Some notes on Camus and The Plague

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The early Camus

• Camus held that life is absurd, or that the universe is absurd. "Absurd" is an ambiguous term, but here it means at least that:
  1. The universe and history lack a single overarching purpose. Perhaps its correct to say that the universe and history both lack any purpose. Thus, many things happen that are purposesless events.
  2. Human beings will all die and all that they accomplish will ultimately be destroyed.
  3. There are no purposes that unify or justify all, or even many other, purposes. (He later will allow that there are individual purposes, had by individual human beings, but not some external purpose that justifies or founds those human purposes.)
     
     Sometimes, and in only some contexts, Camus seems to use the term "absurd" to mean:
     
     
  4. There are no (justified) human purposes.
• In his early work (such as in The Myth of Sisyphus, or in most of The Stranger), Camus holds out the possibility of a response to the absurd in the absurd hero, who embraces some kind of hedonism or rebellion simply because she wants to be hedonistic or rebellious. The absurd hero faces the absurdity of existence and, for her, rebellion is just the asserting of some goals of her own.

The late Camus

• In works like The Plague and The Rebel, Camus expands his views. He now asserts both that there are inherent features of all action, and that there is a human nature. Both of these are important.
• Inherent features of action. To take no action is to implicitly endorse nihilism. To take action without any restraint (or, as Camus likes to say, without any "limits") is also nihilistic. Camus is arguing that any course of action expresses value, but ultimately it only expresses values when it limits itself to some rules; these rules should typically reflect the outcome that you want to have. Thus, avoid killing if you want a world without violence, for example.
• As part of this idea of the inherent features of action, sometimes Camus says that the absurd is contradictory. In such cases, it appears that he is referring to the "absurd" in sense #4 above. This sense of the absurd leads to contradiction when we act. If you act because you believe human life is without (justified) purpose, you are asserting some value for yourself; but then you are wrong to say you have no purpose (values express purposes). For example, if you denounce religion angrily becuase you believe human life is purposeless and that the priests are lying when they say human life has a purpose (given by God), you are contradicting yourself because you (implicitly) assert various values (and thus purposes) with your action, such as the value that we should speak the truth about the inexistence of God.
• [I have glossed over an important issue, which I think Camus also passes over: the difference between purposes and justified purposes. But maybe Camus is willing to say that the rebel must believe her purposes are justified or they would not motivate her as they do.]
• Human nature. Camus goes beyond these inherent features of action. He also asserts that there is a human nature, and as a result there is a fact of the matter about what helps, and what harms, humans. For example, beneficial things include:
  • health
  • social interaction (a social role)
  • friendship
  • equality
  • creativity
  • experience of beauty
  • freedom or liberty
• Camus also argues that actions meant to preserve or defend these benefits or capabilities result in universal judgments. Thus, you and I know that others have the same capabilities as we, and so when we act to respect these capabilities in ourselves we respect them in others. And, when we defend these capabilities for ourselves, we should recognize then that others are justified in their own defense of those capabilities. (If I fight for freedom, for example, then since you also seek freedom, I am asserting a shared value. Your freedom is relevantly like my own.) This aspect of Camus is consistent with a Kantian ethics; that is, the value is by its very nature universal, and also when we act on the value selfishly we are in some sense contradicting ourselves. But Camus argues that the important point is that this is a kind of passion; rebellion can assert a solidarity with a community of humankind, not unlike friendship.
• Also, sometimes people rebel not for themselves but for others. This shows that assertions of value can be unselfish.
• Note: I believe that some of Camus's claims about justice are independent of these last two claims; for some of his arguments, it is enough to observe that there is a fact of the matter that some events are better or worse for any particular human. (This matters because you might be worried that his ethics relies upon a belief that humans tend to be good, at least under certain conditions. Not all of his claims are reliant upon such a view.)
• There are corresponding values that result from these human capabilities. For example, the various values that arise from seeking for all people that they have the opportunity to exercise these capabilities and strive to satisfy these needs listed above. That is, values include that we should help all people be healthy; that we should foster friendship; that we should seek equality; that we should foster creativity and beauty; that we should increase freedom. These values are local values (local to, specific to, human lives); I mean, these have no grounds in some historical project or transcendental facts.
• There are several ways to interpret this value theory. These are not inconsistent with each other.
  1. Sometimes Camus describes our recognition of this human nature and the corresponding values as common sense. We might see him as doing a kind of phenomenology and simply observing the values of human life.
  2. In at least one lecture, Camus refers to his belief in these values as a "faith"--like religious faith.
  3. Camus may be asserting a kind of minimal ethics. Most ethical theories will in fact assert some version of values that each correspond to those human needs listed above.
  4. Camus may be a virtue ethicist, asserting that there are virtues that someone can have, that correspond to the pursuit of these values. This is consistent with much of his references in The Rebel to character, and to "limits" or "meridians."
• However, we should not interpret Camus as a straightforward virtue ethicist. He still retains much of the existentialists. There is a way he differs from Sartre, and a way he is similar to Sartre.
  • Difference with Sartre: For Sartre, we can assert any value through our action. Sartre flirts with a kind of Kantianism regarding action (where contradictory actions would cancel the consequent values), but he never fully explores or endorses this Kantianism. It seems instead that Sartre, and his followers (and Heidegger also before him) are unable to offer any reason to think that any value is better or worse than another. For Camus, we assert value through our action, but some are consistent with human goods, and some actually harm human beings. Only those values that foster human goods are justified (in this limited sense of justification); and we are justified in opposing those values that harm humans.
  • Similarity with Sartre: Camus does not believe that there are values existing independent of human existence. This is what he means when he says, "Justice is a living thing." For him, there are only values when we act in consort with our human nature. Thus, when we do not act, we assert and even realize (that is, make true) nihilism. When we act--specifically, when we rebel against nihilism or against social structures that harm human beings--we make our values exist in our action.
• To take some examples: The fascist's goal of subjugating some humans while creating a superhuman; the Stalinist's goal of creating a new utopian man at some distant future time; the capitalist's goal of bending human beings to production -- these are all inconsistent with real human nature. Note that this does not change the claim that the world lacks an overarching purpose. The fascists, for example, might still demand, "Why not harm human beings for this cause or that cause?" To this question, there will be no answer like, because that's inconsistent with God's will, or the meaning of history, or whatever. But, at least, if there is a human nature then it is a fact that some ways of being are worse for human beings, and some are better. Those of us with the virtue of wanting to benefit other human beings will want to bond together and fight the fascists.
• One of the most important features of our inherent human values is our innate demand for equality. We recognize that we all share enough of a common human nature, such that there is no relevant moral distinction to be made between us. So, as history evidences, we continually assert different forms of equality, through rebellion.
• Camus often speaks also about "limits." Our human nature and shared human values also enable us to assert "limits" on behavior. Certain things, like murder, we should recognize as wrong (as beyond a "limit") because they harm human beings.

