Running head: CAMUS AND NIETZSCHE ON POLITICS IN AN AGE OF ABSURDITY
Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
Submitted for review to
Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
Abstract
This article examines Friedrich Nietzsche’s influence on Albert Camus’ concepts of absurdity
and revolt. It rests on three related claims. First, that Nietzsche’s epistemological critique of
metaphysics is the point of departure for Camus’ absurdist inquiries. Second, that Camus’
philosophy of revolt is informed in crucial ways by Nietzsche’s views on the sources of moral
and intellectual authority in the modern world. Finally, that Camusian revolt is an attempt to
deal with the crisis of foundationalism in a way that preserves Nietzsche’s anti-essentialism
while also avoiding the excesses of absolutist politics. Ultimately, I suggest that the origins and
implications of Camus’ project cannot be grasped apart from an account of its engagement with
Nietzsche.
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Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
Introduction
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes absurdity as a sensibility or experience. In
particular, he likens the absurd to a feeling of purposelessness, which begins with a
‘confrontation between the human need [for transcendent meaning] and the unreasonable silence
of the world’.1 It is precisely when higher meaning is sought and not found, in other words, that
things appear absurd. The Myth of Sisyphus treats absurdity mostly as a metaphysical problem;
it is something with which the individual struggles in his or her own life. In The Rebel, however,
Camus equates absurdity with the larger political crisis of nihilism. This shift was likely the
result of Camus’ engagement with Nietzsche, who was among the first to draw such a parallel.2
According to Nietzsche, nihilism was a logical consequence of absurdity, which demanded “the
repudiation of worth, purpose, desirability’.3 Nietzsche argued that absurdity – and by extension,
nihilism – followed from the collapse of Western metaphysics. On his account, metaphysics was
an umbrella term, encompassing all of religion and traditional morality. These transcendental
doctrines, Nietzsche claimed, ‘assumed that man could have a knowledge of absolute values, and
thus granted him adequate perception for the most important things’.4 In this way, metaphysics
was an “antidote against practical and theoretical nihilism’.5 However, due to various cultural
and scientific movements, metaphysical principles began to lose their authority in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. The all-too-human origins of man’s highest values were exposed, and
‘the whole universe seemed to have been transvalued and to have lost its significance’.6 Dealing
with the consequences of this loss was central to Nietzsche’s critical project. It became the
dominant theme of Camus’ work as well. In political essays, for example, Camus discusses
Nietzsche in detail and similarly argues that his ‘age was afflicted with nihilism’.7 And in
broader works such as The Rebel, Camus also suggests that liberal modernity encountered
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Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
absurdity in the wake of the Enlightenment project but failed to go beyond it. The result of this
failure, he concludes, was nihilism.
Several scholars have noted the importance of Nietzsche to Camus’ thought.8 This is
unsurprising, as Nietzsche was arguably the most significant intellectual influence in Camus’
life.9 Camus’ first published essay, in fact, was a laudatory review of Nietzsche’s aesthetic
philosophy.10 We know also from Camus’ notebooks that he continued to read Nietzsche while
working on The Stranger and The Myth Sisyphus.11 And Camus’ later texts, notably The Rebel
and The Fall, are similarly replete with references to Nietzsche. Among the many commentaries
on the Camus-Nietzsche dynamic, Germaine Bree’s is the first to emphasize Nietzsche’s
influence on Camus’ absurdist thought in particular: ‘Nietzsche he [Camus] read thoroughly and
with passionate attention after 1937, and he was fighting against Nietzsche more than any other
philosopher, or at least against certain facets of Nietzsche's thought’.12 Though exhaustive,
Bree’s study does not examine what aspects of Nietzsche’s thought Camus was fighting against.
There is also little discussion of Camus’ political solution (however provisional) to the problems
political legitimacy and moral authority identified by Nietzsche. This is equally true of the
broader literature on Camus.
The aim of the present paper is to address this dearth in the literature. I begin by
considering the ways in which Nietzsche shapes Camus’ concept of the absurd. I then discuss
how Camus’ political thought, which follows in many ways from his absurdism, is both a
response to and an attempt to go beyond Nietzsche. Finally, I suggest that Camusian revolt,
while not quite a systematic theory of political action, nonetheless identifies the preconditions for
a modern post-foundational politics. In addition to interpreting Camus’ thought in terms of its
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Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
engagement with Nietzsche, this approach also highlights the enduring significance of Nietzsche,
whose insights into absurdity and the pathologies of nihilistic politics remain critically important.
Absurdity and Nihilism
Nietzsche considered nihilism the decisive crisis of modernity. As faith declined and
metaphysical principles were increasingly discredited, he warned that Europe’s ‘highest values’
were ‘losing their value’.13 Recognizing the implications of this, Nietzsche wrote in The Gay
Science:
Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his
murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to
wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?
Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging
continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is not night continually closing in
on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Who will wipe this blood off us? What
water is there for us to clean ourselves? Is not the greatness of this deed to great for us?14
Here Nietzsche is speaking of the immense moral and ontological consequences of the loss of
God. Humanity’s self-understanding, its creaturely significance and ethics, were bound to
various conceptions of a transcendent, law-giving God. Without God as a ground for values,
Nietzsche believed a crisis of foundational authority was inevitable. The concern was not that
God was indispensable to human values; rather, it was that the Enlightenment project simply
reconstructed Christian morality from critical reason without providing the transcendent ground
of the latter. Nietzsche cautions against this in Twilight of the Idols: ‘When one gives up
Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality’.15 Camus refers
to this in The Rebel, writing that Nietzsche ‘saw clearly that humanitarianism was only a form of
Christianity deprived of superior justification, which preserved final causes while rejecting the
first cause.’16 This problematic was persuasively restated by Alasdair MacIntyre nearly one
hundred years after Nietzsche in After Virtue. MacIntyre likewise argued that the West had
preserved the vocabulary of Christian ethics without retaining the foundational contexts from
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Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
which that vocabulary derived.17 To his credit, Nietzsche was among the first to problematize
this loss. Nietzsche also, as Mark Warren points out, emphasizes the political vacuum opened up
as a result of the collapse: ‘Because the loss of Christian-moral culture occurs without the
formation of a sovereign self, the opportunity exists for the state to provide its own legitimations
by manipulating self-identities. In this way, the state assumes a role vacated by the church’.18
As we shall see, this contributes to the modern crisis of legitimacy and identity, which Camus
explores at length in his analysis of political ideologies in The Rebel.19 There in particular,
Camus describes ideologies, much like Nietzsche, as secular religions, or as manifestations of the
need for a post-Christian (and intellectually authoritative) set of objective beliefs and normative
practices.
