Four Reasons for Rebelliion

Four Reasons for Rebellion: On the Existentialist Revolt against the Crowd Antony Aumann Northern Michigan University Forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Existentialism. To rebel, Albert Camus tells us, is to say ‘no’ (1991b: 13). It is to resist some external force that wishes to impose itself upon us, to refuse the dictates of some external authority regarding what to think or how to act. But, Camus adds, to rebel is also to say ‘yes’ (1991b: 13). It is to affirm that there exists within ourselves something worthy of defence. By asserting a limit to the intrusion of others, we also assert the value of what lies beyond that limit. Hence, the rebel is never totally without a cause; they always have their reasons (Camus 1991b: 19). The goal of this chapter is to give an account of some of these reasons. I will explain why, and against what, various existentialists would have us rebel. THE PROBLEM OF THE CROWD Rebellion comes in many forms, but it is possible to distinguish them in terms of the power or force being resisted. Sometimes the power is a political one. Being a rebel is about revolting against a governmental entity that would subjugate people to its will. This is one of the main topics of Camus’s The Rebel (1991b). Other times, rebellion has a religious target. Søren Kierkegaard (1998a), for example, speaks of resisting the Danish state church, and Fyodor Dostoevsky (2003) has Ivan Karamazov talk about rebelling against God. Finally, sometimes rebellion is directed against something abstract: one revolts against the world or reality itself. Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, praises those who defy the absurdity of life (1991a: 121–23). Miguel de Unamuno, in The Tragic Sense of Life, extols those who refuse to succumb to the crushing truth of their insignificance (1972: 291–92). This chapter will focus on social rebellion. In particular, I will be discussing the form of rebellion that resists the force of the ‘crowd’ or the ‘public’ (see Aho 2020: 62–67; Cooper 1999: 110–16; Tuttle 1996). In modern society, many existentialists observe, we do not only encounter isolated individuals. We also confront the nameless, faceless masses. Other people merge into an enormous, anonymous collective that seeks to impose its will upon us. This ‘crowd’ or ‘public’ pressures us to do what they think is right. They command us to be normal—or endure their wrath. It is against this force that many existentialists would have us rebel. Their hero is the individual who refuses to do what the masses would have them do, who rejects the norms of modern society. I will look at four reasons for rebellion that we find in existentialist writings, which can be summarized as follows. First, we ought to rebel against the norms of mass society because they are wrong or misguided. Second, our social norms merit resistance because 1