ANTITHESIS: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS
I have tried to show how Camus’s thought places before us in the most emphatic terms the root metaphors of the cosmic drama by which the European world has been vitalized for more than two thousand years. Being situated affectively on the margin of that civilization by the chance of birth and upbringing, Camus was able to bring a distinct critical sensibility to bear on his analysis of the Western world whose drama became the horizon of his vision. He was drawn into a reflection on the cultural roots of that world: Appreciation of its Greco-Roman and Judeo-
Christian origins, climatically at one with the world of his birth, permeated his thinking more deeply than is likelv to be appreciated by a totally accultured European or North American. From the very first moments of his reflective life, Camus sensed the possibilities for rejuvenation of the West offered by this marginal sensibility.
Not only did the genesis of his sensibility prefigure the possibilities of a historical rejuvenation, but the social rooting of this sensibility in a poor working class district on the margin of European power centers gave Camus a degree of critical distance with respect to those very mainstream value and belief systems that became his philosophical horizon. They were not matters of a taken-for-granted way of being-in-the-world, as much as they were vital offerings to be inspected prior to adoption. But adopt them he did, however much those cultural robes did not always fit that pagan body. The Western world became his world, but never was it taken for granted. His telation to its drama was never simply that of a subject who lived comfortably within the confines of its conceptual horizon, viewing objects and goals from its angle of vision. What is so remarkable about Camus’s thought is that while that European horizon became his, he continued to maintain, to nurture, and to share that pagan sensibility, offering to us a unique critical perspective from within the horizons of our cultural drama. In fact, he lived that tension self-consciously as a sustained tragic vision, his pagan sensibilities offering us the echo of those experiential roots from which we have become increasingly detached. It is here in part that his unique strength and significance for us lie. He situated himself at the center of the Western drama with a sufficiently intimate yet self-conscious and critical relationship to that world so as to have incorporated its essential contradictions into his very being. And he revealed them in his writing in starkly abstract yet deeply personal terms.
In Camus’s life and work the West confronts an existential mirror wherein the
meaning of our world is laid bare. The weaknesses of our strengths and the strengths of our weaknesses are dialectically revealed. We come face to face with ourselves.
It is only as this unique combination of abstract structure and personal experience that the mythic force of Camus’s titles can be adequately appreciated. As the articulation of the controlling root metaphors of the drama of our civilization, they lay bare the essential structure of the existential being of the West. The horizon stretches out before us; the tensions in our landscape find their appropriate tragic shadings. We might draw the image of the assertive, perhaps masculine, Prometheus—Faust rising up to confront the receptive, perhaps feminine, Sisyphus—
Meursault: Fire out of sea; destiny’s child confronts its motherly origins. Here is the mythic root of that most misunderstood confrontation between the north of Europe and the pensee du midi that Camus tries to sketch at the conclusion of The Rebel. This tension between humanity’s aspiring historical-spiritual ideals and its rooting in an earthly body born to die is for Camus the locus of those central philosophical-religious problematics that have long plagued the Western mind: mind-body, fact-value, and theory-practice. In short, Western philosophical dualisms have an existential rooting in the way in which the living of our cosmic drama has involved the denial of its earthly moorings.
If the strength of Camus—his significance and continuing appeal—is thus clear, and if this work has helped to reveal the essentials of that dramatic vision with its reconstitutive as well as existentially descriptive force, the inadequacies of that Camusian vision are nonetheless palpable and significant, emerging tragically as the underside of his very strengths. The point, it must be noted however, is not simply to evaluate critically his vision. To the extent that I am right in claiming that Camus lived, and his thought reveals in a unique manner, the essentials of the Western drama, to that extent the limitations of his work bear searing import for the future possibilities of the West. In fact, it is part of my essential thesis that Camus’s weaknesses as much as his strengths go to the core of the being of the West. Where Camus failed, so likewise has the West. And the renaissance he so passionately desired will remain a vain hope unless we in the West take stock of our “ownmost” inadequacies and find a means to transcend them. Let us in conclusion briefly consider these limitations.
It is appropriate here to return to the roots of the Camusian vision, for in truly tragic fashion his weaknesses emerge as the dialectical pole of his strengths. And if his vision of the fundamentals of our cosmic drama was in part a function of the marginality of his personal sources, so too were his theoretical inadequacies. His North African roots generated a bodily sensibility that preserved the genuineness of his encounter with Western ideas, constantly requiring that the articulation and development of that drama respect the existential needs of that earthly body. But the passionate individualism of that bodily immersion in the natural world tended to suggest a contrast between the worlds of Algeria and of Europe that slowly, prereflec-tively, and at the level of image rather than of explicit thought, tended to merge into a vision of a conflict between nature and history. In addition, and at a different level, since the Algeria of his youth was French colonial Algeria, the working class ethic that provided the existential locus for his reflective identification with that Western drama was a white colonial implantation in an alien cultural setting. Thus subtly but perhaps not surprisingly the surrounding Arab world finds itself situated beyond the horizons of his vision. I am speaking here, of course, not of the reflective focus of his thought, but of the qualitative fringe of associations in which that thought is bathed and by which its articulations seem to be guided at a prereflective level. There are here personal lessons as well as those with wider cultural import.
First, the matter of nature and history. As Algeria was the bodily source while Europe was the mental horizon, so the Algerian youth was able to look toward Europe with a mixture of attraction and repulsion. Attracted by the grandeur of the European drama, by the scope of its technological and artistic achievements, its historic resonances and its untapped potentials, its urban life and its majestic philosophy, Camus was repelled by the hypocrisy of its cultural scene, the misery of its exploited populations, and the depersonalization of its refined speculations. As Algeria offered the experience of the body immersed in the waters of nature, so Europe was the locus of the historical drama of hopes and humiliations. Europe was where the action was, but at times it was also a grotesque scene from which he had to maintain a critical detachment if he was to preserve his vitality and emotional balance. The Europe of cities is the Europe of evil and history, while the Algeria of the body is the source of the individual’s solitary encounter with nature and with death.
Thus at a prereflective level the attitude of the Algerian youth confronting Europe with a mixture of rapt amazement and horror subtly yielded a thinking torn between the drama of history and the demands of nature. As the Algerian youth could imagine the possibility of entering Europe, maintaining his distance and sometimes withdrawing to refresh himself in the more earthly world of his origins, so the reflective observer of the historical scene could study, critically analyze from a distance, then choose to become involved in that unfolding drama—while entertaining the option of withdrawal at any time into nature-body-self for rejuvenation. What I am suggesting here is not an explicit position held by Camus, but rather a prereflective fringe by which his thought seems bathed and sometimes guided, as it were, behind his back.
As the world of Algeria was drawn into the historical processes that were
the developing European drama—owing in part at least to capitalist expansion, imperialism, and colonialism—making the refuge of Algeria increasingly a matter of historical nostalgia, so the nature nurtured at the roots of Camus’s vision is itself being molded and shaped by the forces of history. In short it is becoming a culturally historicized nature. Collective human effort is working a transformation not only of society, but of the natural world that was its prehistorical source. This historicization of nature calls for a vision capable of going beyond the tragic-tension-dualism that counterposes nature against history. And while Camus struggled at a reflective level to grasp the outlines of such a movement that alone would make a renaissance in the West possible, the qualitative feel of those controlling root metaphors that structured the horizon of his thought worked strongly against the possibility of such a breakthrough.