Nietzsche’s aim, according to Camus, was ‘to provoke a kind of crisis and a final
decision about the problem of atheism’.20 This crisis was explicitly political. As Tasmin Shaw
recently observed, ‘in the absence of myth or religion’, Nietzsche believed that secular politics
had ‘no other means of generating normative agreement’.21 Following Nietzsche, Camus
similarly argued that liberal modernity had not yet faced the moral and epistemological
consequences of its rejection of metaphysics. Nor had it developed a coherent moral language
free of first principles. While he does not necessarily posit a solution, Nietzsche at least raised
the problem, and he challenges ‘philosophers of the future’ to create new values and standards on
the basis of which to judge and act.
In 1942, when Camus published The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, absurdity and
nihilism were the cardinal themes of his work. This is a pivotal point in Camus’ intellectual life.
A witness to the peculiar disorder of pre-World War II Europe, Camus was concerned about the
application of nihilistic thinking to politics. As Nietzsche had warned at the turn of the century,
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Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
metaphysics was devalued and ideologies obsessed with history and force were becoming the
principal drivers of European politics. Camus’ attitude is summed up well in a 1944 article he
wrote for the resistance newspaper Combat:
We believe that the truth of this century cannot be discovered unless its tragedy is explored to the
bitter end. If the age is afflicted with nihilism, it is not by ignoring nihilism that we will discover
the morality we need. True, not everything can be summed up by the words ‘negation’ or
‘absurdity.’ We know this. But negation and absurdity must be posited as ideas because our
generation has encountered them and we must learn to live with them. 22
Whereas in earlier works Camus sought responses (on an individual level) to nihilism and
absurdity, he now wondered if it was possible to live peacefully in an age defined by them.
Initially a life-affirming revelation for Camus, the absurd became both a metaphysical and a
political crisis. Referring to the impetus for this crisis, Phillip Rhein writes that
Camus could say in 1943 that the only serious philosophical problem was the one of suicide; but
confronted with the Hitler terror, the occupation, resistance, and final liberation of France, the
Communist successes in France, and the events of the Cold War, he soon discovered that the stoic
comfort offered by Sisyphus was of little solace or value. As early as 1943 and 1944, although
still enmeshed in the theory of the absurd, Camus began . . . a search for some way to transcend
the nihilism of his early writings.23
This shift in Camus’ attitude is evident in his notebooks as well as The Myth of Sisyphus. In The
Myth of Sisyphus in particular, the guiding question is whether absurdity, or the absence of
higher meaning, devalues life and, consequently, poisons politics.
Camus’ dialogue with Nietzsche in The Myth of Sisyphus orbits around the limits of
reason in an absurd world. Of particular importance is Nietzsche’s account of truth, which
Camus’ absurdism takes as a foundational premise. For Nietzsche, truth was primarily a means.
A living and thinking thing requires a horizon, he writes in Untimely Meditations, and if ‘it is
unable to draw one around itself . . . it will come to an untimely end’.24 Truth is thus an
existential ground, a fiction that serves life. But truth remains an anthropomorphic projection;
however useful, it is an error emerging out of the need for intelligibility.25 Without truth, the
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Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
ability to order the world and to pass definitive judgment would be greatly diminished, Nietzsche
argued. ‘We can only take cognizance of a world which we ourselves have made’.26
Nietzsche hoped to undermine the conventional meaning of truth, which implied
objectivity or certainty. This is problematic insofar as it separates truth from human volition.27
Even positivist science fails to meet this standard. ‘How is it possible for an instrument [science]
to criticize itself’, Nietzsche asks, ‘when it is itself that exercises the critical faculty’?28 This is
not to say that all truth claims are equivalent; rather, the point is that science relies upon
constructs and presuppositions that are themselves determined by practical human needs.29 The
same is true of reason. Man uses reason as a conceptual tool in order to differentiate phenomena.
But reason does not produce a dispassionate account of reality; on the contrary, it bears the
stamp of its human origins. ‘The world appears to us logical,’ Nietzsche claims, ‘because we
first logicized it’.30 Reason is therefore a kind of metaphysical illusion; by allowing man to
interpret the world as reasonable, it possibilizes truth and imposes sense – but that is all it does.31
Nietzsche tries constantly to expose this aspect of truth and to identify its origins in the human
psyche.
In The Will to Power, Nietzsche addresses the error in divorcing truth from the interpreting
subject. ‘In opposition to positivism, which halts at phenomena and says, these are only facts
and nothing more, I would say: No facts are precisely lacking, all that exists consists of
interpretations. We cannot establish any fact in itself’.32 That we cannot establish a fact in itself
means that knowledge is necessarily nonfoundational. A particular belief may be true or false,
but it must perforce rest on relative foundations.33 Nietzsche’s broader point is that truths are
incommensurable insofar as they can only be judged relative to a perspective.34 This is
consistent with Nietzsche’s belief that human beings adopt a conceptual scheme in order to make
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Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
sense of the world. Whether this scheme is scientific, religious, or ideological, it begins with a
choice. Nietzsche insists that this choice is permeated by valuations. ‘It is our needs’, he writes,
‘that interpret the world; our instincts and impulses for and against’.35 In each case, individuals
choose an interpretive scheme or a perspective on the basis of certain prejudices and preferences.
It is in this sense that Nietzsche believes truth claims are reducible to value judgments. As the
recent analytic literature points out, it is also the reason why Nietzsche believed that the analysis
of facts would always raise insoluble questions about the interpretation of those facts.36
Nietzsche’s epistemological critique of metaphysics forms the basis of Camus’ absurdist
thought. In particular, Camus acknowledges the limits of reason and accepts, as a consequence
of absurdity, that absolute knowledge of things is not possible. Camus thus adopts Nietzsche’s
anti-essentialism and regards all knowledge as construction.37 At the same, however, as I show
in the discussion of political revolt, Camus shares Nietzsche’s concern that such a view does not
satisfy the standards of justification set forth by secular rationalism.38 In any case, this is the
sense in which Camus takes Nietzsche’s skepticism as a point of departure.
