The history and pathology of revolt that Camus presents is thus the history of a movement in which a living, qualitative experience gives rise to claims of limits and rights the articulation of which transforms that reality into fodder for thought. Ideology, used here in the sense of a conceptual search for totality, can be summed up as fidelity to thought products at the expense of fidelity to the experience in which thinking takes place. It is ultimately the demand for a metaphysical revolution in which the world of experience is to be transformed in accordance with the demands of a totalizing theory
In point of fact, ideology is implicit as soon as thought is viewed from the perspective of experience conceived simply as a matrix in which theoretical distinctions may arise and be meaningfully employed. From this perspective The Rebel—and in fact Camus’s thought in general—can be seen as a study of the pathology of thought’s infidelity to its origins.6
By being cut off from its existential origins, thought is being deprived of its vitalizing source as well as of the natural community that could serve as the framework for its elaboration. The only possibility for communication then rests upon prior acceptance of thought’s first principles, the natural ground of such acceptance having been denied. And since thought cannot ground itself, the first principles must stand as posits in the dialogic situation, requiring force to assure their social preeminence.
The appeal to indubitable evidence, intuition, or any such evidential grounds may be seen as essentially just such a procedure. By seeking to resolve a dispute by means of such an appeal, the standpoint of concrete experience is transcended, thus effectively cutting discussion off from its origins, and the further development that that would permit, and rendering itself unsolvable. From the point of view of dialogue and communication, such a claim—and one makes a claim only insofar as the situation is social—can result only in spiritual imperialism and ideological warfare. In fact, the claim is an implicit
declaration of war, for it is made in order to be recognized. Yet a claim that has cut itself off from its origins or seeks to ground itself in its origins deductively, which comes to the same thing, involves a transformation of the dialogic situation into a power relation.
Ideological warfare is the inevitable result of a totalizing approach, which suggests why Camus did not wish to consider himself a philosopher. For he considers ideological warfare to be at the center of the Hegelian enterprise, perhaps the crowning modern philosophical achievement.7 In his words: “The entire history of mankind is [according to Hegel] . . . nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power. It is, in its essence, imperialist” (R, 139).
In this light, the pathology of the development being considered was stated a bit earlier in The Rebel: “In principle the rebel only wanted to conquer his own existence. . . . But he forgets his origins and by the law of spiritual imperialism, he sets out in search of world conquest by way of an infinitely multiplied series of murders” (R, 103).
Ideology is therefore spiritual imperialism. Initiated by the yearning for unity, the rebel forgets the sources of his movement and attaches himself to a definitive theoretical standpoint from which he may easily produce an explanation and a justification of acts that will prove the existence of the unity he insists upon having. In terms of this position, opposition ultimately can have no legitimate standing, since by definition it is not on the same plane of being as the ideologue, who, by his grasp of the truth, claims a unique and indisputable position.
Revolt can be seen as the formulation of a commitment and the suggestion of a solution, which is to be worked out and progressively realized, if possible, through dialogue. Ideology, on the other hand, perverts the commitment by hypostatizing its ongoing meaning. Ideology turns the axis of involvement from the human centers that meet in terms of a common experience to the articulation of that experience in terms of which those centers are essentially ancillary. In the first context, meaning is experienced and lived in the present, with the future being only
“present-ed” as a possibility for consideration and guidance. With ideology, on the other hand, the existential relation of past—present—future is transformed from moments of a unitary moving present to distinct dimensions of being, which live only as objects for, and in the context of, their theoretical formulation.
The problem is essentially the same as that of the relation between means and ends, of which more later. The Rebel is concerned with justifications, with reasons—and with efficacy only to the extent that reasons are objectively efficacious (an empirical and scientific question always). It is not primarily concerned with history or causality.8 The problem of ideology concerns giving objective reality to the logical independence of thought. An ideology
may well be called a hypostatized and logicized reason that has lost its grip on the moving present (its origin) in terms of which alone it might have been valid. It is, in short, a reason gone mad.
The philosophical enterprise arises in, and may find justification as the articulation and direction of, the movement toward unity and lived meaning. Now, however, it becomes the totalizing grasp of the fixed structure of Being or History. From the point of view of dialogue and community, as soon as this philosophical imperialism insists upon colonization, it gives birth to the ideological conflict of equally unjustifiable posited presuppositions, articulated as the search for grounds rather than consequents. Yet it is consequents, thoughts opening out to new experiences and leading to practical resolutions, that seem to be both the initial impetus and encompassing purpose as well as the experimental justification of inquiry. Finally, inquiry itself is but one of the most rigorous forms of intellectual revolt.
At the root of the excesses of our age Camus thus finds the metaphysical demand for totality.9 An intellectual movement that, in responding to the legitimate human need for dignity and self-respect, ends by betraying its own rebellious origins through an infernal dialectic in which it denies freedom in the search for perfect justice. But perfect justice, should it ever be approachable, would have to be rooted in respect for freedom, without which there can be no dignity and self-respect.
Responding to the demands of revolt requires the integral union of freedom of expression and action with the establishment of a social order in which individuals can achieve the dignity and self-respect without which they cannot live. Justice as the equitable distribution of benefits and burdens provides the necessary conditions for the achievement of human dignity in accord with spontaneous free expression. Rebellion must cleave to the mutually implicated claims of freedom and justice if it is not to become the disease of its own cure. Unity, which Camus systematically counterposes to the demands of totality, is precisely this ontological need for an integral ordering of human living that balances freedom and justice, while
subordinating the imperious metaphysical claims of the intellect to the practical exigencies of daily living. In this way alone will it be possible to restore to human experience the values of which it is capable and to open the way to a celebration of the ordinary, of daily labor, of friendship—to the life of a Joseph Grand. This must be the content of any renaissance in human living toward the achievement of which Camus’s effort was so totally committed.
I will refrain finally from saying that the conclusions of this experience, whose personal character I wish again to underline, have universal value. The Rebel proposes neither a formal morality nor a dogma. It affirms only that a morality is possible and that it costs dearly. . . .
When the labor [travail ] of the worker like that of the artist will have an opportunity for creativity [fecondite], then only will nihilism be definitively outlived and the renaissance make sense. Each in our place, by our works and our acts, must serve this creativity and this renaissance. It is not certain that we will succeed in this endeavor, but, after all, it is the only task which is worth undertaking and persevering in (E, 1713-5).
The actual preconditions and metaphysical roots of this effort for the construction of unity are still to be studied. Before that, however, it will be necessary to study in detail the logic that finds expression in the demand for a metaphysical revolution, and then to explore the psychic subsoil that exis-tentially roots this pathology in an oppressive demand for totality. Only then can we consider Camus’s positive program for constructive revolt through art and politics.
9
Metaphysical Rebellion
The era of tragedy seems to coincide . . . with an evolution in which man, whether or not consciously, separates himself from a traditional form of civilization with which he finds himself in opposition, without yet having found a new form which will satisfy him (TRN, 1701).