Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd [125, 1 ed.] 9042012307

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ALBERT CAMUS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSURD

VIBS Volume 125 Robert Ginsberg

Founding Editor Peter A. Redpath Executive Editor

Associate Editors G. John M Abbarno Mary-Rose Banal Gerhold K. Becker Raymond Angelo Belliotti Kenneth A Bryson C. Stephen Byrum H. G. Callaway Rem B. Edwards WilliamGay Dane R Gordon HaimGordon J. Everet Green Heta AIeksandra Gylling MattiIDiyry Steven V. Hicks Richard T. Hull

Laura Duhan Kaplan Joseph C. Kunkel Vincent L. Luizzi AIan Milchman George David Miller JonMills AIan Rosenberg Arleen L. F. Salles StevenSchroeder JohnR Shook AIan Soble Eddy Souft'rant Tuija Takala Oscar Vilarroya Anne Waters JohnR Welch

ALBERT CAMUS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSURD

Avi Sagi

Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2002

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of "ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence". ISBN: 90-420-1230-7 ©Editions Rodopi B.Y., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2002 Printed in The Netherlands

CONTENTS vii

Foreword Introduction ONE

From Safety to Alienation: The Sources of Absurd Philosophy

TWO

Camus as a Personal Thinker

25

THREE

A Philosophy of Sea and Sun

35

FOUR

The Absurd: Method or Conclusion

43

FIVE

The Absurd: Datum and Concept

47

SIX

The Absurd: Between Rationalism and Rationality

59

SEVEN

Contending with the Absurd: Between Rejection and Endorsement

67

EIGHT

From Alienation to Absurd: The Outsider and The Myth ofSisyphus

87

NINE

The Absurd and the Problem of Values: Caligula and Letters to a German Friend

99

TEN

The Transition from The Myth ofSisyphus to The Rebel

107

ELEVEN

Rebellion, Solidarity, and Self-Consciousness

117

TWELVE

The Fall: Consciousness, Freedom, and Responsibility

131

THIRTEEN

Religiosity and Religious Criticism in Camus's Thought

145

5

VI

FOURTEEN FIFTEEN

Between an Ethics of Compassion and an Ethics of Justice Summary: "My Life Is What I Have Made It"

159 173

Works Cited

179

About the Author

189

Index

191

FOREWORD Avi Sagi's book provides an original and insightful approach to the work of Albert Camus. Sagi subtly uncovers the philosophical concerns at the core of Camus's diverse literary work. Camus's philosophical investigations, he argues, emerge from the challenges and predicaments of concrete human existence. Camus's novels, plays, and essays are personal journeys that struggle with fundamental existential questions: What is the meaning of life? Can ultimate values be grounded without metaphysical presuppositions? Can the pain of the other penetrate the thick shield of human narcissism and selfinterest? In reading Camus as a philosopher, Sagi provides an interpretation that addresses Camus's work as a totality, thus traversing the boundaries between his diverse literary genres. In this fascinating reading, Sagi brings to light the systematic though dynamic nature of Camus's heroic and penetrating journey. Moshe Halbertal Department of Philosophy Hebrew University of Jerusalem

INTRODUCTION Most of us know Albert Camus as a noted writer and essayist. In this book, I present Camus as a philosopher. My central claim is that Camus belongs to the breed of thinkers whose philosophy is a conscious contest with their lives. This approach contrasts with the widespread perception of philosophy as a systematic, "academic" endeavor, entirely detached from concrete existence. Camus holds that genuine philosophical questions touch our lives. The answers we fmd, if at all, in philosophy, detennine the meaning of our existence. Philosophy, then, involves practical conclusions. As is also true of S0Ten Kierkegaard (Sagi, 2000), the philosophy of Camus is a personal voyage. In its course, Camus reveals to his readers basic constructs of human existence, fascinatingly portrayed in his literary and philosophical works. Over the last few decades, the philosophical value of Camus's oeuvre, extensively discussed in works dealing with existentialism, has gained increasing recognition. Many books and articles have painstakingly analyzed his philosophical endeavor, stressing its uniqueness and originality. In the present work, I share the perception arguing for the centrality of philosophical elements in the understanding of Camus. The innovation of the present book is in the attempt to offer an explicit, systematic, and comprehensive explication of the philosophical foundations of Camus's oeuvre, which all too often appear in his writings in the fragmented fashion typical of artistic works. One of the central claims of the book is that Camus's philosophy is dynamic and changes over time. The two pivots of this philosophy, which also establish its boundaries, are The Myth ofSisyphus and The Rebel. Works from The Myth of Sisyphus era represent a Cartesian, solipsistic approach that upholds the individual "self' as the sole ontological and epistemic foundation of existence, culminating in the concept oftbe absurd. Works from The Rebel era represent a subversion of Cartesian solipsism, placing "we" before "I" and culminating in the development of the concept of solidarity. At the focus of Camus's philosophy in this period is the entire complex of ontological, epistemic, and ethical questions related to the primacy of the "we." The third and fmal stage in the dynamic course of this philosophy is a critique of the primacy of the "we," as embodied in the notion of solidarity reaching its peak in The Fall. What is the fundamental problem confronting Camus? As he tells us in his autobiographical book, The First Man, Camus had been involved from the outset in a contradictory experience involving the sense of a crumbling, disintegrating reality eroding his ontological security, as opposed to a growing yearning for harmony, for a metaphysical and transcendent order. This conflicting experience prompts Camus's inner contest. In The Myth of Sisyphus, his first attempt to contend with this problem, Camus adopts the tension between these two contradictory experiences as the

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basic structure of human existence. The absurd represents the convergence between the sense of alienation and the yearning for unity. Resolution, however, is ultimately found in the claim that harmony is internal. Paradoxically, the person who embraces the absurd is the one who attains selfacceptance. Camus concludes the book by claiming that we must think of Sisyphus as a happy man, relying on a notion close to the Aristotelian model, which approaches happiness as a by-product of self-realization. The individual who lives the absurd realizes human existence to the full, and is therefore happy. At a later stage, Camus rejects the idea embodied in the solipsistic hero relying, as a personal writer, on his personal experience. In the course of his life, from his birth in Mediterranean surroundings and through his involvement in the Second World War, Camus learned that the solipsistic description of human experience does not exhaust the human condition, which is intersubjective by definition. From The Plague to The Rebel, Camus suggests a new approach for understanding human reality. Without renouncing the basic epistemic assumptions that had guided him when formulating the philosophy of the absurd, he now mediates the tension between the breakdown of reality and the search for unity by positing harmony between the self and others instead of within the self. In his early Mediterranean short stories, the individual is in harmony with nature, and this approach persists even at the end of The Outsider. In The Myth of Sisyphus, the individual had sought harmony within the self instead of with nature; alienation culminated in the reduction of the experience of unity to the inner self. In contrast, in The Plague and in The Rebel, unity is realized in intersubjectivity, through human solidarity. After the Second World War and the obvious foundering of human solidarity, Camus returns to cast doubt on the ability of individuals to be released from the shackles of the self to turn to others. This is the thesis he formulates in The Fall. Despite these misgivings, however, he does not retract from a general perception of individual existence as constituted through the relation to the other. The uniqueness of Camus's philosophy is that it touches everyone. Its significance lies in its ability to awaken us, compelling us to reconsider the question of meaning in concrete human life, which we tend to neglect by transmuting it into others. Jean Paul Sartre, Camus's rival and former friend, identified this feature in Camus's work: His obstinate humanism, narrow and pure, austere and sensual, waged an uncertain war against the massive and formless events of the time. But on the other hand through his dogged rejections he reaffirmed, at the heart of our epoch, against the Machiavellians and against the Idol of realism, the existence of the moral issue.

Introduction

3

In a way, he was that resolute affmnation. Anyone who read or reflected encountered the human values he held in his fist.... One had to avoid him or fight him - he was indispensable to that tension which makes intellectual life what it is. (Sartre, 1988, p. 165) This book is the product of many years of studying and teaching Camus at the Department of Philosophy of Bar-Ilan University. The reception of this book in Israel is worth noting. In Israeli society, which has long been contending with violence and conflict at levels of intensity unknown in Western societies, Camus's thought has found paths to the hearts of young men and women thirsty for a human voice at once consoling and demanding. I have often been amazed at the interest that Camus's thought evokes in Israel, even when issues of life and death have pushed aside other "philosophical" questions. As a result, I have been privileged with an achievement unusual for philosophers. The Hebrew version of this book became a best-seller, and I tend to think that this is not due to my writing but to Camus's unique powers as a man and as a thinker. The English translation is a revised version of the original, and includes an additional chapter. When I write these lines, the world is struggling anew with the problem of "the plague," making Camus and his thought even more relevant to our daily lives. I sincerely wish that readers joining this dialogue with Camus might find a measure of hope and solace in his writings. I wish to thank my friend Menachem Moutner, who carefully read the entire manuscript and made insightful comments. I cherish his support and encouragement. My friend and assistant Dror Yinon contributed in many ways to the completion of the book. His fruitful and valuable comments are greatly appreciated. Thanks to Shoval Shafat, who assisted in the bibliographic adjustments required for the English translation. My special thanks to my translator, Batya Stein. Batya translated this book, like all my other philosophical texts, with meticulous care. Her dedication, her analytical ability, and her discernment proved invaluable in the revision of the book. Batya is not only a translator but a friend, whose mark is evident throughout my work, and this acknowledgement is only a small token of my gratitude. Finally, I am grateful to Robert Ginsberg for his consistent inspiration and encouragement throughout my involvement with Rodopi. Avi Sagi

One FROM SAFETY TO ALIENATION: THE SOURCES OF ABSURD PHILOSOPHY For many critics and readers, Albert Camus is one of the foremost representatives of the contemporary sense of alienation. Camus does not resort to this term often, but the accepted view is that the term absurd, which Camus does use frequently, is a variation of alienation (Feuerlicht, 1978, p. 33). The connections between the concept of the absurd and the concept of alienation are extremely complex, and Camus's sparing use of the term alienation, which became highly common after Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, is not accidental. In avoiding the use of this term, Camus reveals his view that the absurd, as a concept, adds a dimension lacking in the term alienation. I do not engage in a full analysis of the relationship between these two concepts in this chapter, since this task would only be feasible after clarifying the full spectrum of meanings ascribed to each of them. Understanding the concept of the absurd is the aim of the book as a whole, and launching a comparison at this stage appears pointless. Let us assume for now that the absurd, like alienation, conveys a deep sense of estrangement and detachment. In this sense, the concept of the absurd builds on the concept of alienation. In this chapter, I briefly review the meaning of alienation and the emergence of the consciousness of alienation before embarking in a detailed analysis of the philosophy of the absurd. Alienation is a multivalent concept, and its frequent use suggests the presence of an urgent social and cultural need for a term indicating a particular sensation or sensations (ibid. pp. 16-17). This introductory chapter cannot address the entire range of meanings covered by this concept. In the discussion that follows, I will focus on an attempt to understand the basic structure common to its many denotations, which should help us decode the sensation that this notion conceptualizes. The term alienation appears early. The Latin source is the noun alienatio, derived from the verb alienare, which means to draw away, to separate, to do something else (Schacht, 1970, p. 9; Feuerlicht, 1978, ch. 1; Rotenstreich, 1989, pp. 3-4). In the Middle Ages, they used the terms alienare and alienatio in several contexts: to denote transfer of property ownership, to describe a situation of disturbance or a loss of mental powers, and to indicate a cooling off in relationships (Schacht, 1970, pp. 9-13). In medieval philosophy, the concept of alienation had no negative meanings. Plotinus and his followers, for instance, held that alienation is a preferred option, pointing to a situation in which consciousness separates from

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real existence and shifts to a higher form of life. Alienation, then, implies development and uninterrupted human progress (Rotenstreich, 1989, pp. 4-6). This use of the concept of alienation has not been common since the eighteenth century. Thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx used the concept of alienation to denote a process entailing a negative aspect of detachment and estrangement. Rousseau and Marx, however, differ from Hegel in their use of the concept. Hegel, whose contribution to making alienation a key concept of modem culture is undisputed, used it in terms different from those accepted at present. Alienation was for him one element in a progression, marking a stage in a long-term process. Alienation is a process of detachment and, in Hegel's writings, it indicates several patterns of dissociation. First, separation from society and its perceptions. Human beings no longer perceive themselves through their social functions, and become strangers to society. Second, they become dissociated from themselves as entities living a primary and unmediated existence, and turn into objects of their consciousness, alienated from themselves (for a detailed analysis of alienation in Hegel see Schacht, 1970, pp. 25-72). In Hegel's view, however, alienation is only one level in a process leading human beings to discover their true essence. Alienation is an interim stage, between the lost original unity human beings had within themselves and the new, superior unity they will attain in the future (Rotenstreich, 1989, p. 7). In this sense, the meaning that Hegel ascribes to this concept, which is crucial in his thought, is surprisingly close to the common as well as to the philosophical usages of the term in the Middle Ages. Unlike Hegel, Marx uses the concept to denote a wholly negative process. In his approach, alienation is not a stage from which individuals return to their original unity. He makes alienation synonymous with the enslavement of human beings to their work and to their products, an enslavement that leads them to lose their identity and their essence (for an extensive analysis of Marx's position see OIlman 1980; Schacht, 1970, ch. 3; Feuerlicht, 1978, pp. 130-138, and below). In contemporary philosophical, sociological, and psychological literature, the Marxist interpretation of alienation as a reality of split and crisis that threatens human identity is the more common one (Schacht, 1970, ch. 5). Can we discern an underlying construct for the term alienation common to all these usages? Several scholars dealing with this question have answered in the affirmative (two of the more prominent ones are Feuerlicht, 1978, and Schacht, 1970, 1994). We can describe the basic construct of the concept of alienation as follows: frrst, alienation denotes an unfolding process instead of an existing, factual situation. In the Middle Ages, for instance, the term indicated a process of transferring ownership. Second, alienation is the process of something or someone separating from something or someone. Third, this separation shapes a kind of opposition between the reality before the process of alienation and the reality emerging in its wake. Fourth,

From Safety to Alienation

7

alienation makes sense if we assume that unity had existed in the past or will exist in the future, or that unity should prevail but does not. For instance, Hegel assumes unity had prevailed and will be attained in the future, whereas Marx assumes a kind of unity within human beings, which should prevail but does not (for a detailed analysis see Schacht, 1970, ch. 7; Feuerlicht, 1978, p. 8). This basic construct still leaves open the question concerning the objects of alienation, which may vary: human beings can be alienated from the world, from God, from others, or from themselves. The most prevalent usage of alienation endorses the Marxist construct. Is alienation, then, in the sense of detachment from unity and primary existence, a modem phenomenon, or has it been a part of life ever since human beings appeared on earth? This question has troubled philosophers and theoreticians. Whereas some have held that alienation is a fundamental element of human existence, others have viewed it as a symptom of modem life. Hegel is the leading supporter of the view that alienation is inherent in human existence. For instance, he considered Abraham an alienated hero: He [Abraham] was a stranger on earth, a stranger to the soil and to men alike. Among men he always was and remained a foreigner.... The whole world Abraham regarded as simply his opposite; ifhe did not take it to be nullity, he looked on it as sustained by the God who was alien to it. (Hegel, 1971, pp. 186-187) Hegel's perception of biblical history was extremely influential. Walter Kaufinan and other contemporary scholars, for instance, relate to biblical history. In his detailed introduction to Schacht's book (1970), Kaufinan writes: "Alienation is neither a disease nor a blessing but, for better or worse, a central feature of human existence" (Schacht, 1970, pp. xvi-xvii. For other formulations of this position, see Feuerlicht, 1978, pp. 18-19). Feuerlicht argues that, from this perspective, many biblical stories are stories of alienation. For instance, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is the story of human alienation from God. In this story, human beings become alienated from God, from nature, and from their primary existence, when consciousness and conscience intervene. The story of Cain's punishment is a story of alienation from the family, from God and from the other (Feuerlicht, 1978, p. 21). Alienation marks the onset of human history, which begins with a painful process of separation from the original unity. But this ascription of alienation to the misty dawn of human history is questionable. An essential element in the phenomenon of alienation is its tie to the concrete experience of the process of detachment and separation as constitutive of reality. Claiming that a given event separates human beings from a previous reality is not sufficient, and we must show proof that this process of detachment has become a constitutive element of their consciousness and their reality. Is there any evidence in the biblical story suggesting

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that Adam, Cain, or Abraham felt alienated, or experienced a process of alienation? Biblical heroes may have felt estranged, but not every feeling of estrangement is necessarily synonymous with a sense of alienation. Two conditions are necessary for estrangement to become alienation: the first is that estrangement be a process instead of an event; the second is that this process be constitutive of existence, so that people perceive themselves to be alienated. In this context, we may plausibly assume that scholars who view alienation as a new phenomenon, typical of the modem world, are correct. What makes alienation a modem experience? Why was alienation not a typical experience of ancient and medieval times? Despite the difficulty entailed in any attempt to take such a long-term view of history, several overall claims are possible. Alienation intensifies when the orderly, organized world picture breaks down. As organized reality becomes less intelligible, the sense of alienation deepens. Alienation is the embodiment of "not being at home" or "being outside." When human beings lived with a sense that the world was their home and that they understood its laws, they never experienced alienation. The sense of alienation emerges with the rise of a form of self-awareness that separates human beings from the world (compare Hyppolite, 1955, p. 102). Martin Buber, who devotes the first part of his book Between Man and Man (1955) to a historical analysis of self-understanding, offers a comprehensive analysis of this approach. He argues that human history splits into two basic periods shaping the human spirit, epochs of habitation and epochs of homelessness: "In the former, man lives in the world as in a house, as in a home. In the latter, man lives in the world as in an open field and at times does not even have four pegs with which to set up a tent" (ibid., p. 126). Buber sees significant differences between these two periods, insofar as the development of human consciousness is concerned. When human beings feel that the world is their home, they live with a sense of security and, as a result, they do not tum toward themselves but toward the world. At these times, human consciousness addresses mainly cosmological and metaphysical questions. When the human sense of security in the world is undermined, when "man finds himself a stranger and solitary in the world ... [he becomes] problematic to himself' (ibid., p. 132). Buber claims that the history of the human spirit can be read as a movement from crisis to crisis; whenever human beings perceive a challenge to their ontological security, they seek to reconstruct the home in one way or another, and go back to examine their relationship with the world and with reality. We need not agree with every detail of Buber's analysis to view his thinking as a contribution to our understanding of history and of the sources of alienation. Alienation grows from the human experience of a broken home; it is rooted in a sense of not feeling at home or, in Martin Heidegger's terminology, unheimlichkeit (Heidegger, 1972, p. 189; see also Heidegger, 1962, p. 233). This notion, taken as a starting point, clarifies why alienation is

From Safety to Alienation

9

a fairly modem phenomenon: at this time, more than at any other, human beings become strangers in their home. This alienation developed in three consecutive stages: alienation from the world and from God, alienation from society, and, fmally, alienation from the self. Before we proceed to examine these stages, let us briefly describe perceptions prevalent in the ancient and medieval periods, the pre-modem world in which human beings did not experience alienation. At the center of the Greek approach is the idea of the cosmos: the world is an ordered, quasimilitary camp, with every element in a fixed and precise place. Order and logic prevail throughout this complex system, which is organized with a wondrous, methodical regularity extending to the entire universe. This is probably one of the most crucial contributions of Greek thinking: the perception of the metaphysical, physical, political, and moral realms as a system of laws. No longer a world governed by gods or blind fate, but a world ruled by law. This view draws no distinctions between the natural and social cosmos, in all its manifestations (Gurevich, 1985, pp. 56-57), and refrains from the nature-culture antitheses so prevalent in the modem world. Human beings do not sense a radical contrast between themselves and their natural environment: In modem times, nature has come to be construed as the empirical world, as an extra-human datum, an element that human culture can manipulate; but in the Middle Ages no clear boundary was recognized between the two, or, at best, it was vague and movable. (Ibid., pp. 5657) A popular analogy expressing this idea was the comparison between the macrocosm and the microcosm. The microcosm is not only one more part among the other parts making up the macrocosm; the microcosm, the human being, is a "miniature replica of it, as it were, reproducing it in its entirety"(ibid., p. 57; see also Lopez, 1967, p. 365). The orderly structure of the world is open to human consciousness and human inquiry. When setting up the process of studying reality, therefore, people can begin by studying themselves and conclude with the study of the world, or they can begin by studying the world and conclude by studying themselves. An overall, uniform order encompasses the whole of reality, accessible from either the world or oneself. The relationship between the microcosJ11-,-in the shape of the human being-and the world, enables us to gain knowledge about this order from either perspective, the human being or the world, "seeing himself in nature as in a mirror and at the same time finding nature within himself' (Gurevich, 1985, p. 65). This metaphysic and epistemic trust in a fixed, comprehensive order, made the world a home for human beings, who experienced unity across the

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entire range of life's manifestations: nature, culture, politics, and religion (ibid., p. 288). In Greek tradition, natural law was as much an integral part of the order of reality as was moral law, and even legal edicts reflected this order. Aristotelian ethics, instead of representing a set of obligations opposed to the world of facts, reflects the social aspect of human beings, who need to be complemented as part of a natural process. Moral and political law is valid because it reflects the proper metaphysical order for the human creature. In this view, the metaphysics of human existence is no different from metaphysics in general, since reason is one. Buber writes that, for Aristotle, "man is a thing among these things of the universe, an objectively comprehensible species beside other species" (Buber, 1955, p. 127). This trust in the world, in the general order, in the human creature as one of the possible objects of knowledge, is evident in the perception of rationality as the most essential human quality. The human being shares this quality with God, and even becomes thereby an entity that is the purpose of existence. The human being is the perfect creature and, on the assumption that the world reflects a purposeful order, those creatures that are supremely perfect are the purpose of reality. The human being is not one of many but primus inter pares, the purpose of existence; the world is more than a home to all human creatures-it exists for their use and was created in their honor. After Christianity, the Greek perception of the cosmos undergoes a change, but human beings do not become abandoned, estranged creatures. Unlike the harmonistic perspective of the ancient world, the Middle Ages emphasize the contrast between "the city of God" [civitas dell and "the city of Satan" [civitas diablz]. Human beings can choose between these two alternatives, but Christian metaphysics still ensures their place in the world. God guarantees our existence and our salvation, and the divine incarnation in Jesus attests to God's responsibility for the course of history. The Church promises redemption. Christians find a home in a religion that blended seamlessly with the Greek metaphysical view. Existence in this world was meaningful, anchored in religious faith in God's presence. The Church attested to that, and the believer was not forsaken (Gurevich, 1985, p. 58). According to this approach, assessments of human existence should not take into account its irrational, incidental, and distinctive aspects: physical elements, differences in cultural environments, in education, in wealth, and other factors. Elements expressing uniqueness and variety are irrelevant, since the human being is an entity characterized by universal components shared by humanity as a whole, and incidental and particularistic features are of no consequence. The hallmark of medieval personality is this preference of the general over the particular: The personal self in the Middle Ages was not seen as ... a unique individuality valued precisely because of its individual peculiarities. The

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personal self was positively valued in so far as it partook of what was typical and recurrent... not individuality but universitas is in the foreground... "what is individual is inexpressible"; thus did the medieval philosophers concede the preference of their age for demonstration of what is typical, general and supra-individual. (Ibid., pp. 307-308) Even when a person has a consciousness of self, the object of this consciousness is not his/her existence as a unique entity different from the other. Self-consciousness emerges solely in the context of the typical and the general. The concrete personality, developing and changing, estranged from the surroundings, is not typical of the medieval Weltanschauung. A. J. Gurevich succinctly fonnulated the self-evident conclusion from this analysis: In short, the medieval individual lived in a society which knew nothing of "alienation" in its advanced fonns. Thanks to this, his social existence and practice were integrated and amalgamated in a way that was lost in the transition to a more developed and more differentiated bourgeois society. Progress is always and inevitably dialectical. Here it is paid for by the loss of certain values which embodied a more direct relationship with life. (Ibid., p. 311) In the history of the human spirit, however, crises have compelled human beings to face feelings of despondency and emptiness. The world ceased to be intelligible; it became foreign, alienated, and was no longer home. Pascal excelled at expressing this sense of crisis, and reflects Michel de Montaigne's influence. In his Essays, Montaigne writes as follows: Let him help me to understand, by the force of his reason, on what foundations he has built these great advantages that he thinks he has over other creatures. Who has persuaded him that that admirable motion of the celestial vault, the etemallight of those torches rolling so proudly above his head, the fearful movements of that infinite sea, were established and have lasted so many centuries for his convenience and his service? Is it possible to imagine anything so ridiculous as that this miserable and puny creature, who is not even master of himself, exposed to the attacks of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the universe, the lest part of which it is not in his power to know, much less to command? (Montaigne, 1958,11:12, pp. 328-329) Montaigne stresses human insignificance vis-a-vis the surrounding infinity. Acknowledging the vastness and diversity of the universe requires eradicating the puzzling arrogance leading human beings to believe they hold the key to existence as a whole. Montaigne posits a dichotomy: the vastness of

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the universe and the nullity of humanity, or the centrality of humanity and the nullity of the universe. What led to this turnabout in human consciousness? Where is the root of the view that deflects human beings from the course of supremacy that GreekChristian tradition affirms, which views them as the epitome of Creation? If we accept the assumption that the absence of the concept of the individual personality during the Middle Ages precluded the experience of alienation, we must now conclude that, as individual consciousness grows, alienation will deepen. As soon as individuals identify themselves as different from others and from the environment, their sense of estrangement and alienation will grow. As Gurevich points out (1985, p. 308), the beginning of the shift from the universal to the particular takes place as early as the thirteenth century. The growth of individualism comes to the fore in different realms of human life: In art we see people individually depicted, the beginnings of portraiture; in literature, more and more is written in the vernacular languages, which show themselves to be more capable than Latin of expressing the various shades of human emotion; individual styles in handwriting begin to appear. (Ibid.) These incipient signs culminated in the Copernican revolution. Many scholars, and Buber among them (1955, p. l3I), claim that this revolution shook the human grip on a world that had hitherto been home. Suddenly, human beings stand alone in the infmite space, as insignificant creatures who no longer have a place in it: "the unlimited was pressing in from every side, and man was standing in a universe which in actual fact could no longer be experienced as a house. Man was no longer secure" (ibid.). Evicted from the world, human beings now face their distinct, feeble existence. Tossed back onto themselves, they discover that they are exceptional creatures, different from the rest of creation in their weakness and singularity. This consciousness brings them to the threshold of the alienation experience. One reaction to this revolution is the development of philosophical agnosticism and of a profound skepticism, which were remarkably prominent in the sixteenth century. Agnosticism, which was also the background to Rene Descartes's thinking, culminated in pronouncements such as that of Montaigne. Reason cannot provide human beings with keys to the world and help them make it a home; the unbiased observer of the natural world will also soon discover the insignificance of the human creature in the universe. This sense, which could result in a complete collapse of all values, led Descartes to launch his attempt to rebuild an intelligible world on the foundations of the skepticism of his times. An incisive observer such as Blaise Pascal, however, understood that Descartes's method fails to provide a true

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answer to "the misery of Man without God." Buber argues that Pascal "experienced beneath the starry heavens ... their uncanniness ... and so comes to know man's limitation, his inadequacy, the casualness of his existence" (Buber, 1955, p. 131). Pascal's analysis of reality is sometimes astonishingly modem and upto-date. He grasped the meaning of the Copernican revolution, which shifted the human creature from the center to the margins and led to terrifying distress. Like Camus, Pascal stresses, "we bum with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infmite" (Pascal, 1932, pp. 19-20). Human beings, however, do not fmd a comprehensive basis for understanding reality, "But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses" (ibid., p. 20). The epistemological certainty that had characterized the classic world was lost forever. We are fmite beings, that is, we are incapable of perfect knowledge; a barrier separates us from reality. Pascal argues that our epistemological pretension rests on our conceit, and on a shaky assumption: "they [human beings] bore some proportion to her [nature]" (ibid., p. 18). Epistemological pretension rests on a metaphysical misunderstanding. Pascal assumes that the possibility of knowing the order of reality relies on the correspondence between the structure of knowledge and the structure of reality. Relying on this assumption, he still endorses the classic worldview. He does not adopt the more modem view separating knowledge from reality, which developed in the wake of British empiricism and after Immanuel Kant. He assumes that to know means to take part in nature. But human beings, who are fmite, are different from nature, which is infinite: It is strange that they have wished to understand the beginnings of things, and thence to arrive at the knowledge of the whole, with a presumption as infmite as their object. For surely this design cannot be formed without presumption or without a capacity infinite like nature. (Ibid., p. 18)

By acknowledging their uniqueness and their metaphysical standing, human beings will avoid epistemological conceit. What is the human metaphysical standing? According to Pascal, human beings acknowledge their existence as interim creatures between infmity and nothing. In famous lines from his Pensees, Pascal writes: For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infmite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the

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Nothing from which he was made, and the Infmite in which he is swallowed up. (Ibid., pp. 17-18) Human beings are enclosed in a strange, unknowable reality, and cannot fmd their place within it. What is the outlet? Pascal offers a beautiful analysis of the solutions attempted for this distress. The first solution is practical: distraction. Pascal claims that the sole purpose of most human efforts and occupations is to fmd distraction from the distress of existence: The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self. For he is unhappy, king though he be, ifhe think of himself. This is all that men have been able to discover to make themselves happy. And those who philosophize on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase which turns away our attention from these, does screen us. (Ibid., p. 40) Human beings seek "outside distraction" from their ceaseless hardship. According to Pascal, they strive for rest and serenity, but they are afflicted with a distress leading them to shift from one pursuit to another. What emerges from this tension between "two contrary instincts"? A confused idea... inciting them to aim at rest through excitement, and always to fancy that the satisfaction which they have not will come to them, if, by surmounting whatever difficulties confront them, they can thereby open the door to rest. (Ibid., p. 41) An alternative solution to this distress is to bet on the existence of God. Pascal's phrase is worth noting: a bet instead of knowledge or proof. This is the point: we cannot attain definite knowledge about reality and about God, but we must bet on the existence of God or face the threat of constant danger. The bet rests on the following argument: if we bet on God's existence and no God exists, we incur no damage. But if a God who will rage at our unacceptable behavior exists, the proper thing for us to do is to choose God. The bet releases us from distress, not because it ensures us certainty, or provides an anchor that returns order to reality, but because the bet is an existential act that paves the way to faith, which Pascal considers divine grace. In sum: human beings live in existential anguish, resulting from the change in their metaphysical status. The two radical options that Pascal postulates, alienation and estrangement or redemption in faith, will eventually become the two contending options in the philosophy of alienation. In The

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Myth of Sisyphus, Camus was visibly aware of the redemptive, consoling role of religion, and that was the focus of his rebellion. He sought to defend a life of estrangement and alienation, and rejected the comforting solution of religion. Camus, however, like Pascal, understood that concrete human life stretches between two poles: alienation and metaphysical religious solace. Another form of alienation, besides alienation from the world, is social alienation. From time immemorial, we know of human beings who felt themselves strangers in society and preferred to cut their ties with it. Social alienation in modernity, however, has become more ominous and oppressive. Individuals feel themselves strangers, and also feel that society robs them of their authentic existence, hinders the realization of their uniqueness. Our social roles require us to hide behind masks and remove any remnant of our existence. This view of alienation emerges in the eighteenth century, mainly in Rousseau's thought. He coined the human ideal of the Renaissance: the human being is an active autonomous creature, meant to lead a life of honor and liberty. The Renaissance thinker Giovanni Pico della Mirandola formulated this ideal as follows:

A limited nature in other creatures is confined within the laws written down by Us. In conformity with thy [Adam] free judgment, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds; and thou wilt fix limits of nature for thyself... Thou... art the molder and maker of thyself. . . thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which are brutes. Thou canst again grow upward from thy soul's reason into the higher natures which are divine. (Pico della Mirandola, 1965, pp. 4-5) This ideal, argues Rousseau, is unattainable in modem society and culture. In this society, we are demanded to be strangers to ourselves, to renounce our freedom: "Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains" (Rousseau, 1968, p. 49). This notion recurs in several of his writings, and is succinctly summed up in the following passage: All minds seem to have been cast in the same mould. Incessantly politeness requires, propriety demands; incessantly usage is followed, never one's own inclinations. One no longer dares to appear as he is; and in this perpetual constraint, the men who form this herd called society, placed in the same circumstances, will all do the same things unless stronger motives deter them. (Rousseau, 1964, p. 38) This primeval sense, which Rousseau voices in the eighteenth century, intensified in the nineteenth century. The development of all-encompassing structures- demanding new industries, a capitalist economy, and the rise of the centralist modem state-led to increasing alienation from society. Human

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beings fmd they have become slaves to the structures they had established. The sense of social alienation is now ubiquitous. The world is no longer home, and society, where human beings could have expected to fmd comfort, becomes alien and strange. Social integration requires them to renounce all that is particular and special in them to become indistinct creatures, bereft of identity or uniqueness. Marx, who continues and refmes Rousseau's thought, deepened the formulation of social alienation (on the relationship between Marx and Rousseau, see Plamenatz, 1992, p. 266). Marx sustained the possibility of a social reality enabling human beings to attain self-realization, expressing their identity and their full powers. That is the just society, meaning the society appropriate to human nature. In all others unlike it, a process of alienation unfolds. In his Early Writings (Marx, 1963), Marx devotes section 22 to the issue of alienation. The title of this section is: "Alienated Labor," strongly suggesting that alienation is not anchored in social existence, as Rousseau had postulated, but in the way society organizes work and in the status of the worker within it. Marx points to different aspects of alienation in capitalist society: first, "the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and to a most miserable commodity; that the misery of the worker increases with the power and volume of his production" (ibid., p. 120). Second, workers relate to their products as a foreign object, and the instruments of production do not belong to them: The worker is deprived of the most essential things, not only of life but also of work. Labor itself becomes an object which he can acquire only by the greatest effort... So much does the appropriation of the object appear as alienation that the more objects the worker produces the fewer he can possess and the more he falls under the domination of his product, of capital. (ibid.) Alienation is the expression of historical circumstances. Hegel held that alienation is a necessary feature, anchored in the structure of consciousness, whereas Marx viewed alienation as the expression of a given socio-economic reality. These perceptions led to different results. For Hegel, the solution to the problem of alienation is in the philosophical method, in decoding the meaning of alienation in a process of spiritual discovery. Marx, however, argues that the solution to alienation is in praxis, in a revolutionary change of the social and economic order that will lead to its elimination (Avineri, 1968, pp. 96-123; Kitching, 1988, pp. 19-26; Love, 1986, p. 36; Macquarrie, 1972, pp. 203-204; OIlman, 1980, pp. 131-132; Solomon, 1987, pp. 96-97). How do individuals cope with feelings of alienation from the world and from society? As Buber noted, alienation causes them to look inward. They have discovered the difference between themselves and the world, themselves

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and society, and have identified themselves as thinking subjects. Pascal describes the new consciousness as follows: I can well conceive of a man without hands, feet, head (for it is only experience which teaches us that the head is more necessary than feet). But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute. (Pascal, 1932, p. 96) A faint echo of Pascal's words resonates in Camus's statement: If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity. (The Myth o/Sisyphus, p. 51) These two thinkers, separated by centuries, express in similar terms the experience of alienation and separation from the world, which is anchored in the very nature of human beings as thinking creatures facing the world and relating to it as an object. Pascal, who acknowledges that the basic human posture toward existence is that of a thinking creature, further states: Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. (Pascal, 1932, p. 97) Individuals do not infer their value from external elements, or from their special status in the world: their value is intrinsic, and follows from their consciousness. In Buber's words, It is the new attitude of the person who has become homeless in infmity, for here everything depends on the knowledge that man's grandeur is born of his misery, that he is different from all things .... Man is the being who knows his situation in the universe. (Buber, 1955, p. 132)

Even if human beings cannot understand the world, they can know the relationship between themselves and the world. Their special quality is their consciousness. Pascal claimed that he does not find self-meaning in space, "but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world" (Pascal, 1932, p. 97).

