Philosophy, the perfect alibi...

Albert Camus The Rebel: An essay on Man in Revolt Introduction:

There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic.  The boundary between them is not clearly defined.  But the Penal Code makes the convenient distinction of premeditation.  We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime.  Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse.  On the contrary, they are adults and they have a perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose--even for transforming murderers into judges.

 

Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, would kill everybody on earth in order to possess Cathy, but it would never occur to him to say that murder is reasonable or theoretically defensible.  He would commit it, and there his convictions end.  This implies the power of love, and also strength of character.  Since intense love is rare, murder remains an exception and preserves its aspect of infraction.  But as soon as a man, through lack of character, takes refuge in doctrine, as soon as crime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspects of the syllogism.  Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science.  Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.

 

This is not the place for indignation.  The purpose of this essay is once again to face the reality of the present, which is logical crime, and to examine meticulously the arguments by which it is justified; it is an attempt to understand the times in which we live.  One might think that a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings should be condemned out of hand.  But its culpability must still be understood.  In more ingenuous times, when the tyrant razed cities for his own greater glory, when the slave chained to the conqueror's chariot was dragged through the rejoicing streets, when enemies were thrown to the wild beasts in front of the assembled people, the mind did not reel before such unabashed crimes, and judgement remained unclouded.  But slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman, in one sense cripple judgement.  On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence--through a curious transposition peculiar to our times--it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself.  The ambition of this essay is to accept and examine this strange challenge. 

Posted via email from Jim's Theory Blog Posts