Abstract
Camus published an essay entitled ‘Nietzsche and Nihilism,’ which was later incorporated into The Rebel. Camus' aim was to assess Nietzsche's response to the problem of nihilism. My aim is to do the same with Camus. The paper explores Camus' engagement with nihilism through its two major modalities: with respect to the individual and the question of suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus, and with respect to the collective and the question of murder in The Rebel. While a Nietzschean influence thoroughly suffuses both books, it is in the second that Camus' most explicit, and most critical, engagement with the German philosopher takes place. The crux of Camus' critique of Nietzsche is that the absolute affirmation of existence he proposes as a response to nihilism cannot say ‘no’ to murder. In the terms of Camus' discussion in The Rebel, Nietzsche's philosophy is thus culpable in the straying of rebellion from its own foundations and its slide into bloody revolution. First, the paper argues that Camus' criticisms of Nietzsche are misplaced. Camus focuses his analysis on sections of the problematic text The Will to Power and misses important sections of Nietzsche's published texts which in fact support the condemnation of revolution which is the project of The Rebel. However, the paper argues that Camus moves beyond Nietzsche in radically democratizing the response to nihilism. While Nietzsche's hopes for the creation of meaning are focused on exceptional individuals, Camus insists that any response to nihilism needs to be accessible to the average person. Such a move is laudable, but it raises a number of questions and challenges regarding the type of problem nihilism is, and how these might be addressed.
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Notes
Some portions of the current essay appear in my book Understanding Nietzscheanism (Woodward 2011), and I wish to thanks Acumen for their permission to reuse this material.
In the English translation the section title ‘Nietzsche and Nihilism’ is omitted, and the text in question appears instead under the title ‘Absolute Affirmation’.
According to Deleuze, there are two forms of negation to be found in Nietzsche, one associated with slave morality and one with master morality. The first is opposition (associated by Deleuze with nihilism and Hegelian dialectics) and the second is difference (associated with absolute affirmation and the overcoming of nihilism). The slave establishes himself on the basis of a primary negation of the master, from which a secondary affirmation of his own identity issues. By contrast, the master establishes himself on a primary affirmation of himself, from which a secondary negation of the slave issues. This secondary negation thus issues from primary or absolute affirmation, and negates only that which itself negates difference. On the basis of this interpretation, Deleuze believes that Nietzsche’s absolute affirmation is consistent with a negation of all that is nihilistic. For a detailed presentation of this interpretation, see Woodward 2009, pp. 174–82.
This interpretation has been argued against by some, most recently by Julian Young in his biography of Nietzsche (Young 2010).
‘The Adulterous Woman’ is one of the stories collected in Exile and the Kingdom (Camus 2007).
See, for example, Heidegger’s discussion of nihilism in response to Ernst Jünger, in which we are told it needs to be thought in terms of Being, but the word Being itself needs to be crossed out, to indicate ‘the Fourfold,’ a concept with which even experienced Heidegger scholars struggle (Heidegger 1998).
Nagel does make some brief critical comments on Camus in the paper, arguing (1) that absurdity is due to a collision within ourselves rather than between ourselves and the world, as Camus believes (17), and (2) that irony is a better attitudes towards absurdity than Camus’ ‘romantic and slightly self-pitying’ defiant scorn (22–23). However, both these criticisms are tangential to the point I wish to make here.
More broadly, Nietzsche is concerned with how religious traditions grounded a sense of meaning before they were ‘desacralized’ by Enlightenment reason. Nietzsche seems to hold that the majority of persons are not strong enough to embrace the objective meaninglessness of existence themselves, and that is perhaps one reason he believes humanity needs select value-legislators to imprint their interpretations on life, so that for the majority, what is consciously affirmed by the elect one or few subsists for the majority as simply a given, as an irrational background from which significance appears to spontaneously emerge.
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Woodward, A. Camus and Nihilism. SOPHIA 50, 543–559 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0274-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-011-0274-0