Episode #226 - Albert Camus - The Rebel

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this. So this is part three of this series we've been doing on the work of Albert Camus. Consider listening to the last two before this one, but, you know, I'm not gonna tell you how to live your life. Solidarity was the concept that Camus laid out in his book, The Plague, where he says that affirming life as it is means affirming that other human beings live in the same world that you do. And that when the absurd comes knocking at your door, whatever it is, solidarity means to affirm that these people face a similar set of existential dilemmas that you do as a being, that to ignore the people around you or to justify their suffering with reasons for why they deserve it. Well, to Camus, this is fundamentally to deny something important about the reality that you live in. Now as we know, none of this is grounded for him in a philosophical system. As we've talked about, this emerges for him simply from a lucid affirmation of our own nature and the nature of the universe, the tension between those two. And as I teased at the end of last episode, this concept of solidarity will become the foundation for extending what he thinks we can say from this place of lucid revolt. Solidarity is gonna allow him to make a case for justice. But it can be confusing to hear that at first. Like, how in God's name is he gonna pull something like this off? Justice requires laws. Laws are theoretical abstractions. Camus is the kind of guy on Halloween that'll steal candy from someone dressed up as a theoretical abstraction. He doesn't like them. Certainly not when they claim to be universal. He lays out his case for this justice of his in a very long essay he wrote in 1951 called The Rebel. It should be said the same way Dostoevsky might be most famous for writing Crime and Punishment, but that superfans of his always have one of his other books as their top favorite. Camus may be most known for writing The Stranger or The Myth of Sisyphus, but this essay, The Rebel's The One, that people really serious about his work will often say contains his biggest contribution to human thought. Just saying this is a highly respected book we're talking about today. Camus starts the rebel coming out swinging. He's got no time to lollygag around anymore, not in a world that has no theory of justice yet. He's gotta do something. And immediately, he gives us one of those powerful images he's known for in his work. He gets us to picture a slave who spent their whole life taking orders, and they suddenly decide they're not gonna obey some new order they've been given. They say no to the master that's trying to force them to do something. Well, Camus asks in the first line …