La Chute: Albert Camus on the consequences of not learning to live

The Fall of Phaeton by Peter Paul Rubens, [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

The Fall by Albert Camus

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the last of Camus' works completed before his death in 1960. First published in 1956, the work is presented as a monologue by Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a Parisian lawyer who has moved to Amsterdam to become a "judge-penitent". I will return to this term later. 

Clamence has become bitterly cynical about judges, law, and justice, and has taken to womanising, drinking, and generally driving himself into the ground through hard living. I've read other reviews suggesting the work is Clamence's "confession", for others it is his "self-accusation". The story (it is clearly a philosophical work, rather than a novella) incorporates the stolen panel "The Just Judges" of the Van Eyck painting, The Mythical Lamb (also known as the Ghent altarpiece). The panel was actually stolen in 1934 and is missing to this day. 

There are a few other historical references which I found fascinating, including Girolamo Savonarola (a Florentine precursor to the Reformation and mentioned in Machiavelli's The Prince); Bertrand du Guesclin (a Breton knight and French commander during the 100 Years War); Johannes Vermeer (Dutch painter famous for Girl with a Pearl Earring); and the "Little Ease" (1.2 metre square torture cell in the Tower of London's White Tower where one can neither stand nor lie down); Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (and an earlier reference to Iseult, an alternative name for Isolde in the Arthurian story); and François Achille Bazaine (who rose from the ranks under Louis-Philippe and later Napoleon III, and held every rank from Fusilier to Marshal of France).

I was surprised by how others had interpreted the work. Scott Horton (2009) in Harper's Magazine Blog sees Clamence's fall as the fall of society after the Second World War, and draws parallels with the recent past. He also suggests that the The Just Judges symbolises that while the panel is fake, there is an original, and we can live in hope that the just judges will return some time in the future. I find it interesting that this echoes Girolamo Savonarola's prediction of a prophet from the north who would come to remove the corruption of the church. 

Tony Judt (1994) in the New York Review of Books goes so far as to say that Camus was already in decline before his death, and that he was only "moderately gifted" at philosophy. (Judt also wrote that The Myth of Sisyphus "has not worn well".) I am inclined to make my own interpretation of the work, based on a few things that others (as far as I know) have not mentioned. 

First, Clamence mentions frequently how he despises the dark, underground, and cramped spaces (like the "little ease") and prefers the heights and mountain-tops. Maybe his work as a lawyer frustrates his desire to be a philosopher? 

Second, there are several references to the problems with altruism. For example (p. 8):

...he wrote over the door of his house: 'Wherever you come from welcome and enter'. And who do you suppose welcomed his invitation? Why, militiamen, who marched in, made themselves at home and disembowelled him.

And (p. 72):

Too many people have decided to do without generosity in practising charity.

From these, I see the work is much more about the individual. 

Third, the work addresses the challenge of living a virtuous life. Virtues and vices make numerous appearances, including jealousy (p. 66), cowardice (p. 34), shrinking from responsibility (p. 24), being so self-centred as to not take anyone else seriously (p. 54), and a raft of other issues that resonate with me. For example (p. 52):

...we would like at the same time to be no longer guilty and not to make the effort to purify ourselves. Not enough cynicism, not enough virtue.

I could go on. For me, the work addresses all of the issues of the self-centred person coming to terms with self-respect, and dealing with the guilt and shame that replays itself in the mind. In particular (p. 70):

Don't wait for the Last Judgement. It takes place every day.

And avoiding self-reflection has its own price (p. 50):

I received all the wounds at once and lost my strength at a single blow. Then the whole universe began to laugh around me.

I have written previously about self-respect and how we suffer what Joan Didion referred to as our own home movie, but Clamence refers to as a film (p. 50):

I ran this little film a hundred times, with odd variations, in my imagination. But it was too late and for a few days I would suffer from a feeling of bitter resentment.

Clearly, Clamence is not happy with his past choices and has no idea of his purpose in life. In assessing his life (he is aged 40 by this time), he laments (p. 55):

I measured the years that separated me from my end. I looked out at examples of men of my age who were dead already. And I was tormented by the idea that I might not have time to accomplish my task. What task? I don't know.

All Clamence can do is judge himself (the judge-penitent) (p. 53):

Some mornings, I would conduct my trial to the very end and reach the conclusion that what I excelled in above all was contempt.

