Is Freedom Unlimited? An Existential Response

Introduction

A state of unlimited freedom exists when human beings withdraw from the world so that the human mind becomes the sole source of meaning. In withdrawing, human beings no longer recognise the world as a source of value. In our solitude our freedom is absolute because inner freedom does not need to recognise external constraints. No longer experiencing the world directly, man starts to distrust everything outside his head. He withdraws into a world of his own creation, thus adopting a nihilistic attitude, which denies the existence of the world and all value within it. The problem for man is that if there is nothing to prohibit actions, there is nothing to authorise them either, because no value can be established outside of man. We must either accept these conditions or else seek a new absolute within the world.

In this thesis I will show that unlimited freedom is a direct result of nihilism as a theory and consequently that it leads to historicism1 as a practice. In Chapter One I will outline the claims of nihilism, which says that man is alone in the world and all morality is non-existent. I wish to examine further nihilism as a process of evaluation that calls for ‘freedom from values’ in order for human beings to be free to revaluate. Chapter Two examines the view that history can be seen as a process of human self-creation and I will discuss the consequences of this view of history as a man-made process. In Chapter Three I will provide an existential response to nihilism and propose values that are trans-historical. I will

1

Historicism is the theory that events are influenced by historical conditions, rather than by people. It claims that history is composed of an organic succession of developments that are influenced by local conditions and peculiarities and consequently that social and cultural events are determined by history. As a practice, it places ideas within an historical context.

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show that limits can be found in the world and in the human, which is our fundamental condition of existence in the world. In Chapter Four I will present foundations for human freedom which consent to the relativity of our situations and I will conclude that true freedom requires a constant participation in the world by human beings and the recognition that every standard of values is relative to human history. I will ground my argument in the existential value of the world and human condition, in which human existence is limited by mortality and bounded by its situation.

Chapter 1: Unlimited Freedom

As a consequence of withdrawing from the world and failing to recognise it as a meaningful source of value, man removes all external limitations and experiences the unlimited freedom of solitude. In this condition, nothing provides a limit for human action except individual self-restraint. But since man has retreated into an inner world of thought where nothing is prohibited and nothing assured, morality begins to lose its ontological foundations. Man comes to doubt the validity of the world and his existence and consequently, adopts the nihilist attitude that since nothing is absolute and all existence is meaningless, everything therefore is permitted.

In this chapter is will examine the consequences of withdrawing from the world and concluding that everything is possible. Section one presents the two major claims of nihilism, that man is alone and that morality is meaningless. Section

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two describes nihilism as an opportunity which frees man from all previous values and restraints in order to provide possibilities for new valuation of the world. In section three I will look at the development of the idea that nihilism can be identified with the historical process itself, in which nihilism makes its appearance as a transitional stage in the world for mankind. Finally in section four I will focus on the problem of finding and maintaining a trans-historical value, which can allow human beings to place a limit on history and conclude that the conditions of human existence in the world provide a source of unchanging value for man.

In Very Little … Almost Nothing, Critchley presents nihilism as a psychological state, which is attained when we realise that “the categories by means of which we had tried to give meaning to the universe are meaningless. This does not mean that the universe is meaningless, but rather that the faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. We therefore require new categories and new values that will permit us to endure the world.”2 Human beings are thrown into the world, and without those values which were posited in a ‘true’ and ‘eternal’ world, we are thrown back upon ourselves, having nothing but ourselves to guide our actions. For this reason, with the knowledge that there is nothing beyond this world, we must attempt to rethink the universe consistently without God. This world, which is now the only world we have, seems absurd without our traditional standards of morality, and consequently, each individual action cannot

2

S. Critchley (1997), Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, Routledge, London, p. 49.

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be judged either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. In this sense it appears that everything is permissible and nothing is limited.

In the wake of nihilism, when all values have been devalued and all traditional morality gone, unlimited freedom appears as a reality in the world for the first time. But unlimited freedom brings with it unlimited responsibility.

Therefore every time we act, we must look solely to this world and the conditions of our existence within it, in order to derive an ethic3 for our actions which can be recognised by every human being and which defines a limit for our freedom. In order to understand the source of unlimited freedom we must examine the claims of nihilism. Without the absolute foundations which had previously provided security for man, man alone is now the sole creator of his values and purposes.

1.1

The Claims of Nihilism

Nihilism is the situation which is obtained when ‘everything is permitted.’ It declares the solitude of all earthly creatures and the nothingness of all morality.

There is therefore a greater need for human beings to be able to relate to a common value. Nihilism is a philosophical position which argues that existence is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. It is “the inability to believe in what is, to see what is happening, and to live life as it is offered,”4 which results from valuing higher, metaphysical things (such as God), that do not in turn, value human or earthly things. However, a person who rejects God and

3

An ethic is a system of principles governing morality and acceptable conduct. It provides a standard for right and wrong behaviour which guides individual action, or is representative of a specific culture, society, or group.

4 A. Camus (1971) The Rebel, Penguin, London, p. 59.

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the divine may still retain the belief that all earthly or human ideas are still valueless because they were considered so in the previous belief system. There are two types of nihilism; One form of nihilism arises from the premise that ‘everything is permitted’ and rejects all moral standards; another form is held by absolutists who permit any means necessary in the name of some absolute end.

The decline in the authority of higher law, as well as a growing disillusionment with scientific reason as a means of defining the ethical foundations of political life, has fostered a growth of relativist, subjective interpretations of political values. On the one hand it frees man from ideological traditions but on the other it paves the way for nihilist ideologies. Hoy maintains that a basic problem for man is “whether or not it is possible to give rational meaning and value to his existence in an age where there is no longer confidence that reason can establish absolute or objective truths.”5 It seems to follow that with the death of God and all transcendent forms, all values are of human creation, and from that one can conclude that everything is permitted and nothing is prohibited. The death of God means there is no law superior to or apart from man. Since nothing was left standing, the solution is either utter nihilism or reconstruction from scratch. Therefore, it is necessary to create post-Christian values in order to avoid the dangers of nihilism either by finding a new transcendent absolute or by recognising the relativity of human values.

One reason to advocate a transcendent absolute is a desire to give a point or purpose to the world and life. But with the ‘death’ of God man is alone and without a master. Man must create both himself and his values. If we choose to

5

T. Hoy (Sep., 1960), Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 3, p. 573.

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look solely to man, the question remains: can man alone create his own values?

Nihilists generally assert that everything can be created, and consequently there can be no innate humanness. Human beings are viewed as purely vital creatures, driven by necessity and their behaviour. What is needed therefore is a sense of a shared existence in the world and a common condition to which we can relate.

Myers suggests that the crisis of modern man is that if man creates himself, then he has no ideal nature to realise. Since man makes himself, it really does not matter what he does, “if there is no normative human essence, then there is no moral standard by which individual lives or social structures may be measured, condemned, or approved. On this view, it must be conceded that everything is permissible.”6 Man is that being who transforms nature, and in doing so, continually changes his own nature. If we make ourselves, “we can undo and remake ourselves.”7 Therefore, if nature is the product of human work, it cannot serve as the principle, standard, or objective measure for human behaviour.

Nihilism is the basis of a naturalism which looks upon man as a purely vital means, endowed with a rationality which is solely instrumental. Gurwitsch and Hatcher believe that nihilism sees each man as “the product of the conditions in which he lives” and that the result of “this conditioning is the fact that he holds to this particular idea and embraces this particular conviction.”8 Hence, every human activity is considered only in the light of its vital functions. Perceiving man as a vital being makes it possible to deal with him more or less as one deals with any other natural object. Men can be persuaded to accept certain ideas with 6

D. B. Myers (Dec., 1976), Marx and the Problem of Nihilism, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 37, No. 2, p. 201.

K. Ameriks, ed. (2000), The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, University of Notre Dame, p. 215.

8 A. Gurwitsch and A. Hatcher (Apr., 1945), On Contemporary Nihilism. The Review of Politics. Vol. 7, No. 2. p. 173.

7

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little or no consideration for the rightness of the actions or the truth of the ideas.

This is simply because one ‘insists on the vital nature of the human being’ and ‘contests the existence of such abstract ideas as truth and justice.’9 Nihilists hold the view that objective morality does not exist. To question the existence of God leads inevitably to doubts about morality, because how can there be a just God or an absolute standard for morality if human history is a seemingly endless procession of injustice? Driver defines moral nihilism as “the view that there are no moral facts. It is a metaphysical view about what is out there in the world, about what exists or does not exist. Nihilism holds that moral facts do not exist.”10 If all morality was merely provisional, Willhoite argues that this would reinforce the principle that the end justifies the means, because if no values transcend the flux of history, and if no one knows that history is proceeding inexorably toward a future incarnation of virtue perfected in all mankind, “who can adjudge one guilty if he employs any means – murder, concentration camps, total regimentation of human lives – in passionate dedication to the consummation of the glorious future?”11 If the only ethical guide for choosing and justifying the means by which one must act and live is determined in terms of the future, then history is simply a process of becoming, directed towards a goal or an ideal. Therefore the good and the true become that which survives the inexorable process of the history, in other words, the ‘successful’. Nihilism asserts that no action is logically preferable to any other in regards to the moral value of one action over another.

9

Ibid., p. 183.

J. Driver (2007) Ethics: The Fundamentals, London, Blackwell, p. 170.

11 F. H. Willhoite, Jr. (Jun., 1961), Albert Camus' Politics of Rebellion. The Western Political Quarterly. Vol. 14, No. 2, p. 407.

10

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The practice of nihilism may be defined in effect as “the substitution of concrete things for abstractions.”12 The nihilist no longer clings to such abstractions as truth or justice, having substituted things much more concrete, like biological advantages, needs, desires and utility. The truth of an opinion is decided by its usefulness and rewards. Therefore, to think like everybody else becomes almost a moral duty and those who hold sanctioned convictions are rewarded by society as proof that these convictions are true. In the absence of morality, existence has no intrinsic higher meaning or goal. With this moral relativism certain opinions are seen as useful while others are not because the only interest is with their function. “Since everything is opinion, one opinion is as good as any other; why not, then, prefer that one which is shared by everybody …

which is favoured by public opinion?”13 Since opinion is interchangeable, then

by acting on the basis of certain ideas one will obtain results. This is the ethic of adjusting to the milieu, which elevates mediocrity as a measure of humanity.

Camus accuses the nihilists of yielding to death and despair, saying that they saw “the injustice of our condition to the point of being willing to add to it.”

They never believed in the meaning of the world, and therefore deduced “that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one’s wishes.” 14 In the absence of any human or divine code, the nihilist readily accepted despair. If I believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning so that we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible. The type of freedom which comes from this logic therefore, sees the law of the world as nothing but the law of force. From a nihilistic vision of history there is no kind of 12

Gurwitsch and Hatcher, On Contemporary Nihilism, p. 174.

Ibid., p. 175.

14 A. Camus (1961), Resistance, Rebellion and Death, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, pp. 27-8.

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transcendence. It dedicates itself instead to a perpetual struggle for power, which is carried on through history. But what then is the genuine intellectual attraction of holding a position that negates everything and affirms nothing?

1.2

The Attractions of Nihilism

Arendt sees the decline of tradition as a great opportunity for mankind “to look upon the past with eyes undistracted by tradition,”15 with a directness which has disappeared from the world. Nihilism affords us with a chance for revaluation and with it a great sense of freedom in breaking from the past. Isaac shows how Arendt welcomes “the demise of the props and crutches that have long sustained political orders unable to stand without such supports,” but at the same time she recognises “the need for some anchoring for human freedom.”16 Until new ethical foundations are laid down, the old traditions become an impediment to new way of thinking. Both Camus and Arendt saw a pressing need for new positive values and principles that derive their justification from the world and the conditions of human existence. Nietzsche too, saw nihilism as an opportunity that impelled mankind to seek new values because in doing so, the “world might be far more valuable than we used to believe.”17 For this reason he completely embraced nihilism in order to bring it out of concealment.