It is important to comment briefly on Camus’ interpretation of Nietzsche’s critical
epistemology. There are generally two accounts of Nietzsche’s view of truth in the
contemporary literature. The first holds that Nietzsche’s skepticism is not as radical as it seems.
A proponent of this view, Brian Leiter has argued that a naturalist strain emerges in Nietzsche’s
later works, according to which Nietzsche does not deny empirical truth so much as the claim
that our acquisition of truth can be truly disinterested.39 Indeed, Leiter holds that Nietzsche
never rejects values as such; he merely critiques them from his particular point of view.40
Tasmin Shaw has referred to this as the ‘common sense’ interpretation of Nietzsche’s
perspectivism.41 There is nothing in Camus’ analysis that contradicts this view, although it is
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Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
worth recalling that Camus is not a systematic thinker, and so his writings often lack precision
and philosophical depth. The second account of Nietzsche’s view of truth is more
epistemological. It posits, at minimum, that the world has no discernible structure, and therefore
that truth claims do not correspond to it in any meaningful way.42 Although Camus does not
explicitly reject this, his position seems closer to the ‘common sense’ view.
At any rate, while there is legitimate debate about the implications of Nietzsche’s
insights, the focus here is on Camus’ interpretation, and on how that interpretation shaped his
subsequent thought. Camus regards Nietzsche, above all, as a harbinger of the age of absurdity.
In this respect, Nietzsche’s thought was important for at least two reasons. First, Nietzsche
marks a pivot point in modern life. His thought prefigures the postmodern turn in Western
philosophy, which Camus associates with the emergence of absurdity and nihilism as
metaphysical and cultural problems. Second, Nietzsche’s genealogical account of truth and
nihilism help to define the absurd dilemma for Camus. Psychologically, it awakens Camus to
the role and persistence of transcendentals in human life. Politically, as I demonstrate below,
Nietzsche links the foundational appeal of ideologies to the loss of traditional sources of
transcendence. By relativizing truth, Nietzsche also shows how absurdity (or the absence of
transcendentals) undercuts normative consensus in society and creates a moral vacuum in the
political realm. Camus takes seriously this problematic in Nietzsche’s thought, and tries to
develop a coherent solution.
This solution begins with a fundamental question: what is the proper response of the
individual (and the political community more generally) to a world without transcendent truths?
Nietzsche seemed to struggle with this question. He acknowledges that political authority ought
to be preserved and that normative consensus is necessary, but, as Shaw observes, ‘he cannot
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Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
cede to the state this ideological power’.43 This is perhaps why Leiter concludes that Nietzsche
fails to produce a comprehensive ‘theory of the state and its legitimacy’.44 Nietzsche is left,
ultimately, with a pervasive skepticism and a kind of muddled individualism. He exalts the
creative faculties of superior individuals and enjoins men to find freedom and meaning in selfaffirmation.
While Camus seemed to share this view in his early works, he became increasingly
opposed to the implications of Nietzsche’s ethic of self-determination. ‘With Nietzsche’, Camus
writes, ‘rebellion ends . . . in the exaltation of evil’.45 Although Camus understood that
46
Nietzsche sought only to replace ‘the judge and the oppressor’ with ‘the creator’, he also
believed that, for the majority of mankind, “’he intoxication of freedom ends in biological or
historical Caesarism’.47 Thus, in a 1946 letter to his mentor Jean Grenier, Camus states that his
essay on revolt is in part a response to the destructive legacy of Nietzsche’s thought:
I will use my essay on revolt to say that this cult of history and the will to power in which we live
is both an insanity and a theoretical error. It’s time to start the critique of Nietzscheanism (in its
Hegelian aspect), not from the traditional viewpoint, but from a contemporary one. Out of
nostalgia, no doubt, I am turning more and more toward that side of mankind that does not belong
to history. If it’s true that we live in history, I know that we die outside history. 48
Here Camus implies that Nietzsche’s ideas prepared the way for political nihilism. Nietzsche, in
effect, embraces a narrow and radical brand of freedom, one that is deeply problematic in a
political context in which the freedom of others must also be respected. His legitimate suspicion
of normative authority, moreover, lapses into a kind of moral quietism, or what scholars have
recently referred to as Nietzsche’s political skepticism.49 With Nietzsche, Camus writes in a
1946 notebook entry, ‘liberty is an exaltation’ – there is no concern whatsoever for limits.50
Camus is even more direct about this in his discussion of Nietzsche in The Rebel:
From the moment that it is admitted that the world pursues no end, Nietzsche proposes to concede
its innocence, to affirm that it accepts no judgment since it cannot be judged on any intention, and
consequently to replace all judgments based on values by absolute assent, and by a complete and
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exalted allegiance to this world. Thus from absolute despair will spring infinite joy, from blind
servitude, unbounded freedom. To be free is, precisely, to abolish ends. 51
One of the core problems that Nietzsche’s call to self-affirmation raises for Camus is the
conflict between the individual and the community (or between subjectivity and
intersubjectivity). This problem was less important to Nietzsche, whose primary concern was
the individual. Camus, however, wants to reconcile the freedom of the individual with the desire
to establish moral limits. He accepts the relativistic consequences of absurdity, but he remained
deeply concerned about the absence of a privileged ground for human values. Nietzsche’s
individualism, Camus insisted, was antithetical to communal life, which required mutual
understanding and dialogue. Nietzsche, as mentioned, encouraged the individual to create for
himself, to become a lawgiver. By empowering the individual in this way, however, Nietzsche
undermined the basis for shared values.
Camus’ ethical reservations are dramatized in his first play Caligula, which we know was
at least indirectly inspired by Nietzsche.52 Caligula is about an emperor driven mad by the loss
of his sister. As the play begins, Caligula is announced missing. We learn that he has gone
‘walking’ for three days after hearing of his sister’s death. Caligula returns but is
unrecognizable; he appears to have discovered a truth, which is that ‘Men die, and they are not
happy’.53 Henceforth Caligula institutes his reign of terror and the tragicomedy slowly unfolds.
