Whatever its pleadings for authenticity, is this being not condemned to an inescapable duplicity? Isn’t its morality but a cover for a more sophisticated strategy of domination? Can its continual talk of authentic commitment be other than a clever way of camouflaging its inability to commit itself to anybody or anything?
Sartre, the quintessential bourgeois philosopher of individualism, thus represents the destructive dialectic intrinsic to the being of the bourgeois of which Jean-Baptiste Clamence may be taken as a dramatic embodiment. As for the possibility of good faith:
O young woman, throw yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have the chance of saving both of us! A second time, eh, what a risky suggestion! Just suppose, cher maitre, that we should be taken literally? We’d have to go through with it. Brr . . . ! The water’s so cold! But let’s not worry! It’s too late now. It will always be too late. Fortunately! (F, 147).
PART FOUR
Visions and Possibilities
To give a form to the justice and liberty we need (A/II, 171).
12
The Witness of Liberty
Thanks to [revolt] the spirit begins to walk, but within the narrow confines of its condition. Toward what goal and with what possibilities depends upon freedom. . . . A comparative study of
artistic creation and political action considered as the two essential manifestations of human rebellion would be able to define it with greater precision (E, 1696).
ART AND POLITICS
“The rebel does not deny the history that surrounds him. . . . But he finds himself in front of it like the artist facing reality; he rejects it without freeing himself from it” (R, 290; L’HR, 358).
This identification of artistic creativity with the experience of the rebel brings us to the affective center of Camus’s world. Here political revolt and artistic creativity inform each other, opening the way to a more concrete appreciation of the metaphysical significance of rebellion.
Both artist and political rebel find the given world inadequate to their demands. But this dissatisfaction becomes world-transforming. In a sense, they place themselves outside of the world—in opposition to that world that gave them birth and to which they remain inescapably bound. Their experience bears witness to the ontological demand that life have an integral ordering within which the individual may find a dignified well-being. Happiness is inseparable from personal dignity, rooted in an integrally ordered experience. As temporal beings, however, our experience moves ever onward—and death appears as the inevitable and inescapable horizon of our practical projects. Such is the ground of Camus’s tragic vision.
We may respond to temporality by envisaging a transempirical unity whose achievement might well assuage that exigence ontologique. Upon what evidence, however, can this leap of faith be based? Is it not simply a projection of our needs? And does not the insistence upon its salvific qualities undercut the concrete possibilities that experience may offer? Such has been the concern expressed in the discussion of the absurd. As this need finds political expression, the results gain in practical consequences only by becoming the source and legitimation of a more complete domination and degradation. Such has been the key to the argument in The Rebel.
Thus temporality constitutes the flow of our lives—with death its inevitable horizon. Both aspects make for dispersion, randomness, purposelessness, and disintegration of personality. In the discussion of art in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus seems to welcome these forces of dispersion with his ethics of quantity. He argues there that if one marries them to a consciousness that, in appreciating the inevitability of a meaningless death, commits itself to drawing the utmost value from each encounter, life will offer meaning “enough to fill a man’s heart.” Thus his revolt finds expression in his commitment to lucidity, passion, and freedom, resulting in an ethic of quantity without any ordering principle.
He soon comes to recognize, however, the inadequacy of this position. Increasingly, he realizes that the traditional elaboration of a doctrine of absolutes is rooted in an existential demand for an integral ordering of experience that cannot be assuaged at the level of sensuous dispersal, no matter how passionately sensuous qualities may be appreciated by a consciousness heightened by the lucid awareness of an impending death. The problem of the unity of thought and action goes deeper. The concern to ground unity in the concrete affective life of the reflective animal who will die remains central. The ordering must not betray its bodily roots. Hence the centrality of the concern in The Rebel to define the meaning of unity against the claims of totality. “Political action and creation are the two faces of a single revolt against the disorders of the world. In both cases, the aim is to bring unity to the world” (A/I, 262). The concrete significance of art emerges in its attempt to respond to the dual dimension of human rebellions, for metaphysical insight and for historical liberation. Its answer, when successful, is a unitary expression of both needs in the achievement of an integral work that is the stylized embodiment of a concrete vision.
THE ARTWORK
Thus, the artwork can be viewed as an integral ordering of natural energies that rescues them from the dispersion at work in the flow of events. As a sensuously embodied unity of meanings it is an offering to us of a vision for which we deeply long. Ideally we confront in the work a perfect world—an embodied version of a metaphysical response in which natural experience is reconstructed so as to speak to that exigence ontologique. We encounter in the work a unified world in which our struggles take on the form of destiny. The consequences of actions are grasped in their inevitable flow; the balance of natural forces finds its integral expression; and our experience can appear to possess a definitive articulation. In short, the ambiguous strivings of a human soul can find definite expression in a work that offers itself as an example of what life may be.
In the world of the artwork we encounter a metaphysical revolution completed. The artist has rejected the historical world in its eternally unfinished aspect and has reorganized natural energies and qualities in terms of a vision of their ideal possibilities. We are presented with an embodied vision of our world remade in accordance with our deepest existential needs. This is accomplished in and through the style of the work. Style—the way the sensuous qualities and dramatic meanings are expressed in the medium—is at its best when it is least evident. Ideally, style suggests the transformation of our world in the image of a transtemporal perfection: a perfect fit between need and articulation. Even when the work embodies time, the temporal flow is recaptured in a structural unity that takes the form of a completed destiny. This is the root of the work’s ontological significance, and hence the criterion by which great art can be separated from the ordinary. The reason for Camus’s preference for classical drama should thus be obvious.
The artwork suggests, however, more than the image of a longed-for metaphysical revolution; it offers more than a world transformed with finality. It is an invitation to enter into that world and to experience its salvific unification of meanings; to share in that particular articulation. Beyond the unity of style that constitutes the image of a perfected world, we can share—if but for a moment—in a living dramatic unity. Deeper than the symbolic presentation of the image of a longed-for metaphysical revolution is the experiential “taste” of what such a world might mean. While there is an attraction that comes from the way art speaks to our deepest existential needs; the experience of the work is always more than the conception of it. Thus we must be acutely aware of the potential seduction involved in the likely thought that the artistic elaboration of meanings can serve as a model for the historical reconstruction of daily life.
If art offers this image of our world recaptured, and an experience of our deepest needs fulfilled, it remains but the experience of a moment. We encounter the work of art. We enter its world for but a moment in time to experience the liberation and satisfaction derived from participation in a completed drama. Whether tragic or comic, radical or reactionary, the experience of such a unity of style is felt to be profoundly significant and satisfying. We are exhilarated and relieved by tne destined flow of events; this is the ontological ground of the appeal of beauty. As the perfection in expression that ennobles and enhances our experience, beauty gives us the sense at last of being at home in our world. Here lies the source of that sense of the unity of beauty with happiness. Even tragedy can be deeply satisfying,
as its artistic depiction is subtly contrasted with the experienced satisfaction achieved through the integral ordering of embodied meanings that is the perfection of style.