Beyond the personal level of this tragedy of vision lies a wider cultural lesson. For the image of nature confronting history is also the vision of the individualized body confronting a manipulative social world with its manifold illusions by which it seeks to hide the questionableness of its social drama. This angle of vision does offer to Camus an often fruitful perspective from which to lay bare the hypocrisies, the mystifications, and the oppressions by which people dominate one another in the service of cultural lies—by which organized society can deny to individuals their most vital possibilities. The residual sense, however, of the individual person demanding meaning and dignity, while confronting a society that employs its hypocrisies to deny that person, tends to become at times—and, at a deeper level, perhaps throughout—a metaphysical perspective that sees the individual against the society. All too often it seems as if this sense becomes the qualitative ground through which Camus assimilates the drama of the West into the interstices of his personal world. The Algerian youth immersed in nature develops an essentially liberal sense of the individual, counterposing him to the unfolding historical drama that is the essence of the Western social event. The liberal world of the West becomes so easily and “naturally” the horizon of his thought because it offers a set of readily available root metaphors with which to articulate the existential sense of the individual’s confrontation with others, nature, society, history, and death. Thus the deeply personal, and in some sense irreducible, quality of the individual’s encounter with destiny and death—which plays such an important role in Camus’s life and through which he continues to speak to us in the West—so easily and subtly becomes the articulation of a liberal vision of the individual confronted by society and history.
But as the personal encounter becomes the individual’s reflective articulation of the conditions of self-esteem and dignity, wherein lies the possibility of grasping the self itself as the product of a socially historicized natural
process?
The answer is obvious. No wonder that when Camus comes to write about Marx, while appreciating the incisiveness of the Marxian critical analysis as well as the dangers inherent in the Marxian prophetic tradition, he totally misses (as Sartre suggested) the center of Marx’s vision: humanity’s collective self-creation through time—in short, Marx’s philosophical anthropology.
As nature must increasingly be seen as historicized nature, so humans must increasingly be understood as the product of their own natural, historical, collective self-creation. To counterpose the personal self against the institutional world is to generalize to the point of irrelevance a series of practical struggles. It is to make the historical genesis of social evil fundamentally unintelligible, to legitimate the separation of theory and practice, and to reduce any praxis directed toward the reconstitution of human living to a moralism calling for an attitude it cannot historically instantiate.
It is in this context that we can see the deeper significance, as well as the root weakness, of Camus’s conception of history as “only an open opportunity that remains to be rendered productive through vigilant revolt” (R, 290). The attitude toward history expressed here is similar to the liberal conception of nature and technology: a simplified instrumentalism in which individuals encounter a generally plastic medium that awaits shaping by intelligent and dedicated artist-rebel-technicians. The materials of historical-technical existence are grasped as
essentially separate from the individual. They confront the individual and can be used either constructively or destructively. They can ennoble the environment or destroy it. But they do not constitute its inner being. They are not the stuff of its character and destiny. In short, implicit here is an almost atomistic, transcendent individualism that believes it can view history, technology, and institutions from without, free to choose its attitude and practice with respect to them. But such a perspective can never adequately grasp the extent to which the self I am is itself an integral result of the historical process of natural and institutional transformations. It cannot see the extent to which personal character, consciousness, and behavior emerge from within the historical drama—or that evil and suffering, as well as the possibilities of a practice directed toward a sociocultural renaissance, must be rooted within an engulfing history.
Transcendence makes practical sense only as an emerging moment dialectically grounded in such a concretized history. Moral demands must emerge from within such a historically concretized concatenation of forces and must be bound to realizable possibilities. Otherwise such demands are bound to degenerate into moralisms of attitude bv which the historical creator is reduced to the critical judge who takes a stand above it all. Ironically, the imposition of order from without upon an alien material is Camus’s own definition of revolutionary oppression.
In short the personal strength of Camus’s vision, generated by a marginal sensibility that incessantly returns us to the earthly moorings of our cultural drama whose essential myths it so starkly reveals, falls prev to the illusion of its very strengths. It fails to grasp the extent to which that individualized bodily sensitivity is itself a cultural emergent from within an increasingly historicized nature. Camus’s profound sense of the body does save him from the body—mind dualism that has plagued modern Western thought. It offers him the prereflective sense of the nature and possibilities of a transformed cultural life. His community is to be an earthly union of living persons, not of imagined souls. Yet the conditions of the emergence of that community remain abstract, offering at best but the dialogical preconditions of any such community. Camus’s thought, suffering from what I should call “sociological myopia,” fails to grasp adequately the institutional-cultural constitution of the personal self and its “ownmost” possibilities. Is it surprising, therefore, that his practical proposals often tend to be little more than moralisms? On the basis of such a metaphysics, theory and practice fall apart. The mind’s ideals remain awkwardly situated in a body itself only accidentally located in the historical process, while the values to which individual revolt gives promise must remain at best articulations of moral preconditions. At worst, they degenerate into appeals to the attitudes of others, always at odds with the concrete possibilities that the facts of history alone can reveal.
It is perhaps relevant to note here that the Marxian insights on this matter that might have proved so fruitful for Camus were denied to him by historical and cultural experiences. His encounters with communist authoritarian manipulations of the worker—peasant struggles in Algeria in the 1930s, as well as in immediate post—World War II France and in the emerging cold war, led him to associate Marxism with the Stalinist perversions. It seems to have framed the horizon through which he studied the thought of Marx, thus blinding him to the Marxian philosophical anthropology.
Ultimately this sociological myopia is rooted in a transcendent sense of the individual as a natural being confronting, in a Sisyphean mold, an eternally recurrent destiny. Rooted in the earth, the dignity of humanity is under continual attack from history, society, and ideology. An eternally vigilant and lucid revolt is necessary to preserve human beings from these onslaughts.
This metaphysical perspective grounds an individualism that strives in vain to articulate a concrete vision and a practical communalism commensurate with its deepest existential needs.
Thus, tragically, the metaphysical roots work strongly against his “ownmost” needs.
The sociological myopia is thus grounded in a bourgeois individualist) that it often feels obliged to defend in terms of an ill-defined and sometimes substantialized conception of human nature. As that conception becomes
detached from the historical processes in which it is immersed and out of which it has dialectically emerged, so the fierce defense of our dignity tends to become unreflectively identified with the conditions for the achievement of dignity historically appropriate for its emergence—namely, those of the classical West. Camus’s conception of dignity is essentially Western, but he has no self-critical sense of its limited historical rooting. He thus tends to become a captive of his own unexamined assumptions, and the sociologically myopic individualism easily slides into a “cultural myopia.”
The contrasts between nature and history, between the individual and society, so easily and subtly become the contrast between we and they, between the West and the non-West—most particularly between a liberal West and the totalitarian communist and Arab worlds. Here his North African origins can hide more than they reveal if one fails to appreciate the profound metaphysical significance of the colonial experience. Camus came to self-consciousness as a European in an Arab world. Identification with Christian European civilization came easily to him, while the world of Islam was always “Other.” Only thus can one fathom the otherwise appalling fact that Arabs are never the subjects of his fiction—only at times its objects. As Conor Cruise O’Brien shows so well, in The Stranger the Arab is simply the other. In The Plague, set in the Arab city of Oran, all the characters are European, and Arabs are mentioned only once, in passing. In Letters to a German Friend Camus speaks of “we, free Europeans.” And at the height of the Algerian war his friend Jean Daniel reports being surprised and shocked by Camus’s casual references to we and they when speaking of the Arabs of Algeria.