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Personal Rights: Being a Person Being Free

Working Draft: May 17, 2014 William F. Birdsall

Bedford, Nova Scotia, Canada

wfbirdsall@hotmail.com

Contents Introduction

1 Experiencing Rights in the World1.1 Human rights1.2 Human rights and personal rights1.3 An experiential life

2. An Experiential Methodology2.1 Philosophy and science2.2 Experiencing life2.3 The law of moderation2.4 Establishing zero point

3 A Person Being in the World3.1 The mental space3.2 The physical space3.3 The social space3.4 Human traits

3.4.1 Unity and order3.4.2 Solidarity3.4.3 Autonomy3.4.4 Justice3.4.5 Creativity3.4.6 Communication

3.5 Depersonalization and freedom

4 A Person at Zero Point

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4.1 Arriving at zero point 4.2 Being at zero point

5 A Personal Rights Framework5.1 Consequences of zero point 5.2 Rebellion5.3 Freedom5.4 Passion

6 A Person’s Relationship to Personal Rights 6.1 Being and freedom6.2 Freedom and personal rights6.3 Freedom and the state6.4 Foundational personal rights6.5 Other rights6.6 Duties

7 Conclusion7.1 Summation7.2 Challenges: Finding limits

7.2.1 Government and political action7.2.2 Oppression and oppressed7.2.3 Violence and rebellion7.2.4 Work and servitude

Coda

Cited Publications by Albert Camus

The Author

Introduction

This essay proposes a concept of personal rights as an

alternative to the prevailing understanding of universal human

rights. There are references daily in the mass media to

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struggles throughout the world for human rights. There is an

immense and growing body of legal and political documentation,

philosophical literature, and advocacy publications on the theory

and practice of human rights. National governments,

international organizations, and advocacy groups continually talk

about human rights. However, the philosophising, institutional

structures, and advocacy for human rights have become a vast,

abstract bureaucratic system divorced from the daily lives

experienced by most people throughout the world. Freedom is too

critical to a person’s being to be left to professional

advocates, legal experts, philosophers, and public servants

alone. Freedom is a matter of life and death. A concept of a

person’s relationship to rights is needed based on a person’s

experience and aspirations in the world here and now. I call

this new concept “personal rights.” This essay explains the

source of a person’s rights, why a person’s relationship to

rights is crucial to their very being, and how their relationship

to rights relates to the rights of others. To formulate a

framework for a person’s relationship to personal rights it is

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necessary to reject the current conception of human rights and

start anew at a zero point.

To establish a zero point and a methodology for moving

beyond it I draw on the writings of the French author Albert

Camus (1913-1960). Camus never developed a systematic philosophy

of rights but his fiction, plays, essays, journalism, and

notebooks are a rich source of ideas for formulating a person’s

relationship to rights. His ideas are based on his conscious

reflection upon the major political and moral conflicts he

experienced directly in his own time. His way of thinking about

those moral choices provides guidance for thinking about a

person’s experiential relationship to rights and freedom in their

own time. Because of Camus’s suspicion of absolutist positions

and his willingness to reconsider his position in light of new

experiences he proposed “working hypotheses’ (R, 11; LCE, 305).

This essay on personal rights is not a definitive formulation but

should also be viewed as a working hypothesis subject to

challenge and revision.

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The essay consists of seven sections. Section 1, Experiencing

Rights in the World, provides an assessment of the current human rights

movement and why it fails to provide a concise understanding of a

person’s relationship to rights and to the rights of others.

Section 2, An Experiential Methodology, outlines an experiential

approach to formulating a person’s relationship to rights that

establishes a zero point constituted of a rebellion against death

and a commitment to a life of freedom. Section 3, A Person Being in

the World, examines the mental, physical, and social spaces of a

person in the world, and the role of belief systems in

reinforcing habits of thought and behaviour that restrict a

person’s freedom. Section 4, A Person at Zero Point, explains how a

person at a zero point embarks on an understanding of their

relationship to personal rights. Section 5, A Personal Rights

Framework, explores the consequences of zero point in terms of

rebellion, freedom, and passion. Based on the foregoing

sections, Section 6, A Person’s Relationship to Personal Rights, provides a

concise delineation of a person’s relationship to personal rights

and the rights of others. Section 7, Conclusion, is a summation

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of the essay and examines challenges unresolved by the proposed

relationship to rights.

I have had to rely on English translations of Camus’s

writings. All sources cited of his work are listed at the end of

the essay. The source of every quote is included in the text;

for example, a quote from page 136 of The Rebel is indicated at

the end of the quote as (R, 136). The abbreviation for each work

cited is given in bold type following the title in the references

in the bibliography; for example, the abbreviation for The Rebel

is R.

1 Experiencing Rights in the World

1.1 Human rights

Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights (UDHR) by the United Nations in 1948, the legitimacy,

scope, interpretation, associated responsibilities, and

implementation of universal human rights have been a source of

continuous philosophical and practical debate. As well, state

repression, economic instability and shifting national fortunes,

rapid technological change, conflicting secular ideologies and

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religious movements, and global assaults on cultural traditions

challenge the freedom of people everywhere in the course of their

daily lives. These challenges force a person as never before to

assess their relationship with rights and the rights of others.

The rhetoric of human rights has become so prevalent that the

fulfillment of every human desire is advanced as a right. With

everything advocated as a right, the notion of human rights

becomes a meaningless abstraction divorced from a person’s daily

experience.

The UDHR arose out of the global experience of the slaughter

and oppression of millions of people prior to and during World

War II. The second paragraph of the UDHR Preamble acknowledges

this recognition in stating that “disregard and contempt for

human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged

the conscience of mankind…” People throughout the world,

including those involved with the formation of the United Nations

and the drafting of the UDHR, directly experienced or were

increasingly aware of the vast extent of the oppression of

freedom, the murder of tens of millions of people, the

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displacement of millions more, and the widespread material

destruction brought about by the war. They never wanted such

things to happen again, especially in light of the looming

potential of atomic warfare. There was the hope that out of the

experience of World War II a means could be forged to protect the

freedoms of people throughout the world.

The rights, then, expressed in the UDHR are experientially

based, that is, they were born out of lived experience rather

than having a philosophical foundation. Indeed, an effort by the

United Nations to call upon 150 intellectuals from around the

world to formulate a philosophical basis for human rights failed.

While it was not possible to reach agreement on a philosophical

justification of universal human rights, agreement was reached on

the rights enunciated in the UDHR based on the experience of

recent historical events. The UDHR is a set of moral values

rooted in experience.

Universal human rights are considered entitlements

inherently possessed without distinction by every individual by

their being human. This universality is enunciated in Article 1

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of the UDHR which states “All human beings are born free and

equal in dignity and rights.” Universal rights are inalienable,

that is, they cannot be waived by the individual or taken away by

the state or any other person or organization. Furthermore,

these rights are indivisible or interdependent in that there is

no hierarchy of rights; one right cannot be compromised or

sacrificed for another. All these rights are considered

necessary for the individual to live a dignified life. However,

values represented by these rights have been raised to such a

transcendent level of abstraction that they have little

connection to the day-to-day life of most people and provide

little insight into a person’s relation to rights in the here and

now.

The generality of the language of the UDHR gives it

considerable rhetorical power but it lacks a specificity grounded

in a person’s daily experience. Recognition of the experiential

roots of human rights at the local level survives to some degree

within the United Nations. The 2000 United Nations Human

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Development Report for 2000 on human rights and development cites

the association of human rights and political struggles:

History tells us how people have had to fight for the rights

due them. The cornerstone in this struggle has always been

political activism and people’s movements—national

liberation movements, peasants movements, women’s movements,

movements for the rights of indigenous people. Often the

burning desire of people to be free and to enjoy their

rights started the struggle. Then, building on the people’s

achievements, the formalization, legalization and

institutionalization of these rights came much later

However, there is little evidence to what extent the global human

rights regime actually touches the lives of those engaged in

struggles at the local level to achieve greater freedom. Indeed,

the human rights movement, focusing on the rights of the

individual as an abstract concept has become disconnected from

its experiential roots. As early as the beginning of 1950s

members of the UN drafting committee of the UDHR were concerned

that the rapid politicization and bureaucratization of UN

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agencies threatened the organization’s human rights program.

Their concerns were legitimate. As an example, the members of

the UN Human Rights Council, which is responsible for monitoring

human rights violations in member states, has elected member

states who consistently violate the rights of their citizens and

prohibit UN observers entry to their country. As well, human

rights rhetoric has become a tool used by states to justify

interventions in other countries to promote their own sovereign

geopolitical objectives.

Questioning the current human rights system is neither a

rejection of the historical struggles by which people have gained

greater freedom in the name of human rights nor a rejection of

the rhetorical contribution of the UDHR. The “democratic

liberties we still enjoy are not unimportant illusions that we

can allow to be taken from us without protest. They represent

exactly what remains to us of the great revolutionary conquests

of the last two centuries” (RRD, 93). Nonetheless, “There are

liberties to be won painfully, one by one, and those we still

have are stages—most certainly inadequate, but stages

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nevertheless—on the way to total liberation” (R, 93). The

current human rights system is the end of centuries of struggles

for freedom. What is needed in the twenty-first century is a

change in thinking that matches the continuing fight for a

person’s rights.

