PERSONAL REVOLT
If the Christian God is dead, it might be asked, why discuss Christian doctrine? An answer to this query is called for at two levels: cultural and personal. But first, the problem of method.
Camus always insisted that there is a profound difference between the quality of an experience as it is lived and the nature of the reflection to which it gives rise. The same experience, of the death of God for example, can generate profoundly different intellectual attitudes. Not only must we evaluate the theories by which life’s sufferings and hopes find expression, but we must locate them within the experiences from which they arise and to which they lead. It is because Camus rejects the notion of the independent reality of thought that he rejected the career of the philosopher, as he understood it, for that of the artist.
The artist is wedded to the concrete; and the life of ideas for Camus is always the life of actual human beings struggling to give meaning and dignity to their lives. The essential value of thinking lies not in a succession of logical thoughts, but in their concrete “truthfulness,” the manner in which they remain truthful to an experience. What is called for are responses to experiential exigencies, which point the way toward the enhancement of concrete possibilities.
No wonder Camus could assert that the sole purpose of The Rebel was to point the way toward a renaissance in human living. I will return to this problem later. Here I simply wish to underline the methodological point in order to understand Camus’s belief that the psychic dynamic sustaining Christian belief has not disappeared. Far from it: Christian experience under
lies the thinking of the West. It is our psychocultural ontology. Culturally speaking, Christianity may be suffering an eclipse, despite the many who still desperately cling to the remnants of traditional faith.
Yet our need for such values remains. It is Camus’s belief that we suffer deeply from their loss— even if we lack reflective appreciation of that fact. He seeks simply to give expression to that appreciation, while trying to chart a pathway out of the desert of meaninglessness and desolation that is its cultural legacy.
This is civilization’s problem. We must know if man, solely by himself, can create his own values, without the help of rationalist thought or of the eternal. I don’t much like the already too popular existential philosophy, and, to be truthful, I believe its conclusions to be false. But it draws its truthfulness from a malaise which pervades an entire epoch from which we do not wish to separate ourselves. We want to think and live in our history. We believe that the truth of this century can only be realized by bringing its drama to completion. If the epoch has suffered from nihilism, we will not obtain the ethic which we need by ignoring nihilism. No, everything is not summed up with negation or absurdity. We know that. But we must first present negation and absurdity because our generation has encountered them and we must come to terms with them (A/I, 110—2).
In short, the absurd is a point of departure, not a conclusion. It is the rock to which we must hold firm if we are to find our way out of our desert of doubts; if we are to avoid deluding ourselves while we develop a reflection that points to a sustaining rebirth. The often unarticulated and yet deeply felt root of this absurd is the experience of the sensual and self-conscious animal demanding order and dignity, rooted in the spontaneous vitality of natural existence. For one who is not excited by the sensual, aesthetic, interpersonal, and sportive qualities of living, no search for the meaning of life will fill the void. Such at least was Camus’s conviction.
The absurd is born of the confrontation of such a sensibility—matured by several thousand years of Judeo-Christian history—with the post-Newtonian, post-Darwinian, post-Freudian, urban-bourgeois world.
The challenge of the absurd concerns the meaning of this life. As psychologists know, the root of depression may lie in object-loss—or perhaps, even more deeply, in the loss of the social and personal setting from which our life draws dramatic sustenance. In the words of Ernest Becker, a human being must feel like “a locus of value in a world of meaning” or suffer the most profound despair. “Neither the confrontation with an obstinate adversity nor the exhaustion arising out of an unequal struggle gives birth to true despair. That comes rather when we no longer know our reasons for fighting, or even if we should fight at all” (A/II, 14—15). The experience of the absurd is precisely such a cosmic object-loss, threatening us with cultural depression.
Here Camus’s response is rejection—almost visceral at first, then slowly gaining in clarity and articulation. Initially, rejection of the meaninglessness that the absurd threatens; then of the intellectual responses that seek to deny or repudiate an experience that so pervades him that he cannot conceive of himself apart from it. The absurd reasoning of The Myth of Sisyphus is not primarily an abstract philosophical analysis. It is a deeply personal attempt to come to terms with his experience while remaining truthful to its givens. This reasoning claims interpersonal, even universal, significance only for those who share the experience. Those who look, to The Myth of Sisyphus to prove that life has meaning and that suicide is not a legitimate response to the absurd are rightly disappointed. Camus does not accomplish that goal. He could not. He did not even try. Rather his essay is a reflection upon his own experience and that of an epoch and a civilization whose drama he shared.1 It is not a demonstration. It is an exploration and an experiment. It is simply a question of honesty and persistence.
Thus the personal origins of revolt for Camus are to be found in his refusal to accept either the nihilistic conclusion that life is valueless or the religio-philosophic conclusion that one must abandon reason and experience for the leap of faith. Camus will reject any value attributed to human life that seems to be imposed on it from without. Of the evidence offered by our senses we can be sure. He will hold to this to the end. What is offered to us that transcends the bounds of experience is at best a hope and a promise, which threatens to make of our experience a desert. On the other hand, can we find in our experience alone the source of a value that can sustain our efforts?
It is here that the pagan joys of Camus’s youth assume an almost mythic dimension, offering the promise of a cultural rebirth: For the first time in two thousand years the body has been shown naked on the beaches. For twenty centuries, man has strived to impose decency on the insolence and simplicity of the Greeks. . . . Today, reaching back over this history, young men sprinting on Mediterranean beaches are rediscovering the magnificent motion of the athletes of Delos (LCE, 82).
They are thus recapturing a dignified innocence and natural vitality, free of Christian guilt. What need here for a transcendent grace to expiate an original sin?
The threat to this revitalized living does not come so much from the experience of cosmic nothingness as from the routine of daily living that sanctifies habit and deadens the senses, often submerging the vital present in an unarticulated hope for a salvific future. Aspirations, Advancement, Progress, Vocation, Morality, Salvation, all our “Later-ons” seek in their insidious way to steal from us our only wealth: the magnificent present. Yes,
the enemy is hope for the future or the after-life—and the life of routine, of normality, that is consecrated to it—grounded in an abstract thinking cut off from the living present. It is the insidious form by which nihilism seeps into ordinary lives.
Habit robs us of the meaning of our lives. The beauty of nature and the community of friendship are subordinated to the judgments of the “spirit of seriousness.” The terrain is prepared for the invasion of alien and destructive forces: for nihilism, in short. It is out of the habitual failure of lucid perception that Meursault, who had instinctively rejected but not yet freed himself from the grasp of such absolutes, enters into complicity with the natural world in the death of another human being, thus destroying the implicit community of human beings confronting their fate. It is out of habitualized boredom that Oran offers itself as the appropriate locus for the invasion of the plague—as prewar France, doing political business as usual in the face of mounting danger, left itself vulnerable to Nazi devastation through an inability to appreciate clearly and grasp in dignity the fraternal human community.
Camus identified bourgeois society, certain of its virtues and their divine sanction, the self-confident and self-centered spirit of seriousness itself, as the very seed-bed of contemporary nihilism—contrary to the views of those commentators who saw Camus as a liberal critic of revolutionary politics.2 By submerging Christian values in market hypocrisy, parroting a formalism of virtue without concrete substance, it has robbed our lives of transcendent significance while offering as replacement the mercantile aspirations of material accumulation. It has deadened sensitivity with crass commercialism, using controlled market allocations to sustain a routinized work ethic with the threat of material scarcity. Increasingly, humans find themselves cut off from nature and set at odds with their fellows by a competitive scheme that destroys their dignity in a world not of their own making. The degradation of work and of comradeship thus joins hands with the mystification of time casting a deadening pall over everyday life.