The dilemma of the Church is, therefore, quite instructive for this discussion of dialogue. It places in clear relief the contrasting positions that Camus seems to have had in mind when, in his speech to the Dominican monks in 1946, he asserted that “between the forces of terror and the forces of dialogue, a great unequal battle has begun” (RRD, 55). The equation seems to be between the forces of terror and a political commitment to a definitive metaphysical Truth. Ideology, as we have seen, involves just such a commitment. And Camus sees the question quite directly: If we claim possession of an absolute, indubitable Truth; and if we cannot persuade the erring other of our Truth; then we must insist that we have some special and privileged insight into that Truth (such as revelation, intuition, or scriptures); and that this source yields special privileges. If we insist upon the right of that Truth to prevail politically, we are then compelled to deny the value of any “erring,” contrary opinion insofar as it seeks to assert itself. Ultimately we are led to the denial of the value of the bearer of such an opinion. The destruction of dialogue becomes complete in the destruction of the person.
In sum, the claim to the possession of Truth, accompanied as it must be whenever Truth alone matters by the claim of a special or privileged insight or access, in the political, public, or intersubjective situation is ultimately the claim to special rights and privileges. It is the claim to superiority and, if necessary, the right of suppression. It involves the destruction of any prior commitment to the ultimacy of the person of the other. Through the transformation of priorities, it leads to the destruction of the possibility of dialogue. When pushed to its logical extreme, without regard to the specific content of the theoretical position at issue, such a claim must result, at least implicitly, in the transformation of others into impediments, objects of manipulation, and thus in the reduction of human relations to a state of incipient war, the final arbiter of decision being nothing other than force, implied or exerted.
Those who, as Camus noted, were sure of themselves because they represented an ideology were in fact abstractions, individuals who identified people not as that specific complex of qualities and tendencies concretely encountered, but simply as the bearers of this or that view on the important questions. The encounter with others therefore cannot take place as between particular persons but only as between those for or against. Since only our theoretical positions matter, those with whom we disagree clearly have lost their value.3
The claim is the following. The possibility of dialogue is destroyed as soon as a claim to the Truth, and to the privileged insight upon which it must ultimately be based, insists upon public recognition. Any metaphysical claim that Truth is the only basis for public policy would seem to be implicitly just such a tyrannical act. The abstract conclusion having replaced the concrete inquirer as the ultimate value, the latter is logically (and eventually, no doubt, concretely) reduced to an appendage whose opinion per se is of no value: It is transitional and purely instrumental, at best; dispensable, at worst. A human situation—the encounter of persons in search of an ever corrigible way of living together—is thus replaced by confrontation in which one attempts to make Truth, privately arrived at, hold public sway by brute force. The dialectally inevitable result of such an insistence should be clear. The concept of constructive opposition has here been outlived. No wonder that an individual so possessed is to be feared.
It would be difficult to make this point more forcefully than does Camus:
There is no life without dialogue. And over the largest part of the world dialogue today has been replaced by polemic. . . . But what is the mechanism of polemic? It involves considering the adversary as an enemy, consequently in simplifying him and in refusing to see him. I am no longer aware of the character or the appearance of the man whom I insult, nor whether he happens to smile, and in what manner. Having become three-fourths blind thanks to polemic, we no longer live among men, but in a world of silhouettes.
There is no life without persuasion. And contemporary history only knows intimidation. Men exist and only can exist on the idea that they have something in common in terms of which they can always renew themselves. But we have discovered this: there are men that one does not persuade. It was and it remains impossible for a victim of a concentration camp to explain to those who degrade him that they should not do it. The fact is that these latter no longer represent men, but rather an idea carried to the extreme limits by the most inflexible of wills. He who wishes to dominate is deaf. Faced with him, one must fight or die. That is why men today live in terror (A/I, 252-9).
RECONSTITUTING DIALOGUE
Faced with this analysis of the implicit terror of the contemporary situation, a result of the increasing breakdown of dialogue, the question inevitably arises: How may dialogue be reconstituted as a modus vivendi of sociopolitical life, “in order at least to make the future possible”? (A/I, 175). Camus addressed this question in the most trying of circumstances: the Algerian civil war. Neither the actual failure of his appeals nor the criticism leveled at aspects of his specific political stance need diminish the theoretical significance of his approach to what might be called the transcendental preconditions for the reconstruction of a dialogic community. These failures might be taken, rather, as suggesting that the situation was out of control—
or at least beyond the possibility of a dialogic resolution. Certainly nothing in Camus’s thought suggests he believed that cannot happen. That it has in fact happened quite often in the twentieth century is precisely the problem of terror to which Camus so often refers. The practical failure of his approach may be taken as evidence for one of two things: 1. His failure to recognize that the situation had proceeded well beyond the range of discussion: that there was no available common ground.
2. His lack of a political strategy to deal with structural conflicts between opposed groups. This strategic weakness points toward Camus’s deeper failure to appreciate adequately the role of historically developed institutional structures in ordering political realities. This failure accounts in large part for the abstractness with which his treatment of political problems is often plagued.
A consideration of this situation in which dialogue has broken down may enable us to see more clearly those preliminary steps that Camus saw as basic to its reinstitution. However necessary they may be as preconditions, though, Camus never assumed that their achievement was ever more than problematic. That would require courage and chance.4
Letter to an Algerian Militant
In the Algerian situation, according to Camus, each side was convinced of the tightness of its cause and the evil of the other’s. They were “pitted against each other, condemned to inflicting the greatest possible pain on
each other, inexpiably” (RRD, 94). Inflexible positions at grips with each other constituted a vicious dialectic. Hegel could not have expressed it more powerfully: “Forced to live together and incapable of uniting, they decide at least to die together. And because each of them by his excesses strengthens the motives and excesses of the other, the storm of death that has struck our country can only increase to the point of general destruction” (RRD, 95).
In this extreme situation, reminiscent of the cry of Sisyphus and suggesting the nature of the transition from the individual to the social, the French Camus writes to the Algerian Kessous: If anyone dares to put his whole heart and all his suffering into such a cry, he will hear nothing but laughter and a louder clash of arms. And yet we must cry it aloud, and, since you plan to do so, I cannot let you do such a mad and necessary thing without telling you that I stand beside you like a brother (RRD, 95).
Whenever a relationship between individuals is reduced to a combat between exclusive Truths, dialogue is replaced by force. With the destruction of the felt bonds that unite us, we exist in isolation or in incipient antagonism. The human concern must be to limit the scope of the ideological, to circumscribe the claim to Truth by the claim to the rights of humans in that which we share as humans. Of course, to circumscribe truth is to make its meaning relative to particular contexts, purposes, and limits of applicability.5 “The essential thing is to leave room, however limited it may be, for the exchange of views [la place du dialogue] which is still possible” (RRD, 95).
The detente involves easing the grip of an exclusive ideology upon the individuals concerned, establishing a common ground of meaning that would make dialogue possible and constitute the initial step toward the construction of community.