Confessing one’s own sins can be felt as moral license to condemn others

Evidence

Camus was disturbed by the quarrel, which occurred at a difficult period for him. His personal life was soon to get worse, with marriage difficulties, writer’s block, and the horror of war in his Algerian homeland. In 1956 his crisis would find expression in a novella, The Fall, whose hero is a ‘judge-penitent’: a former trial judge who has decided to sit in judgement on himself. In an Amsterdam bar, over several evenings, the judge relates his life to an unnamed narrator, culminating in a shocking story. One night in Paris, he saw a woman throw herself off a bridge, yet failed to jump in and save her. He cannot forgive himself. The judge acknowledges his sins, but on the other hand he seems to feel that this gives him moral authority to point out the sins of others. As he tells his interlocutor, and implicitly also us, his readers, ‘The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you.’ There is a lot of Camus in this remark. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 815

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘judge-penitent’ figure — a central Camus concept.
• XREF: The judge-penitent’s logic of confessing to earn the right to judge resembles the confessional mechanism Foucault describes in The History of Sexuality — power through enforced self-disclosure. — connects to: Condemning one’s own practiced wrongs in others enables easy self-exculpation. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2033; Small restorative acts against vast harms serve as personal absolution for collective guilt — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1318