Unable to accept the terms of an absurd life, he strives to mirror the world’s indifference. ‘The
world has no importance’, he says, and ‘I shall teach men the truth of this world, which is that it
has none’.54 Caligula’s decree signals his intent to expose the ultimate equivalence of
everything, especially of human values. Much of his actions, therefore, aim to undermine the
foundations of social life.
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Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
In Caligula, the problem of affirming values in an absurd context is explicit.
Consciousness is heightened and the logic of absurdity is carried to its extreme. Caligula
experiences what Roger Quilliot has aptly called a ‘crisis of the intellect’.55 This is dramatized
in an exchange between Caligula and his confidant Cherea. With implacable logic, Caligula
reasons from absurdity to nihilism. He then asks Cherea if he ‘believes in some higher
principle’? Cherea accepts Caligula’s nihilistic logic, but insists that ‘some actions are . . . more
praiseworthy than others’. Predictably, Caligula dismisses Cherea’s claim, maintaining instead
‘that all are on an equal footing’.56 Caligula is trapped in the logic of absurdity, as a result of
which he is driven to destruction. ‘Who can condemn me in this world’, he laments, ‘where
there is no judge, where nobody is innocent . . . where nothing lasts’?57 Thus we know that
Caligula’s nihilism follows directly from his absurd awareness.58
The central motif of Caligula is the individual’s confrontation with absurdity. Caligula
deduces the equivalency of things from the perceived indifference of nature. Absent shared
values and standards, he falls into despair and crime. Too conscious to live with (or accept)
absurdity, Caligula externalizes its inhumanity in order to liberate himself, and thus plunges the
community into chaos. In this way, Caligula’s actions mirror the absurd; he accepts moral
license as a logical consequence of meaninglessness, and so transforms the absurd into a rule of
action. Caligula is therefore the first work in which Camus problematizes the absurd in moral
and political terms. The absurd is carried to its logical conclusion and nihilism, which is the
political manifestation of absurdity, overwhelms the social order.
In The Rebel, Camus suggests that the individual pathologies at the root of Caligula’s fall
are equally operative at the collective level. This is particularly evident in modern political
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Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
ideologies. Like Nietzsche, Camus viewed ideologies as disguised manifestations of the thirst
for truth or meaning. Camus hints at this in The Myth of Sisyphus:
The tradition of what may be called humiliated thought has never ceased to exist. The criticism of
rationalism has been made so often that it seems unnecessary to begin again. Yet our epoch is
marked by the rebirth of those paradoxical systems that strive to trip up the reason as if truly it had
always forged ahead. But that is not so much a proof of the efficacy of the reason as of the
intensity of its hopes.59
The emphasis on hope is noteworthy. The language Camus uses here is reminiscent of
Nietzsche, who often spoke of truth as a concomitant of the desire for metaphysical solace. In
the modern political realm, where religion and metaphysics have lost their authority, Camus
believed this desire produced a distinctly ideological brand of politics. People cling to
ideological systems, he argues, because ideologies impose order on life and history. In the
language of Nietzsche, ideologies create a horizon within which one can interpret and judge
events.
So far we have identified at least two ways in which Nietzsche’s thought overlaps with
Camus’ moral and political concerns. First, Camus accepts absurdity and its implications for
truth. Like Nietzsche, Camus does not so much deny certainty as the notion that beliefs can rest
on absolute, epistemologically pure foundations. Consequently, there can be no authoritative or
transcendent account of reality – or history. However, because the impulse for certainty persists,
people continue to order the world in accordance with ideological narratives, which effectively
function as political religions. Furthermore, ideologies tend to concretize truths that are based
not on common experience but on particular perspectives. And because they derive from
competing worldviews, they are inherently irreconcilable. This undermines any experiential
basis for shared values and, worse still, it devalues the present by justifying action in terms of the
future. Nietzsche’s problematization of truth, if nothing else, illuminates the political perils of
life in an age of absurdity.
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Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
Nietzsche also influenced Camus’ critiques of teleological ideologies, as well as political
realism more generally. This is perhaps clearest in Camus’ analysis of Hegel.60 With Hegel,
Camus argues in The Rebel, history supplants God and the real becomes indistinguishable from
the rational. In effect, though, Hegel only reconciles the real and the rational by identifying one
with the other. The result of this distortion of reality is a kind of blanket justification of present
action. ‘Truth, reason, and justice’, Camus writes, are ‘abruptly incarnated in the progress of the
world’.61 Values, in other words, are either supplanted by facts or ‘found at the end of history’.62
And without independent principles to guide action, the task of shaping history falls to reason
and force. This is what Camus means when he claims that Hegel furnished ‘the decisive
justification of the spirit of power in the twentieth century’.63 With Nazism, for instance, force is
exalted and history is reduced to its purest form. The goal of evolution displaces the process
itself. Such an attitude was expressed perfectly by Ernst Junger, the leading intellectual behind
Nazi ideology: ‘Evolution is far more important than living’.64 For Camus, this is the
culmination of a logic rooted in historical dynamism.
Camus speaks to this in a series of Combat articles, in which he argues that the leading
ideologies of his time (capitalism and Hegelian-Marxism) were
based on the idea of progress . . . and convinced the application of their principles must inevitably
lead to social equilibrium . . . They are extracting a very heave price from us. In practical terms, it
follows that the battle that will be waged in years to come will not pit the forces of utopia against
the forces of reality. Rather, it will pit different utopias against each other as they try to gain a
purchase on the real, and the only choice remaining will be to decide which form of utopia is least
costly.65
Camus, following Nietzsche, considered Hegelianism the logical result of non-naturalistic (and
teleological) interpretations of life and history. The commitment to teleological ideals,
moreover, also helped to instantiate a particular type of political realism, which Camus
associates with the legitimization of crime and violence. Camus also addresses this in Combat:
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Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
‘terror can be legitimized only if one adopts the principle that the end justifies the means. And
this principle can be embraced only if the efficacy of an action is taken to be an absolute end . . .
as in philosophies that take history as absolute’.66 This passage distills Camus’ argument against
political realism. As an outgrowth of teleology, realist doctrines justify present actions in terms
of future aims. Hence much of Camus’ political thought aims at discrediting this approach.