According to Critchley, Nietzsche sees the cause of nihilism as “rooted in a specific interpretation of the world”, that of Christianity, and that this

15

H. Arendt (2006), Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, Penguin, London, p. 28.

J. C. Isaac (1992), Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, Yale University Press, p. 105.

17 F. Nietzsche (1968), The Will to Power, (Ed. Kaufmann, Walter), Vintage Books, p. 22.

16

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“Christian-Moral interpretation of the world is given by a will to truthfulness, but this very will to truth eventually turns against the Christian interpretation of the world by finding it untrue.”18 When we come to realise that the Christian-Moral interpretation of the world is deceptive because it concealed from us that true origin of our moral values, our initial response is to declare all existence meaningless, reduce everything to nothing, and start afresh. Nihilism therefore, provides freedom from old values of society that had previously restricted many possibilities and alternatives for human action. Without these restraints, human beings experienced a new sensation of everything being possible.

For Woolfolk, one of the primary functions of culture prior to modernity was “to close possibilities, to establish constraints upon the freedom of experience, so as to insure a certain inner distance from the treacherous involvements of living.” 19 In the initial conditions of nihilism there is a sense of unlimited freedom. Without any values to define the world and human existence in it, there seems to be an infinite number of possibilities because there are no distinctions and no limits are defined. The traditional standards of society provided a balance between what is forbidden and permitted, thus controlling the problem of human ambiguity in the face of infinite possibilities.

Isaac shows that in an atmosphere in which all traditional values evaporated, it became easier for people to accept patently absurd propositions. In an uncertain climate “it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because that at least destroyed the duplicity

18

Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, p. 7.

A. Woolfolk, (1986), The Artist as Cultural Guide: Camus’ Post-Christian Asceticism, Sociological Analysis, Vol. 47, No. 2, p.

95.

19

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upon which the existing society seemed to rest.”20 Those who conceded to nihilism were oblivious to the practical consequences of their actions. In their sheer delight they welcomed destruction and flaunted all previous standards, thereby adding fuel to the fire. For many people, nihilism represented a complete break from tradition and the prejudices of the past.

The great advantage of these transitional times for Camus is that “nothing is true” and “everything is permitted”21, however this does not mean necessarily that nothing is forbidden. On the contrary, the recognition of absurdity constituted for Camus “a bitter acknowledgement that was binding, not liberating.”22 Unlimited freedom brings with it, unlimited responsibility and it is only with a sense of history, “of limits and opportunities, problems and prospects, [that it is] possible to speak meaningfully about the proper ordering of political life.”23 Throughout history values have changed according to the projects and aims of human existence. In order to understand human history one must be aware that human beings, by their very existence, must constantly evaluate the world in order to define what we can and cannot do. Without value, the world would contain no possibilities for becoming.

1.3

Nihilism, History and Values

Nihilism is the conviction that existence becomes meaningless and void when we come to recognise that the highest values cannot be posited in a ‘beyond’ or an 20

Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 95.

Camus, The Rebel, p. 58.

22 Woolfolk, The Artist as Cultural Guide, p. 106.

23 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 18.

21

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‘in-itself’ of things that might be ‘divine’. It is the recognition that the transcendent24 has lost its power over the determination of man. For Nietzsche, a nihilist is someone “who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of ‘in vain’ is the nihilists’ pathos – at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.”25 In Nietzsche, Heidegger defines nihilism as “the historical process whereby the dominance of the transcendent becomes null and void, so that all being loses its worth and meaning.”26 Ideals, principles, and values that were set above human beings in order to give being as a whole some sense of purpose and order, begin to devalue.

There is a three-step process of nihilism which constitutes the movement of history itself. The first stage is “when we have sought meaning in all events that is not in them. Thus a precondition for nihilism is that we seek a meaning in all events; that is, in beings as a whole.”27 In positing a purpose for beings as a whole, all becoming achieves nothing because it aims at nothing. In response to this, nihilism’s second stage comes from our need for a sense of higher unity.

However, if underneath all becoming there is no supreme value or totality into which the individual can submerge, then in order to remain certain of our own value, man “must posit an uppermost value for beings as a whole. But if belief in a unity that pervades reality is disappointed, this gives rise to the insight that

24

The transcendent when pertaining to God exalted above the universe, is the highest or uppermost position that is beyond the realm of the senses. The transcendent is that which is above and beyond comprehension and therefore, free from the constraints of the material world.

25 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 318.

26 M. Heidegger (1991), Nietzsche Vol. IV, (Ed. Krell, D.F.), Harper Collins, San Francisco, p. 4.

27 Ibid., p. 30.

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nothing is aimed at by any given act or deed.”28 Now only one escape remains for man that is, “to pass sentence on this whole world of becoming as a deception and to invert a world beyond it, as the true world.” With this the final stage of nihilism, a “disbelief in any metaphysical world” emerges, which “forbids itself any belief in a true world.”29 We are left with no grounds for investing some value in the world, so we withdraw again and now the world seems valueless.

However, Heidegger shows that with the last stage of nihilism, “a peculiar transitional stage emerges: first, the world of becoming – that is, life is lived here and now, along with its changing realms – can no longer be denied as real; but, second, this world, which alone is real, has at the outset no aims and values and so is not to be endured.”30 What remains is a feeling of valuelessness, but the universe of being, which exists in itself, still permits “an investing and withdrawing of values.”31 With the decline of uppermost values the world itself does not fall away but is “merely freed from the valuations of prevailing values and made available for new valuation. Thus nihilism does not lead us into nothing”32 because it provides mankind with the transition which is needed from traditional values to the new conditions of human existence. In this way “nihilism is no longer simply the powerless yearning for nothing … but is the very opposite”33, calling for a break from traditional values in order for human beings to be able to revaluate the world.

Nihilism is decisive for the future in the task of new valuation. In its classical sense, nihilism “calls for freedom from values as freedom for a 28

Ibid., p. 33.

Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 13.

30 Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol. IV, p. 34.

31 Ibid., p. 43.

32 Ibid., p. 27.

33 Ibid., p. 56.

29

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revaluation of all (such) values.”34 It is the process of uprooting all previous values, thus obliterating history through a revision of its basic traits, and breeding of a new need for values; a new world project. Heidegger recognises the need for beings themselves to find a “new interpretation through which their basic character may be defined in a way that will make it fit to serve as a principle for the inscription of a new table of values and as a standard of measure for suitably ranking such values.”35 Because the transcendent has been abolished only the earth remains. It is necessary therefore, to posit a new essence for man. With the revaluation of all past values, a challenge has been issued to men; that they raise new standards which accommodate being as a whole.

Isaac asserts that, in “articulating a pervasive sense of the failures of reason, nihilism’s absolute metaphysical revolt symbolises a crisis of value in the modern world.”36 Nietzsche claims that morality previously protected life against despair and the leap into nothing. It was morality which “guarded the underprivileged against nihilism by assigning to each an infinite value, a metaphysical value,” and thereby shielded human beings from the most terrible thought, that is “existence as it is, without meaning or aim.”37 To strengthen mans voice and thus prevent the most extreme form of nihilism, a sense of an eternally recurring meaninglessness, social values were erected over man as if they were commands of God. They were taken as ‘reality’ and the ‘true’ world and concealed from man “that it was he who created what he admired.”38 Willhoite suggests that, sensing the explosive impact that a full awareness of this truth 34

Ibid., p. 5.

Ibid., p. 6.

Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 93.

37 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, pp. 35-7.

38 Ibid., p. 85.

35 36

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would have upon mankind, Nietzsche sought “to transform the apocalypse which would result into a renaissance, so that at least some men would respond affirmatively and creatively to the question: Can one live without believing in anything?”39 For Heidegger, nihilism is a “process of devaluation, whereby the uppermost values become valueless”40 precisely because an aim is lacking. It is the condition that arises when all prior aims of being have become superfluous.

As human beings, we are forever directed in the world towards something in particular and hold it as an aim if we consider it worthwhile. For this reason, an object is “capable of being a standard of measure only where such as values are esteemed and where one values is ranked above or below another. Such esteeming and valuing occurs where something matters for our behaviour.”41 In order to define our position in the world, mankind must provide new limits and possibilities by positing values which are based on an awareness that man is compelled to perpetually assent to, and rebel against, something which he had no part in creating. But in the eyes of a condemned man who refuses supernatural consolation, what values remain?

1.4

History and the Problem of Values

Human beings, in their eternal need for the absolute validity of transcendent, supra-historical values, turned to the concept of history as a totality in order to

39

F. H. Willhoite, Jr. (1968) Beyond Nihilism: Albert Camus’s Contribution to Political Thought, Louisiana State University Press, p. 106.

40 Heidegger, Nietzsche Vol. IV, p. 14.

41 Ibid., p. 16.

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escape the ‘relativism’ and ‘nihilism’ of historicism. But if history is an absolute movement then one phase of human becoming is no better or worse than any other. When the single overriding value is absolute justice, one is not concerned about the morality of one’s tactics because the end comes to justify the means.

From this point of view, a provisional ethic can be derived which consists of nothing more than a doctrine of success, because if history is nothing but chance and force and nothing has meaning, then any means is justified because the success of an action is set up as an absolute goal. The only value that can allow man to judge history, and thereby place a limit on it, must be trans-historical.

Value judgements are ways of summoning other people to take certain attitudes towards things. They are the most meaningful of statements because consciousness cannot begin to exist until it sets a limit to an object. “A consciousness which constitutes everything,” but only as the intelligible structure of all objects, “remains an abstract and ineffective power, because it has no work to perform.”42 History determines the time and space of individual events, because it constitutes “the knowledge of single events, or the development and description of the ‘because’ of a thing.”43 With the death of God, mankind remains, and by this we mean the history, which man alone must understand and shape. For Camus, “history alone offers no hope. It is not a source of values, but is still a source of nihilism.” There is a possibility however, that man can at least create values in defiance of history. Camus believes that thought which is derived from history alone, like thought which rejects history completely, “deprives man

42 43

M. Merleau-Ponty (2006), Phenomenology Of Perception, Routledge, London, p. 32.

A. Stern (1962), Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, Mouton & Co.: The Netherlands, p. 105.

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of the means and the reason for living. The former drives him to the extreme decadence of ‘why live?’ the latter to ‘how to live?’”44 In history we make choices of what we consider essential to our existence in order to distinguish what is important and what is irrelevant. In order to do this we must have a standard of values. But as our projects change, so too do our values. Stern therefore, presents each individual as having a world of different values, because the hierarchies of things and ideas conceived by men are intimately linked with their actions. This inequality of rank among the value of things is conditioned by the relation of the objects to the appreciating subjects and the “positing of a value results when our whole personality and, especially, our faculty of judgement adopts an attitude towards the different feelings inspired by things and ideas.”45 Values do not exist independently of man. In fact, it is only through valuing some things over others that history takes on a specific meaning for human beings.

History cannot be considered a science; it cannot be free from values because the concept of value enters the very definition of history. If you destroy all values then all you can do is generalize history, and everything in general aims at nothing in particular. The generalizing method of natural sciences is exempt from values, but “the individualizing method of history is only possible thanks to an evaluating approach to the objects.”46 If there are no supra-historical truths and values able to serve as standards by which to judge the relative merits of values created in the course of history, then all ideas and all values created in

44

Camus, The Rebel, p. 215.

Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 102.

46 Ibid., p. 120.

45

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the course of history would be justified. It would be impossible therefore to ascertain any progress in history.

For this reason, Hoy asserts that reducing every value to historical terms leads to dire consequences, because if “good and evil are reintegrated in time and confused with events, nothing is either good nor bad, but either premature or out of date.”47 With this radically temporal view of man and values, history becomes merely the continual transformation of nature with no standard by which to measure and evaluate human becoming. Similarly Stern maintains that the particular can become essential “only with respect to a value; without such a relation to a value, the particular would lose all its historical interest and would be nothing but an indifferent element of reality.”48 The identification of values with the historical process leads to the logic that nature is the raw material of history, to be worked upon, transformed, and mastered by men. The problem for human beings is that, in having no absolute and acting into history; the sum of their acts, they realise that they make themselves and their values through history and that no trans-historical truths can exist.

Philosophy must deal with the conditions of human beings that are situated in the world. Each conscious being must accept their mortality and these basic conditions have not changed throughout history. For this reason, these values which are linked to the invariable human condition have a claim to universality. This is because as past evaluations, they will probably be maintained in the future, and will thus remain trans-historical. It is here that we may be faced with “a possible limit to historical relativism in the realm of 47 48

Hoy, Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, p. 577.

Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 120.

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values,” because vital values, such as ‘health’ or ‘life’ are not due to an unchangeable human ‘nature’ but rather, they are due to “the human ‘condition’ which remains identical with regard to life and death.” 49

In this Chapter I have shown that the nihilistic claims of unlimited freedom must acknowledge a source of value in order to be able to begin new valuations. There is a genuine attraction for nihilism because it provides an opportunity for man to revaluate the world and discover in it a new, deeper meaning. I have presented nihilism as a process of revaluation which not only forms the basis of history itself but also presents a possible limit to history, a limit based on the relationship between human beings and their values.

Chapter 2: Historicism

But what happens if man refuses to acknowledge the relativity of his values to history? Man begins to look elsewhere for absolute authority, which is outside himself but is still in the world. If man turns to history, which is the sum of human deeds and actions, he threatens to undermine the only means that human beings have of understanding of the world and the meaning of their actions.

Because human beings make both themselves and their history, there is a danger that by taking history as an absolute outside the control of man, all that would remain would be a world seen through the human mind. Therefore, if man

49

Ibid., p. 137.

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proceeds by acting into the world and creating processes, then any hypothesis will become possible.

In this chapter I will examine the concept of history as a man-made process and consequently the claim that because men change their environments and in doing so change themselves, all thought is historical and is unable to transcend history in order to provide a standard from which to judge history. Section one examines the relationship between human nature and history, showing that human ‘nature’ is historically emergent and thus no one can give more than the truth of their own existence. In section two I will focus on Hegel’s contribution to the growth of history as source of absolute value and that therefore, there can be no extrahistorical authority above history. In section three I look at Marx’s development of history as a process and his conclusion that the end comes to justify the means if the future is posited as a goal. In section four I will examine the process character of history in more detail, focusing on the consequences of man-made processes and concluding in section five that the danger with the process nature of action is that the human mind becomes the sole source of meaning, and no longer relies on the world.

Historicism is the very basis on which we construct our observations of sociocultural reality. It is an organically developed basic pattern which came into being after the religiously determined picture of the world had disintegrated and the enlightenment had destroyed itself. Throughout history there has been an assumption that a natural and rational foundation underlies human values. The

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Stoics believed that universal reason was common to all men and that there was a common understanding of ‘natural right’. In the Middle-Ages natural right was solidly rooted in the divine law.50 ‘Just’ and ‘unjust’ were moral values because they constituted the ethical minimum. But if this ethical minimum cannot be guaranteed by natural right, then ethics is at the mercy of history and forced to sanction all the values and laws of history. This would mean total victory for Historicism.

After the climax of the French Revolution there was a reaction by German Romanticism against the doctrine of natural right, which prepared the way for Historicism. German Idealism distanced itself from the French Revolution by attacking the infallibility of the rationality of man.51 It revealed that concepts such as ‘human nature’, ‘justice’, and ‘reason’ were mere abstractions, detached from concrete reality. The Idealists advocated the principle of man’s creative unreason in which the inability to understanding man as a rational being became all important. In Historicism, the common rational features of mankind that were “supposed to be eternal, were superseded by those irrational vital forces which are characteristic of each nation and are the product of a slow historical revolution, of an organic growth, in the soil of tradition.”52 With the accelerated change of modern dynamic social and political conditions, philosophy’s traditional, static view of the world as a cosmos or fixed totality which had endured since antiquity, collapsed.

However, what remained was a cultural need for orientation in the world, as man looked to supra-historical ideals to which the secular could be relegated 50

Ibid., pp. 140-2.

Ibid., p. 145.

52 Ibid., p. 146.

51

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to virtual insignificance. It is for this reason that human beings sought out a new absolute existing outside of man. Ameriks shows that with German Idealism the meaning of history became fixed to a dogmatic and sacred interpretation. History came to be seen not as an already established, fixed, reality but as an emerging and self-ordering whole. God or the absolute was “conceived as nothing outside or beyond this moral order of the world.”53 Thus the absolute was not seen as an entity beyond the world, but an idea to be realised through history. This form of historicism presented the modern concept of history; a process of never-ending movement. But in order to get a better understanding of Historicism, “one has to know the thesis which it denies; namely, natural right, and its presupposition, the concept of a human nature or a human reason considered as unchangeable, eternal, identical throughout the ages.”54

2.1

Human Nature and History

In the modern age, history has become an absolute authority for mankind. But since history is the product of human actions in the world, whoever tries to understand man, must first rid themselves of all stable concepts, and learn how to think by virtue of dynamic concepts. Therefore, Stern shows that “every concept which refers to a specifically human life is a function of historical time.” This is pure Historicism, because “if our concepts are functions of historical time, then there are no supra-historical stable concepts capable of serving as permanent

53 54

Ameriks, Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, p. 205.

Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 139.

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standards of judging the concepts created in the course of history.”55 Having no human nature, man is nothing but the sum of his acts.

According to Isaac, Arendt makes the distinction between the human condition and human nature in that “the common condition does not constitute anything like human nature” because “human existence does have distinguishing, limiting features.” The conditions to which she refers “do not constitute essential characteristics of human existence in the sense that without them this existence would no longer he human.”56 In other words these conditions of human existence are not essences, and because they are historically emergent, there is no way for philosophy to fix them once and for all. This does not mean however, that we can know nothing about ourselves. There are conditions which frame our existence, that enable and constrain us but which never condition us absolutely.57 Man can only start from the historical situation into which he finds himself cast, to accept it voluntarily, instead of allowing himself to be impelled by it or refuse it; “his history, his previous experiences, together with his circumstances, constitute the basic limitations of his future possibilities.”58 For Heidegger, there is no essential human nature. ‘Being-in-the-world is a basic state of Dasein’,59 it is something which has always been experienced ontically. Man in general does not exist. What exists is the man of a given historical epoch with his historical and national environment. Stern examines Heidegger’s claim that man is free, but that his freedom is limited because to be “cast into the current of historical time is one of the fundamental unalterable 55

Ibid., p. 175.

Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 108.

H. Arendt (1969), The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, p. 11.

58 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 175.

59 M. Heidegger (1962), Being and Time, (Trans. Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E.), Blackwell, Oxford, p. 86.

56 57

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features of the human condition. We cannot change this current. We have to accept the historical conditions of our existence.” We may try to understand and interpret these conditions, but that is all. Every interpretation is historically conditioned however, since every truth is relative to existence. “Thus, no thinker can give more than the truth of his own existence, which is historical. With this, we have come to the core of Historicism.”60

2.2

Hegel’s Concept of History

History possessed an immanent cumulative significance for Hegel, through which the individual could approach self-definition. Stern shows how this interpretation of history “completely eliminated the concept of human nature.

What now appears to be man’s substance is the variable, that which changes in the course of history.”61 Man has no ‘nature’ but he has a history. Consequently, all that exists is historical man; a ‘son of his time’. For Hegel, “it is just as foolish to imagine that any philosophy transcends its present world, as it is to believe than an individual jumps out of time”62 All philosophy is its time expressed in thoughts. No philosopher can lay claim to absolute truth because absolute truth would be the end of history.

In On Revolution, Arendt states that “the most far reaching consequence of the French Revolution was the birth of the modern concept of history in Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel’s truly revolutionary idea was that the old absolute of

60

Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 173.

Ibid., p. 147, quoting from Hegel’s Samtliche Werke, (p. 52).

62 Ibid., p. 157.

61

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the philosophers revealed itself in the realm of human affairs”63 which had been ruled out as the source or birthplace of absolute standards. The simple lesson of history according to Grumley is that, that which “appears to be given, eternal, or natural is in fact the product of human activity.”64 With the disappearance of the transcendent values, man realised that he alone was the source of his values. He is faced with two choices – look to man as the source of values or find a new absolute outside of man to secure his values.

Hegel sought a new absolute in order to ground human values in a higher meaning. Left with human existence in the world as a sole value, Hegel simply proposed to make it absolute. He conceptualised it “in terms of an immanent processual unity of both the natural and historical world,”65 thereby constructing a framework which provided him with a coherent account of historic and social divisions, and allowed him to interpret immanent and rational meaning behind the appearance of chaos. For Hegel, “the realised purpose, or the existent actuality, is movement and unfolded becoming; but it is just this unrest which is the self.”66 Therefore, realisation of spirit’s full self-knowledge came to be conceived as a single, unified, historical enterprise. In “anticipating radical historical possibilities,” Hegel projected his vision of a unified and “harmonious culture into an immediate future within the grasp of the revolutionary present.”67 With this new understanding of historical development he was able to transform, what appeared to him to be a fragmented and disunited world, into the progressive unfolding totality.

63

H. Arendt (2006), On Revolution, Penguin, London, p. 42.

J. E. Grumley (1989), History and Totality: Radical Historicism from Hegel to Foucault, Routledge, London, p. 19 Ibid., p. 19.

66 G. W. F. Hegel (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, Clarendon Press, Oxford, p. 12.

67 Grumley, History and Totality, p. 15.

64 65

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By withdrawing from the world and assuming the position of spectator, Hegel was able to “perceive an essential rationality underlying the apparent chaos of the new order.” This allowed him “to view diremption not as a ‘distortion’ of some ideal unity but as a moment or a phase in a totalising process which overcame and encompassed it.”68 Once you look at history in its entirety everything suddenly made sense. It seems that nature pursues its over-all aims through men, of which they hardly give higher value to their own existence.

Modern ideological thinking devalues the present at the expense of the future and for Arendt, this escape into the whole was prompted by the meaninglessness of the particular.69 Hegel tried to escape the historical relativism resulting from his thesis statement; that all knowledge is only its time apprehended in thoughts, by trying to secure the extra-historical character of moral values. He concluded that the self is “an absolutely free entity” and asserted that the “absolute freedom of all spirits who bear the intellectual world in themselves, and cannot seek either God or immorality outside themselves.”70 Therefore, he withdrew morality from history and consequently history from morality, declaring world-history beyond the reach of moral judgement and above obligations and self-interest. The result for Ameriks, was that if the events of world history were understood to be “a moment of coherent, intelligible, even rationally necessary development,” then what is actual for Hegel, becomes rational and ‘what is rational becomes actual.’71 With this conclusion, Hegel drastically opened the doors of Historicism.

