invokes a value” (R, 14). Thus, rebellion, in which “the transition to rights is manifest” (R, 15, L’HR, 27), offers us the experiential location from within the world revealed by the absurd for a source of values to which we may appeal, and from which we may hope to develop an ethic relevant to the dilemmas of our age. The challenge facing rebellion is to develop that ethic in a manner consistent with the values that gave it birth.
ETHICAL REFLECTIONS
If we stop for a minute and think about the problem of conduct, it becomes clear that simple personal preference is not a sufficient guide. To assert complete meaninglessness is as justified at this level as to assert definitive Truth. Saying everything is permitted is logically equivalent to saying all is obligated. Here is the dead end of absurdist thought and the edge of the abyss of nihilism, to which the Second World War and its aftermath gave palpable testimony. With these alternatives we are dealing with the simple positing of a perspective—a personal, even collective, assertion, to which others may or may not give assent. And from which deductions about conduct may or may not follow.
Inevitably, one assertion encounters an opposed assertion, constituting the paradigm situation of interpersonal conflict. How can such conflict be mediated? Are there no values that can transcend these conflicting perspectives, holding out the possibility of a common ground on which the combatants can meet? Can we not find values to sustain our lives and give direction to our efforts beyond the level of ideological warfare? “Caligula,” “The Misunderstanding,” and The Plague were Camus’s efforts to show the pervasively social character of our situation and the disasters following upon our failure to do justice to the social. The Rebel thus focuses upon the limitations intrinsic to the effort to establish an intersubjective frame for value claims. Such claims constitute a demand upon the other for acknowledgment. They must be justified and defended. What is to be their ground? Ultimately I shall maintain—along with Camus—that a claim becomes intersubjectively justifiable only as a proposal. It is an invitation to a dialogue. And democracy is essentially the development of such proposals—it is collective inquiry. But of that, more later.
Initially, the rebel says no. But this is not so much a deduction as an impulsive rejection, almost an instinctive act of self-defense. “The movement of rebellion is founded simultaneously on the categorical rejection of an intrusion that is considered intolerable and on the confused conviction of a firm right, more precisely the impression on the rebel’s part that he “has the right” (R, 13; L’HR, 25).
Neither values nor rebellion is deduced. The values are lived prereflec-
tively until their denial is felt to be unbearable. Only then, through the act of rebellion, does the value get existentially recognized—in reaction to the experience of its denial. Before that it is simply lived as valued, without being consciously appreciated. Revolt thus struggles to gain articulation in the face of a threat to the heretofore inarticulate value that sustains it. But the specific context of its emergence cannot but mark the manner and content of the claim. We need not disparage the initial more or less brute response that initiates the movement of rebellion.
Yet it is with the effort to articulate the rationale for the revolt and its strategic rules of conduct that the problem studied in The Rebel primarily lies. The invocation of the implicit human community becomes the frame for evaluating the coherence of the rebellious activity. But the implicit universality of the claim to justice is almost invariably in tension with the more precise and limited content that the historical context of its emergence circumscribes. Within the dialectic of this tension resides the conflict whose logicopolitical development The Rebel sets out to analyze and diagnose.
The implicit universality of the claims of rebellion is viewed by Camus as suggesting the boundary conditions by which all subsequent action ought to be constrained. Since it is the “we are” affirmed by the rebel that sets forth the essential ground of justification, the rebel would violate the legitimating rationale by engaging in action that undercut the implicit human community. Thus we find boundary conditions to rebellious action implicit in the initial affirmation. No precise guides to conduct follow from this framework. Rather, a context is suggested that would delimit the range of the ethically permissible.
The matter might be put as follows. Starting with an implicit sense of the communality of the human condition—our metaphysical isolation as dramatized, for example, in The Plague—
Camus seeks a frame of reference that can serve as a common ground for human combatants. This frame is to provide nonrestrictive and nonideological boundary conditions for humane conduct. In a sense the search is for an ethical equivalent of the Cartesian certitude, but its function is not the same. Rather than serving as the base for a deductive proof, what is sought is the establishment of an agreed upon standpoint within which individuals may be able to explore acceptable alternatives as guides to moral action. Camus thus suggests a way to go beyond the positing of preference—as legated to us by the absurdist analysis, for example—to the establishment of a jointly experienced and at least originally indubitable common frame of reference that our condition as human beings can provide. Such a naturalistic frame for morality was originally staked out in Camus’s earliest writings. But he docs not seek to “establish”
this naturalistic frame of reference. He offers it as an “at least originally indubitable” truth within whose frame dialogue may begin. Here in our common human domain may be found an original matrix of meanings—itself implicitly appealed to by almost all acts of rebellion—which, by becoming the explicitly acknowledged context of our efforts, may offer us the possibility of developing an ethic in this absurd world without transcendent justification.
It is noteworthy—and in opposition to Cartesianism—that the question of theoretical Truth takes second place in this endeavor. The clarity and distinctness with which Cartesian philosophy grounds its Truth is ultimately a purely individual matter. The social question is that of an intersubjective grounding of policy decisions. Here the appeal to facts is not as arbiters of policy, but as instruments to call forth potentially common responses. Facts can guide; they cannot demonstrate. Truth considered concretely becomes the continually revisable question of the adequacy of one’s policies with respect to the movement of collective experience.
The fundamental concern of ethical inquiry, therefore, is not primarily the passing of judgment on particular actions or the deduction of values from first principles. Its focus ought rather to be on establishing values through an open and experimental inquiry—ideally, through dialogue: an open inquiry between persons. Values emerge from human experience, and intellectual formulations should be taken as claims whose justification must be sought by appeal to such intersubjectively grounded experiences. Justifications are not so much proved as established; only the inner self-contradiction of claims may be proven.
The task of ethical thought then is to spell out the boundary conditions of any ethical inquiry, to establish the essential constants in human action and conjoint living with which conduct must come to terms. Within this framework we do not deduce rules of action; ethics is not mathematics or even law. Rather, we grasp limits to humane action and recognize that certain commitments cannot go together with others. This approach reveals limi-tations intrinsic to the realm of values, establishing binding hypotheticals, constants of action within particular frameworks.
Thus value claims should take an if— then form: if that is wished, then
this must be taken into view. But the need to act in accordance with any
specific ethical or human framework—with the if-clause of the hypothetical
can never be deduced. That is the force of freedom to which all deductive
ethical theories seek in vain to give the lie.
This point can be made quite briefly. A deductive theory seeks grounds in first principles. The establishment of first principles requires assent. Once given, the rules of action are said to follow necessarily, given appropriate circumstances. But the problem of ethics is always that of specific action. Therefore we can either deny the applicability of the value in this situation, or deny the adequacy or truth of the first principle. For the former there can be no deductive rule (hence the failure of Kantianism); for the latter, ultimately, no argument. Where, logically, could we turn to support an ethical first principle? Thus if the other to whom the principle is offered as an ultimate reason denies its force or relevance, the only remaining dialogue is confrontation. Ethical systems then become totalizing ideologies seeking to extract commitment, in whose terms opposition must be purged, or at least responded to in nondialogic terms. Here the encounter between persons reduces to conflict over issues with acceptable answers predetermined by an unalterable adherence, on the basis of prior attachment, to first principles that are but arbitrary posits.