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Consciousness and thought had hitherto mediated between the world and human beings. Through them, people had understood the world and acknowledged themselves as part of it. Ontologically and epistemologically, consciousness had been the anchor shaping the unity between human beings and reality. Now, consciousness is human self-respect. Consciousness is not a bridge to something outside us but our private possession; it does not redeem us from our distress, and even confirms the strangeness of the world. Yet, this private consciousness grants human beings a new status: alienation is the discovery of human freedom. Human beings are free creatures in the sense that they are free from the world, they are not part of it but stand facing it. Freedom and alienation are different sides of the same coin. Stefan Zweig illustrated this duality when he wrote: "The homeless man becomes free in a new sense: and only he who has lost all ties need have no arriere-pensee" (Zweig, 1953, v). This alienated freedom, however, fills human creatures with terror and anxiety. S0Ten Kierkegaard conveys the distress of alienation in unique ways in many of his writings. In a passage of his journal, he writes: : "All existence makes me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation; the whole thing is inexplicable to me, I myself most of all.... My distress is enormous, boundless" (Kierkegaard, 1977, II A 420, 12 May 1839, § 5383). The encounter with existence leaves the individual with a sense that life is meaningless and evokes serious questions: I stick my fmger into the world-it has no smell. Where am I? What does it mean to say: the world? What is the meaning of that word? Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here? Who am I? ... How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? (Kierkegaard, 1983, p. 200) Kierkegaard often expresses this sense of lacking access to an awesome and perplexing reality. As I showed elsewhere (Sagi, 2000), alienation is the constitutive experience of Kierkegaard's thought in general, and he contends with it by developing a dynamic and unique approach. His entire philosophy is an attempt to reinterpret himself vis-a-vis a human reality dominated by alienation and estrangement. The mark of the new consciousness is the discovery that the individual faces the world and existence as a subject faces an object. Human beings are neither part of the world nor of society; they are different from them, observe them, draw a distinction between themselves and the surroundings, and this distinction is itself the experience of alienation. The experience of separation evokes anxiety and leaves us without support, a feeling Kierkegaard explicitly formulates. In existentialist tradition, chiefly that influenced by Heidegger, the feeling of anxiety indicates the human loss of ontological security within the world. This anxiety makes the world irrelevant to existence (Heidegger, 1962,

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p. 231; see also May, 1983, ch. 7), because the individual is the one bearing the alienation from the world and from society by separating from what hitherto had been the foundation of human existence-the world or society. Had this separation not been an essential element of human existence, human beings would not have sensed that alienation is constitutive of their very being. Marx, who dealt with social alienation, derived from it the phenomenon of self-alienation. His starting point is that individuals attain self-realization through the diverse modes of their existence. These modes include intellectual activity but also, and mainly, concrete activity. People are what they do and create, their identity does not exist beyond these modes of existence; human existence is contingent on external objects and on our action upon them (Marx, 1963, p. 127). Since workers live in a world alienated from their work, they live in self-alienation. Marx conveys this sense of self-alienation in different ways: self-alienation is the depletement of the inner world (ibid., p. 122). When.experiencing self-alienation, human beings sense a loss of self, and others overwhelm them. In the lyrical prose of a sensitive humanist, Marx writes about alienated work: This is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as something alien and not belonging to him, activity as suffering (passivity), strength as powerlessness, creation as emasculation, the personal physical and mental energy of the worker, his personal life (for what is life but activity?) as an activity which is directed against himself, independent of him and not belonging to him. This is self-alienation. (Ibid., p. 126, emphasis in original) Self-alienation emerges when individuals face the contrast between their lives and one of full realization; it conveys failure and a loss of self. Hegel, unlike Marx, had not viewed alienation as failure but as a necessary stage in the development of consciousness. Self-alienation is an independent phenomenon deserving separate analysis, and Hegel devotes a long discussion to it in Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel, 1977, pp. 294-328). His main concern is the relationship between particularistic individual existence and cultural universal existence. Self-alienation is the reality that emerges in the cultural world as an object that is external to the human being, as something the human being faces. This alienation, however, embodied in the transformation of the cultural world into an object, is a necessary step that establishes existence itself (ibid., p. 299). The world does appear to us alienated and strange, but this is not a fmal reality. We overcome this stage by recognizing the role of the spirit in the creation of the world of culture. Through this recognition, the world "out there" becomes a world constituted by the self. Hegel, like Marx after him, accepted that individuals express

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themselves through their mode of action in the world; alienation is the situation in which they have not yet recognized the world as theirs. For Hegel, alienation is a result of individuals developing their association with external cultural reality out of the consciousness of their individual particularistic existence. Individuals living an unmediated existence do not perceive the world as their product, and are therefore alienated. This immediate individual reality, however, is but a moment, and alienation is the beginning of a liberation process. In this process, we move from an initial existential situation as a closed and confmed self to existence as a "universal self' (ibid., p. 296). The individual grasps that culture is the embodiment of the self. The objective world is absorbed into the self. This view of alienation assumes that individual existence is an invention that has no place in the real world (ibid., p. 298). Hegel held that an unalienated life is one where general, public modes of existence defme the individual as a human creature (Taylor, 1996, p. 90). Only through a process of alienation and objectification can individuals attain a sense of self-worth and ensure that others will recognize their worth (Hegel, 1977, p. 306). Contrary to Marx, Hegel does not hold that an individual experiences a loss through alienation, and claims instead that only through alienation does s/he become a human entity of any value. Only those who prefer to remain in an inferior mode of human existence, failing to attain full self-realization, experience a loss of self through alienation (for a comparison between Hegel and Marx, see Avineri, 1968, ch. 5). Hegel's thinking represents a comprehensive philosophical-cultural attempt to balance the classic, rational philosophical tradition that stresses universality against the new element of individualism stressed by Romanticism. In his genius, Hegel seeks to preserve the universal and the particular selves. He asks us to see that universality is not feasible without us but is a product of human beings, the full expression of human existence. Adopting alienation reflects a false consciousness, which negates its own endeavor (Berger, 1967, p. 93). As noted, the philosophical, sociological, and psychological literature adopted the Marxist approach because Marx, unlike Hegel, stressed the importance of individual existence instead of seeking to absorb unique personal existence into the universal self. He knew that individuals are their actions but, unlike Hegel, he offered a mode of existence in which "objective" actions would also be personal. The appeal of Marx's thinking lies in his emphasis on the link between individual existence and alienation in general and self-alienation in particular, without attempting to overcome this through a philosophical theory. The Marxist view of self-alienation reaches its mature fonnulation in existentialist thinking, chiefly in Heidegger. In Being and Time, Heidegger sets up two basic modes of existence: authenticity and alienation (see, for instance, Heidegger, 1962, pp. 222, 298). Alienated existence, to which he

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refers as "falling" (ibid., p. 298), is an existence where individuals are inclined to perceive themselves in terms inappropriate to their being, tending to blur their unique characteristics, and perceiving themselves as objects in the world. By contrast, in an authentic existence, individuals perceive themselves transparently as unique creatures. The distinguishing feature of this existence is individuality. Human existence is usually an alienated existence, and seldom do individuals answer the demand of conscience calling them to replace it with an authentic one (on the relationship between authenticity and alienation in Heidegger see Zimmerman, 1982). Unlike Marx, Heidegger sees no room for a revolution that will change reality and return the authentic existence that was lost. Human beings are doomed to live in alienation, and seldom escape this fate. This sense of loss of self, shaping ways of life meant to deny individuality and collapse uniqueness, was rife in the twentieth century. Herbert Marcuse, for instance, held that loss of self in modem culture is so pervasive that the sense of alienation as an ongoing process has vanished. In words suffused by Marxist overtones, he criticizes contemporary industrial society: Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they fmd their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. (Marcuse, 1964, p. 9) Underlying the basic construct of the alienation experience, as noted, is a process of separation and detachment. Marcuse indicates that, at present, the experience of separation is progressively vanishing. Self-alienation reaches a peak because the self is almost completely absorbed within the objects of industrial society; so successful is this false existence that the individual no longer feels self-alienation: The concept of alienation seems to become questionable when the individuals identify themselves with the existence which is imposed upon them and have it in their own development and satisfaction. This identification is not illusion but reality. However, the reality constitutes a more progressive stage of alienation. The latter has become entirely objective; the subject which is alienated is swallowed up by its alienated existence. There is only one dimension, and it is everywhere and in all forms. (Ibid., p. II) This elaborate foray into the ways of alienation brings us closer to Camus and to the question of where, along this alienation axis, is his thinking

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located. Is his philosophy at all a philosophy of alienation? What types of alienation concern Camus? What is the relationship between the experience of alienation and the experience of the absurd, which is Camus's main concern? Let me suggest a preliminary outline, the only one possible at this stage of the discussion. Camus refers to a strangeness resembling alienation in The Myth ofSisyphus: A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense," sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature of a landscape can negate us .... For a second we cease to understand it .... The world evades us (p. 20). Camus uses "strangeness" in reference to the way the world appears to us instead of to the process of our detachment and separation from it. In this sense, the experience Camus considers in this text does not denote the experience of alienation that has concerned us so far (Schacht, 1970, p. 207). His book is not entitled "The Alienated" but The Outsider. Meursault, the protagonist of the book, which I discuss in Chapter Eight, is an outsider to society and its values. Within himself, however, he does not experience separation and detachment, and this is not the constitutive experience of his being. Meursault is at peace with himself, free of the suffering that characterizes the alienated individual. He has preferences and loves, feelings and beliefs. Meursault's estrangement from society does not emerge in his posture toward it but in the explicit attitude of society toward him. He is even incapable of wlderstanding how society feels toward him. An expression of the estrangement society displays toward him is the trial scene. The trial takes place as if he were not present, no one asks for his view, and his existence is of no interest to any of the participants. According to this interpretation, Meursault is not the hero of the alienation experience (for an extensive analysis see Feuerlicht, 1978, pp. 90-94). But another description of Meursault, as an alienated individual, is also possible. As I claim in Chapter Eight, Meursault is living a double alienation: personal and social. He is self-alienated, since he lives a non-reflective life. He expresses his thoughts, his desires, and his preferences within defined, transient circumstances. He does not think about himself or about his life. He lives and works and, in this sense, he is alienated from an essential element of his existence as a human creature. He does not acknowledge himself as a subject. A life without self-consciousness precludes his accessibility to himself as a personality, as an individual for whom the range of his activities constitutes self-realization. Similarly, Meursault is also alienated from society, since his scale of values was determined as if he lived without a society. His way of life shows that Meursault does not understand that human existence is social. He is alienated from society in the sense that, as a person, he should

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have been attentive to society and should have related to it as a significant and worthwhile element when determining his values. Although we could read The Outsider in these terms, this work is not a typical expression of alienation as I described it above. The possibility of two variant readings shows the extent to which this text is not a characteristic representation of alienation. The answer to the question of whether alienation is at all a fundamental experience of Camus's philosophy is complex. The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel deal with different aspects of the experience of the absurd, requiring us to re-examine the assumption that the absurd is but a variation of alienation. At this stage, I will confine myself to the claim that the absurd is an experience built on two contradictory elements, one positive and one negative--a negative experience of rift and separation, and a positive experience of yearning for harmony and unity. On the surface, the absurd resembles alienation, but this is not so. The experience of alienation focuses on the process of detachment and separation. By contrast, the experience of the absurd assumes that unity and alienation coexist, and the sole legitimate meaning of unity is the constant yearning for it. The yearning for unity does not eliminate alienation, it intensifies it. The absurd thereby turns into a disharmonious experience constituted through two contrary elements, and is doomed to remain in this conflict of opposites. Referring to the absurd as a variation of alienation does not help us to decode its meaning. The absurd differs from alienation because it preserves both contradictory elements as necessary. The absurd is a process experience, but the process is precisely the tension between the reality of alienation and the unattainable ideal of unity. Camus's philosophy moves forward from the strangeness, expressed in The Outsider as the absurd. He reinterprets strangeness through a reading involving a fascinating combination of Hegelian and Marxist elements. From Hegel, Camus took the assumption that alienation is a moment in the transition toward unity; from Marx, he took the idea that returning to unity is not feasible. The old Hegelian unity becomes an endless yearning never to be satisfied. Different formulations of this yearning appear at several stages of Camus's work. At the early stages, Camus confmes himself to pointing out that this yearning is a constitutive datum of consciousness. This is the gist of his claim in The Myth of Sisyphus. Later, in The Plague or The Rebel, Camus seeks to build a new home for us in the shape of human solidarity, which will replace external or metaphysical reality. Camus assumes at this stage that, even if the world is strange and alienated, people can reshape their relationship with society through solidarity, which will override social and self-alienation. This analysis leads to the conclusion that Camus's view of the absurd preserves romantic elements. Romanticism, particular German Romanticism, combines a sense of strangeness with longings for home:

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ALBERT CAMUS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSURD The feeling of homelessness and loneliness became the fundamental experience of the new generation; their whole outlook on the world was influenced by it .... Whenever the romantics describe their outlook on art and the world, the word or the idea of homelessness creeps into their sentences. (Hauser, 1952, pp. 663-664)

German Romanticism chose alienation and strangeness: "They suffer from their estrangement from the world, but they also accept and desire it" (ibid., p. 664). This choice strengthened the longing for the missing home. A similar trend pervades Kierkegaard's philosophy. The constitutive elements of his oeuvre are the sense of alienation and a yearning for repetition, for the reconstruction of the relationship with reality. He shifts restlessly between these poles, at times accepting alienation, and at times wishing, and believing in, a full return to reality (for an extensive analysis see Sagi,2000). Camus continues the romantic and existentialist trends that had preceded him; his contribution is the creation of a renewed balance between contradictory trends. Human beings must build their lives based on their estrangement and alienation from the world; they should not expect the world to understand them and reunite with them. Yet, although they are fated to yearn for a home, they should not build their lives on this passion. Alternatively, in later works, he claims that this passion must be translated into the practical terms of interpersonal relationships. In some of his works, Camus still adopts a radical position of selfalienation, similar to that of Marx or, more precisely, to that of Marcuse. The Fall, which I discuss in Chapter Thirteen, traces the profile of an alienated hero in a perfect trap, resembling Marcuse's description of self-alienation. Even after Camus construes the experience of the absurd as a tension between opposition and negation, the experience of self-alienation resurfaces in full strength. Is it just a coincidence that he chose The Fall as the title of this work? May we not plausibly assume that Camus was thinking of Heidegger, who had characterized inauthentic existence in terms of "falling" and "alienation"? (Heidegger, 1962, p. 298). Whatever the answer, Camus is recurrently concerned with the decoding of the absurd, which counts alienation among its chief elements. What are the sources of Camus's philosophy? Is it the theoretical innovation of a philosopher involved in speculative thinking, or is the preservation of the two contradictory elements deeply anchored in Camus's concrete existence? I discuss this question in Chapter Two.

Two CAMUS AS A PERSONAL TlllNKER Several complex questions have troubled Camus scholars: Is Camus a philosopher or a novelist? Is he a writer of fiction or a man contending with his existence through his writing? How should we understand his oeuvre? Does one recurrent principle pervade his work as a whole? In this chapter, I consider several scholarly evaluations of Camus's work. Despite Camus's unequivocal statement that he had never seen himself as a philosopher (Camus, 1968, p. 345), some scholars still view him as one. Consider, for instance, the view of Thomas L. Thorson: "Camus's philosophical concerns ... are primary" (Thorson, 1964, p. 285). Thomas Hanna, one of Camus's biographers, went even further and argued that Camus is first a philosopher, and "only by understanding Camus first as a philosopher can we fully appraise his literary works" (Hanna, 1958, p. x). Others have argued that Camus's philosophy develops, above all, from a sense of the absurd that is both a priori and empirical (Denton, 1967, p. 26). The absurd is, according to this view, the constitutive foundation of Camus's thought, a primary sense, a foundational pattern of consciousness that precedes all experience and determines the course of our existence. We experience the absurd in our everyday life because an a priori sense of the absurd is constitutive of human experience. Still other scholars have stressed that Camus is a philosopher who takes his personal experience as his point of departure. This experience becomes the focus of his thinking, and Camus explicates it through philosophy (Bn~e, 1964, p. 9). This approach assumes that the personal human experience of existence is not reflective. People do not necessarily turn their lives into an object of philosophical contemplation. Camus, however, makes his life the focus of his study, seeking to understand the meaning of his modes of experiencing existence. The attempt to characterize Camus's entire oeuvre in overall terms is inadequate. The notion that we cannot understand his literary work without understanding his philosophy is probably an overstatement. Many of the short stories in Noces and Summer (Camus, 1968) are not part of a philosophy but of Camus's Mediterranean experience. This experience includes such elements as the glaring light, the sea, pagan scents, myths of grandeur, and others, which also come to the fore in Camus's admiration for the Hellenic myth. Yet, his philosophy does shed new light on some elements of hisliterary work. The view of Camus as primarily a philosopher is also hard to accept. His Letters to a German Friend (Camus, 1966), his journals, and his many

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interviews to the press on current events anthologized in Actuelles (Camus, 1950), place him in the company of social and cultural critics and of the great eighteen-twentieth century moralists, and not within the ranks of existentialism or modem phenomenology. The perception of Camus as only a moralist is also lacking, since most of his work, including The Myth of Sisyphus, shows no trace of moralist trends. The Myth of Sisyphus is a prominent instance of a solipsism incompatible with any moral stance. In Letters to a German Friend, in The Rebel, or in The Plague, Camus is a moralist, but this does not support the claim that he is only a moralist. So the question remains open: Who is Camus? How should we approach his work? My thesis is that, in most of his work, Camus comes across as a special kind of philosopher, the "personal thinker," and Germaine Bree has already succinctly summed up this view. Like all personal thinkers, Camus turned his concrete life into the subject of his concern. To understand the implications of this concept for the interpretation of Camus's work we require a more precise characterization of personal philosophy. The thinking of personal philosophers is a product of their contest with a personal problem, with a concrete life experience. Personal philosophers, unlike academic philosophers, are not concerned with theoretical questions; they do not analyze abstract concepts, and what moves them is a basic question posed by existence. Their philosophical efforts are an attempt to solve their anguish, to reach a new harmony and restore a balance disturbed by the problematic gnawing at their lives. Personal thinkers abide by the ancient Greek injunction, "know thyself': they return to themselves, to their life experience, seeking remedy for their anguish. Augustine's saying sums up this idea by saying, "Truth dwells in the inner man." In this sense, personal thinkers resemble writers driven by a similar anguish. Many philosophers are personal thinkers. Blaise Pascal, S0ren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche are prominent examples, just as Fyodor Dostoevsky or Franz Kafka are instances of writers whose anguish drives their work. Although personal thinking departs from life experiences, from concrete foundational events, it neither stops at the experience nor is it an endless repetition of the personal narrative. The literary or philosophical work of the personal thinker is a form of self-objectification. Human beings, who cannot observe themselves directly, do so through their writing. Philosophizing, then, is an unremitting endeavor of self-interpretation or, in Karl Jaspers's words, "existence is interpretation" (Jaspers, 1955, pp. 26-27; see also Sagi, 2000, ch.4). In this process of self-interpretation, the personal thinker is not a passive hero, quietly engaged in self-observation. Self-interpretation is the process through which personal thinkers shape their lives, and has a dynamic meaning as the process through which individuals transcend their givenness, their original mode of existence. Personal thinkers now return to examine this

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givenness, reject what they consider unacceptable, and endorse what they consider acceptable. The epitome of self-interpretation is action, the return to existence. This return, which Kierkegaard excelled in describing, is radically different from original givenness. According to Kierkegaard, the abyss between original givenness and the return to existence is so deep, that? "one can only figuratively say that the former and the latter relate themselves to each other as the totality of living creatures in the ocean relates itself to those in the air and to those upon the earth" (Kierkegaard, 1980a, p. 17, note). The difference hinges on the process of self-interpretation, which enables individuals to transcend their givenness and activate their consciousness and freedom. The return to existence is the act of a free human being affinning it, facing it by choice and not as an imposition (Sagi, 2000). In the process of self-interpretation or, more precisely, in the process of self-objectification, personal thinkers gradually shift from the personal-private to the universal. They decode or mold the meaning of their existence by exposing the general foundations underlying their concrete individual experience. In the interpretive process, they discover that their personal experience conveys patterns typical of all human existence. Kierkegaard, articulating one of the paradigms of personal thinking, argues that the concept of "the individual" includes both the particular and the universal. Every individual is simultaneously a unique person, different from all others and experiencing concrete life in a unique way, and also "everyone," since being a person makes all of us partners in the universal human experience. "This double meaning is precisely the dialectic of 'the single individual'" (Kierkegaard, 1962, p. 124). The personal thinker lives in the tension between affIrming the personal and its transcendence into the general. This tension marks the boundaries of the field within which personal thinkers create their own selves. Camus is a philosopher in the Socratic sense in that both the motivation and the ideal to which his thinking aspires are the elucidation of his consciousness and his concrete human existence. He does not set up an allencompassing metaphysical system. Camus contends with his life and tries to decode it through his literary works and his essays. He is a personal thinker par excellence, and expresses the personal character of philosophy in several statements: "We know that the system, when it is worthwhile, cannot be separated from its author. The Ethics itself, in one of its aspects, is but a long and reasoned personal confession" (The Myth ofSisyphus, p. 92). Camus also writes philosophy through his literary works. In this sense he resembles Kierkegaard, who also favored the literary form over systematic philosophical writing. Despite this similarity, however, one prominent difference distinguishes Camus from Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard wrote his philosophy in literary form, whereas Camus wrote literature. We could probably say about most of Camus's literary works what he said about other writers: "The great

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novelists are philosophical novelists .... For instance, Balzac, Sade, Melville, Stendahl, Dostoevsky, Proust, Malraux, Kafka, to cite but a few" (ibid.). According to Camus, these writers preferred to intimate their philosophy through literature instead of turning to conventional philosophical writing, since they were "convinced of the uselessness of any principle of explanation and sure of the educative message of perceptible appearance" (ibid., p. 93). Some of Camus's literary works are "the outcome of an often unexpressed philosophy, its illustration and its consummation" (ibid.). In a way, his philosophical essays complement and interpret the philosophy embedded in the literary works. Extensive descriptions in his literary works undergo a change and assume more abstract form in his philosophical essays. Not by chance, Camus writes his philosophical essays concurrently with his literary works: The Myth of Sisyphus with The Outsider, The Rebel at the same time as The Plague. The essays seek to decode the events he describes in his works of literature. Literary works touch existence, describing it precisely and with great depth. According to Camus, "creating is living doubly" (The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 87) since, by v.irtue of its power of description, the work of art returns to the experience, even if not to the original experience. Invariably, the work of art only hints at existence; it cannot, nor should it, be a substitute for existence itself (ibid., p. 90). Like all art, literature is removed from experience. A work of art is a creation, meaning it creates a world (ibid., pp. 91-92). It is a stance vis-a-vis the world as well as against it, and hence "marks ... the death of the experience" (p. 87). Camus holds that the closeness of the work of literature to existence compels the next step, namely, the conscious explication of the philosophy it intimates indirectly. This is the role of his philosophical essays. We have no assurance that the essays will reveal and explicate in precise terms the experienced reality, or the works describing the experienced reality. Just as the literary work is "eternal," so conscious philosophical thinking may create new meanings through the process of explication. Philosophical thinking is even further removed from life than the literary creation, yet the entire oeuvre remains attached to the writer's concrete life. As we will see below, many of Camus's works are a constant effort to reach what he called the "self-transparency" of consciousness, the explanation and explication of human existence (for an analysis of the explication concept, see Chapter Five below). In this sense, he is an existentialist, namely, a philosopher concerned with real existence instead of with "the essence." But Camus is not an existentialist if by this we mean the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre or of Martin Heidegger. Camus's controversy with Sartre is well known (Camus, 1968, pp. 345-346). He has no interest in the phenomenological explication of existence as an abstraction of his life. He is not an academic philosopher, whose theoretical concern is the concept of

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"existence"; he deals with existence itself. He is interested in the "how" instead of the "what" that explains the "how"; his existentialism is an existentialism of action. His existential thinking closely resembles that of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who had both been concerned with the phenomenology of existence, but ultimately strove to decide on a course of action. Both had sought to return to concrete existence and relive it in the light of reason, which they had found in existence. Kierkegaard formulated the details of this undertaking in the following wondrous lines from hisjoumal: What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose ... ; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. (Kierkegaard, 1977, passage 5100, emphasis in the original) Like Kierkegaard, Camus understood that living a human life requires an act of self-explication. Even if the conclusion of The Myth ofSisyphus is a quantitative ethics strikingly different from the ethics of involvement, generosity, and love featuring in The Plague or The Rebel, both ethics share a common feature: philosophy ends with real existence, with the concrete action that we must choose. This aspect is also dominant in the works included in The Fall: Exile and Kingdom. This anthology, and especially The Fall, which I discuss in Chapter Thirteen, contends with the difficulty of engaging in action, highlighting the problematic of shifting from solipsism to involvement. Finally, Camus's work is a non-speculative explication meant to culminate in action. Because of the emphasis on action, his work includes moralistic elements, at least in the writings after The Myth of Sisyphus that affirm human action and human solidarity. This initial characterization still needs to be demonstrated, but one significant dimension is already emerging at this early stage: even if we cannot characterize the whole of Camus's oeuvre by one overall assessment, the leit-motif of his entire work is still his contest with the question: How should we live in this world? What is a worthy human existence? This question, fundamental in both The Myth ofSisyphus and The Rebel, is also a vital dimension of his Mediterranean stories, as well as of The Plague and of his plays, albeit not as openly as in his philosophical works. In his philosophical essays, Camus deals with the question through an extensive description of several modes of existence in all their glory and sordidness. His works represent different answers to the basic question: how will human beings fashion their lives in a world where God is no longer relevant? This account of Camus's oeuvre might suggest that he is concerned with abstract philosophical questions instead of with self-interpretation. This preliminary analysis could lead to the impression that Camus belongs together

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with such philosophers as Heidegger and Sartre, who deal with the question of existence in abstract and theoretical tenns. They are not present in their works, nor are their anguish and concrete problems the focal concern. Their thinking is not an attempt at personal explication. Just like them, then, Camus is an academic philosopher, troubled by a general philosophical question that is not necessarily relevant to his life. Ostensibly, evidence for this view could be the mode Camus adopts when discussing the main topic of The Myth of Sisyphus-the problem of suicide. Generally, people contend with the question of whether to commit suicide out of deep anguish. Camus, however, relates to this as a general philosophical problem: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy" (The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 11). We might have expected Camus to back this presentation of suicide with an earnest personal confession, but he chooses to rest his case on a general phenomenological analysis: If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. GaliIeo who held a scientific truth of great importance abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right. That truth was not worth the stake.... On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living .... I therefore conclude that the meaning oflife is the most urgent of questions. (Ibid., pp. 11-12) Is Camus an academic philosopher, then, dealing with a question entirely irrelevant to his personal life, or is this fonnulation masking the inner passion driving his analysis? My assumption is that Camus, throughout his work, is a personal thinker struggling with the basic experience of his existence, and we should not let the tranquil, serene style of his writing mislead us. In Chapter Five, I demonstrate this hypothesis through a detailed analysis of the question raised in The Myth of Sisyphus. At this stage, I will attempt to establish my claim that Camus is a personal thinker by turning to The First Man, a literary work that remained unpublished for almost forty years. Beginning the discussion with this work involves an obvious advantage. It pointedly traces the personal tension, the anguish, and the anxiety molding the paradigm of Camus's contest with his existence, allowing us a direct glimpse into the primeval lava of his being. In The First Man, Camus does not hide behind sober philosophical language and cold words. He imaginatively describes his childhood surroundings and the mode through which he experienced and perceived existence. This work

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provides a crucial vantage point for understanding Camus's philosophical course. The First Man bears the mark of Camus's life in Algiers, and its raw materials are his family and his immediate surroundings. The mother of Jacques Cormery, the protagonist, is an analphabet who learns to sign in order to take charge of the family fmances. She signs as "Widow Camus" (The First Man, p. 206). Since the materials of this novel match those of Camus's youth, this hint supplies the evidence allowing us to approach it as autobiographical. Our guiding premise when reading this book is that Camus is trying to tell the story of his life. What is the problem, the anguish molding Camus's life? This book provides a key for dealing with this question. The title of the first part of the book is "Search for the Father," telling the story of a man who goes back repeatedly to look for his father's grave. As Gideon Ofrat (Ofrat, 1998, p. 187) points out, however, the search for the father is a search for the metaphysical beginning, for the fixed, permanent foundations of reality. This claim rests both on the events described in the book and on the symbolic meaning of the father figure. As we will see in Chapter Eight below, Camus views the father as a figure representing order and coherence. In his search for the father, therefore, Camus embarks on a journey to find the metaphysical principle organizing the meaning of life. But the confrontation with his father's tomb forces Jacques/Camus to experience the limits of existence and its collapse. Death transcends and challenges the natural order. This experience of breakup is profoundly shattering to Jacques. The entire order on which he had sought to build his life and which he had sought to reaffmn in this journey, falls apart: For he too believed he was living, he alone had created himself, he knew his own strength, his vigor, he could cope and he had himself well in hand. But, in the strange dizziness of that moment, the statue every man eventually erects and that hardens in the fire of the years, into which he then creeps and there awaits its fmal crumbling-that statue was rapidly cracking, it was already collapsing. All that was left was this anguished heart, eager to live, rebelling against the deadly order of the world that had been with him for forty years, and still struggling against the wall that separated him from the secret of all life, wanting to go farther, to go beyond, and to discover, discover before dying, discover at last in order to be, just once to be, for a single second, but forever. (The First Man, pp.26-27) The journey in search for the father culminates in the existential experience of death subverting and collapsing order. It exposes self-molding as fragile and crumbling; the experience of death undermines the basic ontological confidence of human beings in their existence. With the

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experience of collapse, however, the metaphysical longing for something transcending immanence, for a metaphysical order beyond existence, for the unity revealed in reality only in its reversal, grows more intense. Camus, like Kierkegaard, yearns to decode "the secret of life." In his view, this secret does not exist within immanence but only "beyond," in a mysterious, transcendent reality. Only the discovery of this transcendence will establish existence. Stating a claim philosophers recurrently voice, Camus speaks in the passage above of the link between knowledge and being, "discover at last in order to be." Camus, like Kierkegaard or Heidegger, seeks the "instant" experience where we apprehend the wholeness in its entirety; this instant is the aim of human passion and yearning. In his notes to the book, Camus writes: "At the same time it should be the history of the end of the world ... with regret for those years of light running through it" (ibid., p. 293, emphasis in original). Breakup and collapse together with a yearning for the light, for what is mysterious and hidden, are the constitutive elements in the life of Jacques/Camus. Camus's experience of existence emerges through the opposition between immanent reality, which crumbles and crashes into the void, and the yearning for the mysterious Being, the source, and the beginning of creation. His spiritual world assumes shape through the tension between the loss of the mysterious Being and his yearning for it. When thinking of Camus's youth, many readers tend to conjure up a Mediterranean reality of sea, sun, and intimate contact with a concrete existence. His own description of his childhood years, however, is more complex. His youth experience did include "the palms in the wind, birth and baptism in the sea .... There was that" (ibid., p. 278), but other echoes also resonated, upsetting this Mediterranean harmony: There was also the secret part of his being, something in him that all those years had been blindly stirring like those measureless waters under the earth.... And this blind stirring in him, which had never ceased, which he still felt now, a dark fire buried in him like one of those peat fires, gone out at the surface but still burning inside ... would cause, day after day, the most violent and the most terrible of his desires, as well as his most barren anxieties, his most fruitful nostalgia, his sudden need for bareness and sobriety, his yearning also to be nobody. (Ibid., pp. 278279) The quiet anxiety accompanying Camus's existence is the negative side of the yearning for "the secret part of being," for the "beyond." This yearning reaches a peak in the "sudden need" to disappear within this being-"to be nobody." An interesting picture emerges here. Under the innocence and calmness of harmonious youth, a splintering anxiety is seething. Although it does not

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prove that something exists beyond the immanence, it does show that immanence is found wanting. Dread of death plays a decisive role in this experience, and accompanies Jacques/Camus as a persistent shadow in the course of his daily life: That dread of death and the unknown, which he always felt when coming home from the lycee, was already taking hold of him at the end of the day, as fast as the darkness that rapidly devoured the light and the earth, and would not cease until his grandmother lit the suspension lamp. (Ibid., p. 228)

In sum, the experience of immanence is incomplete. Beside immanence is a dark and mysterious element ofbelongingness, or ofthe wish to belong to a mysterious reality. The metaphysical yearning, which will resurface as a constitutive element in Camus's thinking, reflects the original experience of Camus the man; the darkness that precedes and threatens the light. The suspension lamp illuminates the surface but the security it imparts is only fleeting, because the darkness is the mysterious Being in the "beyond," an object of yearning as well as of anxiety. The search for the father, for the Being, is doomed to fail, because as human creatures we must shape and build our lives from within ourselves: where each one is the first man, where he had to bring himself up, without a father ... and he had to grow alone, in fortitude, in strength, fmd his own morality and truth, at last to be born as a man ... try to learn to live without roots and without faith. (Ibid., p. 195) These are his conclusions at the end of a journey he undertook in search for the father. They are not lighthearted, harmonious conclusions. They show a deep awareness that the beyond remains enigmatic and mysterious, and that human beings can rely only on their own powers when contending with themselves. This awareness cannot conceal the ferment or the anxiety erupting in the face of death and the unknown. These conclusions are the product of a profound understanding, which diverts human attention from the mysterious beyond toward concrete reality, even if the beyond remains both threatening and fascinating. Human beings are doomed to live in the absurd, since the absurd is but the tension between the passion for clarity, for unity, and for the beyond, and the palpable imperative to remain within immanent existence in all its dread. The absurd, as Camus understands it, is his self-interpretation of the two contradictory experiences constituting his concrete existence. Let us reassess Camus's thinking in light of this analysis. Suicide is no longer a philosophical question that the academic thinker asks himself in the quiet of his book-lined room. Instead, resonating in this question is the

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experience of a collapsing existence, the meltdown of meaning after encountering death and the mysterious beyond. The Myth of Sisyphus describes two modes of suicide. One mode expresses a yearning for the mysterious beyond, to which Camus refers as "philosophical suicide," when the yearning leads the ind~vidual to forego concrete reality. The other mode, physical suicide, expresses despair from the possibility of touching the beyond and the sense that, without it, concrete reality is meaningless. Without decoding the secret of life, life has no value. Both versions of suicide are tempting in their combination of yearning for the beyond and the experience of a collapsing reality. The question of suicide, which Camus raises as a theoretical issue, shows him delving into his deepest experiences. Camus's choice of life, light, and the sea is not a return to an innocent and harmonious immediacy immune to alienation. As we will see below, the choice of concrete existence and its immanent fullness is a choice aware of the dread of existence and its yearning for meaning. In choosing existence, human beings do not return to the era of immediate innocence. The absurd creature lives in a tension between the need to remain within immanence and the yearning for the beyond. Even when we reject the metaphysics or the religion promising access to the mysterious Being, we do not reject the yearning. This dreadful tension, characteristic of life within the absurd, overcomes the seduction of suicide. What Camus describes in his philosophical works is the renewed embodiment of the two basic experiences of his world: collapse and the yearning for the mysterious Being. Camus draws the raw materials of his thinking from contradictory elements in the founding experiences of his life: harmony and a sense of immanent fullness, as well as a sense of estrangement from this immanence and a yearning for transcendence. A cautions reading of Camus's entire oeuvre enables us to identifY, beyond the impersonal language of philosophy inclined to generalizations, the personal thinker contending with himself. Camus's explication of his personal founding experiences begins with the contradiction, but does not end there. His philosophy is, in a way, a journey to fmd meaning in these events, an attempt to explicate this contradiction. His oeuvre shifts between the personal and the general. In the stories and in his journals, Camus describes the personal dimensions of this experience. In his philosophical works, in The Myth of Sisyphus and in The Rebel, he explicates these experiences by decoding their elemental patterns through the concept of the absurd. The course between the personal and the general, between the experience and its interpretation, sums up Camus's existential voyage, the concrete man contending with his fate.

