complete at the same time that it revealed the essential incompleteness of that experience. This constitutes the root problematic in Camus’s thought. The terms of the confrontation are a natural world opaque to human meanings and a person who cannot exist without such meanings. Without denying these terms, and thus remaining true to the fundamental exigencies of his— and, I would suggest, our—experience, Camus seeks a concrete way in which this human need for unity can be assuaged.
In this struggle, Camus is echoing the most profound need of a culture that has lost its roots in the eternal and not yet found them in the finite. Taking seriously both the individual’s need—
as expressed by the whole of Western culture—for a unity in which life would find its raison d’etre, and the experience of recent history, which, to say the least, has made any transcendent justification of life seem implausible, Camus has sought to re-pose the fundamental question. In facing the absurdity of this situation he has insisted only that integrity is the precondition of the possibility of any viable “solution.” That integrity of human beings to their condition is what he means by lucidity, the insistence on squarely facing the consequences of the absurd confrontation that is our lives.
From a lucid encounter with the absurd Camus finds revealed certain boundary conditions that delimit the scope of the humanly possible. He also concludes that nihilism is not a necessary logical consequence of the experience of absurdity but of the dead end to which certain metaphysical presuppositions of Western thought have led. As long as the meaningfulness of life depends upon its being seen as having transcendent significance, nihilism is the inevitable result with respect to the value of concrete experience. But the transformation of our need for unity from transcendent theory to the practical struggles to achieve lived unities within the flow of temporal experience offers, according to Camus, real possibilities for the rejuvenation of that experience. The struggle to achieve such meaning is precisely what Camus finds at the origin of revolt. And it is revolt that is the crucial constructive-force in Camus’s world.
Revolt gives expression to the need for unity in experience. It is a manifestation of our determination to give to life a style and a movement that, at a minimum, will preserve human dignity in the face of indifference, repression, or destruction. Even more, revolt may open to us a realm of concrete possibilities in which that experience can achieve a fulfillment consonant with its richest insights. The development of such revolts in the service of community is the key to Camus’s vision.
In this experience of community the existential isolation that is the legacy of the absurd and the revolt that opens out a positive alternative to despair find their culmination. Only in communal experience can isolated individuals
at grips with an inescapable destiny come together in common activities in
view of shared meanings and goals by which to overcome the anguish and loneliness, which is the legacy of an impenetrable eternity. Perhaps it is only in such joint activity that our experience can be enriched and partially fulfilled.
The basic pattern for such a unified experience Camus finds in the work of art. There the individual’s passion for a unified whole has found objective expression in a completed vision that can be presented to others as a suggestion of what may be a permanent ideal possibility for their own lives.
The offering of the ideal that is the work of art remains, however, from the point of view of experience, but a suggestion still awaiting concrete articulation in a style of life that might be called artistic. Apart from such a response, the promise of the work is illusory, the experience abortive. It falls to politics, therefore, conceived as the conjoint effort of individuals seeking to structure and institutionalize their concerns, to turn ongoing community experience into the closest possible approximation of an aesthetic whole.
While it is in the movement toward community that Camus locates the most positive responses to the absurd, obviously there are other possibilities. Nihilism and suicide are possible responses on the individual level, as is the life of a mystic withdrawing from society to seek union with the natural world. Totalization and concentration camps are alternatives to existential isolation on the social level. “Terror and concentration camps are the drastic means used by man to escape solitude,” writes Camus. “The thirst for unity must be assuaged, even in the common grave” (R, 247).
Suicide and concentration camps are responses to the absurd, however, only to the extent that they destroy one of its basic terms, those inquiring creative centers of experience who demand unity. As extreme alternatives they constitute less pervasive challenges to human experience than those that grow out of daily encounters. It is usually failure to resolve satisfactorily conflicts growing out of such encounters that lays the groundwork for resort to the extreme solutions. Crucial contemporary social and political problems arise out of the conflicting and often mutually exclusive demands that individuals and groups—in expressing their needs to be important and to relate meaningfully to others—tend to make as the precondition of the establishment of community.1 Not being able to live without others, and yet not knowing how to live with them, we formulate theories that, in seeking to define a program for joint experience, close us off from the criticism that is the precondition of the mutual accommodation upon which alone unity can be established. To “live with” others—in community—
means to value their lives and perspectives as essential constituents of any living unity. Unity can only arise from within the encounter of those inquiring creative centers of experience and can only go as far as those centers individually and collectively deem desirable. That
each perspective be both a contribution to, and a constant critique of, any achieved structure is essential to the maintenance of any community.
The nature of ideology and its challenge to community thus becomes clear. Community rests upon the give-and-take of dialogue, that open inquiry among persons, in which each perspective offers a world in terms of which the common world must be continually revised. But ideology challenges this process, and in its place seeks to substitute the Truth: the
“logicized idea” beyond whose scope there can be no appeal. If in une civilisation du dialogue there is no final formulation, no Truth, but only a constantly revisable theory whose justification is the facilitation of the experience of the human centers concerned, then ideology constitutes an inversion of the “proper” role of thought, the hypostatization of ideas and their removal from the ongoing experiential drama that constitutes their permanent critique.
In sum, if the question of Truth is not posed as a function of an ongoing experience that constitutes its permanent critique, the Truth eventually becomes tyrannical. This results from the fact that it can only find its justification in a claim of access to a beyond that has evaluative priority over the movement of experience. Whether that beyond was literally seen as beyond, as transcendent, or as original and grounding, would not seem to make any difference. It is the form of the attachment that is crucial, and the resultant logical impossibility that experience in its movement out to others and on to the future might provide a critique thereof. If the Truth is grasped, its evaluative priority is assured, and the inquiry and the inquirer become secondary.
On the other hand, if it is only a truth that is in question, no matter how solidly founded, its context, its relevance, its meaning, become relative to the purposes of the inquirers; their direction and experience become the priorities that control its use.
The construction of community thus has certain clear preconditions, not the least of which is the non-ultimacy of any specific formulation of its path. Once claims to ultimacy are abandoned, at least insofar as the intersubjective formulation of common policy is concerned, the encounter of conflicting theories can turn from incipient hostility to potentially fruitful dialogue. But the limits to any specific formulation and its ultimate subservience to the nonexclusive needs of the inquirers remain the ever present frameworks within which alone dialogue can proceed.
In addressing the Dominican monks at the Latour-Mauberg Monastery in 1946 Camus faced the problem of entering into dialogue with those of a fundamentally different metaphysical persuasion. He began, and in a sense-concluded, with the following observation on the nature of this effort:
Not feeling that I possess any absolute truth or any message, I shall never start from the supposition that. . . [your] truth is illusory, but merely from the fact that I could nor accept it. … I shall not try to change anything that I think or anything that you think (insofar as I can judge of it) in order to reach a reconciliation that would be agreeable to all. On the contrary, what I feel like telling you today is that the world needs real dialogue, that falsehood is just as much the opposite of dialogue as is silence, and that the only possible dialogue is the kind between people who remain what they are and speak their minds (RRD, 52-3).