The Cult of Certainty

Camus, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky on one our oldest and most seductive temptations

[This is the eleventh post in an ongoing series adapted from my dissertation on Camus. The level of revision is evolving as I go, so feel free to share thoughts in the comments or DMs.]

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Camus once wrote: “The ideologies which guide our world were born in the time of absolute scientific discoveries. Our real knowledge, on the other hand, only justifies a system of thought based on relative discoveries.”

That’s vintage Camus. It’s the sensibility I most admire in him. It’s also what annoys the shit out of people about him. I call it humility. Others call it pathological moderation. As we move more into Camus’ politics, I feel fairly confident in saying you will land in one of these camps. We shall see!

So what’s he saying, or trying to say, in that quote? I think he’s saying that the age of science should have humbled us by showing the limits of our knowledge but instead gave birth to ideologies that pretended to have absolute answers. Our discoveries should’ve made us more modest, not dogmatic.

Recall that Camus spent his formative years as a writer working out the basic problem of absurdity. For him that meant the mismatch between our hunger for meaning and the world’s refusal to offer it. After this period in his work, he shifted his attention to politics. That wasn’t just because he was writing in the middle of the 20th century, surrounded by fascism, Stalinism, and world war. It’s because he saw a deeper link: reason itself was being co-opted to fill the void left by God.

That may sound strange. Reason, dangerous? As opposed to what? Superstition? Fanaticism? Blind faith? I’m certainly on Team Reason if that’s the menu. For Camus, the answer is more complicated. He’s not anti-reason. After all, reason is the very faculty that allows us to recognize the absurd in the first place. But reason also feeds the human craving for totality. And when it tries to go beyond its limits, it shape-shifts into ideology. It becomes religion without God.

This was, for Camus, the defining problem of the 20th century: the way ideologies dressed themselves up in the language of reason and then justified crime, terror, and mass murder.

And here’s where Nietzsche and Dostoevsky enter the frame. Both had diagnosed the problem in their own way decades before. Nietzsche called socialism a “degenerate form of Christianity.” Dostoevsky filled his novels with characters who destroy themselves with logic. Camus took both seriously. He saw in them a prophetic anticipation of the world he was living in.

This post is about that triangle: Camus, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky. About how absurdity and reason intertwine, and why the pursuit of certainty so easily ends in ideology.

When Reason turns inward

Camus defined the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus as “lucid reason noting its limits.” That’s an important phrase. Reason is indispensable, but it has boundaries. Push too far and it collapses into self-contradiction.

Dostoevsky got there earlier. Again and again in his fiction, the cleverest, most logical characters spiral into despair or debauchery. They can’t stop thinking. They need to justify every goddamn desire, every doubt, every value, every choice. And that endless reflection, as you might expect, eats them alive.

Andre Gide, a French writer Camus admired, once said that Dostoevsky contrasts love not with hate but with “excessive mindfulness.” It’s the intellect, Gide argued, that individualizes us, that separates us, that becomes “the enemy of the Kingdom of Heaven.” Love demands surrender. Reason demands proof. And Dostoevsky’s characters — like so many of Camus’s later ones — can’t stop demanding proof.

Again, let’s go back to Stavrogin in The Possessed. He wants to believe in goodness, in life, in other people. But he can’t will himself to do it. He writes, “I lack greatness of soul… because I can never lose my reason, and I can never believe in an idea.” His intellect won’t let him leap. He knows what he longs for, but he can’t cross the threshold. He’s trapped by the demand for certainty.

Or take Kirilov, also from The Possessed. Without God, he obsesses over freedom. Logic convinces him there’s no God; his intellect insists there must be reasons to live. He craves faith, but he can’t summon it. As one critic put it, his denial of God conceals the most desperate need for God. His suicide is his final attempt at coherence: to show the world that he will not invent God just to survive. He becomes, in his own mind, the first “truly free” man in history.

Or take Dmitri Karamazov, tortured by doubt after being exposed to Western materialism. “It’s God that’s worrying me,” he confesses. “What if He doesn’t exist? What if it’s an idea made up by men?… For whom is man going to love then? To whom will he be thankful?” What kept him awake at night wasn’t hatred of God but the terror of relativism. If values are just inventions, then everything is up for grabs. Dmitri drinks, fights, and rages in part to silence those questions — but they always resurface.

And then there’s Ivan Karamazov, the supreme case. Ivan’s rebellion is pure reason, a rational refusal to accept a world that includes the suffering of children. He can’t justify morality without immortality. And so, by his own logic, “everything is permitted.”

The irony here is pretty thick. Ivan doesn’t want to be a nihilist. He wants coherence. But coherence, in the absence of faith, drives him straight into nihilism. His intellect won’t let him stop short. Camus sums it up perfectly: “Caught between unjustifiable virtue and unacceptable crime, this man of supreme intelligence is killed by contradiction.”

“Killed by contradiction” sort of captures the whole problem here. Reason, left to itself, can’t ground morality, at least not in any secure way. This, of course, does not mean that you can’t reason your way to morality. No serious person believes this. To be sure, Camus didn’t. It just means reason does not offer some transcendent foundation for ultimate values. And if you demand that it must, you end up like Dostoevsky’s tragic heroes or you retreat into a totalizing ideology.

Every age has its versions of this. Today we have the technocratic dream that pure data or AI “reason” will one day replace messy human judgment. On the other side we have conspiracy cultures, where every event, every coincidence, every headline, is pulled into a closed, airtight system that feels rational but is completely detached from reality. Both are examples of reason, untethered from limits, eating itself.

