Camus and the Challenge of Political Thought

Between Despair and Hope

P. Hayden

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137525833
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía política

Albert Camus was a formative artist, writer and public figure whose work defies conventional labels, and whose legacy is controversial but substantial. His distinctive contribution to modern ethical and political thought remains far from settled. Camus and the Challenge of Political Thought comprehensively yet concisely explores how Camus's compelling ideas of absurdity and rebellion emerged, how his complex political engagements and positions developed, and how his conception of an ethics of limits and measure retains a vital, contemporary resonance in an era of unsettling global politics. Drawing upon the full range of Camus's notebooks, novels, plays and philosophical essays, Hayden shows Camus to be an original political thinker of human dignity and freedom whose life and work sought to navigate between the twin dangers of idealistic optimism and nihilistic despair.

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Situating Camus

Abstractt: Hayden establishes the relationship between the life of Albert Camus and the social-political contexts of his thought and work. The chapter explores Camus’s diagnosis of the human crisis of modernity, which also introduces several of the themes crucial to his ethical and political thinking – the absurd, nihilism, truth, dignity and revolt. Setting out the principal elements of Camus’s life in order to better understand the nature of his work, this chapter offers an important overview of the central historical events that informed his development as a writer, artist and politically-engaged public figure.

Hayden, Patrick. Camus and the Challenge of Political Thought: Between Despair and Hope. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. DOI: 10.1057/9781137525833.0003.

In a lecture delivered at Columbia University in March 1946, Camus sought to convey an account of the ‘human crisis’ defining the twentieth century which had a particularly powerful impact on the literary, artistic, philosophical and political attitudes of his generation. Like many others ‘whose minds and hearts were formed during the terrible years’ (Camus 1946–7: 20) between the First and Second World Wars, Camus shared his generation’s suspicion of the grand moral and political hypocrisy of the era of nationalism, imperialism and fascism. For this ‘interesting’ generation, Camus wryly observes, the belief that European civilization reflects the rational development of humankind, and that the modern epoch ultimately will deliver universal emancipation and enlightenment, is but an illusion shattered by the political, economic and military calamities striking not only at the heart of Europe, but within virtually all countries in the world. Drawing upon four disturbing examples of actions committed by various parties during the Nazi occupation of Europe – including that of a mother in Greece who is forced by a German officer to choose which one of her three children would live, and thus which two would be shot – Camus attends to the paradoxical experience of how the categories of guilt and innocence have become increasingly indistinguishable in the post-War period. The murderer’s status as outside the boundaries of ‘civilized’ law and political order, and the victim’s self-understanding as essentially blameless within the bounds of morality, were rendered equally meaningless by the realities of totalitarian states.

However, Camus does not simply bracket the problem of shared meaning and common standards as a kind of symptom of the violence which, for so-called ‘realists’, is inherent in the body politic as a kind of natural fact. Rather, he proposes to locate the causes of the crisis within several phenomena that are intellectually and politically formative of the character of the era, and which touch at the heart of modern life. According to Camus, the value of ‘success’ now supersedes the value of human dignity; or, stated otherwise, dignity is regarded as something predicated on success (1946–7: 22). High ideals such as the intrinsic dignity of human beings are widely inscribed in political documents today, while the actual lives of those who ‘fail’ are regarded with scorn or indifference. Additionally, the belief that politics can be understood according to the inflexible logic of an abstract idea or theory has resulted in a second problem, Camus observes, because it has led to the view that differences of opinion can be settled by an exclusive assertion of truth rather than an inclusive process of dialogue and persuasion. As a result, political practice increasingly requires denouncing rather than convincing those with whom one disagrees. Camus goes on to suggest that placing blind faith in ideological truth correlates as well to the impersonal bureaucratic mechanisms which are emblematic of the modern state (1946–7: 23). With the spread of impersonal bureaucratic rationality throughout the integrated spheres of social, economic and political governance, reason of state relies on instrumental techniques and functional intermediaries to achieve outcomes that can be reproduced by anyone who follows the rules. For Camus, the bureaucratic machine introduces a distance between individuals and the state that signals an end to genuine human interaction and contact, dissolving the sense of the self’s significance and inducing feelings of isolation, loneliness and anonymity. Finally, Camus describes how the factors above help to set the scene for mass movements and grandiose collective doctrines to offer a sense of meaning and purpose to the mass of otherwise isolated individuals in modern society. Ideologies define group identity around sameness and supplant individual beliefs, opinions and conscience. Yet they remain effective only by buttressing an outlook of mutual exclusion: one must necessarily be categorized as either for or against such doctrines, and thus one stands politically either inside or outside the collective. Camus sums up the mid-century crisis as the dominating entanglement of ‘the cult of efficiency and abstraction’ (1946–7: 24).