Three A PHILOSOPHY OF SEA AND SUN In the previous chapter, I argued that Camus is a personal philosopher

contending with concrete existence. My central thesis in this chapter is that Camus thinks of existence in terms of basic metaphors drawn from two archetypal experiences in his concrete life: sea and sun. His personal thinking is Mediterranean, and shows traces of his immediate encounter with the sea and the sun, an encounter that pervades Camus's experiences in general: he reads reality through it and, in his thinking, persistently seeks to explicate these two basic experiences and their mutual relationships. In this sense, Camus's thinking continues the philosophical and existentialist-phenomenological tradition of the Edmund Husserl variety, as well as that of S0Ten Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, which begin from a primary experience or a basic datum that they decode and explicate. Philosophy, then, is a ceaseless journey of interpretation. In Camus's world, the immediate experience of sea and sun is the basic datum; his entire work is, in a way, an existentialist-phenomenological explication of this experience. Camus explicitly conveys the concrete Mediterranean aspect in his literary work, describing these experiences at length. By contrast, in his philosophical works, chiefly The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, he deals with the existentialist and phenomenological aspects, analyzing and interpreting the basic underlying patterns of these experiences. In Camus's oeuvre, then, detailed description merges with an interpretation striving to expose the foundations of existence. The words "sea" and "sun" appear mainly in his literary works, but the full explication of their meaning and the dialectic relationships between them surface mainly in his philosophical essays. In Camus's Mediterranean experience, sea and sun epitomize concrete existence and the fullness of being. They embody the absolute immanence of the Being. As Micheline Tisson-Braun indicates (Tisson-Braun, 1988), the gods have a poetic presence in Camus's works, but their presence is also immanent, embodied in sea and sun and, in this sense, they resemble material gods. In Camus's words: In the spring, Tipasa is inhabited by gods and the gods speak in the sun

and the scent of absinthe leaves, in the silver armor of the sea, in the raw blue sky, the flower-covered ruins, and the great bubbles of light among the heaps of stone. (Camus 1968, p. 65)

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Sea and sun, besides describing external life, denote an inner consciousness: "there are landscapes like moods" (ibid., p. 75). Sea and sun, then, are not only landscapes but genuine pointers to an inner reality. Beginning with Kierkegaard and up to Heidegger, existentialistphenomenological tradition has stressed the crucial epistemic function of the mood. Heidegger devotes to the analysis of the mood, which he calls Befindlichkeit (Heidegger, 1972, p. 134), an entire section of Being and Time (Heidegger, 1962, pp. 172-179). For Heidegger, the mood is an existenzial, a basic, primary experience serving human beings to discover the fundamental constructs of their lives. I take it as self-evident that Camus's brief sentence, "there are landscapes like moods," reflects this legacy. Sea and sun, then, are moods reflecting primary modes of exposure in human existence. What, then, are the sea and the sun in existence and as a mood? In Camus's Mediterranean literary works, the sea and the sun are the protagonists. They function as mutually complementary heroes, precisely as they function in nature. I begin with the sun experience. In The Outsider, the sun is one of the main heroes, if not the chief protagonist. Roland Barthes (1971) succinctly referred to The Outsider as a roman solaire. The sun emerges as oppressive, unbearable: "the sky was so dazzling that 1 dared not raise my eyes" (The Outsider, p. 25). The glare makes the landscape "inhuman" (ibid.). The sun is the reason for killing the Arab, both according to Meursault's description of the event (ibid., pp. 6364), and according to his statement in court: "I tried to explain it was because of the sun" (ibid., p. 103). The sun reflects an experience of incomprehensible violence, the collapse of the rational social order (compare McCarthy, 1988, pp. 37, 52). "The Enigma" describes the meaninglessness of human history when viewed in solar tenns: an enigma, that is to say, a meaning which is difficult to decipher because it dazzles us. Likewise, to the unworthy but nonetheless stubborn sons of Greece who still survive in this emaciated century, the scorching heat of our history may seem unendurable .... In the center of our work, dark though it may be, shines an inexhaustible sun, the same sun that shouts today across the hills and plain. (Camus, 1968, pp. 160-161) In this description, the sun fulfills two roles: it scorches human beings, and undennines the possibility of rmding metaphysical meaning. It represents the incomprehensible world. It "seals our mouths" (ibid., p. 161), but is also an echo of the human subject craving for meaning. It reflects the human mood: "shouts ... across the hills and plain" (ibid.). The sun that emerges in this description has a connection with the absurd as presented in The Myth o/Sisyphus. The absurd emerges in The Myth 0/ Sisyphus through the combination of two contradictory elements: the

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human passion for meaning and harmony, as opposed to the "unreasonable silence of the world" (The Myth o/Sisyphus, p. 32). The experience of the sun as scorching, as the oppressing heat of noon, as distress, as a collapse of meaning reeling in pools of sweat, represents the absurd mainly in its negative pole: misunderstanding, lack of meaning. In "The Enigma," Camus again links together the experience of the sun and the absurd: Where is the absurdity of the world? Is it this resplendent glow or the memory of its absence? With so much sun in my memory, how could I have wagered on nonsense? People around me are amazed; so am I, at times. I could tell them, as I tell myself, that it was in fact the sun that helped me, and that the very thickness of its light coagulates the universe and its forms into a dazzling darkness. (Camus, 1968, p. 155) The experience of the sea represents the antithesis. Immersion in the sea leads to harmony and communion with existence as a whole. While the absurd sun was the chief protagonist of The Outsider, the sea is the hero of the novel's ending, which signals a new harmony and a reconciliation of human beings with themselves and with their concrete existence, albeit not with nature: the cool night air, veined with smells of earth and salt, fanned my cheeks. The marvelous peace of the sleepbound summer night flooded though me like a tide ... made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. (The Outsider, pp. 119-120) Elsewhere, the sea is also an experience of unity with nature as well as with human existence: To feel one's ties to a land, one's love for certain men, to know there is always a place where the heart can find rest .... What is strange about fmding on earth the unity Plotinus longed for? Unity expresses itself here in terms of sea and sky. (Camus, 1968, p. 90) In this passage, the Mediterranean surroundings combine with Plotinus' s philosophical tradition, which was also an inspiration for Camus and a subject he had studied at university. He interprets Plotinian unity in terms of communion with nature, and natural unity in Plotinian terms. Immersion in the sea is interpreted from now on as an act of purification and union with the cosmos. Often, Camus describes immersion in the sea as an act of communion bordering on unio mystica: "self-forgetful and self-forgotten, I am the wind and within it" (Camus, 1968, p. 75). The sea also represents fellowship and comradeship. Friends bathe in the sea, open up to each other. In The Outsider, the most intimate moments

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between Meursault and Marie are their times together at sea. Camus's memories of swimming in the sea during his childhood in Algiers in a gesture of reconciliation and friendship, described in The First Man, resurface in The Outsider and resonate also in The Plague: "Do you know," he said, "what we now should do for friendship's sake?" "Anything you like, Tarrou." "Go for a swim. It's one of those harmless pleasures that even a saint-to-be can indulge in, don't you agree?" (The Plague, p. 209) Swimming in the sea is thus an immersion into absolute immanence, which includes humanity and the entire universe. One of the heights of this passion for the sea is Summer, the anthology of stories that represents different aspects of the yearning for unity and happiness to be found in the sea. The basic datum, the constitutive foundation of Camus's oeuvre is this tension between sea and sun, between immanent, Plotinian unity and alienation. Camus's fundamental problem as a philosopher thinking about existence in the Mediterranean terms of sun and sea is how to balance the yearning for absolute unity-represented by immersion in the sea-with solar estrangement. He discusses the problem of balance in the story "The Sea Close By," when describing a sailing: I was half asleep in the early afternoon sun when a terrible noise awoke me. I saw the sun in the depths of the sea, the waves reigning in the surging heavens. Suddenly, the sea was afrre, the sun flowed in long icy draughts down my throat.... I recognized the world for what it was that day. I decided to accept the fact that its good might at the same time be evil and its transgressions beneficial. I realized that day that there were two truths, and that one of them ought never to be uttered. (Camus, 1968,pp.177-178)

His two long philosophical works, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, offer two different models of balance between sun and sea. In The Myth of Sisyphus, unity is no longer a concrete experience, and all that remains is a longing for absolute communion. Balance is reached in this work through the concept of the absurd, which emerges both through the yearning for absolute unity and harmony and through estrangement and alienation. Realizing the unity of the childhood sea experience is now a dual endeavor, involving the yearning for unity, as well as the harmony that the absurd hero eventually reaches within himself. The concluding lines of the book are: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" (ibid., p. 111). Readers and critics of Camus have often pointed out that Camus mistakenly identifies the logical hope for understanding and clarity with one

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overall, "single principle" (The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 23). This search for an overall principle, however, reflects the primary experience of unity in childhood, conveyed through immersion in the sea (and reflects also the Plotinian legacy, which matches this experience). In this sense, The Myth of Sisyphus is Camus's personal story, a reinterpretation of his life's constitutive experiences. As noted in the previous chapter, Camus contends with this issue in The First Man. The second model of balance appears in The Rebel. Camus argues that rebelling against injustice and wrongdoing reflects the hope for justice, order, and unity (The Rebel, p. 25): "Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death" (ibid, p. 24). Historical rebellion is "only the logical consequence of metaphysical rebellion," and, like its predecessor, "expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being" (ibid., p. 105). The rebel's consciousness, however, is shaped after the absurd. Like Husserl's suspension of judgment (epoche'), the absurd "wiped the slate clean," yet can also "open up a new field of investigation" (ibid., p.10). The absurd dismisses the option of reuniting with natural, metaphysical existence, but does not rule out the possibility of human unity. Metaphysical rebellion and historical rebellion convey the union and identification with "a natural community" (ibid., p. 16). Unity translates into a new metaphysics of interpersonal solidarity or, in Camus's terms, "human solidarity is metaphysical" (ibid., p. 17). The experience of the sun dominates The Myth of Sisyphus, and its conclusion is individual isolation. Camus agrees with Kierkegaard and Heidegger, who hold that, when estrangement and meaninglessness are life's constitutive experiences, the individual becomes a hero of consciousness. Alienation detaches individuals from the world by directing consciousness inward, leading them to ponder the meaning of existence. The solipsism of the Sisyphean myth is thus fully in accord with the experience of alienation, and the only happiness accessible to the absurd hero is that of consciousness and clarity. The fmal line of The Myth of Sisyphus, quoted above, is highly significant in this context. Sisyphean happiness, echoing Aristotelian happiness, is an expression of harmony. This harmony, however, is not the unity of individuals with the cosmos but with themselves, a harmony whose meaning is in consciousness: the individual understands that being a human creature means experiencing the absurd. The Rebel offers a different picture. Solipsism collapses. The primary data are historical rebellion and metaphysical rebellion, revealing the individual as a creature attached to others. Rebellion creates an interpersonal consciousness, which materializes as solidarity. Rebellion conveys a search for unity and harmony, which men and women seek not only within themselves but also with their existence. This unity is not a yearning to be absorbed within existence but to remold it, limiting and uprooting its evil

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aspects. The solidarity that reawakens is the expression of this unity. The experience of the sea and the immanent immersion in it translate into the ethical stance of a constant effort to redress the evils of society. Two literary works provide keys to an understanding of this shift: The Plague, which preceded The Rebel (The Plague was published in 1947, and The Rebel in 1951), and The Fall, written in 1956. The Plague stresses the obligation incumbent on the individual facing the scourge. Evil imposes a responsibility on human beings, who discover their mutual solidarity. Camus renounces philosophical solipsism in favor of the concrete and immediate experience of solidarity and unity when faced with evil. The original experience underlying this work is human interdependence. Contrary to The Outsider, or to The Myth of Sisyphus, which assume that the individual exists as an autarchic subject, a self-contained being living in isolation, The Plague assumes that the human being is constituted through the experience of life with others. The other is not a strange, disturbing experience or an unexplained factor. The other influences and shapes the individual; the distress of others leads each one to act, and the attitude to the self takes shape in the course of contending with the other. In The Fall, the picture is more complex. Jean Baptiste Clamence lives through experiences that undermine his confidence and his narcissistic solipsism, mainly of breakup and self-deprecation. Thus, for instance, his suicide attempt exposes people's lack of care: "I felt vulnerable and as if I were handed over to public accusation" (The Fall, p. 59). The most dramatic event, however, is the woman's suicide. The woman screamed when jumping to her death into the river "I heard a cry, repeated several times, which was going downstream" (ibid., p. 52). Shocked, Jean Baptiste Clamence froze in his tracks; he wanted to save the woman, but he did not. The scream, however, would not leave him, and he became a man who was called upon: that cry which had sounded over the Seine behind me years before had never ceased, carried by the river to the waters of the Channel, to travel throughout the world, across the limitless expanse of the ocean, and that it had waited for me there until the day I encountered it. I realized likewise that it would continue to await me on seas and rivers, everywhere in short where lies the bitter water of my baptism. Here too, by the way, aren't we on the water? .. We shall never get out of this immense stoup of holy-water. Listen. Don't you hear the cries of invisible gulls? If they are crying in our direction, to what are they calling us? But they are the same gulls that were crying, that were already calling over the Atlantic the day I realized once and for all that I was not cured, that I was still cornered and that I had to make do with it as best I could. (Ibid., p. 81)

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This sense of being called upon features recurrently in the metaphors of the sea and the water, mutually linking individuals through bonds of responsibility. The original experience of the sea as one of unity with nature is replicated in a compelling unity between individuals, which imposes on them an endless responsibility. In "The Sea Close By," we hear another echo of the basic sense of being called upon, embodied in the metaphor of the sea. This time, however, instead of the other imposing a demand on the self, a demand is addressed to the other: In the very middle of the Atlantic, we bend beneath the savage winds that blow endlessly from pole to pole. Each cry we utter is lost, flies off into limitless space. But this shout, carried day after day on the winds, will fmally reach land at one of the flattened ends of the earth and echo timelessly against the frozen walls until a man, lost somewhere in his shell of snow, hears it and wants to smile with happiness. (Camus, 1968, p. 177) As an experience of unity, the sea rescues individuals from selfenclosure. The ability to smile at the other is the chance for deliverance from the frozen walls, reaffrrming the other as an entity worthy of a binding commitment. Camus speaks of unity and solidarity with great assurance in The Plague. Although admitting in The Fall that human beings may fail to respond and the unity of humanity may be a chimera, he still clings to this view. In the wake of the atrocities of the Second World War, Camus raises serious questions in this work concerning human responsiveness: "0 young woman, throw yourself into the water again so that I maya second time have a chance of saving both of us!" A second time, eh, what a risky suggestion! Just suppose, cher maitre, that we should be taken literally? We'd have to go through with it. Brr ... ! The water's so cold! But let's not worry! It's too late now. It'll always be too late. Fortunately! (Ibid., pp. 108-109) What are the sources of this new constitutive experience? Unity, as noted, is fundamental to Camus's thought, and we fmd it in the metaphor of the sea. Although not dominant in The Myth of Sisyphus or in The Outsider, unity is still present in these works in ways that fit the controlling experience of estrangement and alienation. Unity emerges in these works as the harmony of individuals with their existence, or as the yearning in The First Man. In the works he wrote after The Myth of Sisyphus, a contradictory primary experience takes up center stage. Unity is now the dominant experience, albeit represented so that it might also adequately include its

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opposite - alienation from nature. A new interpretation of unity emerges. In Camus's Mediterranean works, unity had come to the fore as harmony with nature and with existence. Now, faced with alienation and estrangement from the beyond, unity is communion with others. Even when alienated from nature, human beings can still experience harmony by cooperating with others. According to this analysis, Camus contends throughout his oeuvre with the two basic experiences of unity and alienation, or harmony and rift. This chapter and the previous one lead to the conclusion that the metaphor of the sun epitomizes the experience of breakup, whereas the metaphor of the sea epitomizes the experience of yearning for the beyond. Camus, the personal thinker, contends with the constitutive experiences of his existence through metaphors drawn from his life.

Four THE ABSURD: METHOD OR CONCLUSION In Chapter Two, I described Camus's philosophy of the absurd as an

interpretation of concrete human existence. But given the wide discrepancy between the meaning of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus and in his later writings, the question is whether Camus upholds a philosophy of the absurd in the first place, in the sense of endorsing this concept as the final and supreme explication of human existence. Camus approaches the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus as the sum total of human existence, and does not go beyond it. The absurd is not only a philosophical opening, to be transcended as the analysis progresses. The absurd is the beginning and the end, unlike Cartesian philosophy, where Rene Descartes approaches doubt as a methodical point of departure that will be transcended in the course of the philosophical discourse, after re-establishing metaphysics. The Myth of Sisyphus is an explication of human existence within the confmes of the absurd, and the absurd is the fmal datum from which Camus sought to derive the full spectrum of attitudes to existence. In other writings, however, Camus relates to the absurd in completely different terms. Systemically, the absurd comes to resemble Cartesian doubt, functioning solely as a methodological tool. Let us consider several texts that present the absurd in this fashion. For instance, Camus writes in "The Enigma": The absurd can be considered only as a point of departure-{:ven though the memory and feeling of it still accompany the further advances. In the same manner, with all due sense of proportion, Cartesian doubt, which is systematic, was not enough to make Descartes a skeptic. In any case, how can one limit oneself to saying that nothing has meaning and that we must plunge into absolute despair? Without getting to the bottom of things, one can at least mention... there is ... no total nihilism. The moment you say that everything is nonsense you express something meaningful. Refusing the world all meaning amounts to abolishing all value judgments. But living, and eating, for example, are in themselves value judgments. You choose to remain alive the moment you do not allow yourself to die of hunger, and consequently you recognize that life has at least a relative value .... Literature of despair is a contradiction in terms. (Camus, 1968, pp. 159-160) In his critique of Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, Camus again states:

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The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules for action that can be drawn from it. (Camus, 1968, pp. 201-202) Finally, in The Rebel, Camus reiterates this assertion: the absurd... is an experience to be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence, of Descartes' methodical doubt. The absurd is in itself contradiction .... Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest. The first and only evidence that is supplied me, within the terms of the absurdist experience, is rebellion .... Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition. (The Rebel, pp. 8-10) As we delve deeper into this comparison, the parallels between the absurd and Cartesian doubt emerge as more complex. The three passages quoted above show that Camus views the absurd as a new opening, cutting off human beings from their past, quite like the systematic status of Cartesian doubt. Yet, for Descartes, doubt had only been a point of departure, which he entirely discarded with the discovery of certitudes pertaining to the self and to God, the two basic, original certitudes in Descartes's thinking. Their discovery led to a turning point in Cartesian philosophy, which dismissed doubt in favor of the certitudes it had served to reveal. In Camus's thinking, however, the certainty of the absurd is not rejected, nor does philosophy return to the dismissed truths; instead, the certainty of the absurd leads to new conclusions. In this sense, Camus's absurd is similar to the description of Cartesian doubt that Edmund HusserI suggests in Cartesian Meditations. In HusserI's phenomenology, anything placed in brackets, anything we dismiss because we can cast doubt upon it, does not return to function within philosophical discourse and, as HusserI tells us, is "out of the game,". HusserI's phenomenology influenced Camus, who interprets the meaning of doubt in its terms. The implications of doubt for Descartes are significantly different from its implications for HusserI and, in his wake, for Camus's perception of the absurd. As historical studies tell us, Descartes wished to establish standard truths: the certainty of the worId, of the subject, and of God. Doubt was rampant in Descartes's cultural surroundings; more precisely, the skepticism of antiquity had gained special status in his times.

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Descartes held that the only way to contend with skepticism was through skepticism, exposing it as a self-refuting method. Had Camus viewed the absurd as the existential parallel of doubt, the absurd would have become solely a methodical tool, a self-refuting instrument. But Camus, like HusserI, conveyed through skepticism, which is the absurd, detachment from the old metaphysical world; their skepticism, therefore, is irreversible. Camus's Cartesianism is genuine and consistent, seeking to draw from the absurd all the conclusions that follow. How can we reconcile this perception with the passages quoted above? What positive conclusions are we to draw? 1 noted above that, in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus had endorsed the absurd as an exhaustive description of human existence, whereas later in his thinking, for instance in The Rebel, he went beyond the absurd to demand action in concrete reality. But how does Camus's critique of Sartre's Nausea fit into this picture? This critique appeared in 1938, while The Myth ofSisyphus appeared in 1942. Camus, then, spoke about transcending the absurd even before The Myth of Sisyphus, contrary to my conClusions so far. Can we settle this contradiction? Let us reconsider Camus's critique of Sartre. Camus spells out the type of transcendence he discusses in this text. He emphasizes that his concern are "the consequences and rules of action that can be drawn from it [the absurd]" (Camus, 1968, p. 202). But this conclusion does not transcend the absurd; instead, it develops within its bounds. The Myth ofSisyphus does not end with the description and formulation of the absurd, and its conclusions offer a kind of absurd ethics. As noted, Camus is not concerned with speculation and description for their own sake; his interest in philosophy focuses on praxis. The difference between the meanings that Camus ascribes to the absurd before and after The Myth of Sisyphus lies precisely in the practical implications. Up to The Myth ofSisyphus, he perceives the absurd as a kind of catharsis that reaches culmination in the individual's consciousness. The absurd releases women and men from metaphysical hopes, enabling them to live fully in the present, encompassing all its experiences. This is a "quantitative" ethics that largely preserves the foundations of the basic, pagan Mediterranean experience. Camus's critique of Sartre is that Sartre's sole conclusion from the absurd was "I write, therefore I am" (ibid.), suggesting that writing provides Sartre "solace," or "redemption" from the absurd. Sartre, according to Camus, ascribes to literature a power it does not have: the power to experience existence. Sartre's approach is comic, to some extent, "in the disproportion between this fmal hope and the revolt that gave it birth" (ibid.). Sartre, then, never concretely realized any conclusion compelled by the absurd, a conclusion that Camus describes at this stage through the solipsistic ethics of quantity.

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From 1945, we see signs of a turnabout. In an interview with Jeanine Delpeche, published in Les Nouvelles Litteraires on 15 November 1945, he presented his new approach: Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful. An analysis of the idea of revolt could help us to discover ideas capable of restoring a relative meaning to existence, although a meaning that would always be in danger. (Ibid., p. 346) Asked whether one form of revolt might be valid for everyone, Camus answers: Yes, because if there is one fact that these last five years have brought out, it is the extreme solidarity of men with one another. Solidarity in crime for some, solidarity in the upsurge of resistance in others. Solidarity even between victims and executioners. (Ibid.) The discovery that human reality is interpersonal leads to the collapse of solipsism, which was the starting point of The Myth of Sisyphus. Human solidarity, as he will develop it in The Plague and The Rebel, is the basis for a new ethics of human responsibility, parallel to the development of a new metaphysics at whose core is the discovery of a common reality. In this reality, individuals do not seek meaning in speCUlative contemplation but in action, in shared responsibility, and in the struggle for a better world. Kierkegaard's thinking began with an attempt to break into practical existence. This attempt failed and turned his thinking, as well as the entire course of his life, into a stubborn effort to contend with this impotence. Kierkegaard was pushed from concrete reality into his inner world, without fmding relief in this dialectic contradiction (for an extensive discussion, see Sagi, 2000). Camus's last message is the diametrical opposite. This message is full of optimism and faith in the ability of human beings to struggle for a just world in their everyday lives out of a sense of cooperation and empathy, without awaiting divine hope (see Camus, 1966, p. 73). The preceding analysis defmitely indicates that the meaning ascribed to the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus differs from that in later works. As a whole, however, Camus's thinking retains several common elements. At the speCUlative level, Camus never retreats from the absurd; he does not seek consolation or redemption in a return to the philosophical or religious naYve world that the absurd had rejected. At the practical level, Camus, like Kierkegaard, does not seek to offer a new metaphysics. His interest is real existence, the practical rules of action that he can conclude from his philosophical analyses. The absurd is but the frrst step, since the last step is in the intricate paths of concrete existence.

Five THE ABSURD: DATUM AND CONCEPT The Myth of Sisyphus includes two usages of the absurd: the absurd as datum and the absurd as concept. Camus indicates that the absurd is a primary datum when we experience reality, and points to several modes and manifestations of this feeling in everyday life. The absurd is present in our life without analyzing its meaning: it exists. This datum, however, can become a subject of reflection. Previously a part of experience, the absurd now becomes an object of knowledge, with consciousness analyzing its meaning. Reflection in this context does not transcend the basic datum, and does not engage in an attempt to understand the meaning of this primary datum by providing metaphysical explanations. Instead of questions such as "Where from?" or "Why?," reflection asks: "What are the structural foundations of the feeling of the absurd?" Instead of moving out toward the world, it returns inward to the datum in order to expose it. This description of the relationship between the two meanings that Camus ascribes to the absurd suggests that Camus endorses the existentialistphenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. They, like Camus, view philosophical discourse as a kind of self-explication. We experience the absurd, and the explication is an attempt to describe and interpret the experience conceptually and systematically. The explication does not transcend the datum; it assumes that whatever it will discover exists already, in vague, primal terms, in the experience itself. Husserl, and then Heidegger, held that phenomenology is a method enabling full exposure of the datum, or whatever is already concealed "there" (see Heidegger, 1962, pp. 58-63). In The Myth ofSisyphus, Camus draws a precise distinction between the absurd as datum and the absurd as concept: "In his recovered and now studied lucidity, the feeling of the absurd becomes clear and defmite" (ibid., p. 26). Analyzing the feeling of the absurd implies engaging in a process of explication. This process begins with an undecoded, vague (implicit) datum that, through a process of explication, becomes plain and intelligible (explicit). The explication progresses from the implicit to the explicit, without forsaking the original datum. Moreover, in the process of explication we reenter the datum itself, reinterpreting it through a detailed description and analysis. At the end of this process, whatever had begun as vague and amorphous is entirely clear. The feeling of the absurd is not contingent on conceptualization. The absurd as feeling reflects human circumstances in everyday reality, whereas

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the conceptualization of this situation is a conscious act, namely, the shift from feeling to conceptualization is a process of explication. According to Camus, the absurd person is not the one who senses the absurd, since this feeling is a typical feature of human reality; the absurd person is the one who is aware of, and draws the inevitable conclusions from this state of affairs (see also Sartre, 1962, p. 108). In this sense, the absurd resembles the Heideggerian existenzial. Just as the existenzial is an ontological structure in human existence, so is the absurd. But while the existenzial is decoded through the existenziel, namely, through everyday life, the structure of the absurd emerges in light of absurd existence; this experience is the guideline of the philosophical, phenomenological analysis. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus begins to contend obliquely with the feeling of the absurd. Instead of asking what the absurd is or what is its source, he asks a completely different question: Why not suicide? Camus's primary datum, his point of departure in the voyage to the decoding of the absurd, is the possibility that suicide is a real option. Life is not self-evident, the basic question is the meaning of life. Without a satisfactory answer to this question, suicide is the most logical response. The start of the voyage detennines its course. Had Camus not assumed that meaning is the most pressing question and human beings find different meanings to life, the rest of this voyage - the philosophy of the absurd would have been prevented. Camus's starting point is a dichotomical all or nothing: life has meaning, or to go on living is pointless. This fonnulation of the question grows from existence, characterized by a deep sense of despair and an inability to frod purpose in life's everyday moments. This question also implicitly assumes the classic religious and metaphysical worldview, whereby meaning is part of an overall, unified organization of existence. Is this departure point necessary, or does it originate in an oppressive personal experience? For Camus, as a personal thinker, this is a crucial question. Its unique fonnulation reflects the world of Camus as that of a concrete man living between immanent commitment and a yearning for a transcendent entity. Latent in this existential tension is a deep despair. The problem entailed by a life of questionable meaning is made doubly harder: first, because a life within absolute immanence appears pointless, and second, because if we also assume an insatiable yearning for transcendence, the meaninglessness of immanent existence is even harder to bear. In the introduction he wrote for the English translation of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus relates to this question: "this book is in a certain sense the most personal of those I have published in English. More than the others, therefore, it has the need of the indulgence and understanding of its readers" (ibid., p. 8). In Darkness Visible (1992), William Styron confinns these assumptions. Styron reports that he had planned to travel to France in 1960 to meet Camus, a meeting that never took place because Camus was killed in a road accident.

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Styron argues that Camus's decision to travel in a car driven by his publisher's son, who all knew was "speed crazy," suggests foolhardiness on Camus's part: There was an element of recklessness in the accident that bore overtones of the near-suicidal, at least of a death flirtation, and it was inevitable that conjectures concerning the event should revert back to the theme of suicide in the writer's work. (Styron, 1992, pp. 22-23) Styron says that the opening lines of The Myth of Sisyphus-''there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide"-had puzzled him, since he was "unable to deal with the premise that anyone should come close to wishing to kill himself in the fITst place" (ibid., p. 23). Styron mentions that Romain Gary, a friend of Camus, had told him that Camus had "occasionally hinted at his own deep despondency and had spoken of suicide. Sometimes he spoke in jest, but the jest had the quality of sour wine, upsetting Romain" (ibid., pp. 23-24). The Myth of Sisyphus is not the story ofa suicide, but the story of one struggling with existence and prevailing. But the question and its formulation grow from the depths of Camus's personal experiences. At a later stage in his life, Camus so thoroughly overcomes the temptation of death that he rejects the dichotomical formulation altogether. In The Plague, Paneloux claims that struggling against the plague is "working for man's salvation," implying that some actions are meaningless without a larger purpose. Rieux, the doctor, rejects this argument: "Salvation's much too big a word for me. I don't aim so high. I'm concerned with man's health; and for me his health comes fITst .... What I hate is death and disease" (ibid., pp. 178-179). Rieux finds his actions meaningful without anchoring them in any metaphysical order. No knowledge of an overall "larger plan" is necessary for human beiI)gs to find significance in their actions, and the immediate meaning provided by concrete human reality will suffice. These meanings are not theoretical insights but actions taken vis-A-vis a defmed obligation (see also Sagi and Statman, 1995, pp. 108-109). Paneloux, then, endorses the dichotomy that Camus had introduced in The Myth of Sisyphus, and the later Camus endorses Rieux's view. Camus's ability to overcome the dichotomy probably has some connection to his way of contending with the meaning of existence in The Myth of Sisyphus. In this sense, this book conceivably plays a decisive therapeutic role in the shaping of Camus's worldview. The therapeutic power ascribed to this book is closely associated with the method Camus chose in order to contend with his question. He does not begin by answering the question, but by analyzing the basic experiences that engendered it. The question becomes the guideline of the discourse. In this choice of method, Camus follows Heidegger in Being and Time. Heidegger

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argues that the logic of every question rests on many assumptions, which enable us to ask the question in the fIrst place. For instance, underlying a banal question such as "what is the time?" is the assumption that time exists and we can measure it, as well as many others. When a question arises, we can deal with it by exposing and decoding the presumed clusters of knowledge: "Every inquiry is a seeking [Suchen]. Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought" (Heidegger, 1962, p. 24). According to Camus, the analysis of a question about the meaning of existence, or about why refrain from suicide, shows that the question arises from a feeling of the absurd. This feeling collapses the meaning of existence and turns the possibility of suicide into a constant temptation. The feeling of the absurd, according to Camus, grows from several sources. The fIrst is the break in the chain of meaning in everyday life: "the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again" (The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 19). Existence becomes a sequence of moments lacking a context of meaning that unites them and endows them with coherence, a meaningless, disjointed routine. This oppressive sense draws its power from the yearning for the lost unity. At least implicitly, Camus assumes that only a unifIed context can confer meaning on the random sequence of events and isolated details. Through this approach, Camu"S is indirectly endorsing Plotinus's thinking, which largely matches the Mediterranean experience I discussed above and had occupied Camus at length. At the same time, this approach also implicitly adopts the rationalist view of t~ Enlightenment, which saw meaning as deriving from one universalist context. Barring this allencompassing context, the elements of reality are fleeting, detached units. According to Camus, the negative experience of an existence broken up into disjointed moments assumes meaning only through the longing for a comprehensive unity. . The second source of the feeling of the absurd is the passing time. The experience of real time as a sequence of events makes the present meaningless. "We live in the future: 'tomorro'W, 'later on', 'when you have made your way'" (ibid., p. 19). The meaning of this experience is that being loses its value in favor of a mysterious future. Life becomes "unillustrious" (ibid.). Tomorrow is hope but, thereby, also the enemy of concrete existence. The third source is the awareness of death. Contending with death and the modes of experiencing it are expressions of existentialist philosophy. As noted in Chapter Two above, anxiety about death is part of Camus's constitutive experience, and is now part of the feeling of the absurd. Following Heidegger in Being and Time, Camus stresses that we have no experience of death, neither ours nor that of others. In the experience of death, "the horror comes in reality from the mathematical aspect of the event" (ibid., p. 21), suggesting that the certitude of death is what awakens the absurd. But what in death evokes this feeling? Death makes us aware of the

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fragility of our existence, which awakens the anguish and undennines all the basic certainties of life. Human beings are turned back upon themselves, "he seeks his way amidst these ruins" (ibid., p. 29). In "The Wind at Djemila," Camus describes even more precisely the meaning of experiencing death: "I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me, it is a closed door ... a death without hope" (Camus, 1968, p. 76). Anxiety about death exposes the deep human yearning for life: I tell myself: I am going to die, but this means nothing, since I cannot manage to believe it and can only experience other people's death. I have seen people die. Above all, I have seen dogs die. It was touching them that overwhelmed me. Then I think of flowers, smiles, the desire for women, and realize that my whole horror of death lies in my anxiety to live. I am jealous of those who will live and for whom flowers and the desire for women will have their full flesh and blood meaning .... It is to the extent I cut myself off from the world that I fear death most. (Ibid., p.78) Like the experience of an existence collapsed into moments, the experience of death is complex and involves negative and positive aspects. It has a negative aspect because death is negation. At the same time, the experience of death is deeply committed to the positive, because it reflects a passion for life that is insatiable. It evokes a feeling at once dialectical and self-contradictory, in that the experience of death is a deep expression of the passion for life. Camus's analysis of the death experience differs from Heidegger's. For Heidegger, the rush toward death is evident in the self-exposure of consciousness, when individuals understand they are thrown back onto themselves. Death isolates us and directs us to ourselves (see Heidegger, 1962, pp. 279-311). Heidegger holds that this experience and its decoding are a significant element in a process of liberation and detachment from inauthentic consciousness; in the anxiety of death, we return to perceive ourselves as people (Dasein) instead of as objects. The anxiety of death brings back to us our unique place in existence, it dismisses the illusion that we are part of the world. For Camus, the experience of death has a "cathartic" power. Death infonns human beings that the eternal world is "forever lost" (The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 78), throwing them back into concrete life. Contrary to Heidegger, however, he holds that latent in this experience is a passionate yearning for eternity, for a different existence. The experience of death, then, is self-denying, and exposes a deep longing for a missing positive dimension. The fourth source of the feeling of the absurd is the experience of alienation, evident in Camus at several levels. The first is alienation from the world, which involves a number of aspects: (1) The world is strange,

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threatening, not human; (2) the world is strange to us because we cannot understand it: "for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand" (ibid., p. 20). This experience of alienation, to which we can refer as epistemic alienation, realizes a conclusion adopted in Western philosophy since David Hume, through Immanuel Kant, and up to Friedrich Nietzsche. Hume left the epistemic system bereft of metaphysical certitudes, pointing out the psychological context of knowledge. Kant then attempted to reestablish metaphysics through an a priori system, whereas Nietzsche indicated that human knowledge is a spiderweb trap, reflecting nothing more than our concrete empirical world (Nietzsche, 1997, 2: 117). We have no access to knowledge of the world per se. The characteristic detour of modem philosophy, which turned away from the world toward SUbjectivity, resulted in an alien world, because the only world human beings ever know is their own. Camus even goes as far as claiming that "the world evades us because it becomes itself again" (The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 20). This is an ontological claim that we cannot substantiate, however, because the world's strangeness cannot be the source for reaching any conclusions about the world, its nature, or its very existence. Another aspect of the absurd is part of the experience of human language. Hume and Nietzsche had already pointed to the impotence of human language that, because of its universal structure, cannot fully exhaust the concrete. The term "house," or even "this house," cannot convey the empirical quality of a given house.. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had already noted this problematic in Phenomenology o/Spirit: "we do not strictly say what in this sense-certainty we mean to say" (Hegel, 1977, p. 60, emphasis in the original). In our sense experience, we relate to the datum in its particular form, but in language, we transcend this particularity. Consequently, a gap emerges between our intentions and their ways of expression. From Hegel's point of view, "language, as we see, is the more truthful; in it, we ourselves directly refute what we mean to say" (ibid., emphasis in the original ). Hegel claims language is more truthful because, as we saw in Chapter One, truth for him is always in the universal instead of in the particular dimensions. Existentialist thinkers such as S0ren Kierkegaard and Nietzsche rejected this stance because, to some extent, it dismisses the meaning of the concrete. Nietzsche endorsed the thesis that language falsifies and can neither convey nor exhaust the concrete experience. Whereas Hegel had argued that language is a negation of this world and reflects progress toward the world's genuine meaning, Nietzsche pointed to the discontinuance, since the "world" refers to concrete experience. Camus adopted Nietzsche's view and, in "The Enigma," he writes: "When things have a label, aren't they lost already?" (Camus, 1968, p. 155). Camus offers a similar formulation in another essay:

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What we need to know is whether or not our language is false at the very moment when we think we are telling the truth, whether words have flesh or are merely empty shells, whether they mask a deeper truth ... the question is to know whether our most accurate expressions, our most successful cries, are not in fact empty of all meaning. (Camus, 1968, pp. 229-230) Camus then points to another problem of language: "the most ordinary words had several different meanings, were distorted and diverted from the plain and simple use that people imagined them to have (ibid., p. 231), and Camus again directs us to the dichotomy posed by Blaise Pascal: ''the world or language" (ibid., p. 234). This dichotomy, which appears in an essay published in 1950, becomes a categorical stance in The Rebel: The only coherent attitude based on non-signification would be silence-if silence, in its turn, were not significant. The absurd, in its purest form, attempts to remain dumb. If it finds its voice, it is because it has become complacent or ... because it considers itself provisional. (The Rebel, p. 8) Kierkegaard had hesitated regarding language, which can no longer reach concreteness (Sagi, 2000, ch. 4), and so does Camus. In his view, two solutions are possible: admitting that language does not represent and the linguistic world is only one of speech, solely concerned with statements and the pleasure of them, or temporariness, which is obviously neither a solution nor an explanation of absurd speech. The common denominator of all these sources of the absurd is that they convey anxiety (The Myth o/Sisyphus, p. 20), in the Heideggerian sense of the term: an experience of losing basic certainties, of undermining the ontological certainty of existence. Yet, whereas Heidegger had viewed anxiety as an expression of individuals cast off onto to their existence, Camus held that a basic element in the experience of the absurd was the longing for what was lost. Camus claims that the experience of the absurd sets in motion a new dynamic, which he often notes, whereby the experience per se, happening randomly at any given time, "awakens consciousness and provokes what follows" (ibid., p. 19). As soon as consciousness awakens and embarks on its course, the process of disclosing the meaning of the absurd is neither random nor arbitrary, and unfolds as a continuous movement as we experience the absurd. Striving for conscious clarity is immanent to the mind: "The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations ... is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity" (ibid., pp. 22-23). In the experience of the absurd, the mind faces itself, at first attempting to interpret and outline the

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basic structure characteristic of the absurd experience. In the course of the description, Camus assumed the negative feeling of the absurd and the longing for the positive, namely, the longing for unity and clarity. Did Camus blur the distinction between the description of the feeling and the theoretical assumption without which, so he held, the feeling of the absurd will not prevail? Can we argue, as Camus's critics often have, that Camus does not offer a clean description of the feeling, since he argues without any justification that this feeling has no basis without assuming a "nostalgia for unity"? I believe this problem reflects a deeper one: Can we identify the primary datum without frrst conceptualizing it? Can we isolate the "datum" from its interpretation? This is an instance of the problem known as "hermeneutical circularity," or, in the phenomenological formulation: ''the problem of the phenomenological opening." Camus does not consider this question but, given the phenomenologicalexistentialist influence on his thought, we may assume that his answers to this problem resemble Heidegger's in Being and Time. According to Heidegger, the search for a way out of this circularity in the shape of an objective anchor is mistaken, since it misses the meaning of existentialist hermeneutics. This hermeneutics assumes that human beings have a conceptual system and preconceptions that guide their existential interpretation. Human beings, then, possess a priori insights and preconceptions. Explication, instead of avoiding these preconceptions, uses them to enable full exposure of the structure of human existence. In one of the most highly quoted passages of Being and Time, Heidegger writes: What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way. This circle of understanding is not an orbit in which any random kind of knowledge may move; it is the expression of the existential fore-structure of Dasein itself. It is not to be reduced to the level of a vicious circle .... In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing. (Heidegger, 1962, p. 195, emphasis in the original) According to this approach, interpretations and presumptions burden the first datum. But this is not a weakness, or a human inability to grasp the datum in its pristine purity; it only indicates that human beings have a priori insights about their being. The process of interpretation is not a transcendence of the datum but an explication of the insights latent in our everyday experience in implicit, non-thematic fashion. Heidegger concludes: "The 'circle' in understanding belongs to the structure of meaning ... rooted in the existential constitution of Dasein .... An entity [that] has ... ontologicaIIy, a circular structure" (ibid.). Circularity, then, is constitutive of the experience of human beings who, according to Heidegger, are "ontic-ontological" entities, namely, entities bearing their self-understanding.

