If Nothing Has Any Meaning

Why do limits matter at all? Camus answers by showing what disappears without them. This sentence stands near the opening of The Rebel, and everything else in the book follows from it. If nothing has meaning and no value can be affirmed, then everything is possible and nothing is important. The murderer is neither right nor wrong. Cruelty and kindness become matters of taste.

Camus takes nihilism seriously because he almost agrees with it. He too doubts that the universe comes with meaning attached. But he refuses the conclusion. If nothing has importance, there is no reason to prefer the victim to the executioner, honesty to fraud, care to cruelty. His century, he saw, had run precisely that experiment. Movements that believed in nothing but history’s verdict found that everything was permitted to them, and the result was terror.

Here is the turn worth memorizing. You already do not live as if everything were permitted. There are things you would not do at any price, people you would protect at real cost to yourself. Those refusals are evidence. They show that you believe in something, whether or not you have ever named it. A limit is a value made visible.

Today, catch yourself refusing something. Notice the line you will not cross, and ask what that line protects. That is where your real beliefs live, far below your opinions.