Nietzsche’s shadow

Nietzsche diagnosed the same condition, but he came at it from a different angle. He agreed that the “death of God” left modern man stranded without foundations. But instead of lamenting it, he saw it as an opportunity. For Nietzsche it was a chance to create new values. The problem wasn’t reason itself, but the slavish way we’d tied reason to metaphysics.

If you read Camus, especially his later stuff, it’s obvious that he admired this part of Nietzsche but also feared it. Nietzsche’s demand for new values was inspiring, but in practice it opened the door to exactly the kind of absolutism Camus rejected. If you read Nietzsche one way, he looks like a prophet of freedom. Read him another way, and he looks like a prophet of ideology. That’s why Camus walked a middle line. He internalized Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and his diagnosis of modern nihilism, but he resisted Nietzsche’s temptation to resolve the problem with a leap into myth, will, or destiny.

For Camus, Nietzsche was right that modern ideologies are “degenerate Christianities.” They inherit the same need for certainty, just with new names: History, Reason, Progress, Nation. And once you’ve convinced yourself you’re on the side of “History,” anything can be justified. That was exactly what Camus was staring at in mid-century Europe.

And again, there are echoes today. We’re told that AI will inevitably replace human labor, that capitalism is the natural endpoint of human freedom. These aren’t neutral observations — they’re narratives of inevitability. They function like Hegelian alibis: history is on our side, so resistance is futile. Camus would’ve bristled at this. For him, inevitability is the ultimate excuse for inaction and, occasionally, for the worst forms of political violence.

The Hegel problem

This brings us to Hegel, another shadow in the background. Camus thought Hegel embodied the apotheosis of reason — the idea that history itself unfolds according to rational laws, and that everything, no matter how terrible, serves a higher logic.

This was absolutely intoxicating to generations of revolutionaries. It made history itself into a kind of god. If reason is embedded in history, then the executioner’s axe, the prison cell, the purge — all of it is necessary, all of it is justified.

Camus loathed this. For him, Hegelianism was reason drunk on itself. It excused violence in the name of totality. He saw it as the intellectual root of Marxism’s worst excesses and of every ideology that claimed history as its alibi.

This is where Camus differs most sharply from the Hegelians of his time. He wanted rebellion, yes — but rebellion without appeal to history, destiny, or absolute justification. Rebellion had to stay tethered to limits. Otherwise it turned into murder.

The need for certainty

Camus dramatized this pathology in his short story The Renegade. The protagonist is a missionary who goes to Africa, full of zeal, eager to convert the “barbarous.” But what drives him isn’t love or even conviction. It’s his need for certainty. “I dreamed of absolute power,” he confesses, “the kind that makes people kneel down… the blinder, the crueler he is, the more he’s sure of himself.”

When his world falls apart, he embraces force instead. Truth, he realizes, is square, heavy, merciless. Goodness is impossible. So he bows to the only consistent thing he can find in the world: evil. By no means is it Camus’ best work, but it is a pretty chilling parable. The missionary’s lust for certainty drives him first to fanaticism, then to nihilism. Either way, he simply can’t live with ambiguity. He’d rather worship power than endure limits.

This is the “political realism” Camus hated. The idea that truth is nothing but force, and that justice belongs to the strong. Once reason loses its grounding in transcendence, it becomes a tool: great for strategy, but incapable of setting limits.

And that’s how we end up with ideology. Ideologies take reason, inflate it into totality, and then enforce it through power. “This is how I see things” turns into “this is the truth, and the police will show you we’re right.”

Reason as pathology

The throughline in all of this is the pathology of reason. Not reason as such — Camus never abandons it. But reason unmoored, reason turned into an idol. Dostoevsky dramatized its effect on individuals. Nietzsche showed how it metastasizes into culture. Camus synthesized both: ideology is what happens when reason becomes religion.

This is why Camus kept circling back to absurdity. To accept absurdity is to accept limits. To insist on totality is to fall into ideology. And for Camus, ideology was not just a political danger but a metaphysical sickness.

He knew it firsthand. He saw the way totalitarian systems justified terror with reason: the logic of history, the inevitability of progress, the science of race. All different creeds, all claiming rational authority, all lethal.

And he saw the same impulse at the individual level. Characters like Clamence in The Fall or Caligula in the play of the same name — brilliant figures who reason themselves into madness because they can’t accept the world as it is.

Living with Limits

What, then, is the alternative? Camus’s answer was simple but difficult: live within the limits of reason. Don’t demand coherence where there is none. Don’t worship totality. Don’t turn your hunger for certainty into an ideology.

This doesn’t mean giving up on truth. It means accepting relative truths. It means refusing the leap into either nihilism or absolutism. It means choosing rebellion over resignation — rebellion in Camus’s sense, which is grounded in the acceptance of absurdity, not in its denial.

Camus will always be relevant in this way. Whatever ideologies we’re living with — technocratic rationalism, hyper-nationalism, transhumanism, etc. — they all offer their promise of certainty. And I think Camus would say that these are not escapes from absurdity but its denial.

In practice, this is why democracy matters. Democracy is institutionalized humility: no one has the whole truth, we argue it out, we accept disagreement. Authoritarian movements, by contrast, sell the thrill of certainty — one truth, one people, one destiny. But it’s bullshit. It’s always bullshit in the end.

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