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).
Camus’ historicization of bad faith may highlight a key difference between Camus and Sartre. Whereas Sartre indicates that bad faith simply comes with being conscious beings, for one who simultaneously is what it is not and not what it is, something that presumably has been the case as long as conscious human beings have existed, for Camus the possibility of living with a consciousness of life as a problem, and thus a life where one can challenge and rebel against answers and solutions that are forced upon us as if they were incontestable solutions without a problem, is of fairly recent origin. But one should be wary of taking Camus’ historicizing move too seriously, or at least of assuming that it excludes other aspects of life where the consciousness of life as a problem, that is good faith, may well have been a key component of human experience well before 1789. There are a couple reasons for this caution. First, in the Introduction to The Rebel Camus states, and in rather Sartrean terms, that ‘Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is’ (ibid., xii), implying that our tendency to rebel against the various ways in which one finds oneself living is not simply a historically recent phenomenon. Camus implies this even more strongly, and again in Sartrean terms, when he claims that ‘There is not one human being who, above a certain elementary level of consciousness, does not exhaust himself in trying to find formulae or attitudes which will give his existence the unity it lacks’ (ibid., 207). Camus’ point about exhausting oneself in an effort to find the unity our existence lacks recalls Camus’ arguments in the Myth of Sisyphus, where he claims (recall §1.1.a), and again in general terms that imply a universal human condition rather than a historically specific one, that there is a fundamental disparity between the purposelessness we find in the world and our desire to find, in this world, a unity that gives life a meaning and purpose.
To reconcile Camus’ claim regarding the “universal” nature of human existence as one that involves seeking that which it is not—that is, a unity that gives life a meaning and purpose—with his claim that 1789 is the ‘starting-point of modern times,’ we should note that for Camus what is unique to modern times is the ‘metaphysical revolt’ (ibid., 14). What emerges in the wake of the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, therefore, is the ‘metaphysical rebel,’ or the person Camus sees as the one who ‘attacks a shattered world to make it whole’ (ibid., 11). We can thus distinguish between the existential rebel, the person who ‘refuses,’ as Camus puts it, ‘to be what he is’—that is, a person, such as Sisyphus, who refuses to bow to the pressure of living life only if it has unity and purpose—with the metaphysical rebel, who is concerned with restoring unity and purpose to a ‘shattered world.’ And what was shattered with modern times, according to Camus, is the sacrosanct, unproblematic nature of tradition, and most especially the manner in which this tradition helped to provide the unity and purpose human existence lacks. With modern times, therefore, we could say a new form of bad faith emerges. In addition to the Sartrean bad faith where one takes oneself to be what one is not—a thing-in-itself—or in Camus’ version where one takes one’s life to have a unity and purpose it lacks, we have post-1789 version that one might call a philosophical or metaphysical bad faith. The reason for Camus’ focus on this particular form of bad faith is because a consequence of eliminating divine right justification for political power is that it has led us to the point where one frequently finds it to be the case that one in power often ‘admits with equanimity that murder has justification,’ to which Camus adds, ‘this is because of the indifference to life which is the mark of nihilism’ (ibid., x). Having written The Rebel just a few years after the close of World War II, the risks that come with this nihilism were palpable (I will return to this theme below, see §5.1.a) .
As Camus understands nihilism, at least in the context of The Rebel, it is characterized by ‘the inability to believe…[and] its most serious symptom is not found in atheism, but in the inability to believe in what is, to see what is happening, and to live life as it is offered’ (ibid., 41). For Camus, since 1789 there have been two forms of metaphysical rebellion that have had significant political implications. In the first form the transcendence of God and divine right is replaced by the ‘transcendence of principles,’ as Camus puts it. The Jacobin Saint-Just emerges as a key figure here for Camus, and in particular Saint-Just’s willingness ‘to go to his death for love of principle and despite all the realities of the situation…His principles cannot accept the condition of things…’ (ibid., 80). Saint-Just thus goes to his death, defending the principles of the revolution, oblivious to what was happening on the ground, to the emerging factions, the reign of terror, and thus the great distance that separated his principles, principles that were taken as solutions without a problem, from the realities he encountered on a daily basis. In the second form of metaphysical rebellion we have Hegel, and especially Marx, who Camus claims went further than the Jacobins, for whereas the Jacobins ‘destroyed the transcendence of a personal god,’ the tradition begun by Hegel and carried forward by Marx initiated the ‘contemporary atheism [that destroys] the transcendence of principles as well’ (ibid., 148). Marx thus throws Hegel’s ‘transcendence of reason’ into ‘the stream of history’ (ibid.). The problem with this move, according to Camus, is that one likewise does not see what is happening in life, or pay heed to life as it is offered, for our life as lived is simply caught up in historical processes over which one has no control.