1.2 Human rights and personal rights

The UDHR does not provide enunciation of a person’s

relationship to rights other than that human rights are inherent

to the person and that each person should relate to others in a

spirit of brotherhood. Questions remain for the average

citizen. How do rights relate a person’s personal experience and

aspirations? Are rights a value system a person should

personally adopt and, if so, why? What is the validity of those

values? Can they serve as the foundation for action? What is a

person’s relationship to struggles to preserve and to achieve

personal rights? To what extent does such a relationship extend

beyond oneself to fellow citizens and to those beyond a country’s

borders? To answer such question it is necessary to ascertain a

base point and methodology to address them

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The initial impulse behind the creation of the UDHR was the

repulsion against the oppression experienced during the World War

II era. Is it possible to return to an experiential foundation

for a person’s relationship to rights? An experiential approach

to rights means a formulation of a person’s relationship to

rights and to the rights of others based on a person’s being in

and experiencing the world here and now. In the immediate

aftermath of the liberation of Paris in 1944, Camus asserted:

“For new times there must be, if not new words, at least new

definitions for old ones” (BHR, 54). In the opening decades of

the twenty-first century it is time for new words and new

definitions for rights. It is time to focus on the personal: a

person’s relationship to the world, to their experience in the

here and now, to their aspirations, to their relationship with

other aspiring persons. Camus’s life and work serve for the

purposes of this essay as an exemplary experiential life and

approach to personal rights. Both the life and the work

constitute Camus’ personal statement, not a political philosophy.

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1.3 An experiential life

Albert Camus is exemplary of a generation that was “twenty

years old when Hitler came to power and the first Soviet trials

began, and to perfect their education, witnessed the Spanish

Civil War, the Second World War, the concentration camps, and a

Europe of torture and prisons” (ACNPS). Camus was born 7

November, 1913, in Mondovi, Algeria. His father was killed less

than a year later in World War I, leaving behind an impoverished

French colonial working class family. Growing up without a

father and with a silent, partially deaf mother, Camus invented

himself. This background, combined with his experience as a

French colonial inhabitant of Algiers, contributed to his

formulation of a rebellious questioning of all authority and a

commitment to a person’s freedom in the creation of themselves.

He drew on the French colonizer’s cultural traditions to develop

an intellectual strategy of rebellion against it.

His ideas arose out of his own personal experience of the

global wars, colonial struggles, and national conflicts of the

years embracing the First World War to the Cold War of the 1950s.

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He explored that experience as novelist, short-story writer,

essayist, playwright, actor, theatre director, journalist,

newspaper and book editor, member of the French World War II

resistance, and public intellectual. Out of his experience Camus

set himself two principles: “the refusal to lie about what one

knows and the resistance against oppression” (ACNPS).

Camus considered himself first and foremost a literary

writer, not a political theorist; he was awarded the Nobel Prize

in Literature in 1957. He felt a writer’s first obligation was

to create. However, he believed a person cannot ignore the most

significant political developments of their time: they must

“leave no question as to [their] personal determination to defend

liberty” (RRD, 170). Camus embarked on an experientially based

trajectory of self-realization. Only through experiencing the

world can a person gain knowledge of themselves, of others, and

of the world. It is only out of such experience can values be

forged. His focus was always on the moral issues confronting the

consciously alert person experiencing the realities of their own

time and place. His writings provide a methodological zero point

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from which to establish a person’s relationship to personal

rights and an example of how to move beyond that point.

For Camus “My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence

that aroused it” (MS, 49-50). Freedom, then, arises out of a

person’s immediate experience with oppression; “Freedom is the

concern of the oppressed, and her natural protectors has always

come from among the oppressed” (RRR, 89). Consequently,

“Whatever people may say, revolutions come first and ideas

afterward” (LCE, 196). It is because of the import of the person

and a person’s experience in the world here and now that

“personal” rights is a more appropriate characterization of rights

than the abstract “human” rights.

2 An Experiential Methodology

2.1 Philosophy and science

Why cannot philosophy or science provide an approach for

establishing a zero point and methodology in formulating a

person’s relationship to rights? Neither field provides an

experientially grounded, readily comprehensible visions of a

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person’s place in the world. Philosophers of the modern era have

attempted to construct a bridge between the person and the

unfathomable world but none can say “just once: ‘This is clear’”

(MS 27). Instead they “vie with one another in proclaiming that

nothing is clear, all is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity

and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him” (MS,

27). Philosophy brings us face to face with the irrational world

but no further. In the specific realm of political philosophy

the sources, validity, and nature of human rights remain a source

of continuing debate.

Ancient philosophers, lacking books, spent their time

meditating more than reading. But with the advent of printing

philosophers read more than they meditated with the result their

work is primarily commentary on earlier philosophers rather than

current insights. Consequently, “We have no philosophies but

merely commentaries” (NB1942-1951, 67). For philosophers the

objective becomes not the discovery of truth but to distinguish

themselves from other philosophers. And so, “The age of

philosophers of philosophy was followed by the age of professors

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of philosophy concerned with philosophers” (NB1942-1951, 67).

Fortunately, “Social justice can be realized without brilliant

philosophy” (BHR, 85).

The current status of philosophy as a mode of understanding

our place in the world is a realm of speculation far removed from

the daily consciousness of most people. However, science is a

different matter; it has been since the sixteenth century an

intensive onslaught on all other modes of explaining a person’s

place in the world. By the twentieth century science was the

pervasive cultural ethos that continues to challenge spiritual

and secular beliefs around the world. Scientists and their

adherents promote science theory to the general public as an

ideology of scientism; that is, the belief science is the only

valid methodology for ascertaining truth and creating an

authoritative body of knowledge. What is the result? Science

describes and classifies the visible and the invisible elements

of the world while proposing theories and “laws” of explanation

that await their usurpation by new theories.

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All science can promise at the end of life is the dispersal

of our matter throughout the universe. It condemns a person to

an “immortal death” in a “blind universe where atoms accidentally

form human beings and where human beings accidentally return to

atoms” (R, 30). In the end, “Science explains what happens and

not what is” (Camus’s emphasis, NB1942-1951, 27).

Science is a realm of infinite probabilities leaving an

unbridgeable gap between human consciousness and the world. Its

language is a mathematics that can no longer be intelligibly

translated into that of the uninitiated. If through science a

person “can seize phenomena and enumerate them” they “cannot, for

all that, apprehend the world” (MS 20). Science provides no

answers to the ultimate values of life. Consequently, a person

must create their own values based on their life experiences in

the here and now. Camus provides direction on how to adopt an

experiential awareness for the formulation of a person’s

relationship to personal rights.

2.2 Experiencing life

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Camus believed people confronted with a spiritual,

political, and cultural crisis had to find values within

themselves through their experience. As he undertook this

endeavour, he made clear “…I was looking for a method and not a

doctrine. I was practicing methodical doubt. I was trying to

make a ‘tabula rasa,’ on the basis of which it would then be possible

to construct something” (LCE, 356). He declared: “If I have

tried to define something, it is …simply the common existence of

history and of man, everyday life with the most possible light

thrown upon it, the dogged struggle against one’s degradation and

that of others” (MS 208). Camus established his own zero point

and mode of analysis of his life experience and the moral choices

it generated; “It is in this process of bending and adjusting

thought, in this conscious elimination of error, that truth—that

is to say, what life can teach us—is to be found” (NB1935-1942,

139).

Reliance on “what life can teach us” through the application

of a lucid consciousness is the key element of an experiential

method. Thus, abstract philosophizing must yield “to a more

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modest attitude of mind deriving at one and the same time from

common sense and understanding” (MS, 4). Changes in ideas due

to a person’s response to life experiences may frustrate the

philosophic and dogmatic minded. If a philosopher indicates in a

new book that “’Up to now I was going in the wrong direction. I

am going to begin all over. I think now that I was wrong.’ No

one would take him seriously anymore. And yet he would then be

giving proof that he is worthy of thought” (NB1942-1951, 42).

Camus declared, “If you want to be a philosopher, write novels,”

which of course he did (NB1935-1942, 10). Indeed, “The great

novelists are philosophical novelists—that is, the contrary to

thesis writers” (MS 101). Philosophers deal with the abstract

while novelists deal with the lived experience of people.

The experiential methodology recognizes that “Properly

speaking, nothing has been experienced but what has been lived

and made conscious” (MS, 15). In contrast to the lofty tone of

much human rights rhetoric, “there exists a certain nobility that

does not lend itself to the lofty” (MS, 159). To find that

nobility it is necessary to “go out into the street” (MS, 159).

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The objective is to avoid perceiving the world through the lens

of abstract mental constructs, but rather to the greatest extent

possible, see the world as it is. In doing so it is critical

“that, faced with the humblest or the most heart-rending

experience” a person “should always be ‘present’…and endure this

experience without flinching, with complete lucidity” (NB1935-

1942, 143). There is the caution that “There is no ideal freedom

that will someday be given us all at once, as a pension comes at

the end of one’s life. There are liberties to be won painfully,

one by one, and those we still have are stages—most certainly

inadequate, but stages nevertheless—on the way to liberation”

(RRD 93). It is necessary to remember “The unjust law of history

is that man makes enormous sacrifices for results that are often

absurdly small. Even so, man reaches toward his truths; his

progress may be slow, but we think it justifies the sacrifices”

(BHR 56). This is the trajectory of incremental moderation, as

opposed to the full-scale revolutions that most often lead to

totalitarian systems of absolute values and oppression of freedom

and justice.