When he condemns communism in Combat, for example, he expresses his solidarity with the
collectivist vision but says explicitly that ‘their adherence to a very consistent philosophy of
history justifies their acceptance of political realism as the primary method for securing triumph
of an ideal shared by many Frenchmen . . . We do not believe in political realism. Our method is
different’.67
Camus rejects political realism for the same reasons he rejects historical progressivism: it
tends to deny lived experience (despite claims to the contrary) in defense of abstract ideas. In
this respect, Camus seems to follow Nietzsche, who similarly wrote that ‘We should serve
history only so far as it serves life; but to value its study beyond a certain point mutilates and
degrades life: and this is a fact that certain marked symptoms of our time make it as necessary as
it may be painful to bring to the test of experience’.68 In a 1947 notebook entry, Camus likewise
asks: ‘Being in history while referring to values that go beyond history – is it possible? Does not
the value of ignorance itself cover a convenient refuge? Nothing is pure, nothing is pure – this is
the cry that has poisoned our century’.69
Camus is troubled by the tendency of political actors to judge and act on the basis of
principles unconnected to immediate experience. To separate values from politics in this way, he
argues, is to deny a concrete source of limits. On Camus’ view, realist doctrines (at least those in
Hegelian and Marxist traditions) are justificatory extensions of political ideologies; they begin
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Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
with assumptions about the order and direction of history, and proceed to justify actions on the
basis of those assumptions. Such methods, Camus maintains, are often called realist but are, in
fact, disguised forms of idealism.
It is important to clarify Camus’ use of the term ‘political realism’, which diverges from
much of the current literature. As Enzo Rossi and Matt Sleat recently observed, realists
generally
maintain that political theory should begin (in a justificatory rather than temporal sense) not with
the explication of moral ideas (of justice, freedom, rights, etc.), which are then taken to settle the
questions of value and principle in the political realm but in an (typically interpretative)
understanding of the practice of politics itself.70
Camus’ understanding of political realism is rather specific, and at least partially inconsistent
with this account. His view is also distinct from contemporary interpretations of realism, most of
which are more sensitive to the moral dilemmas of political life.71 However, Camus’ task is to
refute the classical account of realism, according to which political legitimacy ought to be
separated from questions of normative values. Such, for example, was the view of Carl Schmitt.
Schmitt, as Shaw claims, ‘sees the attempt to ground politics in objective values as an
unnecessary reaction to nineteenth century nihilism’.72 This is the realism against which Camus
is reacting.73 In his political journalism in particular, Camus regards such attitudes as
incompatible with any effort to constrain political actions. His critique aims, therefore, at what
Rossi and Sleat rightly refer to as Machiavellian realism, a doctrine “in which politics is not
subject to moral criteria but is judged by the extent to which political action realizes its intended
goals, and hence it would be wrong to pass ethical judgment on political actors’.74 For Camus,
this is especially pernicious in an age of ideologies, as goals are defined progressively in terms of
larger historical aims. This approach defined the modern era, and Camus’ political thought is
intended as a corrective to it. Thus, while Camus may misappropriate the term ‘political
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Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
realism’, he invokes it in order to stress the need for an experiential (concrete) political morality.
As I argue in the final section, Camus’ philosophy of revolt is a provisional attempt to do this
within a Nietzschean framework.
Beyond Nietzsche: Camus’ Philosophy of Revolt
Camus’ theory of revolt is fully articulated in The Rebel. Here the aim is to identify a
ground for human values that is both non-transcendent and binding beyond the individual. The
theoretical basis for Camus’ argument is set forth in The Myth of Sisyphus, where the
individual’s decision to live is said to be a positive affirmation of the value of life itself.75 This
logic is extended in The Rebel. ‘If we decide to revolt’, Camus writes, ‘it must be because we
have decided that a human society has some positive value’.76 Revolt thus makes, in principle at
least, a universal value of the individual’s affirmation of life.
Camus’ critique of Nietzsche also reaches its climax in The Rebel. Commentators such
as Tasmin Shaw have suggested that Nietzsche’s skepticism concerning the potential for
normative agreement in a secular (or absurd) context inclined him towards pessimism.77 Shaw’s
claims are certainly justifiable. But Camus was interested more in the emancipatory implications
of Nietzsche’s thought. Nietzsche, for instance, considered the absence of foundational authority
liberating. In an absurd world, values are created and thus impermanent and non-binding; the
individual must choose and act according to his own dictates. This is the key tension in
Nietzsche’s works with which Camus wrestles. While Camus accepts Nietzsche’s premise
concerning the impermanence of values, he rejects the notion that the individual ought to be his
own lawgiver. Indeed, Camus’ philosophy of revolt can be seen as a response to Nietzsche in
this respect. Camus hints at this in The Rebel: ‘Nietzsche did not formulate a philosophy of
18
Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
rebellion, but constructed a philosophy on rebellion [italics mine]’.78 Camus, I argue, does the
opposite: he uses a philosophy on rebellion (Nietzsche’s) to construct a philosophy of rebellion.