The danger of the crisis, Camus argues, is that an ‘absurd world’ in which the bottom has dropped out of traditional values leads to a double temptation: either nothing is true or historical progress is the only truth (1946–7: 25). One way out of the crisis, then, could be to deliberately reduce the sum total of the everyday experience of modern life to a nullity. This solution was chosen by many artists and political figures of Camus’s generation. Believing in nothing, bereft of meaningful lives, they chose the path of nihilism. Yet others chose another option, overcoming doubt about the actual value of existence by investing completely in the idea of a heroic engagement with universal history, fully endorsing the potential to direct the course of world civilization. But the contradiction between the two solutions is only apparent. Both lead to the same conclusion: anything can be done in the name of power and domination, consequently politics has no limits. A kind of fatal desperation therefore reverberates as the impetus for both positions, and each remains beholden to the lingering suspicion that nothing really matters in the absence of a higher purpose.

Camus, however, eschews both options. The question then becomes whether another value can be found that allows for drawing limits around what can be done, and for making discerning judgements about what matters. Here, against the grain of the post-totalitarian epoch of repudiation, Camus finds in the phenomenon of revolt a form of justifiable resistance. What leads some people in one part of the world, he asks, to revolt on behalf of strangers on the other side of the world? Surely such actions are absurd, since rationalist morality can provide no explanatory basis or predictive capacity to determine such an outcome. And yet revolt is a paradigmatic experience, a manifestation of the ceaseless desire to be free that cuts across vastly diverse societies and epochs, appearing in, for example, the Roman and Haitian slave uprisings, the Paris Commune, the American Revolution and the Hungarian workers’ councils. More importantly, revolt opposes and affirms simultaneously: in denouncing tyranny and degradation, revolt experientially substantiates that ‘something’ of positive value is common to all persons. It follows, for Camus, that the sense of common dignity can be treated as an objective existential reality of general human significance. The defence of common human dignity, the preserving and sustaining of a particular quality and condition of existence can be regarded, in his view, as the ‘baseline’ value upon which we can rely in a world in crisis. Through the upwelling of resistance and rebellion, not only is existence itself imbued with meaning and importance, but other values associated with freedom and justice may also be saved from existential irrelevance (Camus 1946–7: 26–8). Without articulating a programmatic vision, Camus nonetheless anticipates a number of positive actions that can grow from the contemporary crisis: speaking and acting truthfully in politics; refusing fatalism and Realpolitik; promoting a sense of collective responsibility; denouncing terror; creating new universal values of trust, respect and communication across cultures; and deflating the absolute prominence given to politics over all other aspects of modern life.

Camus concludes his lecture by pointing out that the continued existence of humanity, in spite of the profoundly destructive forces it has inflicted upon itself, bestows some degree of hope to forestall complete despair. Simply put, we may look to the sheer fact that humanity, and therefore human freedom and its many possibilities, continues to begin anew in the world in order to temper the desperation and despondency haunting late modernity. At the same time, given the prevalent miseries and atrocities also born from that very existence, Camus cautions that espousing naive optimism ‘would be scandalous’ (1946–7: 30). For these reasons, it is incumbent upon us to continue living within the space of insoluble contradiction, holding together both sides – yes and no, hope and despair intertwined – rather than simply advocating one and evading the other. This situation, in which everything hangs in the balance, Camus proposes, is none other than the fragility of the contemporary human condition.

