Awakening from the Neutralist Coma

...It draws Camus toward precisely the opposite conclusions from those reached by the Frenchman with whom he has often been confused, Jean-Paul Sartre...

...The least satisfactory aspect of the book is the one to which the author evidently attached the greatest weight, for his title alludes to it...

...On the opening page of the introduction, this theme is clearly stated: "There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic...

...The new intellectual catchword seems to be "conformity," just as a few short years ago it was "alienation...

...Camus makes use of the counter when he informs us that "the era which dares to claim that it is the most rebellious that has ever existed only offers a choice of various types of conformity...

...But Camus, in this respect, only adds one more failure to the attempts that have already been made to find them out...

...The world is a study of God which has turned out badly...

...For this monumental task of historical imagination, his impressionistic equipment is inadequate...

...Well, we might answer him, and what if it is...

...Obviously, there is a world of difference between a libertarian Socialist like the late Mayor of Berlin, Ernst Reuter, and his counterparts in East Germany...

...If the revolution is to occur at the end of two parallel movements, the indefinite shrinking of capital and the indefinite expansion of the proletariat, it will not or ought not to occur...

...Our criminals are no longer those helpless children who pleaded love as their excuse...

...Is it no longer so great a title as it has always been thought for a man to recognize himself (apart from all this sophomoric chi-chi about "rebellion," "conformity" and the like) "to be what he is," i.e., the servant of God...

...Capital and proletariat have both been equally unfaithful to Marx...

...The most sensitive portions of the book, which enjoy only an arbitrary relation to his main intentions, deal with art...

...But slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste for the superhuman, cripple judgment...

...Yet, it is this latter formulation which Camus unluckily attempts...

...He is not satisfied with the merely pragmatic differentiation between the stubborn democrat and the apologist for tyranny which can be recognized and accepted by all, but he must also convince us that this difference has its ultimate foundation in the most subtle metaphysical roots...

...We are living in the era of premeditation and perfect crimes...

...So far, so good...

...He spins out great nets with which to catch the most airy abstractions, and when he has satisfied himself that he has captured them he industriously weaves them into completely invisible shapes...

...Yet, this is precisely the area that deserves to be most thoroughly prospected, for in it, if anywhere, the answer that is sought is to be found...

...It contrives, by the promise of absolute justice, the acceptance of perpetual injustice, of unlimited compromise, and of indignity...

...But the Penal Code distinguishes between them by the useful concept of premeditation...

...Perhaps, like his more mature compatriot Malraux, he is destined to find himself at last in an unorthodox combination of art criticism and cultural history, of which The Rebel, at least in its best parts, is an example...

...The development of this theme goes, in the middle sections, through an extensive autopsy of Marxism—of which we have room here only to quote the high points: "We know that the evolution of the contemporary world refutes a certain number of the postulates of Marx...

...There is still too much confusion, too much rhetoric and, above all, too much self-confidence for us to feel certain that the patient will not suffer a relapse...

...Spengler's prediction that "Marxism will die not of refutation but of boredom" has long ago been fulfilled...

...It is with sympathy that he quotes Balzac, who brought to an end one of those interminable conversations about world politics with the words: "And now let's get back to something serious," meaning that he wanted to talk about his novels instead...

...The answer is easy...

...For the scope of his ambition is no less than to trace the etiology of our contemporary malaise through the thought of the last two centuries...

...One might think that a period which, within fifty years, uproots, enslaves or kills seventy million human beings should only, and forthwith, be condemned...

...The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude...

...What we are now seeing, except perhaps in France, is no longer a struggle in the realm of theory at all but the infinitely painful physical process by which humanity seeks to mop up after the worst ravages of a historical disease...

...The direction of this thought is clear enough...

...How could a so-called scientific socialism conflict, to such a point, with facts...

...For though there are marked symptoms here of an awakening from the neutralist coma —that feeling of a "lifting cloud" of which Herbert Read speaks in his foreword—it seems too early to congratulate ourselves yet...

...But also its guilt must be understood...

...But this essentially negative critical task is also the easiest, and when it comes to subtler, more sustained and positive ones, it seems to me he is less satisfactory...

...Not that I am not convinced that the pragmatic differences between men who are intentionally cruel and sadistic and men who are habitually kind and benevolent do rest on fundamental metaphysical grounds...

...The authoritarian socialists deemed that history was going too slowly and that it was necessary, in order to hurry it on, to entrust the mission of the proletariat to a handful of doctrinaires...

...That is how Camus must sometimes feel, too, though he is not so clear about it...

...He has neither the knowledge nor the temperament to pursue a really systematic inquiry...

...Serve we must, it seems, and if we will not willingly serve the source of our common humanity and the guarantee ultimately of all our freedom, we will surely be condemned to kowtow before the visible representative of a more infernal Power, the lineaments of which Camus clearly draws and which is recognizable to us, though he does not label it with its well-known traditional theological tag...

...author, "The Crippled Giant" This interesting book has a number of distinguishable purposes, at least one of which seems to be realized more successfully than the others...

...The primary purpose I take to be the definition by Camus of a political stand which he recommends to his European readers in the present historical situation...

...That is the distinction which he tries to make between the valuable humanistic rebel, whom he justifies, and the valueless nihilistic revolutionary (Communist or Fascist), whom he rejects...

...But, unfortunately, the difference between the Communist and the Socialist, which in practice is so grave as to be taken for a truism, is a little more elusive when it comes to philosophical, and especially metaphysical, formulation...

...I wish to end on a positive note, but it is not easy...

...The conclusion to which this line of reasoning tends toward the end of the book is summed up in these sentences: "The mystification peculiar to the mind which claims to be revolutionary today sums up and increases bourgeois mystification...

...it was not scientific...

...In more ingenuous times, when the tyrant razed cities for his own greater glory, when the slave chained to the conqueror's chariot was dragged through the rejoicing streets, when enemies were thrown to wild animals in front of the assembled people, before such naked crimes consciousness could be steady and judgment unclouded...

...Camus performs adroitly the analytical job of dissection...

...On the contrary, they are adults, and they have a perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for anything, even for transforming murderers into judges...

...There are occasional apercus and aphorisms which catch the light, but the connecting reverie remains largely subjective and alien to the reader...

...What if it was meant to be that way by the Creator of that eternal pattern of nature, the limitations of which upon the aspirations of humanity Camus prides himself, as a true Mediterranean man, he has only recently rediscovered...

...The result, on this level, is less like a chain of objective facts and interpretations than it is like a free-flowing stream of the author's consciousness...

...The name of the deity several times enters into the discussion shamefacedly—by the back door, so to speak—as in this wonderful quotation which Camus finds in Van Gogh: "I believe more and more that God must not be judged on this earth...

...The line that divides them is not clear...

...France, which used to pride itself on being always with the avant-garde, has become anachronistic in its present-day thinking...

...In spite of all my strictures, however, I hope I have made it clear to the reader that this is a book which is not only worth reading but worth meditating on...