The late Camus: Rebellion

• In response to absurdity, the human being is driven to rebel; rebellion asserts value. There are two kinds of rebellion.
  1. Metaphysical rebellion: this is to assert human values against the purposelessness of the universe and history; and against death.
  2. Historical rebellion: this is to assert human values against the injustices humans commit against each other.
• But: Rebellion is caught in a kind of tragic trap. We must rebel, if we are not to be nihilists. If we do not rebel, we simply accept meaninglessness or injustice. But, when we rebel, we are continually tempted to step over the "limits", and ultimately act in a way that is murderous or in other ways unjust. (This tendency is evident in rebellions like The French Revolution or in The Russian Revolution; but it is also evident in metaphysical rebellion, which tends to endorse empowering humankind or just the individual to exercise arbitrary power -- e.g., Nietzsche's Ubermensch, Sade's endorsement of cruelty -- resulting in the intellectual justification of the worst kinds of historical injustices.)
• We need to cultivate an awareness both of the duty to rebel, and of the danger of rebellion. Here, Camus offers something almost like an Aristotlean virtue theory: we must be temperate in our rebellion.
• One way to be temperate is to avoid, as much as possible, compromise of our values. We must both have moderate expectations about human possibilities, and we must strive to be the thing we hope to bring about through rebellion. Thus, for example: "authentic revolt will only consent to take up arms for institutions that limit violence, not for those which codify it" (TR 360).
• It is interesting to wonder if Camus would have thought that any of the rebels arising after his death were these temperate rebels. For example, are Ghandi and Martin Luther King examples of temperate rebels?
• In the end, Camus endorses a politics of bottom up action, organized organically among the people (not organized top down by some revolutionary vanguard). This is why he thinks the best example we had of wise political action and wise rebellion, in 1950, when he wrote The Rebel, was trade unionism.
• Here is the hauntingly beautiful conclusion to Camus's essay The Rebel; I know of no other passage of philosophy that can match its poetry:

