Edward asked:

What did Albert Camus mean when he wrote or said the following quote:

"The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value
which supports him is never given to him once and for all."

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I don't know this quote, but I have been using The Rebelon and off in my courses over the last 7
years and can clarify the meaning. Quotes from The Rebelare especially dependent on the context
because coherence is not one of the book's great qualities. It is a bubbling cauldron of philosophy,
reaction, history, manifesto, call to arms, book review and journalism. While it fails on all these counts
taken singly, it succeeds in being unique and in making the reader catch his breath. In the last
analysis The Rebelis a plea for the individual; and that is who the rebel is. It is Camus and — he
hopes — his solitary reader.

The value which supports the rebel is never given to him once and for all, because value is not
absolute, it is in the making or on the way. The original rebel was Ivan Karamazov from
Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov.Camus' The Rebel, and the idea of it, comes from a
chapter of that title in the Dostoyevsky novel. Ivan rebels against God, as did Camus in real life, for
justifying suffering as a means to a greater end. To God's instrumentalism Ivan Karamazov says No.
This leads the door open to a nihilism where "all is permitted", to a Nietzschean Yea-saying (although
Camus defends Nietzsche from misinterpretations along these lines). Nihilism is the shape of every
alternative 'end of history' and of man as far as Camus and his rebel are concerned. To nihilism the
rebel says No. This is a No to man, history, reason, consciousness, art and everything else that
would replace God as a 'higher end'.

Rebellion itself is the principle. This is the thesis of the book. Given this principle, the rebel can never
find peace. In principle, he cannot. For the rebel every superior motive for action, or inaction, finds its
limits in evil. To join the revolution leads to murder, not to join it condones the murder going on.
Murder either way. Therefore, despite himself he does evil. But the rebel knows what is good.
Freedom and justice are good, and they find their limits in each other qua individual life. The right of
the individual to life — to freedom circumscribed by justice and justice supportive of freedom — is
Camus' thought at the meridian. With this thought, it is no longer truethat, 'despite himself he does
evil', for the rebel, instead, finds himself condemned to live for those who, like himself, cannot live, i.e.
those who suffer injustice and imprisonment by the instrumental purposes of God or of ideology. The
principle of rebellion turns into what Camus calls "a strange form of love".

Matthew Del Nevo

www.sicetnon.com

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