The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

Nihilism—which comes from the Latin word nihil, meaning “nothing”—is a philosophical movement that asserts the meaninglessness of existence and rejects all human morals and values as baseless. While forms of nihilism appeared at various points in European history, it became especially dominant during the 19th century, when it attracted the attention of philosophers like Søren Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Some attribute the popularization of the term nihilism to the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, whose novel Fathers and Sons (1862) dramatizes a conflict between a young nihilist and his bewildered acquaintances. Camus attacks nihilism throughout The Rebel as the root of European civilization’s moral and intellectual decline, accusing its amorality and indifference to life of enabling the 20th century’s worst atrocities.

Rebellion, for Camus, is an act in which a man both defies the realities he is subjected to while asserting the dignity of both himself and his fellow men: “[Rebellion] founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel—therefore we exist” (55). While rebellion is individualistic in the sense that the rebel knows his own worth and wishes to defend it, Camus argues that true rebellion is nevertheless selfless and communal in nature. The rebel does not wish for absolute liberty; rather, he wishes to establish the limits of what is or is not acceptable to do to another human being. In other words, “rebellion puts total freedom up for trial. It specifically attacks the unlimited power that authorizes a superior to violate the forbidden frontier” that should exist between men as equals (615). While rebellion is often disorganized, uncomfortable, and in a sense never-ending, it is still a source of moral meaning for Camus, who writes of the “perpetual struggle, and, sometimes, unparalleled joy [of rebellion], when it reaches the heights of proud compassion” (643).

Rebellion often leads to a more formal revolution, but for Camus, revolution is a very different thing. While rebellion “relies on reality to assist it in its perpetual struggle for truth,” revolution “is primarily political and ideological. It cannot, by its very function, avoid terror and violence done to the real” because “it begins in the absolute and attempts to mold reality” (645). In other words, revolution is often dangerous because it is driven by an ideology that is frequently inflexible and highly utopian in character, which can lead revolutionaries to justify the use of any means necessary to achieve their desired ends.