As religion loses hold, questions arise that must be answered. Questions as to man's purpose and nature had been answered by religion, but now these questions must be answered within a secular context. The logical conclusion of a movement of this sort is the denial of God and the pressing need to know whether one can live with what one knows and only with that.

     An even more fundamental question arises, however: is life worth living at all? That the question arises at all is interesting in itself and a phenomenon of the twentieth century primarily. Among many over whom religion has some hold, the question, of course, does not arise, or, at least, it is best not dwelt upon since suicide is a mortal sin. With others, the question probably does not arise because life for the religious person offers goals of various sorts: the search for salvation, the desire to know God, or the wish to submerge oneself in the ocean of the Godhead. Because of these goals, the meaning and purpose of life is not often questioned by the religious person.

     But remove from man this orientation, and the problem of the meaning of life may become distressing. Albert Camus is among those men who question whether life is worth living and who refuse to turn to God for assurance or direction. Camus may feel perhaps, with Kant, that it is one's duty to live, and to live as best one can, but this creature of the intellect lacks the blood so necessary to life, to a vital life at any rate, and a living death is not attractive.

     One reason men like Camus wonder whether life is worth living is that they love life and feel the question should not even arise. The world, they feel, is not as it should be, whether God created it, or it arose from the natural interactions of impersonal law. These men do not believe that the world will be made more livable by a retreat into belief, nor do they feel that a Creator has a well-ordered plan for the universe. Part of the reason for this feeling is that the plan seems so ghastly and disorganized. Religious explanations of the mysterious ways of God, a Hegelian justification for human misery, or the thesis that man has mis-used his gift of free will, does not console. A comment like Van Gogh's -- "I believe more and more...that God must not be judged on this earth. It is one of his sketches that has turned out badly..."(1)-- is not likely to encourage men like Camus to turn to God. Art itself, according to Camus, is a commentary on God's poor workmanship: "Every artist tries to reconstruct this sketch and give it the style it lacks."(2) All of this puts God in a rather preposterous position, although it is not Camus' intention to do so. One of his theses is that there is no God, or, since it is best to be positive about important matters, there are only man and nature. Men like Camus ignore God as he seems to ignore man and rebel against the suffering of the human condition. Out of this rebellion has arisen, in our century, a literature of revolt.

     In the past, writers of revolt literature (De Gourmont and Dreiser, for example) had certain common standards which gave meaning to life. This is not true of the modern writer of revolt literature like Camus; he does not see meaning and purpose as part of the universe. He feels meaning has to be created by the individual out of his experience of revolt. There are obvious difficulties in such an attitude. Values must be limited: they can only be topical and personal. If absolute revolt rejects all values, from where will these writers derive new ones? How can one create an ethic that is generally acceptable and practically effective?

     Besides a search for new values and an attack on traditional values, a contemporary revolt in literature evidences three common characteristics. First, traditional distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, have been blurred. Revolt writers hold with Nietzche that "God is dead," that is, the traditional God -- for man has killed him in his heart. Therefore, the intermediary values between God and man are also dead. The revolt writers try to create new values without appeal to God. The rejection of God was not a militant atheism so much as a result of a general distrust of abstractions ("absolutes") such as Truth and Justice, which manifested itself early in the century. The causes of the deterioration of abstractions is complex and will be discussed in more detail in the conclusion. We can say here, however, than one of the major causes of the distrust of "absolutes" was abuse by politicians, with the resulting death and displacement of so many millions in the name of Freedom and Justice and Democracy.

     In rejecting God these writers are rejecting abstractions which result in absolute sanctions. The logical problem involved in trying to create new values without appeal to God and tradition is immense. For example, a writer like Albert Camus tends to make ambiguity itself a value. At best, the revolt writers can supply only particular values which a few will accept, but most will not.

     It is natural enough for this rejection of "absolutes" to result in an emphasis on the concrete, which is the second characteristic of revolt literature. Meursault, the protagonist of Camus' The Stranger, personifies this view. He refuses at all times to say more than he feels and is extremely skeptical about "big words."

