal and individual rebellion. Art, like rebellion against gross societal injustices, pits reality against representation. Art theory was rapidly evolving when Camus wrote The Rebel in 1951. Camus sought to elucidate the continuity in 20th century art as well as the nature of art as intersectional with contemporary sociopolitical and metaphysical states of being (Durfee 204). In other words, Camus was trying to say in The Rebel that 1. Art serves a fundamental purpose (quite a utilitarian point of view) which is to create a sense of unity in our lives, and it will always do so, and 2. The rebellious spirit of art that bleeds into society is a very good thing. But what distinguishes the active sculpting of reality by artists from the utopic schemes of revolutionaries? Camus would say the answer can be reduced to the degree of manipulation of reality and its resultant utilitarian impact. When she creates, the artist affirms and denies reality at once. She works within the confines of her nature and her knowledge to create representations which capture in time and space either transcendental values worth pursuing or injustices worth criticizing (Durfee 204). The revolutionary, on the other hand, knows no limits to what he can create. His high-minded hubris always leads him spiraling downwards into the dark, primitive abyss. Thus art is the ultimate vehicle for the rebellious spirit which Camus believes is the key to living contently in (not with!) the absurd world we were all born into. Art is the solution to human predicament (Durfee 205).
The Legacy of Albert Camus
Albert Camus was born on November 1, 1913 in Mondovi, Algeria. He came from humble origins; his mother was a half-deaf, illiterate housecleaner, his father, an agricultural worker (Lattal). Camus’s poor upbringing in Algeria likely impacted his sui generis exploration of the metaphysical meaning of life as well as his ideological split from the existential French intelligentsia with which he came into contact later in his life. Camus worked ceaselessly as a journalist, author, playwright, and philosopher until the day he died in a car accident at the age of 46 (Lattal). In only 46 years, however, Camus wrote numerous books, polemical essays, plays, and newspaper articles. In 1957, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his extended essay “Reflections on the Guillotine,” in which he argued that capital punishment is metaphysically unjustifiable and politically savage. Camus’s impact, thought not recognized fully while he was alive, outweighs that of any other prominent existentialist of his time, just by virtue of its scope and sheer originality.
Like the title of his seminal fictional work, L’étranger, Camus was himself very much an outsider. Existing between France’s mid-twentieth century elite intellectual circle and that of his pied noir roots, Camus’s ideas represent an original, divergent take on existentialist thought of his time. In fact, Camus refused to be grouped with his famous existential contemporaries, Sartre and Beauvoir, rejecting any ideological associations and preferring instead to be referred to as an Absurdist. Camus’s philosophy of the absurdity of the human condition is his most lasting contribution to the history of thought; however, it is Camus’s response (an existential act in its own right) to his deeply familiar conception of the absurd which continues to shock readers to this day. “Existential divorce between man and his life, between the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity,” the novelist Daniel Stern keenly wrote in “The Fellowship of Men that Die: The Legacy of Albert Camus,” (187). In his famous allegorical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, a marriage of mythological imagery and lucid philosophical inquiry, Camus artfully packages the absurdity of the human condition and asserts his famously discomfiting response to it all. Humanity’s futile struggle for coherence, meaning, and destiny in an inscrutable, Godless world is, according to Camus, enough to sustain the will to live (Harvey). “One must imagine Sisyphus [destined to roll a boulder up and down a hill for eternity] happy,” he wrote. In other words, a determined soul will always manage to seek freedom, however absurd the world is. Camus’s simultaneous humble concession to the absurd, to the limits of love, death, knowledge, and will to embrace life on Earth, to defend humanity, to live in solidarity with others, to love, to create, make him one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. The spirit of Camus’s ideas and writing style influenced the French Resistance during World War II, the post -World War II Theatre of the Absurd, and postmodern rock and indie music.
The role of the clandestine press in circulating the ideals of the French resistance to German occupation cannot be underestimated. Camus’s early work as editor and writer for France’s underground, left-wing newspaper Combat influenced the nation during an extremely tense, liminal period of occupation, liberation, and reconstruction (Penichet-Paul 3). Combat acted as the mouthpiece for the United Resistance Movement, the French Resistance’s foremost organization for social and political changes that embraced the concepts of liberty, justice and anti-parliamentarianism (Penichet-Paul 17). The Resistance, which included Camus, fought for the right of self-determination and the liberation of France (Penichet-Paul 8). Camus’s commitment to elucidating the corruption and injustices committed by Marshall Philippe Pétain’s interim-government in Vichy France during German occupation was an early suggestion of the core philosophical convictions which he would later delineate in his extended essay, The Rebel (Penichet-Paul 2). At a time of enormous upheaval in Europe (the collapse of the Third Reich, failure of communism, resurgence of religious fundamentalism; essentially, Europe was a shattered puzzle board) Camus stood for lucidity and the Justice in the face of totalitarian politics and futuristic utopian schemes (Stern 183). He repudiated the notion, advanced by his predecessor Hegel, of history as a theodicy in which divine providence and design are reconciled with the evils and atrocities committed by mankind. An atheist and a nihilist, Camus defended the existentialist’s belief that we must continually face our present choices and their future consequences, head on. His work is full of these ostensible paradoxes. In The Rebel, he writes:
“Revolutions quickly dispense with memory. Rebellious thought, therefore, cannot: it is a perpetual state of tension. This tension is the need to examine the actions of each “revolution” large or small…to examine, to examine at each moment whether it remains faithful to its first noble promise; or has descended into a mire of tyranny, slaughter and servitude.”
