QuestionsWhat makes something right?I rebel, therefore we are
What makes something right?Nature or conscience

I rebel, therefore we are

Albert Camus 1913 · 1960The world is silent: live lucidly, in revolt.
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What it claims

Revolt founds the first value on all people: I rebel, therefore we are.

Why

Every act of revolt invokes a value that is not only one's own but shared by all: revolt founds solidarity.

In short

"I rebel, therefore we are" is an argument by Albert Camus (The Rebel, 1951) on the question "What makes something right?" (answer: nature or conscience). Its claim: Revolt founds the first value on all people: I rebel, therefore we are. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Rebel, 1951
Valid with an implicit premise

In The Myth of Sisyphus, the absurd gives no values: it does not say whether one may kill. Nine years later, Camus looks for a foothold in another certainty, revolt. The slave who refuses an order says no, but also says yes to something in himself that he wants to defend. Camus draws from this a value shared by all people, and a limit: a revolt that destroys other people destroys what grounds it and stops being a revolt. Our text is an OCR digitisation of the 1951 edition, partly corrected. Camus suspects a "human nature" there; we therefore place the argument in the "nature" camp of the moral question, with this reservation: he also says these principles are not proved eternal.

P1Every act of revolt tacitly invokes a value: the slave who says no also says yes to something in himself.
P2This value is not his alone: the individual is not by himself the value he defends, it takes at least all people to make it up.
P3 · implicit premiseIf the value defended is shared by all people, revolt commits them all and affirms their community: human solidarity is founded on revolt.
P4I rebel: I say no.
Therefore revolt founds the first value on all people: I rebel, therefore we are.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3, the computer finds a case where I rebel, my revolt invokes a value, the value is shared by all, but nothing establishes that a community exists: "we are" stays false.
Valid with P3, which Camus states in chapter I but as a consequence of P2, without proving it separately. Without P3, one can grant that the value is shared by all without concluding that "we are": a shared value could remain an idea with no real community and no bond between people.
Analogy. When a child cries "that's not fair!", he is not speaking only for himself: he assumes the rule he invokes applies to others too. Camus says the cry of revolt does the same thing, on the scale of all people.

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Max Scheler, Ressentiment (as Camus reports him) 1912 · attacks premise 1

Behind the proclaimed value there is often resentment: a prolonged powerlessness that poisons itself and disguises itself as defence of humanity. What the rebel says he defends might be only his envy. Camus reports that Scheler identifies the spirit of revolt with resentment.

Camus replies
Camus
Camus answers that resentment is always resentment against oneself: one wants to be other than one is. The rebel, in his first movement, refuses to let anyone touch what he is, and fights for the integrity of a part of his being.
The debate goes on (our summary) Camus does not deny that resentment exists. He even grants (§11) that Scheler's critique might apply to certain vague forms of humanitarian idealism, or to the techniques of terror. He writes in chapter V that a revolt which lets itself be contaminated by resentment "is no longer revolt or revolution, but rancour and tyranny". The disagreement remains whether the first movement is truly pure, or whether the two are always mixed.
Karl Marx 1848 · attacks premise 2

Values are not shared by all: the dominant ideas of an age are the ideas of the ruling class. What a slave or a worker invokes in revolt is not a value of man in general, but the product of his class situation and his age.

Camus replies
Camus
Camus notes that the value revealed by revolt exists before any action, and that this contradicts the purely historical philosophies, in which value is won, if it is won, at the end of action.
The debate goes on (our summary) This passage does not name Marx. In chapter V, Camus reproaches Hegel and Marx for saying that everything is necessary, whereas revolt says only that everything is possible. A Marxist would answer that judging history in the name of a value placed before it leaves injustice in place as long as material conditions do not change. Camus and Marx part ways here, and the discussion goes on.
Objection Camus raises against himself 1951 · attacks premise 2

Are revolt and its value not relative? A Hindu pariah or an Inca warrior did not have the same idea of revolt. Camus himself notes that the problem of revolt seems to take on a precise meaning only within Western thought.

Camus replies
Camus
Camus answers that the Inca subject or the pariah do not raise the problem of revolt, because it was settled for them by tradition before they could raise it, the answer being the sacred.
The debate goes on (our summary) This answer says when the question of revolt appears: when a society leaves the sacred. It does not show that the same value is present in all people of all times. Revolts outside Europe (slaves, peasants, castes) are not examined in this chapter: the objection remains open.
Francis Jeanson and Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Temps modernes 1952 · attacks the conclusion

In 1952, Les Temps modernes, the journal edited by Sartre, published a harsh critique of The Rebel by Francis Jeanson, then, a few months later, a reply to Camus by Sartre himself. The charge, broadly: by judging history in the name of a revolt and of limits placed before it, Camus condemns real revolutions without saying how to fight present injustice, and stays, in practice, outside history, which benefits the established order. Our summary is a general one: these texts are not in our corpus.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
Camus did reply, but that text is not yet in our corpus.
The debate goes on (our summary) In between, Camus answered with a "Letter to the editor of Les Temps modernes". It is not in our corpus and we do not quote it; according to the usual accounts of the quarrel, he reproaches his critic for not discussing the book's thesis (can murder be justified in the name of history?) and for keeping silent about the Soviet camps. In our text, he writes that the rebel does not deny history: he "pushes it away without slipping out of it" and never makes it an absolute (chap. V). Each side still has its defenders: some judge that Camus was right about violence in the name of the future, others that Sartre and Jeanson were right to ask what revolt proposes against today's injustice. The quarrel marked the break between the two men.