The Fall

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher born in 1844. His writing was largely unknown in his lifetime but became a pillar of 20th-century philosophy. Nietzsche was concerned with the “death of God” and the crisis of nihilism that began in his time. Nietzsche predicted the loss of objective truth that would occur with the “death of God” and condemned Christian morality for creating the crisis. He referred to Christian morality as a “slave morality.” Nietzsche’s most important concept to understand for reading The Fall is “master/slave morality.”

Nietzsche explored this concept in his 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche believed there are two kinds of morality in the world. The first is “master morality,” the set of beliefs held by the “strong” (colonizers, conquerors, men, kings, etc.) which views the world as a split between good and bad. “Good” is that which the masters themselves value, often as extensions of their will that keep them in power; they view themselves as inherently good because they have power, and their elevated status is proof of their morality. Likewise “bad” is everything not associated with “the masters”; i.e., everything that the oppressed do. Nietzsche asserted that masters create morality as a concept. They believe that “slaves” (the lower classes, the colonized, women, etc.) corrupt morality, and they envision everything as a split between good and evil, creating moral judgments. Nietzsche viewed “slave morality” as a morality that values everything the oppressed have and masters do not: kindness, empathy, and a disdain for power. Nietzsche believed that “slave morality” tears down the strong and convinces them to be enslaved as well by emphasizing equality. He believed the modern world was ruled by “slave morality” via Christianity and democracy, which tore down remarkable people to make them unremarkable. In The Fall, Clamence espouses very similar beliefs and advocates for “master morality.”

Camus was familiar with Nietzsche’s work and had ambivalent feelings toward it. The scholar Neil Cornwall quotes Camus describing Nietzsche as “the only artist to have derived the extreme consequences of an aesthetics of the absurd” (The Absurd in Literature. Manchester University Press, 2006, p. 186). Camus believed that Nietzsche truly grasped the core of absurdity and spearheaded nihilism with his belief in the death of God. Nietzsche’s ability to believe in exceptional people despite the lack of meaning in the world influenced Camus.

Camus’s use of Nietzsche’s philosophy to critique contemporary European society is intentional. Nietzsche died in 1900 and was writing from a context that predated both World Wars. However, his sister, who was in charge of his manuscripts, was an ardent supporter of German nationalism, and she edited his work to support Nazi ideology even though Nietzsche was opposed to nationalism after the Franco-Prussian War. With this, Nietzsche’s theories, including “master/slave morality,” were adopted to justify many of Nazi Germany’s atrocities. In a post-war interview, Camus described Nietzsche as one of the “evil geniuses of contemporary Europe,” a statement likely influenced by Nietzsche’s popularity with Nazis (“Foreign News: The Rebel.” TIME Magazine, 18 Jan. 1960). In a book grappling with the lack of humanity necessary to perpetuate the worst atrocities, it is natural that Camus would confront what was seen as a prevalent fascist ideology. However, around the time that Camus died, scholars began revisiting Nietzsche’s original manuscripts and republishing his work without his sister’s editorial lens, lending to Nietzsche’s renewed relevance and popularity as a philosopher from the 1960s onward.