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2.3 The law of moderation

A person’s experiences the moral choices in the world as

contradictions they encounter. Their life experiences involve

choices between freedom and justice, the individual and the

society, expression and silence, violence and non-violence, unity

and diversity, solitude and solidarity, liberty and oppression,

means and ends, and so on. Confronting such contradictions is a

means of reaching zero point and moving beyond it, beginning with

the most fundamental contradiction between life and death: “I

don’t care if I am in a state of contradiction; I don’t want to

be a philosophical genius. I don’t even want to be a genius at

all, for I have enough trouble just being a man. I want to find

an agreement, and, knowing that I cannot kill myself, to find out

whether I can kill or let others be killed and, knowing it, to

draw all the conclusions from it even if that is to leave me in a

state of contradiction” (NB1942-1951, 135). Facing the

contradiction of life and death moves a person to and beyond zero

point.

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How should such contradictions be resolved? A person accepts

their relative positions: “Divided between the relative and the

absolute,” the mind “leaps eagerly into the relative” (NB1942-

1951, 46). The poles of contradictions define each other; there

cannot be one without the other. The value of one pole is

determined through an analysis of its relative value to the

other, thereby establishing the limits of the contradiction. A

person must insure that in finding a point between the

contradictory poles does not itself become an absolutist

position; it is a point of flexible equilibrium that will from

time-to-time have to be shifted between the absolutist extremes.

Inherent to this flexibility is the ambiguity that must be

endured. In doing so a person follows a “law of moderation” by

rejecting absolutist, abstract values represented by each pole

(R, 295). Instead, moderation “cannot be anything other than the

affirmation of contradiction and the heroic decision to stay with

it and to survive it” (NB1951-1959, 21). Holding a position

that avoids the extremes is not a weak compromise; it is a

position of constructive strength that holds the balance between

the destructive absolutism of extreme positions. In all

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contradictions there is this underlying unity. Through the

application of the law of moderation when a person confronts the

need to make a moral choice, a person achieves a degree of the

order and unity they desire in their lives.

However, “The advocacy of moderation is double-edged. It

risks serving those who want to conserve everything, that is,

those who have failed to understand that some things must be

changed. Our world does not need tepid souls. It needs burning

hearts that know how to put moderation in its proper place” (BHR,

99). This reasoning leads neither to the acceptance nor

rejection of either pole but the acceptance of both as limits to

each other thereby resulting in a dynamic equilibrium between the

two. It is a matter of learning to “braid with white thread and

black thread a single cord stretched to breaking point” (MS

202).

2.4 Establishing zero point

Camus conceived of his work as beginning at a “zero point”

(NB1942-1951, 20). Zero point is the nexus of the individual

consciousness confronting the contradiction of life and death and

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the need to find values within life itself: “it is essential for

us to know whether man, without the help either of the eternal or

of rationalistic thought, can unaided create his own values”

(RRD, 58-59). At zero point a person is aware of the injustice

of a life desiring unity and order confronting a chaotic,

unfathomable world, a confrontation Camus characterized as “the

absurd” (MS 28). Neither the individual nor the world is absurd

but the confrontation of the two “in their presence together”

(MS, 30). Zero point is a state of equilibrium between one’s

consciousness and the world, “straining against each other

without being able to embrace each other” (MS 40). Zero point

wipes “the slate clean” (R, 10) thereby revealing a path to the

creation of human values and a relationship to personal rights.

At zero point a person does not know if the world has meaning but

does know not to expect to know it. Indeed, if there is any

meaning in the world for humans it is because they are “the only

creature to insist on having one” (RRD, 28).

Zero point then is the site of a person’s rebellion against

death and a commitment to a life of freedom. It is also a point

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of departure whereby a person is prepared to move “toward a

deeper complexity that remains to be defined” (NB1942-1951, 20).

Through that commitment to freedom a person takes responsibility

for who they are and what they want of life while recognizing

this journey is within the social bond of the human community.

On their life journey a person (a body) occupies a mental space

(consciousness), a physical space (the world), and a social space

(society). The ideal is a person’s harmonious integration of the

three spaces. As each space is in a state of constant flux

achieving a harmonious integration is a continuous challenge.

This challenge can only be achieved if a person possesses the

freedom to accept the challenge and the to undertake the action

to achieve it.

3 A Person Being in the World

3.1 The mental space

States and people have killed and crippled many bodies in

the name of the abstract values of human rights, therefore, the

import of recognizing that being a person in the world is first

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of all being a body; no body, no existence. A person confirms

their own existence through experiencing the body: “This heart

within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists” (MS, 19). The

body is the source of a compelling commitment to life over death:

“In a man’s attachment to life there is something stronger than

all the ills in the world. The body’s judgment is as good as the

mind’s, and the body shrinks from annihilation” (MS, 8). Beyond

this sentient mode of knowing, the body possesses a

consciousness, an awareness of itself in the world. What a

person knows of the world is through their consciousness fed by

the senses of our body subjected to emotion and reasoning: “For

everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth

anything except through it” (MS, 13). Consequently, “Properly

speaking, nothing has been experienced but what has been lived

and made conscious” (MS, 15).

Emotion is an important part of consciousness. A person

first experiences oppression emotionally: “In every act of

rebellion, the rebel simultaneously experiences a feeling of

revulsion at the infringement of his rights and a complete and

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spontaneous loyalty to himself” (R 13). Reflection on an

experience follows the emotional impulse: while there “are facts

the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they

become clear to the intellect” (MS 3). Therefore, a person must

also enlist reason in their understanding of the human’s

confrontation with the world. Lucid consciousness, the

transparent application of reason informed by emotion, can rely

only upon what a person can understand in human terms from their

personal experience; “What I touch, what resists me—that is what

I understand” (MS, 51). What is important is “To keep a balance

between an active concern for the body and an attentive awareness

of being alive” (NB1935-1942, 85). Freedom can only be defined

after its absence has been felt. Consequently, a value such as

freedom is both “a cerebral idea and at the same time a fire in

the soul” (BHR, 81). The body deserves recognition equal to the

mind in a person’s encounter with the material world. Physical

experience can be as life changing as reflective reasoning.

3.2 The physical space

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A person’s relationship to the material world is their

physical space. The research of multiple disciplines of

knowledge describes, classify, enumerate, and theorize about the

phenomena of the world and the human presence. In the end all

this research teaches us is “that this wondrous and multicolored

universe can be reduced to the atom and the atom itself can be

reduced to the electron” (MS, 19). Indeed, the search for ever

smaller particles continues while scientists debate whether we

can ever discover what is “real.” The result of all their

investigations is that “all the knowledge on earth will give me

nothing to assure me that the world is mine” (MS 19). The world

was here before humans and it will be here after they have

disappeared from its surface forever. Indeed, “This world in

itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said” (MS, 21).

While consciousness cannot grasp the ultimate relationship,

there is nonetheless a bond experienced between a person and the

world, a bond a person shares with others: “The thing that lights

up the world and makes it bearable is the customary feeling we

have of our connection with it—and more particularly of what

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links us to human beings” (NB1942-1951, 57). The consciousness

grasps an almost primordial sense of the material world, a sense

found in insentient stone and fecund sea. A character in the

novel A Happy Death contemplates life as a stone: “The stone cools

off and that’s fine. Another day, the sun bakes it. I’ve always

thought that’s exactly what happiness would be” (HD, 38-39). As

for the sea: “It is in the sea that life is born, and for all

of time immemorial, which has led life from the first cell to the

organized marine creature, the continent, without animal or plant

life, was only a land of stones filled solely with the sound of

wind and rain in the center of an enormous silence, traversed by

no movement other than the rapid shade of large clouds and the

racing waters over the ocean basins” (NB1951-1959, 254).

A person’s relationship with the material world is a sensual

encounter: “And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface,

water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at

night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes—how shall I negate

this world whose power and strength I feel?” (MS, 19). Through

such sensory experience “This world I can touch, and I likewise

32

judge that it exists” (MS, 19). Confronting a silent world, the

challenge for a person is “in the very heart of nature, to build

…a dwelling” (NB1942-1951, 23). In contrast to the continuous

tumultuous times of the human experience “Nature is still there….

She contrasts her calm skies and her reasons with the madness of

man” (MS, 190). Consciousness cannot avoid confronting the

world: “Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the

human, stamping it with his seal” (MS, 17).

3.3 The social space

There is the person and the material world, their mental and

physical spaces, but there is also the social space within which

a person is embedded. The social space is constituted of

cultural values and beliefs, institutional structures, and

material resources. This social space is the collective arena

within which a person in the world undertakes their own and

others’ struggle for freedom. A person’s self-preservation in

the world depends on their participation with others in the

social world. It is in the social world a person learns a

language which allows them to communicate with others and which

33

enhances their capability to reason. Just as there is a bond

with the material world, a person has a bond with the social

world: those accepting life share one absolute universal norm;

the equality of a certain death. This fact is the only

undisputable truth given to everyone about living in the world.

3.4 Human traits

In order to function in the mental, physical, and social

spaces a person displays certain traits relevant to personal

rights. They are a need for unity and order, solidarity,

autonomy, justice, and creativity. Subsequent discussion will

reveal how the positive expression of these traits by a person

with others can contribute to their achievement of greater

freedom through personal rights. Following is a brief

delineation of each trait. However, it will be seen in Section

3.5 that there are systems of belief that aim to direct a

person’s fulfillment of their needs for the systems’ own ends.

3.4.1 Unity and order

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There is a yearning for a life of unity, a cohesive

narrative of one’s life, in the face of a world of dissonance,

opaqueness, and endless contradictions that defies rational

explanation; “That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the

absolute illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama”

(MS, 17). The desire for unity has two companions: order and

ambiguity. Unity implies an orderly combination or pattern of

wholeness. Our rebellion against death “Amounts to claiming that

life has a meaning, to fighting for order and unity” (R, 101).

