 At the beginning of The Rebel, Camus picks up where he left off in The Myth of Sisyphus. Writing as a philosopher again, he returns to the terrain of argument by explaining what absurdist reasoning entails. Its “final conclusion” is “the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe” (R, 6). Since to conclude otherwise would negate its very premise, namely the existence of the questioner, absurdism must logically accept life as the one necessary good. “To say that life is absurd, consciousness must be alive” (R, 6, tr. changed). Living and eating “are themselves value judgments” (LCE, 160). “To breathe is to judge” (R, 8). As in his criticism of the existentialists, Camus advocates a single standpoint from which to argue for objective validity, that of consistency.