68

Ibid., p. 17.

Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 83.

70 G. W. F. Hegel (1998), The Hegel Reader, (Ed. Stephen Houlgate), Blackwell Publishers, p. 28.

71 Ameriks, Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, p. 182.

69

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According to Beiser, “instead of seeing natural law as an eternal law above the process of history, Hegel historicises it, so that it becomes the purpose of history itself. This then gives him an absolute standard by which he can appraise all the different cultures.”72 The concept of ‘right’, when associated with history, comes to be seen as basically an unwritten law sanctioned by usage. For Hegel, if there is no human nature invariable throughout ages, then natural right loses its ontological foundation. From the materialist conception, Sartre shows that, “man returns to the very heart of Nature as one of its objects and develops before our eyes in accordance with the laws of Nature.”73 But if Nature has no ‘will’, then consequently it cannot prescribe a definite kind of conduct for human beings, because in starting from the facts of what actually is one cannot infer what ought to be. Stern regards this as a serious problem, because human reason can understand and describe but it cannot prescribe. Therefore, “the belief that one can find norms for human conduct in reason is the same illusion as the belief that one can draw such norms from nature.”74 In history, facts are of interest to us for what they may have in common with other facts but especially for what is specific and individual in them. The reason for this is that “historical fact is the carrier of a specific value absent in the natural facts which repeat themselves.”75 Hegel maintained that if history is the unfolding universal Reason in time, then what is reasonable is real and what is real is reasonable. Thus ‘the real world is as it ought to be.’ Here lies the justification for Stern, that “the consecration of

72

Beiser, F. C. Ed., (1993), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, Cambridge University Press, p. 279.

J. P. Sartre (2004), Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. I, Verso, London, p. 27.

74 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 152.

75 Ibid., p. 112.

73

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all that history has brought forth” that what is real is “rationally necessary, and, therefore, it does not need any further justification, be it a moral one or any other.”76 Hegel’s dictum that universal history is the universal tribunal is the keystone of Historicism. If there is no extra-historical authority above history, then history is the supreme judge of all truths and all values. In this way history results in complete amoralism, condemning to oblivion the very truths and values it has produced.

According to Willhoite, in Hegel’s thought, all values lose eternal status and are wholly incorporated into the flux of history, into the ‘becoming’ rather than the ‘is’. But Hegel also asserts that “these principles will ultimately come to full realisation in the course of the historical process; thus they become absolute ends or goals and no longer serve as regulative criteria of means in the historical present.”77 Hegel therefore, makes moral judgement in principle, impossible. For him the good and true are only that which survives the inexorable dialectic movement of history; in effect the successful. In saying that all morality is provisional, Isaac shows that Hegel’s thought becomes “a form of nihilism, embracing the destructive march of reason through human history and claiming a privileged standpoint – the end of history”78 from which to judge it after the fact.

If one believes that history is proceeding toward a future incarnation of freedom, then any means is justified which seems necessary in the present for the ultimate realisation of man’s glorious destiny.

For Ameriks, a great deal in Hegel’s project depends on understanding that the issue of objectivity, for “the problem of actual content, has ceased to be 76

Ibid., p. 159.

Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 114.

78 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 81.

77

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an issue about the correct (clear and distinct) grasping”, and has become a problem of legality, “of our being bound by a rule of some sort that prohibits us from judging otherwise.”79 Nothing about our desires count as responsible for an action occurring and if they do count, it is only because the subject has taken them to count. It seems then that all decisions can be made completely independent of the world. Throughout his work, Hegel often refers to objective a priori judgements as ‘self-determining’, “as if any thinker’s attempt to represent an object can be said to set its own rules.”80 Hegel calls this ‘free judgement’, in which matter has its substance outside itself, “spirit, on the other hand, is selfsufficient being, which is the same thing as freedom. For if I am dependent, I am beholden to something other than myself, and cannot exist without this external point of reference.”81 Intelligence for Hegel, is the mind “that withdraws into itself from the object”82 and recognises its inwardness as objectivity.

2.3

Marx’s Concept of History

According to Marx, Hegel’s Phenomenology contained “all the elements of criticism concealed, often already prepared and elaborated in a way that far surpasses Hegel’s own point of view.”83 In an attempt to find a supra-historical value by which to judge the unfolding of history, Marx replaced Hegel’s spiritual essence with the notion of human essence. This historical realisation of human essence would culminate in the attainment of a universal value perspective from 79

Ameriks, Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, p. 186.

Ibid., p. 187.

Hegel, The Hegel Reader, p. 401.

82 Ibid., p. 316.

83 K. Marx (1977), Selected Writings, (Ed. David McLellan), Oxford University Press, London, p. 100.

80 81

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which to judge and condemn all existing social conditions. Grumley shows that Marx constantly reiterated the view that human essence and human activity are essentially historical because they are both “shaped by the reigning sociohistorical forms.”84 For Marx, human essence was the sum of productive forces inherited by contemporaries as a legacy of humanity’s historical development and continuity.

The difference between Hegel’s idea of totality and Marx’s emphasis on the dynamism of practical totalisation is the difference between the philosophical assertion of “a meaning to history as a whole and the concrete strivings of a class as they modified inherited social institutions and meanings,” 85 who make conscious decisions about their present historical situation from the perspective of its current social possibilities. Marx denounced the ideological character of historical closure and posited the practical necessity of an unending struggle leading to emancipation in the future as the goal of human history.

The limitations of Hegel for Marx, was that self-conscious man had recognised the spiritual world “as self-externalisation and superseded it,” but had nevertheless confirmed it again in this externalised form and declared it “to be his true being,”86 thus restoring it. Mankind had tried to disguise from itself, that it is man which is the sole creator of his values and purposes, simply because such an acknowledgement would make man solely responsible for his actions.

Although Marx criticises Hegel for escaping into an absolute, he still preserved Hegel’s progressive understanding of history. He adopted the view that the totality of social relations is the bearer of a human essence that is fixed in its 84

Grumley, History and Totality, p. 45.

Ibid., p. 49.

86 Marx, Selected Writings, p. 106.

85

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social and cultural objectification. It was in so doing, that Marx disentangled his philosophy from the existing world and established in it a future perspective.

Marx’s philosophy is seen by Ameriks as “taking over the most fundamental philosophical project of German Idealism: the glorification of human history as having a thoroughly dialectal shape in its development as the complete and immanent fulfilment of self-consciousness.”87 He bestows upon mere time-sequence an importance and dignity it never had before. Marx argues that every process must have an agent; a subject, but this “subject only comes into being as the result; this result, the subject knowing itself as absolute selfconsciousness, is therefore God, absolute spirit, the idea that knows and manifests itself.”88 In this way, Marx presents human consciousness as a completely self-knowing activity, which is capable of determining its own future.

Progress carried for Marx “a substantial prospective significance”, which is derived from “a practical historical reflection primarily motivated by an orientation to the future.”89 Arendt asserts that the danger of transforming the unknowable higher aims into planned and willed intentions “was that meaning and meaningfulness were transformed into ends.” When Marx took the Hegelian meaning of history as a totality, freedom came to be seen as the “progressive unfolding and actualisation of the idea of Freedom – to be an end of human action.”90 However, meaning can only rise out of human deeds after action has come to an end, and therefore the aim of today becomes the means of tomorrow. In this way, we overlook the need

87

Ameriks, Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, p. 273.

Marx, Selected Writings, p. 109.

89 Grumley, History and Totality, p. 55.

90 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 78.

88

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for valuation in the here and now; the only hope for a life that is meaningfully human. The chief characteristic of mean-ends category when it is applied to human affairs is that the end is always in danger of being overwhelmed by the means, which it justifies and which are needed to reach it. Since human action can never be reliably predicted, the means used are often of greater relevance to the goal of the future world than the present.

The turning point of world history for Arendt, is that “for the first time, the history of mankind reaches back into an infinite past to which we can add at will an into which we can inquire further as it stretches ahead into an infinite future.”91 History, by stretching into the twofold infinity of past and future, seems to be able to guarantee immortality on earth. The great advantage to this concept of the historical process is that it makes the very notion of an end inconceivable.

In its search for a strictly secular realm of enduring permanence, mankind discovered a source of potential immortality, in which permanence is entrusted to a flowing structure.

2.4

The Process of History

In Between Past and Future, Arendt claims that in the modern age history emerged as something it had never been before. It was no longer composed of human deeds, nor did it tell “the story of events affecting the lives of men.” It had become “a man-made process, the only all-comprehending process which

91

Ibid., p. 68.

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owed its existence exclusively to the human race.”92 The emphasis shifted from knowledge of individual things to entire processes because nothing had meaning in and by itself, not even history or nature.93 The concept of process implies “that the concrete and the general, the single thing or event and the universal meaning, have parted company. The process, which alone makes meaningful whatever it happens to carry along, has thus acquired a monopoly of universality and significance.”94 The experience which underlies the modern age’s notion of process sprang from the despair of never experiencing and knowing adequately all that is given to man and not made by him.

The experiences of inner freedom always presuppose a retreat from the world, where freedom is denied, into an inwardness to which no other has access.

Inwardness is seen as a place of absolute freedom. The Christian tradition equated freedom with free will; a freedom between me and myself. The presence of freedom was experienced in complete solitude, independent of the world and others. Man began to distrust his senses when he withdrew from the world. He concluded that in order to prove the physical, he would have to make it. Thus knowledge began to be associated with man-made processes, rather than objects or events in themselves.

Arendt insists that the first result of men’s acting into history is that history becomes a process and by starting natural processes, “we have begun to

92

Ibid., p. 58.

In “Authority in the Twentieth Century”, Arendt examines totalitarian movements in greater detail, focusing on the movements understanding of freedom. She says that “what they have in mind when they talk about freedom is the freedom of a process, which apparently needs to be liberated from the meddlesome interfering activities of men, and what we have in mind is freedom of people, whose movements need protection by fixed and stable boundaries of laws, constitutions and institutions.” (Pg. 409) According to Arendt in “Ideology and Terror”, totalitarian societies do not operate without guidance of law, but instead dispense with human will to action altogether and replace it with the law of permanent movement. Totalitarianism “executes the law of History or of Nature without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual behaviour.” (Pg. 307) 94 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 64.

93

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act into nature as we used to act into history.”95 Process is the inevitable result of all human action, and like human action, it can never be entirely predicted or controlled. We have manifestly begun “to carry our own unpredictability into that realm which we used to think of as ruled by inexorable laws.”96 By carrying our own actions into nature, we have blurred the boundaries and limits for human action in the world.

Though one cannot know truth as something given and disclosed, man can at least know what he makes himself. The mind can only know that which it has itself produced in some sense within itself. In The Human Condition, Arendt examines the process character of action, saying that as human beings, we prescribe “man-made conditions to natural processes and force them to fall into man-made pattern.”97 This enabled man to carry it, as it were, “within himself wherever he went and thus freed him from given reality altogether – that is, from the human condition.”98 For a moment we rejoice in a rediscovered unity of the universe, but with the suspicion that we deal only with the patterns of our own mind, which prescribes its laws to nature. According to Arendt, “what men now have in common is not the world but the structure of their minds”99 and wherever we go in the world we encounter only ourselves. How then are we to understand the meaning of our actions through the course of history?

95

H. Arendt (Oct., 1958), The Modern Concept of History, The Review of Politics, Vol. 20, No. 4, p. 586.

Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 61.

Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 231.

