The search for absolutes being forsworn as a major source of oppressive violations of daily living, a relative and open-ended means of dialogue in part constitutes the end, namely the concrete development of democratically self-defining communities that are the experienceable unities possible for human beings. Democratic community becomes for Camus an ontological concern, and dialogue the essential means. “The democrat, after all, is he who admits
that our adversary may be right, who, therefore, lets him express himself, and who is prepared to reflect upon his arguments” (A/I, 125). What then is this dialogue at the center of Camus’s vision?
To engage in dialogue is to join with another in mutual respect. For I cannot speak to one whom I do not respect. I can only speak at; I cannot talk with. Dialogue, in being dialogic, recognizes the transaction between two “logoi”—two modes of speaking, two ways of being-in-the-world. In such a transaction both parties remain open to learning, to growing, and, to the extent an issue is at stake, to the mutual modification of their initial positions in response to the speech of the other. As an open-ended transaction it bears witness to respect for the possible contributions of The Other and thus to the lack of finality of one’s own position. It involves implicit recognition that one’s own position is only a partial articulation of a more encompassing experience in which The Other has a legitimate—nay, an essential—place. It is not simply a discussion about an issue. It is an active listening to the speech of The Other, an entering into The Other’s world. It thus involves, at a deeper level, a respect for the person of The Other as one who may have a contribution to make, but in any case has a right to take a stand and have a say. It further involves recognition that there is no privileged access to the truth, no path of insight that is in principle inaccessible to The Other. It thus undercuts any claim of a right to suppress the views and oppress the person of The Other. In short, there can be no transcendent legitimation of power in a dialogical encounter. “When parties or men find themselves sufficiently persuaded by their reasons in order to accept the closing of the mouths of their contradictors violently, then democracy no longer exists” (A/I, 225).
Dialogue as a method and a process is thus also at least implicitly a metaphysic of persons that grounds an ethic. It is a commitment to a world of partial truths, multiple angles of vision, and encompassing and open-ended social experiences. To insist upon an absolute truth would be to short-circuit the dialogic process, to lay claim to an insight that transcends the experiential encounter and thus in principle cannot be modified by the speech of The Other. This would necessarily undercut democratic equality and seem to prepare the way for the legitimation of domination.
To reject dialogue is to turn human relations into a struggle for power and prestige.1 Relations between people become competitions between objective powers. Human communities collectively seeking to work out their destinies in a partial and groping manner are replaced by the totalizing demand for absolute vision and a “metaphysical revolution.” The result can only be the destruction of freedom in the name of justice through the imposition of a totalitarian order. Camus observes, “Tolain, the future Communard, wrote: ‘Human beings emancipate themselves only on the basis of natural groups.'” And he goes on later to note that “the first preoccupation of the historical and natural state has been … to crush forever the personal nucleus and communal autonomy” (R, 298). This is the root of Camus’s critique of metaphysical revolutions in the arena of history. “It is a matter … of defining the conditions of a modest political thinking . . . delivered of all messianism, and freed from the nostalgia for a terrestrial paradise” (A/II, 259).
INTERWEAVING ART AND POLITICS
It is not an insignificant fact of Camus’s career that he often felt personally moved and practically obligated to take stands on pressing political issues. A brief consideration of the attitudes and perspectives thus revealed can help us understand the philosophical significance of his work. In politics as in art, Camus always spoke for metaphysical concerns.2
If art and politics are the two major prongs in the constructive offensive of l’ homme revolte, they stand in an interesting relationship with one another. From one angle, art may be seen as an end of living, an activity in which meaning is complete and experience fulfilled, whereas politics is always a means, never an end in itself—the engagement of individuals in the manipulation of objective and intersubjective relations toward the end of achieving human well-being. In the experience of art, meaning is complete; in the experience of politics, it is never so. As poetics was the ideal perfection of history for Aristotle, so art may be seen as die ideal perfection of politics for Camus. In fact, it might even be said that politics is the means that makes possible the experience of art—or, better, of aesthetic experience. Camus certainly suggests as much in his reaction to the reverse view of orthodox Marxists.
Yet the experience of art remains brief and temporary. Most human beings seem to be in need of art, but to have time for it only momentarily or tangen-tially; it is only a limited minority who are able to devote extensive periods of time to it. While art is for most people, therefore, but an occasional and temporary respite from the toils of living, politics bears witness to the continuing struggles with power that theme daily existence. Few of us are ever free of involvement with others and with conflicts of power. Even Thoreau left the society of his compatriots for only a couple of years—and at that, he took books with him. The meanings and values of other times and societies were his companions, not to speak of his regular walks to town. He too lived off the fruits of society. Thus the means, politics, is the continuing reality of our lives, while the end, art, is but the momentary respite from daily toils. .
Furthermore, the artist is usually an individual or a small group, and likewise the respondent. Yet the message of art is unity and reconciliation. Art offers us an image of our potentials; but it can do nothing more toward their actual realization in the only world and the only life we have. This
task of constructing concrete and enduring unities, of institutionalizing an artistic style of life is precisely the goal of politics. Here art is the means and politics the end. In a different sense, however. For whereas art is a function of individual stylization seeking to give expression to isolated ideal styles of life, politics is the conjoint activity of humans coming together in the hope of giving style to their shared life. Thus while each work of art is a unique whole presented to experience in finalized form, the experience itself is an ongoing reality in need of its own unique form, which ideally is the political art work. Thus the quality of the ongoing experience stands as a constant check on the formulations that seek to give it expression, while the formulations themselves stand in need of mutual reevaluation in view of their constantly conflicting ideals.
If art therefore speaks ideally for a certain quality of human experience, its goal is an abstraction apart from the practical steps required for its realization; and these steps constitute the core of politics. Ideally, art and politics, ends and means, ought to come together in a coherent whole; but this remains a vague vision whose use is the manner in which it may aid in giving direction to the movement of the present. In this practical movement toward the achievement of reconciliation art can only offer its insights; it remains for politics to strive intersubjectively to give it form and substance. As the later experiences of artists provide a constant critique of their earlier expressions, so the conflicting perspectives offered by the members of society are the continual sources of an ongoing collective reevaluation that constitutes the dialogic movement of community experience.
THE CENTURY OF FEAR
“Of course, the twentieth century has not invented hatred,” noted Camus in 1951. “But it cultivates a particular variety, dispassionate hatred, wedded to mathematics and large numbers. The difference between the massacre of innocents and our settling of accounts is a difference in scale. Do you know that in 25 years, from 1922 to 1947, 70 million Europeans, men, women, and children, have been uprooted, deported, or killed? That is what has become of the land of humanism which, despite all protests, we must continue to call ignoble Europe” (A/II, 33).
It was this “ignoble Europe” in which he lived, against which he struggled, and to which he referred in his Nobel Prize speech of 1957 when he suggested that, while other generations had thought their task was to build a new world, this generation is more modest: It sees its task as simply to save the world it has.