as a crucial metaphysical foil. This stance of anti-theism, even more strongly
than atheism, is especially marked in Camus. Rebellion against religion is
central in all of Camus’s writings. His first work, the play Caligula, written in
1938 but not produced until the “existentialist year” 1945, depicts rebellion
against the gods because life entails death and unhappiness. The success of the
theme demands a delicate balance; for if God does not exist, metaphysical
rebellion is a rather adolescent gesture. Ambivalence between religion and
disillusioned secularism is the requisite turf, which Camus plays from the
atheist side, in counterpoint to the existentialist theologians. Where Camus
came into his own was in asserting the equivalence between God and the
modern state. Camus’s novel La Peste, written during World War II and
published in 1947, borders on ludicrousness in its discussions by an atheist in
a quarantined city blaming God for a plague; but it strikes a resonant chord
as a metaphor of Nazi occupation and the Resistance, the style in which Sartre
had made his theatrical mark under German censorship in The Flies (1943).^25
Camus’s career channel was a mixture of academics, theater, journalism,
and politics. He started in the conventional path of lycée and university;
deflected by illness from sitting for the philosophy agrégation leading toward
a schoolteachers’s career, he became an actor, playwright, and newspaper
reporter (Lesbesque, 1960; Lottman, 1979). The newspaper chain sent him to
Paris in 1940, where he rapidly assimilated current intellectual topics. In 1943
he was back again, working for Gallimard and editing the underground resis-
tance paper, mixing in avant-garde theater and in Sartre’s intimate circle. In
the centralized French educational system, Camus was exposed to much the
same curriculum as Sartre; his initial selection from this material, however, was
its Greek classics, which he wields in time-honored fashion as a secular value
system with which to attack Christianity. Camus has much in him of the
provincial French schoolteacher, the stalwart of the secularist campaign and
enemy of the Catholics, with whom control of the school system had been
contested only a generation previously.
Camus strikes an anti-academic note: “There is but one truly serious
philosophical problem, and that is suicide... All the rest—whether or not the
world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—
comes afterwards” (Camus, [1942] 1955: 3). It is the specifically Kantian issues
of the dominant school curriculum which he singles out here. Nevertheless, his
tools are those of the academic curriculum; he uses the Neo-Kantian style of
argument to show that to judge life to be absurd, one must assume a prior
value standard (a Kantian would say “transcendental”) in terms of which to
judge it. In his most ambitious treatise, The Rebel (1951), Camus adopts an
explicitly Cartesian logic, asserting that the value revealed by rebellion is a
universal and collective one. “I rebel—therefore we exist.”^26
780 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths