“St. Just is, of course, the anti-Sade. If Sade’s formula were ‘open the prisons or prove your virtue,’ then St. lust’s would be: ‘Prove your virtue or go to prison.’ Both, however, justify terrorism—the libertine justifies individual terrorism, the high priest of virtue State terrorism” (R, 125). Two paths by which the divinization of man is to replace the fallen deity, but one common nihilism. Metaphysical revolution, according to Camus, will continue to reveal these distinct strands, sometimes deifying the irrational, sometimes the rational, and more often than not borrowing from both, in its drive to rectify the injustice of the human condition. “Sade or dictatorship, individual terrorism or State terrorism, both justified by the same absence of justification, are, from the moment that rebellion cuts itself off from its roots and abstains from any concrete morality, one of the alternatives of the twentieth century” (R, 131-2).
In its deepest motivation Romanticism is an heir of Sade through its affirmation of single individuals and their tortured sensibility in the face of evil and death, as well as by its continual flirtation with apocalypse. This Romanticism has fed the flames of revolutionary messianism and itself been tempted by it, as for example with Breton. But, for all its yearnings, Romanticism has usually resulted in the ineffective singularities of the dandy like esthete. Others similarly motivated have not been so inconsequential.
The backdrop of the modern era is thus the disintegration of the Judeo-Christian cosmic drama, whose foreground is the struggle of metaphysical rebellion that so easily and “naturally”
turns into metaphysical revolution. The drama increasingly moving to center stage in the West is not of isolated individuals, such as Sade and the Romantics, but of broad cultural and political movements of which these singular individuals may be taken as prescient and sensitive forerunners. It is to these movements and their effective spokespeople that we must now turn our attention.
10
Confronting Modernity
Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man (R, 147).
THE BOURGEOIS ASCENDANCE
Three movements have dominated the Western stage for the last 150 years, according to Camus: bourgeois formalism and the liberal deification of progress; Marxist revolution, the myth of the classless society, and the deification of the proletariat; and fascism or Nazism and the deification of the volk in action. Each in its turn has offered itself as the instrument of human salvation, either as spiritual heir or radical alternative to the decaying Christian order. For the prophetic tradition of Marxism this deification was the “rational” product of a scientific analysis of the historical process that revealed the mission of a class and the inevitability of its ascension. For the fascists it appears as the mystical union of the pure blood of the volk in action, embodied in the nation. For the ascending bourgeoisie, on the other hand, their revolutionary messianism imperceptibly becomes the contractual rationality of daily practice as the Western world is increasingly shaped by the logic of profitability. Thus an irrational faith in progress and a commitment to personal gain have become the order of the day for much of the Western world.
All three movements seek to respond to the sense of loss of cosmic purposefulness, resulting from the eclipse of God, by turning to history as the locus of absolute values. The bourgeois response frames the project of mainstream Western civilization; the Marxian and fascist movements are seen by Camus as critical responses to the dominant bourgeois world, being directed only secondarily at Christianity. They share with their adversaries, however, the same existentio-metaphysical demand for salvation extracted from the historical process: they are messianic and eschatological.
The bourgeoisie occupy a halfway house. Deifying material progress, working through an open-ended linear history, they remain wedded to tran-scendent Christian values, reduced to a pure formalism, and serving to cover
an unrepentant materialism and social exploitation. “They still preserve the Supreme Being. Reason, in a certain way, is still a mediator. It implies a pre-existent order. But God is at least dematerialized and reduced to the theoretical existence of a moral principle” (R, 132).
This bourgeois world is hypocritical to the core and incapable of speaking to the existential hungers of the human spirit—a point made strongly, if only by implication, in The Stranger.
Human beings, having been robbed of their spiritual home in the drama of salvation, are offered in its place technologies and material consumption. The Faustian bargain of seduction by power and wealth has, however, not only destroyed spiritual peace, but proved to be illusory. Bourgeois ideals have rarely been realizable, except for a privileged minority at the centers of its world empire, while the spiritual and social cost of that achievement has profoundly undermined that very world. At the same time, the moral values offered to justify and guide this practice have been shown to be hypocritical formalisms, simply used to cover the drive for power and wealth of that privileged minority. “The entirely formal morality by which bourgeois society lives had been emptied of its substance by the gaping holes our elites have opened in it for their profit” (E, 1703).
These moral values—cut off from a spiritually sustaining community life, undermining the dignity of labor, and lacking justification other than that in divine transcendence from which they had drawn their original content—are left dangling in mid-air: to be employed by a class of exploiters to keep a lid on the people’s frustrations. “The bourgeoisie succeeded in reigning during the entire nineteenth century only by referring itself to abstract principles. Less worthy than St. Just, it simply made use of this frame of reference as an alibi, while employing, on all occasions, the opposite values” (R, 132).
In short, the world of the bourgeois is one of deep spiritual malaise and an increasingly desperate sense of the meaninglessness of it all—nihilism being the subterranean offshoot—patched over in ever more unsatisfactory terms by a liberal moralism without direct bearing on the affairs of daily life, and by a panegyric to the possibilities of material well-being. The last of these is like a horizontally projected heaven offered to cover up the ever-increasing dissatisfactions felt in the present. Recognizing the emptiness and lack of justification of bourgeois values, nineteenth-century nihilists such as the Russians called for the destruction of this hypocritical shell of value in favor of commitment to material well-being and the rule of efficacy Witness Pisarev’s poignant rejection of bourgeois ideals with the assertion that a pair of shoes is worth more than all of Shakespeare, or Bazarov’s commitment to material force (cf. R, 154, 254).
for Camus, two positive elements in the bourgeois position were falsified by its root hypocrisy. First was its commitment to the advancement of material well-being.1 Second was its espousal of personal freedom. In fact, the
problem of personal freedom is at the core of its world view and of its moral hypocrisy.
The bourgeois-liberal ideal involves free individuals working out their destiny through personal effort, guided by secularized Christian values, and supported by the “free” market allocation of resources within the confines of contracted political obligations. While the values lack reflective justification, possessing only historical momentum, their rationale is the maximization of individual freedom. Material well-being, it is argued, is the freely chosen goal of individual effort and the power that will make possible its realization.
In fact, the values by which that freedom is to be guided, having lost both their transcendent rationale and their communal content, have become a pure formalism by which the abstract search for maximization of freedom has become the practically unfettered exercise of power by those who can use it. The hypocrisy that Camus sees cutting through the bourgeois world is precisely the use of the language of a formalized transcendent value scheme to cover this exercise of power by the corporate few at the expense of the many. The demands of justice for satisfaction of the existential hunger for dignity, self-respect, and a meaningful life, including as its necessary precondition the fulfillment of essential material needs, have been submerged in the formalized ideology of freedom—often under the guise of unhampered free-market allocation—and idealized as historically inevitable material progress.
Karl Marx’s “most profitable undertaking has been to reveal the reality that is hidden behind the formal values of which the bourgeois of his time made a great show” (R, 200). What Camus
calls critical Marxism develops a theory of ideology that seeks to lay bare how bourgeois “morality prospered on the prostitution of the working classes. That the demands of honesty and intelligence were put to egoistic ends by the hypocrisy of a mediocre and grasping society was a misfortune that Marx, the incomparable eye-opener, denounced with a vehemence quite unknown before him” (R, 201). “His theory of mystification is still valid” (R, 200).
At the heart of the Marxian critique of bourgeois society, which its ideology seeks to cover up, lies the condition of the worker. Marxian rebellion begins, for Camus, with outrage at the assaults to human dignity that Marx details in his doctrines of exploitation and alienation. While Camus’s primary concern is with the reasoning process that leads from these sources to the legitimation of oppression that is Russian communism, he wishes to remain faithful, in fact to revitalize, that initial insight. Both these matters suggest the poles of Camus’s position that remain to be delineated. But I should here underscore the values underlying the critique of bourgeois society that Camus shares with critical Marxism. Camus spells it out in some detail.