The need for unity and order is accompanied by the desire to

avoid ambiguity. The lack of order and unity fosters uncertainty

and doubt about a person’s place in the world. This ambiguity is

a source of anxiety. Indeed, “There is not one human being who,

above a certain elementary level of consciousness, does not

exhaust himself in trying to find formulas or attitudes that will

give his existence the unity it lacks” (R, 262). Since the

beginning of human consciousness people have been mythmakers,

continually seeking meaning beyond their daily existence.

Philosophy’s and science’s rationale approach have displaced

myth-making but do not provide unified meaning of a person’s

35

place in the world. People continue to look elsewhere to fulfill

the need for unity in the face of chaos.

3.4.2 Solidarity

There is a feeling of solidarity with others. A persons

shares with others a consciousness of the world, the “sea, rains,

necessity, desire, the struggle against death—these are the

things that unite us all” (RRD, 222). Indeed,” our solidarity

against death” is the “only indisputable human solidarity” (RRD,

222). Consequently, as persons are alike “in what we see

together, in what we suffer together… the reality of the world is

common to us all” (RRD, 258). Because of a shared commitment to

life, people share a “human community united against death” (RRD,

225). There is an understanding that “no one can save himself

all alone and that one cannot be free at the expense of others”

(C vi). Solidarity with others includes the feeling of empathy,

the awareness of not only a person’s own oppression but that of

others. A person has the innate ability to consciously discern

and share the thoughts and emotions of others.

3.4.3 Autonomy

36

There is the desire for individual autonomy. This need

finds expression in opposition to oppression imposed on a person

by others in many spheres of social relations. This drive for

autonomy is translated into a struggle for what is characterized

as freedom. The question of “free from what?” generates the

question of “free for what?” (R, 72). Experience teaches that

“Freedom exists only in a world where what is possible is defined

at the same time as what is not possible” (R 71), that is,

freedom exists through the application of the law of moderation.

3.4.4 Justice

There is a universal desire for justice, the conviction a

person should be treated with reasonable equality, fairness, and

dignity. Confronted with oppression and ultimately mortality, a

person “from the very depths of his soul cries out for justice”

(R, 303). Indeed, “To remain silent is to give the impression

that one has no opinion, that one wants nothing …” (R, 14). A

cry for justice is the creation of a person’s being. Again, a

person’s demand for justice extends beyond the self alone.

Empathy can “be caused by the mere spectacle of oppression of

37

which someone else is the victim. In such cases there is a

feeling of identification with another individual” (R, 16).

3.4.5 Creativity

Finally, there is the need to create; “creation is a demand

for unity” (R, 253). Creativity is central to a person’s being:

“To think is first of all to create a world” (MS, 89). We cannot

know, even imagine, death but we can imagine life and in doing so

create it. A person’s greatest creation is the creation of

themselves, an objective only possible if a person has the

freedom to do so. Creation is critical to the achievement of

freedom’s progress without the dangers of violent revolution:

“What defines progress…is that without compromise, creators of

all kinds triumph over the mind, over reaction, and over

inactivity without revolution being necessary. When there are no

more of these creators, revolution is inevitable” (NB1951-1959,

111). Without creators the direction of progress “lies in the

struggle between creation and inquisition” (MS, 192). Living

itself is a creative act; all people display a need to create in

all spheres of human experience. Life can be a virtuous cycle of

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creating freedom and of the freedom to create. There is no

distinction between living and creating: “There is not one

talent for living and another for creating. The same suffices

for both. And one can be sure that the talent that could not

produce but an artificial work could sustain but a frivolous

life” (NB1951-1959, 10).

3.4.6 Communication

A person’s innate ability to learn a language and their need

to communicate is a defining trait of being human. The

development of human communication is accompanied by the

development of a person’s self-consciousness. While a person is

born with the innate ability to learn a language, they learn and

use a language in a specific cultural context of human

communication. Therefore, communication is both a social process

necessary for the development of a person’s distinct self-

consciousness and their participation in human relations.

Throughout history humans have developed ever-more sophisticated

techniques, such as writing, and technologies, such as the

39

Internet, to extend their ability to communicate over time and

space.

With the twenty-first century the use of social media

throughout the world is increasing the communicative

consciousness of people everywhere. For the first time in their

lives many are aware of such challenges to their freedom as

government surveillance, limited access to communication

technology, suppression of freedom of expression, lack of access

to information, and corporate manipulation of a person’s

communication options. Increasingly people question want to

know the extent technological innovations and public policy

impact on their capability to communicate. They desire greater

self-sufficiency over their communicative experience and display

a diminishing deference to traditional gatekeepers of

communication channels while questioning government and private

sector communication policies and practices.

3.5 Depersonalization and freedom

The human traits of a desire for unity, solidarity,

autonomy, justice, creativity, and communication find expression

40

in a person’s efforts to maximize their freedom. However, there

are secular and religious systems of belief that appeal to these

traits by claiming they will fulfill a person’s needs through the

harmonious integration of their mental, physical, and social

spaces. At their most extreme manifestation belief systems

promise either a unity of everything in the universe or in the

world. These belief systems aim to completely infuse a person’s

consciousness with an all-encompassing world view that directs

the totality of their thinking and acting. By doing so the

systems alleviate the ambiguity that drives the desire for unity

and order. But these systems that strive to completely define

and guide a person and their relation to the world demand a

habitual conformity that fosters the denial of personal freedom.

By totally defining a person’s destiny such systems depersonalize

a person; that is, the negation of a person as a distinct, lucid

consciousness exercising their freedom. The system denies a

person the experience to create themselves.

A system can become so all-encompassing in prescribing a

person’s beliefs and actions that it becomes a form of

41

totalitarianism. A person will flourish only to the extent the

system flourishes as they are one and the same. There is no

separation between a person’s public life and private life.

This is the Utopian unity the system provides a person. Such

highly developed belief systems claim a person has the freedom to

make choices but in practice only as long as the choices conform

to the dictates of the system. The freedom offered by these

systems “is a ‘total’ collective freedom and not a personal one”

(NB1942-1951, 180). Members of the system should not question a

system’s values. However, the system can ask anyone the most

intimate questions with the requirement they be answered

truthfully. Members of a system who deviate from its dogma are

punished, including the possibility of expulsion from the

movement or worse.

A belief system’s values become so embedded in a person’s

consciousness that they are unaware of it. They system becomes

for them a way of being, a way requiring a person to make no

choices. Their being has no need for freedom of choice. The

requirement to adhere to system values stifles learning from

42

experience and personal creativity. Consequently a person is

disconnected from seeing life as it is and its moral choices. By

fervently adhering to the values of the system a person avoids

“responsibility toward human beings. That is [the system’s]

comfort” (NB1942-1951, 198). The systems offer a person the

comfort of solidarity with others while, in fact, transforming

and reinforcing a person’s status as an isolated member of the

human community, thereby actually betraying a person’s need for

genuine solidarity.

Belief systems propagate some idyllic end in some

indefinable future. A person is given the sense they are in

accord with the unfolding of history rather than being a victim

of history. This gives a person a sense of power over their

lives but in doing so the system actually fosters passivity by

reinforcing the acceptance of habits of belief and action. This

reinforcement is necessary because a person is considered weak

and therefore infinitely malleable. People are deemed to “love

pleasure and immediate happiness; they must be taught to refuse,

in order to grow up, immediate rewards.” In short, “They must be

43

saved from themselves” (R, 244). Thus, the systems proselytize

among those who they believe do not know their own interests.

While extolling the virtues of the individual, the systems

give first priority to universal domination by the system and its

preservation. Indeed, “Nowhere in the world has there been a

party or a man with absolute power who did not use it absolutely”

(RRD, 161). As a result, totalizing movements “have almost

always been coercive and authoritarian” (R, 208). As such they

strive to dominate the control of the state, “whether a police

state or a bureaucratic state” (RRD, 78). Consequently, “in all

countries under the cover of the most varied ideological

pretexts, the … security granted by its mechanical and

psychological means of repression make of the State a mortal

danger for everything that is best in each of us” (RRD, 78). But

the denial of freedom does not arise from the state alone; other

social institutions can embody totalizing tendencies: “The

society of money and exploitation has never been charged…with

assuming the triumph of freedom and justice.” Consequently,

“when they oppress and exploit, they are merely doing their job

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and whoever blindly trusts them with the care of freedom has no

right to be surprised when she is immediately dishonored” (RRD,

89).

Belief systems display totalizing tendencies to a greater or

lesser degree in their effort to emerges a person in a collective

consciousness through the use of communication media of all

types. In the twentieth century this was done through the

domination or manipulation through the one way transmission of

information via the various mass media technologies: film, radio,

newspapers, and television. Because of such all-encompassing

systems many people “live in a world of abstractions,

bureaucracies and machines, absolute ideas, and crude messianism.

We suffocate among people who think they are right in their

machines as well as their ideas” (BHR, 118). However, “If

absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does

not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it” (RRD,

165). In the opening decades of the twenty- first century the

traditional mass media top-down flow of information is challenged

by the increased access of people to the interactive personal

45

communication of the Internet and social media. It is yet to be

determined if this mode of communication will succumb to efforts

by private and public institutions to dominate access to and the

content of communication over the newer technologies, thereby

denying a person’s right to communicate.