The work of Camus thus can be understood as a critical exploration of the human condition which consistently pursued his commitment to two intertwined values: truth and liberty. Reflecting on the circumstances of his life and his conception of the role of the writer, in his Nobel acceptance speech Camus addresses issues of responsibility, which also concern power, oppression and resistance. The general aim of the writer in the modern world, Camus (1957) explains, must be to make the silence imposed by oppression ‘resound by means of his art’, and ‘to unite the greatest possible number of people’ across the ideological divisions that ‘breed solitude’. The viability of Camus’s position for the writer rests on a sense of obligation that binds the artistic enterprise to ‘the service of truth and the service of liberty’. Because ‘lies and servitude’, propaganda and terror, have become commonplace instruments of contemporary geopolitics, human existence is continually at risk of limitless manipulation and degradation. Here several key ideas of Camus’s thought come together: the role of the writer is an activity that can only take place given the presence of others who are free to receive, to think through, and to debate the image of reality and with it the ‘picture of common joys and suffering’, offered to them. If the writer seeks to communicate and bear witness to a wider audience, this activity presupposes not only a reader able to respond openly to the work of the writer, but also a degree of human connectedness that sustains a sense of shared reality that can never be fully hidden behind some supposedly higher purpose, forces or agency. The activity of writing for Camus is thus not only a question of aesthetic creativity, but of a wider moral and political resistance to domination and ideological obfuscation. Hence he states (1957) that ‘the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression’.

Camus’s speech, like his earlier lecture, makes clear that his work was conditioned by his lived experience of the intellectual, cultural and political crises that defined the twentieth century. For this very reason, the entirety of Camus’s work supports the importance of the free exchange of ideas and opinions, of crafting diverse perspectives and interpretations about the world and the meaning of human existence, and of fighting for the right to speak truth to power. Camus believed truth is not something that can be imposed, and neither can the claim to possess the truth legitimate the suppression of dissent. Rather it is arrived at, circulated, shared and protected through conversation or dialogue that always begins and never ends – an intersubjective and public process that is unachievable without freedom. Because of this, it is also often deeply contentious. Camus’s voice as a public intellectual resonates at the start of this century as much as it did in the middle of the last one, because it remains tied to the question of what it means to be human and to have a properly human political life under the complex conditions of the present. The political dilemmas Camus faced were always at the centre of his life’s work and, like many other writers of his generation, Camus turned to literature, drama and the art of the essay in order to come to some understanding of a world whose excesses often seem senseless. From savage world wars to exterminatory concentration camps, from totalitarian governments to nuclear weapons, and from colonial subjugation to the global expansion of ideologies of violence, Camus’s life story thus remained intimately bound up with the most transformative and traumatic events of recent political history. Similarly, his life and his work are fruitfully, yet sometimes painfully, interwoven.

Early years

For Camus, a great writer always brings his world into his art, and the twofold nature of the world – conjoining absurdity and revolt, solidarity and misunderstanding, happiness and misery – delineates the parameters of his personal biography and its relation to his work. As a writer and thinker intensely driven to explore both the problems of everyday existence and the great themes of philosophy, Camus’s feelings towards the world are anchored in the Mediterranean coasts of North Africa. Camus was born in the Algerian town of Mondovi (now Dréan) on 7 November 1913, where Lucien Auguste, the father he never knew, was a foreman at the Saint-Paul vineyard. Eight months after Camus’s birth, Lucien was called up to the French army at the outbreak of the First World War. Seriously wounded at the Battle of Marne in September 1914, he was evacuated to Saint-Brieuc in Brittany for treatment but died on 11 October. After his family relocated to the working class district of Belcourt (now Belouizdad) in Algiers, Camus lived with his mother, maternal grandmother, uncle, and older brother in a three-room apartment without electricity, running water or bath (a squat toilet was on the landing outside the apartment). His mother, Catherine Hélène, like Camus’s grandmother, was illiterate. She was also deaf and, because she rarely spoke, was often mistakenly believed to be mute. Catherine Hélène worked as a domestic cleaning woman to supplement the meagre widower’s pension she received from the state. Camus’s uncle, Etienne, made barrels at a cooperage in the neighbourhood, and his brother, Lucien, took assorted jobs after completing primary school in order to bring some much needed income to the household.

