In view of the scale of the calamities of modern times, Camus’s quite personal concern with the justification of artistic activity is certainly understandable:
I derived comfort from the vague impression that writing was an honor today because the act involved obligations, obligations to more than just writing. It obligated me in particular, such as I was and according to my strengths, to bear, along with those who were living the same history, the pain and the hope we shared (Nobel Prize Address, E, 1072-3).
Camus felt quite strongly that the artist has a social obligation: either because in our age of totalization the artist is forced to take a stand—”Today’s tyrannies have been perfected: they no longer allow either silence or neutrality” (A/II, 174)—or because of “a sort of quasi-organic intolerance that one either experiences or does not experience” (A/II, 180). Perhaps still more to the point: “As artists perhaps we do not have to intervene in the affairs of the century. But as men, we do” (A/II, 179).
The needs of freedom, the very ground of creativity, place the artist in solidarity with those who are enslaved and suffering. The artist’s task actually reveals the basic needs of experience in concentrated form: “to finally give a form to the justice and liberty which we need” (A/II, 171). It arises out of experience in view of what it rejects, in order to transform it; and it returns to that experience in view of what it accepts, in order to renew it.
Camus calls the artist the witness of liberty, who, in bearing witness to the common suffering of humans in view of their ideal potentials, offers to them an image of their dignity that ennobles the spirit in its common struggles against a recalcitrant, indifferent universe. Artists must speak for solidarity; their aim is to reconcile; and, at their best, they suggest that human community in the experience of which life may be fulfilled. “But if [the artist] can tell himself that finally, as a result of his long effort, he has eased or decreased the various forms of bondage weighing upon men, then in a sense he is justified” (RRD, 184).13
Thus art “cannot serve . . . anything but men’s suffering or their liberty. . . . Liberty alone draws men from their isolation; but slavery dominates a crowd of solitudes. And art, by virtue of that free essence . .. unites, whereas tyranny separates (RRD, 205, 206).
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Camus gave a beautiful and moving testament to his conception of the role of the artist in modern society.
Personally, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed this art above everything else. On the contrary, if it is so necessary to me, that is because it separates me from no one and enables me, such as I am, to live on the same level as everyone else. For me, art is not a solitary enjoyment. It is a means of moving the greatest number of men by offering them a privileged image of the suffering and the joy which they have in common (E, 1071).
As an expression of the human effort to articulate an experience that will reconcile us to life, art offers the promise of that living transcendence that is found in the experiences of dialogue and love, as well as in vital participation in the activity of a concrete community. Camus suggests the importance such communal activity had for him when he observes, “On a theatrical stage … I am natural, that is to say that I neither think nor fail to think about being natural. I only share with my co-workers the worries and the joys of a common action. That, I believe, is what is called ‘camaraderie,’ which has been one of the great joys of my life. . . . For me, in any case, the theater offered to me the community which I needed. . . . Here, we are all bound to one another without each one hardly ceasing to be free: isn’t that a good formula for the future society?” (TRN, 1721-2).
Here we may have the key to Camus’s understanding of the only possible salvation open to humans: participation in a lived community. Creative activity, such as acting in a drama, is a valued experience of which the work of art at its height—akin to revolt in The Rebel—offers a promise. But art only offers its unity to human experience—and only occasionally and briefly.
The problem facing human living is to structure experience so as to make it more sure and enduring. This is precisely the task of politics, which Camus approaches with a vague ideal that can negate but not prescribe; an integrity that insists upon facing the moral dimension of political issues; and a sensibility and an attitude (not really a methodology) rooted in the notion of dialogue. It is to a consideration of the meaning of dialogue and some of the prerequisites of its institutionalization, that we now turn.
13
Searching for a Style of Life
There are two kinds of revolt—one that conceals a wish for servitude, and another that seeks desperately for a free order (R, 323).
A STRATEGIC OVERVIEW
“Conquerors on the Right or the Left do not seek unity, which is primarily the harmony of opposites,” comments Camus, “but totality, which is the crushing of differences” (A/I, 263). The demand for totality springs from the human need that life be meaningful, finding reflective expression in the metaphysical demand to give a complete and definitive order to the world. Only if the cosmic drama in terms of which we live our lives can be found to have—or can be given—ultimate significance, can mat hunger be satisfied. If such significance cannot be grounded beyond history, then perhaps it may be found as the meaning of the historical drama itself. This too could assuage the metaphysical hunger.
Beyond history or through history, the same demand is at stake. But if humans have an ontological need to experience their actions as meaningful and themselves as worthy of respect, it is not essential that this need be met through an absolutization of the meaning of the process. The root need is experiential, not logical. The conceptual elaboration is derivative, not primary, involving the reflective organization of experience, not its immediate constitution. Camus understood this, at least in a preliminary way, at the time of his dissertation.
The givens of nature, human and nonhuman, personal and social, must be respected if conceptualization is not to be self-destructive. The elaboration of system is an illicit development of the ontological need for a dramatic ordering of our efforts, which in its inevitably destructive consequences bears witness to an experiential pathology. By making the value of experience derivative to its formulation, the demand for totality reduces the actual community of humans facing their destiny to the level of ideological combat— thus threatening to cut off any renaissance at its existential roots.
Those who cannot find even potentially a unity integral to their immedi-
ate experience, which may well be the common root of the sense of sin and guilt, are likely to compensate by developing an apocalyptic vision of a condition in which present alienations will be overcome and concrete happiness assured. By making the meaning of life depend upon the articulation of a conceptual system—a personal Utopia—we not only testify to a root personal diremption, but also commit ourselves to a type of practical action that denies to the concrete the possibility of being the source of directive insights as well as the locus of consummatory consequences. Most likely such a denial is experientially rooted in the sense of its practical impossibility. If Clamence (or Caligula, Sade, Stepan, or Lenin) reveals such a dialectic in which the experience of self-alienation roots an oppressive search for totality, Meursault (or Scipio, Cherea, Rieux, or D’Arrast) may be taken to suggest an experiential location from which unity may emerge. Totality for Camus is simply the ontological need for unity reflectively transformed into a destructive-oppressive metaphysical demand for a transexperiential salvation. By unity, on the other hand, Camus means the achievement of an integral meaningfulness, however partial, which is an essential constituent of happiness for a reflective animal.
Revolutionaries may find happiness in and through their total commitment. This ought not to be denied; even though that happiness is not likely to include appreciation of the simple joys of nature and the body. But that revolutionary commitment is likely to exact a heavy toll of hierarchical domination and oppression upon the recalcitrant many insofar as it implicitly involves an attachment to a specific brand of truth—which thus legitimates the suppression of counterrevolutionary activity. It is only when our experience is torn from within or totally impeded from without, when we cannot find a way back into that experience in terms of its integral possibilities for generating insights and practices that may prove concretely satisfying, that we are likely to give ourselves over to the ultimately vain and destructive attempt to unify the entire world in accordance with a theory. We are then embarked upon the destructive path of the logical elaboration of an ideology and the practical imposition of that ideology, no doubt personally experienced as the necessary condition of meaningfulness and sincerely believed to be legitimately imposed upon others as essential to their salvation.