Belief systems promote habit of thought and action that

reinforces the depersonalization of a person. Habit carries a

person unthinkingly through their days. The daily routine

described by Camus over seventy years ago still resonates:

“Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory,

meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday

Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the

same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time” (MS,

12-13). However, “Living life is never easy. You continue making

the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first

of which is habit” (MS 5). Consequently “We get into the habit

of living before acquiring the habit of thinking” (MS, 8). The

uniformity of habit deadens a person’s moral sensibility,

allowing consciousness to skim along through a person’s daily

46

routine without reflecting upon the consequences for themselves

and others. Habit breeds a comforting familiarity against

disconcerting change and any disturbing discernment of subtle

oppression. Over time, through the force of habit,

consciousness no longer sees the need to engage in moral choices;

no longer is it even aware of any such choices.

While these systems speak with the claim of absolute

authority and unified vision, they all fail on one account:

“Prophecy functions on a very long-term basis and has as one of

its properties a characteristic that is the very source of

strength of all religions: the impossibility of proof” (R, 189).

Indeed, these systems tend to prophesize an end—judgement day or

the achievement of a Utopia on earth—at some ever-receding point

in time. As frustration mounts over the lack of progress, the

desire to achieve the end justifies the use of means that

undermine the ends. Indeed, the systems’ means become their

ends. The systems align themselves with abstract values against

the freedom of a person in the here and now. Those who adhere to

such systems “have turned their backs upon the fixed and radiant

47

point of the present” (R, 305). As a result such systems oppose

any diversity of thought and behaviour and any cultural or

political diversity that questions the authority of the system.

In the extreme a system tends to construct a totally

authoritarian social space.

It takes a strong emotion to break habit. But in time a

person becomes aware of the gap between a belief systems values

and their own experience in the here and now. A person questions

why conformity to habits of the systems beliefs are a person’s

only option when confronting an unfathomable world devoid of any

discernible explanation. This moment of lucidity opens the way

for a person to break habit in order to give to themselves a

chance for freedom. It is only then a person sees that “The

mind’s first step is to distinguish what is true from what is

false” (MS, 16). Such a moment is the arrival at zero point.

4 A Person at Zero

Point

4.1 Arriving at zero point

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Is zero point, the nexus of human consciousness confronting

a world offering no evidence of a person’s meaning in it, a

nihilistic dead end? Confronted with a silent world a person

could see the confrontation as unjust and succumb to despair. As

Camus famously posed the issue: “There is but one truly serious

philosophical problem, and that is suicide” (MS, 3). Some people

do pick suicide, but since the beginning of humanity tens of

billions of people chose life and continue to do so; we “cling to

the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it” (R,

260). People embrace the comforting habit of mind and behaviour

of totalizing belief systems that prophesize some secular or

spiritual promised land in an indefinite future in the world or

in a world beyond death. But at zero point “It is not sufficient

to live, there must be a destiny that does not have to wait for

death” (NB1935-1942, 10). At this point what we “want now is not

happiness but awareness.” At zero point a person exalts

“justice in order to fight against eternal injustice” creates

“happiness in order to protest against the universe of

unhappiness” (RRD, 28).

49

With the achievement of lucid awareness at zero point “The

return to consciousness, the escape from everyday sleep represent

the first steps of …freedom” (MS, 59). In the short story “The

Adulterous Wife” the protagonist arrives at her zero point: “Her

heart was in pain, she was suffocating under an immense weight,

which she suddenly discovered she had been dragging around for

twenty years. Now she was struggling under it with all her

might. She wanted to be delivered ... even if the others never

were. Awake, she sat up in her bed and listened to a call that

seemed very near….she was no longer even certain of having heard

anything except a mute call which, after all, she could readily

dismiss or receive, but whose meaning she would never understand

unless she answered it at once. At once, yes, that at least was

certain!” (EK, 22-23). The adulterous wife commits adultery not

with a man other than her husband but with freedom.

With the awareness achieved at point zero a person moves to

a new mental space that is out of joint with their social space.

They desire a mental state no longer reinforced by the rigid

habit found in their social state. They feel compelled to move

50

to or to create a social space possessing a greater degree of

freedom of thought and expression, that is, a social space open

to personal creativity and greater integration with their mental

state. To know freedom starts with becoming conscious of its

possibility. The awareness achieved at zero point creates that

consciousness of the possibility of freedom. It is through this

conscious struggle for freedom that persons create and knows

themselves. Only by knowing themselves as a singular, free

person can a person break away from the conforming habits of the

collective mass of totalizing systems. However, this self-

consciousness as a singular person does not preclude them from

the ability to feel empathy for others who are striving for their

own singular self-consciousness. Indeed, a person’s self-

consciousness fed by their struggle against oppression is a bond

of solidarity with others.

At zero point “the one who drags through his life, and

succumbs under its weight, cannot help anyone with the few duties

he does take on. The one who controls himself and controls his

life can be truly generous, and give without effort, expecting

51

nothing and asking for nothing but this strength to give and to

work” (NB1951-1959, 204). At zero point a person is open to

genuine engagement with the human community, not through habit,

but based on a lucid consciousness of one’s freedom in the world.

In rebellion against death, a person seizes the challenge of

radical exposure to a contingent world and embraces the lucidity

of that moment of awareness to move beyond zero point. The

durability of a paralyzing habit dissolves, a new consciousness

is awakened that liberates the imagination and opens avenues for

alternative future action beyond zero point. A person’s action

shifts from being driven by abstract dogma and habit to being

driven by their personal aspirations and experience in the world.

4.2 Being at zero point

Zero Point is not an easy place for a person to be. It does

not offer the solace provided by belief systems. Nor does it

resolve the question whether life has meaning; however “on the

contrary, [life] will be lived all the better if it has no

meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting

it fully” (MS, 53). Having arrived at zero point a person

52

accepts as truth only what they know through experience in the

world. A person sees the world anew and the possibility of

participating in the making of history. This breakthrough is the

initial step in a person’s relationship to personal rights. At

this point it is important to “Remain close to the reality of

beings and things” (NB1951-1959, 204). In short, a person

focuses on the world in the here and now. There is an acute

awareness that time is one’s own; that conscious, active routines

in life overcome unconscious, passive habit. A person’s life is

a stream of instantaneous moments in the here and now possessing

multiple choices of action.

A person cannot escape entirely the constraints of the

unfolding history in which they live but a person can rebel from

letting it totally define who they are and their actions. A

person at zero point experiences an acute awareness that the

habitual forms adhered to prior to it can no longer account for a

person’s life. Instead, a person acquires a freedom of mind and

creativity with which to confront the challenges of life

experiences. The challenge is to insure that a person’s

53

transformation is of their own creation, not history’s alone.

This choice is a point of liberation; an embracing of freedom as

the means of fulfilling a person’s being and an embarking on a

life of action.

A continuous challenge for a person is the need to

distinguish a genuine value from an illusion. How ascertain

genuine freedom from the illusion of freedom? Both may appear to

have the same form. How can be a person assured that attacking

the illusion of freedom they are not really destroying freedom?

A person must apply lucid consciousness to the particular

situation confronting them in contrast to the application of

values of some abstract illusion. A person achieves an ever

present conscious alertness to any infringement of their freedom

in the here and now. There is the realization there is no single

self but the potentiality of a plurality of selves each of which

can be more authentic than adherence to some fixed abstract or

imposed conception of the self. The unending struggle for and

exercise of freedom constructs the arc of a person’s time in the

54

world. Personal rights are not about philosophy, ideology or

spirituality; they are about life and death.

A significant discovery at zero point is “the consequences

and rules for action that can be drawn from it” (L&C, 160).

Rather than a dead end, zero point is a beginning; the

recognition a person can create their own experientially grounded

values: “Refusing the world all meaning amounts to abolishing

all value judgements. But living and eating…are in themselves

value judgements. You choose to remain alive the moment you do

not allow yourself to die of hunger, and consequently you

recognize that life has at least a relative value” (L&C, 160).

Accepting the consequences of zero point is not a commitment to a

life of heroics. In the historic struggles for freedom there are

certainly individuals who rightly achieve recognition for their

heroism, but it is the acts of rebellion of countless individuals

in their struggles for freedom at the local level where the

success of overcoming oppression resides. With this un-heroic

but courageous sensibility rooted in life in the here and now,

55

what are the consequences of zero point for a person’s

relationship to personal rights?

5 A Personal rights framework

5.1 Consequences of zero point

There is but one universal, absolute truth: all persons die.

Acknowledging this truth that all persons share and the

liberation that acknowledgement achieves are the foundation of a

framework for personal rights. Embracing the liberation of zero

point, a person derives three consequences “which are my revolt,

my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of

consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an

invitation to death—I refuse suicide” (MS 64). The confluence

of human traits -- a desire for unity, autonomy, solidarity,

justice, creativity, communication—with rebellion, freedom, and

passion provides the context for constructing a framework for a

person’s relationship to personal rights.

5.2 Rebellion

56

With but one life in a silent world and the assurance of

death at any time (Camus died at the early age of 46 in an

automobile accident) a person must live life to the fullest which

begins at zero point with rebellion. This rebellion, the

simultaneous acceptance and rejection of a meaningless death,

“gives life its value. Spread out over the whole length of a

life, it restores majesty to that life” (MS, 55). In rebelling

against death a person asserts that their death will not be of

their own doing; that they commit to life and all they can make

of it. The challenge for a person is that “we must keep alive

our power of revolt without yielding to our power of negation”

(LCE, 309). Society today, “with all its storm and strife,

compels us to say that rebellion is one of the essential

dimensions of man. It is our historic reality” (R, 21). Zero

point establishes the obligation to permanently sustain in our

consciousness the constant awareness of the freedom achieved

through this initial rebellion: “There is no freedom for man so

long as he has not overcome his fear of death. But not through

suicide. In order to overcome one must not surrender” (NB1942-

57

1951, 98). By choosing a life of rebellion a person challenges

“the world anew every second” (MS, 54).