It is at this point where good faith enters the scene for Camus. More precisely, Camus rejects the bad faith form of metaphysical rebellion, or nihilism, where one fails to see life as it is, including the problematic nature inseparable from life, and instead sees life as playing its predetermined role in accordance with unquestioned forces, whether these be the force of transcendent principle, or the force of history. In both cases life becomes what it is not, an object, a determinate thing subject to powers that involve a solution without a problem and where the nihilist subsequently refuses, or is unable, to see the problematic nature inseparable from life—that is, it is a bad faith attitude towards life. As Camus makes this point, he claims that ‘rebellion, in man,’ or what we might call acting from good faith, ‘is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms…But man, by rebelling, imposes in his turn a limit to history and at this limit the promise of a value is born’ (ibid., 195). The form this rebellion takes for Camus is artistic creation, where ‘instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not,’ the being that has the unity which gives life an unproblematic meaning, ‘we have to live and let live in order to create what we are’ (ibid., 197). This creation of what we are, moreover, is not to be done in accordance with predetermining rules, whether these be determined by transcendent principles or by historical processes. For Camus one who accepts life as it is given, and its problematic nature, will be prepared to ‘renounce nihilism of formal principles and nihilism without principles’ (ibid., 216). As Camus states it, the contemporary rebel ‘cannot turn away from the world and from history without denying the very principle of his rebellion, nor can he choose eternal life without resigning himself, in one sense, to evil’ (ibid., 229). In other words, in being attentive to life as it is given, including the problems inseparable from it, one must be attuned to that which provokes our thought, our knee-jerk negative reactions, and thus have a ‘higher taste’ for the problems that may allow us to challenge and rebel against things as they are. In doing this we cannot turn away from the world and from history, for it is precisely history and the world that give us that upon which we must exercise our higher taste for problems. Nor should our higher taste be done in the name of principles that transcend this life, eternal principles, for in doing so we may come to feel justified in murder as a result of an indifference to life, an indifference that results from valuing eternal principles that are taken to be superior to whatever we might value or concern ourselves with in this mortal, fragile life.
….from later in book (4.2.b)
To illustrate the sense in which the critique sketched here can be termed a critical existentialism, we can turn to the dispute that ended the friendship between Sartre and Camus. This is the dispute that erupted with the publication of Camus’ The Rebel and the scathing review that Francis Jeanson wrote of it in Les Temps Modernes, the journal Sartre founded and thus a review that was clearly published with the blessings of Sartre. At issue, in short, was Camus’ critical stance to the communists, and in particular Stalin’s regime, with the implication being that Sartre’s continued adherence to Stalinism exemplified the nihilism Camus challenged in The Rebel (recall §4.1.c). As noted earlier, Camus understands nihilism to be the ‘inability to believe in what is, to see what is happening, and to live life as it is offered’ (Camus 2000 [1951], 41), and thus by refusing to see what is happening with the camps Stalin established in the Soviet Union, and the mass murder of many of his own citizens, Camus sees Sartre as falling into nihilism. In short, Sartre holds to the communist narrative, the Stalinist narrative that sees itself as the best alternative to the capitalist system and the oppressive conditions it subjects workers to—that is, the vast majority of society—and he holds to this narrative regardless of what the determinate facts may be, facts one ought to be attentive to if they are going to ‘live life as it is offered,’ and hence live a life that challenges or refuses to endorse narratives that turn a blind eye to the sufferings and injustices that are done with their backing.
In his own defense, Sartre responds specifically to Camus’ claim that Sartre has the ‘relative right to ignore the fact of concentration camps in the Soviet Union as long as you [Sartre] do not address the questions raised by revolutionary ideology in general, and Marxism in particular’ (Sprintzen and van den Hoven 2004, 141). In other words, from Camus’ perspective Sartre can ignore the camps in the Soviet Union only if he does not promote or discuss the ideologies (that is, the narratives) which support the very regimes that implemented the camps—namely Stalin’s Marxist regime. Since Sartre did support the narrative that communism is the best alternative to capitalism, Camus argues that he ought to have taken into consideration the connection between this narrative (or ideology) and its horrific consequences, or he ought to have taken note of the dangerous, murderous consequences of nihilism. In his response to Camus, Sartre argues that he did indeed address the horrors of the camps, that an issue of Les Temps Modernes dedicated ‘an editorial to the camps as well as several articles’ (ibid. 142), and although he goes on to claim that ‘I find these camps inadmissible…equally inadmissible is the use that the “so-called bourgeois press” makes of them every day’ (ibid.). For Sartre, therefore, the camps are indeed to be rejected but this does not mean, as Sartre understands Camus, that one ought to give up the communist ideology that is nominally associated with the regime that has carried out a genocide on its own people.[i]
