What is fundamental is not any specific political society or set of laws by which it may be given constitutional embodiment. These structures are no more fundamental than the concepts we use to regulate our lives. The actual basis of such arrangements is to be found in the experience of community, which is essentially the experience of unity—that is, the felt communality of actions ground in common practices and common perceptions of meaning. Here we have the core notion of community: shared meaningful activity through time. Its method of communication through reciprocal approximations and mutual development of meanings in response to novel experiences is what is meant by dialogue. “What must be fought today is fear and silence, and with them, the separation of minds and souls which accompanies them. What must be defended is dialogue and universal communication among men. Servitude, injustice, lies are the curses [les fleaux] which break this
communication and prevent dialogue” (A/I, 177).
Speaking of the principles revealed by revolt, which provide the basis for dialogue, Camus sums up much of our thesis in these words: Nothing justifies the assertion that these principles have existed eternally: it is of no use to declare that they will one day exist. But they do exist, in the very period in which we exist. With us, and throughout history, they denv servitude, falsehood, and terror.
There is, in fact, nothing in common between a master and a slave; it is impossible to speak and communicate with a person who has been reduced to servitude. Instead of the implicit and untrammeled dialogue through which we come to recognize our similarity and consecrate our destiny, servitude gives sway to the most terrible of silences. If injustice is bad for the rebel, it is not because it contradicts an eternal idea of justice, but because it perpetuates the silent hostility that separates the oppressor from the oppressed. It kills the small part of existence that can be realized on this earth through the mutual understanding of men. . . . The mutual understanding and communication discovered by rebellion can survive only in free exchange of conversation. Every ambiguity, every misunderstanding, leads to death; clear language and simple words are the only salvation from this death. The climax of every tragedy lies in the deafness of its heroes. Plato is right and not Moses and Nietzsche. Dialogue on the level of mankind is less costly than the gospel preached by totalitarian regimes in the form of a monologue dictated from the top of a lonely mountain. On the stage as in reality, the monologue precedes death (R, 283-4).
Dialogue grounded in truth and integrity is all that can protect us from the despair of nihilism in a world that offers no meaning beyond what we can conjointly construct. “We have a right to think,” Camus wrote a year or two before he died, “that truth with a capital letter is relative. But facts are facts. And whoever says that the sky is blue when it is grey is prostituting words and preparing the way for tyranny” (quoted in Carruth, 180).
This is not so much an implied theory of knowledge as a statement of the moral role of intelligence. The question of Truth becomes derivative; the importance of truths for experience, fundamental. Intelligence must bear witness to the facts of existence. It must disintoxicate politics, as an essential condition for maintaining dialogue.
By democracy is meant the attempt to institutionalize the principles of dialogue in order to contribute to dialogue’s continual possibility. Democracy therefore involves recognition of the limited scope to be given to any human construction with respect to its role of facilitating meaningful interactions. Ultimately, of course, dialogue cannot be institutionalized; and the experience of community is beyond any framework. It serves rather as the point of critical reference for all frameworks.
Democracy thus finds its limit and its method in the expression of others. “It is a form of society in which the law is above the governors, this law being the expression of the will of all as represented by a legislative body”
(A/I, 164). This law that the joint will of all has given rise to is self-consciously intersubjective in nature, not objectively founded. It is above the governors but not above the people. It is not a mechanism of judgment and retribution, but of organization and direction; never an end, but a means of constructing a unified experience. As an expression of the will of all it must find its limit in the will of each; and it must ultimately be based on, and grow out of, the concrete exigencies of the felt human situation.
This emphasis upon theory and structures as emergents from the natural conditions of existence, which Camus so often insisted on, explains his support of le syndicalisme revolutionnaire.
It was truly revolutionary, not simply efficacious, because it
began from the concrete base, the occupation, which is to the economic order what the commune is to the political, namely the living cell upon which the organism develops itself, while caesarian revolution begins with doctrine and seeks its realization by force. … It cannot, by its very way of operating, avoid terror and doing violence to the real. In spite of its pretensions, it begins with the absolute in order to reshape reality. Rebellion, inversely, relies on the real in order to wend its way in a perpetual struggle toward the truth. The first tries to realize itself by working from top to bottom, the second from bottom to top. … If [rebellion] wants a revolution, it wants it on behalf of life, not against it. That is why it primarily relies on the most concrete realities, the occupation, the village, in which the being, the living heart of things and of men, can be found (R, 298; L’HR, 367-8).
An important footnote continues this reasoning: “The first concern of the historical and rational state has been … to crush forever the occupational cell and communal autonomy.”
Finally, and most simply, “human beings only emancipate themselves in the midst of natural groups” (R, 298; L’HR, 368). It is on this basis alone that the individual can achieve the felt intersubjective meaning by opening out to others in the conjoint endeavors that constitute the moment of community. Dialogue, the social formulation of the doctrine of open inquiry, is the movement toward and continuing support of the community that Camus sees as our only possible salvation. It would be realized in a developing experience in which, at least for the moment, meaning is felt as sufficient. Totality, demanding unity in the name of a preconceived and definitive theory, can coerce external agreement; but actual community depends for its achievement on a word whose meaning will develop in the interaction of the speaker with those to whom it is offered. “If revolutions can succeed by violence, they can only maintain themselves through dialogue” (A/I, 267).
Only in dialogue and the felt community it establishes can the passionate human quest for a unity of experience be at least partially assuaged.
14
Concluding in a Dialogic Mode
The kingdom which is in question . . . coincides with a certain tree and open life that must be found in order for us finally to be reborn. Exile, in its manner, will show us the path to that kingdom only if we know how to refuse both servitude and possessiveness (E, 2031).
thesis: in the spirit of camus
In Camus’s last completed original work, Exile and the Kingdom, Daru, the main character in the short story “The Guest,” reflecting on his life, offers a symbolic commentary on human destiny: He had requested a post in the little town at the base of the foothills separating the upper plateaus from the desert. There, rocky walls, green and black to the north, pink and lavender to the south, marked the frontier of eternal summer. He had been named to a post farther north, on the plateau itself. In the beginning, the solitude and the silence had been hard for him on these wastelands peopled only by stones.
Occasionally, furrows suggested cultivation, but they had been dug to uncover a certain kind of stone good for building. The only plowing here was to harvest rocks. Elsewhere a thin layer of soil accumulated in
the hollows would be scraped out to enrich paltry village gardens. This was the way it was: bare rock covered three quarters of the region. Towns sprang up, flourished, then disappeared; men came by, loved one another or fought bitterly, then died. No one in this desert, neither he nor his guest, mattered. And yet, outside this desert neither of them, Daru knew, could have really lived (EK, 97-8).
Here are the essentials of the Camusian worlaV Individuals, dreaming of an “eternal summer,” find themselves in a “wasteland,” with only “a thin layer of soil … to enrich paltry village gardens.” The experience of solitude and silence, the fact that ultimately “no one in this desert, neither he nor his guest, mattered,” this “metaphysical isolation” is the source of the absurd, reflection upon the consequences of which themed Camus’s thought. The absurd testified to the need for a unity in which experience would be felt as