The transition from individual (metaphysical) revolt to collective action is central to
Camus’ account. On his view, metaphysical revolt begins with a certain kind of awareness,
either of absurdity itself or of some aspect of life which the individual finds intolerable. In either
case, it is ‘the movement by which man protests against his condition’.79 For Camus, however,
and in contrast to Nietzsche, metaphysical revolt is not merely a negation: ‘it implies a value
judgment in the name of which the rebel refuses to approve the condition in which he finds
himself’.80 This judgment is significant inasmuch as it precedes theoretical justification. This
holds, Camus insists, whether the impulse to revolt is metaphysical or political; that is, whether
the individual is protesting against absurdity (as Caligula does) or against oppressive political
institutions. In both cases, the individual discovers a principle in defense of which he is willing
to act. This marks the transition from solipsism to collective consciousness. Perhaps most
importantly, it reveals the existence of a shared value, the reality of which is affirmed through
individual and collective action.81 The moral and political significance of revolt therefore lies in
its universality. It is common to all human beings who seek affirmation or resist oppression.82 It
is, moreover, a step towards self-transcendence. Metaphysical revolt, at its core, is ‘not an
egoistic act’.83 It may, as Camus concedes, have egoistic motives, but its expression signals a
demand for respect that transcends the individual. Hence it begins the moment the individual
‘identifies himself with a natural community’.84
The question of whether Camus resolves the tension between the demand for values and
the absence of foundational authority is difficult to answer. Critics such as David Sprintzen have
argued that Camus’ alternatives are vague and ‘tend to be little more than moralisms’.85 Like
19
Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
Sartre and others, Sprintzen claims that Camus fails to appreciate the individual’s relation to
historical processes and, consequently, fails to understand humans ‘as the product of their own
natural, historical, collective self-creation’.86 Critiques of this sort, however, fail to understand
the radical nature of Camus’ project. The ethics of revolt are non-prescriptive by design.
Camus’ goal is not to posit a definitive ground for judging and deciding; for that is what
foundationalist systems have done. Instead, he tries to identify the preconditions for a postfoundational politics. Experience and dialogue are fundamental because they provide a general
framework within with to judge action, but only on a provisional basis. The acceptance of
uncertainty is a product of Camus’ desire to impose limits on action. Given the eruption of
nihilistic violence in Europe, it is not surprising that Camus thought imposing limits the most
urgent need of his time. As Roger Quilliot observes, Camus believed the best way to do this was
to purge politics of the prophetic spirit and the romantic sense of mission’ which came to
dominate revolutionary politics in the twentieth century.87 Judged in this light, Camus’ notion of
revolt is of greater value than many of his critics suggest.
It is also inaccurate to claim that Camus fails to account for the role of collective selfcreation. Indeed, Camus’ rebellious ethos is an attempt to re-interpret the meaning of
metaphysical revolt, to transform it into a collective experience. By collective experience I do
not mean mass action involving the use of a party or movement to effect political change; this is
precisely the sort of action to which Camus is opposed. In Camus’ writings, particularly his late
fiction, individual revolt is based upon and brings about a collective sense of the human
condition. Out of this collective sense a genuine community of revolt can emerge. Revolt is
thus a creative act whose symbolic significance transcends the individual. Camus does not,
therefore, deny that historical conditions shape human life and consciousness; rather, he is
20
Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
evoking the classical symbols of exile, judgment, and kingdom to awaken human beings to the
concrete reality of suffering and loss. For Camus, these symbols have the capacity to alter
human consciousness, even in the face of historical necessity and material scarcity.88 To be sure,
Camus does not present a scheme whereby institutions or decisions can be categorically judged.
But his framework does allow for a basic evaluation of political and ethical foundations. This is
all Camus intends to do with his concept of revolt, and its significance must be judged on this
basis alone.
Ultimately, Camus’ philosophy of revolt seeks to accomplish two things. First, it
establishes a ground for human judgment beyond metaphysics or transcendentals. By doing so,
Camus avoids the epistemological traps of nihilism and transcendence. Second, revolt identifies
ethical boundary conditions on the basis of which certain actions (murder, for example) can be
deemed illegitimate. Camus’ success on these two fronts is a matter of legitimate debate, but
that debate must begin by acknowledging the impetus and intent of Camus’ political project.
Here I have defined this project in terms of Camus’ engagement with and response to Nietzsche.
In addition to crystallizing the problems against which Camus was reacting, this approach has
also clarified the novelty of Camus’ efforts. Whereas many political thinkers have sought to
establish what human beings can and cannot know, Camus categorically rejects this method.
Instead he accepts uncertainty and tries to reconnect knowledge and meaning to its proper
ground in experience rather than in history or foundationalist principles.
Revolt is post-foundational insofar as it rejects the language of absolutism and relativism,
as both categories presuppose that values require foundations in the traditional sense. As
Nietzsche noted, nihilism was an inevitable consequence of this model. Camus’ philosophy of
revolt escapes this problem by arguing that absurdity (and Nietzsche’s anti-foundationalism in
21
Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
particular) does not delegitimize normative values as that claim would itself require external
justification. Camus addresses this in his critique of Nietzsche in The Rebel. The absence of
eternal laws authorizes nothing, he argues, ‘as there must also be values and aims in order to
choose another course of action’.89 If anything, Camus takes Nietzsche’s claims about the
absence of an independent moral authority as an imperative to establish limits. He relinquishes
the idea of absolute truth and advocates an experiential pragmatism in which values are
collectively acknowledged and mutually reinforced. The source of limits and values, he insists,
cannot be reduced to a unified principle. For this reason, a community of revolt is held together
not by a common conception of truth but rather by a commonly recognized experience and a
commitment to active dialogue. In the end, Camus sought a ground for solidarity that recognized
distinctions and embraced the tensional quality of human existence. Hence he does not so much
resolve the problem of foundationalism as reject its underlying assumptions.
Conclusion
This article has examined the importance of Nietzsche to Camus’ thought, and suggested
that Camus’ project is inextricably linked to Nietzsche’s. The central claim was that Nietzsche
inspired Camus’ efforts to recover evaluative standards in the absence of a foundational
authority. This effort first emerges in Camus’ absurdist inquiries, and is more fully developed in
his writings on revolt. That there are limitations to Camus’ approach is undeniable; however,
this is not surprising given the scale of his ambitions. Ultimately, Camus wants to modify our
expectations of politics and truth. This process begins in The Myth of Sisyphus, where the limits
of human knowledge are marked by absurdity. In The Rebel, Camus builds a political
philosophy on the basis of these absurd revelations. Untruth and doubt are affirmed, but
meaning is preserved (and nihilism is rejected) on account of human volition. Camus’ project
22
Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
may not achieve the sense of awe that can be inspired by foundationalist pleas, but this is a
necessary concession he makes to absurdity. A witness to the political horrors of the twentieth
century, Camus believed that rejecting doctrinaire thinking required that we also reject the
consolations of transcendent meaning. To compensate for this loss and to resist nihilism, Camus
tried to restore a sense of value and community in the modern world.