Camus’s paternal grandfather and great-grandfather had emigrated to Algeria from the Bordeaux and Ardèche regions of France in the mid-nineteenth century, while the maternal side of his family was of Spanish origin (his mother’s family name was Sintès) from Minorca. Algeria became a French colony in 1830 and many poor immigrants from France and other European countries were lured by the prospect of a better life on African soil. For many of them, as it was for Camus’s family, the reality fell far short of the dream, and opportunity turned out to be another phase of poverty. Camus’s relation to his Algerian identity and his understanding of the status of poverty are complex and important issues that informed his philosophical, literary and political views. Although born and brought up in Algeria to an assimilated family of French (and Spanish) descent, Camus was neither simply French nor Algerian. He was, rather, a pied-noir or ‘black-foot’, a term originally coined to refer to any white settler born in Africa, later evolving into a slang name for French settlers in Algeria. For Camus, this was an identity imposed on him from the outside, a label applied to him negatively by both ‘real Frenchmen’ and ‘real Algerians’. But Camus did not recognize himself in either term of this dichotomy, and while he was culturally and intellectually immersed in the French and European heritage, he considered himself the ‘offspring’ of Algeria, to which he was passionately loyal throughout his life. Equally, the label ‘poor’ had a different status for Camus than it did for wider society. Although he was well aware of the economic hardships faced by his family, out of a condition of poverty Camus developed not only a healthy distrust of excess and a high regard for simplicity and modesty, but also a deep appreciation for the abundance offered by an eternally blue sea, an immense landscape brightened by the sun, and the generous affection of family and friends. As he later recalled:

Poverty ... was never a misfortune for me: it was radiant with light. Even my revolts were brilliant with sunshine. ... There is no certainty my heart was naturally disposed to this kind of love. But circumstances helped me. To correct a natural indifference, I was placed halfway between poverty and the sun. Poverty kept me from thinking all was well under the sun and in history; the sun taught me that history was not everything. I wanted to change lives, yes, but not the world which I worshipped as divine. ... In any case, the lovely warmth that reigned over my childhood freed me from all resentment. I lived on almost nothing, but also in a kind of rapture. I felt infinite strengths within me: all I had to do was find a way to use them. It was not poverty that got in my way: in Africa, the sun and the sea cost nothing. The obstacle lay rather in prejudices or stupidity. (Camus 1970: 6)

Camus was expected to finish his education after completing primary school and begin to learn a trade. However, one of his teachers, Louis Germain, had taken an interest in Camus and his academic potential, and managed to convince his domineering grandmother that he would be able to obtain a better job if he remained in school. Germain tutored Camus with a small group of other talented students and, after sitting entrance exams, he was awarded a scholarship to the prestigious Grand Lycée d’Alger in June 1924. It was at the Lycée that Camus first ‘discovered’ his poverty, in the form of a social stigma that differentiated him from many of the students from wealthy families. Camus would rise at 5:30 in the morning in order to travel across the city in time to eat the free breakfast to which his scholarship entitled him, and he would stay up late into the night studying after completing his chores at home. Despite the long hours, Camus relished the intellectual challenge of being exposed to new languages, literature, classical studies, philosophy and history. He was also an avid and skilled athlete, with a special passion for swimming and football. Moreover, Camus came under the influence of one of the most crucial intellectual forces of his life, the philosopher and writer Jean Grenier, who taught Camus at the Lycée and later held a chair in aesthetics at the Sorbonne. Although Camus and ...