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Camus endorses this approach. Without this assumption, we must claim that Camus does not draw a proper distinction between the description of the feeling of the absurd and its interpretation, turning this into a case of petitio principii. Conceptualization, then, actualizes something alFeady latent within the feeling of the absurd. What is the common denominator for feelings of the absurd? What is the structure of these feelings? First, the absurd is a kind of relationship; a relationship between human beings and the world, with one another, and within themselves. The absurd has an intentional structure, and entails someone's relation to something, encompassing the thinker and the object of hislher thinking. My use of the concept of intentionality reflects the assumption postulated in previous chapters, stating that Camus's philosophy confronts Husserl's thinking. What is the relationship between Camus and Husserl? Camus adopts the method of phenomenology, which "declines to explain the world, it wants to be merely a description of actual experience" (The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 44). According to Camus, then, phenomenology, like absurd thinking, "aims to enumerate what it cannot transcend" (ibid., p. 45). In his judgment, the focus on the empirical world and the removal of the one absolute truth are the great contributions of phenomenology. Using Husserl's terminology, Camus points to the "profound enrichment of experience and the rebirth of the world in its prolixity" (ibid.). The elimination of transcendent dimensions and the perception of consciousness as a kind of relationship to a complex cluster of experiences extracts the world from the shallowness and uniformity resulting from classic rationalism. Camus, however, rejects several of Husserl's basic assumptions. First, in his view, Husserl wants to adduce new justifications for rationality. Husserl had claimed that the true object of intentional consciousness is not this concrete table but the idea, since in every intentional act we relate to the object - the table, the chair, and so forth. In truth, however, our empirical consciousness always contains specific contexts or aspects of the table, which are conditioned by the subject's perspective and by the environmental conditions, such as light, place, etc.. Husserl, therefore, concludes that the idea is the true object of intentional consciousness. I will not enter here into the precise meaning of this notion in ontological and epistemological terms. Camus, however, mistakenly believed that Husserl's idea is identical to the Platonic one, and that intentionality implies a return to the rejected ontological, rationalist world. Camus argues that rationality expresses an "intellectualism sufficiently unbridled to generalize the concrete itself' (ibid., p. 48) and, consequently, phenomenology has ultimately returned the lost harmony. Intentionality, including all its implicit assumptions, leads back to the rejected metaphysical realm, a notion that Camus rejects. What remains, then, of phenomenology? According to Camus, what is left is a clinging to the description of empirical experience, as well as the

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evidence of intentionality exposed in this experience. The absurd as intentionality does not reestablish harmony; instead, it points to a detachment. The intentionality of the absurd is negative intentionality. Dialectically, however, in Camus's analysis, this attitude naturally exposes the yearning for a lost unity, but not the existence of this unity. In his formulation: "the absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world" (ibid., p. 32). The detachment, the alienation, and the isolation of human beings point to this yearning, to the "wild longing for clarity" (ibid., p. 26), for intelligibility, for rationality. According to Camus, the absurd does not rest on a specific feeling, but on a comparison between what is and what we expect. Separation, and the accompanying sense of oppression, expresses the immanent desire for unity and clarity. The lack of meaning expresses a desire for meaning, never to be satisfied. Camus accepts Husserl's idea whereby intentional consciousness relates to the unity implicitly embodied in every act of consciousness. But the process of relating to unity exposes it as unattainable, no more than an object of desire. The characteristic structure of the absurd is one of disproportion, of separation between two elements: I am thus justified in saying that the feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere scrutiny of a fact or an impression but that it bursts from the comparison between a bare fact and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it. The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation. (Ibid., p. 33) Camus's emphasis on the claim that the absurd does not spring from one single source has Jean-Paul Sartre as its immediate target, and he expressly states that he wrote The Myth of Sisyphus against Sartre's existentialist philosophy (Camus, 1968, p. 345). In Nausea, Sartre argues that the absurd has one sole meaning: the inexplicable and unjustified existence of the Being (Sartre, 1959, pp. 174-183). The absurd is a unique ontological experience, transparently exposing us to the existence of the beyond; existence emerges as contingent. No justification compels the existence of the beyond, and existence divests itself of its apparent unity: Existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category... all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder-naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. (Ibid., p. 171)

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This inability to explain leaves everything in its concrete specificity, in empirical cognition, and this is precisely the experience of the absurd: The world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Knotty, inert, nameless .... The function explained nothing .... This root, with its color, shape, its congealed movement, was ... below all explanation. (Ibid., p. 174) The absurd is precisely the contestation of a general order and explication, and the meeting with the material entity in all its concrete, unexplainable cognitiveness. Sartre explicitly rejects Camus's interpretation: Camus's philosophy is a philosophy of the absurd. For him the absurd arises from the relation between man and the world, between man's rational demands and the world's irrationality. The themes which he derives from it are those of classical pessimism. I do not recognize the absurd in the sense of scandal and disillusionment that Camus attributes to it. What I call the absurd is something very different: it is the universal contingency of being which is, but which is not the basis of its being; the absurd is the given , unjustifiable, primordial quality of existence. (Paru, December 1945. Quoted in Cruickshank, 1960, p. 45, note) Although choosing between Camus's and Sartre's interpretation of the absurd is not my concern in this work, I must indicate that Camus's usage of the term appears more plausible for two reasons. The first is that, etymologically, the Latin term "absurd" means "out of harmony" in a musical context (Esslin, 1961, p. xix). Even if this has no effect on the validity of Sartre's position, his usage of the term appears contrived and he does not resort to it in most of his works. The second reason is that everyday usage of this term is closer to Camus's. As Thomas Nagel showed, "a situation is absurd when it includes a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality" (Nagel, 2000, p. 178). In sum, the structure of the feeling of the absurd is one of lack of proportions between a negative and a positive yearning. The absurd person, like Heidegger's authentic person, is conscious of this state of affairs and views it as an ontological situation. The transition from feelings to their conceptualization is a process of exposure to consciousness, climbing from the empirical to its ontological structure. Camus's complex analysis of the absurd leads to an interesting conclusion. He rejects metaphysics and its assumptions about the nature of the world and its embedded. order and rationality, but still holds that that all

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philosophical efforts, from the dawn of humanity, attest to the yearning for unity. Hence, he rejects the contents of metaphysics, but not its nature, as the expression of an element essential to human existence-the yearning for unity. Even if we rule out the ontological and epistemic value of metaphysics, therefore, we cannot rule out its hermeneutical value, because metaphysics represents the deepest human yearning, the longing conveyed in daily -life through the feeling of the absurd.

Six THE ABSURD: BETWEEN RATIONALISM AND RATIONALITY A prominent trend in the research literature views Camus's thought as continuing the tradition of anti-rationalism. Thus, for instance, John Cruickshank argues: Within a historical context, then, the notion of the absurd appears as a particularly intense form of anti-rationalism .... a rejection of the claims of classical rationalism obviously prepared the ground for it. (Cruickshank, 1960, p. 50) Patrick Henry advances a similar claim (Henry, 1975). When outlining the history of philosophy, literature, and art in the first half of twentiethcentury Europe, Henry points to the anti-rational trend typical of this period. Drawing on it, the surrealist movement develops in art, and Henri Bergson becomes highly influential in French philosophy. Andre Malraux and Andre Gide, who stressed the irrational aspects of existence in their work, precede Camus in literature: The key word "absurdite" has finally been pronounced and with this acknowledgement we have reached the epitome of anti-rationalist thought. Western man finding himself in a universe whose key has been lost can do nothing but proclaim the fundamental absurdity of his existence. (Henry, 1975, p. 58) The rejection of classic rationalism, however, does not necessarily imply a rejection of critical-rational thought. Even if we do not assume a metaphysical order, a cosmos in the classic sense of this term, we are not obliged to endorse anti-critical thinking. My central claim is that Camus rejects classic rationalism but endorses critical thinking, when he argues that traditional-metaphysical rationalism is not rational. In order to develop this claim, we must sharpen the distinction between rationalism and rationality. Rene Descartes has already demonstrated that critical thinking can question classic rationalism. Casting doubt challenges the certainty of the world and its organized structure but, in and of itself, casting doubt is a sign of critical rational thinking. This tradition of critical rational thinking, which is not rationalist, re-emerges in the empiricist thinking of John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Friedrich Nietzsche. In several ways, they all rejected the metaphysical assumption that the world's structure follows some

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general order. They fonnulated these claims, however, through precise recourse to logical tools. They showed that the assumption of classic rationalism is an unfounded belief. Reason itself, then, can challenge rationalism and expose its hollowness, a line of argument also manifest in nineteenth and twentieth-century thought. Edmund Husserl's thought, for instance, rejects classic rationalism but remains a paragon of rational thinking. Karl R. Popper, in The Open Society and its Enemies, points to different options of rational thinking: For an uncritical rationalism may argue that the world is rational and that the task of science is to discover this rationality, while an irrationalist may insist that the world, being fundamentally irrational, should be experienced and exhausted by our emotions and passions (or by our intellectual intuition) rather than by scientific methods. As opposed to this, pragmatic rationalism may recognize that the world is not rational but demand that we submit or subject it to reason, as far as possible. Using Carnap's words ... one could describe what I call "pragmatic rationalism" as the attitude which strives for clarity everywhere but recognizes the never fully understandable or never fully rational entanglement of the events of life. (Popper, 1977, p. 357, note 19, emphasis in the original) Let us assume that Camus rejects classic rationalism and does not accept the premise of the world's structure as ordered, rational, and amenable to human understanding. Can we conclude from this that he also rejects critical rationality? May we not see Camus as a pragmatic rationalist of the Popper variety? These questions clarifY the extent to which standard discussion of the relationship between the absurd and rationality has been wanting. Contrary to the theses of Cruickshank and Henry, Camus's support of a philosophical trend that has renounced critical reason to rely on such elements as feeling and imagination, is not self-evident. In the following discussion, I will try to draw a distinction between rationalism (which assumes that the world has an explanation and that the order of reason corresponds to the order of reality), and rational critical thinking. Given this distinction, can we say that Camus rejects rationalism? What is his attitude toward rationality? This fonnulation allows us to detect an interesting tension in Camus's thought between the basic assumption of a rationalist ideal, to which human reason strives, and critical rationalism, which rejects this ideal. I claim that this tension shapes the absurd, allowing us to describe it as the incompatibility between rationalist passion and rational intelligence. Herbert Hochberg (Hochberg, 1965) points out that thought strives for an all-encompassing model. Camus claims that the sole explanation that would satisfY thought is one of total unity explaining everything:

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If thought discovered in the shimmering mirrors of phenomena eternal relations capable of summing them up and summing themselves up in a single principle, then would be seen an intellectual joy of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ridiculous imitation. That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse for the human drama. (The Myth o/Sisyphus, p. 26) Hochberg notes that Camus adopts Plotinus's model of metaphysical thought, which anchored the entire cosmos in one overall principle, as the optimal and exclusive model of existence. Camus even claims this model is essential for spiritual life. Plotinian rationalism, then, is not solely speculative, but reflects the spirit's immanent demand. How does Camus substantiate this thesis? Why is the "single principle" the exclusive account of a reality that we cannot explain otherwise? Camus's thought provides no key to this, but the answer may be in the biographical elements I presented in Chapters Two and Three, as well as in the philosophical influences that shaped his thinking. As we saw, a yeaming for unity marks Camus's biography, unity with nature and with the one transcendent Being. The metaphor of the sea emerged as a strong, rich expression of this yeaming. His philosophical training and his focus on Plotinus, whose thought bears the mark of this longing for unity, also contributed to this. The uniting rationalism, as well as the search for unity, is a datum possibly explained within the biographical context. Although this description of the yeaming for one comprehensive explanation does not reflect a necessary reality, we cannot ignore that the history of classic thought, as well as the history of religions, reveal an arduous and consistent search for the supreme principle, from which all derives. Camus's personal biography blends with the cultural tradition. The description of the rationalist yeaming rests not only on a random personal experience but reflects, according to Camus, a basic human experience. But the philosophy of the absurd argues that this yeaming for unity cannot guide reason, which remains confmed within its defmed borders. Camus assumes that reason cannot concretize its longing for the absolute, although we cannot deny its ability to function adequately in the area of concrete, empirical life. In this sense, Camus's move is strikingly similar to that of Husserl (see Henry, 1975, pp. 65-66). Husserl, in the epoche move, which entailed casting doubt on whatever reason cannot justity with utter certainty, pointed to reason's inability to grasp the transcendent entity. Yet, precisely this move liberated thinking and allowed it to function appropriately within its limits. Abandoning the pretension of absolute reason is itself the expression of a rationality released from illusions that can, on these very grounds, excel within its defined area: the study of itself. Liberation from

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metaphysics directs thinking to itself, and reason thereby becomes the act of disclosing consciousness. Camus vigorously attacks what he calls existentialist thinking, represented in The Myth 0/ Sisyphus by S0ren Kierkegaard, Leon Chestov, or Karl Jaspers. According to Camus, this thinking chooses to give up reason altogether, on the grounds that only metaphysical rationalism can provide valid, valuable knowledge. Since human beings have no access to this knowledge, existentialism strives to break through the locked gates by means of another mechanism, beyond reason: Now, to limit myself to existential philosophies, I see that all of them without exception suggest escape. Through an odd reasoning, starting out from the absurd over the ruins of reason, in a closed universe limited to the human, they deifY what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. (The Myth o/Sisyphus, p. 35) Camus cannot accept this point of view, and continues to adhere to human reason and its confined borders: I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone. I am told again that here the intelligence must sacrifice its pride and the reason bow down. But if I recognize the limits of the reason, I do not therefore negate it, recognizing its relative powers. I merely want to remain in this middle path where the intelligence can remain clear. If that is its pride, I see no sufficient reason for giving it up. (The Myth o/Sisyphus, p. 42) This programmatic paragraph reveals the full rationality of Camus's position. In his view, rationalism itself rests on "the incomprehensible." Reason cannot understand reality and its ultimate metaphysical meaning. In this sense, argues Camus, the understanding that the world is absurd, and hence incomprehensible, is a conclusion of reason: Hence the intelligence, too, tells me in its way that this world is absurd. Its contrary, blind reason, may well claim that all is clear. I was waiting for proof and longing for it to be right. But, despite so many pretentious centuries and over the heads of so many eloquent and persuasive men, I know that is false .... That universal reason, practical or ethical, that determinism, those categories that explain everything are enough to make a decent man laugh. They have nothing to do with the mind. They negate its profound truth which is to be enchained. (Ibid., p. 26) The rejection of rationalism is thus an expression of a rationality aware of itself and its limits. Camus and Ludwig Wittgenstein argue that an all-

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encompassing explanation of the world requires a perspective from outside the world enabling us to grasp this unity. For Camus, who emphasizes the fmality of reason, this point of view is not possible (Hanna, 1958, p. 14). The absurd is thus the most prominent sign of reason's awareness of its finality. In his preface to the fIrst edition of Critique 0/ Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant offers a similar argument: Human reason has a peculiar fate in one kind of its cognitions: it is troubled by questions that it cannot dismiss, because they are posed to it by the nature of reason itself, but that it also cannot answer, because they surpass human reason's every ability. (Kant, 1996a, p. 5) Kant, Hume, and others, herald the basic shift that will come to typify modem consciousness. Classic tradition had assumed that human rationality is part of the rational structure of reality, drawing meaning from its role in a larger, comprehensive, order. By contrast, modem consciousness becomes increasingly aware of reason's fInite human quality, an understanding that seals the rift between consciousness and reality. Like Kant, Camus stresses reason's yearning for the absolute. Awareness of its finality does not lead reason to conceal its will to be divine. This could be the meaning of the chasm between classic and modem approaches: the classic approach assumes that human reason is divine in the sense that the full meaning of the metaphysical order, which reason can disclose, is embedded within it; reason is divine because its contents are identical to the contents of the deity. By contrast, modem consciousness claims that reason is only human; its contents are not identical to those perceived from a divine perspective. A passion to reach divine reason now replaces the divine contents. Modem consciousness, however, is well aware that this passion cannot be satisfied, and must remain within its confines. What, then, is the datum within whose confmes reason can function? Camus tells us this is the empirical datum: Of whom and of what indeed can I say: "I know that!" This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (The Myth o/Sisyphus, p. 24) The only certitude is the immediate sense, and reason builds on it and from it. Note that, in this passage, Camus speaks of certitude only concerning the senses - the rest is construction. This formulation is illogical since, as Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel have already shown, the sense is itself a construction of reason. The sense of immediacy is an abstract concept, since we encounter it without the mediation of reason. Elsewhere in the text, Camus refers in more general terms to "human experience": "It is useless to

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negate the reason absolutely. It has its order in which it is efficacious. It is properly that of human experience" (ibid., p. 38). Although a construction, reason is efficacious in the realm of human experience, and efficacy is a plausible substitute for absolute certainty. Reason does not disclose the ultimate essence of experience but functions as a pragmatic tool, in Rudolf Carnap's terms, for arranging and organizing experience in its widest sense (see also Vasil, 1985, ch. 1). In a passage from The Myth 0/ Sisyphus (p. 42, quoted in p. 62 above), Camus speaks of clarity of intelligence as the rational ideal. Clarity, or the transparency of consciousness in Camus's formulation, discerns that reason is constituted both by its passion for the absolute and by its inability to attain it. The absurd is thus the tension between the demand for rationalism and the need for intelligence to remain rational. The absurd reflects a tension between two antithetical cultures: a rationalist, metaphysical culture, as opposed to a rationalist, critical culture. The classic model of the rationalist approach is Greek tradition and its continuation within rationalist philosophy. Critical thinking, as Dean Vasil shows, appears among such moderate Enlightenment thinkers as Fran~ois Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Charles Louis de Montesquieu, Kant, and even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all of whom reject the notion of the cosmos (Vasil, 1985, p. 3; see also Cassirer, 1951, p. 37). Camus, possibly influenced by Hegel, views the history of philosophy as the main arena for the revelation of human consciousness. He views philosophy as a hermeneutical activity of self-interpretation, but rejects its consistent pretense to advance truth claims. Some of these thinkers, including Nietzsche, did renounce the rationalist ideal altogether, and stressed the joy of immanent survival. From Nietzsche's perspective, the absurd is impossible: if human beings go on yearning for absolute knowledge, if a reason aware of its limits clashes with the passion to transcend them, this proves that human beings are still prisoners of superstition. Camus's absurd, by contrast, indicates he has opted for immanence while also embracing the primary yearning for a relationship with the mysterious entity, a relationship that Nietzsche dismisses outright. Camus, and Kant, consider the rationalist demand meaningful. Unlike the classic approach, they do not expect this demand will be satisfied, but they still view it as valuable. In Camus's view, both rationalism, which he rejected, and rationality, which he affirmed, draw from the same source--"man stands face to face with the irrational" (The Myth o/Sisyphus, p. 31). As we will see below, Camus fashions a new philosophy after The Myth o/Sisyphus. The affirmation of reason is among the elements Camus retains in his new approach, and he never tires of stressing this point in Letters to a German Friend. He notes that the difference between the Germans and the French during the Second World War was that the Germans surrendered to instinct and the French acted out of reason. He admits "there is always

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something in us that yields to instinct, to contempt for intelligence, to the cult of efficiency" (Camus, 1966, p. 7), but that the French placed reason above all (ibid., pp. 8-9). Camus then sums up: "My tradition has two aristocracies, that of the intelligence and that of courage" (ibid., p. 22). Camus emphasizes these elements again in The Plague and in The Rebel. The heroes of the revolt are those who refuse to be prisoners of their passions, who reject the consolation of approaches opposed to their rational understanding. They rebel and struggle against evil, dismissing worldviews incompatible with conscious transparency and detached from human reason. This anchoring in a reason bound by its limits is the culmination of human rationality, and the barrier against the emergence of a nihilistic worldview. Following Nietzsche, Camus holds that this approach attests to despair from the hope of satisfying the passion for metaphysical rationality, together with the refusal to remain in a world that is only human. Nihilism is despair from a transcendent order, and the unwillingness to affirm, and live in, an immanent world suited to human existence. The rebel demands unity and rationality but, failing to fmd them, recurrently shapes a world characterized by another kind of unity. The absurd person had been satisfied recognizing the tension between the passion for metaphysical unity and the necessity to remain within the bounds of fmite understanding; the rebel engages in concrete action: "In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe. Rebellion, from this point of view, is a fabricator of universes" (The Rebel, p. 255). I discuss revolt more extensively in Chapters Ten and Eleven below. The main issue in the present context is that Camus preserves the basic pattern of thought that characterizes all his previous works: the individual lives in a tension between rationalism and critical rationality, evident in the absurd and in the revolt, whose limits are determined by reason itself.

Seven

CONTENDING WITH THE ABSURD: BETWEEN REJECTION AND ENDORSEMENT What is the appropriate response to the absurd, to the tension between rationalism and critical rationality? How should we act when faced with the experience of the absurd? Camus points to two main strategies, and rejects both; the ftrst is suicide, and the second is faith. He argues that, through suicide, the individual chooses to renounce one of the constitutive elements of the absurd; suicide entails "negating one of the terms of the opposition" (The Myth o/Sisyphus, p. 53). Since the absurd is the deepest expression of human existence, and suicide renounces the absurd, it conveys an inferior state of consciousness: "suicide is a repudiation" (ibid., p. 61). The renunciation of life emerges as a renunciation of lucidity, of the transparency of human existence manifest in the experience of the absurd. In The Myth 0/ Sisyphus, Camus suggests an analysis of the concept of "revolt" that sheds new light on the argument he raises against suicide, and is fundamentally different from that appearing in The Rebel. In one of the most beautiful passages in the book, he writes: If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning or rather this problem would not arise, -for I should belong to this world. I should be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness and my whole insistence upon familiarity. This ridiculous reason is what sets me in opposition to all creation. I cannot cross it out with a stroke of the pen. What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve .... And what constitutes the basis of that conflict, of that break between the world and my mind, but the awareness of it? If, therefore, I want to preserve it, I can, though a constant awareness, ever revived, ever alert. (The Myth 0/ Sisyphus, pp. 51-52; see also p. 21 above) Like Blaise Pascal, Camus assumes that the source of the rift between the individual and the world is consciousness. Human beings are not part of the world, they face it. The question is whether they choose to renounce the rift that their consciousness has exposed and, if so, what is the meaning of this renunciation. According to Camus, renouncing the rift implies choosing a life of vagueness and lack of clarity. Faced with the absurd that reflects

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consciousness, the task of humanity is now "metaphysical revolt" (ibid., p. 53), namely, to revolt against the shades of vagueness ultimately threatening the very meaning of conscious life. Camus sums up this point as follows: One of the only coherent positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. It is an insistence upon an impossible transparency .... Just as danger provided man with the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience. It is that constant presence of man in his own eyes. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it. (ibid., pp. 53-54) We constantly face the temptations of a non-transparent consciousness. Temptation assumes many forms and suicide, as the polar antithesis of revolt, is one of them. The logic of metaphysical revolt is the logic of consciousness, which exposes the rift between the individual and the world. Camus emphasizes that staying alive is an expression of revolt, while suicide is a form of resignation. Suicide provides an answer to the problem of the absurd, but the solution it offers is nothing more than the dismissal of existence. The equation is thus a choice between absurd human existence and death, and suicide chooses death. The absurd is "simultaneously awareness and rejection of death" (ibid.). By committing suicide, people expect to realize rationalism, a theory that will explain everything; since they cannot fmd it, they accept reality and choose not to take part in human life. Camus points out that these individuals fail to understand the very meaning of human existence, which lies in the tension between fmitude and an endless passion for infmity and totality, a tension that expresses transparent self-awareness. The second solution is philosophical suicide, namely, an attitude that seeks to solve the tension of the absurd through a comprehensive theory that will restore the hope for redemption and harmony. This approach argues that the absurd is only temporary, and harmony will return and will again prevaiL Camus singles out for attack the approach that is aware of the absurd, and yet rejects it. This, according to Camus, is the position of religious existentialism: by assuming a transcendental element, God, it restores redemption after the absurd. Physical suicide and metaphysical suicide share one feature in Camus's view: both fail to grasp human existence, and do not understand that the absurd is a kind of supreme human consciousness. Whereas physical suicide renounces human existence, thereby renouncing one of the elements of the absurd, metaphysical suicide refuses to remain in the realm of the absurd and turns to the transcendent, hoping it might endow concrete existence with

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meaning. Faith seeks a lost UJ?ity and conveys hope, unwilling to live a life without promise (see also Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch, 1974, p. 55). Camus argues that existentialist thinkers such as Sf2Iren Kierkegaard, Leon Chestov, and Karl Jaspers favor a vague future that entails salvation, hope, and unity, over absurd existence. The central point of their argument is the radical endorsement of irrationalism. Existentialism assumes the irrationalism exposed through the absurd, but without concluding from it the critical rationalist approach discussed in the previous chapter. Camus also argues that this irrationalism is the basis of faith. In this context, he examines the views of these thinkers and of writers such as Franz Kafka. In Camus's view, all share the religious conclusion drawn from the exposed irrationalism. He quotes Jaspers, who writes: "Does not the failure reveal, beyond any possible explanation and interpretation, not the absence but the existence of transcendence?" (The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 36). For this type of thinker, the absurd is only a point of departure that dissolves progressively into faith. If we accept the assumption that the absurd is the antithesis of hope, we see that, for Chestov, existentialism does presume the absurd a priori, but substantiates it only in order to reject it (ibid., p. 37). The absurd is "eternity's springboard, it ceases to be linked to human lucidity" (ibid., p. 38). According to this view, the absurd functions as the Cartesian methodical doubt, as an opening device that does not fully reflect conscious human life, challenging certainty in order to prepare the religious leap. Camus makes Kierkegaard the main target of his offensive. In a unique interpretation, Camus describes the deepest meaning of Kierkegaard's thought as follows: "Antinomy and paradox become criteria of the religious. Thus the very thing that led to despair of the meaning and depth of this life now gives it its truth and its clarity" (ibid., p. 40). Deeply sensitive to Kierkegaard's plight, Camus states: "Kierkegaard wants to be cured. To be cured is his frenzied wish and it runs throughout his whole journal. The entire effort of his intelligence is to escape the antinomy of the human condition" (ibid.). Camus holds that faith acts for Kierkegaard as a therapeutic attempt to recover from the existential disease of the absurd. As noted, Camus philosophizes in order to fmd a cure to the disease of human existence. Kierkegaard , however, had not thought of faith as a cure, since faith provides neither refuge nor hope (Sagi, 2000). It imprisons people in an endless uncertainty, and they must fmd the meaning of religious duty within their being. For Kierkegaard, the meaning of faith is not necessarily the infmite resignation of concrete existence; resignation may be a religious demand, but it may also be a temptation and a sin. Only the individual contends with the meaning of religious duty and religious demand, which are the source of the ceaseless anxiety Kierkegaard describes in Fear and Trembling:

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ALBERT CAMUS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSURD The knight of faith, however, is kept in a state of sleeplessness, for he is constantly being tested and at every moment there is the possibility of his returning penitently to the universal, and this possibility may be a spiritual trial as well as the truth. (Kierkegaard, 1983, p. 78; see also Sagi, 2000, ch. 7)

Contrary to Camus's description, then, the Kierkegaard variety of religious existentialism does not offer escape from the world. Even if he misunderstood Kierkegaard, however, the critique sheds light on Camus's position; for Camus, an approach that glorifies the hope for redemption and harmony implies endorsement of the irrationalism he rejects: The absurd man... does not absolutely scorn reason and admits the irrational. Thus he again embraces in a single glance all the data of experience and he is little inclined to leap before knowing. He knows simply that in that alert awareness there is no further place for hope. (The Myth ofSisyphus, p. 39) Concluding religious hope from the irrationality of the world involves the renunciation of human awareness and, above all, of consciousness, which showed that hope has no place. The solution of existentialism renounces critical reason. While it adopts the assumptions of classic rationalism, it negates the position itself and assumes the existence of an overall, unified explanation that religious faith will provide, should rationalism fail to do so. Camus rejects suicide and faith as solutions, since both renounce the basic certainty of the absurd: suicide renounces the existence of the self, and faith gives up the concrete world for the sake of hope in the next one. Instead, he endorses a third option - accepting the absurd - which implies a sober, realistic stand vis-it-vis the world. This approach makes no demands that fail to fit the meaning of conscious human existence. Camus's view has evident implications for the individual's approach to existence, which he sums up as follows: And carrying this absurd logic to its conclusion, I must admit that the struggle implies a total absence of hope (which has nothing to do with despair) [since despair is precisely a disappointed hope], a continual rejection [of any fmal, absolute meaning] (which must not be confused with renunciation) [since renunciation does not reject absolute meaning and merely implies resignation to the failure to attain it], and a conscious dissatisfaction (which must not be confused with immature unrest) [since dissatisfaction is precisely the expression of the tension involved in the rift]. Everything that destroys, conjures away, or exercises these requirements (and, to begin with, consent which overthrows divorce)

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ruins the absurd and devaluates the attitude that may then be proposed. (ibid., pp. 34-35, my additions in brackets) This analysis of Camus's contest with the problem of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus leaves us extremely frustrated. His original point of departure was that the absurd is a problem to grapple with, but Camus's answer, transforms the tragedy and malediction of the absurd into something with which compromise is not only possible but desirable. A sudden twist in the argument changes the absurd into a solution... a kind of salvation. (Cruickshank, 1960, p. 63) This analysis views Camus's thought as grounded on the very leap he ascribes to Kierkegaard. Afftrming the problematic absurd is leaping into it. What is the process that transforms a tragic datum into a value? This question is tied to a more fundamental problem: is not Camus concluding the ought from the is? The absurd is the basic datum of existence, but its aff1llllation is an act of evaluative judgment. Herbert Hochberg, one of Camus's critics, argues: Camus has leaped from the factual premise that the juxtaposition of man and the universe is absurd, to the evaluative conclusion that this state ought to be preserved .... For this transition we have no justification. Without such justification, Camus has not... made his point. He has simply begged the question. (Hochberg, 1965, p. 92) Hochberg holds that Camus does not fmd himself in this paradox by chance: His lack of coherence may be explained by the fact that, having denied a transcendent source of value, he must, if he is to have an ethic at all, anchor his values somehow in the world of ordinary experience. Values must come about from the factual condition of the world as it is. This being so, one might be led to think that values must "emerge" from facts, and what is more natural than to have one's values emerge from what is for Camus one of the most fundamental facts of all-man's absurd condition? (ibid.) Hochberg is certainly right in the first premise of his argument: Camus's thought includes no transcendent source of value. But is adopting the absurd an ethical inference of a value from a fact? Should we understand Camus's contest with the problem of the absurd as an attempt to offer an ethical argument in the first place?

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The following formulation may rescue Camus's move from these paradoxes: the first and supreme premise of his inference is ethical, and the factual datum of the absurd is only the second premise. Camus advances a proper argument because the ethical conclusion follows from the ethical premise. The basic ethical premise of the argument is the recognition of basic values: honesty and integrity. R. A. Duff and E. Marshall claim that, in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus does acknowledge these values as worthy. These values, they claim, generate the idea of the Absurd, since this arises from a clear and stubborn understanding of the nature of the world and the limits of human reason; it is honesty which forbids us, having recognized the Absurd, to evade it by false hope or philosophical suicide. (Duff and Marshall, 1982,p.122) The adoption of the absurd as a fact does not rely on a factual datum but on values such as honesty and integrity, and Camus points to a logical sequence from ethical premise to ethical conclusion. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus speaks of honesty and decency and, on this basis, he draws conclusions. For instance: If I become thoroughly imbued with that sentiment that seizes me in face of the world's scenes, with that lucidity imposed on me by the pursuit of a science, I must sacrifice everything to these certainties and I must see them squarely .... Above all, I must adapt my behavior to them and pursue them in all their consequences. I am speaking here of decency. (The Myth ofSisyphus, p. 26) But this solution does not further our understanding of Camus's move, for two reasons. First, as Duff and Marshall point out, the silent, irrational world of the absurd that Camus describes in The Myth of Sisyphus leaves no room for such values as integrity and decency. These values are more appropriate to Camus's approach in The Rebel, where he claims that revolt assumes human solidarity as the basis for ethics, than to his move in The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus is aware of the difference between the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus and the revolt in The Rebel, as a passage from The Rebel quoted above makes plain: "Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley" (The Rebel, p. 10). According to the later Camus, then, the end accord of The Myth of Sisyphus is a scorched ethical field. The next sentence in this passage from The Rebel, however, reads as follows: "But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation" (ibid.) Victory over the absurd and the revolt against it by relying on more basic values and ideas are an innovation of Camus's later thought, which makes its way from

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literary works like The Plague to the terse formulation of The Rebel. The Myth of Sisyphus ends in "scorched earth" and cannot assume values such as decency and honesty, barely rescued from the blaze. Second, honesty does not function at all as a supreme ethical premise in the passage I quoted from The Myth ofSisyphus. The acknowledgement of the absurd does not follow from a previous value; this acknowledgement is forced upon humanity, a "lucidity imposed on me by the pursuit of a science." We are not concerned with a previous system of values but with an ontological or anthropological premise, stating that human beings have an inescapable need to reach clarity: "I hold certain facts from which I cannot separate. What I know, what is certain, what I cannot deny, what I cannot reject-this is what counts" (ibid., p. 51). Honesty arises only in the context of adapting practical behavior to consciousness and expresses, according to Camus, no more than logical consistency. The attempt to rescue Camus's move by turning it into an ethical argument is patently implausible. Camus's critics and defenders share the assumption that his argument is based on an "ethics of obligation," which seeks to derive the absurd from an ethical-normative premise. The debate between advocates and opponents of this argument comes down to one question: did Camus reach this conclusion about the value of the absurd through the proper course? My thesis will argue that Camus, instead of seeking to infer a moral justification for choosing the absurd, is claiming that this choice actualizes a natural human yearning for clarity. The acknowledgement of the absurd is the concretization of human consciousness. The absurd person adopting the data of consciousness does not conclude an "obligation" from this state of affairs, but embraces whatever emerges within human existence itself. As we will see, Camus's approach combines Aristotelian elements stating that values reflect a natural human passion with a phenomenological-existeritialist method. This integration of Aristotelian elements within phenomenological-existentialist analysis characterizes existentialist tradition from Kierkegaard to Martin Heidegger (for an interesting analysis of Aristotelian elements in Kierkegaard's and Heidegger's thought see Stack, 1977, ch. 2). Camus's innovation lies in the renewed characterization of human reality as absurd, and in the application of Aristotelian and phenomenological elements to these circumstances. Camus articulates the thesis that the yearning for consciousness is a basic datum of human existence in several places in his work. In the essay "Pessimism and Tyranny," he writes: "We all have a dreadful need to reflect" (Camus 1966,p. 60). Pointing to reflective activity as a basic immanent drive, of a deep immanent passion for clarity and transparency in consciousness, Camus notes: The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feelings in the face of his universe: it is an

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insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity .... Likewise the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought. (The Myth ojSisyphus, pp. 22-23) The will is only the agent here: it tends to maintain consciousness. (Ibid., p. 61, note) In a passage quoted above, Camus refers to the "lucidity imposed on me by the pursuit of a science" (ibid., p. 26), and elsewhere in the book he writes, "human will had no other purpose than to maintain awareness" (ibid., p. 104). The premise of the spirit's immanent yearning for a life of consciousness raises the question: when does consciousness awaken? How does the will awaken consciousness? Or, what is the process that launches consciousness on its course? As noted in Chapter Five above, Camus answers this question by claiming that the absurd "awakens consciousness and provokes what follows" (ibid., p. 19). The original state of consciousness is vagueness. This state is unaware of human reality and ignorant of the structure of reality. Consciousness embarks on a voyage of self-realization and awareness through the sense of the absurd, the original datum that awakens the individual and turns himlher toward the self. In this sense, the absurd functions similarly to Heidegger's conscience in Being and Time. As conscience awakens and turns the individual to the possibility of authentic existence, manifest in the transparency of the ontological-existentialist structure (Heidegger, 1962, pp., 312 ff.), so the sense of the absurd turns consciousness toward itself and generates a process of selfexplication. We usually perceive conscience as an outside imposition (ibid., p. 320); similarly, the sense of the absurd trap individuals against their will. We do not choose the different manifestations of the sense of the absurd: the break in the continuity of meaning in everyday life, alienation, or awareness of death. Finally, in Heideggerian phenomenology, conscience is a concrete, empirical confirmation of the possibility of authentic existence. In a way, conscience is a mediating phenomenon between concrete-empirical existence and the ontological-existential structure, demonstrating the immanent nature of authentic existence. Similarly, the sense of the absurd is an intermediate phenomenon between inauthentic existence, which does not acknowledge the absurd as a basic structure, and absurd existence, which is the authentic human life. Just as conscience does not create the authentic option but urges its realization, so the sense of the absurd generates the process of explication, without creating consciousness as such. If human beings had no consciousness, they would never sense the absurd. The understanding that the absurd constitutes the very foundation of human existence can only emerge at the end of the process, when we have

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disclosed the structure of the absurd in its entirety and the sense of the absurd emerges through it: "In his recovered and now studied lucidity, the feeling of the absurd becomes clear and defmite" (The Myth o/Sisyphus, p. 26) . When we envisage the process from the beginning, consciousness appears to unfold through the sense of the absurd, but the truth is the absurd only awakens it. The conceptualization of the absurd emerges as a process of explication that, according to Camus, is identical to the explication of consciousness to itself. Camus often refers to this process as one in which "the mind studies itself'(ibid., p. 22), noting that "only at the end of this difficult path does the absurd man recognize his true motives" (ibid., p. 49). As the prolonged process of self-examination ends, we become aware of the absurd as the structure of human existence. When we analyze the course Camus follows in his analysis of the absurd, we fmd it has typical features of explication. He begins with an original, implicit datum, explicitly referring to the vagueness of the absurd: Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying. The regularity of an impulse or a repulsion in a soul is encountered again in habits of doing or thinking, is reproduced in consequences of which the soul itself knows nothing. Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject .... There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness or of generosity. A universe-in other words a metaphysic and an attitude of mind. What is true of already specialized feelings will be even more so of emotions basically as indeterminate, simultaneously as vague and as "defmite," as remote and as "present" as those furnished us by beauty or aroused by absurd. ity. (ibid., p. 17) This original vagueness is the frrst, and even the only, datum of the spirit: "the climate of absurdity is in the beginning. The end is the absurd universe and that attitude of mind which lights the world with its true colors" (ibid., p. 18). The explication ends with the clarification and exposure of the absurd in its full meaning. How does the explication proceed? According to Edmund Husserl, the only guideline of explication is the datum. The absurd propels the wheels of the explication, which remains within the confmes that awakened it: "My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence that aroused it. That evidence is the absurd" (ibid., p. 50). The explication, without transcending the sense of the absurd, penetrates it in a direct contemplation in order to explain it: Up to now we have managed to circumscribe the absurd from the outside. One can, however, wonder how much is clear in that notion and

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ALBERT CAMUS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSURD by direct analysis try to discover its meaning on the one hand and, on the other, the consequences it involves. (ibid., p. 33)

This direct grasp unfolds through a complex explication process, which relies on description and analysis. As noted, to explicate is to discern the elements found at the basis of human experience, making them explicit and conscious. Explication does not unfold through any particular theory. Explication is a process whereby the spirit, liberated in the Heideggerian sense of existential freedom, fully exposes itself to itself: "The only thought to liberate the mind is that which leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of its impending end. No doctrine tempts it. It awaits the ripening of the work and oflife" (ibid., p. 105). Aware of the link between the course he negotiates and Husserl's explication, Camus argues that the spirit fmds fulfillment in "describing and understanding every aspect of experience" (ibid., p. 45), and explicitly refers to an awakening process: "It is a way of awaking a sleeping world and of making it vivid to the mind" (ibid.). The analysis so far suggests that the optimal conceptual structure for understanding Camus's philosophical endeavor is the phenomenological ontology and epistemology of Husserl and Heidegger (compare Hanna, 1958, p. 214). Although Camus takes issue with Husserl concerning several basic questions, he endorses the phenomenological method "that limits itself to describing what it declines to explain" (The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 45). Phenomenology, like absurd thought, seeks to "enumerate what it cannot transcend" (ibid.). For Camus, the focus on the empirical world and the dismissal of the one abstract-universal truth represent phenomenology's most significant contribution. Using Husserl's formulations, Camus argues that this move results in "a profound enrichment of experience and the rebirth of the world in its prolixity" (ibid., p. 45). Dismantling the transcendent dimensions and perceiving consciousness as a kind of relationship to a complex set of experiences, releases the world from the shallowness and uniformity impressed upon it by traditional rationalism. The significance of integrating Aristotelian and phenomenological elements in Camus's thought now becomes evident. The phenomenological explication, which embodies the immanent yearning for self-realization, is the method that best allows consciousness to study and explicate itself without transcending the basic datum of human existence. The phenomenological method since Husserl and Heidegger is a method enabling the transition of consciousness from potential to actuality. Instead of a theory, phenomenology is a pure method of the spirit in its immanent movement. As for ethics, Camus claims that it has ontological meaning as well, and relates to ethics in two ways. In the first, he writes:

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We know that the syste~, when it is worthwhile, cannot be separated from its author. The Ethics itself, in one of its aspects, is but a long and reasoned personal confession. Abstract thought at last returns to its prop offlesh. (The Myth ojSisyphus, p. 92) Ethics here means relating to the self, a confession that emerges as a long process, which is the explication. Camus then writes: "What distinguishes modem sensibility from classical sensibility is that the latter thrives on moral problems and the former on metaphysical problems" (ibid., p.95). Since the absurd is part of the modem sensibility, this thinking expresses metaphysical concern above all. But this metaphysics is ethical in its meaning, in the sense of returning to concrete existence by revealing its foundations. The ethics embedded in the text, instead of a theory of morality or a system of norms, is a process of self-exposure leading also to practical conclusions. In this sense, The Myth ojSisyphus is a kind of voyage, the realization of a self-revelation process expressing "self-concern." Camus speaks about the process dimension of the text, claiming, for instance: "Is there logic to the point of death? I cannot know unless I pursue, without reckless passion, in the sole light of evidence, the reasoning of which I am here suggesting the source" (The Myth ojSisyphus, p. 16). What awaits at the end of the explication? Lucidity and a sober understanding of human reality as tom between a longing for the absolute, a yearning and a nostalgia for transcendent unity, together with a limited, finite ability. This ends the explication but not the process: what do human beings do when facing this discovery of consciousness? As noted, they are driven into a process that ends with them facing themselves; now they have to decide whether to embrace human existence. The decision to embrace existence does not rest on the premise that this is a human obligation, or a conclusion from a given fact; instead, it results from the human readiness to embrace the basic facts of existence as they emerged in the explication process of the absurd. It reflects the Greek idea of amor jati, as Camus uses it in the following passage: "Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one wi1llive this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by consciousness" (ibid., p. 53). Elsewhere, Camus remarks: "What matters is coherence. We start out here from acceptance of the world" (ibid., p. 62, note). Let us return to the comparison between Heidegger's phenomenology of conscience and Camus's analysis of the absurd. In Heideggerian phenomenology, "to the call of conscience there corresponds a possible hearing. Our understanding of the appeal unveils itself as our wanting to have a conscience" (Heidegger, 1962, p.314).