98 Ibid., p. 285.

99 Ibid., p. 283.

96

97

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2.5

A Limit for History

For Arendt, if we assume that something like “an independent realm of pure ideas exists, all notions and concepts cannot but be interrelated, because then they all owe their origin to the same source: a human mind seen in its extreme subjectivity.”100 In this way, thought can remain completely unaffected by experience and hold no relationship to the world at all. What really undermines the whole modern notion that meaning is contained in the process as a whole is the fact that “we can take almost any hypothesis and act upon it, with a sequence of results in reality which not only make sense but work.”101 No question exists at all which does not lead to a consistent set of answers. In this sense everything which is ‘permitted’ in theory can now be actualised through history and made ‘possible’ in reality.

The observable fact is that the single occurrence has ceased to make sense without a universal process. Any order, any necessity, any meaning that human beings wish to impose will do. “It is as though men were in the position to prove almost any hypothesis they might choose to adopt.” The paradox however, is that man, whenever he tries to learn about things which “neither are himself nor owe their existence to him, will ultimately encounter nothing but himself, his own constructions, and the patterns of his own action.”102 In the course of consistently guided action, any hypothesis will become actualised as factual reality. From the

100

Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 69.

Ibid., p. 87.

102 Ibid., p. 86.

101

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moment it starts, the process of action will proceed to create a world in which the assumption becomes self-evident and true.

For Arendt, “the modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as manmade or as potentially man-made. These processes, after having devoured, as it were, the solid objectivity of the given, ended by rendering meaningless the one over-all process,”103 history, which originally was conceived in order to give them meaning. Thinking in terms of processes; we know only what we have made ourselves, results in the insight that we can choose whatever we want and some kind of meaning will always be the consequence. However, Arendt shows that “the world of experiment seems always capable of becoming a man-made reality” and this “unfortunately puts man back once more – and now even more forcefully – into the prison of his own mind, into the limitations of patterns he himself created.”104 If there are no limits or moral boundaries to define a process of becoming, all that remains is an endless natural cycle without any individual meaning. The world in itself, without the limits and possibilities defined by freedom, would be nothing more than an amorphous and unnameable mass. Merleau-Ponty claims that freedom arranges for there to be possibilities and obstacles, but “it does not draw the particular outline of the world,” it merely “lays down its general structures.” It is freedom therefore, which “brings into being the obstacles to

103 104

Ibid., p. 89.

Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 288.

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freedom, so that the latter can be set over and against it as its bounds.” 105 If freedom conditions the structure of what ‘is’, it is present wherever these structures arise. When freedom is devoid of any project and faced with unknown obstacles, there is no possibility of choice and absolute freedom cannot choose since it allows itself to be drawn in all directions. Merleau-Ponty therefore concludes that it is not ‘outside ourselves that we find a limit for our freedom.’106 With history as a process, there is a greater insistence on an unbroken continuity to history, however past values are not present values, and cannot truthfully be understood from the premises of the present. As human beings we are able make the reality “only from the viewpoint of possible fulfilment and continued enhancement of the complex structure of already historically attained human needs and capacities.”107 To make history is to impose upon reality the preconceived meaning and law of man. Sartre in The Critique of Dialectical Reason says that “consciousness can see the strict necessity of the sequence and of the moments which gradually constitute the world as a concrete totality, because it is consciousness itself which constitutes itself for itself as absolute.”108 At every moment of history, we can only have a historically conditioned view or perspective of the mind’s systematic structure, because “in order to be able to ascertain and to measure progress, one must have set up a standard of values.”109 In history every standard is determined by the point where the subject is situated and it is from there that it originates. If we recognise that all values are relative to our epoch then there appears to be no unquestionable standards by 105

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology Of Perception, p. 510.

Ibid., p. 511.

Grumley, History and Totality, p. 55.

108 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, p. 22.

109 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 166.

106 107

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which to gauge our actions and consequently, we prepare the way for nihilism.

However, Stern believes that we do not need absolute values to escape nihilism, because “we live in the present epoch and not in eternity”, and therefore, we may “be satisfied with values valid for the present epoch.”110 Each new collective project gives birth to a new code of values. By giving themselves new projects and by imposing new norms upon themselves, a nation is able to create new codes of values. It is the intrinsic directive value, “that is, the ideal affirmed in a collective project,” which determines the whole system of “a nation’s radiated values, gives a definite orientation to its instrumental values and impresses a certain style on the evaluations of its members.”111 The most fundamental and universal project which exists is the project of living. It is more fundamental than all other projects because unlike them, “the human project of living does not depend upon history but solely on the human condition, which is transhistorical.”112 If we recognise that the human project of living is the a priori condition of all other projects then we avoid Historicist nihilism. History can be seen as the manifestation of a sequence of clashes between collective projects and codes of values bound up in them.

The recognition of the human condition provides a limit for Historicism.

Stern suggests that there is no necessity for us to live without a belief in our truths and values as long as we recognise our own standards as being relative to our own epoch, because “it is in the very name of Historicism that we can insist on the validity of our standards for our epoch and for our civilization.”113 Each

110

Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 186.

Ibid., p. 226.

112 Ibid., pp. 242-3.

113 Ibid., p. 189.

111

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epoch creates its own standards and ideals, which open up roads of new possibilities yet unrealised in history. The standards of values by which progress is measured “have not stopped changing. They take the form of ideals, of directive values and norms, which we carry in front of us while marching through history. Mobile as ourselves, these standards always precede us.”114 Despite the plurality of the human condition, we have a deeper consciousness which unites us and this in turn implies certain specific values. The human condition is a constant in history – as long as men accept the conditions of their existence they maintain certain fundamental evaluations of the world.115 They hold values that are affirmed intrinsically in existence itself and in the project of living common to all men. This establishes an objective limit to Historicism.

In this Chapter I have shown that by defining ourselves and our actions through history, our human ‘nature’ can be seen as historically emergent and if man becomes immersed in a totality of history, objective morality cannot be defined.

If human beings look to the process of history as absolute and outside themselves, all that remains is a closed process, which functions independently of the world and human deeds. With an escape into the absolute, the particular becomes meaningless, because single events can no longer be understood in isolation from history. It is the process as a whole which becomes meaningful.

114

Ibid., p. 193.

In “Practical Foundations and Political Judgement”, Biskowski focuses on the importance of the world in providing human beings with orientation and meaning, saying that “the world provides action with context, meaning, a space to appear, and the possibility of remembrance, as well as a common point of reference and orientation. When we lose contact with the world, for any reason, we lose our sense of reality and our orientation in it.” (p. 881).

115

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Chapter 3: The Existential Response

In a world divested of a divine authority we have only our own existence to ground us. We must look to this world and our human condition for the new evaluation necessary to define the limits of our freedom. True freedom requires the recognition that we are in the world and that there are definite things that we can and cannot do. Maintaining an awareness of the conditions of our existence and recognising that man alone gives value and meaning to the world is crucial to our understanding of freedom.

This chapter focuses on the Existential reaction against a concept of history that tries to dissolve the individual into a totality. In section one I will examine the claim that man makes himself and his history and consequently, that man alone can therefore define a limit for history. Section two looks at the sources of meaning that remain for human beings after they have refused a higher transcendent world, by focusing on their present situation in the world and their adherence to the limits of their condition. In section three I will present the argument that the conditions of existence in the world provide an unchanging standard for human action. Finally in section four I will suggest that in focusing on its affirmation of life and its perpetual struggle against death and injustice, rebellion proves to be an enduring source of value for human beings.

The relationship of the individual to history is crucial to a fuller understanding of freedom in the world. Olafson describes Existentialism as “a philosophy which

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[refused] to dissolve the individual,” and arose in response to Historicism. It was Kierkegaard’s direct reaction against Hegel, whose modern concept of history absorbed “every revolt and conflict and assertion of individual freedom into an over-all, logical and necessary development.”116 Existentialism is a philosophy which holds that the individual is defined or defines himself solely through the free choices they make. It is the awareness of the absurdity of man’s situation, which arises when man as an active being, confronts a world in which no over-all rational pattern can be found. Nevertheless man is obliged by his ontological structure to choose and act in the absence of any guiding principle to guide his choice other than just the fact itself of being free.

Durfee emphasises that man asserts his presence in the world, that history may set limits on man, “but it is also true that man in rebellion sets some limits upon history.”117 For Camus, the act of rebellion is man’s “refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historic terms.” History is one of the limits of man’s experience, but by rebelling, man “imposes in his turn a limit to history and at this limit the promise of a value is born.”118 Camus asserts that he who “dedicates himself to this history dedicates himself to nothing and, in his turn, is nothing. But he who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself to the earth and reaps from it.”119 Camus believes that as human beings, we must recognise that life has an intrinsic value that must be defended at all costs.

116

F. A. Olafson (Jan., 1955), Existentialism, Marxism, and Historical Justification, Ethics, Vol. 65, No. 2, p. 127.

H. A. Durfee (Jan., 1958), Albert Camus and the Ethics of Rebellion, The Journal of Religion, Vol. 38, No.1, p. 35.

118 Camus, The Rebel, p. 216.

119 Ibid., p. 266.

117

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Camus’s idea of rebellion affirms this value of existence, which is recognised by every human being as a fundamental human value. “In rebellion there is always one’s existence which is the very foundation for the rebellious spirit.”120 It is precisely for this reason, that rebellion cannot offer a formal rule to balance the insanity of history. The moral value brought about by rebellion is no further above life and history than history and life are above it. It assumes no reality in history until man gives his life for it or dedicates himself entirely to it.

However, the rebel is still able to set a limit on history, because in the act of revolt, the rebel defies his unjust and incomprehensible condition and in doing so affirms that life has a value for all people.

However, we cannot look on the invariable human condition as an absolute limit for Historicism. For Stern, the human condition is “not a human nature. While the latter was supposed to contain the universal, trans-historical, eternal standards of all truths, all values, and all principles of right and morals, the acceptance of the human condition by all men only throws into relief some isolated trans-historical standards.”121 There exists therefore a human solidarity which is opposed to death and suffering. A solidarity which is built around the project of living that is common to all men. If we call this code of values basic human ethics, it is because it refers only to the basic values of human existence: life and health. These values are intrinsic to human existence and since they are fundamental to human ethics they can also be seen as existential values.

Stern shows how Sartre’s Existentialism places two significant limits on Historicism. First, that Sartre admits a kind of human universality under the name 120 121

Durfee, Albert Camus and the Ethics of Rebellion, p. 35.

Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 202.

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of ‘condition’, by which, Sartre “understands, with other thinkers, the totality of a priori limits which circumscribe the fundamental situation of man in the universe. The historical situations vary. What never varies is the necessity for man to be in a world, to live, to act in order to maintain himself in existence.”122 Despite the non-existence of a human nature in the midst of a constantly changing history, the human condition allows us to preserve enough human principles to understand any human project. Even through the diversity of human actions, each individual project is an attempt to overstep the limits of the human condition and thereby motivated by the same aim. In asserting that the choice of a free project is always socially and historically conditioned Existentialism finds a second limit for Historicism. Stern believes that “our freedom in choosing our projects, on which Existentialism insists so strongly, can be carried out only within the framework of the naturally, economically, and historically given possibilities.”123 By changing the present to build a new future, we create a new history which situates us and envelops us. Essence is a timeless abstraction, but existence is basically historical and therefore is always situated historically.

Jenkins sees the existential man as a creature that must “satisfy the objective conditions of life, but who encounters real subjective alternatives in the way he can satisfy them.” In this way “values become both reports of conditions that life imposes and expressions of the individual’s response to these conditions.”124 If we look for a general overall meaning for the world, a meaning that is not motivated by any particular project, we will be unable to find a specific aim. Meaning can only mean something for an individual in a particular 122

Ibid., p. 178.