Thus, throughout the course of German occupation, Camus embodied his own metaphysical response to the absurd, reminding humanity of its ultimate insignificance and alien status on this planet which it believes it dominates, while freely defending Justice, honesty, and human rights as an existentialist would. Because for Camus, this is true rebellion; this is the key to creating meaning in an un-sympathizing, inhospitable world. According to Camus, not only does this conception of rebellion arise out of humanity’s desire for metaphysical purpose, but conversely, metaphysical purpose itself is born out of this rebellion, revealing “the part of man which must always be defended.” Thus the very individual act of rebellion, something positive and not to be confused with revolution, leads to metaphysical insurrection in solidarity with humanity. “I rebel-- therefore we exist,” Camus writes (a nod to Descartes) at the end of The Rebel’s opening chapter. Rebellion in the spirit of Camus is the highest order of existence one can achieve, for to resign oneself to the bleakness of existence without accepting it is ultimate freedom.
Absurdism as a developed personal belief system was born out of Camus; however, it truly grew pervasive and provocative following his death in 1960 (MacKenzie 175). Camus’s cogent philosophy of the absurd provided theatrical, fine, musical, and literary artists with an ideological framework within which to explore their reactions to the torn, post-World War II world they were living in. The Theatre of the Absurd, which Princeton University defines as “a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction, written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as well as to the style of theatre which has evolved from their work,” built upon the foundations of Camus’s philosophy a revolutionary kinetic medium that successfully engaged and advanced the world’s contemplation of the absurd (Quackenbush 62). Camus really got the philosophical ball rolling for theatrical artists in the latter half of the 20th century. Ionesco, Beckett, Kafka, Stoppard; these Theatre of the Absurd playwrights did not necessarily concur with Camus’s shocking response to the absurd (sheer acceptance), yet they explored the same existential themes and conundrums (authority, individuality, love, boredom, self-worth) in their works, often with reservations, yet curiosity all the same (MacKenzie 175-176).
“Camus was the most rock 'n' roll philosopher who ever lived,” Chris Price of The Huffington Post wrote in 2013. Price was referring to Camus’s reputation for being a womanizer, to his brooding air of mystery and his dramatic, untimely death in a car accident (Lattal). Yet there are strong ties between the worldly, restless spirit of Camus and rock ‘n’ roll music (Price). Camus believed humanity should wrestle with its fate, rebel against it (suicide being the ultimate concession to absurdity and perhaps the only thing more absurd than the absurdity of life itself.) Similarly, rock ‘n’ roll music oozes a particularly masculine sense of passion, revolt, freedom, and nostalgia for lost innocence (Price). It’s a postmodern medium through which individuals have been able to channel (as opposed to sublimate like psychoanalysts Freud and Lacan advised) into art their existential turmoil. And they have knowingly or unknowingly obeyed Camus’s strongest admonition in The Rebel, a pragmatic action statement with real world applications that’s rooted in the deepest levels of metaphysical inquiry:
“We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.”
Rock ‘n’ roll music represents man’s struggle to refrain from unleashing his “crimes” and “ravages” on the world in cruel, dangerous ways. Rock music is the artistic expression of Camus’s fight, humanity’s fight, for meaningful meaninglessness on indefinite moral and existential grounds. From Jimi Hendrix, to Bob Dylan, Bono Vox, David Bowie, Charly García, Fito Paez, and Kurt Cobain, the positive, re-creative spirit of rebellion in all that Camus ever wrote is alive and well in rock music. More explicit musical references to Camus exist too. The Cure’s controversial song “Killing an Arab” is a cold retelling of L’étranger and Neil Diamond’s song “Done Too Soon,” and Gaz Coombes’s otherworldly album “Here Come The Bombs” also make direct references (Price; Tafarella). All of these artists have grasped, at least on an instinctual level, that Camus is the essence of rock music and rock music is the essence of Camus. And for a philosopher’s work to touch and influence humanity at such a range of levels is remarkable. Camus’s political and artistic influences on the pre and post- World War II worlds as discussed above put him in a category that’s truly its own. His influence reverberates to this very day.
Annotated Works Consulted
Camus, Albert. The Rebel. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. Print.
This is the full translation of Camus’s extended essay from which I have quoted throughout the main paper. It’s the unadulterated language of Camus, save for the inevitable translator’s subjective interpretations and style.
Deranty, Jean Philippe. “Existential Aesthetics.” Ed. Edward Zalta. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ed. 2009. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.
This article developed the nexus between existential metaphysics and the philosophical field of aesthetics for me. It informed me as to the compatibility between Camus’s notion of the absurd and the creation of art. It also connected the idea of existential freedom to artistic creation, another highly compatible relationship. This article informed my writing of the summary, primarily.