How does a person become reconciled with the world? “It is

a matter of achieving a rule of conduct in secular life” (Emphasis in the

original, NB1942-1945, 10). Accordingly, “Rebellion proves in

this way that it is the very movement of life and that it cannot

be denied without renouncing life” (R, 304). Rebellion

challenges the habits of totalizing belief systems that oppress

freedom. In doing so, a person understands “why the doctrines

that explain everything to me also debilitate me at the same

time. They relieve me of the weight of my own life and yet I

must carry it alone” (MS, 55). Many people “take refuge in the

parties or groups that will think for them, express their anger

for them, and make their plans for them” (RRD, 101). Rebellion

“is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to

simple historical terms” (R, 250). In abolishing habit a person

makes contact with the world in the here and now. Rebellion is

“where refusal and acceptance, the unique and the universal, the

individual and history balance each other in a condition of acute

58

tension” (R, 273). Consequently, “unless we choose to ignore

reality, we must find our values in it” (R, 21).

Making a commitment to life is itself a value judgement:

“Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth

preserving?” (R, 16). At this conscious moment of rebellion the

individual is applying an implicit value judgement: “Not every

value entails rebellion, but every act of rebellion tacitly

invokes a value” (R, 14). Every act of rebellion is in response

to the feeling a person’s freedom is being oppressed to such an

extent they are prepared to support values “no matter what the

risk” (R, 14). No longer willing to adhere to old habits, a

person is at a place from which the only route is forward; “the

present is the only value, rebellion the only action” (R, 210).

This is rebellion founded on personal experience and aspirations,

not abstract dogma.

The act of rebellion generates a compelling awareness of the

value, the right, to be treated as an equal to the oppressor by

saying no to oppression. A person, sensing that the source of

oppression has gone too far, adopts “an attitude of All or

59

Nothing” (R, 15). “All” means that in rebellion a person

identifies freedom as their very being and expects it to be

recognized as a right. “Nothing” means that being deprived of

the right, a person accepts the nothingness of death: “Better to

die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees” (R, 15). By

demanding “All or Nothing” against oppression and for freedom a

person establishes a value the consequence of which is their

willingness to sacrifice themselves in the recognition of a

common right more important than themselves alone. Freedom is

bound in a collective solidarity grounded in rebellion.

Rebellion against oppression is a fate a person shares with all

humanity: “How can one fail to realize that in the vulnerable

universe everything that is human and solely human assumes a more

vivid meaning?” (MS, 88).

Indeed, “From the moment life is recognized as good, it

becomes good for” everyone (R, 6). When any person rises up

against oppression it reaffirms their solidarity with all other

persons. A person’s “solidarity is found on rebellion, and

rebellion in turn, can only find its justification in this

60

solidarity” (R, 22). Consequently, any person’s rebellion that

denies or destroys this solidarity is not genuine rebellion but

oppression. As Camus expresses it: “I exalt man before what

crushes him, and my freedom, my revolt, and my passion come

together then in that tension, that lucidity, and that vast

repetition.” (MS, 87-88). For the rebel, “All or Nothing”

leads to “Everyone or No One” (R, 57). As Camus famously

declared: “I rebel—therefore we exist” (R, 22).

A person’s rebellion, then, can arise not only out of their

own experience but also in having the empathy to identify with

others in their struggle for justice, even if a person does not

directly experience the injustice. The increasing world-wide

personal access to global communication networks and social media

brings the struggles for freedom and justice instantaneously to

the attention of people everywhere. This awareness takes a

person out of the false solitude of belief systems and

establishes a value of solidarity with humanity. Consequently,

“the individual is not, in himself alone, the embodiment of the

values he wishes to defend. It needs all humanity … to comprise

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them” (R, 17). Indeed, a person’s “solidarity is founded upon

rebellion, and rebellion, in its turn, can only find its

justification in this solidarity” (R, 22). A person demands

freedom “but in no case … does he demand the right to destroy the

existence and the freedom of others. … The freedom he claims, he

claims for all” (R, 284). Freedom then is the unity that binds

the desire for both autonomy and for solidarity.

5.3 Freedom

By valuing life a person values freedom as the fundamental

value of life. Freedom is for a person their very being:

“Freedom is not hope for the future. It is the present and the

harmony of people and the world in the present” (NB1951-1959,

177). Freedom is a person’s supreme aspiration. For everyone

“The aim of life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and

responsibility to be found in every man and in the world” (RRD,

240). Facing the threat of a death at any time, “which morals can

allow us to live only in the present? Honor and freedom”

(Emphasis in the original. NB1951-1959, 161). Arriving at zero

point “The return to consciousness, the escape from everyday

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sleep represent the first steps” to a new, lucid freedom (MS,

59). It is a freedom “which a human heart can experience and

live” (MS, 60).

If freedom is the essence of a person’s being, what is this

freedom? It is the achievement of the autonomy necessary to

create a life in the present. As a person creates freedom so

freedom creates the person. Freedom is embodied in a person’

body; it is their very being. Freedom is necessary for a person

to be creative, not a subject of passive habit and prescribed

absolutes. Confronted with repression in all spheres of life,

“Every act of creation, by its mere existence, denies the world

of master and slave. The appalling society of tyrants and slaves

in which we survive will find its death and transfiguration only

on the level of creation” (R, 274).

However, freedom is not permission to do anything. Freedom

has limits: “Rebellion is in no way the demand for total

freedom” (R, 284). A person demands a degree of freedom but does

not have the freedom to deny others their own freedom: “The

freedom of each finds it limits in that of others; no one has a

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right to absolute freedom” Thus, “Every human freedom, at its

very roots, is therefore relative” (R, 284). Indeed, “Absolute

freedom is the right of the strongest to dominate. Therefore it

prolongs the conflicts that profit by injustice” (R, 287-288).

If absolute freedom denies justice, “Absolute justice denies

freedom” (R, 291). An example is that “Freedom for each also

means freedom for the rich and ambitious; that invites injustice.

Justice for all means the submission of the individual to the

collective good. How can we speak then of absolute freedom?”

(BHR, 51).

Can the freedom of the individual be preserved if justice is

to prevail for the entire community? “The goal we must

preserve is to make life free for the individual, but just for

all” (BHR, 51). An example of a contradiction between freedom

and justice is in the realm of the distribution of the wealth

generated by an economy. There is a contradiction between those

totalizing tendencies by which the distribution of wealth is

determined by individuals exercising their freedom of decision

making in a totally unregulated market and those totalizing

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tendencies by which wealth is distributed according to some

criteria of equality under the control of the state. The

contradiction between freedom and justice is resolved through the

law of moderation: "To be fruitful the two ideas must find their

limits in each other” (R, 291). Our motto becomes: “without

giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the

plane of freedom” (RRD, 93). The choice of one must be the

choice of the other simultaneously. No one considers their

“condition is free if it is not at the same time just, not just

unless it is free” (R, 291). In this context, what then are

justice and freedom? Justice is “a social state in which each

individual starts with equal opportunity, and in which the

country’s majority cannot be held in abject conditions by a

privileged few” (BHR, 57). Freedom is “a political climate in

which the human being is respected both for what he is and for

what he says” (BHR, 57).

While freedom and justice find their limits within each

other there may be times when a choice must be made of one over

the other. Such situations demonstrate the intimate bond between

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freedom and the need for communication. There can be no justice

without the right to speak out against the repression of freedom

of expression. Thus, when this choice must be made it must favour

freedom over justice: “Even when justice is not realized,

freedom preserves the power to protest and guarantees human

communication” (R, 291). Indeed, freedom “is the only

imperishable value of history” (R, 291). The fundamental values

of freedom and communication are acknowledged in the solidarity

of a person with others; that is, a solidarity as a form of

communicative community. The genuineness of this type of

solidarity as a foundation for communication is critical to

struggles against oppression and a politics that is complicit

with oppression: “Politics is no longer dissociated from

individuals. It is addressed directly by man to men. It is a

way of speaking” (BHR, 48).

Freedom is the social as well as the personal fundamental

component of a relationship to personal rights. Freedom is a

person’s and a society’s “supreme good that governs all others”

(RRD 248). Freedom strives for a social space filled with

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diversity and pluralism. However, freedom is not an abstract

philosophical concept. It is real only when translated into

concrete law; thus, “Freedom exists only in a world where what is

possible is defined at the same time as what is not possible.

Without the law there is no freedom” (R, 71). A person’s and a

society’s freedom as expressed in law takes the form of personal

rights: “The limit where freedom begins and ends, where rights

and duties come together, is called law, and the State itself

must bow to the law” (RR, 101). When freedom is not expressed in

the law as personal rights the existence and aim of life of a

person are violated, thereby establishing ground for rebellion.

Indeed, “freedom is not a gift received from a State or a leader

but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and

the union of all” (RRD, 97).

5.4 Passion

The contemporary conception of human rights is dominated by

legal and philosophical rational modes of thought devoid of

emotional considerations. The experiential conception of

personal rights recognizes the importance of emotion along with

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reason in human affairs. Although confronted by random death and

by a world lacking explanation, at zero point “the mind

passionately choses the world” (NB1942-1951, 46). A person’s

passions are the intensity of feeling and awareness accorded to

experience. Out of the experience arises a person’s aspirations,

aspirations not derived from abstract dogma but from their

encounter with the world and others in it. The objective is not

to deny one’s passions but to seek “A deeper virtue that consists

in balancing them” (NB1942-1951, 187). This moderation is

essential to a commitment to a life of freedom. In the end, a

person’s destiny “is always passionately interesting” if a person

“achieves it passionately” (HD, 133).