Clamence is not free, but wishes to be so (p. 58):

I wanted to break up the mannequin I presented to the world wherever I went, and lay open to scrutiny what was in its belly.

For me, the fall is not about the fall of society or humankind, but the inevitable residue that greets he who does not learn to live (p. 90):

These nights, or rather these mornings, because the fall occurs at dawn, I go out and walk briskly along the canals.

Camus presents to us, through Clamence, what it is like to live without philosophy, what it is like to live without self-respect (p. 90):

Yes, we've lost the light, the mornings, the holy innocence of the man who forgives himself.

Clamence is happy to die, not because of some reconciliation of the self, but because he knows himself, yet is incapable of conquering himself.

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What does it mean to have self-respect?

The Weighing of the Heart from the Book of the Dead of Ani (circa 1300BCE).
British Museum [Public domain] via Wikimedia.

Kitty Flanagan's recent comedy skit on The Weekly got me thinking about the idea of the "residue" we accumulate from our interactions with others, and how to deal with it. For example, checkout staff have been copping abuse from consumers as a result of the self-imposed ban on free plastic shopping bags at Woolworths and Coles stores in New South Wales.

In the skit, Flanagan pokes fun at angry consumers:

I don't believe that anyone is really that angry about plastic bags; I think people are angry about their lives.

While effective approaches to dealing with "high conflict individuals" are accessible, there is an assumed level of calmness and patience of those dealing with angry people. It does not explain, however, why even self-reflective individuals might feel the after-effects of dealing with these angry people.

The same residue might also remain from those who are hyper-critical, judgemental, or just plain rude. No matter how much we exercise pity or compassion, the residue doesn't remove itself. It requires practice, and, I believe, the practise of self-respect.

One of the major issues I have with terms like self-respect is the lack of a definition. I have found the same with self-esteem.

Self-esteem is often regarded as "the way we think about ourselves and the value we place on ourselves". I take issue with this definition as it assumes that we can perceive that value accurately.

So what if our evaluation is wrong?

In my leadership classes, I ask students to consider self-esteem from a different perspective: our self-esteem is greater the closer our self-image is to our actual self.

So, self-confidence is not the same as self-esteem. Indeed, it is possible to be over-confident while suffering from low self-esteem, or even to appear confident while being incompetent.

And self-esteem is not the same thing as self-respect. To simplify, self-esteem is evaluative, while self-respect is a matter of liking oneself.

Again, the problem with this definition is the presupposition that we can simply like ourselves.

Joan Didion, in an essay on self-respect that appeared in Vogue magazine in 1961, provided a clearer definition. (Her essay was added at the last moment as a previous author had failed to deliver on the same topic. To fit the space available, Didion wrote her essay to a precise character count.)

Didion wrote that self-respect is not a mythical charm that protects us from harm, it "concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation". This reconciliation enables us to deal with the residue of high conflict individuals:

To do without self-respect,... is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

Didion does not assume that we can simply like ourselves. Rather, we develop self-respect through practice - deliberately - and forever. It is:

...a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.

Self-respect, then, is part of our character:

[C]haracter - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

Much like experience, self-respect does not come without its cost: 

...it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price.

So why bother? For Didion, it is the price we pay for a peaceful life:

Without [self-respect], one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

And self-respect is not just something for the present moment. It has a clear temporal dimension. Didion makes this clear in her essay, On Keeping a Notebook:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

But how does one develop and practise self-respect?

I have found it requires daily reflection through journalling. I notice others' emotional residue most first thing in the morning. Without the practice of journalling, I know my mood would spiral out of control if left to its own devices. Journalling, then, is a process of emotional self-cleansing.

But journalling has its own dangers. For Virginia Woolf, we tend to censure our own private writing. Woolf also wrote about her past and present self to her future self, so there is also a temporal aspect to the journalling process.

Woolf wrote that her journal was a private affair:

The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

At the same time, she was wary of her ability to bend the truth, even in her private reflection:

I want to appear a success even to myself.

Two lessons are clear. First, self-respect is more than just liking oneself, it is an active process of reconciling our inner selves to the society we experience on a daily basis. It is a habit of the mind, and not an innate ability.

Second, self-respect doesn't just materialise. It requires a desire to have self-respect, and the price to be paid is to be self-aware, and act in accordance with our sense of virtues. (Note that Didion did not approve of Aristotles' golden mean of virtue.)

