Do we really need such transcendent props in order to go about our finite business? Can we not satisfy our need to belong on a more modest scale? Can we not develop an experiential and felt unity that, while not answering ultimate demands, “is enough to fill a man’s heart”? “I have nothing to do with ideas or with the eternal,” observes Camus’s conqueror. “The truths that are within my range are those that the hand can touch. I cannot separate myself from them” (E, 167; MS, 89). “Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me” (MS, 60).
The desperation of our metaphysical predicament has tempted many toward extravagant solutions—even to the extent of seeming to flirt with, if not actually welcome, nuclear annihilation as the fulfillment of divine prophecy, thus putting an end to our historical misery. None of these most recent threats to humanity’s survival would have surprised Camus or his mentor on this issue, Nietzsche—both of whom thought that the death of God threatened to bring crashing down the entire edifice of a civilization built on its foundation.
But if these are our times, we must try to find a way to live in them.
If I hold as true that absurdity which determines my relation to life, if I am thoroughly imbued with this sentiment by which the spectacle of the world seizes me—with this clarity of insight which scientific research imposes upon me—I must sacrifice everything to these certainties and I must face them squarely in order to be able to sustain them.
Above all, I must determine my conduct in relation to them and pursue them in all their consequences. I am speaking here of honesty. But I want to know beforehand if thought can live in these deserts (E, 113; MS, 21-2).
Before considering his “relative Utopias” (A/I, 159), I should clear up any lingering confusions concerning the apparently opposed emphasis placed on diversity in The Myth and on unity in The Rebel. The context is crucial. Unity, in The Rebel, is counterposed to totality, an ideological claim that purports to offer a definitive interpretation of, and solution for, life’s struggles.
Since daily living does not seem to generate such meanings on its own, Camus believes that they can only be imposed upon it. Any such imposition would seem to require belief in a special insight or revelation available to a select group. Whatever the legitimacy of such a claimed truth, from the perspective of those to whom it is not given but upon whom it is imposed it can only be experienced as oppressive. Such claims not only delegitimate alternative experiences, justifying subordination, but constitute methodologically closed circles that are self-justifying.
Personal expression and individual dignity can obtain no independent status within the metaphysical horizons of such an empirically closed universe. But of these issues, more later.
By unity, on the other hand, is meant the integral experiential coherence that organically emerges from the free exercise of individual or collective choice. There is nothing here antagonistic to the experienced diversity of qualities, activities, beliefs, and lifestyles described in The Myth. Quite the contrary, such unities presuppose and value it. This is the meaning of giving style to one’s life, which constitutes the existential core of Camus’s vision in both art and politics.
And that is precisely what Camus praises in The Myth. By unity he there means what totality means in The Rebel. The transformation of expression registers an altered problematic. Where The Rebel sought to demystify ideology, the central concern of TheMyth was to combat nihilism (and the illusory hope often built upon it). The emphasis on diversity is directed at freeing experience from the constraints of preexistent hierarchies of meaning so that lucid consciousness may be able to confront anew the practically infinite variety of qualities and values that
experience concretely offers. “How could the Church”—that classic repository of transcendent hope—”have failed to condemn” the actor for his “emotional debauchery, [and] the scandalous pretention of a spirit which refuses to live only one destiny and gives itself over to all forms of excess?” asks Camus (MS, 82; E, 161). Here diversity clearly means liberation from transcendent illusion. But it does not mean randomness and total incoherence. That was the Achilles’ heel of Meursault’s life.
Between the “all or nothing” there remains a world “of which man is the sole master” (MS, 117). Form must be given to that world for it truly to be ours. Suggestive of his later emphasis upon style, Camus invites us, like his absurd heroes, to gather together the strands of our life: “To create is also to give a form to one’s destiny” (MS, 117; E, 192).
AN UNCERTAIN PATH
Thus the absurd, teaching us that “there is no tomorrow” (E, 141; MS, 58), transforms our moral perspective. “Deprived of the eternal,” says the conqueror, “I want to ally myself with time” (MS, 86). “Before encountering the absurd, the average man lives with purposes. … To the extent to which he imagined a purpose to his life, he adapted himself to the demands of a goal to be achieved and became the slave of his freedom” (E, 140, 141; MS, 57, 58). Once the illusions of another life are gone, along with the attendant psychic and moral constrictions of our thinking, feeling, and behaving, a new world opens up for us.
All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness,10 is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master.
What bound him was the illusion of another world. The outcome of his thought, ceasing to be renunciatory, flowers in images. . . . Not the divine fable that amuses and blinds, but the terrestrial face, gesture, and drama in which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral passion (MS, 117-8).11
No longer aspiring to immortal life, we are free at last to seek to “exhaust the field of the possible.” Unleashing the once chained passion for living, however, requires the will to maintain lucid consciousness of concrete details freed both from the potential seduction of transcendent meanings and from resignation attendant upon the realization of the absence of absolute significance. This is the original personal meaning of revolt for Camus. Revolt is initially the upsurge of outrage upon the realization of the fact of death, and the impassioned refusal to allow that fact to rob life of its significance. His confrontation with death at an early age when he contracted tuberculosis was the initial crucible for the forging of this consciousness of revolt. Consequently, Camus focuses upon the way that daily living to which his social condition condemned him tended to fritter away his newly found precious and irreplaceable existence. Revolt then becomes the rejection of the daily routines of habit with their attendant moral injunctions. Thus, A Happy Death. Refusal “to play the game” demands that revolt generate a new morality. These two strands of revolt, therefore, merge into the rejection of efforts to compensate for the emptiness that finitude threatens by having recourse to hope, to a transcendent ground for meaning. That was the experience Camus describes before the inscriptions in Florence, recapitulated by Meursault in his cell. With that rejection of a transcendent ground comes the rejection of its attendant moral injunctions.
Revolt thus rooted in the consciousness of one’s irreplaceable finitude demands a passionate and lucid commitment to the possibilities of animal existence no longer hemmed in by the illusory moralism of the transcendent. No wonder Camus can conclude that the absurd offers the possibility for the first time of truly living. “It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning” (MS, 53). From a rule of despair Camus draws an invitation to live.
Living is keeping the absurd alive. . . . Revolt … is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. … It challenges the world anew every second. . . . Metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience. It is .. . the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it (MS, 53-4).
Revolt, freedom, and passion thus become the rules of conduct of this newly discovered life.
An adequate response to the absurd, should such be possible, will clearly require a detailed consideration of the “social question.”12 That is clearly the position that begins to emerge with his Letters to a German Friend. But it is the metaphysical condition of the single individual that initially poses the question. And it is probably the experiential problem of a culture that increasingly throws one forth to struggle on one’s own—increasingly cut off from traditionally sustaining communities—which undergirds the contemporary experience. “The important thing … is not to be cured,” Camus observed, “but to live with one’s ailments” (MS, 38).