It's quite sad what alleged logic can do to morality or individual conscience. It should now be quite obvious to humanity what dangers arise from the lack of a conscience.
Camus gives us here the confession of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a lawyer turned "Judge Penitent".
"Have you noticed that Amsterdam's concentric canals resemble the circles of hell? The middle-class hell, of course, peopled with bad dreams. When one comes from the outside, as one gradually goes through those circles, life — and hence its crimes — becomes denser, darker. Here, we are in the last circle." (Camus 283)
Look at an aerial photo of Amsterdam and you will immediately see how true Clamence's words are. Here in the red-light district of hell, at a bar, "Mexico City", Clamence confesses. Half the book is taken up with showing us what a wonderful and caring person Clamence had been at the height of his successful career as an attorney in Paris. He helped the blind, took on cases of the poor for no charge, et cetera, et cetera.... It goes on at length.
Due to Clamence not coming to the aide of a woman who commits suicide, his Fall begins. He begins to become aware of his duplicity. He helps people not to help them, but to gain respect, to build himself up. He suddenly feels the glaring reality of his falsity and he hears the laughter which acknowledges his acknowledgment.
"To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others."
Clamence no longer believes in the speeches he must give in court on justice, law, crime... His descent into hell begins, and it is fairly ugly, though illuminating. There are many philosophical truths Camus strikes upon, yet there is more disillusionment.
The problem with Clamence is that he cannot accept his duplicitous nature. He goes from one polarization to the other, never finding a balance, but rather a comfortable position. He sees paradox as ridiculous, yet cannot escape it. In trying to do so, he becomes ridiculously tragic.
Paradox saturates our world to keep us from polarization. Clamence would lose much of his seething cynicism should he stop drinking gin. The gin philosopher is indeed, a false prophet. What do we gain from listening to false prophets? If we know not that they are false prophets, we lose much and chances are they know not that they are a false prophet. Clamence however, being a Judge-Penitent, confesses to us before we confess to him—that he is a false prophet.
The danger in this is losing oneself further into the abyss. How much more dangerous is the man who knows he is falling than the man who is falling and does not know it? Certainly the latter will not be as desperate or as illuminated.
This is a complex and shallow book. It ends on a sinister note. I believe that Jean-Baptiste Clamence was on the verge of death from alcoholism. After the woman who committed suicide awakened him to his reality, he goes on a dangerous voyage of self exploration, and at the end denies the importance of life and is happy that he did not save the woman's life. He traveled the circle of hell, ended upon the spot he started out on, and remains inside the circle.
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