Episode #226 ... Albert Camus - The Rebel

Hello everyone. I'm Steven West. This is philosophize this. So this is part three of this series we've been doing on the work of Alber Camu.

Consider listening to the last two before this one. But you know, I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. Solidarity was the concept that Camu 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 camu, 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 going to 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 going to pull something like this off? Justice requires laws.

Laws are theoretical abstractions. Kamu 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 Dstvki might be most famous for writing Crime and Punishment, but that super fans of his always have one of his other books as their top favorite. Kimu may be most known for writing The Stranger or The Mythosphice, but this essay, The Rebels, the One, that people really serious about his work, will often say contains his biggest contribution to human thought. Just saying this is a ...