Part One
The Rebel
*
What
is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose
refusal does not imply a renunciation.
He is also a man who says yes, from the moment
he makes his first gesture of rebellion.
A slave who has taken orders all his life suddenly decides that he
cannot obey some new command. What does
he mean by saying “no”?
He means,
for example, that “this has been going on too long,” “up to this point yes,
beyond it no,” “you are going too far,” or, again, “there is a limit beyond
which you shall not go.” In other words,
his no affirms the existence of a borderline.
The same concept is to be found in the rebel’s feeling that the other
person “is exaggerating,” that he is exerting his authority beyond a limit
where he begins to infringe on the rights of others. Thus the movement of rebellion is founded
simultaneously on the categorical rejection of an intrusion that is considered
intolerable and on the confused conviction of an absolute right which, in the
rebel’s mind, is more precisely the impression that he “has the right to …” Rebellion cannot
exist without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right. It is in this way that the rebel slave says
yes and no simultaneously. He affirms
that there are limits and also that he suspects – and wishes to preserve – the
existence of certain things on this side of the borderline. He demonstrates, with obstinacy, that there
is something in him which “is worthwhile …” and which must be taken into
consideration. In a certain way, he
confronts an order of things which oppresses him with the insistence on a kind
of right not to be oppressed beyond the limit that he can tolerate.
In every
act of rebellion, the rebellion simultaneously experiences a feeling of
revulsion at the infringement of his rights and a complete and spontaneous
loyalty to certain aspects of himself.
Thus he implicitly brings into play a standard of values so far from
being gratuitous that he is prepared to support it no matter what he
risks. Up to this point he has at least
remained silent and has abandoned himself to the form of despair in which a
condition is accepted even though it is considered unjust. To remain silent is to give the impression
that one has no opinions, that one wants nothing, and in certain cases it
really amounts to wanting nothing.
Despair, like the absurd, has opinions and desires about everything in
general and nothing in particular.
Silence expresses this attitude very well. But from the moment that the rebel finds his
voice – even though he says nothing but “no” – he begins to desire and to
judge. The rebel, in the etymological
sense, does a complete turnabout. He
acted under the lash of his master’s whip.
Suddenly he turns and faces him.
He opposes what is preferable to what is not. Not every value entails rebellion, but every
act of rebellion tacitly invokes a value.
Or is it really a question of values?
Awareness,
no matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion: the
sudden, dazzling perception that there is something in man with which he can
identify himself, even if only for a moment.
Up to now this identification was never really experienced. Before he rebelled, the slave accepted all
the demands made upon him. Very often he
even took orders, without reacting against them, which were far more conducive
to insurrection than the one at which he balks.
He accepted them patiently, though he may have protested inwardly, but
in that he remained silent he was more concerned with his own immediate
interests than as yet aware of his own rights.
But with loss of patience – with impatience - a reaction begins which
can extend to everything that he previously accepted, and which is almost
always retroactive. The very moment the
slave refuses to obey the humiliating orders of his master, he simultaneously
rejects the condition of slavery. The
act of rebellion carries him far beyond the point he had reached by simply
refusing. He exceeds the bounds that he
fixed for his antagonist, and now demands to be treated as an equal. What was at first the man’s obstinate
resistance now becomes the whole man, who is identified with and summed up in
this resistance. The part of himself that
he wanted to be respected he proceeds to place above everything else and
proclaims it preferable to everything, even to life itself. It becomes for him the supreme good. Having up to now been willing to compromise,
the slave suddenly adopts (“because this is how it must be …”) an attitude of
All or Nothing. With rebellion,
awareness is born.
But we can
see that the knowledge gained is, at the same time, of an “all” that is still
rather obscure and of a “nothing” that proclaims the possibility of sacrificing
the rebel to this “All”. The rebel
himself wants to be “all” – to identify himself completely with this good of
which he has suddenly become aware and by which he wants to be personally
recognized and acknowledged – or “nothing”; in other words, to be completely
destroyed by the force that dominates him.
As a last resort, he is willing to accept the final defeat, which is
death, rather than be deprived of the personal sacrament that he would call,
for example, freedom. Better to die on
one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.
Values,
according to good authorities, “most often represent a transition from fats to
rights, from what is desired to what is desirable (usually through the
intermediary of what is generally considered desirable). [Lalande: Vocabulaire philosophique.] The transition from facts to rights is
manifest, as we have seen, in rebellion.
So is the transition from “this must be” to “this is how I should like
things to be,” and even more so, perhaps, the idea of the sublimation of the
individual in a henceforth universal good.
The sudden appearance of the concept of “All or Nothing” demonstrates
that rebellion, contrary to current opinion, and though it springs from
everything that is most strictly individualistic in man, questions the very
idea of the individual. If the
individual, in fact, accepts death and happens to die as a consequence of his
act of rebellion, he demonstrates by doing so that he is willing to sacrifice
himself for the sake of a common good which he considers more important than
his own destiny. If he prefers the risk
of death to the negation of the rights that he defends, it is because he
considers these rights more important than himself. Therefore he is acting in the name of certain
values which are still indeterminate but which he feels are common to himself and to all men.
