PARIS LETTER
611
Temps Modernes
is all based on the assumption that Camus had meant
his work to be primarily a political manifesto, if not a new
Das Kapital.
Briefly summarized, the main thesis of
L'Homme Revolte
runs as fol–
lows: (1) Nihilism, already implicit
in
the Jacobin myth of terroristic
violence, has been brought to its extreme consequences by contemporary
Communism. But nihilism is not exclusively a political phenomenon.
It
is
rooted in the history of modem consciousness, and its origins can
be
traced back to such strange "revolts" against reality as Sade's,
Lautreamont's, and
~baud's.
Philosophically, the Hegelian notion of
reality as "history," and of human action as a dialectical series of "his–
torical tasks" knowing of no other law than their realization is one of the
main sources of ideological nihilism. From Hegel, in fact, Marxist
prophecy is derived, with the vision of a "happy end" of history for the
sake of which, in Goethe's words, "everything that exists deserves to be
annihilated." This is the aspect of Marx emphasized by Communist fa–
naticism at the expense of Marx's critical thought, simply because
apocalyptic prophecy, being as it is beyond the pale of proof, is the sur–
est foundation of a ruthless orthodoxy. (2) At this point, the revolution–
ary myth finds itself in absolute contradiction with man's impulse to re–
volt against oppression, leading to systematic enslavement rather than
liberation. (3) By denying that human life can have a meaning aside
from the "historical task" to which it must
be
made subservient, the
"nihilist" must inevitably bring about and justify systematic murder.
The contradiction between the revolutionist who accepts such a logic
and the man who revolts against injustice in the name of the abso–
lute value of human life is radical. And the very absurdity of this
contradiction should convince the man who insists on acting for the
sake of real humanity that he cannot escape the classical question of
the "limit." To begin with, the limit of the idea of "revolt" is, according
to Camus, the point where the idea becomes murderous. Contemporary
ideologies, the revolutionary as well as the reactionary ones, are es–
sentially murderous. Hence they must be refused once and for all, at
the cost of one's being forced
into
what the ideologists call "inaction,"
but which, in fact (except for the self-satisfied and the philistine), is
a refusal of automatic action and an insistence on choice, real commit–
ments, and the freedom to act according to authentic convictions on the
basis of definite situations, rather than follow ideological deductions
and organizational discipline.
This is a rather crude simplification of Camus' thesis. It should,
however, be sufficient to indicate that, no matter how debatable the
arguments and the conclusions, the question raised by Camus is a serious