23
Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
Notes
1
Albert Camus (1991) The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 28. New York: Vintage International.
In The Will to Power (2006), for example, Nietzsche writes that ‘Nihilism is the conviction that life is absurd’
(New York: Barnes and Noble, p. 5.).
3
Friedrich Nietzsche (2006) The Will to Power, tr. Anthony Ludovici, p. 3. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006.
4
Ibid. p. 6.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid. p. 7.
7
Albert Camus (2006) Camus at Combat, tr. Arthur Goldhammer, p. 100. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
8
Notable examples are Thomas Hanna (1958) The Thought and Art of Albert Camus. Chicago: Henry Regnery
Company; Fred Willhoite (1968) Beyond Nihilism. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press; James
Arnold (1973) Camus’ Dionysian Hero: Caligula in 1938. South Atlantic Bulletin (4); Jeffrey Isaac (1992) Arendt,
Camus, and Modern Rebellion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; and Samantha Novello (2010) Camus as
Political Thinker. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. All of these analyses are provisional, however; a comprehensive
study of Nietzsche’s import to Camus remains to be done.
9
This is suggested in a revealing passage taken from Camus’ personal notebooks (2008): ‘It is said that Nietzsche,
after breaking with Lou, entered into a final solitude, walked at night in the mountains that dominate the Gulf of
Genoa and lit immense fires there that he watched smolder. I’ve often thought of these fires and their gleam has
danced behind my entire intellectual life. So even though I’ve sometimes been unjust toward certain thoughts and
certain men whom I’ve met in this century, it is because I’ve unwillingly put them in front of these fires and they
were promptly reduced to ashes’ (Notebooks 1951-1959, p. 89).
10
See Nietzsche and Music in Camus’ Youthful Writings (1976), tr. Ellen Conroy Kennedy. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf.
11
In the month of September 1937 alone, for example, Camus (1963) quotes four passages directly from Nietzsche’s
Twilight of the Idols. See Camus’ Notebooks, 1935-1942, pp.144-45.
12
Germaine Bree (1964) Camus, p. 196. New York: Hancourt, Brace & World.
13
Nietzsche (n. 2), p. 5.
14
Friedrich Nietzsche (1974) The Gay Science, tr. Walter Kaufmann, p. 181. New York: Random House.
15
Friedrich Nietzsche (1968) Twilight of the Idols, tr. R.J. Hollingdale, p. 79. New York: Penguin Books.
16
Ibid. p. 78.
17
See Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
18
Mark Warren (1991) Nietzsche and Political Thought, p. 220. Boston, MA: MIT Press.
19
In his study of Nietzsche’s political thought, Tasmin Shaw (2007) refers to this aspect of Nietzsche’s secular
politics as the problem of “political self-justification” (Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism, p. 5. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press). According to Shaw, Nietzsche argued that, in the absence of external authority (i.e.
transcendent religion), states will “manufacture the very normative beliefs to which they then appeal in their claims
to legitimacy (Ibid.). This political insight of Nietzsche, I argue, was central to Camus’ critique of modern
ideological politics.
20
Albert Camus (1991) The Rebel, tr. Anthony Bower, p. 66. New York: Vintage Books.
21
Tasmin Shaw (2007) Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism, p. 6. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
22
Camus (n. 7), p. 100.
23
Phillip H. Rein (1969) Albert Camus, p. 80. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers.
24
Friedrich Nietzsche (2009) Untimely Meditations, tr. Anthony Ludovici and Adrian Collins, p. 101. New York:
Digireads.
25
In The Will to Power (2006), Nietzsche makes this point with regard to all knowledge: ‘Of what alone can
knowledge consist? – Interpretation, the introduction of a sense into things, not explanation . . . There is no such
thing as an established fact, everything fluctuates, everything is intangible, yielding; after all, the most lasting of all
things are our opinions’ (p. 351).
26
Nietzsche (n. 2), p. 290.
27
Maudemarie Clark (1990) has emphasized why Nietzsche’s metaphysics does not permit such a conception of
truth. Nietzsche, she writes, maintains that ‘once we get rid of the thing-in-itself, we lose all basis for regarding
objectivity as the transcendence of subjective factors. If we recognize the perspectival character of knowledge, our
2
24
Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
only alternative is to think of objectivity as openness to perspectives other than our own’ (Nietzsche on Truth and
Philosophy, p.148. New York: Cambridge University Press).
28
Ibid. p. 286.
29
As an example of this, Nietzsche (2006) points to the assumed distinction between appearance and reality. ‘We
have no categories’, he says, ‘which allow us to separate a world as thing-in-itself from a world of appearance’ (The
Will to Power, p. 287). There are several other constructs to which Nietzsche points as well, including subject, ego,
object, being, thingness, essence, causality, etc.
30
For more see Arthur Danto (1980) Nietzsche as Philosopher, p. 89. New York: Columbia University Press.
31
Arthur Danto (1980) sums up Nietzsche’s claim quite well: ‘He [Nietzsche] means only that reason has application
to the surface of things, of ourselves and of reality, and that the highest paradigms of reason are only fantastic
edifices sprung forth, insubstantial and unanchored, from the forming imagination of men (Nietzsche as
Philosopher, p. 128).
32
Nietzsche (n. 2), p. 284.
33
Maudemarie Clark (1990) illustrates Nietzsche’s point concerning the impossibility facts in themselves well: ‘I
therefore interpret Nietzsche’s metaphor of perspective as designed to help us avoid the snares of the idea that we
can have knowledge of things as they are in themselves. To call nonperspectival knowing an absurdity and a
nonsense invites us to think of knowing things-in-themselves as equivalent to the recognizably absurd idea of seeing
things from no perspective’ (Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, p. 132. New York: Cambridge University Press).
34
This interpretation of perspectivism is rather common among Nietzsche scholars. Arthur Danto (1980), for
example, writes that ‘We cannot speak of a true perspective, but only of the perspective that prevails. Because we
cannot appeal to any fact independently of its relation to the perspective it is meant to support’ (Nietzsche as
Philosopher, p. 77). Alexander Nehamas (1985) similarly argues that Nietzsche’s perspectivist doctrine precludes
the possibility of a ‘privileged perspective’ (Life as Literature, p. 49. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
35
Ibid.