  At this meridian of thought, the rebel thus rejects divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all men. We shall choose Ithaca, the faithful land, frugal and audacious thought, lucid action, and the generosity of the man who understands. In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps on live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time. On the sorrowing earth it is the unresting thorn, the bitter brew, the harsh wind off the sea, the old and the new dawn. With this joy, through long struggle, we shall remake the soul of our time, and a Europe which will exclude nothing. Not even that phantom Nietzsche, who for twelve years after his downfall was continually invoked by the West as the blasted image of its loftiest knowledge and nihilism; nor the prophet of justice without mercy who lies, by mistake, in the unbelievers' plot at Highgate Cemetery; nor the deified mummy of the man of action in his glass coffin; nor any part of what intelligence and energy of Europe have ceaselessly furnished to the pride of a contemptible period. All may indeed live again, side by side with the martyrs of 1905, but on condition that it is understood that they correct one another, and that a limit, under the sun, shall curb them all. Each tells the other that he is not God; this is the end of romanticism. At this moment, when each of us must fit an arrow to his bow and enter the lists anew, to reconquer, within history and in spite of it, that which he owns already, the thin yield of his fields, the brief love of this earth, at this moment when at last a man is born, it is time to forsake our age and its adolescent furies. The bow bends; the wood complains. At the moment of supreme tension, there will leap into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and free.

  (The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, translated Anthony Bower. New York: Random House, Vintage Books. 1956.)

Contrasting Camus with the existentialists

• Here's a hypothesis: Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre to some degree seem to think that a purpose is justified if it is founded upon some ultimate, self-justifying purpose. I've called this foundationalism about purpose, akin to foundationalism in epistemology. But these three also believe that there are no ultimate, self-justifying purposes; and so they offer various alternatives (the creation of value, or some hope in an original relation with being, or the responsbility of our freedom). I read Beckett also as accepting the foundationalism about purpose, and accepting that there is no foundation; but also as thinking there is no escape, that nihilism is true, and the best we can do is laugh at it. Camus seems instead to deny the foundationalist presupposition: he seems to say, the world is absurd, there is no overarching plan, there is no ultimate purpose. But there is good -- at least, good for us, for living things, here now (here by "good" I mean justified purposes, purposes we should pursue). And in the world there is also evil (and evil means purposes and actions we are justified to oppose, that we should oppose). Look at what Camus said in his lecture to some Christian monks who invited him to speak:

  We are faced with evil. And, as for me, I feel as Augustine did before becoming a Christian when he said: "I tried to find the source of evil and I got nowhere." But it is also true that I, and a few others, know what must be done, if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it. Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.

• In politics, Camus tends towards bottom-up socialism, and perhaps even left-anarchism (what might in the US be called left-libertarianism). He distrusted attempts by Marxists and others (including Sartre!) to see some purpose in historical movements. He claimed attempts to see such sweeping trends was akin to deifying history or movements, and this tended to become a justification for murder in the end. (Sartre and his followers bitterly rejected Camus for this conviction.) Thus, Camus's political statements stress the benefits of individual rebellion and community solidarity. Gabriel Marcel, who for a while called himself a Christian existentialist, criticized Camus for setting the play "State of Seige" in Spain. Camus's response was devastating, but includes this passage:

  Every day pundits reflect about the decadence of our society and look for its basic causes. Most likely such causes exist. But for the simpler among us the evil of our times can be defined by its effects rather than by its causes. That evil is the State, whether a police state or a bureaucratic state. Its proliferation in all countries under cover of the most varied ideological pretexts, the revolting security granted it by mechanical and psychological means of repression make of the State a mortal danger for everything that is best in each of us. From this point of view, contemporary political society, in any form, is despicable.

  I think that it is important to remember that Nazism had just collapsed, and Stalinism and other tyranical "communist" regimes were very much alive, when Camus wrote this. That is, I suspect he did not see opposition to the State as a first or intrinsic political principle; rather, I think he opposed grand historical narratives and great power bound to such narratives. In his time, this was best exemplified by states like the USSR. Were Camus alive today, I think his target would not be the state, or not alone the state; I leave it to you to decide what the great evils of our time are that Camus would oppose.

Major characters of The Plague (in rough order of appearance)

• Rieux, doctor and narrator
• Rambert, journalist and frustrated lover
• Tarrou, man of independent means, diarist, later active volunteer for Rieux
• Father Paneloux, fierce Jesuit
• Grand, civil servant and secret novelist who "can't find his words"
• Cottard, petty criminal who fails in his suicide attempt

Some minor characters of The Plague (in rough order of appearance)

• Michel the building manager, early victim of the plague
• Rieux's sick wife
• The Old Asthmatic, who delights in his cynical observations
• The Old Man who Spits on the Cats, living across from Tarrou's balcony
• The bourgeois family diners: the father, the mouse, the owls