Without God, Is Everything Permitted? Camus's Answer

"Without God, everything is permitted." You have probably heard the phrase as a sentence about what happens when morality loses its foundation, or perhaps you have used it as an argument in a conversation. Camus knew this reading and confronted it head-on in The Myth of Sisyphus. His answer fits in one line: "'Everything is permitted' does not mean that nothing is forbidden."

Who says the phrase

The phrase is associated with Ivan Karamazov, the intellectual brother in The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky, and it is Camus who brings it into the essay. He opens the chapter "The Absurd Man" with Ivan's cry, "Everything is permitted," and from there sets out to say what it does not authorize.

There is a gain in reading here, and it comes from the novel itself. The phrase in slogan form, "if God does not exist, everything is permitted," is a condensation. In Book 2 of The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan argues that without immortality there is no virtue, and the idea keeps reappearing in other characters' speeches, with words that change from edition to edition. In Constance Garnett's most widely read translation, the word used is "lawful," and the full sentence does not appear. Scholars who checked the Russian original point to "Without God, everything is permitted" in Mitya's mouth, in Book 11, echoing what he heard from Ivan. In short, the phrase sums up Ivan's thought well, but when you quote it in quotation marks, check the edition you have in hand.

The same premise, carried to the end

Ivan's line is not the only form this premise takes in the essay. Camus turns to another Dostoevsky character, Kirillov, the engineer in Demons, who takes the reasoning to its final consequence: if there is no higher authority above me that defines good and evil, then I define them, and if I define them, I am God.

Camus needs a fiction to find someone consistent to that point. This admission, tucked into the middle of a sentence, is the fact that matters here: in real life, nobody takes the denial of meaning to the end. People deny meaning and keep having lunch, working, loving, paying bills. Camus does not treat this as cowardice. He treats it as a fact, and the whole essay comes from that fact: there is something in the human being that keeps going even when the argument says it should not. With this premise on the table, the question in the title asks for an answer.

The reading the phrase usually gets

The most common reading, and the one Camus meets head-on, is the libertine one: if there is no meaning, everything is permitted, so I do whatever I want. It is tempting to understand the absurd this way. If the universe does not answer, and no authority from outside defines what is right and wrong, why follow any rule?

It is the most common misreading of the book, and it rests on a half-truth. Camus does start from the idea that the world offers no ready-made meaning. What he does not accept is the conclusion people draw from it.

Camus's answer

The text shuts the door in the face of anyone who tries: "The absurd does not liberate, it binds. It does not authorize every act. 'Everything is permitted' does not mean that nothing is forbidden." (Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, Brazilian edition by Record, quoted in our translation, chapter "The Absurd Man.")

The first sentence of the passage already disarms the libertine reading: the absurd does not liberate, it binds. And notice the precision of the last one. It does not claim there is a list of prohibitions. It says that "everything is permitted" does not erase the difference between permitted and forbidden.

The experience of duty

Camus goes further, and this is where he says what the summaries usually leave out: if all experiences are equally indifferent, then "the experience of duty is as legitimate as any other." Hear it again, because it is the opposite of what it seems.

The lesson in the video gives an example to make this concrete. A mother gets through the small hours with a child running a fever. She is not naive in the face of the absurd, and she does not expect any prize for it. She chose this, and she will do it again tomorrow. By Camus's standard, this gesture is worth exactly the same as the freest night of a seducer. It is not resignation. It is the same passion for life that condemned Sisyphus, spent on something the person chose to carry.

Read this way, Ivan's line does not open a door to anything goes.

The libertine also decided once and for all

There is a second blow to the argument as well. Whoever uses the absurd to do whatever they want is making a choice. A choice requires a criterion. And a criterion is exactly what, by the same reasoning, does not exist. If nothing has weight, what would make the libertine prefer one night to another?

That is why, for Camus, the libertine is not the absurd man. He is one more person who has decided once and for all. Camus has a name for this movement: philosophical suicide, the act of closing the open question, this time from the side of "it doesn't matter." The absurd man, he defines this way: "he who, without denying it, does nothing for the eternal." He is not someone who denies the eternal. He is someone who has stopped doing the math.

What remains

Ivan's line is usually read as a license. Camus cites it to show what it does not authorize: the absurd binds, the experience of duty remains as legitimate as any other, and whoever declares themselves free of everything has made a choice just like anyone else. The video's lesson walks through this passage in the middle of the essay, between the leap Camus refuses and the image of Sisyphus that closes the book.

Continue: The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus: Summary and Where to Start · Philosophical Suicide in Camus: What About Faith? · Where to start reading Dostoevsky · Psalm 51: the penitent's prayer
Source lesson: O Mito de Sísifo, de Albert Camus