This is the ontological root and the metaphysical frame for the emergence of totalitarian oppression, whether of the right or of the left. At least this seems to be Camus’s claim. He has nothing positive to say about the possibility that such messianic visions may be needed to mobilize oppressed masses into action. The relation of these ideologues of totality to those who are not of their mind is thus that of an “apocalyptic monologue”; having denied in advance the possibilities of legitimate challenges to their vision, they are deaf both to natural experience and to the meaningful responses of others.
THE PATHOLOGY OF LONELINESS
Clamence has revealed only one form in which this ontological demand for unity may become the ideological demand for totality: the guilt-ridden ex-Christian bourgeois tempted by the offer of personal salvation through attachment to a new church. The experiential roots of that totalizing demand are felt by Camus to be essential to an appreciation of our historical excesses. It is not only necessary to catalogue those excesses and to reveal the ideological madness that projected them as desirable policy, thus legitimating murder; it is absolutely essential to reveal the experiential roots of that ideological frenzy before we can chart a possible pathway for a contemporary renaissance. The search for the roots of our modern pathology of the intellect is
simultaneously the struggle for a practical cure. And the path to that cure begins where the pathology first found expression: in the development of the rebel’s initial outrage.
Committing himself to justifying the desire for happiness against the claims of god and history, Camus grounds the rebel’s confrontation with The Other in the commonality of our nature and condition that roots our felt needs. Since we are bound together in fact, what is called for is a strategy that transforms this factual commonality into a mutually sustaining recognition of value. This is the promise to which revolt bears witness—and the source of the value to which it makes claim. Both nature and others are essential to me; they are constituents of my experience and of the possibility of a dignified happiness. I cannot live, I cannot even conceive of myself, without them. But as they are essential to me and share the same conditions of existence as I do, so I am essential to them. We are both constituents of the being and the possibility of The Other, as well as being limits to The Other’s activity.
When, in The Plague, Rieux suggests that Rambert is right in struggling to be happy, Rambert responds that one cannot be happy alone. Camus suggests not simply that we have a moral responsibility not to buy our happiness at the expense of others; but that the very constitution of happiness itself involves the happiness of others. The self that I am is a particular expression of the quality of social experience. Abstract morality ultimately must be grounded in the metaphysics and ontology of community. The quality of my community is an essential ingredient of the quality of my experience. Our shared condition and our shared destiny—joined to the fact of our felt need for dignity—not only set the practical boundaries of possible meaningfulness but, in and through the experience of revolt, offer the promise of a value. The value suggested by revolt is the transformation of this prereflective community of fact into a program for the concrete and always partial realization of a reflectively constituted and consciously appreciated developing communal experience. Here the ontological hunger (which roots the metaphysical demand) can find actual satisfaction by bringing, individuals out of their solitary confrontation with destiny to a communal sharing that is the concrete experience of unity. The quality of the experience is transformed, the sense of impotence at least partially assuaged, by the realized social power to create within limits our own future. The range of our sensibility and the quality of our satisfaction are thus expanded and enriched. While the experience of community cannot answer to any absolutistic demands, it may thus mitigate and even remove the reflective demands by healing the experiential wounds rooted in a deep-seated existential isolation. This is the ground of the implied metaphysic of TheMyth.
In sum, the experience of the absurd is the experience of isolation and impotence. Its theoretical source for us may lie in the breakdown of absolutistic belief systems—ultimately the death of the Christian God and the end of His cosmic drama. But, as the example of Clamence is meant to suggest, its deeper personal roots lie in the experience of isolated individuals who, in feeling cut off from others, even when surrounded by them, are forced to face their destiny alone, and bear the burden of their freedom without communal or cosmic support. For such people, for whom others are at best indifferent, and at worst continually threatening, it is probably true that “Hell is other people.” Clearly the weight of such “freedom” is unbearable. If suicide does not draw them, or offers only a temptation—as if to prove that they scorn their destiny and are above the judgment of others—then the dialectical alternative of mastery and servitude is the likely experiential ground wherein to take their stand against an implacable fate. The universal servitude of Clamence or the mass graves and total destruction of the Nazis become the appropriate final consequences of this pathological expression of the existential need for a unity betrayed.
WAGING A MORE EFFECTIVE BATTLE
All this is not to say that the encounter with the absurd has failed to reveal its profound truths. But the encounter is impotent to provide a practical and viable program. To build a program upon the absurd is impossible. At this level, Caligula and Clamence are as legitimate as Cherea or Meursault. The struggle for unity at the level of the absurd is blind and directionless.
Camus implicitly recognized this when he said of the “Letters to a German Friend” that their purpose “was to throw some light on the blind battle we were waging and thereby to make our battle more effective” (RRD, ix).
The light to be shed was in terms of those concrete values to which revolt could lay claim—or at least offered a promise—even in the face of the truth of the absurd. There the struggle was to point a direction and articulate some essential preconditions for die renaissance in human living ih.ii Camus considered both die promise ol revoli and the only kingdom
open to humans in this post-Christian era. Humans must reject the vain lure of absolute Utopias for the relative Utopias that are not assured and can never be final. “The dawn of truth has not been promised to us. . . . But truth remains to be constituted, like love, like intelligence. In effect, nothing is given or promised; but everything is possible for those who are willing to struggle and to risk. We must grasp this wager at this time, in which we are being smothered by lies” (A/II, 30).
The wager of our generation is for the relative values that revolt promises and experience may offer. Truth is not given to us. Nor is it a matter of transcendent insight to be imposed upon experience from without. Life is not simply plastic to the demands of Reason. Truth is relative, emerging out of experience in which we risk ourselves in a struggle. Truths emerge as experience takes a shape and its movement a direction that responds—at best momentarily, never once and for all—to the demands of an integral and aesthetic ordering of natural energies.
Truth, love, intelligence can thus be won in the relative, for the moment, only through a concrete risking in which humans, recognizing their common destiny, commit themselves to the construction of an experiential sharing. Only the construction of community can draw us out of the metaphysical isolation to which the experience of the absurd bears witness. Only here can the exigence ontologique find concrete satisfaction.
It is toward the possibility of community that Camus’s thought incessantly turns. And it is the preconditions of such a kingdom that he is so concerned to elaborate and defend. This is the meaning of his call for une civilisation du dialogue. If the concern for community is not to be but another ideological cover for an oppressive praxis; if it is to have any chance of giving birth to that renaissance without which we are condemned to wander through life in a desert of desiccated souls and desecrated nature, then it must be a mode of social living that places dialogue at the center. It is not what people will talk about that is at issue here. That is for them to decide within the developing processes of communal life. The concern rather is for means, which, however, constitute qualitatively and methodologically an essential ingredient in the end to be achieved. The notion of dialogue suggested here is the notion of a democratically developing, open-ended, communal process in which the means are inextricably wedded to an end that is always a partial and relative achievement of experienced values.