We see that the affirmation implicit in every act of rebellion is
extended to something that transcends the individual insofar as it withdraws
him from his supposed solitude and provides him with a reason to act. But it is already worth noting that this
concept of values as pre-existent to any kind of action contradicts the purely
historical philosophies, in which values are acquired (if they are ever
acquired) after the action has been completed.
Analysis of rebellion least at least to the suspicion that, contrary to
the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the
Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is
nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving?
It is for the sake of everyone in the world that the slave asserts
himself when he comes to the conclusion that a command has infringed on
something in him which does not belong to him alone, but which is common ground
where all men – even the man who insults and oppresses him – have a natural
community. [The community of victims is the same as that which unites victim
and executioner. But the executioner
does not know this.]
Two
observations will support this argument.
First, we can see that an act of rebellion is not, essentially, an
egoistic act. Of course, it can have
egoistic motives. But one can rebel
equally well against lies as against oppression. Moreover, the rebel – once
he has accepted the motives and at the moment of his greatest impetus –
preserves nothing in that he risks everything. He demands respect for himself, of course,
but only insofar as he identifies himself with a natural community.
Then we
note that rebellion does not arise only, and necessarily, among the oppressed,
but that it can also be caused by the mere spectacle of oppression of which
someone else is the victim. In such
cases there is a feeling of identification with another individual. And it must be pointed out that this is not a
question of psychological identification – a mere subterfuge by which the
individual imagines that it is himself who has been offended. On the contrary, it can often happen that we
cannot bear to see offences done to others which we ourselves have accepted
without rebelling. The suicides of the
Russian terrorists in
It would
be possible for us to define the positive aspects of the values implicit in
every act of rebellion by comparing them with a completely negative concept
like that of resentment as defined by Scheler.
Rebellion is, in fact, much more than pursuit of a claim, in the
strongest sense of the word. Resentment
is very well defined by Scheler as an autointoxication – the evil secretion, in
a sealed vessel, of prolonged impotence.
Rebellion, on the contrary, breaks the seal and allows the whole being
to come into play. It liberates stagnant
waters and turns them into a raging torrent.
Scheler himself emphasizes the passive aspect of resentment and remarks
on the prominent place it occupies in the psychology of women who are dedicated
to desire and possession. The
fountainhead of rebellion, on the contrary, is the principle of superabundant
activity and energy. Scheler is also
right in saying that resentment is always highly coloured by envy. But one envies what one does not have, while
the rebel’s aim is to defend what he is.
He does not merely claim some good that he does not possess or of which
he was deprived. His aim is to claim
recognition for something which he has and which has already been recognized by
him, in almost every case, as more important than anything of which he could be
envious. Rebellion is not
realistic. According to Scheler,
resentment always turns into either unscrupulous ambition or bitterness,
depending on whether it is implanted in a strong person or a weak one. But in both cases it is a question of wanting
to be something other than what one is.
Resentment is always resentment against oneself. The rebel, on the contrary, from his very
first step, refuses to allow anyone to touch what he is. He is fighting for the integrity of one part
of his being. He does not try,
primarily, to conquer, but simply to impose.
Finally,
it would seem that resentment takes delight, in advance, in the pain that it
would like the object of its envy to feel.
Nietzsche and Scheler are right in seeing an excellent example of this
in the passage where Tertullian informs his readers that one of the greatest
sources of happiness among the blessed will be the spectacle of the Roman
emperors consumed in the fires of hell.
This kind of happiness is also experienced by the decent people who go
to watch executions. The rebel, on the
contrary, limits himself, as a matter of principle, to refusing to be
humiliated without asking that others should be. He will even accept pain provided his
integrity is respected.
It is
therefore hard to understand why Scheler completely identifies the spirit of
rebellion with resentment. His criticism
of the resentment to be found in humanitarianism (which he treats as the
non-Christian form of love for mankind) could perhaps be applied to certain
indeterminate forms of humanitarian idealism, or to the techniques of
terror. But it rings false in relation
to man’s rebellion against his condition – the movement that enlists the
individual in the defence of a dignity common to all men. Scheler wants to demonstrate that
humanitarian feelings are always accompanied by a hatred of the world. Humanity is loved in general in order to
avoid having to love anybody in particular.
This is correct, in some cases, and it is easier to understand Scheler
when we realize that for him humanitarianism is represented by Bentham and
Rousseau. But man’s love for man can be
born of other things than a mathematical calculation of the resultant rewards
or a theoretical confidence in human nature.
In face of the utilitarians, and of Émile’s preceptor, there is, for
example, the kind of logic, embodied by Dostoievsky in Ivan Karamazov, which
progresses from an act of rebellion to metaphysical insurrection. Scheler is aware of this and sums up the
concept in the following manner: “There is not enough love in the world to
squander it on anything but human beings.”