Durfee, Harold. “Camus’s Challenge to Modern Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.14.1 (1955): 201-205. JSTOR. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.
This peer reviewed article discusses the challenges which Camus’s philosophies posed to the increasingly nihilistic and conceptual modern/postmodern art movements. Camus was a nihilist and yet he believed in the societal role of art as an enforcer of transcendental values and rebellious energy. Many of the cultural movements of his time challenged these notions, preferring to regard art as merely objects whose only intrinsic value was in their beauty. This article informed my writing of the summary though the specific references to modern art around which ideas were tied in this article, did not appear in anything I wrote.
Eubanks, Cecil, and Peter Petrakis. “Reconstructing the World: Albert Camus and the Symbolization of Experience.” The Journal of Politics. 61. 2 (1999): 293-312. JSTOR. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.
This peer reviewed article deals, primarily, with the impacts of Camus’s existential aesthetics and allegorical writing style on the literature and philosophy that followed him. It places less emphasis on Camus’s ideas themselves, and more on the creative ways he used to convey his ideas as well as his distinct style’s inherent philosophical relevance for literary communities following his death. I did not end up talking about the impact of Camus’s distinctive marriage of images with laconic Hemingway styled prose on literature, simply because I did not have the space to do so.
Harvey, Van A. “On Living Without Transcendence: A Homage to Camus.” philosophynow.org. Philosophy Now, 2014. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.
This article really breaks down in simple terms what Camus’s individual response to the metaphysical absurdity of the human condition was, as exemplified by multiple seminal works of his. It captures the spirit of Camus’s take on the world which, in turn, colored the spirit and tone of my evaluation of Camus. Also of note: it was published this year, offering a contemporary take on Camus to complement some older, more erudite analyses of his impact.
Lattal, Ashley. “The Life, Work, and Creativity of Albert Camus.” Diss. Miami University, 18 Dec. 1995. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.
This article was really the equivalent of a Wikipedia page, however much more reputable seeing as it was published by a large research university. I used this article to obtain the background knowledge which I presented early on in my main paper (e.g. cause of Camus’s death, birthday, family situation, etc.)
MacKenzie, Gina M. “Theatre’s New Threshold: A Review of Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Genet and Pinter.” Journal of Modern Literature. 36. 1 (2012): 174-176. JSTOR. Web. 17 Nov. 14.
This peer reviewed article framed my understanding of the connections between the Theatre of the Absurd and Camus’s philosophy. It is a review of Michael Bennett’s book in which he argues that the Theatre of the Absurd plays can be read as ethical texts that suggest how life can be made meaningful. Bennett’s work was a reaction to Martin Esslin’s book on the same topic 50 years earlier, titled “The Theatre of the Absurd,” in which it was argued that the same plays purport the absolute meaninglessness of life.
Penichet-Paul, Christian. “From Resistance to Revolution: Albert Camus and the Clandestine Press in the French Resistance.” Diss. Texas State University, 2013. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.
This honors thesis available to the public online focused very narrowly on Albert Camus’s early life as a journalist and editor in the heat of the French Resistance. It provides insight into Camus’s philosophical beginnings (he was pro-communist at the time of the German occupation of France) as well as his early impact on the sociopolitical state of France.
Price, Chris. “Existentialism on Main Street: The Rock and Roll Philosophy of Albert Camus.” huffingtonpost.co.uk. com. The Huffington Post, 2 Jan. 2013. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.
This article, published in the culture section of The Huffington Post, really inspired me to look further into the relationship between the spirit of Camus and that of rock ‘n’ roll music which I like and know well. The ideas suggested in it served as a launching point for the construction of the end of my main paper. I thought it also did a nice, holistic job of not only suggesting the relationship between rock and Camus’s personality and lifestyle but rock and Camus’s ideas.
Quackenbush, L.A. “Theatre of the Absurd, Reality, and Carolos Maggi.” Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century. 3.1 (1975): 61-72. JSTOR. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.
This peer reviewed article has little to do with Camus at all; however, it informed my understanding of the Theatre of the Absurd, something absolutely necessary for writing about its philosophical overlaps with Camus who lived earlier, but whose impact was felt long afterwards.
Stern, Daniel. “The Fellowship of Men That Die: The Legacy of Albert Camus.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature. 10. 2 (1998): 183-198. JSTOR. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.
This source was most instrumental in grasping the general spirit of Camus as it connects to each of his major convictions. From Camus’s complicated relationship with Sartre to his writing style to his beliefs about the absurd and rebellion, this source was particularly elucidating for me as I set out to the right the main paper and summary. While many of the facts it contained appear nowhere in my writing, they informed my analyses of most everything that did.
Tafarella, Santi. “Albert Camus in a Neil Diamond Song.” Prometheus Unbound. santitafarella.wordpress, 30 Oct. 2008. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.
This is a blog post written by an ordinary person regarding the presence of Camus in a Neil Diamond song which the blogger listened to all his life. It provides insight into the more understated impact of Camus’s philosophy on modern day life as opposed to, say, its effects on conceptual art or deconstructivist architecture. 
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