In fact, Camus spends most of his discussion not on the question whether
an ordinary person should commit suicide, but on the preceding lineage of
“existential” thinkers as the philosophical equivalent of suicide. Kierkegaard
and Jaspers (and, in a forced interpretation, Husserl) are charged with giving
up the tension between the human demand for reason and meaning and the
meaninglessness of the world, taking the leap toward metaphysical transcen-
dence and thereby losing the honest affirmation of absurdity. Camus de-
votes most of his two major philosophical essays to presenting a lineage of
existentialist predecessors. They are selected from the classical French school
curriculum, updated and integrated with the literary modernists of the current
publishing explosion. Camus dresses them in their most Romanticist poses:
Epicurus walling himself in his garden to shut out death, the revolutionist
Saint-Just working out his philosophy of the guillotine in a shuttered room
with black walls spangled with white teardrops, and (since Camus does not
distinguish fictional characters from historical ones) Ivan Karamazov confront-
ing the Grand Inquisitor. Camus’s “metaphysical rebels” are a popularized
enticement to philosophy, and his essays serve as an existentialist pedagogy.
By 1951 Camus was ready to appropriate for himself Sartre’s central philo-
sophical resource: Hegel. In Camus’s reconstruction of modern intellectual and
political development, Hegel is the arch-villain, the betrayer of the impulse to
rebel by turning it into the supremacy of the absolute and the victory of the
totalitarian state. At the same time, Camus mimics Hegelian history, presenting
his own stages of the logic of rebellion; he arranges his canon from Rousseau
and de Sade onward, claiming at every step that an inevitable logical impulse
causes rebels to overstep their bounds and negate the value of the earlier steps.
In fact it is little more than a device for organizing Camus’s poets, philosophers,
and revolutionists in a series; there is no real chain of logical negations from
one period to the next. For Camus, references to logic serve largely for their
rhetorical force: “There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic” (Camus,
[1951] 1956: 3). As a Hegelian he is an amateur. The beauty of his style, and
its infusion with passion and political relevance, carried his readers over the
thinness of his argument.
Camus’s split with Sartre came ostensibly on political grounds. Camus’s
Cartesian proof of collective morality went a step beyond Sartre’s exit-less
individualism, and was a justification of the moral standards of political
activism. But in fact both men had long been committed political activists; even
in 1951 they remained in the same faction, the segment of French intellectuals
attempting to establish a non-communist party of the left. The larger dynamic
of political conflict doomed the effort; as world geopolitical blocs realigned
and the cold war and the nuclear arms race began their polarization, neutralist
intellectuals were forced to choose between ineffectuality and giving in to the
Writers’ Markets: The French Connection^ •^781