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Heidegger emphasizes that the choice cannot relate to conscience itself, since the call of conscience does not depend on human beings. Although conscience appears to be an imposition, they may still wish to adopt its call, which directs them to themselves (ibid., p. 334). Wishing for conscience is not a decision that follows from a normative-ethical system, but from the individual's readiness to live in conscious transparency. The meaning of the decision is ontological-existential above all: the readiness to realize the ontological structure characteristic of human beings. Similarly, Camus holds that the decision to adopt the absurd is merely the readiness to convey, in explicit terms, the meaning of basic human existence. The dynamic of the conscious immanent process generates a selfawareness that compels the individual to make a decision on whether to endorse or reject the absurd. The decision to endorse the absurd reflects the immanent disposition toward clarity, as well as the readiness to express this disposition at all times. Paradoxically, the decision to endorse the absurd implies a harmony between the individual and herlhis basic given data. Ontologically, individuals can endorse or reject this datum, and this option conveys their freedom. According to Camus, however, and in line with the existentialist tradition stretching from Kierkegaard to Heidegger, the authentic decision views the return to factual givenness as the deepest expression of human existence. The meaning of the authentic decision is to embrace the absurd. Afflrming the absurd, then, is a lucid acknowledgement of the human condition, mainly a problem of self-understanding and not an ethical matter. Individuals can refuse to recognize their existence as absurd, but this does not tum the decision to endorse the absurd into an ethical issue. Deciding to endorse the absurd returns us to the problem, but the solution is not in the logical inference enabling us to derive the afflrmation of the absurd from some supreme ethical system. Instead, the solution is in a process of explication, whereby we learn that the absurd is an essential part of our existence and, in choosing it, we realize the inner yearning for conscious transparency. The paradox regarding Camus's position followed from an attempt to read The Myth of Sisyphus as an ethical text and not as one concerned with ontological-existential meaning. In Camus's terminology, the paradox reflects a misunderstanding that failed to take into account the dependence of ethics on metaphysical instead of on moral problems. One of the most significant elements in the adoption of the absurd, for Camus, is the experience of happiness that accompanies it. An analysis of Camus's unique view of happiness sheds new light on the absurd mode of existence, and he conveys its link to happiness in several of his works. In The Myth of Sisyphus he writes: "Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth ....The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy" (The Myth of Sisyphus, pp. 110111).

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What is this happiness? Does it remove despair and terror from the absurd? Is it serenity, or resignation? According to Serge Doubrovsky, happiness consists in the moments of identification and unity with nature (Doubrovsky, 1988, p. 83). This type of happiness appears in the concluding lines of The Outsider: When I woke, the stars where shining down on my face. Sounds of the countryside came faintly in, and the cool night air, veined with smells of earth and salt, fanned my cheeks. The marvelous peace of the sleepbound summer night flooded through me like a tide ... gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. (The Outsider, pp. 119-120) This view of happiness suggests reconciliation and absolute harmony between the individual and the surrounding world out "there," a world in which, at happy moments, the individual is swallowed up. But this notion of happiness is not compatible with the one found in many other texts and in The Myth of Sisyphus, since happiness as reconciliation with nature is supposed to remove the terror of the absurd. By contrast, in the alternative approach, happiness does not remove the absurd, or angst, or despair. In "Love of Life," Camus writes: "there is no love of life without despair of life"(Camus, 1968, p. 56). In ''The Desert," he points to the link between despair and happiness: "I know of times and places where happiness can seem so bitter that we prefer the promise of it" (Camus, 1968, p. 102). At times, Camus claims: "What I wish for is no longer happiness but simply awareness" (ibid., p. 61). What, then, is the Sisyphean happiness, which does not emasculate the terror and despair of life, which does not promise transcendental hope, "when happiness springs from the absence of hope" (ibid., p. 104). In broad terms, two basic theoretical approaches concerning happiness prevail in the history of ideas: the first views happiness as an end that human beings long for, or should long for. John Stuart Mill is one of the advocates of this view and, in Utilitarianism, he endeavored to defend a theory whereby the pursuit of happiness is the supreme human goal: "By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure" (Mill, 1971, p. 18). The opposite view is the Aristotelian one: "To judge by their lives, the masses and the most vulgar seem - not unreasonably - to believe that the Good or happiness is pleasure" (Aristotle, 1955, 1:5). Aristotle, however, in an extensive discussion of happiness in his Ethics, concludes that happiness is associated with the realization of the individual's chosen pursuit. Yet, since we tend to perceive happiness as linked to

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perfection, happiness is associated with the full realization of the individual's unique endeavor. This analysis leads to the conclusion that happiness is associated with self-realization, with an activity wherein individuals express their human quality. Contrary to the first view, happiness is not inherent in a situation or a reality but in an activity that allows iridividuals to bring their uniqueness to the fore. We reach happiness from within. In this sense, happiness is the sign that the activity is now complete instead of a defined element, distinctive and separate from human existence per se. The link between Aristotle's and Camus's views of happiness is not surprising, since the influence of Aristotelian tradition on existentialist thought is well known, and I have noted this above. Camus accepts the view associating happiness with self-realization. Since people realize their existence as human creatures in their absurd consciousness, they will only find happiness in the conscious adoption of absurd existence. Camus adds the reflective dimension to Aristotle's view, as a constitutive element of happiness. According to this Aristotelian perception of Camus, happiness is a condition of harmony and reconciliation, but the object of this reconciliation is the self instead of the world: He defmes happiness as a simple harmony relating the individual to his existence. What more sure basis can there be for happiness, then, than recognition by the individual of that insoluble paradox which constitutes his position in the world? Happiness will follow from a relationship in which the individual accepts the eternal antagonism between his desire for life and the inevitability of his death. (Cruickshank, 1960, pp. 38-39) John Cruickshank recognizes that the source of happiness is within. But this acknowledgement of the human condition is not sufficient, since understanding the absurd can also lead to suicide. A further step is required the will to happiness or, more precisely, the constant longing for human reality and its acceptance as is. Happiness is not a situation of quiescent acknowledgement, but a constant endorsement of reality, as represented by Sisyphus: instead of passively facing his destiny, he embraces it. The passion for clarity, as noted, is an immanent human disposition. Happiness is equivalent to the Aristotelian entelecheia-the perfection noted above since, when individuals embrace their reality as is, they reach maximum lucidity in their existence as concrete creatures. Were they to remain passive and be satisfied with a theoretical acknowledgement of their situation, they would be refusing their human condition. Even without committing suicide, a theoretical acknowledgement would not constitute a full realization of human existence. Only through the act of choosing and willing the absurd, does the individual fully realize human reality and reach conscious

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transparency. Happiness is a situation of harmony within: the absurd person liberates, in the Heideggerian sense of the term, herlhis inner tendency to will clarity, and brings it to full realization. An absurd life as a life of conscious transparency ultimately expresses the full endorsement of immanent human existence. The Sisyphean readiness to roll up the rock to the top of the mountain implies a readiness to affirm absurd human existence. According to Camus, the crucial moment in the affmnation of human existence comes after the rock has rolled down, and right before the next ascent: I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step towards the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock. ... Sisyphus ... knows the whole extent of his wretched condition; it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. (The Myth o/Sisyphus, pp. 108-109) The movement of repetition is the basic affmnation of immanent reality: Sisyphus forever repeats the same act. This eternal repetition acknowledges the act and renounces escape from it. This movement reflects a conscious position whereby the individual attains redemption through the total endorsement ofhislher being. This acknowledgement of repetition as the deepest affmnation of human existence is a prominent feature of Kierkegaard's and Friedrich Nietzsche's thought. Kierkegaard devoted a special book to the subject, Repetition; as I showed (Sagi, 2000), his entire oeuvre contends with the possibility of return. Similarly, Nietzsche develops the notion of eternal recurrence in his later thought. A succinct comparison between Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's approaches on repetition will help us understand Camus's position on this question. Both were profoundly concerned with this concept, and both influenced Camus. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche view repetition as the epitome of human existence, although they assign different meanings to the concept. In Repetition (Kierkegaard, 1983), Kierkegaard stages a confrontation between two possible models of repetition, rejecting one and accepting the other. In its fIrst meaning, repetition is a return to a previous situation, to the past, lacking any personal, inner meaning. Kierkegaard describes this movement in the fIrst part of the book; in his journal, however, (Sagi, 2000, p. 20) he notes that only in the second part of Repetition does he deal with it seriously. The fIrst part "is always a joke or a relative truth." The true movement of repetition is not a return to the past but the movement through

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which the self is reconstituted as a unity. Through repetition, the individual overcomes self-alienation and self-estrangement and afftrms concrete existence: "I am myself again ... the split that was in my being is healed; I am unifted again" (Kierkegaard, 1983, p. 220). From Kierkegaard's perspective, self-alienation is inherent in the selfs ontological foundation, because individuals are constituted by their factual data and by their ability to transcend it through freedom (for an analysis of this question see Sagi, 2000, pp. 33-36). The tension between givenness and self-transcendence requires the mediation of conscious activity, which reestablishes the link between these two ontological elements. Through the act of repetition, individuals affIrm their factual data out of freedom (ibid., pp. 98-99). The gist of the repetition movement, however, is not this affIrmation but the return to the self. Since the self is not an abstract entity, return occurs through the return to concrete existence (ibid.). Repetition, therefore, is a movement meant to restore the self. Through it, the self affIrms itself as an entity constituted by its imposed factual data and by its freedom. Repetition is fundamentally a reflective movement, embodying the authentic consciousness of the individual as a human creature. The result of this movement is an affIrmation of concrete fullness, since the self is no more than a concrete creature of characteristic speciftcity. Kierkegaard struggled with this question throughout his life: can individuals return to affIrm their existence after alienation, or is this option hopeless? Existence, which entails a ceaseless ontological uncertainty, epitomizes this struggle; even if we assume movement is possible, it will be laden with characteristic tension and anxiety. Nietzsche offers a different perception of repetition, to which he refers as "eternal recurrence." Nietzsche developed two theories on this question: one scientiftc metaphysical, and the other ethical. The central idea of the scientiftc theory is the claim that all events, which merely recycle some form of energy, will repeat themselves ad infinitum. This argument, which I do not discuss here in detail, is based on several premises: fITSt, according to Nietzsche, the law of conservation of energy means the universe holds a defmed and fmite quantity of energy. Second, the possible states of energy are fmite. Third, time is infmite. Nietzsche therefore concludes that energy states will repeat themselves (see, for instance, Nietzsche, 1968, 4:1063). The notes in which Nietzsche formulates the idea of eternal recurrence show that he views it mainly in ethical-metaphysical terms, as a theory conveying the affIrmation of immanence and the absolute rejection of transcendence. The world has no purpose beyond itself, no goal yet to be achieved: "If the world had a goal, it must have been reached. If there were for it some unintended fmal state, this also must have been reached" (ibid.). According to Nietzsche, teleological or developmental perceptions of reality undermine the meaning of the present and of concrete existence, and thereby destroy the value of individual life. Existence becomes a means for a

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goal beyond it, or yet to be attained. By contrast, the doctrine of eternal recurrence implies an aff"mnation of reality as is: "It [the world] lives on itself: its excrements are its food" (ibid., p. 548). Nietzsche views the idea of eternal recurrence as a synthesis between two opposing philosophical traditions: the tradition of Heraclitus, stressing permanent becoming, and the tradition of Parmenides, emphasizing the absolute value of the is (ibid., 4:1057). Eternal recurrence emphasizes the dynamic movement of existence, but has no aim beyond it; it returns to itself, in an absolute affmnation of existence. Every moment is eternal, since we do not need to transcend it for the sake of a goal beyond it. A concise summary of this view on absolute aff"mnation appears in a key passage of The Gay Science: What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life, as you now livest, and have lived it, you will have to live once more, and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it.... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth, and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a God, and never have I heard anything more divine!" (Nietzsche, 1974,3:41) Some interpretations of this passage view it as an attempt to offer an alternative to Kant's categorical imperative, whereby Nietzsche is offering a universal criterion: the practical rule that will guide the believer in the idea of eternal recurrence is the will to repeat the event forever and ever. Yet, Walter Kaufmann (1974, pp. 322-323) raises several noteworthy arguments against this reading. First, Immanuel Kant points to a logical, formal criterion, whereas Nietzsche relates to the psychological human dimension. Second, Nietzsche does not offer a universal criterion for faith in eternal recurrence. In his view, the attitude to the demon's question attests to the human condition. Listeners who curse the demon show they are imperfect, whereas those impressed by the question have achieved the desired perfection in their absolute affmnation of reality. The epitome of the absolute affmnation of reality, taking up the challenge of eternal recurrence, is the ancient idea of amor fati. In Nietzsche's words: "Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! ... and all in all, and on the whole ... some day I wish to be only a yes-sayer" (Nietzsche, 1974,4:276) Unlike Kierkegaard, Nietzsche does not view eternal recurrence as a process of balance and self-harmony. Instead of a victory over alienation, eternal recurrence is the aff"mnation of the world. Even if return is a challenge, an individual returning to existence no longer yearns for transcendence, and does not live in dread and anxiety. The affmnation of immanence is joyful and safe.

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Camus's approach integrates elements from Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's positions. From Nietzsche, Camus takes the idea that an absurd life means the full affIrmation of immanent existence. Unlike Nietzsche, however, Camus acknowledges an intense longing for transcendence. Contrary to eternal recurrence, absurd existence rests on the tension between the affIrmation of immanence and the yearning for transcendence. Camus argues, unlike Nietzsche, that although human existence must convey absolute commitment to immanence, it neither can nor should negate the very acknowledgement of the yeaming for transcendence, salvation, and hope beyond this world. The absurd hero, therefore, lives within a complex reality of joy and angst. The Sisyphean hero affIrms his immanent existence, but his lucidity compels him to recognize the hardships and the challenge involved in this affIrmation. From Kierkegaard, Camus takes the idea that absurd existence means a renewed attitude to the self; the absurd hero is a reflective hero, who creates a renewed harmony with his existence or, more precisely, with the basic rift constituting his absurd existence. Unlike Kierkegaard, however, Camus does not view the affIrmation of existence as just a consequence of affIrming the concrete self. The absurd hero, as a reflective hero, addresses his consciousness simultaneously to the self and to full concrete existence. Camus formulates his quantitative ethics, embodying this synthesis between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, as follows: "On the one hand the absurd teaches that all experiences are unimportant and, on the other, it urges towards the greatest quantity of experiences" (The Myth ojSisyphus, p. 60). On the surface, this perception of existence is hedonistic, striving to maximize experiences. But the opening sentence, "all experiences are unimportant," makes this interpretation problematic. For Camus, the different experiences of existence are the distinctive expression of freedom and lack of boundaries: To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them. Being aware of one's life, one's revolt, one's freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum. (ibid., p. 61) What is the quality of this freedom? Does it mean boundless arbitrariness? Further on in this passage, Camus writes: "Thus it is that no depth, no emotion, no passion and no sacrifIce could render equal in the eyes of the absurd man (even if he wished it so) a conscious life of forty years and a lucidity spread over sixty years" (ibid.). Quantity, then, is not the exclusive meaning available to the absurd person. Camus's critics notwithstanding, quantitative ethics is not the sole possible expression of a life without transcendence, and the sum of experiences is not the only value in an existence without God. This critique

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makes immanence synonymo~s with an immediate fusion with concrete existence. Without God, human beings have their freedom. Above all, freedom means awareness of existence and a life of lucidity; quantity without awareness is worthless. Quantity, including the expression of individual freedom and the consciousness of immanence, is the meaning of Camus's quantitative ethics. Sisyphus, who has only one experience, realizes this ethics without maximizing quantity. Quantitative ethics balances the Nietzschean element - affinning the fullness of concrete existence and the Kierkegaardian element - shaping a conscious life. The Kierkegaardian element, however, plays the decisive role within this balance, so that one or several experiences suffused with consciousness of the absurd are preferable to a maximum of experiences lacking consciousness and transparence.

Eight FROM ALIENATION TO ABSURD: THE OUTSIDER AND THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS The basic premise of this book, as noted, is that Camus's thought is a contest with the meaning of existence. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus provides one answer to this question, but his explication of existence is dynamic. To understand the innovation entailed in Camus's view of the absurd, I devote a special discussion to The Outsider, which appeared several months before The Myth ofSisyphus. The narrative framework of The Outsider is straightforward: Meursault, the protagonist, is a clerk who receives a message informing him of his mother's death in an old-aged home. He travels to her funeral and, after his return, goes out with his friend Raymond. Raymond becomes entangled in a squabble with a group of Arabs and, in the course of it, Meursault shoots one of the Arabs to death. Thus ends Part I of the story. Part IT is Meursault's trial, in which he will not only answer the charge of the Arab's killing, but also of the moral killing of his mother. Meursault is sentenced to death, and in his prison cell conducts several conversations with the priest, who tries to lead him to faith. He rejects this option, and persists to the end in his commitment to immanent existence, even when facing the threat of death. Yet, beyond this narrative framework, the story is strange and remains, in a way, a dark, unsolved riddle. We think we are reading this account in Meursault's journal, but is Meursault the narrator? On the surface, the story traces the course of events in a kind of present continuous, as set by the opening line: "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure." This style, however, leads to an interesting paradox. In Part I, Meursault emerges as a man whose being is constituted by immediate experience; he is not a reflective creature reexamining his existence. Meursault even says so himself. When his lawyer asks him if he had been grieved by his mother's death, "I answered that in recent years I'd rather lost the habit of noting my feelings, and hardly knew what to answer" (The Outsider, pp. 68-69). Meursault's statement about himself is ambivalent, since his very description as unreflective is a reflective statement. The wording of this declaration hints to a past in which reflection had been present and, although now intentionally forsaken, is still considered a real option. Were Meursault an unreflective creature deeply engulfed in his immediate experience, he would not have kept a journal and would not have reported the experience, since these actions transcend immediacy. The narrator must therefore be, in Robert C. Solomon's formulation, "another Meursault, a reflective Meursault .... It is this second Meursault who is the narrator" (Solomon, 1987,

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p. 250). But this Meursault is not the one of the story since, as noted, the story is written in the present continuous. Solomon therefore concludes: "Meursault of part I is an impossible character because he is both the reflective transcendental narrator and the unreflective bearer of experience" (ibid.. See also Sprintzen, 1988, p. 25). This genre, where the "self' is hero and narrator at the same time is common in French literature, and Andre Gide also resorts to it. Patrick McCarthy describes this genre, which endows inner life with a unique significance: . The reader becomes a confidant who is seduced into believing what the "I" reveals, while the character usually develops throughout the book; by the time he becomes a narrator at the end, he can look back and trace his evolution. So there is a series of presuppositions: that the inner life is important and can be discussed with someone else, and that it is coherent. (McCarthy 1988, p. 26) Camus's use of this genre is puzzling because Meursault, at least in Part I, rejects these approaches: "Camus has selected the literary form that requires the highest degree of awareness and has inserted into it a narrator whose very identity consists in the inadequacy of his awareness" (ibid.). According to McCarthy, this is Camus's innovation: using the genre in order to challenge it. He thereby seeks to demonstrate that harmony in a work of art is illusory (ibid., p. 25). I noted in Chapter Four above that Camus rejects Jean-Paul Sartre's view of literary writing as an outlet for the absurd, because this approach ascribes to literature a power it lacks: to provide the experience of existence. In The Outsider, to some extent a self-negating work, Camus offers a new artistic formulation of this idea. This move is not surprising, since, for Camus, as for S0ren Kierkegaard (Sag~ 2000), the contest with existence must unfold in life and not in writing. We require, therefore, a literary form that challenges its own existence. Sartre senses this when he states that "The Stranger is not an explanatory book" (Sartre, 1962, p. Ill), and McCarthy adds: "it ostentatiously does not explain" (McCarthy 1988, p. 30, emphasis in original). For Camus, "art is no different from the rest of the universe and should not pretend to a harmony or a perfection which it cannot possess" (ibid., p. 31). This enigmatic novel views existence as a riddle, and conveys this in its literary design. As we will see below, the literary enigma embodies a deeper phenomenon: it challenges our world. The trial scene represents the threat and the question that The Outsider poses to our life. How should we understand its content? In "An Explication of The Stranger," Sartre writes: "In The Myth of Sisyphus, which appeared a few

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months later [than The Outsider], Camus provided us with a precise commentary upon his work" (Sartre, 1962, p. 108). Sartre's famous statement reflects a trend widely prevalent trend in the interpretation of The Outsider, tending to read the story by reference to the conceptual framework developed in The Myth of Sisyphus. The relationship between The Outsider and The Myth of Sisyphus resembles the relationship between the sense of the absurd and its conceptualization. In Sartre's formulation, "The Myth of Sisyphus ... [is] the theory of the novel of absurdity" (ibid., p. 111). This is an appealing interpretation, since both works appeared close together and Camus saw them as one whole, but hardly any supporting evidence exists for it within the story. The concept of the absurd does appear at its end, but Camus uses the term here in a sense resembling Sartre's view, to expresses the randomness of existence: I'd passed my life in a certain way, and I might have passed it in a different way, if I'd felt like it. I'd acted thus, and I hadn't acted otherwise .... And what did that mean? ... Nothing, nothing had the least importance .... From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. (The Outsider, p. 118) Meursault's acknowledgement that existence is random, the absence of any supreme causality imbuing it with meaning, leads him at the end of the story to affirm existence as is. Although The Outsider and The Myth of Sisyphus conclude by affmning immanent existence, we need not thereby assume that an identical conceptual framework is also appropriate to both. In The Myth of Sisyphus, as noted, two poles shape the absurd: a negative, deconstructing pole, and a pole yearning for a positive alternative. The antithetical tension that dominates the experience of the absurd emerges through the philosophical analysis, which decodes this basic experience. The Outsider, however, includes no hint of this tension. Instead, The Outsider focuses on a completely different experience: social alienation. In "Preface to The Stranger," dated 1955, Camus writes: I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark that I admit was highly paradoxical: "In our society any man who does not weep at his mother's funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death." I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game. In this respect, he is foreign to the society in which he lives .... A much more accurate idea of the character, or, at least, one much closer to the author's intentions, will emerge if one asks just how Meursault doesn't play the game. The reply is a simple one: he refuses to lie. To lie is not only to say what isn't true. It is also and above all, to say more

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ALBERT CAMUS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSURD than is true, and, as far as the human heart is concerned, to express more than one feels. This is what we all do, every day, to simplify life. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings, and immediately society feels threatened .... He [Mersault] is animated by a passion for the absolute and for truth. This truth is still a negative one, the truth of what we are and what we feel, but without it no conquest of ourselves or of the world will ever be possible. One would therefore not be much mistaken to read The Stranger as the story of a man who ... agrees to die for the truth. I also happened to say, again paradoxically, that I had tried to draw in my character the only Christ we deserve. (Camus, 1968, pp. 335-337, emphasis in the original)

In his interpretation of The Outsider, Camus focuses on the key element in the story. Meursault faces the social world as a stranger, failing to share its values because he is honest with himself. He is not willing to participate in the mourning over his mother and share in her friends' solidarity because he feels nothing toward her. Meursault's loyalty to himself leads to his rift with society. Camus points out that this self-honesty is the negative expression of the passion for truth. Instead of just a refusal, the negation expresses a passion for the absolute. Meursault, like Christ, is ready to die on the altar of this truth. This distinctively social perspective, and not the experience of the absurd, is the deep meaning of the story. Meursault is estranged from society, and this work in no way hints to metaphysical concepts of the absurd in the style of The Myth o/Sisyphus. The trial situation highlights this angle. Ostensibly, the charge against Meursault is the killing of the Arab, but the exchanges at the court are extremely problematic. As Conor Cruise O'Brien points out: In practice, French justice in Algeria would almost certainly not have condemned a European to death for shooting an Arab who had drawn a knife on him and who had shortly before stabbed another European. And most certainly Meursault's defense counsel would have made his central plea that of self-defense .... There is no reference to the use of any such defense or even to the bare possibility of an appeal to European solidarity in a case of this kind. This is as unreal as to suppose that in an American court, where a white man was charged with killing a black man who had pulled a knife, defense counsel would not evoke, or the court be moved by, white fear of blacks. (O'Brien, 1970, pp. 22-23) In this light, the trial's role in the story becomes completely different. The accusation discussed at the trial is not the killing of the Arab, as Meursault sums up the prosecutor's charge: "Really, he said, I had no soul,

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there was nothing human about me, not one of those moral qualities which normal men possess had any place in my mentality" (The Outsider, p. 101). The prosecutor reiterates that Meursault has "no place in a community whose basic principles he flouts without compunction" (ibid., p. 102). The charge against Meursault, then, is his alienation from the basic rules of society and culture, and the prosecutor's words in the next passage are uniquely instructive: This man, who is morally guilty of his mother's death, is no less unfit to have a place in the community than that other man who did to death the father who begat him. And, indeed, the one crime led on to the other; the first of these two criminals, the man in the dock, set a precedent, if I may put it so, and authorized the second crime ... I am convinced ... that you will not find I am exaggerating the case against the prisoner when I say that he is also guilty of the murder to be tried tomorrow in this court. (The Outsider, p. 102) The prosecutor is accusing Meursault of no less than parricide. The narrative establishes the link between parricide and the charge against Meursault through the contiguity between his trial and that of a man who had murdered his father. The key to the charge against Meursault, however, lies in the psychological meaning ascribed to parricide. Erich Neumann suggests that parental figures represent basic archetypes: the mother represents the archetype of nature and of life, and the father the archetype of law and tradition (Neumann, 1970, pp. 140-143). The tie linking the father figure to law and tradition is even more salient in Sigmund Freud's theory. The Freudian view bases the evolvement of social and cultural norms on the primeval murder of the original ancestor. Freud argues that, at the dawn of culture, a powerful male had ruled the tribe uncontrolled, and all females had belonged exclusively to him. He subjugated the sons and, when they evoked his anger, he killed them, castrated them, or expelled them. The banished brothers revolted against this order, killed the father, and devoured his flesh. After a period of squabbling over the inheritance, a change took place: The memory of the deed of liberation they had achieved together and the attachment that had grown up among them during the time of their exile - led at last to a union among them, a sort of social contract. Thus there came into being the first form of a social organization accompanied by a renunciation of instinctual gratification; recognition of mutual obligations ... in short, the beginnings of morality and law. (Freud, 1955, pp. 103-104) According to Freud, this story is not an event that occurred at the dawn of history, but one that recurs in the development of every human being (ibid.,

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p. 153; see also Freud, 1938, pp. 917-918; Marcuse, 1962, pp. 62-63). From their inception, then, culture and norms have links to a crime (Freud, 1938, p. 919). As culture and social arrangements develop, the sense of guilt intensifies: We have interpreted the first rules of morality and moral restrictions of primitive society as reactions to a deed which gave the authors of it the conception of crime. They regretted this deed and decided that it should not be repeated and that its execution must bring no gain. This creative sense of guilt has not become extinct with us. (Freud, 1938, p. 928) Cultural reality is one of limits and boundaries. Our ancestors, then, unbound by a system of constraints, were happier, but Freud argues they were unsure of their happiness: "Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security" (Freud, 1962, p. 62). Culture and the normative system, according to Freud, repress freedom and instincts, but still promise the maximum attainable. In Herbert Marcuse's formulation: "The concept of man that emerges from Freudian theory is the most irrefutable indictment of Western civilization - and at the same time the most unshakable defense of this civilization" (Marcuse, 1962, p. 11). From the perspective of a theory of culture, Freud associates culture and the normative system with pain. As Marcuse notes (ibid., pp. 16-17), Freud did not challenge culture on romantic grounds, which assume an authentic human self marred by culture and tradition, but for the pain and the suffering involved in its attainment. In the nature-culture dichotomy, Freud favored culture, but he was aware of the price entailed by his choice. This last point returns us to Camus who, unlike Freud, reinstates the nature-culture dichotomy (Sprintzen, 1988, p. 26). Meursault is a hero of natural life, acting according to his immediate feelings. Camus describes him as a man abiding by unmitigated truth, restoring Jean-Jacques Rousseau's romantic critique of society and its values (Rousseau, 1964, p. 38. For a comparison between Rousseau and Camus see Sprintzen, 1988, p. 37; see also above, p. 15). Meursault, who clings to his senses and his immediate experience, represents this natural mode of existence. Although Camus, as noted, argues that what drives Meursault a passion for truth, O'Brien (1970, p. 21) shows that Meursault is ready to lie. Thus, for instance, Meursault helps Raymond write a letter deceiving Raymond's Arab girlfriend, and even gives evidence to the police about "the girl having been false to him [to Raymond]," which the police accept without checking (The Outsider, p. 53). Meursault does not lie, but not because he has reached an ethical decision to favor truth over deceit. As Solomon emphasizes, Meursault neither lies nor tells the truth, because he is not at the existence level of the judging consciousness. He represents an autonomous, non-reflective realm of feeling. This is Meursault's sincerity and authenticity. Solomon then notes that

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Meursault is at the level of existence Sartre calls prereflective, namely, an existence exhausted by pure, Unconscious experience (for a detailed analysis see Solomon, 1987, pp. 247-248). In this sense, The Outsider "bespeaks an inner call of our being, a countercultural invitation to return to a precivilized innocence, free of the burdens of individuality and conscience" (Sprintzen, 1988, p. 37). The antithesis of Meursault is Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the hero of The Fall, who is pure reflection and detachment from daily existential experience (Solomon, 1987, p. 249; see also Chapter Twelve below). Meursault, who clings to real, immediate existence, cannot experience guilt or remorse. The prosecutor finds this point crucial: "And has he uttered a world of regret for his most odious crime? Not one word, gentlemen. Not once in the course of these proceedings did this man show the least contrition" (The Outsider, p. 101) Meursault confrrms this statement. He is also willing to explain to the prosecutor "that I have never been able really to regret anything in all my life. I've always been far too much absorbed in the present moment, or the immediate future, to think back" (ibid.). Meursault epitomizes the antithesis of culture, law, and tradition. His life has no boundaries, and he is unwilling to include regret or guilt within it. By his very presence, Meursault poses an essential threat to society and its values, bringing back into history the possibility of parricide and of a return to the original condition. Meursault poses this fundamental threat because he does not contest social values by offering an alternative; instead, he presents another, entirely different option: a world without norms or boundaries, such as feelings of guilt and regret, where society and culture are built through their negation. Meursault sets up a world that, in cultural-social terms, is not human (see also Sprintzen, 1988, p. 31; Barrier, 1966, p. 69). Meursault is the absolute outsider, since he denies society and culture and calls for a return to an era of innocence and blamelessness. Is Meursault guilty, or is society guilty? M. G. Barriei holds that, in Camus's eyes, Meursault is innocent of the moral crime of which he is accused, and society is the one guilty of the very crime of accusing him (ibid., p. 74). In The Plague, a later work, Tarrou vigorously opposes capital punishment. Tarrou relates that his father had been the attorney general, and had more than once requested the death penalty for criminals. One such event had been one of Tarrou's hardest experiences ever, and he tells of his reaction: Something seemed to grip my vitals at that moment, and riveted all my attention on the little man on the dock. I hardly heard what was being said; I only knew that they were set on killing that living man and an uprush of some elemental instinct, like a wave, had swept me to his side.. .. I... felt a far closer, far more terrifYing intimacy with that wretched man than my father can ever have felt. (The Plague, p. 203)

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Tarrou refuses to see this man as only a "defendant"; he is a living creature, a fact sufficient to deny society's right to take his life. Tarrou changes the entire complex of his relationships, not only with his father, with whom he severs all contact, but with society in general. Now, he believes, "the social order round me was based on the death-sentence" (ibid., p. 204). Even if society holds that "these few deaths were inevitable for the building up of a new world in which murder would cease to be" (ibid., p. 205), Tarrou is not willing to accept this justification for the death penalty. He holds that the death sentence shows "they're all mad-crazy over murder," and that the historical consequences of this process will be appalling (ibid., p. 206). Tarrou feels that "by fighting the established order I'd be fighting against murder" (ibid., p. 204), and is mortally ashamed of his participation in this murder through his silence (ibid., p. 206). His new stance leads him to a profound alienation from society: "once I'd defmitely refused to kill, I doomed myself to an exile that can never end" (ibid., p. 207). In psychoanalytic terms, which represent the father as the archetype of law and tradition, Tarrou' s detachment from his father conveys his severance from society and its values. Tarrou blames law and tradition for shaping an inhuman culture, a culture of murder. Society accuses Meursault of parricide, namely, of harming tradition and its values, and Tarrou answers this charge through an ethical critique of society, which establishes a culture of murder. But Meursault is not Tarrou. The difference between them is that Camus writes The Plague at a different stage in the development of his thought, which I discuss below. When he writes The Plague, Camus no longer upholds solipsism and a "natural" human existence. The protagonists of this work, Rieux and Tarrou, represent solidarity and responsibility for the other. The Plague is a sharp indictment ofa society fashioning an ethos of murder, which culminates in the Second World War. In The Outsider, Camus proposes an antithesis between natural existence, represented by Meursault, and an existence resting on culture and social norms. Barrier's claim that The Outsider is an indictment of society appears problematic. The trial is a confrontation between culture and prereflective existence, Camus does not search for guilty parties here, by contrast with The Plague, where he explicitly points to the guilt of a society pervaded by the lethal virus of murder. In light of my analysis so far, the character and meaning of human existence are in the dock at this trial. The alternatives Camus considers basic, culture and immediacy, confront each other at the trial. The question is: what kindles this confrontation? Do society, or Meursault, gain anything from it? In other words, do their attitudes change because of the trial? Meursault's phenomenology of existence, before and after the trial, will help us formulate an answer to this question. In Part I, Meursault emerges as a man of spontaneous responses, lacking depth and normative judgment. His life is organized around the events and

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occurrences within which he finds himself. He resorts to factual language, reporting on events. In a later reference to this, Camus argues that Meursault limits himself to answering questions. At fIrst, these are the quotidian questions of the world, and fmally they are the questions of the priest (Camus, 1962, p. 1923). Meursault neither judges nor takes the initiative, he only responds. When asked to react verbally, his answers are brief and to the point. Conversation does not tempt him, and he never initiates it. When an opportunity emerges for a chat, he demurs: "I slept most of the way. When I woke I was leaning up against a soldier; he grinned, and asked me if I'd come from a long way off, and I just nodded, to cut things short" (The Outsider, p. 14). Meursault has no ambitions or goals; he lacks a judging, evaluating consciousness. He cannot affirm, or negate, the value of life. Reality is the principle that activates him, and he lives within it. He is not even capable of making decisions when required to do so. When Raymond "asked me if I'd like us to be pals, I replied that I had no objection" (ibid., p. 37). When Marie, to whom he is physically attracted, asks whether he loves her, he says: "that sort of question had no meaning, really; but I supposed I didn't" (ibid., p. 42; see also p. 48). His lack of judgment reaches a pinnacle in the encounter with the Arabs. Meursault has a gun, but takes no stand on this: "it crossed my mind that one might fIre, or not fIre" (ibid., p. 62). In the end he shoots, but not after deliberation and judgment; in Meursault's view, the reason was the sun (ibid., p. 103). We read that Meursault shows "great callousness" (ibid., p. 68), but this is mistaken. Meursault senses and feels, he enjoys the sun and Marie's company. What he lacks is reflection (Solomon, 1987, pp. 248-249). The trial marks the turning point, after which Meursault begins to reevaluate his life, to analyze it retrospectively and examine its meaning. As Solomon notes (ibid., p. 258), reflection is no longer subject to sensuous experience; instead, experience now serves reflection: "So I learned that even after a single day's experience of the outside world a man could easily live a hundred years in prison" (ibid., p. 81). The day assumes absolute meaning and is no longer another moment in a sequence. In Part I, the "look" of others is meaningless, and plays no part in the shaping of Meursault's consciousness. The reason is that he has no "gaze," because he is not a conscious but an experiencing being. In Part II, together with the development of reflection, Meursault discovers the other. He identifIes the faces of others as expressive, and the other becomes a subjective entity: "It seemed to me then that I could interpret the look on the faces of those present; it was one of almost respectful sympathy" (ibid., p. 107). Meursault's acknowledgement that he lives as an inter-subjective creature is manifest in the story's concluding sentence:

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ALBERT CAMUS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSURD For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained was to hope that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration. (Ibid., p. 120)

The Meursault of Part 1 could not be lonely since, as Heidegger notes, loneliness is a mode of being with the other; it is a recognition that the human being is not an autarchic, self-contained entity (see Heidegger, 1962, p. 157). In order to feel the other, Meursault is ready to accept the howls of execration that negate his being because hate, like love, confers meaning on its object. Displays of hate at his execution will make Meursault happy, since they will imply that Meursault does not live in an alien world, without the faces of others. The expressive face of the other evokes feeling in Meursault as well: "I felt as 1 hadn't felt for ages. 1 had a foolish desire to burst into tears. For the first time I'd realized how all these people loathed me" (ibid., p. 91). When Meursault discovers the other, he discovers guilt. During the trial, Meursault feels "a sort of wave of indignation spreading through the courtroom, and for the fIrst time 1 understood that 1 was guilty" (ibid.). This guilt is not a return to the safe bosom of society, an adoption of social and cultural norms established after the father's murder. Meursault does not feel guilty about a specifIc action; he feels guilty about his very existence. This is metaphysical-existential instead of normative guilt, characteristic of the human creature qua human creature. Human beings are guilty because they are judging, responsible beings, whose lives are their concern and their responsibility. They reach this understanding through the "look" of others, which Sartre describes in great depth (Sartre, 1966, part 3, ch. 1:4). The look extracts human beings from their innocence; it shows that we are judged by others and, through this discovery, we learn the act of objectification that constitutes us as conscious creatures. "I am guilty" means that the judgment of the other ultimately determines my being as a self-judging creature. This admission of guilt contrasts with the guiltless existence that had characterized Meursault in Part I. Whenever he could have been considered guilty, Meursault chooses evasion: "I had a feeling he was blaming me for something, and started to explain" (The Outsider, p. 14); "it wasn't my fault if Mother was buried yesterday and not today" (ibid., p. 27). After the trial, he assumes guilt. He understands that he is responsible for his life. Meursault rejects the consolations of the investigating judge and the priest. He will not repent before God. He refuses to accept solace from the transcendent world and reaffirms his life as is. Like the absurd hero, he rejects divine consolation and opts for the fullness of concrete existence in all its angst. My analysis, supporting the perception of the trial as a turning point in Meursault's existence, differs from views holding that the trial does not lead to a metamorphosis in Meursault's life (see, for instance, Hudon, 1960, p. 60; Henry, 1975, pp. 120 ff.).