     It is natural that the individual who rejects God and traditional values and tries to create his own standards will become painfully aware of his own responsibilty. The third major characteristic of revolt literature is an insistence on individual responsibility. Man must fashion his own destiny without appeal to supernatural authority. Sartre calls this experience anguish and full individual responsibility, if accepted, he defines as freedom.(3)

     In this world of revolt, we find not only the alienated individual Meursault, but also a doctor (Rieux in Camus' The Plague) who fights desparately a plague whose nature and origin are incomprehensible. We also find men condemned, like Sisyphus in Camus' The Myth of Sysyphus, to roll the the stone of an "absurd" existence up a hill with no illusion that it will do other than roll right back down. They survive the anguish of their freedom through revolt against their condition.

     The difficulty with this new-found Sartrian freedom is deciding what to do with it. Once traditional values have been rejected what is to replace them? the major problem of the writer of revolt literature is how to proceed beyond negation to affirmation with only revolt to sustain one along the way. Camus accomplished this impossible task remarkably well, but many problems remain unsolved.

     Men like Camus, who--if they must be called something, had best be called non-religious humanists--are unable to accept anything they have heard or read without serious examination and reservation. They mistrust philosophies, religions, institutions, and ethical systems because these systems do not satisfactorily answer fundamental questions. However, these "humanists" are certainly not pessimists. The nihilism of Ivan Karamazov does not appeal to them, nor does the early despair of Bertrand Russell. They do believe, however, that they must learn to live with it. They may have something in common with the hero of Sartre's Nausee, but they prefer not to remain sick to their stomachs. Nor do they care to be "heroes without a cause," like Jake in The Sun Also Rises.

     On may admire Romain Gary's heroes who continue courageously in the face of despair, and there is some consolation in Gary's belief that idealists continue to struggle through some inner compulsion regardless of their pessimism, but this smacks too much of the medieval endurance of this "vale of tears" to be entirely satisfying.(4)

     The most important concern of any humanist is man--what he is and what is best for him-- but men like Camus prefer to leave the question unsettled since they have cause to be frightened by dogma. They do not consider man as an end as Kant teaches--but feel with Sartre that man is something to be determined. Humanism should not be a cult, and there is no legislator for man but man himself. Man must decide for himself, not by turning back upon himself, but by seeking beyond himself--but, and this is important, not too far beyond.

     Like Pater, these "humanists" are interested in everything human beings have ever done, "not as final answers, but as servants of human needs."(5) Why then, do they feel they must reject religion? Religion has satisfied important emotional needs: security, in that religion has given to man an all powerful father and son to watch over him; immortality, which makes up for his frustrations while he is on earth; order, in that it has supplied answers to man's basic questions with a unified picture of the universe. "Humanists" like Camus, in their rejection of religion, must certainly take these needs into consideration, since the strength and permanence of the church forces them to accept these needs as being strong and real.

     What Camus rejects in religion is that which restricts man's development, his individuality, and his closeness to other men. He feels that his attitude (and he can claim little more for his kind of "humanism" than that it is an attitude, a way of living) must be flexible. He refuses to formulate dogma. He insists that a man's attitude must establish sound bases as criteria of change. It cannot be chance or whim that characterizes this change, but careful and continual examination and judgement.

     Certain so-called humanists must be excluded from the ranks of those under consideration. The esthete for example, as exemplified by the count in Jame's Portrait of a Lady, has no place, for the worshippers of taste ignore a changing society. The humanist must not culture art as if it were a hot-house plant. There is no value in art for its own sake; it has value because it was done by men for men. Men like Camus, tend to feel about art as Kenneth Burke feels about literature: in relation to life it is "the thing added--the little white house in a valley that was once a wilderness."(6) They may wince somewhat at Burke's statement that "the meanest life is so overwhelmingly superior to the noblest poem that illiteracy becomes almost a moral obligation,"(7) yet they will consider the statement carefully for there may be an important truth there.

