To differ is one
thing, to exclude is another. It is the moment of exclusion that closes off time and polarizes discussion, reducing the dialogue between individuals to ideological warfare and a struggle for power.
To exclude is to leap out of the relative as far as truth is concerned and to claim a source of insight that transcends the human community. It is only within the limits of that community, however, that ethics is a living matter. The entire discussion of politics takes place from this perspective. Ideology means for Camus an absolute commitment to fixed categories. Attachment to such categories involves a leap out of the present and the meaning it continually offers. The denial of freedom and novelty is implicit in such an attachment because Truth, in transcending the present, transcends the movement and continual novelty that time offers. Thus it implicitly affirms that no present and no future can yield any meaning that would significantly modify the Truth to which the ideology makes claim. Time, the meaning it embodies, and the evaluative standpoint it implies are thus transcended as the fount and source of values. Ideologists are thus freed to do with others as they wish in view of their insight.
In this context, the so-called historical truth of Hegel or Marx is no different from the ahistorical truth of St. Thomas. In the last analysis, the movement of time is no more fundamental in the one than in the other. What is fundamental is the form of time. Whether dialectical or not, it is closed, and thus experientally tyrannical. Perhaps the key difference between Hegel, Lenin, and possibly Marx, on the one hand, and Dewey and the pragmatists, on the other—and the reason why Camus in many ways is more American and closely allied to the pragmatists than to classical European thought— resides in their relations to time. For Hegel, Lenin, and Marx time seems closed, the laws of movement fixed, the available resources limited; while for Dewey and the pragmatists the reverse holds, novelty being an ever present possibility. Thus categories are loosened and relativized, possibility is taken seriously, and dialogue can replace polemic on a metaphysical level.
With respect to historical tasks Chiaromonte reports Camus as saying, “If the problem of mankind boils down to a historical task, whatever that task may be, man is no longer anything but the raw material of history, and one can do with him what one wishes” (quoted in Parker, 104) .8
The question of unity and totality, to which Camus often makes reference, is but another way of posing this problem. Unity, for Camus—”before everything the harmony of contraries” (A/I, 263)—is the experience of shared meanings achieved through the conjoint endeavors of individual centers of value. A social structure that can facilitate such experience is the aim of his politics. On the other hand, totality, which is “the obliteration of differ ences” (A/I, 263), refers to any attempt to impose homogeneity of values or goals on individuals in view of a unique source of value that transcends those individuals. Such a source is usually the product of a special or original insight or revelation formulated in an abstract conception and logicized into an ideology.
OF LIBERTY AND JUSTICE
“When one wishes to unify the world in the name of a theory, there is no other way . . . than to cut the very roots which attach man to life and to nature” (A/I, 269).9 “In simplest terms,”
observes Parker in discussing Camus’s conception of politics, he “thought that the chief aim of political and governmental organization was ‘to render freedom and justice compatible'” (Parker, 90).10 If Camus did not often define these terms, his meaning was usually clear.11 Meursault, in jail, complains to the jailer about his sexual privation. The jailer responds, “It’s precisely for this reason that you were put in prison.” “What do you mean?” asks Meursault. “Well, your freedom is being taken away, that’s all” (STR, 63).
However admirably direct, of course, this is but one formulation, with a clearly defined and limited purpose. Furthermore, Camus usually formulated the problem on the social rather than the individual level suggested by these remarks. He is never primarily a motivational psychologist. Liberty or freedom and justice or necessity—all are matters of the individual and his social and natural world, not problems of psychology.
The dialectical relation between liberty and justice and its bearing on ideology is broached in The Rebel:
Absolute freedom is the right of the strongest to dominate. Therefore it prolongs the conflicts that profit by injustice. Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction; therefore it destroys freedom. The revolution to achieve justice, through freedom, ends by aligning them against each other (R, 287—8).
An important footnote clarifies this issue. In referring to his teacher and master, Jean Grenier, Camus writes, “In his Entretiens Sur le Bon Usage de la Liberte (Conversations on the Correct Use of Freedom) . . . [he] lays the foundation for an argument that can be summed up thus: Absolute freedom is the destruction of all value; absolute value suppresses all freedom” (R, 288).12 A further note: “Likewise Palente: ‘If there is a single and universal truth, freedom has no reason for existing.'” Camus continually insists upon the necessity of relativizing the terms of the discussion. In so doing, he reaffirms his view that rebellion and revolution are opposed only when they are absolutized. “There is, it would seem, an irreducible opposition between the
movement of revolt and the achievements of revolution. But these antinomies exist only in the absolute. They presuppose a world and a mode of thought without mediations” (R, 288; L’HR, 356).
Since absolutized, each excludes the other, they must only be defined concretely and in relation to one another. “Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice negates freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limit in each other” (R, 291; L’HR, 359).
A brief definition of liberty and justice was offered by Camus in Combat:
We shall call. . . justice a social state in which each individual receives every opportunity at the start and in which the country’s majority is not held in abject conditions by a privileged minority. And we shall call liberty a political climate in which the human being is respected for what he is as well as for what he expresses (Combat, 10/1/44, my italics; TRN, 1527-8).13
This is clearly not an exhaustive definition, nor was it so intended—Camus would probably not have even tried to offer one—and it could probably be shown to have been influenced by certain political conditions then obtaining. Yet it is a revealing statement. With respect to justice two points bear special emphasis: (1) Justice is defined not in terms of fact but of
opportunity. (2) It is contrasted with a structure based on privilege, which is the social equivalent of the epistemological claim to a unique source of, or privileged insight into, Truth. Camus is not, of course, speaking for a simple egalitarianism; all our remarks on unity and the value of difference should counteract such an interpretation. He rather speaks of “two aristocracies, that of work and that of intelligence” (A/II, 168—9). These, however, are open aristocracies, based upon the creative ability to assume and develop the roles required. The only privileges are those that accrue as a result of the appropriate activity. Justice is thus defined in terms of opportunity, that is, fundamentally in terms of freedom; and “Freedom [la liberte] is nothing else but a chance to be better” (RRD, 76).
Liberty, on the other hand, is defined in terms of the being of individuals, not primarily in terms of any specific thing they have said or done. Individuals can give value to a social system; and we are always more than any particular expression of ours. We are the possibility of growth and development, of responding in a novel way to novelty, and of endowing life with new meaning. Such is our nature, as Camus sees us; and it is this that must be protected. “When one knows of what man is capable, for better or for worse, one also knows that it is not the human being himself who must be protected but the possibilities he has within him—in other words, his freedom” (RRD, 75).
While justice is defined ultimately in terms of opportunity and liberty,
liberty must finally be so defined in terms of individuals that it is self-defining in terms of others, that is, in terms of justice. But such definitions can never be adequately given before the fact. Camus had written less than two months prior to the previous remark (Combat, 8/21/44), “We wish to realize without delay a true people’s and worker’s democracy … a constitution under which freedom and justice recover all their guarantees, profound structural reforms without which a policy of freedom is a mockery” (quoted in Parker, p. 74, my italics). He was interested only in the concrete reconciliation of freedom and justice, which depended upon the achievement of a jointly accepted policy that would progressively institutionalize the steps required. To define these concepts and then (deductively) achieve their union through an analysis of the meaning of the terms did not interest him.