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But signs of reflection in Meursault are also evident in Part I. For instance, Meursault, a man of fme discernment and sophisticated judgment, is capable of a profound insight: "So far as I knew, my mother, though not a professed atheist, had never given a thought to religion in her life" (ibid., p. 15). Could a non-reflective creature distinguish religious indifference from atheism? Meursault also remarks: "Now, in the full glare of the morning sun, with everything shimmering in the heat-haze, there was something inhuman, discouraging, about this landscape" (ibid., pp. 24-25). Or: "One never changed one's real life; anyhow, one life was as good as another and my present one suited me quite well" (ibid., p. 48). No wonder that, given these signs, Micheline Tisson-Braun argues that Meursault "simplified deliberately" (Tis son-Braun, 1988, p. 50). The atomism and the simplicity are, in her view, "a flight into insignificance." These and other remarks indicate that Meursault is not just living, but also engaging in evaluations and appraisals of life and of himself. Is this the experiencing Meursault, or Meursault the transcendental narrator? Camus does not answer this question. He retains the veil of strangeness that envelops the story, a veil that, as I noted, implies his rejection of the artistic solution. The trial is the point of confrontation between the elements of history, culture, and values, as opposed to the natural, prereflective element. What is Meursault's choice? The answer is unequivocal. Meursault chooses a third option: the conscious affirmation of primary, natural existence. The discovery of the conscious element is not an implicit affrrmation of social existence as the constitutive element of human life. Camus opts for conscious solipsism and communion with natural existence. Meursault goes on conveying alienation and strangeness, but of a different quality from the one found in Part I: his strangeness is now conscious. In a different formulation, we could say that the transition from Part I to Part II is a transition from self-estrangement to social estrangement. The immediate Meursault is estranged from society but, above all, from himself. He has removed from human existence one of its essential elements. The reflective Meursault overcomes this estrangement, and rediscovers the conscious element. This element, of which we found minor, latent signs in Part I, becomes the constitutive element of existence. The human entity is experience and reflection, but social estrangement has now deepened, because only a process of self-reference establishes the existence of the self. Meursault has defmite features of a romantic hero. He is fiercely independent, and ready to be what he is. He also has defmite features of a rationalist hero from the Enlightenment era: he rejects history, culture, and social values. He overcomes the rift between history and nature by returning to nature, a return denoting decisiveness and freedom. In the terms I presented at the beginning of the book, Camus emphasizes the disharmonious experience in The Outsider, namely, the experience of the sun. The hallmark of this book is negation and rejection. The Outsider traces a

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pattern of opposition between the individual and society, as opposed to a pattern affirming natural human existence: estrangement in one dimension and harmony in the other. By contrast, in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus explicates the experience of estrangement as such, and returns to the basic Hegelian argument stating that negation assumes affIrmation. He decodes anew the experience of estrangement and discovers in it negation and affIrmation, rift and harmony. Reality reveals the negative element, the breach, but includes also the yeaming for harmony. In The Myth of Sisyphus, rift and harmony do not represent different dimensions of existence, and they coexist within the same phenomenon. In sum, The Outsider does not articulate the sense of the absurd, nor does The Myth of Sisyphus conceptualize it; instead, they are two attempts to explicate the experience of estrangement. Whereas The Outsider contends with the experience of estrangement, The Myth of Sisyphus assumes that the deep meaning of this experience is alienation, explicated as the absurd. Although both these ventures entail similarities, they are neither identical nor do they refer to the same phenomenon. Both convey the dynamism of the selfexplication process, which does not end in The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus returns to examine the experience of alienation, and attempts to trace another profile of the relationship between alienation and harmony.

Nine THE ABSURD AND THE PROBLEM OF VALVES: CALIGULA AND LETTERS TO A GERMAN FRIEND What is the meaning of values, if any, in an absurd world? Will "everything be allowed" in a world "without God"? Does an absurd world preclude the option of negating and murdering the other? Or is the absurd perhaps indifferent toward the other's death? On the surface, indifference is the self-evident conclusion of life in an absurd world, since adopting the absurd implies an absolute affirmation of immanence, or of reality in all its possibilities, all of equal status. Immanent reality appears to offer no criterion for ranking acts according to their value. Meursault, who lives in an estranged world, reaches this conclusion when he notes that nothing has the least importance (see above, p. 89), and this conclusion is Camus's main concern in Caligula as well. Like Meursault, Caligula stands by this view. Unlike Cherea, who claims, "I believe that some actions are - shall I say? - more praiseworthy than others," Caligula says, "And I believe that all are on an equal footing" (Caligula, p. 83, emphasis in original). If all acts are of equal value, then murder and compassion are equally praiseworthy. The question is whether, and how, can we create a set of values within the absurd. Camus discusses the implications of this question in Caligula, a play he began writing in 1937 and revised in 1940. The play was first performed in 1945. Caligula is an absurd hero, a transparent embodiment of absurd consciousness. The dramatic event that sparks off the plot is the death of Drusilla, Caligula's beloved who is also his sister. As noted, death is one of the basic experiences of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus, and Drusilla's death leads Caligula to conclude that the world is absurd: Caligula: Really, this world of ours, the scheme of things as they call it, is quite intolerable. That's why I want the moon, or happiness, or eternal life - something, in fact, that may sound crazy, but which isn't of this world. Helicon: That's sound enough in theory. Only, in practice one can't carry it through to its conclusion. Caligula: You're wrong there. It's just because no one dares to follow up his ideas to the end that nothing is achieved. All that's needed, I should say, is to be logical right through, at all costs. I can see, too, what you're thinking. What a pother over a woman's death! But that's not

100 ALBERT CAMUS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSURD it.. .. And I swear to you her death is not the point; it's no more than the symbol of a truth that makes the moon essential to me. A childishly simple, obvious, almost silly truth, but one that's hard to come by and heavy to endure .... Men die; and they are not happy. (Caligula, p. 40, emphasis in original) Drusilla's death troubles Caligula and challenges his existence more because of what it reveals about human existence than because of the personal dimension of the beloved's loss. Human existence is absurd, and provides no harmony or understanding of existence: "men die and they are not happy," despite their desperate hope for contentment and harmony. Helicon does not think this is a crucial discovery: "It's a truth with which one comes to terms without much trouble ... This truth of yours doesn't prevent them from enjoying their meal" (ibid.). Helicon represents the average person, who chooses to ignore the experience of the absurd and just go on. Caligula, however, cannot accept this: "All it proves is that I'm surrounded by lies and self-deception. But I've had enough of that; I wish men to live by the light of truth" (ibid., p. 41). Caligula, as an absurd hero, is not willing to renounce transparency, the basic truth he has discovered about reality. The sense of the absurd is intensified by the understanding that human beings cannot change reality: "What use is the amazing power that's mine, if I can't have the sun set in the east, if I can't reduce the sum of suffering and make an end of death?" (ibid., p. 48 ). Despair from the possibility of restoring the metaphysical order leads Caligula to conclude that the only acceptable logic is one that rejects limits. Since he cannot have the moon, since mending reality is impossible, all that human beings can do is generate the impossible in their lifetimes. For Caligula, absolute, unbounded freedom is the concrete expression of the impossible: "Ah, my dears, at last I've come to see the uses of supremacy. It gives impossibilities a run. From this day on, so long as life is mine, my freedom has no frontier" (ibid., p. 45). The impossible that Caligula speaks of could be termed "the immanently impossible," which is antithetical to the metaphysically impossible, represented by the metaphor of having the moon. Human beings cannot have the moon, just as they cannot prevent pain or death. Whereas the metaphysically impossible reflects a correction of reality or an essential change in it, the immanently impossible means overcoming standard modes of human existence. Most human beings do not live a life of freedom. They are driven by reality, and abide by what is considered proper. Caligula resists this, pointing to self-transcendence as the conquest of the impossible. For Caligula, only one who chooses a life without limits, who equates the value of all acts, can overcome the given and act out of absolute freedom: "This world has no importance; once a man realizes that, he wins his freedom .... You see in me the one free man in the whole Roman Empire" (ibid., p. 46).

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For Caligula, absolute fr~edom is the remaining haven for individuals who have renounced a yearning for the absolute. Freedom is the antithesis of despair with the metaphysical order. In other words, since we cannot prevent suffering or preclude death, all we have left is boundless freedom. Caesonia, Caligula's mistress, acknowledges the equation between despair and the aspiration to be the creator of a perfect world: "But that's madness, sheer madness. It's wanting to be a god on earth" (ibid., p. 48). Caligula, who has already chosen and already knows that nothing good will come from waiting for the moon, tells Caesonia: So you, too, think I'm mad. And yet - what is a god that I should wish to be his equal? No, it's something higher, far above the gods, that I'm aiming at, longing for with all my heart and soul. I am taking over a kingdom where the impossible is king. (ibid.) Caligula emphasizes that he wants something different now. Yesterday, and the day before yesterday, he had wanted something else. Only when fmding that his hopes were dashed, did he choose absolute freedom. In Caligula's words, "there's no understanding Fate; therefore I choose to play the part of Fate. I wear the foolish, unintelligible face of a professional god" (ibid., p. 75). Caligula, then, does not choose a life of amor fati. He does not wish to endorse meaningless reality. The uniqueness of his revolt against reality, however, is not his rejection of the absurd, but his leading it to its most radical conclusions (Cruikshank, 1960, pp. 196-197). His yearning for humane life, now thwarted, turns into a passion for arbitrary existence without any moral limits. Caligula now holds that he is above the gods, since he has chosen a life without boundaries or restraints. . One of the central lines of the play is Caligula's attempt to live without checks or limits. When a man or a woman living this life holds the reins of government, slbe poses a deep threat to human existence. Cherea fonnulates this threat as follows: [Caligula] imperils everything we hold most sacred. True, it's not the fIrst time Rome has seen a man wielding unlimited power; but it's the fIrst time he sets no limit to his use of it, and counts mankind, and the world we know, for nothing. (Caligula, p. 53) The confrontation between Caligula and Cherea is inevitable, and I discuss it below. In the version available to us, the play ends with Caligula's dying words, after an attempt on his life: "I'm still alive." The original version had ended differently, with Caligula returning to center stage to tell the audience that he lives on in every single one of them. If they had the strength or the daring, or would love life, they could witness the wild unchaining of

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this monstrous or angelic creature. Why did Camus change the end? According to James Arnold, Camus underwent a metamorphosis because of his experience in the Resistance during the German occupation. Arnold claims that this is a unique phenomenon, of a "writer writing against himself' because of his misgivings about the potential effects of his writing (Arnold, 1984, p. 173; see also Lamont, 1988, pp. 137-138). This approach holds that works such as The Rebel recognize the danger latent in the conclusions of Caligula. Camus thought that the Dionysian spirit he had learned from Nietzsche was responsible for the wars and the holocaust of his times (Lamont, 1988, p. 138). Rosette C. Lamont indicates that, contrary to the ethics of boundlessness we find in Caligula, in The Rebel Camus introduces an ethics of limits: The errors of contemporary revolution are first of all explained by the ignorance or systematic misconception of that limit which seems inseparable from human nature and which rebellion reveals. Nihilist thought, because it neglects this frontier, ends by precipitating itself into a uniformly accelerated movement. Nothing any longer checks it in its course and it reaches the point of justifYing total destruction or unlimited conquest .... To escape this fate, the revolutionary mind, if it wants to remain alive, must therefore return again to the sources of rebellion and draw its inspiration from the only system of thought which is faithful to its origins: thought that recognizes limits. (The Rebel, p. 294) The ending we know is more moderate, and refrains from a positive attitude toward Caligula. Yet, the view that it represents a metamorphosis in Camus's position following his experience in the war and the Resistance is questionable, for two reasons. The first concerns the key question about the role of the play in general, and of the character ofCaligula in particular. If the intention of the play was to stress the positive dimension in the life option represented by Caligula, then Arnold and Lamont are correct. But a different interpretation, reading Caligula's character as a signpost warning against the options latent in absurd existence, is also possible. Instead of offering an answer, Caligula is posing a question (compare Hanna, 1958, p. 56). The second reason is that the play is polyphonic, and the different voices function as Caligula's alter egos (Sprintzen, 1988, p. 72). All the characters share Caligula's basic human experience, but draw different conclusions from it. For the present discussion, we will focus on the character ofCherea. Cherea understands Caligula's thinking. He admits that "it's a philosophy that's logical from start to finish" (Caligula, p. 53). He neither hates nor despises Caligula:

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There, Caius, you're mistaken. I do not hate you. I regard you as noxious and cruel, vain and selfish. But I cannot hate you, because I don't think you are happy. And I cannot scorn you, because I know you are no coward. (Ibid., p. 82). He opposes Caligula's inability to distinguish thought from deed: So do most men ... resent living in a world where the most preposterous fancy may at any moment become a reality, and the absurd transfix their lives, like a dagger in the heart. I feel as they do; I refuse to live in a topsy-turvy world. I want to know where I stand, and to stand secure. (Ibid.) Against the logical consistency of Caligula, who infers from the absurd all the self-evident conclusions, Cherea takes as his point of departure the human need and the human desire for life and happiness. Maximizing happiness is contingent on setting borders: I'm quite an ordinary sort of man. True, there are moments when, to feel free of them, I desire the death of those I love, or I hanker after women from whom the ties of family or friendship debar me. Were logic everything, I'd kill or fornicate on such occasions. But I consider that these passing fancies have no great importance. If everyone were set on gratifYing them. The world would be impossible to live in, and happiness, too, would go by the board. (Ibid., pp. 82-83) Caligula holds that setting borders and favoring some actions over others must rely on some supreme value: "So, I take it, you believe in some higher principle?" (ibid.). Cherea vehemently rejects the view that we should set up one supreme value, or "idea," from which to derive prohibitions and obligations. He argues, ironically, that the supreme value from which human beings derive their ethical stance is the acknowledgement that some acts are preferable to others, as quoted above: "I believe that some actions are - shall I say? - more praiseworthy than others" (ibid., p. 83). What makes some actions preferable? Cherea's answer is that the criterion rests on practical reasoning, prompted by the need to protect life and attain happiness. No supreme idea, no values rooted in the transcendental are necessary to justifY normative preferences; life and its needs direct our choices. Against alienated, absurd rationality, Cherea offers a concrete human existence that embodies wants and needs. Human beings he says, should not turn to heaven to justifY their obligations and prohibitions. Those who turn to heaven will ultimately stumble upon the incontestable logic of the absurd, when they discover the heavens are empty, the world is not set in motion by a normative system, and life is meaningless. But those who do not seek anchors in the absolute and try

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to realize their most basic wishes will discover that, to attain these goals, they will be required to make normative decisions and favor some acts over others. These ideas, which will progressively become dominant in Camus's later works, are formulated in the play by another voice of the absurd experience. This analysis shows that the thesis arguing that Camus undergoes a metamorphosis after Caligula is unacceptable. In this work, we hear a voice seeking to rebuild a system of values that is not committed to claim, "without God, everything is allowed." The attempt to claim that the war and the holocaust explain the shift in Camus's thought from a Dionysian life without boundaries to an approach endorsing limits, is unfounded. This play was not written during the war, and Caligula is not Hitler. Caligula is a genuine option that emerges from the absurd, and the play contends with this option. After the war had broken out, Camus did identifY this link between the absurd and the logic of boundlessness, and tried to rely on this logic to understand the behavior of the Germans. Letters to a German Friend, which includes four letters written between July 1943 and July 1944, reflects this trend. In this work, the struggle between Caligula and Cherea emerges more explicitly. Camus argues that he shares a premise with the German: "this world had no ultimate meaning" (Camus, 1966, p. 27), but their reaction to this discovery was different: Where lay the difference? You readily accepted despair and I never yielded to it. Simply that you saw the injustice of our condition to the point of being willing to add to it, whereas it seemed to me that man must exalt justice in order to fight against eternal injustice, create happiness in order to protest against the universe of unhappiness. (Ibid., pp. 27-28) They had different expectations at the outset. Camus holds that the Germans, like Caligula, expect order and meaning to be transcendent. The despair and the weariness from the exhausting struggle of "fighting heaven" (ibid., p. 28) led the Germans to act like gods, namely, to impose arbitrariness and injustice: "you relaxed in that exhausting adventure in which you had to mutilate souls and destroy the world" (ibid.). But Camus's surprising claim against the Germans is that their approach is without logic or reason (ibid., pp. 6-7, 12-13). On this point, we note a difference between his approaches in Caligula and in Letters to a German Friend. In Caligula, Cherea admits that logic is on Caligula's side, whereas in Letters to a German Friend, Camus accuses advocates of Caligula's view of lacking logic and reason. How can we explain this retraction? To what "reason" is Camus referring? Not to the mechanism through which the individual acknowledges metaphysical truths. Instead, Camus speaks here in terms identical to the concepts of rationality I discussed in Chapter Six. Reason and logic focus on human reality, identifY the elements vital to its

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existence, and struggle for its preservation: "human evidence is what we must preserve" (ibid., p. 14). At the center of human existence are friendship, happiness, and justice (ibid.). The meaning that human beings fmd in existence derives from these elements, even without assuming one supreme meaning: I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one. This world has at least the truth of man, and our task is to provide its justifications against fate itself. And it has no justification but man; hence he must be saved if we want to save the idea we have of life. (Ibid., p. 28) In sum, Camus afftrms immanence by relying on the idea that meaning is neither given nor found "somewhere there," beyond human reality. Meaning emerges through human beings, within the borders of their concrete existence. Human life, therefore, must be preserved and protected, and this calls for self-restraint and overriding instinct (ibid., pp. 6-7). For Camus, a "constant temptation" threatens human existence: "there is always something in us that yields to instinct, to contempt for intelligence, to the cult of efftciency" (ibid., p. 7). Note the difference between Cherea's remark and the stance Camus formulates in Letters to a German Friend. Cherea accepts the absurd worldview even when he vigorously condemns it. He acknowledges the tension between the passion for order and intelligibility and the lack of order in real life, and justifies his values on different grounds: basic human wishes and needs. By contrast, in the Letters, Camus collapses the absurd tension altogether. He transcends it in the sense that he embraces the immanent worldview unquestionably, without any expectation from heaven. His attention turns toward human existence and toward the logic that stems from an affirmation of this existence. Camus's revolt against the absurd is much more radical than that suggested by Cherea, since he renounces one of the cornerstones of the absurd: the yearning for another positivity. Camus offers two different reactions to the absurd in these works: one, represented by Caligula, takes the logic of the absurd to extremes, allowing killing and murder. The other leads to a revolt against the absurd through an unwavering afftrmation of immanence, epitomized in the understanding that human happiness is within reach. But immanence and happiness are radically different here from their version in The Myth of Sisyphus. In The Myth of Sisyphus, immanence relates to the experience of the individual as a creature striving for conscious transparency, and happiness is the quintessence of human consciousness. Here, however, the afftrmation of immanence means the affirmation of human existence, shaped by a. passion for happiness, justice, and friendship.

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Immanence involves a successful struggle to overcome the temptations of instinct, and an activity directed toward human communion. Happiness is communion with other human beings as well as with nature: But our difficult achievement consisted in following you into war without forgetting happiness. And despite the clamors and the violence, we tried to preserve in our hearts the memory of a happy sea, of a remembered hill, the smile ofa beloved face. (Camus, 1966, p. 29) After shaping his conception of the absurd, Camus had to contend with the problem of values and norms lacking an anchor in a transcendent world. In Caligula, we hear several options through the polyphony, and the play poses a question and a challenge. In Letters to a German Friend, Camus gives an answer. Neither one of these works, however, offers a detailed account of the relationship between the concept of the absurd and the revolt against it, which Camus tackles in a comprehensive and detailed report to himself in The Rebel. This work, published in 1951, is an attempt to rethink the absurd. It has elements included in Caligula and in Letters to a German Friend, as well as elements included in The Myth of Sisyphus. In the following chapters, I will follow Camus's new analysis of the relationships between the absurd and rebellion, as well as his response to the ethical dilemma.

Ten THE TRANSITION FROM THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS TO THE REBEL Both Caligula and Letters to a German Friend convey frustration with the conclusions deriving from the absurd. The Myth of Sisyphus, which did reject suicide, did not reject murder. The absurd, then, leads to immorality. At the crux of The Rebel is the contest with the problem of murder. Murder is the negation of the other, so that confronting this problem is equivalent to contending with the position of the other and, thereby, with the position of the self vis-it-vis the other. Beyond the question of murder, then, The Rebel reexamines human metaphysics: is this a metaphysics with an autarchic, individual "I" at its center, or does it begin with "us," existing with the other? As we will see, The Rebel offers a new insight into metaphysics, making "we" the foundation of the existence we must realize in a historic and social context (The Rebel, pp. 294-297). The Rebel represents a new stage in Camus's oeuvre. In The Myth of Sisyphus, the hero is the individual striving toward an understanding of the human condition, together with the realization of concrete existence. The happiness of the absurd individual begins and ends with a life of selfawareness and realization. Absurd heroes are solipsistic, and their relationship with others is irrelevant to their existence as individuals. They attain harmony within themselves and not with nature or with other people. By contrast, the hero of The Rebel attains self-realization in the revolt against injustice and suffering, through solidarity with the other. The rebel is an active hero, struggling against evil within a solidary community. The rebel does not seek clarity but moral action, culminating in the links with the other. For the rebel, harmony is harmony with the other. This is a "positive" stance because it entails obligations and concrete commitments. This position contrasts with the one Camus had endorsed in The Myth of Sisyphus, which is "negative" because its main concern is the negation of metaphysical solutions or consolations. Do The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel belong in one continuum, or does The Rebel represent a radically different approach? Let us begin with the view supporting the notion of a continuum. Herbert Hochberg describes the relationship between these two works as follows: The Rebel is devoted to showing how a value, and hence an ethic, arises from the absurdist position. But this too adds nothing to The Myth of

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Similarly, James W. Woelfel argues that, in The Rebel, Camus "returns to the absurd starting point and sees some implications he had not seen before" (Woelfel, 1975, p. 92). The Rebel thus functions as a corrective, serving to refocus the philosophical discourse. Camus does not offer a new viewpoint; instead, he returns to the starting point and draws the appropriate conclusions. Donald Lazere also views The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus as works contending with two possible conclusions of absurd nihilism: suicide and murder. The Myth of Sisyphus tackles suicide and rejects it as an improper conclusion from the absurd, whereas The Rebel contends with murder, discarding it on the same grounds (Lazere, 1973, p. 141). David Sprintzen's position is more complex. In his view, absurd consciousness plays a crucial role in both works. In The Myth of Sisyphus, this consciousness points to "an unbridgeable gulf between people and their destiny" (Sprintzen, 1988, p. 133), whereas, in The Rebel, absurd consciousness leads the individual to acknowledge the communality of our condition (ibid.). The progress marking the transition from one work to the other is the progress of absurd consciousness gradually discovering that human existence is constituted through concrete human relationships instead of through transcendent dimensions. Camus also endorsed the approach assuming continuity, and compared his transition from the absurd to a positive view to Rene Descartes's transition from doubt to certitude (see above, pp. 44 ff.). The absurd represents for Camus the absolute negation of existence; reflecting on this negation leads to the discovery of the first certitude, the certitude of rebellion. The Cartesian simile is straightforward. As Cartesian doubt had led to the discovery of the fIrst certitude - cogito ergo sum - so the absurd leads to the certitude of revolt, from which progress toward the positive direction becomes possible. Camus summed up this point in the claim that the absurd is "a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence, of Descartes's methodical doubt" (The Rebel, p. 8). How does the analogy with Descartes help to clarify the transition from The Myth of Sisyphus to The Rebel? Descartes could move from doubt to certitude by clinging to God and the self as entities outside the realm of doubt. Through this anchor, so he claimed, he could reestablish the old world. For Camus, however, the experience of the absurd is total. In Edmund Husserl's terms, nothing remained outside the brackets. How, can we now shift from the absurd? How do we move from a negation of meaning to a positive affirmation of existence?

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In an attempt to explain Camus, John Cruickshank sums up Camus's move as follows: To claim experience of the absurd, as Camus had already pointed out, means that there is a value judgment, a value, involved when this claim is made ... in the sense of having said "no," to some state of affairs. But to do this is to say ''yes,'' by implication, to something which is not that state of affairs .... To say "no" is to impose limits, and within these limits, we must conclude, values of some kind are still preserved despite the apparent destruction of all values by comprehensive nihilism. (Cruickshank, 1960, p. xvi) Camus speaks, inter alia, of the following values: (1) Individuals discover a critical element within themselves, namely, their essence as human creatures. (2) They share this value with other individuals, and thereby acknowledge a shared human nature. (3) They acknowledge the tie linking all human beings concerning the absurd. Revolt is thus a possible response, based on an evaluation of the absurd. The absurd is a normative negation, predicated on the assumption that we negate within a set of values. Let us trace the course of this idea. Camus holds that three responses to the absurd are possible. The fITst, to which I refer as the dichotomical response, is an extreme expression of radically incompatible reactions, for which no justification exists: If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance. There is no pro or con; the murderer is neither right nor wrong. Weare free to stoke the crematory fITes or to devote ourselves to the care of lepers. Evil and virtue are mere chance or caprice. (The Rebel, p. 5) This approach is a prelude to murder: if we can neither substantiate any value nor deny justification to any act, Caligula was right: we have clearance for murder. The second response is indifference and passivity in the face of evil and suffering, which means "accepting the murder of others" (ibid.). The third is to making "the cult of efficiency" the supreme value (ibid.), and Camus had identified this response among the Nazis, as he writes in Letters to a German Friend. All three responses share a nihilistic worldview, namely, they renounce a supreme system of values as a guideline for action, and this troubles Camus: Is normative nihilism the only way of facing the absurd? This concern is not just theoretical. After Auschwitz, contending with evil becomes the most

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critical question. The lack of a plain answer to this question is tantamount to the licensing of evil. Camus argues that a fourth response is possible: rebelling against evil. Revolt, a possible instead of a necessary response to evil, is contingent on specific conditions. Camus stresses this point in the analogy I discussed above between the absurd and Cartesian doubt. But if Camus thinks of the absurd and of revolt in Cartesian terms of doubt and certainty, the perception of the absurd as blazing a new trail is problematic because, for Descartes, the transition from doubt to certainty is necessary and not only possible. When casting doubt, human beings discover their existence in "clear and distinct" terms, whereas the transition between the absurd and rebellion is only optional, since a nihilistic response to the absurd is also possible. Apparently, Camus claims that discovering the certainty of revolt depends upon a realignment of consciousness vis-a-vis the absurd. Nihilistic responses reflect an immediate reaction to the sense of the absurd. The point of departure, the absurd, was also the end (The Rebel, pp. 9-10). The absurd is only "one perception among many" (ibid., p. 9), and cannot be the basis for rules for action (ibid.). In a critique of the nihilistic trends that had prevailed between the wars, Camus argues: "The error of a whole period of history has been to enunciate - or to suppose already enunciated - general rules of action founded on emotions of despair" (ibid.). Camus's critique of this reliance on the absurd rests on his general view of rationality, which I analyzed in Chapter Six. Relying on feeling is problematic for two reasons: first, an emotion cannot formulate overall rules of action. It lacks the universal element, since feelings are particularistic by definition and differ from person to person. Second, emotions are random, they can emerge and disappear, and are not anchored in a stable element. Camus does not argue that these flaws should lead us to disregard the feeling of the absurd altogether. His claim is more balanced. Based on his phenomenological point of departure, he argues that the feeling of the absurd should be transformed from an element guiding and directing action into a datum of consciousness. The study of the absurd as datum reveals that revolt is the certain response when facing the absurd. Nihilistic responses are neither rational nor critical, and fail to understand the datum of the absurd correctly. Acknowledging the absurd means that we cannot believe in anything, and no order, pattern, or reason exist in the world. This statement, however, involves a desperate yearning for certainty and reason; in the conditions of the absurd, the only possible expression of this yearning is protest, namely, engaging in action that negates existence. The scream, the negation of the absurd, is the only incontrovertible datum exposed in the absurd (ibid., p. 10). But for Camus, this negation of whatever exists rests on a set of values: "To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive" (ibid., p. 6). The claim that the world is absurd, then, is a value judgment. In this sense, this claim differs from the parallel one in The Myth o/Sisyphus, where its meaning

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was solely epistemological and implied that the world is not amenable to understanding because of the mind's limits, its finitude, and its inability to understand reality as is. In The Rebel, the claim that the world is absurd has moral meaning. The world is pervaded by evil, injustice, and chaos, hence the protest against it. Rebellion, which is the quintessential expression of this protest, "is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition ... it protests, it demands, it insists that the outrage be brought to an end" (ibid., p. 10). Camus understands that this revolt could again place human beings in an absurd reality, which condones murder. In the course of the book, Camus points to movements of total rebellion that had been inspired by a passion for justice but led instead to a bloodbath (ibid., pp. 70-71, 101-102), and sums up this point as follows: "Totality is, in effect, nothing other than the ancient dream of unity common to both believers and rebels" (ibid., p. 233). The problem that Camus identified is: How to remain within the revolt without falling into the absurd? In other words, Camus acknowledges in The Rebel that the absurd is evil and injustice, and rebellion is a response that refuses to return to the absurd itself. This analysis, although helping to claritY Camus's understanding of rebellion, leaves open the question of the transition between The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. Supporters of the discontinuity thesis point to essential reasons to explain the unbridgeable gap between them. First, as noted, the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus is epistemic, as opposed to the ethical negation of The Rebel. Second, these works differ in their metaphysical worldview. The metaphysical world of The Myth of Sisyphus cannot be a basis for ethics. R A. Duff and E. Marshall (1982) indicate that every ethic must have an accompanying metaphysics, which is itself ethical and establishes a world that includes values and objects to be responsible for, besides facts. The world of The Rebel is a world in which the "we," the being with the other in Martin Heidegger's terms, is a cardinal metaphysical foundation. This is not a world of solipsistic beings leaving no room for the other. The Rebel is not Meursault from The Outsider, nor even the absurd hero, whose entire existence rests on their concern for themselves and themselves alone. The metaphysics Camus outlines in The Myth of Sisyphus includes a strain of radical skepticism together with an attitude of extreme solipsism. The process whereby this solipsism shifts to an ethics of responsibility and solidarity remains ambiguous. Although a shift from the absurd to revolt is patent in The Rebel, a shift from the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus to the revolt of The Rebel does not necessarily follow, and the reason for this is that the concepts of absurd and revolt in these two works are radically different. The experience of the absurd in both works shows a longing for order. Yet, whereas The Myth of Sisyphus reveals a longing for the rational or

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metaphysical order of reality, the feeling of the absurd in The Rebel expresses a desperate longing for a moral world, for "a complete unity, against the suffering oflife and death" (The Rebel, p. 24). Rebellion as the depth structure of the absurd reflects the perennial quest for "a moral philosophy or a religion"(ibid., p. 101). In The Rebel, more than in any other work, Camus recognized that the perception of rebellion as the depth structure of the absurd reflects the romantic foundation of human life, the "nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being" (ibid., p. 105). These differences between different concepts of the absurd dictate differences between the concepts of rebellion prevalent in these two works. In The Myth ojSisyphus, rebellion has one meaning: [Revolt] ... is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. It is an insistence upon an impossible transparency. It challenges the world anew every second. Just as danger provided man with the unique opportunity of seizing awareness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the whole of experience .... That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it. (The Myth ojSisyphus, pp. 53-54) Revolt in The Myth oj Sisyphus rebels against metaphysical consolation and against all metaphysics, which deprives human beings of conscious transparency. Revolt is the expression of the absurd creature, who refuses to jump into the irrational and the unintelligible. This type of revolt does not generate action in the world, nor does it lead human beings to any action designed to shape reality; instead, it reflects the abstention of the absurd individual from any action that will diminish consciousness. Revolt, therefore, stays within the boundaries of the individual, expressing the lonely absurd being. By contrast, in The Rebel, revolt is the beginning of a new metaphysics, a metaphysical revolt instead of a revolt against metaphysics, since revolt is a defInite act whereby an individual rejects the conditions of life that were exposed in the absurd (The Rebel, pp. 23-24, 100-101). Revolt in The Rebel is not the watchdog of an absurd consciousness that has reached maturity; revolt is not the culmination of self-consciousness but, as we will see, only its beginning. Through revolt, individuals discover their ability to act and the basic values motivating their action. Revolt replaces the principle of divine justice, which has failed. Not in vain does Camus emphasize that the basis of revolt is a "disenchanted religious experience" (The Rebel, p. 101). After people failed to fmd the god who acts to mend injustice and evil, they understood that the weight of responsibility for "fmding a new god" (ibid.) rests solely on their shoulders. Revolt is an attempt to change the order of creation and of reality:

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Metaphysical rebellion is the movement by which man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation. It is metaphysical because it contests the ends of man and of creation .... The metaphysical rebel declares that he is frustrated by the universe. (The Rebel, p. 23) This analysis points to the revolution that unfolds between The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. In The Rebel, Camus preserves the old concepts of absurd and revolt, but pours new meaning into them. A chasm is now visible, a transition from a solipsistic metaphysics to one we could call a metaphysics of human unity. The phenomenon whereby Camus and many Camus scholars failed to acknowledge this turning point deserves separate analysis. Unquestionably, the use of concepts such as absurd and revolt in both texts is one of the main reasons for the confusion, but linguistic usage should not preclude the appreciation that the original meaning of these terms, as they appear in The Myth of Sisyphus, undergoes a radical transformation in The Rebel. In sum, conscious self-transparency is the culmination of human life in The Myth of Sisyphus, as opposed to rebellion against evil and injustice in The Rebel. Already in Caligula, and even more so in Letters to a German Friend, Camus reveals his profound dismay with the results of The Myth of Sisyphus, as noted in Chapter Nine above. He senses that this conceptual framework has deepened human alienation from the world to the point of estranging human beings from one another. In the view of the absurd outlined in The Myth of Sisyphus, human beings lose importance. We also fmd that, in Caligula, Camus uses a concept of the absurd closer to that of The Rebel than to that of The Myth ofSisyphus. In order to pinpoint more precisely the transition from. The Myth of Sisyphus to The Rebel, let us consider a letter Camus wrote to Roland Barthes. The letter deals with The Plague, which Camus compares to The Outsider: Compared to The Stranger, The Plague does, beyond any possible discussion, represent the transition from an attitude of solitary revolt to the recognition of a community whose struggles must be shared. If there is an evolution from The Stranger to The Plague, it is in the direction of solidarity and participation. (Camus, 1968, p. 339) Latent in the transition from The Outsider to The Plague is the transition from The Myth of Sisyphus to The Rebel. The Plague appeared in 1947, four years before The Rebel; it heralds the turning point and exposes a crucial element that deserves further consideration. Paramount in The Plague is the recognition of evil, of the scourge that should be fought. The motivation of the protagonists - Rieux, Tarrou, and even Paneloux - to engage in the arduous struggle is the very presence of distress and sorrow, as Rieux tries to explain. His motivation to participate in

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this grueling effort is not faith in a divine promise of some perfect metaphysical order, nor an assurance of victory: For the moment I know this; there are sick people and they need curing. Later on, perhaps, they'll think things over; and so shall!. But what's wanted now is to make them well. I defend them as best I can, that's all. (The Plague, p. 107) Rieux explains that he draws strength only from adversity, from his confrontation with the disease. The presence of suffering is what drives him to act. Neither a metaphysical approach nor faith in a transcendent being or order was necessary to generate action, and he acts only in response to the demands of an interpersonal reality. The foundational experience assumed in The Plague is that human existence is interpersonal. Contrary to The Outsider, or to The Myth of Sisyphus, which presuppose an autarchic, self-contained subject, The Plague assumes that human beings are constituted by interpersonal contact. The other is not a stranger, a troublesome nuisance, or an unexplained factor. Slhe influences and shapes the individual, who is moved to act by the other's distress, and shapes hislher personal self while doing so. In The Fall, published in 1956, Camus return to this point and sheds light on the plight of the solipsistic individual, who remains unresponsive to the distress and the demand that follows from the other's existence. Jean Baptiste Clamence, the protagonist, goes through several experiences that undermine his confidence and his narcissistic solipsism. Prominent among them are experiences of fragility and misery. His suicide attempt, for instance, exposes the others' lack of interest when he feels exposed and defenseless facing public attack (The Fall, p. 59). The most dramatic event is the suicide of the woman, who jumps into the river to her death. Clamence is shattered but freezes on the spot, wants to save the woman but does not. The cry, however, never leaves him and turns him into someone called upon (ibid., p. 81) Clamence's deeds from this moment onward are a desperate attempt to return to a situation of being called upon to act. Saving the woman is saving Clamence, since only by responding to the call of the other do human beings discover their full humanity. But Clamence is unable to save himself, as the fmallines of The Fall attest (see pp. 41-42 above). Clamence is doomed to exile from his existence and his home. He understands that his re4emption as a human being depends on the other, but this insight does not move him to act. Clamence is an intermediate type between Meursault and Rieux: Meursault never opens up to the other, while Rieux is fully turned toward the other. After The Plague and The Rebel, Camus returns in The Fall to his great fear that no one will be at the right place at the right time to take up the

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challenge of the other's call. He does not retreat from the thesis that hwnan existence depends on the other, but becomes more keenly aware of the risk that no one will answer the demand of the other. The profound impact of the Second World War resonates passionately in The Fall. The adult Camus becomes aware of the silence, the surrender, and the apathy characterizing many "cultured" reactions to the Holocaust and to Auschwitz, and does not recoil from calling the Nazis "our Hitlerian brethren" (ibid., p. 10). Camus became conscious of the hwnan treacherousness that Clamence knows well: I have no more friends; I have nothing but accomplices .... They are the whole hwnan race ... How do I know I have no friends? It's very easy: I discovered it the day I thought of killing myself to playa trick on them, to punish them, in a way. But punish whom? Some would be surprised, and no one would feel punished. I realized I had no friends. (The Fall, p. 56) Camus/Clamence asswnes that the death of one is the punishment of the other, as long as we understand that the other's death is our concern. Clamence, however, discovers that his so-called friends are unwilling to see themselves as punished, and do not see themselves called upon by the other. Camus understood, before Emmanuel Levinas, that the hwnan being lives vis-a-vis the other, that the existence of the other poses a demand. His first response had been optimistic; The Plague and The Rebel are stories of responsiveness, although Camus is more optimistic in The Plague than in The Rebel, where he already suspects that rebelling against evil could lead to an even greater evil. By contrast, The Fall is a story offailure. No tie binds, nor could bind, solipsism and the interpersonal ontology. Camus's turnabout is a kind of conversion, a born-again experience, the discovery of another self-identity. In The Fall, Camus again uses a rhetoric of rebirth. The experience of being called upon by the woman drowning in the ocean asswnes unique meaning; the sea becomes "the bitter water of my baptism," an inescapable "stoup of holy-water" (ibid., p. 81). As I noted in Chapter Three above, the metaphors of sea and water convey unity. The transition from The Myth of Sisyphus to The Rebel is thus a transition from alienation to unity, but the object of the new unity is hwnanity instead of nature. The struggle against the Nazis confIrmed for Camus his basic intuition, developed in The Rebel, that individuals can fIght evil even when not personally affected by it. He also discovered that individuals can be oblivious to evil, and remain indifferent. For him, however, the heroic struggle against evil, when individuals are willing to assume hard risks, requires an explanation. Camus views the struggle as a phenomenological guiding principle to the ontological truth about humanity. In other words, personal

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experience is no longer a random event in the biography of specific individuals, but teaches something about human beings, exposing their unique metaphysical dimensions. Whereas The Plague is an attempt to describe this foundational experience in terms close to the experience itself, The Rebel is an attempt to place it within a conceptual structure. The Plague begins from the primordial experience that, in the terminology of The Rebel, is called the feeling of the absurd. Camus, as noted, understands that this feeling is the primary datum in the course of the explication toward its constitutive element: revolt. In Husserl's terms, the absurd is the guideline in our attempt to penetrate inward, to the very meaning of human existence. The description of the absurd in The Rebel, and the deep transformation of this concept, lead to the new primordial experience that Camus wishes to decode. We must now make our way across the same phenomenological terrain covered by Camus, and follow the absurd and the revolt to the meaning embodied within them.

Eleven

REBELLION, SOLIDARITY, AND SELFCONSCIOUSNESS To rebel is to resist a reality of injustice and evil. Rebellion is not necessarily intended against the evil inflicted on us personally, and may express a protest against the evil inflicted on the other: We note that rebellion does not arise only, and necessarily, among the oppressed, but that it can also be caused by the mere spectacle of oppression of which someone else is the victim. In such cases there is a feeling of identification with another individual. (The Rebel, p. 16) According to Camus, solidarity is the identification with the other's suffering. Hence, "man's solidarity is founded upon rebellion" (ibid., p. 22). Solidarity, then, is not a normative imperative, requiring justification within an independent ethical approach; ethics is not supposed to instruct individuals to "be solidary." Solidarity emerges as the inner meaning of rebellion. Rebellion is meaningless unless embodied in solidarity, and solidarity is meaningless unless based on rebellion. On these grounds, Camus argues, "any rebellion which claims the right to deny or destroy this solidarity loses simultaneously its right to be called rebellion" (ibid., p. 22). The conclusion this analysis reveals parallels the one we drew when analyzing the absurd as a normative stance, where Camus had also derived values from the phenomenological datum. In The Myth of Sisyphus, the transparent life of the absurd is an immanent passion of consciousness, which exposes and decodes the datum of the absurd. In The Rebel, solidarity with the other follows from the datum of rebellion, which appears as the basic response to injustice and evil. Rebellion is thus the phenomenological datum, and solidarity the depth of its meaning. What is the meaning of these displays of solidarity? Two interpretations of identification with the other are possible. One holds that the rebel identifies with the other because the resulting similarity between them makes the other less "other." The rebel responds to the wrong inflicted on the other because slbe imagines hislber personal victimization. Rebellion in this sense does not imply a transformation in the rebel's being or identity, but a preservation of the rebel's identity and a co-optation of the other, who is no more than an alter ego. This identification with the other, even if intended against injustice, takes away the other's otherness, herlbis personal uniqueness. I absorb the other's suffering insofar as it could have been my suffering and, more precisely,

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insofar as I can include the other in my being. Ultimately, a rebellion based on an identification of this type places only the rebel's interests at the center. Alternatively, identification with the other could mean the exact opposite. In this process, the rebel undergoes a deep transformation. No longer enclosed within hislber existence, slbe opens up to the other, uprooted from solitude and existence as a self-sufficient, autarchic individual. Identification with the other implies an expansion of human existence from "I" to "we," an essential partnership. A rebellion of this kind reflects, according to Camus, "humanity's gradually increasing self-awareness" (ibid., p. 20). This type of rebellion can erupt even if the other's suffering is not the rebel's, or even when the rebel cannot include the other within hislber being. According to the first option, solidary identification with the other is a process resulting in the ~ssimilation of the other's otherness, through the other increasingly becoming myself By contrast, according to the second option, this identification is a process wherein we acknowledge each other's otherness and interpersonal partnership as constitutive of existence. Camus suggests that the choice between these options should rely on an empirical test. In his view, the analysis of historical rebellion against evil shows the second option to be the correct choice: It can often happen that we cannot bear to see offenses done to others

which we ourselves have accepted without rebelling. The suicides of the Russian terrorists in Siberia as a protest against their comrades' being whipped is a case in point. Nor is it a question of the feeling of a community of interests. Injustices done to men whom we consider enemies can, actually, be profoundly repugnant to us. There is only identification of one's destiny with that of others and a choice of sides. (The Rebel, pp. 16-17) Camus refers to this mobilization in the interests of the other as solidarity (ibid.). But who is the object of this solidarity? Let us consider two theories on the nature of solidarity: one historicalcultural, and the other metaphysical. Richard Rorty, who advocates the historical-cultural theory, claims: I do not think there are any plain moral facts out there in the world, nor any truths independent of language, nor any neutral ground on which to stand and argue that either torture or kindness are preferable to the other. (Rorty, 1989,p. 173) This ethical approach relies on Rorty's post-modernist theory whereby, in any given human community, neither truths nor unconditioned values are possible. Essentialist theories, then, predicated on a joint morality and general metaphysical truths, are failures:

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There is nothing deep inside each of us, no common human nature, no built-in human solidarity, to use as a moral reference point. There is nothing to people except what has been socialized into them - their ability to use language, and thereby to exchange beliefs and desires with other people. (Ibid., p. 177) Human solidarity is not an autonomous metaphysical datum, beyond a given social reality, but the link joining members of a particular community, as Rorty illustrates in the following example: If you were a Jew in the period when the trains were running to Auschwitz, your chances of being hidden by your gentile neighbors were greater if you lived in Denmark or Italy than if you lived in Belgium. (Ibid., p. 189) According to Rorty, the usual explanation of these events is that the Danes, unlike the Belgians, displayed solidarity with Jews. In the metaphysical interpretation of solidarity, this statement means "there is something within each of us - our essential humanity - which resonates to the presence of this same thing in other human beings" (ibid.). This explanation, however, is unacceptable to Rorty, precisely because it assumes an essential human nature. Rorty advocates an explanation of human solidarity that rests on the "us" phenomenon, as in "being one of us." "We" are always the members of a given group, as opposed to "they," another group of human beings (ibid., p. 190). Danes or Italians, when explaining their actions in favor of Jews, have tended to adduce arguments pertinent to a discrete human group instead of relying on the metaphysical claim that Jews are also human beings. Even when some did rely on this metaphysical claim, if they had been asked to explain it, they would have advanced arguments replacing this metaphysical statement about human nature with others making the Jew a member of the "we" group: "This Jew is a fellow Jutlander," or "slbe belongs to my union," or "slbe is a colleague," and so forth. Solidarity with Jews is linked to specific socio-historical circumstances that make Jews part of the group in question. Similarly, Rorty argues that American liberals are moved to act in support of poor urban blacks because they are Americans, and less because they are human beings. According to Rorty, socio-historic circumstances are the answer to why people display solidarity with some human groups and not with others. The feeling of solidarity, then, is neither general nor immutable. It changes according to the extent to which we perceive the other as one of us. A group, and not humanity in general, is the object of our solidarity (ibid., p. 191).

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Rorty is aware of the differences between his view and the Christian ethos, which requires us to relate equally to everyone, "even the guards at Auschwitz or in the Gulag, as a fellow sinner" (ibid.). His approach is also antithetical to the universalism of secular Kantian ethics since, according to this ethics, an act is morally valid only if universal. Yet, Rorty holds that the justification he offers for his view of solidarity is better, because it does not rest on essentialist metaphysical claims that cannot be validated. His view does not imply that solidarity means reaching out to one sole group predefined as "we." The relationship between "we" and "they" is not immutable. Social processes can change it, and today's "they" can become tomorrow's "we." This process of enlarging the "we" group is the process of moral development that leads to the expansion of solidarity (ibid., p. 192). The object of solidarity, according to Rorty, is a concrete other, specific individuals with defined characteristics and features. The object of solidarity is not "the human being" but live human beings, and solidarity conveys sensitivity to their suffering. I pointed out above two options for understanding the identification with the other: include the other in the self, or create a renewed identity based on "we," on being with the other. Rorty adopts the second option, as does Camus. The difference between them hinges on the question of who is "we." Whereas Rorty's "we" is a given human group, Camus's "we" includes the whole of humanity: "Human solidarity is metaphysical." Solidarity is an ontological element indicating that "we," and not the concept of the self, are the constitutive human experience. If explicating rebellion discovers the metaphysical "we," this conclusion follows: In our daily trials rebellion plays the same role as does the "cogito" in

the realm of thought: it is the first piece of evidence. But this evidence lures the individual from his solitude. It founds its first value on the whole human race. I rebel- therefore we exist. (The Rebel, p. 22)

How does Camus substantiate his view? What are the grounds for his claim that the object of solidarity is humanity as a whole? Even if we claim that rebellion represents disinterested action, it need not follow that its object is humanity as a whole. What, then, is the meaning of his position? The considerations leading Camus to draw such a far-fetched conclusion probably rest on his attempt to probe the meaning of the act of rebellion. Camus does not ask Rorty's question: what is the object of solidarity? He does not focus on the object but on the agent. He asks himself what drives the rebel. What is the rebel seeking to attain? Who is target of the rebellion? Camus's answer is that the rebel rises up against injustice and wrongdoing: He denounces the contradiction. Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering

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of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil. (The Rebel, p. 24) Camus points out the links between the history of metaphysical rebellion and the history of the confrontation with God, but stresses that the history of metaphysical rebellion is not synonymous with the history of atheism. The atheist does away with God, whereas the rebel rejects the reality that God has created (ibid., p. 25). Human beings may be ready to accept pain and suffering when they appear logically necessary. Metaphysical rebellion ensues when they are not sure of the "need" for suffering, when they identify a pointless evil, a reality that cannot be organized within a system of plausible meaning. The rebel is motivated to act by the harm to unity, to order, and to intelligibility in a world flawed by evil (ibid., p. 101). In rebellion, then, we see a progression from the claim, ''you [God] do not deserve to exist" to the conclusion, ''you do not exist" (ibid., p. 102). Given this analysis of metaphysical rebellion, Camus concludes that the object of rebellion could not possibly be a given human group. When rebelling against creation as a whole, we show care for it. In other words, the scope of negation in rebellion offers clues to the affIrmative scope the rebel is striving for. The object of solidarity, therefore, is humanity as a whole. The perception of solidarity in The Rebel is signifIcantly different from the one in The Plague. Tarrou asks Rieux, who is struggling against the plague: "Why do you yourself show such devotion, considering you don't believe in God?" (The Plague, p. 106). And Rieux answers: Ifhe believed in an all-powerful God he would cease curing the sick and leave that to Him. But no one in the world believed in a God of that sort; no, not even Paneloux, who believed that he believed in such a God. And this was proved by the fact that no one ever threw himself on Providence completely. Anyhow, in this respect Rieux believed himself to be on the right road - in fIghting against creation as he found it. (Ibid., pp. 106--107) Ostensibly, Rieux resembles the hero of metaphysical revolt in The Rebel, rising up against creation and struggling for solidarity. Yet, a closer reading shows that this is not Rieux's main claim. He is a healer because human suffering has touched him and he feels called upon to act, not because he is rebelling against creation. In the passage quoted above, he intends his remarks against the view that faith in God is what motivates people who do for others. Rieux holds that faith in God has no part in this undertaking, and might even hinder people from responding. Rieux explains this to Tarrou. When Tarrou asks him whether he believes in God, he answers: "No - but what does that really mean? I'm

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fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original" (ibid., p. 106). Tarrou persists and asks: "Isn't that it the gulf between Paneloux and you?" And Rieux answers: I doubt it. Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn't come into contact with death; that's why he can speak with such assurance of the truth - with a capital T. But every country priest who visits his parishioners, and has heard a man grasping for breath on his deathbed, thinks as I do. He'd try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out of its excellence. (Ibid.) Rieux's claim is that rebellion and solidarity do not rest on religious worldviews but, above all, on a concrete demand: we feel called upon by the other's anguish. For Rieux, concrete experience precedes any theory or justification, even religious justification. Hence, even the country priest closely attached to his parishioners is driven to act by their suffering. According to Rieux, denying God's existence is not a condition for rebellion and solidarity, which reveal God's irrelevance as a motivation for action. Faith in God could even be a hindrance: "Mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him, and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?" (ibid.). Instead of engaging in action when faced with distress, believers might turn to God for help. Rieux has no quarrel with faith per se and holds that believers too are moved to act by the other's distress and not by religious theories, but he fears faith could hinder them. Tarrou's attitude is similar. Rieux asks "if Tarrou had an idea of the path to follow for attaining peace. 'Yes,' he replied. 'The path of sympathy.'" (ibid., p. 208), again pointing, like Rieux, to an element at the level of interpersonal relationships. For Rieux, understanding his immediate motivations is enough, but Tarrou is still troubled: "'It comes to this,' Tarrou said almost casually, 'what interests me is learning how to become a saint...Can one be a saint without God? That's the problem, in fact the only problem, I'm up against today'" (ibid., p. 208). The difference between Tarrou and Rieux does not hinge on their motivation for action, but in their recourse to theory, which Rieux rejects and Tarrou thinks crucial. And yet, neither views solidarity and the struggle against the plague, namely, rebellion, in the negative connotation they assume in The Rebel. Revolt in The Rebel is part of the history of ''the sons of Cain," but not of "the sons of Prometheus." The reason is that "the sons of Prometheus" "believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall" (The Rebel, p. 27). By contrast, "the sons of Cain" believed in a personal God:

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Rebellion, after all, can only be imagined in terms of opposition to someone. The only thing that gives meaning to hwnan protest is the idea of a personal god who has created, and is therefore responsible for, everything. (Ibid., p. 28). Revolt, and solidarity in its wake, emerges as a heroic act, facing the God who failed and whose world did not live up to the promise. In The Plague, the tone is minor. Rebellion is not against the God who failed but against disease, against a specific evil that hwnan beings cannot accept. The solidarity of the heroes of The Plague, then, unlike the heroes of The Rebel, is not with hwnanity as a whole but with concrete hwnan beings who are in trouble. In The Plague, Camus formulates a view of solidarity close to that of Rorty, whereas in The Rebel his approach is entirely different. If The Rebel is an attempt to interpret The Plague in philosophical terms, what moved Camus to offer a conceptual framework so far removed from that of The Plague? I claimed above that The Rebel probably drew on the experiences of Camus's struggle during the war, but The Plague also appeared after the war. What drove Camus to endorse a different explanation of the war events? Several answers are possible. First, a tension might prevail between two basic trends in Camus's thought. His return to the approach he had endorsed in The Plague in the basic thesis of The Fall, supports this hypothesis. In both works, the protagonists face a demand to answer a concrete cry for help. Rieux, Tarrou, Paneloux, and their friends respond, and Jean Baptiste Clamence does not. Camus's two models for explaining hwnan activity and undertaking a commitment for the sake of the other emerge here: one postulates a call of distress from a concrete other, the other asswnes rebellion and solidarity with hwnanity as a whole. Second, The Rebel is aphilosophical essay; Camus wrote it within a particular philosophical orientation and influenced by phenomenological writings, as he had been in The Myth of Sisyphus. He analyzes the phenomenon of revolt and, like Edmund Husserl in Cartesian Meditations (1960), he diverts emphasis from the noema, the object, to the noesis, the agent and his activity. This diversion, as well as the insight into the meaning of revolt and solidarity through Camus's interpretation of historical phenomena, led to a unique perception of these phenomena. Metaphysical revolt, the rejection of evil, unfold through concrete action in historical revolutions: "Rebellion is therefore compelled, on pain of appearing futile or out of date to become revolutionary" (ibid., p. 107). Historical rebellion is the continuation of metaphysical revolt. The relationship between these two types of rebellion resembles the relationship between idea and action: metaphysical rebellion is the shaping of the idea, whereas historical rebellion, in the form of revolution, is "an attempt to shape actions to ideas" (ibid., p. 106).

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For Camus, metaphysical rebellion without historical rebellion means negating reality without offering a positive, alternative approach: "If metaphysical rebellion refuses to assent and restricts itself to absolute negation, it condemns itself to passive acceptance" (ibid., p. 81). The relationship between metaphysical and historical revolt, however, is not sufficiently obvious. According to Camus's analysis, rebellion is metaphysical in the sense that the fundamental human reaction to evil and injustice is revolt and solidarity. The history of rebellion should thus overlap the history of evil. Yet, Camus does not accept this conclusion when he contemplates human history, pointing out that revolt is an exclusively Western occurrence (ibid., p. 20): ''metaphysical rebellion, in the real sense of the term, does not appear, in coherent form, in the history of ideas until the end of the eighteenth century" (ibid., p. 26). Camus also argues that rebellion imposes preconditions: The spirit of rebellion fmds few means of expression in societies where inequalities are very great (the Hindu caste system) or, again, in those where there is absolute equality (certain primitive societies). The spirit of rebellion can exist only in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. (Ibid., p. 20) As noted, Camus also assumes that rebellion, and thereby solidarity, assume a personal God against whom we rebel. Rebellion is only possible in monotheistic cultures or, as Camus claims, "the history of rebellion is inseparable from the history of Christianity" (ibid., p. 28). But if rebellion and solidarity are basic elements that reflect an essential foundation of human existence or, in other terms, of human metaphysics, why do they emerge only in specific circumstances? If solidarity is the core of rebellion, which itself emerges only in given historical settings, what is the point of a metaphysical solidarity that anchors our response to the other on our shared humanity? One way of settling these difficulties is to rely on a narrow interpretation of the term "metaphysical" in metaphysical rebellion. A rebellion is metaphysical insofar as its aim is metaphysics, namely, evil cosmic orders. The metaphysical aspect of rebellion reflects its purpose. This explanation makes the question I posed above redundant. The question had assumed that, if rebellion reflects human metaphysics, it must correspond to the duration of human reality. According to this explanation, however, the metaphysical aspect is linked to the purpose of rebellion, and rebellion does not reveal metaphysical elements of human reality. But if rebellion does not discover metaphysical elements of human reality, how can Camus assume that solidarity is metaphysical? Solidarity emerges through rebellion, so it cannot reveal anything beyond rebellion itself. If rebellion does not discover metaphysical elements of human reality

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and is only a random historical-cultural product, how can solidarity be metaphysical? Camus also emphasizes repeatedly the link between metaphysical rebellion and the metaphysics of human reality. For instance, he argues: Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving? (Ibid., p. 16) The key to this issue, then, lies in the distinction between the essence of rebellion and the modes of its discovery. Rebellion is metaphysical because its target is metaphysics, and because it discloses human metaphysics, the "we" as a primary datum substituting the Cartesian self (ibid., p. 22). Our conscious acquaintance with our basic essence and character, however, is not a primary datum. The development of human beings must go through stages, which will enable them to engage in the reflective process of discovering human metaphysics. In this sense, metaphysical rebellion in action, or historical rebellion, is the process of explicating consciousness. Consciousness, however, does not create a new datum, it only discovers it. Historical rebellion, then, is not only a historical phenomenon; it also reflects the depth structure of human reality. Historical rebellion explicates the metaphysical rebellion, which is the basis of historical rebellion. A self-evident link thus joins rebellion and consciousness, and I devote the rest of this chapter to an analysis of this relationship. As noted in Chapter Five above, self-consciousness in The Myth of Sisyphus begins with the experience of the absurd, and revolt reflects the mature consciousness rebelling against all metaphysical consolation. By contrast, self-consciousness in The Rebel begins with revolt. Phenomenologically, determining the first datum in the explication process is a crucial hermeneutical decision, since this phenomenological datum delimits the borders of the inquiry and sets the horizons of meaning. The phenomenological explication proceeds toward the datum itself and decodes its inner meaning, never stepping beyond its boundaries. In The Myth of Sisyphus and in The Rebel, the voyage of self-discovery begins at different points, and we can hardly expect the result, namely, decoding the meaning of concrete existence, to be identical. The Myth of Sisyphus begins with the individual going through the experience of the absurd and ends with the disclosure of the self as individual. In The Rebel, the situation is radically different, and Camus explicitly argues that, in this work, the absurd is not his primary datum. He also ascribes deconstructionist meaning to the absurd, liberating us from original simplicity by pointing out that absurdism had led to a "blind alley" (ibid., p. 10).

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Camus repeatedly stresses the liberating function of the absurd in The Rebel. But although the absurd awakens consciousness from its slumber, releases it from naivete and from the immediate certainties of safety in the world, the absurd is not itself the object of consciousness. Liberation from innocence may direct consciousness to its true primary datum, which is rebellion (see above, p. 108). Exposing this primary datum of consciousness, as Camus notes, is tantamount to exposing consciousness: "Awareness, no matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion" (The Rebel, p. 14). Self-explication unfolds through a complex process. At the outset we experience the absurd, and this experience may become a turning point if it moves us to analyze its foundation - rebellion (ibid., p. 10). Although the absurd is not necessarily the propeller of consciousness, it provides consciousness an opportunity for self-examination should it turn to selfinquiry instead of to the world or to God. As noted above in the analysis of The Myth of Sisyphus, human beings yearn for clarity and self-understanding. Although turning to the self is not a necessity, individuals are driven to do so; when consciousness turns to itself, it discovers that its primary datum is rebellion (ibid.). Camus also claims, however, that rebellion, and not the absurd, is the primary datum for disclosing consciousness. The absurd is only the potential propeller of consciousness, without including its object. The explanation of this disparity lies in Camus's use of the term "consciousness," which for him denotes self-consciousness and not consciousness of objects. The genuine object of consciousness is the "self." The experience of the absurd does not reveal the self because the object of this experience is the world, or the human experience of being hurt by the world. This experience thus moves "outward," and involves only elements of negation and rejection, without any positive components that might constitute a primary datum. But since this experience includes also the human reaction to the absurd, we find that two elements mediate the absurd: the outside, or the world, and the inside, the response. The absurd, then, is a phenomenon that emerges from the encounter between the world and the self, including elements of both. It can therefore be a phenomenological "guideline" leading to the true datum of consciousness, namely, rebellion, which is the reaction to the absurd. What is the meaning of this rebellion? According to Camus, rebellion relies on a double act of negation and affrrmation. Although to rebel is to deny the hurt, implicit in the negation is the assumption of a positive value system on which we base our negative evaluation of reality. Camus then adds that this positive value is identical with an element within the self: "In every act of rebellion, the rebel simultaneously experiences a feeling of revulsion at the infringement of his rights and a complete and spontaneous loyalty to certain aspects of himself' (ibid., pp. 13-14).

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Why does Camus assume that, despite the revulsion, the rebel is affrrming selfhood? The answer to this question is inherent in rebellion. Rebellion denotes a refusal to remain in the same place. The slave rejects bondage, the sufferers their pain. The rebel does not agree to the transgression, and is willing to put life at risk in the struggle against it. The revulsion, however, is not limited to a specific act. Rebellion is a deeper movement, in which rebels reject their previous being altogether. For Camus, the unconditional quality of rebellion means that rebels fight for their very being, demanding "All or Nothing" (ibid., p. 15). Rebellion is the moment at which the rebel discovers that his being and existence have reached a crisis, and he now faces only one choice: to win or lose himself. The very readiness for such an absolute rebellion means that the rebel recognizes a valuable element within her being, which Camus illustrates in the rebellion of the slave: The very moment the slave refuses to obey the humiliating orders of his master, he simultaneously rejects the condition of slavery. The act of rebellion carries him far beyond the point he had reached by simply refusing He exceeds the bounds that he fixed for his antagonist, and now demands to be treated as an equal ... The part of himself that he wanted to be respected he proceeds to place above everything else and proclaims it preferable to everything, even to life itself. (Ibid., pp. 14-15) The rebel rejects her previous being and seeks to identify completely with that part of her personality worthy of respect and appreciation. He thus identifies a good part in his personality no longer willing to tolerate evil and injustice. Although the experience of rebellion is confined to the life of the individual, it "questions the very idea of the individual" (ibid., p. IS) because, as we saw, rebels are willing to risk their life not only for themselves but for others. The rebel discovers that hislher inner good is a common good: If the individual, in fact, accepts death and happens to die as a consequence of his act of rebellion, he demonstrates by doing so that he is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of a common good which he considers more important than his own destiny... Therefore he is acting in the name of certain values which are still indeterminate but which he feels are common to himself and to all men. We see that the affrrmation implicit in every act of rebellion is extended to something that transcends the individual. (Ibid., pp. 15-16) This fmding is crucial in phenomenological terms, because it shows that human existence is not solipsistic. Ontologically, the original foundation is the "we," which precedes the individual "I." The phenomenological explicatiol),

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discloses, as noted, humanity's ever-widening self-awareness, including even its most corrupt members. Camus illustrates this here in his image of the rebelling slave: It is for the sake of everyone in the world that the slave asserts himself

when he comes to the conclusion that a command has infringed on something in him which does not belong to him alone, but which is common ground where all men - even the man who insults and oppresses him - have a natural community. (Ibid., p. 16)

In a remark probably intended to the atrocities of the war, Camus argues that the difference between victim and executioner hinges precisely on this issue: "The community of victims is the same as that which unites victim and executioner. But the executioner does not know this" (ibid.). Unlike the executioner, the rebel bears the good and discovers the common human good that constitutes herlhis very being. In Camus's terms, the rebel discloses human nature, which engenders solidarity. Camus thereby hints that a fuller understanding of human existence will thwart iniquity and foster solidarity, echoing the prophet: "Have we not all one father? Has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother ... ?" (Malachi 2:10). In this light, solidarity is not a normative requirement externally imposed, but the essence of self-consciousness. In The Myth of Sisyphus, self-explication culminates in selftransparency, which cannot extract individuals from their splendid isolation; by contrast, in The Rebel, self-explication reaches its peak in active historical rebellion and solidarity. Whereas The Myth of Sisyphus presents a version of Aristotelian ethics involving conscious self-perfection, The Rebel introduces an ethics in which being with the other is the foundation of existence, identifying the common human element. Neither The Rebel nor The Myth of Sisyphus presents an ethics of obligations imposed from outside, or even from inside, as an autonomous law of the Kantian variety. Camus endorses an Aristotelian approach in The Rebel too, whereby ethics is an effort to reach self-perfection. The "self' here, however, expands to include all human beings, and the conscious exposure of this ontology implies a perpetual condition of being called upon. The rebel recurrently discovers the existence of "an obvious complicity among men ... the solidarity of chains, a communication between human being and human being which makes men both similar and united" (ibid., p. 281). Rebellion, as the basic response to injustice, entirely transforms selfconsciousness and, in its wake, our attitude to the world and to others. The rebel understands the bonds that link human creatures, and hence the shared responsibility, the "solidarity of chains." Revolt shapes a consciousness of mutual respect that follows from the partnership and the basic human similarity (ibid., pp. 281, 297).

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Rebellion as a response to anguish implies a renunciation of absolute freedom, since the rebel renounces the freedom to murder and to impose herlhis will unconditionally: Freedom has its limits everywhere that a human being is to be found the limit being precisely that human being's power to rebel.. .. Every human freedom, at its very roots, is therefore relative. (Ibid., p. 284). Rebellion is thus coupled with self-restraint because, in responding to the other, the self renounces the will to engulf the entire existential space. In Emanuel Levinas's terms, this responsiveness implies a recognition of the other's "face" as imposing an obligation on the self - ''thou shalt not kill." Unrestrained revolt becomes meaningless (ibid., pp. 294-297). Revolt can only prevail "in the free exchange of conversation" (ibid, p. 283) wherein human beings acknowledge the value of others. The result is a new model of existence: At this limit, the "We are" paradoxically defines a new form of individualism. "We are" in terms of history, and history must reckon with this "We are" .... I have need of others who have need of me and of each other. Every collective action, every form of society, supposes a discipline, and the individual, without this discipline, is only a stranger, bowed down under the weight of an inimical collectivity. (Ibid., p. 297) The ethics of rebellion, consequently, is a "metaphysical ethics." Instead of an oppressive burden imposed on human beings as a legal obligation, this ethics stems from the rebellion itself, concretizing their existence as human creatures and organizing their mutual relationships out of a basic existential experience. No wonder, then, that rebellion rests on "proud compassion" (ibid.). Rebellion will not arise from a normative demand imposed as an obligation. It comes from "within," from the web of relationships human beings weave with themselves and with others, who experience a shared fate and deserve our love and respect. Rebellion offers "unparalleled joy" (ibid.), when human beings acknowledge their worth and that of others, the value of a persistent, austere struggle against evil and the plague, and the meaning that rebellion brings into their lives. Can human beings bear this discovery for long? Is there no fear they will fail to respond when called upon? This fear, which Camus discusses in The Fall, originates in our tendency to blur existence, to return to solipsism, to enclose ourselves within the confmes of autarchy. Only a constant process of explicating rebellion will direct human consciousness toward solidarity. To be human, we must ceaselessly activate our consciousness, which discovers rebellion. We cannot forsake our watch, lest we sever our links to the community and return to an isolated existence as "I." The hero of The Rebel,

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like the Sisyphean hero, undertakes an endless voyage. Human beings may retreat from the absurd into redeeming hope and from the "we" into the "I." The rebel's voyage is an existentialist voyage, through which we struggle for our existence as human creatures.