Ibid., p. 180.

124 I. Jenkins, (Sept. 1950), The Present Status of the Value Problem, The Review of Metaphysics, p. 109.

123

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situation. Stern claims that by starting with existing man, “Existentialism has been forced into Historicism,” because existential man always exists at a certain moment. By insisting that man is in the world and thus always existing at a certain place and always situated historically, Existentialism defies the classical concept of man in general who is “timeless, spaceless, extra-historical man, a man without a world: in short, an abstraction.”125 Lichtheim says that philosophy must think about man and his position in the world, because “man is an historical being, and his situation is constantly changing; hence the only kind of thinking that can interpret his role is historical thinking, which however is itself subject to change and cannot rise above the horizon of its particular epoch.”126 Here Existentialism comes into its own, because the historical process itself is the process of man’s self-creation, and therefore, what man experiences in history is simply his own being as it comes back to him mediated by the time-sequence. The same thinking that reveals the logic of history at the same time makes transparent the ontological structure of human existence. In the same act, man creates both himself and his world. For this reason, there is nothing behind history, neither God nor Nature and therefore, all that is needed for a better understanding of history “is the awareness that it has the world of history and can never cease to project itself forward in an endless quest for a union that cannot be attained.”127 Consciousness represents the element of freedom, because through it the future is already present inasmuch as men are able to throw off the deadweight of past historical accretions. Lichtheim declares that “we anticipate the future by 125

Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, pp. 172-3.

G. Lichtheim No. 2, (1963), Sartre, Marxism, and History, History and Theory, Vol. 3, p. 244.

127 Ibid., p. 245.

126

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shaping our circumstances in accordance with our desires. The element of freedom – deliberate choice – is embedded in the time-sequence inasmuch as men relate themselves consciously to their future as well as to their past.”128 Man defines himself by his projects and these acquire a practical content if it can be shown that the historical process is kept going, by a dialectic ends and means that is both imposed and willed. In this way, all action must conform to some degree with our estimates of the future otherwise it would be utterly irrational and chaotic.

In Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre states that “if God does not exist, everything would be permitted.” This is the starting point for existentialism, because without the existence of God or any transcendent absolute, we are not provided with any values or commands to legitimise our behaviour. “Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. We are left alone, without excuse.129 Likewise, Wood maintains that men make their own history, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”130 Human beings create themselves and their values through history, shaping the world through their projects and providing a limit for their actions by drawing from the world. In this way, they define the world and give it meaning.

128

Ibid., p. 231.

J. P. Sartre (1989) Existentialism and Humanism, (Trans. Philip Mairet), Methuen, London, pp. 33-4.

130 P. Wood (1985), Sartre, Anglo-American Marxism, and the Place of the Subject in History, Yale French Studies, No. 68, p. 15.

129

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3.1

Sources of Meaning

The absurd situation arises out of the polarity between man and the universe. It arises out of man’s desire to give meaning to the world and the awareness that the universe in itself is without point or purpose. It is the awareness that there is no final resolution, because man is always in the process of becoming. Realising that no final synthesis is an attainable, the act of rebellion becomes the only meaningful course of action for human beings. In rebelling against the absurd condition of their existence, human beings are able to find a source of meaning in the world.

Without rebellion, the absurd condition can lead to nihilistic conclusions.

As Camus writes in The Rebel, “if one believes in nothing, if nothing makes sense, if we can assert no value whatsoever, everything is permissible and nothing is important.” The sense of the absurd makes murder seem a matter of indifference and hence, permissible. Indifference to life is a mark of nihilism and having no higher value to direct our action, human beings aim at efficiency, because since nothing is true or false, good or bad, human ‘principles will become that of showing ourselves to be the most effective.’131 Camus presents the human condition as an encounter with absurdity and concludes therefore that life provides an absolute value, since the preservation of life is necessary to maintain the absurd polarity between man and the world.

Willhoite however, shows that the absurd condition was “always nothing but a point of departure” for Camus; “a place where, bereft of convincing transcendent 131

Camus, The Rebel, p. 13.

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meanings or imperatives, he felt compelled to take his stand before setting out to chart a path to authentic human existence.”132 For Hoy, Camus is led to the recognition that “from the moment that life is recognised as good it becomes good for all men.” Human life is the only good, since “it is precisely life that makes the absurdist logic possible, and since without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis.”133 It is the world which provides a source of meaning for human action, because to be human is “to experience and to defy absurdity, to demand that the world be intelligible, that it affirm a sense of meaning.”134 For Camus the act of rebellion is a demand for meaning in an unjust and irrational universe. Confronted with an incomprehensible condition, it is “a demand for clarity”, in which the rebel expresses an aspiration for order by attacking “a shattered world to make it whole.”135 Rebellion for Goodwin is the demand of human beings for “order in the midst of chaos.”136 In his perpetual demand for unity, the rebel’s fight against death amounts to claiming that life has a meaning. “Every rebel therefore pleads for life and affirms that rebellion is the only value which can save them from nihilism.”137 This passion for order disclosed in the act of rebellion, sets a limit to man’s acceptance of oppression by disorder or injustice. It involves not only the rejection of the lack of order of the world, but it also conserves and augments other aspects of reality, such as the common human dignity disclosed by the rebellion. In this way, it is the existing conditions of the world which determine its new meaning.

132

Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 27.

Hoy, Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, p. 577.

134 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 120.

135 Camus, The Rebel, p. 29.

136 Ibid., p. 16.

137 G. A. Goodwin (Mar., 1971), On Transcending the Absurd: An Inquiry in the Sociology of Meaning, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 76, No. 5, p. 838.

133

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Hochberg suggests, that since “the world is the only one Camus comprehends and its joys and values the only ones he grasps, he can only be satisfied with giving the world, somehow, an intrinsic value.”138 For Camus, man comprehends only what he experiences, therefore he must seek some means of anchoring his values in the world of experience. Values must come about from the factual condition of the world as it is and without the otherworldliness of transcendent values, man is left with this world and this life as sole possible sources of value. Throughout his life, Camus maintained the simple position of attempting to remain faithful to the concrete foundations motivated by human existence in the world.

There is a discernible development throughout Camus’s life in his understanding of the human condition. For him, the world remains the sole source of meaning, and because of this, he maintains a total adherence to the ‘this-worldliness’ of life. This can be seen in man’s constant rebellion against suffering and death. Throughout his work, the fundamental value of life remained the sole value. Camus maintained that there is no superhuman happiness or eternity outside of time where man can possess ideal truths. Because of his intense existential concern with his own knowable bodily existence, Camus refused to believe in the reality of any life other than the present earthly existence. There is a certain ‘pointlessness’ to the problem of immortality because for him, human beings are only interested in their destiny before, not after.

138

H. Hochberg (Jan., 1965), Albert Camus and the Ethic of Absurdity, Ethics, Vol. 75, No. 2, p. 90.

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For Camus, a “purely historical absolute is not even conceivable” in reality, since man lives in the midst of this totality he cannot grasp it. For this reason, history as an entirety can only exist “in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world.”139 Thought is always out in front and sees further than the body, but the body lives in the present and is determined by its finite situation. for this reason, Camus does not want to turn his back on his present riches. He refuses all the ‘later ons’ of the world insisting that “even if I wished it, what have I to do with any truth that does not decay? It isn’t cut to my dimensions.”140 In the refusal of the future, accepting of the present becomes all important, but only on condition that man should always remain faithful to the present and endure each experience with complete lucidity.

Hoy maintained that Camus’s argument remained quite simple: “We must live with what we know. We cannot escape into faith.” Because of this, we are called upon “to adopt the logic of the absurd man, who is conscious that reason cannot give him certainty, but also insists that he must live without appeal.”141 If we decide to live, it is because we find some positive value in our personal existence. In each case however, the values are not given and have to be deduced from the conditions of living. Camus denied all transcendent sources of value and found instead “a basic value, one created by man.” With this value he attempted “to construct an ethic and repudiate nihilism.”142 This life is all we have and

139

Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 109, quoting from Camus’s The Rebel (p. 189).

Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 21.

141 Hoy, Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, p. 580.

142 Hochberg, Albert Camus and the Ethic of Absurdity, p. 93.

140

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because of that, the rebel’s ethic must be one of ceaseless opposition against the absurd world, through which ‘the absolute value becomes opposition to death’143 Life itself proposes an ethics of choice and limitation. If a limited future does not render life meaningless, it is because Camus is a man of the present. He realises that “real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.”144 His attitude comes from nothing more that a total and uncompromising adherence to the sole dimension of time we have elected. Far from being an ethics of passivity, it demands a constant awareness to the present. For Camus, a threatened future adds all the more value to present life. In Letters to a German Friend, he states that he chose justice in order to remain faithful to the world, saying: “I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one. This world has at least the truth of man, and our task is to provide its justification against fate itself. And it has no justification but man.”145

3.2

A Sense of Limits

Since human beings are left with the world only as their sole source of meaning, they must find and define the limits of that world. Camus claims that in the past, the Greeks took refuge behind the conception of limits, in which they negated nothing and thereby never carried anything to its extremes. Modern day Europe,

143

Ibid., p. 99.

Camus, The Rebel, p. 268.

145 Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death, p. 28.

144

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on the other hand, “negates whatever she does not glorify. And through all her diverse ways, she glorifies but one thing, which is the future rule of reason. In her madness she extends the eternal limits.”146 Willhoite appears to agree with Camus in saying that it was Christianity which “turned man away from the world” and reduced him “to himself and to his history.”147 Human beings, in no longer sharing the world, extended their thought beyond the limits of immediate experience and began to make the demands of nihilism. This is because when reason is “released from ascetic limitations in the personality”, it edges towards “an inner world in which everything is possible and nothing is true.”148 Camus possesses a strong sense of the limits and a clear understanding of individual human responsibility, because for him “the absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorise all actions.”149 He rejects all moral absolutes because he does not view the present as a corrupt and incomplete moment which points to something beyond itself. Willhoite examines Camus’s denial of ‘a life beyond earthly existence’, which allows him to set forth “a new system of beliefs and acts of faith. Far from negating all transcendence, he gives back a structure to a sunken world limited by man, but a place wherein things take on meaning.”150 Roth claims that “the root of the matter lies for Camus in the self-discovery by the individual that his claim is not for total liberty” but that “there is in each of us a consciousness of limit, a limit which we cannot overstep without contradicting

146

A. Camus (1975), The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Penguin, London, p. 167.

Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 116.

Woolfolk, The Artist as Cultural Guide, p. 107.

149 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, pp. 98-9.

150 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 52.

147 148

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our nature.”151 The freedom asserted by rebellion is always a never wholly successful attempt to liberate oneself from necessity.

For both Arendt and Camus it is human existence which presents the most profound limits. They argue for an ethical and political conduct which is constrained by our existence because it is our ‘common human condition, which makes a politics of human rights imperative.’152 The conditions of human existence are inherently limited because all life is bounded by birth and death.

The frailties of the human condition can either be exploited by ideologies that seek forcibly to transcend human limits or can be sustained by healthy, selflimiting forms of individual and collective autonomy.