Even if this proposition were true, the appalling despair that it implies
would merit anything but contempt. In
fact, it misunderstands the tortured character of Karamazov’s rebellion. Ivan’s drama, on the contrary, arises from
the fact that there is too much love without an object. This love finding no outlet and God being
denied, it is then decided to lavish it on human beings as a generous act of
complicity.
Nevertheless,
in the act of rebellion as we have envisaged it up to now, an abstract ideal is
not chosen through lack of feeling and in pursuit of a sterile demand. We insist that the part of man which cannot
be reduced to mere ideas should be taken into consideration – the passionate
side of his nature that serves no other purpose than to be part of the act of
living. Does this imply that no
rebellion is motivated by resentment?
No, and we know it only too well in this age of malice. But we must consider the idea of rebellion in
its widest sense on pain of betraying it; and in its widest sense rebellion
goes far beyond resentment. When
Heathcliff, in
But, to
sum up, are not rebellion and the values that it implies relative? Reasons for rebellion do seem to change, in
fact, with periods and civilizations. It
is obvious that a Hindu pariah, an Inca warrior, a primitive native of central
On the
basis of the evidence, the only conclusion that can be drawn from Scheler’s
remark is that, thanks to the theory of political freedom, there is, in the
very heart of our society, an increasing awareness in man of the idea of man
and, thanks to the application of this theory of freedom, a corresponding
dissatisfaction. Actual freedom has not
increased in proportion to man’s awareness of it. We can only deduce from this observation that
rebellion is the act of an educated man who is aware of his own rights. But there is nothing which justifies us in
saying that it is only a question of individual rights. Because of the sense of solidarity we have
already pointed out, it would rather seem that what is at stake is humanity’s
gradually increasing self-awareness as it pursues its course. In fact, for the Inca and the pariah the
problem never arises, because for them it had been solved by a tradition, even
before they had had time to raise it – the answer being that tradition is
sacred. If in a world where things are
held sacred the problem of rebellion does not arise, it is because no real
problems are to be found in such a world, all the answers having been given
simultaneously. Metaphysics is replaced
by myth. There are no more questions,
only eternal answers and commentaries, which may be metaphysical. But before man accepts the sacred world and
in order that he should be able to accept it – or before he escapes from it –
there is always a period of soul-searching and rebellion. The rebel is a man who is on the point of accepting
or rejecting the sacred and determined on laying claim to a human situation in
which all the answers are human – in other words, formulated in reasonable
terms. From this moment every question,
every word, is an act of rebellion while in the sacred world every word is an
act of grace. It would be possible to
demonstrate in this manner that only two possible worlds can exist for the
human mind: the sacred (or, to speak in Christian terms, the world of grace
[There is, of course, an act of metaphysical rebellion at the beginning of
Christianity, but the resurrection of Christ and the annunciation of the
kingdom of heaven interpreted as a promise of eternal life are the answers that
render it futile.]) and the world of rebellion.
The disappearance of one is equivalent to the appearance of the other,
despite the fact that this appearance can take place in disconcerting
forms. There again we rediscover the All or Nothing. The present interest of the problem of
rebellion only springs from the fact that nowadays whole societies have wanted
to discard the sacred. We live in an
unsacrosanct moment in history.
Insurrection is certainly not the sum total of human experience. But history today, with all its storm and
strife, compels us to say that rebellion is one of the essential dimensions of
man. It is our historic reality. Unless we choose to ignore reality, we must
find our values in it. Is it possible to
find a rule of conduct outside the realm of religion and its absolute
values? That is the question raised by
the rebellion.
We have
already noted the confused values that are called into play by incipient
rebellion. Now we must inquire if these
values are to be found again in contemporary forms of rebellious thought and
action, and if they are, we must specify their content. But, before going any farther, let us note
that the basis of these values is rebellion itself. Man’s solidarity is founded upon rebellion,
and rebellion, in its turn, can only find its justification in this solidarity. We have, then, the right to say that any rebellion
which claims the right to deny or destroy this solidarity loses simultaneously
its right to be called rebellion and becomes in reality an
acquiescence in murder. In the
same way, this solidarity, except insofar as religion is concerned, comes to
life only on the level of rebellion. And
so the real drama of revolutionary thought is announced. In order to exist, man must rebel, but
rebellion must respect the limit it discovers in itself – a limit where minds
meet and, in meeting, begin to exist. Rebellious thought, therefore, cannot dispense
with memory: it is a perpetual state of tension. In studying its actions and its results, we
shall have to say, each time, whether it remains faithful to its first noble
promise or if, through indolence or folly, it forgets its original purpose and
plunges into a mire of tyranny or servitude.
Meanwhile,
we can sum up the initial progress that the spirit of rebellion provokes in a
mind that is originally imbued with the absurdity and apparent sterility of the
world. In absurdist experience,
suffering is individual. But from the
moment when a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective
experience. Therefore the first
progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to
realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human
reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the
rest of the universe. The malady
experienced by a single man becomes a mass plague. In our daily trials rebellion plays the same
role as does the “cogito” in the
realm of thought: it is the first piece of evidence. But this evidence lures the individual from
his solitude. It founds its first value
on the whole human race. I rebel –
therefore we exist.