Camus

Camus, Sartre, and Saint-Just

Saint-Just

If we are to take bad faith as living life in accordance with a solution to which there is no problem, or living a role as if that is who we are, like an inkwell is an inkwell, and where this bad faith is to be contrasted with good faith, then we find in Camus’ The Rebel a precise date for the emergence of this bad faith—1789. More precisely, Camus argues that ‘Seventeen eighty-nine is the starting-point of modern time,’ for with the French Revolution, Camus claims, humanity ‘overthrew the principle of divine right and…introduce[d] to the historical scene the forces of negation and rebellion…’ (Camus 2000 [1951], 64). Before the French Revolution, whether it be the ‘Inca and the pariah,’ or those who endorsed the principle of divine right monarchy, Camus believes that ‘the problem of revolt never arises, because for them it has been solved by tradition before they had time to raise it—the answer being that tradition is sacrosanct. If, in the sacrosanct world, the problem of revolt does not arise, it is because no real problems are to be found in it—all the answers having been given simultaneously’ (ibid., 8). It may seem that it is the sacrosanct tradition that characterizes a world of bad faith, of living life in accordance with solutions to which there is no problem, for indeed Camus does point out that ‘no real problems are to be found’ in the sacrosanct world. If this is indeed true, and it is debatable, then Camus’ point is that prior to 1789 living in good faith, or as a rebel, was not truly possible for only then could one live with the awareness of the problems inseparable from solutions (to put it in the terms being used here).

(more…)
By Jeffrey Bell, ago

Seneca and the Condemned Prisoner

To begin with Seneca and take on board the problems that motivated his philosophical writings, we can start with the concluding paragraph of his first letter to Lucilius. The paragraph begins with the question: “What is the state of things, then?” to which Seneca answers that we are not to “regard a man as poor, if the little which remains is enough for him,” and then he directly advises Lucilius “to keep what is really yours.” The problem then for Seneca is a problem of loss, and of keeping and having enough, and that which can and is most frequently lost and which we seem never to have enough of, and yet which is most ours, is time. “Nothing, Lucilius,” Seneca urges, “is ours, except time.” This problem, however, is a substantial problem, a problem of substance and being (ousia), and connected to this problem is a relationship to time, to that which belongs to us more than anything else, and yet it is time that is least appreciated and most frequently lost. Thus the subject of Seneca’s first letter is to caution Lucilius to be wary of the ease with which we lose time, and hence lose ourselves.

(more…)

By Jeffrey Bell, ago