If all a person can know is what they experience, then they

should want to maximize their life experiences. For those wedded

to habit life is killing time while time is killing life. But

time is one thing a person knows they have even though few know

how much of it there will be. In any case, “Life is short, and

it is a sin to waste one’s time” (NB 1935-1942, 9). It is only

through experience in time can a person’s true nature find

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itself. It is through experience a person creates their own

cohesive narrative of their life. Passionately embracing life at

zero point is a commitment to strive for a wealth of experience

in the time available and to reflect upon that experience. It is

through reflection a person creates their life: “It takes time

to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about”

(HD, 74). While striving for the greatest experience of life, it

is understood “living also implies thinking about life—that

living is, in fact, precisely this subtle relationship between a

man’s experience and his awareness of it” (NB1935-1942, 104),

Camus himself exemplifies a passionate involvement with

life. Although his health was undermined throughout his adult

life by tuberculosis, he carried on a life of intellectual,

emotional, and physical intensity until the day of his premature

death, and analyzed the moral implications of his experience in

his writings. For Camus it was “the furious passion for life

which gives meaning to my days” (NB1935-1942, 58). He saw the

fictional writer –such as himself--as emblematic of the

passionate engagement with life. For the writer, with his or her

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own experience and with what she or he creates out of it,

“Creating is living doubly,” that is, experiencing life and

reflecting upon that experience (MS, 94). If the artist is an

exemplary example of creative, passionate life, Camus’s

characterization of the artist’s commitment to freedom serves as

a model for a person’s relationship to personal rights: “An

artist may make a success or a failure of his work. He may make

a success or a failure of his life. But if he can tell himself

that, finally, as a result of his long effort, he has eased or

decreased the various forms of bondage weighing upon men, then in

a sense he is justified and, to some extent, he can forgive

himself” (RRD, 241).

Philosophers and legal experts will continue to struggle to

find logical foundations for freedom. Reason alone can never

know freedom; it has to be felt and lived. A person first feels

freedom and only then turns to reasoned reflection and action to

make it real. The initial impulse is born with a person’s

rebellion against oppression and a feeling of freedom. To feel

free is not to be free; it is the moment for lucid reflection

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prior to a person taking action. By passionately embracing life

a person verifies themselves as a singular, free person. The

feeling of freedom and reflection upon its consequences and

requirements for action drives a person’s passionate struggle

against oppression and for the achievement of freedom in personal

rights. It is when a person is moved to action that the desire

for autonomy, unity, solidarity, justice, creativity, and

communication give direction to action. And as all people to a

lesser or greater degree display similar tendencies the impulse

for freedom is translated into collective action to achieve it.

A person having once felt the impulse for freedom will never

want to give up that feeling; they will continually seek to

enhance their freedom. Therefore, based on the foregoing

analysis, we can enunciate a concise statement of a person’s

relationship to personal rights.

6 A Person’s Relationship to Personal

Rights

6.1 Being and freedom

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For a person rebellion is the action of being; freedom is the

state of being; passion is the commitment to being. The

conjunction of these factors defines the context of a person’s

relationship to personal rights. A lucid consciousness,

achieving awareness of the consequences at zero point of

rebellion, freedom, and a passion for life, says no to oppression

and yes to freedom. This pledge recognizes freedom as the

essence of a person’s being and aim in life. Freedom becomes a

person’s supreme aspiration. Thus, a person’s body is a living

embodiment and vehicle of freedom. Being is freedom; freedom is

being.

6.2 Freedom and personal rights

Personal rights arise out of a person’s awareness of and

rebellion against the oppression of their freedom. As there are

no absolute values, a person must create in their own time and

place their own values of personal rights. These values and

rights can only be enshrined when translated into personal rights

through collective action in solidarity with other members of the

human community. As a person only experiences their freedom in

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their own time and place, their rights are subject to limits and

change arrived at through democratic dialog with others seeking

their own freedom.

6.3 Freedom and the state

Freedom is achieved through a shift of power from the

oppressor to the oppressed. This shift is manifested as personal

rights legislated and protected by the state. As personal rights

are only achieved when expressed in law the state has the duty to

legislate and protect the rights of all persons. The state’s

failure to fulfill these duties is itself grounds for a person’s

rebellion.

6.4 Foundational personal rights

There are two personal rights that are foundational

prerequisites to all other personal rights: the right to life and

the right to communicate.

When a person chooses life over death, no person or persons,

state, or institution can ever deny that person their life.

Only a person can make their own choice about the end of their

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life. Conversely, if and when a person chooses death, no person,

state, or institution can deny that person that right.

As the right of a person are the rights of everyone to be

achieved through the collective action of dialogic communication,

all must have the capability of the fullest range of modes of

communication for achieving and protecting their personal rights.

Here “communication” embraces all its manifestations including

freedom of expression, assembly, access to information, and

access to technological means of communicating.

6.5 Other rights

Through their variegated life experience a person will

continually encounter challenges to their freedom. Consequently,

personal rights encompass the entire social, cultural, economic,

and political realms of a person’s life experiences.

6.6 Duties

The possession of personal rights is accompanied by duties.

Indeed, “The oppressed has no real duty because he has no rights.

Rights only return to him with rebellion. But as soon as he

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acquires rights, duty falls on him without delay. Thus

rebellion, source of rights, is by the same token mother of

duties….He who neglects his duty loses his rights and becomes the

oppressor even if he speaks in the name of the oppressed”

(NB1951-1959, 172). As the rights of a person are also the

rights of all persons, the first duty is to respect the rights of

others. A person’s violation of another person’s rights forfeits

their own expression of that right.

As personal rights exist only in law, it is a person’s duty

to hold government accountable for the legislating and protecting

of personal rights. As all persons choosing life share the same

mortal fate in solidarity, it is a person’s duty to resist the

oppression of their own personal rights and those of others

through collective action. As rights are achieved through

collective action a person has the duty to utilize the full range

of modes of freedom of expression and democratic political

participatory processes in order to undertake the struggles and

dialogic processes necessary for achieving their rights.

7 Conclusion

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7.1 Summation

The current human rights system, initially a global response

to the experience of the murder and oppression of millions during

World War II, has become disconnected from its experiential

foundation in the struggles for rights at the local level. As a

result, it does not provide a framework for a person’s

relationship to their rights and the rights of others.

Consequently, there is a need for a new formulation of the

relationship to rights.

The person of flesh, blood, and bones is the locus of personal

rights, not an abstract human. Through the application of lucid

consciousness a person achieves awareness of the contradiction

between their mortal existence and an unfathomable world. This

confrontation is a zero point at which a person rebels against

the habits reinforced by totalizing systems of belief and

prescribed action. The rebellion against the strictures of

totalizing tendencies requires a person to develop their own

values including those constituting personal rights.

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There are three consequences for a person at zero point.

There is rebellion of a person against the silent world; the

awareness that continually challenges the oppression of a

person’s freedom. There is freedom; the liberation necessary for

creativity to flourish in a person’s quest for freedom. There is

passion; the striving to pursue an active life which serves as the

foundation of an experiential formulation of rights. Embracing

rebellion, freedom, and passion is saying no to oppression and

yes to freedom. In doing so, freedom is a person’s very being.

Rebellion, freedom, and passion are the components enabling a

person to move beyond zero point to the formulation of a

relationship to personal rights in the here and now. Freedom

becomes their supreme aspiration and grounding for action.

A person’s being is constituted of freedom as manifested in

the legal entrenchment of personal rights, of which the rights of

life and to communicate are foundational prerequisites to other

rights. Personal rights arise out of a person’s rebellion

against oppression and out of collective action with others

experiencing the same rebellion or who are in empathy with it.

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Personal rights embody values that have limits and that are

embedded in a particular time and place, as opposed to abstract,

absolutist principles.

The distinctions between universal human rights (UHRs) and

personal rights (PRs) can be summarized as follows. The initial

source of UHRs arose out of the collective repulsion to the

oppression experienced prior to and during World War II but have

been transformed into abstract rhetorical devices for advocacy

purposes subject to continual philosophical debate. PRs arise

out of a person’s rebellion against oppression at the local

level. UHRs are considered inherent to being human. PRs are

manifest when entrenched in law and upheld by the state. UHRs

are considered inalienable in that they cannot be waived or given

away by the individual. PRs can change in accordance to a

person’s experience and actions. UHRs are interdependent in that

one right cannot be sacrificed for another. As PRs arise out of

a person’s experience in the here and now, they are independent

of each other although the rights to life and to communicate are

considered prerequisites to all other rights. UHRs are

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considered absolute allowing for no deviation in interpretation

or implementation. PRs recognize limits, the need for moderation

in implementation, and are subject to change over time. UHRs

encompass civil, political, economic, cultural, and social

rights. PRs are not categorized according to spheres of social

relations but relate to a person’s experience whenever their

freedom is being oppressed. UHRs, while inherent to the

individual, can require the state to take responsibility for

insuring a right can be exercised. PRs only exist when

entrenched in law and their expression fully supported by the

state.

7.2 Challenges: Finding limits

There are challenges that cannot be resolved by a framework

for personal rights but that must be briefly noted as they

confront a person’s relationship to personal rights. These

challenges are government and political action, oppressors and

oppressed, violence and rebellion, and work and creativity.

