Clearly the demand for unity is answering to a felt, though inarticulate, need to belong. Remember our starting point: the dawning realization, for Camus personally and for the West more generally, that our existence is without transcendent significance. Having been put on this earth for no apparent reason, we find, according to contemporary science, that we evolved in a more or less haphazard way from other species on an earth whose origin is uncertain, whose place in a practically infinite universe is negligible, and whose future is insignificant. The struggle to come to terms with these emerging scientific truths—especially in the face of a several-thousand-year history that has embedded in our collective psyche the sense that, devoid of transcendent purpose, life is not worth living—has left us facing a metaphysical void. It is as if some of us were thrashing around in search of a myth to replace Judeo-Christianity, while others, disillusioned by that loss, have been drawn to nihilistic beliefs and actions.
I said that this world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrationality and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world (MS, 21; E, 113).
Thus Camus presents his sense of what we may call the exigence ontologique by which the human being’s most fundamental needs are to be understood. Here is the source of that metaphysical demand for rationality or coherence. Here also is the companion existential demand for familiarity, for a feeling of being “at one with” or “at home in” the world around us. It is these twin and coordinate demands for coherence and familiarity that Camus has in mind whenever he refers to the hunger for unity, for a truth that will at least momentarily assuage our sense of estrangement, of alienation.
It is of course important to recognize the common root of the need to unify as well as to underscore the distinct though companion aspects of its expression. The existential sense must be seen and appreciated as distinct from the metaphysical demand. The former is often inarticulate, more a matter of
mood, or feeling tone, that pervades our individual experience, qualifying, behind our back as it were, our encounter with others, with nature, and with our sense of life and its possibilities.
Of course, this existential sense relates to the lived meaning of our world; it is not simply a matter of biology or physiology, hence it implicates the metaphysical concern with the articulate structure of meanings by which we live. Thus this distinction has something arbitrary in it. But it is, nonetheless, not without significance, as it highlights distinct strands of this basic
“exigence.”
By metaphysical demand for coherence is meant, then, the conceptual and often reflective concern to make coherent sense of the human condition. To develop a theoretical frame within which particular human actions—even one’s entire life—may be seen as part of a more comprehensive frame of reference. This is what Camus means when he suggests that if at least one
thing could be explained this thirst for unity would be assuaged, and we would not feel that the world is so alien.
But there is an important confusion that seems to operate in Camus’s conception of coherence. Instead of distinguishing between rational coherence and purposefulness, he often speaks as if they were interchangeable. But this is certainly in error. It is entirely possible for us to conceive of a universe —many scientists, in fact, believe this to be the case—which is essentially coherent, operating entirely in accord with known or knowable natural laws. Given that we have not yet established the truth of such a perspective, many scientists may be said to have a faith about the nature of our universe. It might even be said that science presupposes such a faith, though that claim is more dubious. In any case, it is perfectly conceivable that the universe is so ordered. But that in no way assures its purposefulness, nor does it providentially guarantee our future. In fact, our fate may be no less absurd, at least as far as our needs and aspirations are concerned.
The point to be underscored here is that the universe may be rationally coherent yet not purposeful. There may still be a quite poignant divorce between our desire for familiarity and a world in which we are but the intelligible products of natural forces operating in accord with impartial physical laws. The question of purpose, on the other hand, would seem to require the existence of some being—a god of sorts—whose purpose this world is. It is this notion that seems required by the more profound sense of need that has become so pervasive in the West.
Certainly this need is the hidden source of the derailments that Camus explores in The Rebel as well as of the longings for oppression that feed the hero of The Fall.
Nevertheless, the absurd registers the distance between what we need in order to be at one with ourselves and our destiny and the objective scene in which we find ourselves called upon to make our way. In Heideggerian
terms, we find ourselves thrown into a world, not of our choosing, that cares
not for our concerns. We try to humanize our surroundings and to build a world in which we feel we belong. But otherness pervades our efforts, insuring the ultimate personal defeat that is death and, as Djemila proved, wearing away our collective efforts through time. “From the point of view of Sirius,” reflects Camus, what can be the ultimate significance of anything we do?
“That idea has always contained a lesson” (MS, 78).
But precisely what lesson? we might ask. And what bearing does it have on the exigence ontologique that finds expression in our desire to unify the world? Under what conditions can life still be found to be meaningful? That last question suggests a prior one: What is it that threatens to rob life of its meaning? The fact that we are finite and fated to die? Or that life has no overall purpose or direction? Or that it lacks intrinsic coherence? Or that we cannot understand how we got here and what makes the world function as it does? Do we really need to understand existence in order to feel that it makes sense? Does making sense equal being worth the effort?
Sometimes Camus writes as if the ultimate absurdity consists in our being fated to die. At other times, he suggests that understanding the nature of existence would reconcile us to our condition. At still other times, the absurd seems to emerge out of the arbitrary and random nature of our lives—perhaps as an expression of its lack of purpose or direction.
But these are clearly not equivalent expressions of one common problem, however related they may be. Would Camus, for example, mean to suggest that obtaining an adequate and comprehensive theory of existence would assuage our exigence ontologique? I doubt it.
On the other hand, if we were given an indubitable assurance of personal immortality (even without understanding how and why) or of divine pur-posefulness, I suspect that would be felt to be more satisfactory. Of course, these distinct possibilities are themselves melded into one for Camus, though in principle they need not be.9
For The Stranger, for example, the absurdity of existence is expressed both by the randomness of events and by society’s need to impose rational coherence. From the counterposition of these two factors the absurd trinity dramatically emerges. What then can we say of Meursault’s personal struggle to face his imminent death? Here, at least, Camus seems to come down on the side of living on, rather than of comprehension or coherence.
In short, although Camus occasionally confuses the issue, he is primarily concerned with the loss of belief in any extrinsic or transcendent meaning to existence. References to unity suggest the need to feel that life is the expression of an overriding purpose that gives direction to daily activity, thus saving it and releasing us from the insignificance that would otherwise follow from the inevitability of our death. Unity thus means overarching purposefulness, within which our finitude is framed by transcendent meaningfulness. To feel that we are not alone, but rather have a place in an all-encompassing and eternally significant cosmic drama, would dramatically transform the meaning of our situation.
Such a sense of belonging would answer the fear of death with a promise that would make it all worthwhile. Here is the root need upon which Camus focuses his attention. It is the gnawing, and potentially debilitating, sense that the need cannot be met—or at least, the growing doubt that there is any adequate way of addressing it—that brings contemporary humanity to the brink of a metaphysical abyss.
The Search for Totality
The gnawing emptiness occasioned by the metaphysical abyss demands consolation. Even more, it wants hope. It yearns for a total solution to human contingency. The exigence ontologique that demands satisfaction is potential prey to the offering of totality. Here, according to Camus, among individuals suffering anomie and longing for a place to belong, is where the deranged temptations of the modern world have taken root. The exploration of this pathology of the intellect, rooted in the psychic soil of a decimated sensibility, is the concern of The Rebel. But if false alternatives are the concern in that work, a historically cluttered terrain overgrown with encrusted but failed religious beliefs hides the game being hunted here. “I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it” (MS, 51).