One of the consequences of Camus’ philosophical position regarding the absurdity of our existence, Sartre counters, or the fact for Camus that there is no ultimate meaning that can be discerned despite our efforts to do just that, is that Camus is preternaturally predisposed simply to defend the status quo, to accept things as they are rather than how they once were. Citing a sentence from Camus’ Letters to a German Friend where Camus addresses ‘a Nazi soldier [and says]: “For years now, you have tried to make me enter History,”’ Sartre concludes that Camus ‘view[s] History with distrust’ and ‘“since he [Camus] believes himself outside [History], it’s only normal that he poses conditions before entering into it.”’ (ibid., 157) In particular, Camus acts like a ‘little girl who tests the water with her toe,’ wondering whether the water is too hot, where in Camus’ case it is a matter of asking, ‘“Has it [History] a meaning?”’ (ibid.). The result of this attitude, Sartre concludes, is that Camus is inclined to accept things as they are, and he leaves himself with no real basis for bringing about change. Camus, in short, embodies Meursault’s attitude from The Stranger who, in response to his boss’s offer to be transferred from Algeria to Paris, and in response to his specific question as to whether he ‘wasn’t interested in a change of life,’ Meursault claims, ‘I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all’ (Camus 1989 [1942], 41). Such an attitude is telling, for Sartre, and although Camus sought to bring about change in 1941, this was forced upon Camus in order to prevent ‘Hitlerian madness from destroying a world where solitary exaltation was still possible for some, and you [Camus] agreed to pay the price for your future exaltations. Today,’ Sartre laments, ‘it’s different. It’s no longer a matter of defending the status quo, but of changing it’ (Sprintzen and van den Hoven 2004, 157; emphasis in original). Since Camus sees himself outside History, a History lacking in the meaning and purpose that might help one to find one’s way through the complexities of life in the present, Camus consequently remains quiescent with the status quo. For Sartre, by contrast, one cannot help but draw from History, and the question of whether or not History has a meaning is one that has ‘no meaning’ for Sartre, and this is ‘because History, apart from the men who make it, is only an abstract and static concept, of which it can neither be said that it has an end, or that it doesn’t have one. And the problem is not to know its end, but to give one to it’ (ibid.). Understood in the context of our arguments regarding the nature of problems, with problems tending both towards the infinitely determinate and determinable (differentiating tendency) and towards an indeterminate and abstract whole that is irreducible to anything determinate (dedifferentiating tendency), we can begin to clarify the nature of the dispute between Sartre and Camus. Most notably, with this understanding of the nature of problems we can place Sartre’s criticism into the context of Camus’ point, cited earlier, that a contemporary rebel ‘cannot turn away from the world and from history without denying the very principle of his rebellion, nor can he choose eternal life without resigning himself, in one sense, to evil’ (Camus 2000 [1951], 229). Sartre is indeed right to claim that to change the world we need to throw ourselves into historical events and do so with a sense of meaning and purpose that we give to these events. This meaning, however, is a narrativizing that tends toward the eternal, to use Camus’ phrase, or the dedifferentiating of the determinate facts of history. There is thus the risk of nihilism that comes with giving meaning to history, for the narratives that guide our actions and give our projects meaning and purpose may also blind us to life as it is actually given, and lead us to turn a blind eye to the evils that are done for the sake of the projects our narratives have justified. It was precisely for this reason that Camus argued we ‘cannot turn away from the world and from history,’ but we must enter history with caution, aware of the tendencies our narratives may lead to and yet embrace both the narratives that make sense of our projects as well as the determinate facts of ‘life as it is offered.’ We are thus not to be fearful of history, like the girl afraid the water is too hot to enter, as Sartre characterizes it, but rather we must continue to discern whether our narratives are working with the facts—does our narrative make sense of the determinate facts or are we forced to reject them and turn away from facts because they do not make sense? What is key to critical existentialism, therefore, is determining whether a given narrative works—that is, does this narrative make sense of the facts while affirming the undermining tendencies that may transform one’s narrative, allowing the solutions to become problematized, or does the narrative not work, excluding, in knee-jerk fashion, the facts that stop making sense while remaining committed to a narrative that is removed from life as it is offered. The critical target of critical existentialism will be just these instances of turning away from life as it is offered, when the narrative that make sense of one’s life allows for evil, as exemplified by Saint-Just for Camus, as well as by Sartre’s accommodation of camps in Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was no wonder that Sartre was quick to reply to The Rebel in forceful terms, first by way of Jeanson but later in his own words. Although it is certainly true that Sartre was aware of the evils done in the name of Marxist communism, and did indeed speak out against them, it also appears that Sartre was not as sensitive as Camus was to the problematic nature of making sense, to the fact that one must remain attentive to those places and circumstances where things stop making sense.
[i] There has been some debate among scholars regarding whether Stalin’s regime intentionally committed genocide of Ukrainians, in what is called the Holodomor genocide question. Robert Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, for instance, do not believe that Stalin’s policies were implemented with the intention to kill people and should thus not be classified as genocide (Davies and Wheatcroft 2009); on the other hand, Norman Naimark argues for what is the consensus view that the policies were indeed intentional and do count as genocide (in Naimark 2010). Both Camus and Sartre accept the consensus view, albeit Sartre somewhat hesitantly according to Camus.