Morning Coffee - Wake Up is a Spotify playlist I have been listening to each morning. The first piece is Mt Wolf's Burgs. Over time, the lyrics have grown on me:

I, I think if I could get you to do one thing
I would say that when you get to the point that you...
Really feel, highly motivated, to, just, towards keeping your virtue...
Then you'll you'll discover quite quickly how extraordinary a life was meant to be, could be
And it's, it's just we get so messy, it's not that we are doing lots of wrong things, our mind is so messy
We don't keep it simple
And we end up making the life that we are living, so in-ordinarily complicated
Completely unnecessarily, and it's such a shame to end up feeling, in a real muddle, while actually, you ought to be having the time of your lives.

This reminds me of the Delphic maxim, Know Thyself. It would appear that self-respect begins with living the virtuous life.

We can never be perfect, but it is the striving that counts. And while Rousseau thought experience was "dearly bought and hardly worth the cost", I daresay the cost of self-respect is worth every penny.

Coming Soon: Road Pricing and Provision (Book)

Traffic congestion will only get worse and road pricing is inevitable.
Photo © Depositphotos.com/toxawww 

While it will not be everyone's cup of tea, roads are the least reformed infrastructure sector in Australia, and some form of road user charges are inevitable. I hope that my forthcoming book (edited with Professor John Wanna), Road Pricing: Changed Traffic Conditions Ahead, will go some way to explaining the need for urgency in road reform.

Michael de Percy and John Wanna (eds).

There are two main reasons for a system of road pricing. First, funding the construction and maintenance of roads is based on projections with little usage data. We don't know how much motorists are prepared to pay for the use of roads, so we don't really know their value.

Second, motorists currently pay taxes, fuel excise (a quasi-user charge) and an access fee (motor vehicle registration) which is not based on road use. There is a form of cross-subsidisation where light road users are paying the same amount (proportionally) as heavy road users.

A system of road pricing provides market signals - we can discover the actual rather than the estimated demand for road usage. Although we pay an access fee, in effect, road users don't actually pay for how they use our roads.

Sure, we have tolls in major cities, and there is some form of road user charge for heavy vehicles, but this neither accurately reflects the extent of road usage nor the damage done to the roads by heavy vehicles.

Road pricing (what they are worth) and road user charging (what motorists will pay) are basically unknown quantities. Many motorists assume that road usage is free (after paying rego), but this is because there is no point-of-use cost to motorists.

Even the fuel excise, which motorists pay at the petrol bowser, is not clearly indicated on fuel receipts. Indeed, motorists with fuel-inefficient cars actually contribute more for their road use than those wealthy enough to afford the latest Tesla or hybrid vehicle. Poor people in general are paying more fuel excise than wealthy people do for the same amount of road use. And the fuel excise is not linked to road funding - it is, in effect, a tax that goes back into general revenue - it is not hypothecated funding.

Previously, the technology did not exist to accurately reflect individual motorists road usage. Those days are long gone. Yet roads remain inefficient, and political representatives are reluctant to tackle an issue that, based on the evidence, is the best way to signal demand, fund, and charge of road use. We do this for everything else: electricity, gas, water, telecommunications, and so on, but not roads.

The distortions in the market mean that it is cheaper to use trucks than it is to use rail for freight. But this is because the externalities - the hidden costs of road use - are not included in the price of road freight. It is interesting that the exact opposite was the case back in the 1950s before State-owned railways, as a result of a Privy Council decision, were forced on to a level playing field with trucks.

I have written about this problem for a few years now. Each time I have, someone has complained about the extra costs they will have to pay. The thing is, motorists are paying for it anyway, either in rego and fuel excise, or for every minute they sit in traffic.

This book is due to be released by ANU Press soon, and includes chapters from several transport policy experts. All are in favour of road reform and road pricing. But the biggest issue is the lack of political will, coupled with a lack of understanding by the average motorist.

I suspect road pricing will be like the introduction of the GST, which, along with the Y2K Bug, appeared like it was going to be the end the world. But the opposite was true. Our income taxes were reduced significantly, the price of many goods decreased after sales tax was removed, and now we consider the GST as part of our normal household expenditure and don't think twice about it.

Road pricing will be the same, but the trick is to convince others that the time has come. I hope this book goes some way to accelerating the implementation of road reform in Australia.