7.2.1 Government and political action

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The necessity for entrenchment in law of personal rights

introduces politics and government into a person’s relationship

to personal rights; “The problem of government is of such

importance that we must each consider it our own problem” (BHR,

83). The problem of government raises the challenge of the

relationship between individual and collective action. A person’s

freedom cannot be achieved by themselves alone; hence the

necessity of collective political action based on the solidarity

of the human community. However, while empathy for the oppressed

may be widespread, the intensity of a person’s involvement

against the oppression will be in direct proportion to their

proximity to the oppression. There may be calls of support by

many elsewhere but few are prepared “to love or die together”

with the oppressed; “They’re too remote” (P, 139). It is for

this reason the focus of rebellions for freedom is at the local

level. What are required are the political participation of the

individual and “the basic elements of good sense, which are

clearsightedness, energy, and selflessness” (BHR, 85). The

success of any political ideas in the struggle for personal

rights will succeed, not because of philosophy, but “through the

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energy and sacrifice they inspire” (BHR, 85). Forgoing reliance

on pronouncements of abstract goals and long-range progress, a

person’s political struggle for rights is based on the belief

that their success is in their hands here and now.

The form of government required for the achievement and

protection of personal rights “is a form of society in which law

is above the government, in which law is based on the will of all

expressed by a legislative body” (BHR, 131). How can the freedom

and justice be achieved and protected in a government of law?

These objectives can only be met through communication among

those confronting oppression, communication that is lucid and

straight forward: “Freedom … cannot even be imagined without the

power of saying clearly what is just and what is unjust” (R,

291). Camus warns that “All of our troubles spring from our

failure to use plain, clear-cut language” (P, 253-254). This

communication is not the one-way, top-down flow of information

transmitted from the oppressor to the oppressed. Genuine

communication is through multi-way dialogic communication between

equals. When communication breaks down, opposing sides resort to

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coercion and the repression of freedom of expression.

Consequently, people “should never be isolated from one another,

that in facing hard times their solidarity must be total. It is

justice and freedom that fashion solidarity and reinforce

communion, and justice and freedom make them genuine” (BHR, 58).

Thus, freedom, solidarity, and communication converge in

rebellion against an oppressor, which can include government

itself. In the struggle for personal rights “what we must fight

is fear and silence, and with them the spiritual isolation they

involve. What we must defend is dialogue and the universal

communication of men. Slavery, injustice, and lies are the

plagues that destroy this dialogue and forbid this communication,

and that is why we must reject them” (BHR, 138-139). In the era

of the Internet and social media the political power of

interactive two-way communication between people reinforces the

importance of dialog and the need for everyone to possess the

freedom and capability to communicate in all media; in short, the

ability to exercise a right to communicate.

7.2.2 Oppressors and oppressed

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There is a challenge that haunts all struggles for rights:

the oppressed becoming oppressors. A person is always

potentially the oppressed or the oppressor. The protection of

freedom requires constant awareness for too often the success of

the oppressed in overthrowing the oppressor leads to a new

revolutionary regime of totalizing oppression. There is the

temptation for the rebel to return to habit, to embrace the

comforting conformity of a totalizing system and its absolutist

constraints. “Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of

rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual

history. It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is

tempted to succumb, if he forget his origins, to the most

absolute conformity” (R,87). To break this cycle calls for

constant vigilance against any sign of oppression. The hope is

that “when the oppressed, for the first time in the history of

the world, rules by justice, without in his turn oppressing,

everything will end and everything will at last begin” (NB1951-

1959, 159).

7.2.3 Violence and rebellion

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In the rebellion against oppression is there a role for

violence? Does rebellion justify murder? Is there a point where

violence is a legitimate response to oppression by the oppressed?

At their extreme, belief systems in the past and currently have

resulted in systematic violence by governments, movements, and

individuals. Such violence is justified as a necessary means to

achieve their ends. In contrast, the three greatest leaders of

major successful rights movements in the twentieth century,

Mahatma Ghandi (1869-1948) in India, Martin Luther King, Jr.

(1929-1968) in the United States, and Nelson Mandela (1918-2001)

in South Africa, all embraced, in different cultural and

political contexts, a non-violent disobedience approach. They

were able to mobilize millions of people to achieve their rights

through non-violent means.

Yet, there may be times when the use of violence is seen to

cross the border between murder and heroism. Camus favored a

non-violent approach to fighting oppression although he

acknowledged, as a result of his experience with the oppression

of the Nazi occupation, that there may be instances where

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violence must be used as a last resort in defense of a person’s

life. The distinction between heroism and terrorism can be

agonizingly ambiguous, especially when struggles against

oppression embrace terrorism involving the killing of innocent

people.

The objection to violence is founded on the solidarity

inherent among those who have chosen life over death and the

consequent prohibition of any person being denied life by another

person or institution. All persons have a bond with the human

community: “If this world has no higher meaning, if man is only

responsible to man, it suffices for a man to remove one single

human being from the society of the living to automatically

exclude himself from it” (R, 281). Consequently, “murder and

rebellion are contradictory” (R 281). Again, it is a case of

moderation: “Moderation is not the opposite of rebellion.

Rebellion in itself is moderation, and it demands, defends, and

re-creates it throughout history and its eternal disturbances”

(R, 301). In turn, “Moderation, born of rebellion, can only live

by rebellion” (R, 301). So again, persons must strive through

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lucid consciousness to control within themselves the tension

between excessive rebellion and moderation.

How then address the contradiction of violence and non-

violence? The rejection of the absolutist values of belief

systems establishes that a person does not kill in the name of an

abstract principle. However, in terms of struggles for freedom

against oppression there is a limit to non-violence: “violence

can only be an extreme limit which combats another form of

violence, as, for example, in the case of an insurrection” (R,

292). There are times when the “spirit is of no avail against

the sword” (R, 9). At such times the “the spirit together with

the sword will always win out over the sword alone” (R, 9). This

position does require that those who feel they must take up

violence against oppression must also insure through lucid

analysis that freedom is on their side. Even in such cases a

person “will only consent to take up arms for institutions that

limit violence, not for those who codify it” (R, 292).

There is no absolute answer to the limits of violence and

non-violence. But a commitment to seeing the world as it is

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demands, prior to taking any action, the need to apply lucid

reasoning to the oppressive situation and the moral choices it

entails. This process involves keeping in mind that “If it is

true that in history …values—whether those of the nation or those

of humanity—do not survive unless they have been fought for, the

fight is not enough to justify them. The fight itself must

rather be justified, and elucidated, by those values” (RRD, 121).

Finally, a person who decides violence is unavoidable must be

prepared to accept personal sacrifice including the sacrifice of

their own life in the taking of another’s life. Above all, “no

cause justifies the death of innocents” (R, 134).

7.2.4 Work and servitude

Most people spend a large part of their lives at employed

work in one form or another. Work contributes not only to their

need to survive but to their self-identity, social status, and

personal well-being. However, much work is a form of oppressive

habit structured by rigid bureaucratic, technological, social,

economic, and ideological constraints. Technological advances

create a bifurcated work force between those engaged in highly

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creative and well-paid skilled work and those sentenced to

servitude in unskilled and lower paid jobs. This bifurcation is

detrimental to the individual as well as to social and economic

relations.

Creativity has been identified in Section 3.4.5 as a common

human trait. Because of its importance to a person’s identity

and well-being and to society’s stability, work is a particular

sphere of human activity where there is a need to be able to

express creativity. A person “longs for a work born of the very

opposite of habit” (NB1935-1942, 162). Indeed, “There is dignity

in work only when it is work freely accepted” (NB1935-1942, 92).

To fulfill the yearning for creative work people must take the

initiative through collective action to redefine work and the

personal rights necessary to implement the redefinition. This

redefinition must determine the limits of and a balance between

stultifying work and creativity, balance that contributes to the

economic well-being of a person, advances their self-fulfillment

as a person, and provides an opportunity to make a contribution

as a member of society.

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Coda

“Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is

dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march

toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in

advance of our failings on so long a road.” Albert Camus, Noble

Prize Banquet Speech, 1957. 

“There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere.” Nelson Mandela,

Long Walk to Freedom, 1994.

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Camus

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Between Hell and Reason: Essays From the Resistance Newspaper Combat, 1944-1947. BHR. Translated by Alexandre de Gramont. Hanover, NH: UniversityPress of New England, 1991. (French: Essais, 1965).

Caligula and 3 Other Plays. C.Translated by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage Books, 1958. (French: Le Malentendu suivi de Caligula, 1944; L’Etat de siege, 1948; Les Justes, 1950).

Exile and the Kingdom. EK. Translated by Carol Cosman. New York: Vintage Books, 2007. (French: L’exil et le royaume, 1957).

89

The First Man. TFM. Translated by David Hapgood. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. (French: La Premier Homme, 1994).

A Happy Death. HD. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. (French: La Mort Heureuse, 1971).

Lyrical and Critical Essays. LCE. Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. New York: Vintage Books, 1970.

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. MS. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. (French: Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 1942).

Notebooks 1935-1942. NB1935-1942. Translated by Philip Thody. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010. (French: Carnets, Mai 1935- Fevrier 1942, 1962).

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The Plague. P. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. . (French: La Peste, 1947).

The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. R.Translated by Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. (French: L’homme Revolte, 1951).

Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. RRD. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. (Essays selected from Actuelles, 1950; Actuelles II, 1953; Actuelles III, 1958).

The Author

William F. Birdsall has served in senior administrative positions in university libraries as library consortia executive director, and consultant in the United States and Canada. His publications include

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papers, chapters, encyclopedia entries, and books on the development of librarianship, telecommunications public policy, communication rights, Web 2.0, information and communication technology, and human rights and capabilities. His work has been translated into Japanese, Norwegian, and Portuguese (Brazil).