After the fall: camus on evil

This chapter will examine Camus’s thoughts on natural and moral evil in three registers. The first is the ontological register, in which the reality of senseless suffering becomes for Camus the cause of both his ceaseless engagement with, and irreconcilable distance from Augustinian theology (although not other aspects of Christianity). The second is the political register, in which Camus’s The Rebel (1956a) gives a philosophical account of how the twentieth-century totalitarian regimes came to rationalize political murder on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Third, we turn to what can be called the psychological or spiritual register. In Camus’s The Fall and “The Renegade,” as we will see, Camus dramatized and explored the questions of how individual humans can be seduced into perpetrating and rationalizing deceit and violence