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quoted in Existentialism Versus Marxism : Conflicting Views on Humanism (1966, New York, Dell Pub. Co., p.234, available on archive.org), an essay edited by George Edward Novack; this essay includes a collection of texts (abstracts) of authors such as Sartre and Camus (in translation), preceded by brief introductions; this quote is drawn from its Chapter "Albert Camus" (pp.206-240), in the reproduction, in translation, of the section "Totality and trial" from Part III of "The Rebel" by Albert Camus (due to an editorial error in this book edited by Novack, this quote of Camus is often wrongly associated in English with a preceding section titled "the failing of the prophecy"). The exact original quote in French, in L'homme révolté by Albert Camus, Gallimard, 1951, 131th ed., p.293 is On peut asservir un homme vivant et le réduire à l'état historique de chose. Mais s'il meurt en refusant, il réaffirme une nature humaine qui rejette l'ordre des choses. The original French text shows a possible misinterpretation or overinterpretation -or even a possible political bias ?- in this English translation of the second sentence of this quote, the idiom 'order of things', 'l'ordre des choses', having the exact same meaning in French and English, and meaning just how things are, how life works, in a very general sense. Thus Camus here doesn't precisely speak of 'another kind of human nature', but here in this quote may just (re)affirm the constancy of rebellious jolts in the human nature -that's just what the French words litteraly say- (in spite of the considerable plasticity of the human nature, Camus specifies in nearby paragraphs; human nature may be interpreted here as 'repeated actions of some humans', but not all of them, systematically). This view may be easily confirmed by the analysis of the complex full context of this quote, preferably directly in French, the whole Part III of The Rebel, L'homme révolté, which is a harsh critic by Camus of Russian Marxism such as implemented in the USSR of 1951, which precisely, in his view, tries to change or negate the true human nature. (en) |