36
Shaw (2007) offers a particularly useful analysis of this aspect of Nietzsche’s skepticism (Nietzsche’s Political
Skepticism, p. 62. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
37
“This heart within me I can feel,” Camus (1991) writes, “and I judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge,
and the rest is construction” (The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 18).
38
See Shaw (n. 21), p. 60 for a broader discussion of this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought.
39
See Brian Leiter (1994) Perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of
Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, pp. 336-37. Berkeley: University of California Press.
40
Brian Leiter (2002) Nietzsche on Morality, p. 74. London: Routledge.
41
Shaw (n. 21), p. 63.
42
See Danto (n. 30), p. 75 for an explication of this account.
43
Shaw (n. 78), p. 78.
44
Leiter (n. 40), p. 296.
45
Camus (n. 1), p. 74.
46
See Tasmin Shaw (2007) Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism, pp. 137-152. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
47
Ibid. p. 79.
48
Albert Camus and Jean Grenier (2003) Correspondence, 1932-1960, tr. Jan F. Rigaud, p. 90. Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press.
49
See Tasmin Shaw (2007) Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism, pp. 137-152. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
50
Albert Camus (2010) Notebooks 1942-1951, tr. Justin O’Brien, p. 149. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee.
51
Camus (n. 18), p. 72.
52
For an account of Nietzsche’s influence on Caligula, see Henry Bonnier (1959) Albert Camus ou la force d’etre,
p. 92. Paris: E. Vitte.
53
Albert Camus (1958) Caligula and Three Other Plays, tr. Stuart Gilbert, p. 12. New York: Vintage Books.
54
Ibid. p. 14.
55
Roger Quilliot (1970) The Sea and Prisons, p. 47. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press.
56
Camus (n. 40), p. 52.
57
Ibid. p. 72.
58
Before signing execution orders, for instance, Caligula declares that since everything is equivalent, ‘all these
executions have an equal importance . . . all those fellows are on a par, one’s as guilty as another’ (Caligula and
Three Other Plays, p. 12).
59
Camus (n. 1), p. 22.
25
Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
Camus’ reading of Hegel is arguably superficial. However, it is of little consequence to this study whether Camus’
interpretation of Hegel was justified or not. Here it suffices to note the degree to which Camus’ understanding of
Hegel’s philosophy (and its enduring influence) was informed by Nietzsche. Camus understood his century as one
that tried to live without transcendence. For Camus, Nietzsche diagnosed the peculiar brand of nihilism that resulted
from this effort. As Camus writes in The Rebel, modern nihilism ‘is still nihilism in the Nietzschean sense . . . to the
extent that it is a calumny of the present life to the advantage of a historical future in which one tries to believe’
(1991, p. 144).
61
Camus (n. 18), p. 134.
62
Ibid. p.142.
63
Ibid. p. 137.
64
Ibid. p. 179.
65
Camus (n. 7), p. 261.
66
Ibid. p. 262.
67
Ibid. p. 63.
68
Nietzsche (n. 21), p. 96.
69
Camus (n. 37), p. 159.
70
Enzo Rossi and Matt Sleat (2014) ‘Realism in Normative Political Theory’, Philosophy Compass 10, p. 2.
71
For detailed discussions of such dilemmas, see Bernard Williams (2005) In the Beginning was the Deed. Oxford:
Princeton University Press; Raymond Guess (2008) Philosophy and Real Politics. Oxford: Princeton University
Press; Richard Bellamy (2010) ‘Dirty Hands and Clean Gloves: Liberal Ideals and Real Politics’, in European
Journal of Political Theory 9(4): 412-30; Glen Newey (1997) ‘Political Lying: A Defense’, in Public Affairs
Quarterly 11(2): 93-116; and C.A.J. Coady (2008) Messy Morality – The Challenge of Politics. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
72
Shaw (n. 41), p. 15.
73
Shaw (2007) makes a similar point with regard to Nietzsche: ‘In Nietzsche’s early and middle writings he clearly
aligns himself with the critics of contemporary realpolitik’ (Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism, p. 16). Shaw adds that
‘Nietzsche wants to make at least some normative demands on state power, for he holds that our capacity to
recognize independent criteria for beliefs and values must be preserved’ (Ibid). The problem, for Camus at least, is
that Nietzsche does not supply any such criteria.
74
Rossi and Sleat (n. 72), p. 6.
75
Camus (n. 1), p. 54.
76
Ibid. p. viii.
77
Shaw (n. 21), p. 6.
78
Ibid. p. 68.
79
Ibid. p. 23.
80
Ibid.
81
Although it is beyond the scope of this article, it is worth nothing that much of Camus’ fiction aims at illustrating
this movement. This is particularly true of Camus’ novel, The Plague. In this text, as Avi Sagi (2002) has
suggested, the act of revolt is the very process by which the ‘Cartesian I gives way to an interpersonal we’ (Camus
and the Philosophy of the Absurd, p.168. New York: Rodopi).
82
Camus (1991) claims, for example, that metaphysical rebellion points to a common human nature. An ‘analysis of
rebellion’, he writes, ‘leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a
human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed’ (The Rebel, p. 16).
83
Camus (n. 18), p. 16.
84
Ibid.
85
David Sprintzen (1988) Camus: A Critical Examination, p. 278. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
86
Ibid. p. 277.
87
Quilliot (n. 42), p. 201.
88
Camus’ reliance upon symbolism points to an interesting and enduring overlap with Nietzsche as well. As Shaw
(2007) notes, Nietzsche’s work ‘identifies two important features of the modern world. The first is secularization. In
The Birth of Tragedy, he describes to us the ways in which rational reflection eroded the horizons of myth that
bounded Greek culture of the Tragic Age. And in Untimely Meditations he describes the “whirlpool of
secularization” that occurs as Christian faith recedes. The loss of a shared worldview entails a breakdown of
previous forms of normative consensus’ (Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism, p. 12). These are precisely Camus’
concerns, and his revolt is intended to reinvoke the normative power of myth and symbolism in a modern context.
60
26
Camus and Nietzsche on Politics in an Age of Absurdity
89
Camus (n. 20), p. 71.
27