{"id":2409,"date":"2015-05-11T16:52:45","date_gmt":"2015-05-11T16:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stanford.edu\/group\/bookclub\/cgi-bin\/wordpress\/?p=2409"},"modified":"2015-05-29T02:32:18","modified_gmt":"2015-05-29T02:32:18","slug":"if-that-is-justice-then-i-prefer-my-mother-stanford-student-discusses-camus-stance-on-non-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/?p=2409","title":{"rendered":"“If that is justice, then I prefer my mother”: Stanford student discusses Camus’ stance on non-violence"},"content":{"rendered":"
Stanford philosophy major \"\"<\/a>Truman Chen clearly has a passion for Albert Camus. As a freshman, he used Sophia Coppola’s film\u00a0Lost in Translation<\/em>\u00a0as a vehicle to explain Camus’ concept of the absurd and absurd freedom, from\u00a0The Myth of Sisyphus\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Fall<\/em>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n
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More writing is in the future. He wrote, “Over the summer, I will be writing a comparative piece on Camus’ political theory, as outlined in\u00a0The Rebel<\/em>, and its similarity to some of Hannah Arendt’s and John Dewey’s critiques of modern representative democracy and Bolshevism. In addition, I will be a writing a piece on Camus’ metaphysics and its relation to Heidegger’s.”<\/strong><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n
He recently wrote a political piece on violent resistance in\u00a0The Stanford Political Journal<\/em>, grounded very much in Camus’s arguments from\u00a0The Rebel\u00a0<\/em>to refute the justifiability of violent resistance and opt for a more nuanced approach to combatting oppression. The immediate prompt for the article was student Manny Thompson’s\u00a0quarrel with Provost John Etchemendy<\/a>. Read Truman’s whole\u00a0article\u00a0\u00a0here<\/a>, but meanwhile, here’s a<\/strong>n excerpt:<\/strong><\/div>\n
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Peaceful protesters in Baltimore (Photo: Creative Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n

… It is far from clear that to condemn violent resistance is to endorse the oppressor. This is the very problem that alienated Albert Camus from both the French and the Algerians during the Algerian War of Independence. Camus, an Algerian native raised in poverty, of course morally favored an Algerian freedom from colonial oppression, but violence complicated everything. He had always condemned the horrifyingly violent occupation of Algeria by the French, but at the same time he could not endorse the violent means used by the Algerian revolutionaries. He attempted to escape what he understood to be a false dichotomy.\u00a0Camus<\/a>\u00a0expressed his problem poignantly: \u201cPeople are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.\u201d Still, the Algerians accused him of supporting the French colonizers, and the Stalinist French intellectuals of his time accused him of being spineless and self-absorbed. But, in the end, like in most wars, there was a truce, a political act pleaded for by Camus since the beginning. …<\/p>\n

Thompson is correct that there are those who act violently because they \u201chold life sacred,\u201d but he has forgotten that there are also those who hold the lives of others\u00a0too<\/em>\u00a0sacred to act violently. In\u00a0The Rebel<\/em><\/a>, Camus wrote that the act of rebellion is a simultaneous denial and affirmation: a \u201cno\u201d against the condition the rebel finds himself in, and a \u201cyes\u201d for the human dignity he and all human beings deserve. A limit is drawn to protect that which is worthwhile in all humans. The rebel knows what is and what ought to be but is careful in his actions to prevent his \u201cno\u201d from violating the \u201cyes\u201d of others through violence. If he were to act violently against another, his own \u201cyes\u201d predicated upon a universal human dignity would be logically undermined, and if \u201cmen cannot refer to a common value, recognized by all as existing in each one, then man is incomprehensible to man.\u201d This comprehensibility is essential for the thinking of political discourse, the only means we have to correct the oppressive power structures. To preserve this avenue for change, it is imperative we renounce violence in all forms, even in the form of resistance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stanford philosophy major Truman Chen clearly has a passion for Albert Camus. As a freshman, he used Sophia Coppola’s film\u00a0Lost in Translation\u00a0as a vehicle to explain Camus’ concept of the absurd and absurd freedom, from\u00a0The Myth of Sisyphus\u00a0and\u00a0The Fall.\u00a0 More … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}