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Experiential Sources
From the shores of Africa where I was born, with the help of distance, the face of Europe can be seen better (A/II, 63).
FRAMING A VISION
As children our immersion in the present is both total and transcendent. It is total in that our horizon is consumed by the immediacy of the sounds, shapes, colors, odors, natural qualities, and above all, by the affective tonality of a world that is both mood and temperament. It is transcendent in that we recapitulate the universal confrontation of sensual consciousness with the natural world, which is the inevitable experience of our species. From birth we are thus bathed in the historical waters that are the dramatic unfolding of our culture, and constrained by the ontological structure of the human condition. While the latter confronts us with inescapable challenges to growth, to the mastery of skills, and to the development of intelligent sensibility, the former structures the horizon of individual consciousness, shaping the mental frame in whose terms such challenges will be experienced.
Between the experience and the articulation falls the shadow, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot. As awareness emerges from within the inchoate present, it tends to shape itself in accordance with the dramatic contours of its culture. At first we see the world through the eyes of others. The cultural drama becomes the horizon of our awareness, shaping the prereflective quality of experience. Soon childhood exploration becomes adult problem solving: technical problems calling for practical solution absorb our attention, while our personal version of the cultural mindscape sets the horizon of understanding that conditions our action. The structures of the drama itself are taken for granted as necessary, self-evident, unquestioned, even unquestionable.
But it occurs to some of us, occasionally, to wonder at the structure of the world in which we live, to determine its limits, to understand its necessity, to appreciate its contingency, and to
explore its hidden possibilities. With this “weariness tinged with amazement” that places in question the very dramatic horizon itself, philosophy begins. It is a matter of merely academic interest whether such reflection dresses itself in the majestic garb of abstract treatises on metaphysics and epistemology, of logic and ethics, or whether it wears the more modest garments of concrete and sensual imagery embodied in essays, plays, or novels. Such reflection either invites us to share in the exploration of the problems of existence, or it does not. Only in the former case does it call for serious reflection, seeking to initiate a dialogue on the essentials of our shared experience—
perhaps even opening up for us the horizon of our “ownmost” possibilities.
Camus’s writing was clearly of such dimensions. Marked personally, culturally, and theoretically by the historicity of its emergence, it aspires to a perspective from which the dramatic structure of our world can obtain coherent articulation, and constructive reformulation.
Since this work is both deeply personal and profoundly cosmic, it is appropriate and necessary to explore briefly its personal roots in order to appreciate adequately its cosmic significance.
Those roots are in that Mediterranean land of stark beauty and precise definition wherein a pagan body came to consciousness in a Christian world.
I was born poor, under a happy sky, in accord with nature, and without hostility. My life did not begin therefore with inner turmoil, but with plenitude. … I feel that I have a Greek heart. . . .
The Greeks do not deny the gods, but they keep them within bounds. Christianity [on the other hand] … is a total religion (A/I, 225—6).
A French-Algerian, born and raised in the sunbathed and impoverished working-class districts of North Africa, Camus’s relation to European civilization was deeply ambivalent. His thinking was profoundly European, tormented by problems inherited through several thousand years of Judeo-Christian history, but his physical sensibilities were pagan—that is, Greco-Roman—
rooted in the sensual vitality of a body immersed in the sun, sand, and sea of the Mediterranean shore. Half in and half out of European civilization, he experienced “both sides of the coin.”
He knew the strengths and weaknesses, the possibilities and disasters, the grandeur and vulgarities of the European civilization with which he felt total solidarity. He was at one with it in its struggle for survival against the forces of nihilism, emerging with powerful destructive force in the fascist movements of the 1930s and 1940s. And he experienced the vitality, the force for renewal, that was the offering of a guilt-free body at grips with the beauties of nature, which he felt was emerging on the shores of North Africa, on the margins of European civilization. As his exile was double—forced both by natural and social events out of a union with the North African world, and by the movement of European history out of the ultimate meaningfulness that had been its Judeo-Christian
promise, so his need for the resurrection of the kingdom was more poignant and deeply felt. The challenge of his life was to find a path out of this desert of alienation, desiccation, and dehumanization toward a renaissance in human living—and to give preliminary form to such a renaissance.
Writing of The Rebel, his major work devoted to the search for those positive values he felt “we can no longer do without,” he observes: All those for whom the problems discussed in this book are not simply rhetorical have understood that I was analyzing a contradiction which initially had been my own. The[se] thoughts . . . have nourished me; and I wanted to further them by removing those elements which I felt impeded them from developing. In fact, I am not a philosopher, and I only know how to speak about what I have experienced. I have experienced nihilism, contradiction, violence, and the vertigo of destruction. But … I have welcomed the power of creating and the honor of living. Nothing authorizes me to pass judgment upon an epoch with which I feel in total solidarity. I judge it from within, blending myself with it. But I reserve the right, henceforth, to say what I know about myself and about others on the sole condition that by so doing I do not add to the unbearable suffering of the world, but only in order to locate, among the obscure walls against which we are blindly stumbling, the still invisible places where doors may open. … I am only interested in the renaissance (A/II, 82-3).
NATURE AND HISTORY
Situated as he was on the margin, half in and half out of Europe, completely involved and profoundly agonized, deeply sensitive and passionately inquiring, he sought to grasp the essentials of the drama, to lay bare the mythic structures of that agonized experience—of those interior forces working for self-destruction—in order to awaken the Western mind to a grasp of its possibilities for cultural renewal.
In his “Diplome d’Etudes Superieures” on “Metaphysique Chretienne et Neoplatonisme” Camus sought to come to terms with the conflict between Hellenism and Christianity with which his experience resonated. Making a point of methodological significance for the entire body of his work, he insisted that, in contrast to the pagan world, “the novelty of Christianity is to be sought on the affective level from which the problems arise rather than in the system which tries to respond to them” (E, 1224). His manner of framing these contrasting metaphysics is so significant for an understanding of his perspective that it deserves to be quoted at length:
Hellenism . . . implied that man was self-sufficient and had within himself the capacity to explain destiny and the universe. His temples were built to his measure. In a certain sense the Greeks accepted an aesthetic and sportive justification of existence.
The design of their hills and the running of a young man on the beach would reveal the secret of the world to them. Their gospel said: our Kingdom is of this world. It is the “Everything which satisfies you, Cosmos, satisfies me,” of Marcus Aurelius.
This purely rational conception of life—that the world can be completely understood—leads to a moral intellectualism: virtue is something which is learned…. All Greek philosophy makes the wise man an equal of God. . . . The entire universe is centered around man and his works. If moral evil is simply ignorance or error therefore, what place can there be for the notions of Sin and Redemption? . . .
The Greeks still believed in a cyclical world, eternal and necessary, which was not compatible with a creation “ex nihilo” leading toward an end of the world. . . .
What constitutes the irreducible originality of Christianity is the theme of the Incarnation. Problems are made flesh, and they immediately assume that tragic and necessary character which is so often lacking in certain Greek mind games. . . .
The problems [of the world] themselves are incarnated and the philosophy of history is born. … It is no longer a question of knowing and understanding, but of loving. And Christianity will only give body to this idea, so foreign to the Greeks, that man’s problem is not to perfect his nature, but to escape from it (E, 1225-6, 1229, 1228).