Philosophy and Literature Blog

     Now I've really gone off. I got a whole bunch of Plato on Audio CD: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, The Republic, and The Symposium. I've listened to all of it except for the end of The Phaedo -- oh, man, I think Socrates is in trouble... Plato makes a big point of disallowing poets, in particular Homer, from The Republic. It has been pointed out with tiresome frequency that the dialogues are themselves art, with the attendant questioning as to whether Plato is a hypocrite and with the answer that since his art is in the service of dialectic, it is not subject to the same objections as Homer. Plato has specific problems with Homer.  First, Homer represents unstable personalities in a heroic way. Homer's poetry does not do what the dialogues do, instruct. So is Plato agrees with Camus that Homer is a poetical rebel.      The question is, what is the status of Socrates? Camus would likely say that Socrates was not a Rebel. In fact, Soc...

     Alright, I know what you're saying, Camus was killed in a car accident in 1960, he couldn't have mentioned Jim Morrison. Well, I read the little section on Rimbaud and the surrealists and decided to write about Jim Morrison instead. Morrison styled himself a poet and seems to have had an affinity for Rimbaud. He was obviously a rebel -- I recently read a good biography of Morrison -- and he took bits and pieces of poetry and Nietzsche to help define the counterculture.      At first, while reading the biography I felt very sorry for Morrison, but as the book progressed I felt increasingly sorry for the people who came into contact with him. In some ways Morrison was the perfect embodiment of Camus' and Nietzsche's rebel, in other ways he was a silly caricature. Interesting though his life was, he does not really present in any way a heroic life I would want to emulate. I know what I'm saying is heresy to a great number of people. Sorry. ...

     Camus moves from Nietzsche's assault on Christianity to his assault on socialism. Unfortunately, his assault on socialism bears some superficial commonality with the attitudes of the Randians. But Nietzsche was anything but some capitalist. He had Homeric heroes in mind, not dull boardrooms. "Socialism is only a degenerate form of Christianity. In fact, it preserves a belief in the finality of history which betrays life and nature, which substitutes ideal ends for real ends, and contributes to enervating both the will and the imagination. Socialism is nihilistic, in the henceforth precise sense that Nietzsche confers on the word. A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists. In this sense, all forms of socialism are manifestations, degraded once again, of Christian decadence."(pg. 69) Socialism is committed to values of equality which ultimately derive from a religious root. It is therefore just as nihilistic. Bu...

     I figure it will take me more than one entry to handle what Camus says about Nietzsche in this section of the book(still 'Metaphysical Rebellion'). In the popular mind Nietzsche is a god killer who went crazy; others try to turn Nietzsche into a thinker with political views commensurate with contemporary liberalism. The main thing to understand about Nietzsche is that he accuses Western culture of being nihilistic -- he's not a proponent of  nihilistic resignation, he is a diagnostician.  Camus writes: "Nietzsche never thought except in terms of an apocalypse to come, not in order to extol it, for he guessed the sordid and calculating aspect that this apocalypse would finally assume, but in order to avoid it and to transform it into a renaissance. He recognized nihilism for what it was and examined it as a clinical fact...He said of himself that he was the first complete nihilist of Europe.  Not by choice, but by condition, and because he was to...

"You're a rebellious soul in a good-looking body." -- my first therapist, c. 1986      Well, I'm not as good looking as I used to be... which brings me to Camus' presentation of the Marquis De Sade. I am not familiar with the writings of Sade and I think I'm going to keep it that way.  Apparently Sade spent many years in prison and had time to dream up all kinds of wacky fantasies. Mainly, Camus is giving Sade as an example of complete negation. In his imagination Sade wants to dominate and then destroy the universe, or something. Sadism sounds exhausting.      Camus portrays Sade's work as ending with all the victims dead and the executioners are left to turn on each other: "The most powerful, the one who will survive, is the solitary, the Unique, whose glorification Sade has undertaken -- in other words, himself...He is in fact alone, imprisoned in a bloodstained Bastille, entirely constructed around a still unsatisfied, and hencefort...

     Camus begins his 'Metaphysical Rebellion' section, first by saying that the rebellion he is describing does not predate the enlightenment, then by saying intimations of it are to be found in the ancient tragedies.  Obviously, Prometheus is the first case that comes to mind.  He is in rebellion to the Gods and is heavily punished for it.  In a certain sense, bringing fire to humans can be taken as a rebellion against the inequality between humans and gods.  But Camus goes deeper into the Greek notion of Fate.  I can't help at this point quoting  Greenberg in his lectures on Beethoven, when Beethoven began the romantic movement in science Greenberg says he assumes his new 'artistic self image, that of a hero, battling, and finally triumphing, over Fate itself.'  I heartily recommend any of Greenberg's lectures from the Teaching Company, especially those on Beethoven.           Metaphysical reb...

     The title of the short first part of The Rebel is, called, well, 'The Rebel'.  He deals with rebellion in the forms it took since the 18th Century, where some group demanded its rights.  Camus argues that in a society that holds a sacred view of the world and social order, there is not the same type of rebellion.  He says: "The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality  conceals great factual inequalities.  The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society."(pg. 20) I think that he, well, equates Western society with certain notions of human equality.  In a society whose view of reality denies this, there is not the same potential for rebellion in the sense Camus is describing.  What is interesting to me is that it is against this very society that some are rebelling for the sake of returning to a 'sacred' world(I used to belong to a religious group ...

     Well, the Sandel book was not all that interesting, and I think I've grown strong enough to take a chance again at reading this book by Camus. Albert Camus is one of my favorite authors. I first read Camus as a teenager and found that among 20th-Century writers he was the one who spoke to me the most.  I put Camus' writings in the category of the works that have set the agenda(or non-agenda) for much of my mental life.  One can ask which direction the causality went: did my tendency to be deeply morose come first and cause my resonance with certain works, such as Ecclesiastes, or did this exposure cause my tendency.  I'm certain now that the causality ran in the first direction. But, once I read Ecclesiastes, it was done. Then came Macbeth, then Camus.  Camus is, for me, far more affecting than, say Sartre, with whom he is, I think unfortunately, connected.       As a philosopher, Camus is uninterested in the usual p...