According to Hochberg, the human condition of mortality sets a limit to our existence and it is for this reason that Camus aims to face the actuality of the present, in order to recognise in it all its possibilities and limitations without reverting to faith in transcendent and absolute values. For Willhoite, an absolute unshakable foundation is meaningless for human beings, simply because each man is imprisoned in the conditions of his own existence. The question of the meaningfulness of life as a whole is pointless because a man who is “indifferent to imposed meanings and ignorant intellectual puzzles finds a strange immediate communion with an impenetrable and equally indifferent world.”153 Metaphysical freedom is of no concern to the absurd man. Because it “is irrelevant to one who believes neither in a God who controls his actions nor in an after-life in which he will be judged according to the use he has made of his capacity for free

151

L. Roth (Oct., 1955), A Contemporary Moralist: Albert Camus, Philosophy, Vol. 30, No. 115, p. 301.

Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 11.

153 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 43.

152

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choice.”154 Though we can’t escape death, we should not accept it and for this reason we should rebel. In refusing to evade the reality of our fate and our condition we are drawn nearer to the world.

For Camus, the rebel rejects the consequences implied by death because in rebelling, he does not ask for life but only for reasons for living. “If nothing lasts, then nothing is justified: anything that dies has no meaning. To fight against death amounts to claiming that life has a meaning, to fighting for order and for unity.”155 For the rebel, what is missing from the suffering and happiness of the world is some principle by which that can be explained and justified. With an existential awareness of death, there is no point in living for some future reward, for the ‘later ons’ of the world. Under the weight of such awareness, human beings have a need to take an unjustified leap into some transcendent principle in order to give life the appearance of meaning. An absolute provides man with a means of comprehending the absurd and giving life an overall coherent aim.

According to Nietzsche, “the nihilistic question of ‘for what?’ is rooted in the old habit of supposing that the goal must be put up, given, demanded from outside – by some superhuman authority. Having unlearned faith in that, one still follows the old habit and seeks another authority that can speak unconditionally and command goals and tasks.”156 Human beings have a constant need to ground their values in some form of unquestionable absolute, in order to provide them with meaning and orientation in the world. Willhoite warns against this tendency, saying that “those who set out the premise of a limitless human freedom … seek to

154

Ibid., p. 32.

Camus, The Rebel, p. 73.

156 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 16.

155

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actualise their boundless freedom by aligning themselves with a movement which claims the authorisation of history for it exercise of total freedom.”157 Camus was unable to discern a divine order outside of existence that could provide a transcendent meaning and make human life ultimately coherent. He concluded therefore that there were “no laws or norms accessible to man through revelation or from nature to govern the manifold complexities of his existence.”158 This does not mean however, that there are no valid standards for the conduct of life discernible to man. According to Peyre, one must accept the unintelligibility of the world and pay attention to man in order to lead into a realm of human significance. But the question remains; “What are the positive values which persist in this world of mortals sentenced to death?”159

3.3

Sources of Value

Camus’s concept of rebellion reinforces his fidelity to the human condition, and it is this that remains a fundamental value for him. Each man must be continuously aware that life has no significance that transcends the particular moments in which he lives it. Thus, by being fully involved and committed to the world, the rebel is able to respond to each situation in which he finds himself.

Willhoite shows that rebellion “keeps continuously alive an awareness of the absurd,” which requires a wholehearted “embracing of life, a perpetual struggle

157

Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 92.

Ibid., p. 49.

159 H. Peyre (1960), Camus the Pagan, Yale French Studies, No. 25, p. 25.

158

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against death.”160 In doing so, it provides a standard of value for Camus because of its intensely personal reaction to the existentially realised fact of mortality.

Rebellion must embrace life as its only foundation because without it, the rebel would be unable to assert any principles.

The act of rebellion affirms values while limiting reality. The slave in rebelling defines a limit for suffering and in so doing he discovers something of value within himself which is identical with something of value within other men. There is universality to cultural values in that, “what is historically essential must not only be essential for this or for that individual, it must be important for all.”161 The act of revolt appears to precede the conscious formulation of values, because in his refusal, the rebel affirms certain human rights and values that must be defended.

According to Durfee there is a common humanity implicit in the act of rebellion which is always a value. Rebellion offers “a rule of conduct which does not need to be endlessly projected into the future; nor is the rule merely a formal ethical principle without immediate relevance to the historical situation.”162 As a value it exists here and now and provides the basis of our protest against injustice. The act of revolt uncovers this universal value which is crucial for a shared understanding of the world. Roth shows that for Camus, “if men cannot refer themselves to a common value, then man is incomprehensible to man. The rebel demands that this value be clearly recognised in himself because he

160

Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 37.

Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 122.

162 Durfee, Albert Camus and the Ethics of Rebellion, p. 36.

161

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suspects, or knows, that, without this principle, disorder and crime would reign over the world – it is the aspiration to an order.”163

In this Chapter I have provided the Existential response to Historicism, which asserts that man makes himself and his history and therefore, it is man alone than provide a limit and a meaning for history. Existentialism agrees that human nature is historically emergent, however it maintains that if man looks to his present situation in the world, to the ‘here and now’, and continues to remain faithful to the origins of rebellion, then he is able to derive an ethic from his actions.

Chapter 4: The Foundation of an Ethic

In this chapter I will examine the foundations that are necessary for freedom to appear in the world, emphasising that these conditions must remain continuously open to the future and consent to the relativity of human existence. Section one focuses on the Existential response to the nihilistic claim that man is alone in the world, which emphasises the importance of human participation in the shared struggle against death. Section two presents the claim that, in realising that human beings make themselves, man becomes solely responsible for his actions and decisions because there is no transcendent principle in which he can take refuge. In section three I will focus on a conception of limited freedom, presenting the claim that although everything is permitted, it is only by accepting 163

Roth, A Contemporary Moralist, p. 299.

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new obligations and maintaining a fidelity to the world that we derive a sense of freedom and that this involves making choices and limiting our options.

What then is needed for forging a more just and meaningful life? Isaac says that “we need, in short, to ground, and thus to limit, our conduct, seeking foundations at the same time that we acknowledge their provisional character.”164 Therefore, there must be an awareness that human values are relative to the conditions of existence and likewise that the foundations that arise must accommodate the dynamic nature of human beings. Stern claims that “if all values, all norms and standards were trans-historical and eternal, this would be tantamount to a total inertia of mankind’s axiological consciousness.”165 Human beings by their very nature are constantly involved in the world, and history is that constant process of valuation and revaluation by human beings, according to their ever-changing aims and projects. Values are appreciated throughout history and each one makes its claim for universal validity, however, the individual that acts and the history which gives an account of him “cannot be understood without the relativity of values.”166 Since no values appear to be free from these historical conditions, there can be no trans-historical standards that allow us to judge the truths and values created throughout history.

For Camus, the world appears meaningless because there is no absolute, but in another sense, there can be no absolute since such a thing would be meaningless to the conditions of the world. Nietzsche supports this view by saying that “the unconditional, representing that highest perfection, cannot 164

Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 110.

Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 194.

166 Ibid., p. 137.

165

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possibly be the ground of all that is conditional.”167 Existence in the world invites human beings to act but it also makes the future indeterminate and the ultimate consequences of their acts unknowable. Arendt likewise, reinforces this view by saying that “laws residing on human power can never be absolute.”168 The ‘inauthoritive authority’ of rebellious politics places it on shifting sands rather than solid rock. It still remains a stable and lasting authority however, because it is grounded in our timeless condition of being rebellious and limited creatures.169 According to Goodwin, “the absurd is never overcome – all that occurs is the creation of new theses which in turn have their own contradictions. A meaningful existence, then, could become one of continual rebellion.”170 The continual fight for order and unity is testimony that life has meaning, and for this reason, Camus sought to derive an ethic from rebellion because it defines the limits beyond which we cannot go. Because of this, it is absolutely necessary that rebellion derive its justifications from itself; to study itself in order to learn how to act. Through rebellion we may perhaps discover the rule of action which the absurd could not give us. By Camus’s reasoning, it is not the knowledge of the absurd that distinguishes man, but rather the rules of life and of action that he derives from this truth. “Unless we ignore reality, we must find our values in it.

Is it possible to find a rule of conduct outside the realm of religion and of absolute values? That is the question raised by revolt.”171

167

Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 15.

Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 132.

169 For further discussion on the topic of freedom and foundations, see Keenan’s “Promises, Promises: The Abyss of Freedom and the Loss of the political in the Work of Hannah Arendt”, which examines the possibility that “freedom can only gain a foundation or a space, or become a law for a particular group of people, by taking on a specific, limited form; the foundation, to make certain options possible, will have to close down certain others: future possible new beginnings will be restricted and others ruled out entirely.” (Pg. 315) 170 Goodwin, On Transcending the Absurd, p. 837.

171 Camus, The Rebel, p. 27.

168

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For Camus, the rebel slave says yes and no at the same time. “He affirms that there are limits and also that he suspects – and wishes to preserve – the existence of certain things beyond those limits.”172 Thus in the act of rebellion, the rebel implicitly brings into play a standard of values that he is willing to preserve at all costs. The moment he rebels, he begins to consider things in particular and his situation becomes defined by new values. In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet. Camus presents rebellion as the common ground on which every man bases his first values. In saying ‘I rebel – therefore we exist,’173 he is led to an ethic of openness and participation in the world with others. Rebellion, though it springs from an individualist impulse, questions the very idea of the individual through the rebel’s willingness to subordinate his personal life to a common good. Therefore, the act of revolt provides us with a ground for human ethics because in our awareness of the common condition of men, we derive a minimal evaluative standpoint from which to establish a stable foundation.

For Willhoite, before ever reflecting on the most fruitful ethic for action, human beings must first fully and openly encounter life in existential awareness and find it to be essentially good and meaningful. Otherwise, “ethics can all too easily become a closed system increasingly isolated from experience and inspire fanatical efforts to crush human realities inconsistent with the reign of abstract ideals.” One must love life before loving meaning because “when the love of life disappears, no meaning consoles us for it.”174 Critchley agrees that one must embrace life here and now, otherwise in our solitude and isolation, the highest 172

Ibid., p. 19.

Ibid., p. 28.

174 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 99.

173

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thing upon which we can contemplate is nothing more than the “empty and pure, naked and mere ego, with its autonomy and freedom.” 175 Left with nothing more than ‘rational self-contemplation,’ rationality becomes a curse and we come to deplore our existence.

4.1

Solitude and Participation

It is for this reason that Isaac emphasises the movement beyond solitude which is entailed in rebellion and consequently, that dialogue and communication become central to the formation of human values. Human freedom requires that communities “establish conditions whereby ethical standards and public policies can be collectively agreed upon rather than arbitrarily imposed.”176 However, these foundations can only ever be provisionally given. For this reason these conditions are forever dissonant and strange because “between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.”177 Human natality and rebellion furnishes us with the first principles of ethical construction, because they always remain open and alive to the continuous process of revision, responding to the changes of each situation in the world.

For Isaac, Camus saw rebellion as the “passionate affirmation of human value” because it referred “the exercise of human freedom, to the fact that humans are agents always capable of surpassing or at least distancing themselves

175

Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, p. 4.

Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 124.

177 Ibid., pp. 124-5.

176

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from their existing circumstances.”178 He makes the transition from solitary revolt to a shared struggle because the act of revolt implicitly affirms a shared value and dignity. Willhoite also shows that Camus saw with increasing clarity that being human “requires broadening one’s rebellion so that it encompasses resistance to forces which threaten the lives of [other] men and not merely oneself.”179 For this reason, through rebellion, Camus places a greater emphasis on participation instead of solitude, thus shifting from a primary concern with the situation of the lone individual to that of the community.180 Honeywell shows that Camus, in his focus on rebellion, moves beyond mere personal experience to a fuller understanding of freedom that requires the shared participation of society. In this way “unity among men exists as a tension or balance maintained by the mutual limitation of freedom and justice; it thus is based on a freedom and a justice which are always relative, never absolute.”181 Rebellion is never a claim to absolute unity because it only ever aspires to the relative. The freedom to rebel requires that no one system of justice is taken as final or absolute. It emphasises a type of unity that involves plurality, because it “provides a framework within which each man’s passion for order, operating in its unique perspective, can contribute to the whole, thus a framework in which rebellion can result in fruitful action – the creation of order out of disorder by each man, the activity which marks his human nature.”182 Rebellion is the recognition of the positive value of creative freedom while at the same time, recognising the limits of this freedom. This limit comes 178

Ibid., p. 73.

Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 51.

180 For a more detailed discussion on the importance of participation and its relationship to freedom in the world, see Kateb, “Freedom and Worldliness in the Thought of Hannah Arendt”.

181 J. A. Honeywell (Jul., 1970), Revolution: Its Potentialities and Its Degradations, Ethics, Vol. 80, No. 4, p. 256.

182 Ibid., p. 257.

179

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from an awareness of other human beings and their capacity to rebel. For Hoy, rebellion “supposes a limit at which the community of man is established. Its universe is the universe of relative values.”183 Rebellion therefore provides human beings with a freedom which is relative, both to the world in which we live and the conditions that we share. According to Durfee “man’s solidarity is founded upon rebellion, and rebellion can only be justified by this solidarity, [because] with rebellion this estrangement of the self from the world is seen as a collective experience.”184 Thus there is a need for human beings to find a common value in their existence that can be maintained and defended.

In The Rebel, Camus asks the question ‘why would a person rebel if there is nothing worth preserving in themselves?’ For him, it is a question of whether or not a human ‘nature’ can exist, since rebellion, though “apparently negative since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.”185 The individual is not the embodiment of the values they defend. All humanity is needed to comprise those values and therefore, when man rebels he comes to identify himself with other men. Thus the ‘All or Nothing’ attitude of rebellion undermines the very conception of the individual, who actually consents to die and be sacrificed for the sake of a common good which he considers more important than his own destiny. The rebel acts therefore, “in the name of certain values which are still indeterminate but which he feels are common to himself and to all men.”186

183

Hoy, Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, p. 578.

Durfee, Albert Camus and the Ethics of Rebellion, p. 33.

185 Camus, The Rebel, p. 25.

186 Ibid., p. 21.

184

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Man’s values appear therefore to be derived from his essence rather than his existence. Like Camus, Hochberg holds that there is a human essence which is presupposed by the rebel’s value and that this value emerges from man’s existential condition. Both universals and values are spoken of as “transcending individuals”, which provides part of “the bridge whereby Camus proceeds from the premise that one rebels for values to the conclusion that there is a universal human nature.”187 Likewise, Roth asserts that we rest in the position that there is a limit in all things, and that “there is a limit restraining the relations between man and man. For the limit we recognise in our own selves we recognise to exist in others, so that we see in them too, just as in ourselves, a limit beyond which they may not be pushed.”188 Consequently we dare not do unto others what we would not have others do unto us. This limit of human endurance holds for others as well as for ourselves and so declares the common nature of us all.

4.2

Human Nature and the Human Condition

As long as there is human consciousness in the world, there will always be subjectivity. And with this subjectivity it becomes impossible to establish and maintain absolute and permanent modes of authority. Human existence is bounded by mortality and situated within the history of the world. Arendt states, that “the human condition does not constitute anything like human nature” because it is highly unlikely that we, “who can know, determine, and define the natural essence of all things surrounding us, which we are not, should ever be 187 188

Hochberg, Albert Camus and the Ethic of Absurdity, p. 98.

Roth, A Contemporary Moralist, p. 302.

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able to do the same for ourselves – this would be like jumping over our own shadows.”189 Sartre likewise declares that man has no other nature than the one he has made, building up his own essence which is preceded by his existence. He denies that man’s essence precedes his historical existence, writing that “man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it.”190 Killinger claims, that in rejecting the concept of human nature, Sartre is lead to declare that “man is freedom” because of his openness to possibilities for the future through his indeterminate potentiality. Existentialism tries to return man to himself as freedom, because it insists that “existence precedes essence.

Because man can choose, within the limits of his finitude, how he shall live, his existence occurs before his essence is determined.”191 As an existentialist, Sartre is dedicated to the reawakening of the individual consciousness and the innate freedom of man. If existence really does precede essence, then “there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom.”192 But his freedom does not come cheaply. The possibility of becoming gives a greater dignity to man, but it also brings an individual responsibility for each choice and ultimately for all men.

189

Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 10.

Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, pp. 27-28.

191 J. Killinger (May, 1961), Existentialism and Human Freedom, The English Journal, Vol. 50, No. 5, p. 304.

192 Ibid., p. 313.

190

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Absolute responsibility for Sartre, means saying that “I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him be. In fashioning myself I fashion man.”193 The existential man is thereby ‘condemned to be free.’194 This new freedom, for which man alone is responsible for defining, is a terrifying freedom. Many people would rather live life as an object, than face the consequences of self-determinism, because there is nowhere to hide from responsibility and no absolute to secure the voice of man. Existentialism denies that the individual values which we posit by our evaluations are determined by essences or general norms existing before those values. In this way, Existentialism denies the existence of a transcendent absolute above and beyond the world.

For Sartre, freedom is “the only foundation of values, and nothing, absolutely nothing justifies me in adopting this value rather than that, this hierarchy of values rather than another.”195 The values emerging in the course of history are the only values in the world. There is no supra-historical value allowing us to judge these historical values. Stern reinforces this view of freedom by stating that likewise, there is no human nature if there is no God to conceive it. Thus, “man is nothing but what he makes himself in the course of history. If there is no human nature hovering above history as a supra-temporal essence, then there is no universal man, no archetype-man who could serve as a standard by which to judge the different types of men emerging in the course of history.”196 This activity of making ourselves through history, without any

193

Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, p. 30.

Ibid., p. 34.

195 Stern, Philosophy of History and the Problem of Values, p. 177.

196 Ibid., p. 177.

194

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reliance on previous standards, gives us a sense of unlimited freedom. What is needed then is a concept of freedom which is limited to the World

4.3

Limited Freedom

For Arendt, freedom is conceived in the world “not as an inner human disposition but as a character of human existence in the world.” Therefore, man does not possess freedom, but rather “his coming into the world, is equated with the appearance of freedom in the universe; man is free because he is a beginning and was so created after the universe had already come into existence.”197 However in the case of the human condition, there is forever a ‘necessity which prevents us from doing what we know or will’, which arises from the world, from our own bodies, and is ‘bestowed upon man by birth.’198 Therefore, we are constantly trying to get beyond this necessity and this struggle constitutes the whole of human history.

The nihilist erroneously concludes that if God is dead, everything is permitted because no values can be affirmed outside the realm of the transcendent. But Willhoite shows that the absence of an eternal law does not mean that there is no law of any kind, because “if nothing is prohibited eternally, neither is anything permitted apart from human denial or permission. No liberty is possible except in a world where both the permitted and the prohibited are defined.”199 To have unbridled freedom would be to suffer a new form of anguish and a new form of happiness. Camus says, that “from the moment that man 197

Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 165-6.

Ibid., p. 158.

199 Willhoite, Beyond Nihilism, p. 106.

198

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believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.” Freedom of the mind is not a comfort but an achievement. There is a great risk in wanting to consider oneself above the law. That is why the mind only finds “its real emancipation in the acceptance of new obligations.” 200 Freedom for Camus, can only exist in a world where “what is possible is defined at the same time as what is not possible.”201 Camus reasons that although it is not possible to define human existence in terms of objective or transcendental values, this does not justify nihilist reasoning that anything is possible, but on the contrary, it “leads to a respect for human dignity and limited freedom.”202 Absolute liberty, which is the aim of rebellion, eventually becomes a prison of absolute duties and collective asceticism. If the world is without a higher order and nothing is therefore true, then nothing is forbidden because in order to prohibit an action there must first be a standard of values. However, this also means that nothing can be authorised, because there must also be values and aims in order to choose the correct course of action. Therefore, at the conclusion of complete liberation Nietzsche chooses complete subordination, because for him rebellion ends in ascetic renunciation; “If nothing is true, nothing is permitted.”203 Willhoite shows that for Camus, “Nietzsche’s nihilism implies that man lives without restraints, except those he places upon himself; that he can re-create

200

Camus, The Rebel, p. 62.

Ibid., p. 62.

202 Hoy, Albert Camus: The Nature of Political Rebellion, p. 579.

203 Camus, The Rebel, p. 63.

201

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the world in whatever image he desires.”204 Therefore Camus presents, in the figure of the rebel, an individual of integrity who chooses self-renunciation in the face of opportunity. Even though the individual inhabits a moral universe in which everything is permitted, he chooses instead a narrower and more defined sense of self. Camus sees our existence as a liberating condition, because “not only does it free us from a transcendent absolute, but it frees us in smaller ways.

For just as we lose our freedom with a transcendent absolute that defines our purpose, we tend to lose it by thinking in terms of the future. We propose roles for ourselves and hence limit our freedom by living within these roles.”205 Because of this, Camus imagines a culture freed from all commanding values and creeds, but which favours inhibition over impulse. For Camus, genuine character represents an internalisation of limits, a repression of possibilities in the personality. Therefore it is necessary that the broadening experience of sympathetic understanding “have limits in order to protect the capacity of the personality to reject”206 some aspect in order to accept others. One must maintain fidelity to the limits of the world around us and to the limits of ourselves. Without the protection of an ascetic discipline, man can resist no opportunity.

In this Chapter I have shown that the conditions of freedom must be relative, continual, open, and shared. I have presented the existential claim that we make ourselves and therefore we have absolute responsibility for our actions and decisions. Everything is permitted and choice is unlimited in general, but it is 204

Willhoite, Albert Camus' Politics of Rebellion, p. 405.

Hochberg, Albert Camus and the Ethic of Absurdity, p. 94.

206 Woolfolk, The Artist as Cultural Guide, p. 96.

205

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only be accepting new obligations and closing off certain possibilities that we define the world and make is mean something in particular. As human beings situated in the world we have a duty to maintain our awareness of our limits and our place in that world.

Conclusions

The modern conception of freedom; of humans as makers of their own destinies, is a powerful one. There is a sense of rebelliousness, of pushing up against the limits. As Isaac puts it; “it is essential for us to know whether men, without the help of either the eternal or rationalist thought, can unaided create their own values.” Everything can not be reduced to negation and absurdity. But we must first “posit negation and absurdity because they are what our generation has encountered and what we must take into account.”207 Both Arendt and Camus arrive at a similar vision of freedom; one which refuses to privilege any form of human authority.

Without God, man is left with two choices: either seek out a new absolute and posit his values there, or look to what remains and derive his values from that. If man chooses the first option, he withdraws from the world even though he is in it. If he makes history his absolute then he has an absolute of eternal movement and no way of stabilizing his values. But if man chooses the second option, he remains faithful to all he has – the world and the conditions of his

207

Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, p. 11.

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existence. He acknowledges the relativity of his standards both to himself and his history and in so doing, finds a new limit for freedom in the world.

In this thesis I have asked the question; ‘Is freedom unlimited?’ I have shown that there is unlimited freedom but that this kind of freedom, without any recognition of limits, leads ultimately to meaninglessness. I conclude that man alone as sole creator of his values and purposes, is left with a choice – ignore the world and choose unlimited freedom or choose a limited freedom and accept life and its conditions. We are always in the process of becoming and we must define our existence by what we can and cannot do.

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