     Humanists like Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More offer little more satisfaction than the esthete. When Babbitt speaks of the "inner check" and More recommends the "inalienalbe authority" of a law wihin nature, they have stepped into the realm of the mystical. Men like Babbitt and More are replacing traditional religion by their own personal one. One should either accept or reject relgion, and Eliot, therefore, is justified in saying that the ethic of men like Babbitt and More seems to be founded on nothing but itself. One must decide whether everything in man can be deduced from the natural world or whther something comes from above. "Humanists," like Camus are not primarily concerned with philosophical condsiderations such as these, but with practical ones. They are well aware that there may be a supreme being of some sort, but they feel that man has enough to do if he limits his interests to man here on earth. The "humanists" we refer to, assume pragmatically that all their questions have naturalistic answers. They do not attempt to reconcile religion and humanism for they feel such an attempt would stultify both criticism and action. Also, these men are anti-religious because religion is institutional, institutions are dogmatic, and they reject and attack all dogma. Camus objects to religion primarily because it offers as answers to evil and suffering, only the kingdom of heaven and eternal life. This attitude demands faith, but "suffering exhausts hope and faith and then is left alone and unexplained."(8) Evil and murder are experienced here and now, but Christianity offers a cure for them only in a hypothetical hereafter.

     If these "humanists" reject all dogma and tend to advocate a return to inconclusiveness, one may well ask how the work of the world is to get done. This presents no problem. There will always be plenty of those who are eager to do the work of the world: men who are positive, who know the answers, who have found the "right way." There will always be a Christ and a Luther, and unfortunately for our century, a Hitler and a Stalin. The problem lies not in getting the work done, but in impeding the work of the Hitlers and in picking up the pieces afterward. The "humanists" we speak of are not men of action normally. They are usually found attacking the zealots and following in their wake, "repairing what they have wantonly destroyed and consolidating what they have gloriously won." They are the rebels, the gadflies, who have learned their lesson from Socrates and learned it well.

     That Camus is a rebel and far more than a gadfly will become apprent as we examine his works. When it also becomes apparent that he presents only two or three ideas in his works, the fact that he presents them ingeniously, dramatically, and emotionally, will not obscure the fact that the ideas are nevertheless simple. Why then his appeal to Frenchmen and Americans, and apparently the world -- since he recieved the Nobel Prize in 1957.

     Although there is poetry in his works, there are no pretty words or speeches to lighten our load. He offers no rewards unless it be the reward of knowing one has been a decent human being and has borne his burden well. He, at least, does not ask a man to bear it without complaint; in fact, he insists that he complain vociferously.

     He arrives at conclusions that seem obvious to most of us, but because they have been arrived at through courage and intelligence, they carry far more conviction than they would if they were delivered to us in neat little packages of ideas and thought. Ideas can be delivered; thought arises only through living, through experience. Ideas are the opposite of thought.

     The idea of the "absurd," so widely familiar and so seldom understood, was experienced by Camus. He did not try to avoid the reality of it, unpleasant as it was, nor did he seek an easy solution to it. The hopelessness and despair that prompted The Myth of Sisyphus, is difficult for Americans to comprehend. They fact that Camus did not lapse into a spineless pessimism is sufficient reason for his appeal. But, in addition, there is the appeal of the clear, clean mind which is not afraid to be inconsistent or contradictory and is more interested in saying what he believes to be true and in remaining true to his own experience rather than in remaining logical and consistent and systematic.

     What makes Camus eminently satisfying to a certain type of mind is his hatred of complacency and clichés. His appeal to contemporary sceptics lies primarily in his conviction that intellectual honesty makes happiness difficult to attain, and that honesty must not be sacrificed for peace and content that is only the illusion of true happiness. His prime value lies in his belief that revolt, not consent, is our only hope for the future.



1. Albert Camus, The Rebel (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), p.256. The original quotation is from Dear Theo: The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.
2. Rebel, p.256.
3. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'existentialisme est un Humanisme (Paris: Les Editions Nagel, 1946), pp. 36-37.
4. See Romain Gary, A European Education (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960). Also see "What Heroes Learn," Time, March 14, 1960, p.100.
5. Walter Pater, The Renaissance (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 40.
6. Kenneth Burke, Counterstatement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 124.
7. Counterstatement, p. vi.
8. Rebel, p. 303.
9. Herbert J Muller, Modern Fiction: A Study of Values (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1937), p. 91.