Twelve THE FALL: CONSCIOUSNESS, FREEDOM, AND RESPONSIBILITY The Fall is one of the deepest and most beautiful of Camus's works, and much has been written about this unique story and its meaning (see, for instance, Sartre, 2000, p. 301; Sartre 1988, p. 165). At least three different perspectives are possible when reading The Fall; we can read it as a personal confession, as the story of a generation, and as an existentialist voyage. When it was first published in France, readers viewed it "more as a confession than as an account of the times" (Lottman, 1979, p. 578), and scholars consider it the most personal of Camus's works (Hanna, 1958, p. 164), with Camus featuring as actor and spectator. Several scholars have pointed to this work as Camus's attempt to answer the critique that Sartre and his circle had aimed at The Rebel. Jean-Paul Sartre, who read The Fall as Camus's attempt to indict him for his support of the Soviet Union, considered it a harsh critique of Marxism in general, and of the Stalinist regime in particular. In The Rebel, Camus describes these historical events as extreme and irrational expressions of the basic human impulse to revolt against oppression, which in Marxist theories culminates in the licensing of murder, torture, and il\iustice. In a letter to Sartre, who was then editor of Les Temps Modernes, Camus claimed: "he who believes nothing of history is authorizing terror" (quoted in Felman, 1992, p. 174), Sartre responded by arguing that Camus represents the past: "In 1944 [your personality] was the future, in 1952 it is the past .... You had to change if you wanted to remain yourself and you were afraid of changing" (ibid., p. 176). Sartre was still clinging, in a sense, to the optimism of The Plague, to the belief in the human power to struggle against evil and, if not vanquish it, at least relegate it to the margins. In The Rebel, Camus became aware of the great danger latent in total war and in the yearning for a world cleansed of evil; he feared shortcuts potentially leading to murder and blood. Now, in The Fall, Camus offers his answer to Sartre, repeatedly alluding to the betrayal of friends. Beyond that, Camus's central claim is that history offers no evidence of rebellion and correction. The atrocities of the war prove that despair from the perfect rebellion leads to murder. In this work, Camus unhesitatingly points to the deafening absence of the Jews to denote the failure of heroic rebellions (The Fall, p. 10; for a broader analysis of this question see Felman, 1992). The character of Jean Baptiste Clamence, who strongly resembles Camus (Lottman, 1979, p. 578; Lazere, 1973, pp. 188-189), openly defies

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Sartre. Clamence/Camus argues that his existentialist friends are incapable, as he is, to act in response to a demand addressed to them by other human beings. Unlike them, however, he does not pretend to appear as an accomplished, innocent man and, unlike them, he is aware of himself as an actor incapable of fully experiencing reality. He is conscious, whereas they delude themselves (QuiIIiot, 1970, p. 242). I will not enter here into the Sartre-Camus argument (on this question, see Felman, 1992; Sprintzen, 1988, pp. 202-208; Onimus, 1970, p. 93), but I do agree with the view that, in The Fall, a different dimension of Camus's personality becomes prominent. According to Donald Lazere's interpretation (Lazere, 1973, pp. 188-189), this is the personal story of a man who has attained eminence and social success, but feels that his real life is incompatible with his achievements. Lazere views the story as an attempt on Camus's part to reframe his stance on the Algerian struggle for independence. Camus, unlike Sartre, did not support this demand, and he is now questioning whether his position is not an expression of the stagnation that had taken hold of him. As Clamence had failed to respond to the demand posed by the woman's scream, so had Camus failed to contend with the demand posed by the Algerian struggle (ibid.). Without fully translating events in the text into the terms of Camus's personal life, I do argue that Camus's figure is easily discernible in it. Clamence's character has much in common with Camus: both are actors, both have achieved a social success that only masks a deep despair; both are exiles, men without a country. Camus voices the despair that engulfs him: "There is no country for those who despair.... Those who love and are separated can live in grief, but this is not despair: they know that love exists. This is why I suffer, dry eyed, in exile. I am still waiting" (Camus, 1968, pp. 173-174). As noted in Chapter Two above, this is the nature of Camus's philosophy. It grows from his concrete personal experience. Camus never agreed with a definition of him as an existentialist because he deemed existentialism a philosophy like any other. Yet, he did admit to having a philosophy, as a man reflecting on his existence and expressing his thought in his work. In Thomas Hanna's formulation, "he thinks existentially before he thinks rationally" (Hanna, 1958, p. 162). The first expression of his thought is his literary and dramatic oeuvre; he thinks himself through his imaginary characters. In this sense, he continues S0ren Kierkegaard's philosophical tradition (see Sagi, 2000, ch. 4). The personal, private voyage, however, is only the beginning of the process. This is the existentialist voyage into the depths of the soul for anyone living in our times (Sprintzen, 1988, p. 197). Clamence is a kind of mirror placed before all of us, demanding self-examination. By judging himself, Clamence awakens the other to do the same (Hanna, 1958, pp. 167-169). Finally, this work is a continuation of Camus's moralistic pathos, evident in his harsh critique of his generation, of the bourgeois morality founded on

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masks, hiding only more m~ks. Clamence is the hero of an era, a man without a personality, a "no man," a creature living his image instead of his authentic being. He is the quintessential representative of the shallow culture of his times, unable to undertake any commitments, preferring babbling and glitter to responsiveness (see also Sprintzen, 1988, p, 197; Quilliot, 1970, p. 249). The different possible perspectives for the understanding of this novella come together, tracing the contours of a shift from the uniquely personal to the generally human, and shedding light on the tension between overt and covert. All these perspectives weave together in the critical mirror that Camus faces, as does his generation. These perspectives, then, represent the question mark that faces the reader. No wonder that The Fall begins and ends with a question. At the opening we read: "May I, Monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding" (The Fall, p. 5); and at the end: Are we not all alike, constantly talking and to no one, for ever up against the same questions although we know the answers in advance?.. "0 young woman, throw yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have the chance of saving both of us!" A second time, eh, what a risky suggestion! Just suppose, cher maitre, that we should be taken literally? .. The water's so cold! But let's not worry! It's too late now. It'll always be too late. Fortunately! (The Fall, pp. 108-109) Replacing the question mark are a growing number of exclamation marks. But as Edward Engelberg indicates, these exclamation marks should not mislead us. Camus does not end with an answer, and the exclamation marks only deepen the questions: "the exclamation mark at the conclusion may in fact be a question placed in the form of an exclamation" (Engelberg, 1972, p. 230). The novella confmes itself to posing the questions. Did Camus think no answers exist? Did he think that the voyage of consciousness ends in emptiness, or did he leave the answers to each individual? Maurice Blanchot argues that Camus dismisses any option of answers in this work, which is a form of irony that questions all the substantive contents of life. A man who had been rather pleased with himself at the beginning of his life, ends up with nothing and courts self-destruction. The profound meaning of the irony is that it teaches us nothing, "it gives us only what it takes away from us" (Blanchot, 1988, p. 141). This is an extremely radical view. Camus's purpose in ending with questions is not to destroy and undermine, but to liberate the individual from the comforts of a banal existence. This liberation resembles the Heideggerian conscience, a significant element for Camus, as noted above, awakening individuals and turning them inward. Contrary to The Myth of Sisyphus or to The Rebel, Camus does not provide general answers here, and leaves them to each one of us. The basic question is whether to respond to the demand of the

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other or to sink into the comforts of narcissism. Will the freedom revealed by our consciousness paralyze us, or will we return to share in existence? Although imbued with pessimism when asking this question, Camus does not reject the hope that human beings might respond to the demand, willing to take risks and jump into the cold water to rescue themselves and the other from narcissism and self-involvement. The quasi-dialogical character of The Fall indicates that the story does not foreclose the option of commitment but merely questions it, expecting each one of us to contend with it in the course of our lives. The novella is a kind of personal confession, and continues a literary tradition that includes Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Charles Baudelaire among others, yet remains unique in its genre because of its form. We neither hear nor know Clamence's interlocutor, but we know that Clamence speaks to him. The story, then, is a monologue addressed to the other or, as Blanchot describes it, a "solitary dialogue" (Blanchot, 1988, p. 140). Addressing the other without hearing his voice or seeing his face implies posing a question. The book is Clamence's attempt to tell the other the story of his life, and thereby awaken him to tell his. The use of a dialogical technique would be pointless if its sole purpose had been to close the discussion. A dialogue including only one voice, the narrator's, leaves room for the voices of many participants. Unlike Clamence, they are all silent, but their silence prepares the ground for voices resonating beyond the story, in real life. Clamence's interlocutor is no one and everyone. Contrary to Clamence, whom we know, his partner in this dialogue is a specific but anonymous individual who could be anyone. The dialogical character attests to the story's "open" quality, as one awaiting the other, any other and not necessarily this particular one. Blanchot (ibid., p. 141) points to a further meaning of the dialogical structure. Clamence, argues Blanchot, is engaged in a dialogue with himself instead of with a specific other. This dialogue is evidence of a "double," suggesting that human beings are simultaneously actors and spectators. The duplication attests to self-consciousness. As I show below, the main issue in this work is the relationship between self-consciousness and commitment. The dialogical structure, therefore, preserves the central problematic of the story. These two possible meanings of the dialogical structure are mutually complementary instead of mutually contradictory, since the relationship of consciousness versus commitment is Clamence's problem as well as the reader's. We all share in these two meanings of the dialogical structure, since we all experience this "doubling" and, in our lives, we are all supposed to contend with the problem that Clamence addresses to every reader. The protagonist, Jean Baptiste Clamence, is a fortunate man. He has had access to opportunities and has lived a happy and morally worthy life, always supporting those requiring his help and assistance. As a lawyer, he had always worked for the poor and downtrodden, and had been widely praised for this.

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Yet, gradually, his life changes. He progressively loses the pivots of meaning around which he had organized his life, and he is fmally forced to abandon Paris for Amsterdam, where he spends his days at a harbor bar. Increasingly, he sheds standard norms and lives among thieves, on the margins of society. He is a friend of sinners, and uses his legal skills to spare them punishment. A closer reading reveals that a series of events had harmed Clamence's self-image and led him to exile. In the first, Clamence tries to remove from the road a motorcycle driver whose engine had stalled and was blocking traffic. A spectator beats him (The Fall, p. 40), and this blow hurts his selfesteem: "My dream had not stood up to the facts. I had dreamed ... of being a complete man" (ibid., p. 41). The blow exposes Clamence to his vulnerability and his piteousness. He is not a self-contained creature; he depends on his fellows, who humiliate him. The other enters his life and unstitches the narcissistic web he has woven around himself. Other events follow. Clamence recurrently claims: "a laugh burst out behind me. Taken by surprise, I suddenly wheeled round; there was no one there" (ibid., p. 30). This laugh, similar to the shame that Sartre analyzes in Being and Nothingness (Sartre, 1966, especially pp. 350-352), conveys Clamence's entrapment in the other's gaze. Clamence holds that his laugh is not the act of a specific outsider, but grows from within: Since you are interested, I'll tell you that I thought a little about that laugh, for a few days, then forgot about it. Once in a great while, I seemed to hear it within me. But most of the time, without making any effort, I thought of other things. (The Fall, p. 33) Laughter is, above all, an inner event; through laughter, individuals become objects of themselves. Laughter disturbs the simplicity and immediacy of life, because subjects perceive themselves as spectators; laughter is the basic experience through which individuals discover themselves as self-consciousness. Clamence conveys this perception unambiguously: To begin with, that perpetual laugh and the laughers had to teach me to see clearly within me and to discover at last that I was not simple. Don't smile; that truth is not so fundamental as it seems. What we call fundamental truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others. However that may be, after prolonged research on myself, I brought out the basic duplicity of the human being. (Ibid., p. 63) Unlike the absurd heroes, Clamence does not launch his existentialist voyage from the sense of the absurd but from laughter. His central discovery comes down to his identification of the "basic duplicity of the human being," namely, that the human being is self-consciousness. Hinting to the

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phenomenological tradition that, as noted, shapes Camus's views, Clamence argues that laughter is the "guideline" leading to the primary phenomenological datum: the discovery of self-consciousness. Camus, like Martin Heidegger in Being and Time, accepts the view that the first datum does not reveal itself immediately to the spectator, and remains invisible. Discovery is a process of removing it from its concealment. The voyage of consciousness is driven by laughter, which disturbs and subverts quotidian comforts. Laughter directs Clamence to himself, to the voyage supposed to discover the hidden, primary truth about human existence, namely, that the human being is a dual creature: subject and object, actor and spectator. Laughter as the discovery of self-consciousness places events, including those that preceded the laughter, in a new perspective. The central event of the story is, ostensibly, Clamence's unresponsiveness to the scream of the woman jumping to her death from a bridge over the Seine (ibid., p. 52). This event surfaces repeatedly in the story and marks its end, with Clamence wishing he could go back and thereby perhaps save the woman and himself. But this event took place "that particular night in November, two or three years before the evening when I thought I heard laughter behind me" (ibid., pp. 51-52). Clamence reporting this event after reporting the laughter, and even linking them together, reverses the temporal, and even the causal link between them; the laughter is what sheds new meaning on it (this analysis relies on Engelberg, 1972, pp. 232-233). The laughter undermines Clamence's confidence in his immediate self-sufficiency, and so does the woman's suicide. Her scream pierces Clamence's heart; like the laughter, it haunts him and changes his life. The relationship between the laughter and the suicide, however, is deeper. The laughter defines us as self-consciousness. The human being, free from immediacy, becomes a reflective creature. Although this act grants freedom and liberation from the primary data of existence, the cost is paralysis. Clamence discovers that freedom and conscious life have a price: the inability to commit (see The Fall, pp. 65-66). Freedom and consciousness translate into alienation from the other. This alienation shapes Clamence's existence in estrangement from the other as well as from himself, and self-consciousness removes him further and further away. Like Kierkegaard (see Sagi, 2000), Clamence/Camus discovers that the role of self-consciousness is more than a passive concern with selfknowledge. Self-consciousness creates images; instead of destroying the masks to discover the authentic self concealed in the depths, it supplies more and more options for existence. Clamence discovers that he is no more than an actor (The Fall, pp. 36, 45). Acting shapes his entire being. He lives constantly vis-a-vis others and facing his reflection in them. Even when he confesses, he cannot refrain from acting. While declaring, "one could not die without having confessed all one's

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lies" (ibid., p. 67), he views confession as yet another prank in a series of games (ibid., pp. 103-104). Clamence understands that the prank, instead of being prompted by a desire to corrupt or to fake, is yet another expression of human "duplicity" (ibid., p. 104). Self-consciousness invariably leads us to discover the arbitrary, imaginative element in human life. Individuals believe they have found themselves, 'they have reached home, but consciousness rediscovers that the "self," or being "home," is just another game. Camus shares with Kierkegaard the understanding that imagination fashions consciousness and, again like Kierkegaard, finds theater fascinating. Theater acting enables individuals to give concrete shape to different life options - "shadows" in Kierkegaard's terms - that may represent the self, because the self is progressively constituted through its possibilities instead of being a given, fmished entity. Kierkegaard was aware of the imagination as a constitutive element of self-consciousness, and of imagination's ability to remove the individual from the self. The infmite possibilities tempt us, and our being drifts into the continued movement of these options, detaching us from actual experience: Thus possibility seems greater and greater to the self, more and more becomes possible because nothing becomes actual. Eventually everything seems possible, but this is exactly the point at which the abyss swallows up the self .... Possibility becomes more and more intensive-but in the sense of possibility, not in the sense of actuality .... The instant something appears to be possible, a new possibility appears and fmally these phantasmagoria follow one another in such rapid succession that it seems as if everything were possible, and this is exactly the final moment, the point at which the individual himself becomes a mirage. (Kierkegaard, 1980b, p. 36. For an extensive discussion ofKierkegaard's position, see Sagi, 2000, ch. 4). Camus loved the theater, as playwright and as actor. He often behaved as an actor in his daily life and, in this sense, Clamence faithfully represents him. As Onimus points out, however, acting is for Camus the representation of self-consciousness: "To be conscious is always more or less to take part in a spectacle" (Onimus, 1970, p. 97). Clamence does not hesitate to tell his interlocutor: "Don't take too seriously my emotional outbursts or my ravings. They are controlled" (The Fall, p. 107). Like Kierkegaard, Clamence/Camus faces the most crucial question of the self-conscious modem individual: Can we return to existence after reflection? In Kierkegaard's terms, is repetition at all possible or is the human being doomed to a life of exile? This question troubled Kierkegaard throughout his life, and he gave different answers to it at different stages of his thought. At times, he.held that return is possible, and is the main human

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task. Human beings must return to original innocence and pre-conscious simplicity. At times, he felt that only unique individuals, such as Abraham, "the knight of faith," are deemed worthy of this state and attain it through faith. Yet at other times he held that the individual is doomed to a life of permanent exile, and true harmony with one's existence means accepting selfalienation as the worthy mode of human existence (see Sagi 2000, especially Chapters Six and Nine). From Kierkegaard's answers, Clamence chooses the one stating that genuine human harmony means endorsing the special character of conscious life: You'll fmd me unchanged. And why should I change, since I have found the happiness that suits me? I have accepted duplicity instead of being upset about it. On the contrary, I have settled into it and found there the comfort I was looking for throughout life. (The Fall, p. 104) Unlike Kierkegaard, Clamence never loses his ironic perspective. He is aware of consciousness, understands that accepting duplicity is itself a conscious molding that includes an imaginary element. His confession, therefore, never attaches any heroic meaning to the acceptance of duplicity, and he formulates it with another concern in mind - comfort. Clamence is the antithesis of Meursault. Meursault presents a world of blamelessness, without judgments or evaluations. Clamence goes out in an all out war against innocence. Contrary to Meursault, he declares: "I am for any theory that refuses to grant man innocence and for any practice that treats him as guilty" (ibid., p. 98). An accusation is not a moral description; above all, an accusation is an existential characterization of human beings as free creatures aware of themselves and relying on this awareness to direct their actions. This is Karl Jaspers's infmite accusation, or Heidegger's ontological accusation. But this ontological, infmite blame involves moral implications. Clamence vigorously defends the claim that the source of evil is within us. Only human beings are responsible for evil and injustice. Hitler is not on another planet, he is "our brethren." Human beings bear absolute responsibility for their actions, a responsibility resulting from their freedom and their consciousness. Will they return to hear the cries of the Jews burnt in the gas chambers? Will the streets emptied of Jews become an indictment? Will they be liberated from their alienating consciousness and commit themselves to be responsible? Camus holds that these questions are crucial at the interpersonal level but also, and mainly, at the intrapersonal one. Saving or not saving the woman is saving or not saving Clamence. The attitude to the demand stemming from the other's existence is the criterion for our ability to extricate ourselves from the trap of self-consciousness and the freedom to return to existence. Freedom

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alone is insufficient to constitute human life and return us to existence. Freedom can imprison us anew within narcissistic emptiness. Clamence discovers that the great test of existence is the shaping of our attitude to the other. He knows what Camus had taught about Nietzsche in The Rebel: Because his mind was free, Nietzsche knew that freedom of the mind is not a comfort, but an achievement to which one aspires and at long last obtains after an exhausting struggle. He knew that in wanting to consider oneself above the law, there is a great risk of finding oneself beneath the law. That is why he understood that only the mind found its real emancipation in the acceptance of new obligations. The essence of his discovery consists in saying that if the eternal law is not freedom, the absence oflaw is still less so. (The Rebel, pp. 70-71) Clamence is unable to respond to the call, trapped to his core in consciousness and empty freedom. His strength, however, hinges on his ability to ask the question: is the human being sentenced to self-redemption or to hell? The name of the book fits in well with the analysis so far: what is the meaning that Camus ascribes to the concept of "fall"? He had a choice of three main perceptions: the classic Christian view, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's view, and Heidegger's view. The Christian idea of the fall ties it to the original sin that led to expUlsion from Eden and makes salvation, from then on, dependent on divine grace. Hegel transformed religious and theological concepts in his works, explaining them in a philosophical, historical, and cultural context. In line with this trend, he offers a new interpretation of the meaning of the fall: "knowledge brought about the Fall, but it also contains the principle of Redemption" (Hegel, 1968, p. 447). Plucking the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the biblical narrative leads to the expUlsion "from the state of innocence, from Nature ... and from Paradise" (Hegel, 1977, p. 468). For He~el, then, the fall is not necessarily a descent to an inferior state, but a libe~tion from primary existence. This liberation entails an element of negation, but also the inner power leading it to redemption, to the full revelation of the spirit, and to full consciousness of the immanent purpose of history. Hegel marks a crucial turning point in our understanding of the Christian concept of the fall. First, in the Hegelian fall, human beings are not expelled by an external power; they reject their original state. Second, the fall is not a physical movement from one location to another but a change in a state of consciousness. Third, the fall is progress instead of retreat. The fall is not accompanied by 10ngiJJl.gs for the original state, since the fall represents a step forward. Heidegger discusses at length the meaning of the fall in Being and Time (1962, pp. 219-224). He suggests an approach that incorporates Christian and

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Hegelian elements. From the Christian approach he takes the idea that a state defmed as fall is less perfect than one not so defmed; contrary to the Christian view, however, he argues that the fall is a shift from authentic to inauthentic existence instead of from one location to another. Extensive discussion of Heidegger's concept of authenticity exceeds the confines of the present discussion. Briefly, an authentic existence is one in which human consciousness is transparent, namely, a reality in which individuals are conscious of existential meanings in their lives. The fall is a kind of blurred existence in terms of consciousness, in which individuals tend to explain themselves in terms fitting the objects. A state of fall, for Heidegger, is one of self-alienation (ibid., p. 222), because in a blurred, unfocused existence, individuals are alienated from their authentic being. Unlike Hegel, who had seen the fall as a progressive process, Heidegger claimed that the fall is not progress but everyday reality for most people at most times, so that authentic existence is merely its modification (ibid., p. 224). The existential voyage is still a voyage to authenticity, to transparency, and to self-clarity. Like Hegel, Heidegger located the concept of the "fall" within ontological existential reality and not within the cosmological story. Camus defmitely rejects the Christian approach: Clamence was not expelled from Paradise, Paris is not Eden, nor is Amsterdam the earth. The fall is not physical displacement, but a change in consciousness. But does he consider the fall a form of progress, as Hegel had, or a retreat to a vague, unfocused conscious existence? His answer is complex: the fall is progress as well as retreat. He agrees with Hegel's claim that, in the fall, human beings become conscious of themselves and are released from their "natural," immediate existence. Contrary to Hegel, however, Camus is not convinced that retreat includes the "principle of redemption." The fall takes us further away from self-redemption; our conscious existence deepens our alienation from others and from ourselves. In this sense, Camus endorses the Heideggerian view. The Fall is thus a complex picture of human existence, incorporating realism as well as criticism. The loss of innocence is more than the central thesis of this work, and becomes the foundation that Camus is now reexperiencing. The tension between redeemed, harmonious life as opposed to alienated life is fully visible in the metaphor of the sea, which plays a significant role in this work. As noted in Chapter Three, the sea represents harmony and salvation. Camus even writes: "The sea: I did not lose myself in it, I found myself in it" (Camus, 1964, p. 314). In The Fall, however, metaphors of sea and water are extremely complex. This is how Camus describes Amsterdam and its canals: Have you noticed that Amsterdam's concentric canals resemble the circles of hell? The middle-class hell, of course, peopled with bad

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dreams. When one co~es from the outside, as one gradually goes through those circles, life - and hence its crimes - becomes denser, darker. (The Fall, p. 13) The concentric circles more than hint to Dante's hell. As Shoshana Felman points out: "Camus's is thus not merely a concentric but a concentrationary hell, the very one whose ghost is now returning in Stalin's Russia" (Felman, 1992, p. 187). The description of the sea as a loss of the way and as death recurs elsewhere: The Zuiderzee is a dead sea, or almost. With its flat shores, lost in the fog, there's no knowing where it begins or ends. So we are steaming along without any landmark; we can't gauge our speed. We are making progress and yet nothing is changing. It's not navigation but dreaming. (The Fall, p. 73) The mention of the Zuidersee is interesting in the context. The Zuidersee is dead because, many years before The Fall was written, the Dutch "killed" it. They enclosed part of it and left only part connected to the ocean. Neither of these two parts took the name Zuidersee after the division. Camus thus uses a dead concept to refer to a dead entity. Neither the linguistic representation nor the object signifies a real entity. This is death par excellence. This description of the sea is antithetical to the symbolic meaning of the sea in Camus's oeuvre as a whole, including The Fall. This death is the result of a human act, as Amsterdam's concentric canals are a human feat. Contrasting with the human corruption of existence is the classic metaphor of the sea. The infmite sea is an entity that human hands have not restricted, corrupted, killed, or turned into hell, as Camus describes it in most of his works: "Holland is not only the Europe of merchants but also the sea, the sea that leads to Cipango and to those islands where men die mad and happy" (The Fall, p. 12). This complex picture describes the tension between the abyss, the fmding of the self and of harmony, as opposed to opacity, blurring, and the inability to sink into existence and into the implications of this immersion. These two metaphors of the sea juxtapose the given against the yearning. Clamence/Camus longs to immerse again into existence. This novella, as noted, poses the question that Camus appears to have answered long ago in The Plague and The Rebel. This work is a touching display of sincerity, when Camus does not hesitate to take the place of Clamence, an untruthful actor whose continued lies, fabrications, and denials are a profound manifestation of truth and honesty about conscious and existential human anguish. He is everyone in the vast cities burdened with the memories of the dead who are no longer, and branded with the human failure to take a stand. Camus does not elude responsibility. Tenaciously, with almost

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religious zeal, he digs up the mystery and removes all possible masks. He renounces even the human hope implied in the solidarity of a pledged community responding to the call. Camus now repeatedly demands from his readers, as well as from himself, to consider whether human beings can escape the mirror that has overtaken them. He has no answers, but his present questions are more relevant than his previous answers. They convey a cruel transparency and a self-consciousness unwilling to slip away, and this is the story's power. Camus was aware of the quasi-religious pathos of this work. As John the Baptist calls for repentance (see Matthew 3:2; Mark 1:4; Luke 3:8), so Jean Baptiste Clamence is a "judge-penitent" (The Fall, p. 10), whose presence is a plea for repentance. Camusl Clamence is a "voice crying in the wilderness" (Matthew 3:1; Mark 1:4; Luke 3:4). Clamence shows he is fully aware of his role as prophet: "That's really what I am, having taken refuge in a desert of stones, fogs, and stagnant waters - an empty prophet for shabby times, Elijah without a messiah" (The Fall, p. 87) Like John baptizing for repentance, Clamence/Camus also baptizes himself and his readers into repentance, a baptism that unfolds through participation in the existentialist voyage to the depths of one's being. This baptism, contrary to John's, is not the fIrst step toward the revelation of the Messiah, nor is it part of a messianic or redemptive process. Instead, this baptism leads us to the most profound recesses of our being, to discover the exile in which we live, and encounter the relentless demands raised by intersubjective existence. We may compare this existentialist voyage to the meaning of "the voyage" in the traditional cultures described by Victor Witter Turner (1974, chapters 5-6). The classic voyage is one between times, places or classes. Pilgrimages to holy places, for instance, are in this category. The voyage is an experience generating meaning .that is often described as extremely dangerous, especially in rites de passage or in initiation rituals. The purpose of this voyage is to connect those who embark on it to the center, to the navel of the world: The road is arduous, fraught with perils, because it is, in fact, a rite de passage from the profane to the sacred, from the ephemeral and illusory to reality and eternity, from death to life, from man to the divinity. Attaining the center is equivalent to a consecration, an initiation; yesterday's profane and illusory existence gives place to a new, to a life that is real, enduring, and effective. (Eliade, 1991, p. 18) The center, or the navel of the world, need not be out "there"; it can be inside us. A voyage of this kind could be the one connecting us to the center of our being (ibid.).

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In this sense, The Fall is a kind of voyage, not to a place but to the self. Jean Baptiste Clamence undertakes a voyage to his being to reach the origin, to fmd release from yesterday's lies and enter a life of truth. He is a modem, "secular pilgrim," whose sanctified "place" is his being. This is not only an initiation voyage, then, but a rite de passage. Rites de passage is a generic term for a series of cultural rituals, of which the "initiation voyage" could be one, with the self, the "center" of one's being, as the destination. Clamence's initiation is a rite de passage because he is separating from a previous false identity and searching for a passage to the self, to the new, true identity. As Arnold van Gennep (1960), Mircea Eliade (1975), and others have pointed out, rites de passage involve three classic stages: separation from the previous identity, an intermediate, "liminal" stage, and a stage of entry into the new identity. Whereas the first stage includes elements of pain and death, the last stage emerges as a kind of rebirth. During the liminal stage, between death and birth, the participants have no identity - they have already detached themselves from their previous identity and have not yet entered their new one. This is the most dangerous stage, a situation without defenses. Where is Clamence within this framework? At what stage in the rite de passage? He is obviously not at the third stage, since he has not reached redemption, has not attained a new identity. But he is not in his old identity either, since he has left it behind with great pain and suffering. Clamence, then, is at the liminal and most dangerous stage, without an identity and without a defmed reference group. Clamence is "an empty prophet for shabby times, Elijah without a messiah." This is the paramount difference between the classic rite de passage and the one Clamence is undergoing. Classic rites de passage usually end. These rites entail an assumption of completion. Clamence's modem rite de passage does not end, because no basic cosmic ontological order exists to ensure transition from one identity to another. Self-consciousness also stops individuals from innocently re-entering a new identity. The fall thus represents a process, an endless existential voyage. What was obvious in the great religious and tribal traditions, became for Camus an existential problem. Clamence undertakes an existential voyage without innocence, without any premises about the order of the world and of existence. This is a deconstructing voyage, removing masks, the absolute antithesis of classic pilgrimages. Camus reverses the religious-traditional world. He uses its symbols and its metaphors to describe a life representing the polar opposite of religious life. According to this interpretation, however, the denial of religious traditionalism is evidence of its strength. Camus/Clamence does not engage in a battle with dead shadows, which would be a pointless endeavor. He struggles for his soul against a tempting alternative. Is this not a confmnation of the power of religion? The status of religious tradition in Camus's thought is the subject of the next chapter.

Thirteen RELIGIOSITY AND RELIGIOUS CRITICISM IN CAMUS'S THOUGHT Readers and critics of Camus's oeuvre often ascribe to him an atheistic Weltanschauung. In their view, atheism is the starting point of his general outlook. According to Jean Onimus, Camus's atheism is even more primary than his link to nature, and atheism deflects him to nature: "It [nature] filled the abyss that consciousness creates .... Nature snatches the conscious being from his subjectivity and overwhelms him suddenly by annihilating him, an experience well known to the mystics" (Onimus, 1970, p. 10). According to this theory, openness and the yearning for the mysterious Being, which 1 analyzed in Chapter Two above, are but one of the consequences of Camus's primary atheism. But this ascription of atheism to Camus is problematic. From the perspective of the absurd, consciousness must remain within its boundaries: it cannot compel the existence of God, but cannot deny it either. Atheism and theism exceed the boundaries of critical thought that Camus endorses, since both are committed to metaphysical claims that transcend the confines of consciousness (Loose, 1962, p. 203). Camus clarifies this point by stating: "I shall never start from the supposition that Christian truth is illusory, but merely from the fact that I could not accept it" (Camus, 1966, pp. 69-70). Camus, then, rejects Christianity not because he considers it false, but because he is unwilling to accept the values it represents, a point he discusses when referring to metaphysical rebellion (see above, p. 121). He refers to this position as "irreligion" (The Rebel, p. 92) or "provisional atheism" (ibid., p. 145). These meticulous formulations show that Camus carefully refrains from endorsing the approach Onimus ascribes to him, namely, from adopting atheism. Aware of the similarities between his approach and atheism, Camus is willing to project his view as a kind of provisional atheism embodied in his adherence to immanence and to nature, but without thereby implying a refutation of God's existence or of Christian truths. Institutionalized religion played no role in Camus's personal biography. His family was not atheistic, but found faith irrelevant: Actually religion had no part in their lives. No one went to Mass, no one invoked or taught the Ten Commandments, nor did anyone refer to the rewards and punishments of the hereafter.... This because for them, as for most Algerians, religion was part of their civic life and that alone. They were Catholic as they were French. (The First Man, pp. 164-165. See also The Outsider, pp. 110-111)

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Camus did not view his family's approach to religion as the product of a deliberate decision. This way of life reflected his family's needy circumstances as well as the Mediterranean lifestyle. For the poor, "it becomes hard to find a place for religion" (The First Man, p. 165). Their world was full of light, sun, and sea. Recollecting his early experiences, he describes children as living in a world, "unknown to and ignorant of God, unable to imagine a future life when this life seemed so inexhaustible each day under the protection of the indifferent deities of sun, of sea, or of poverty." (ibid., p. 209) In this sense, his deprived, provincial family expressed, even if unconsciously, a modernist worldview. Modernity differs from previous eras, inter alia, in its renewed attitude to religion. Modernists are not typical atheists, who deny religion and the existence of God. Typical atheists build their approach in reference to the religious world, thereby enhancing the importance of the very religion they seek to reject. By contrast, modernists do not claim "God does not exist," but, in Friedrich Nietzsche's formulation, "God is dead." God and religion are irrelevant to human existence. Modernists do not mold their lives through the denial of religion, since religion no longer has a constitutive role in their world. Camus's poor, Mediterranean family distinctively represents this state of mind, a state of mind that also proved decisive in the shaping of his views. Camus admits he feels no attachment to God (Camus, 1966, p. 22). Given this biography, we should not wonder that Rieux needs further clarification when Tarrou asks him whether he believes in God (see p. 121 above). In light of this analysis, the claim that atheism is constitutive of Camus's spiritual and , existential world is misleading. But despite his remoteness from faith in God or from Christianity, Camus's worldview bears the imprint of an approach we could call "secular religiosity." As noted in Chapter Two above, Camus has a deep sense of the mysterious, of existence being more than our transparent experience of reality. This religiosity is secular because its object is not God but the Being itself, and Camus consciously formulates its parameters. Jean-Claude Brisville asked him in an interview: -You once wrote: "Secret of my universe: imagine God without the immortality of the soul." Can you define more exactly what you meant? -Yes, I have a sense of the sacred and I don't believe in a future life, that's all. (Camus, 1968, p. 364) The mystery emerges within immanence. The encounter with immanence expands into a religious experience bordering on a unio mystica (see p. 37 above). At the same time, however, Camus stresses a sense of detachment and isolation:

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Yes, I am present. And what strikes me at this moment is that I can go no further-like a man sentenced to life imprisonment, to whom everything is present ... All through this country I followed something that belonged not to me but to it [the landscape], something like a taste for death we both had in common. (Ibid., p. 75, my emphasis) This passage emphasizes Camus's detachment from the landscape, from the Being, a separation that, for Camus, rests on the experience of a death we do not wish: "men die in spite of themselves, in spite of their surroundings" (ibid., p. 78). Death makes us lucidly aware of our passionate love for life, but also turns us away from the world and toward existence: It is to the extent I cut myself off from the world that I fear death most, to the degree I attach myself to the fate of living men instead of contemplating the unchanging sky. Creating conscious deaths is to diminish the distance that separates us from the world and to accept a consummation without joy, alert to rapturous images ofa world forever lost. (Ibid.)

Death severs us from a sense of unity with existence and leads us to action, to "consummation," leaving us longing for a "world forever lost." Two fundamental experiences mark Camus's spiritual horizon: unity and a divine presence, as opposed to a sense of detachment and the pining for a unity lost through our consciousness of death and human finitude. Micheline Tisson-Braun (1988) holds that unity, as Camus describes it in "Nuptials at Tipasa," is the more primary of the two, whereas in "The Wind at Djemila" we witness Camus becoming aware of the break between himself and the world, and between himself and the transcendent. I do not accept this view, since I consider unity an immanent, sustained element in Camus's thought. For instance, in "Summer in Algiers," he writes: It is not always easy to be a man, even less to be a man who is pure. But to be pure means to rediscover that country of the soul where one's kinship with the world can be felt, where the throbbing of one's blood mingles with the violent pulsations of the afternoon sun. (Camus, 1968, p. 90) Concepts such as purity, or mingling with the water and the sun, are expressions of a return to the source and reflect a yearning for unity with the universe that was a permanent component of Camus's life and work. The concrete world in which we are meant to immerse becomes increasingly alien to all of us. The gods in The Outsider no longer speak in their quiet voices. This strangeness, however, does not imply complete nihilism and alienation. The absurd is the classic representation of the lost unity we yearn for, but Camus does not renounce unity, only its realization in the concrete world. More precisely, he forsakes the idea that, by uniting with the concrete

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world, we return to our personal identity, to the "country of the soul." Unity will now seek other avenues and, paramount among them, human solidarity. What began as a religious, pantheistic, Plotinian experience, is ultimately reduced to the unity of humanity. Although ostensibly far removed from a religious conceptual framework, this is Camus's fundamental religious experience - the experience of unity with the Being. Nowhere does Camus endorse a transcendent perception of divinity, which is forever immanent. His preference for immanence, however, is not a renunciation ofreligiosity, but the profound expression of his basic approach to religion. Camus's use of religious language deserves special attention in this context. He does not reject the concepts of religious language, but transmutes their meaning. Let us consider a few examples. The story "The Desert" involves this kind of conceptual transmutation: For the body knows nothing of hope. All it knows is the beating of its own heart .... The impassiveness and the greatness that man shows when he has no hope, the eternal present, is precisely what perceptive theologians have called hell. (Camus, 1968, pp. 94--95) Human existence attains eternity in the fullness of bodily existence, through an unqualified endorsement of the present without expectations from the future. This eternity contrasts with religious eternity, and theologians have therefore called it hell. For Camus, imperviousness to the primacy of concrete existence expresses an unwillingness to experience this existence to the full: The immortality of the soul, it is true, engrosses many noble minds. But this is because they reject the body, the only truth that is given them, before using up its strength .... [the body is] a truth which must perish and which thus acquires a bitterness and nobility they dare not contemplate directly. (Ibid., p. 95) Further, Camus writes: A living Lorenzo is better than a Romeo in his grave, despite his rosebush. Then why not dance in these celebrations of living love ... look once more for the face of that laughing woman with the long nose and proud mouth. All we need understand is that this initiation prepares us for higher illuminations .... It is in joy that man prepares his lessons and when his ecstasy is at its highest pitch that the flesh becomes conscious and consecrates its communion with a sacred mystery whose symbol is black blood. It is now that the self-forgetfulness drawn from the ardor of that first Italy prepares us for the lesson that frees us from hope and from our history. (Ibid., pp. 97-98)

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Concepts such as "initia~ion" and "illumination" relate here to concrete existence. Immanence is holiness, and illumination is accepting the eternity of a present that is not a means or a stage in the passage to another world. Human beings draw a covenant with this concrete existence. Camus makes similar use of the religious concept of "purity": There was a generous opulence in the flowers and in the women, and I could not see that desiring the latter was much different from longing for the former. The same pure heart sufficed for both. It's not often a man feels his heart is pure. But when he does, it is his duty to call what has singularly purified him truth, even if this truth may seem a blasphemy to others. (Ibid., p. 99) Purification is an act that improves us, cleanses us from pollution. The purity Camus mentions refers to the correct attitude to the most concrete aspects of desire and passion as bearers of human existence. Camus also speaks of the "gospels": "The message of these gospels of stone, sky and water is that there are no resurrections" (ibid., p. 101) and then adds: "The world is beautiful, and outside it there is no salvation" (ibid., p. 103). We could go on tracing new signifieds for long-established religious concepts. We see that this use ascribes the complex of religious meanings conveyed through the traditional religious concepts to immanent existence. Why persist in the use of traditional religious language? Why not discard this language together with the rejection of religious attitudes? One explanation worth considering is that Camus's use of religious language is part of a strategy of religious criticism whereby, by pouring secular immanent contents into religious language, Camus intends to neutralize its seductive power. If we assume, however, that Camus does not reject secular religiosity as a basic datum of existence but renounces only the transcendent, the assumption that Camus accepts this language instead of seeking to neutralize it, appears more plausible. The language itself, contrary to the specific manifestations of religiosity, represents a fundamental element of human existence. As Camus had rejected the rationalist metaphysical manifestation but not the passion for rationality, so does he reject specific manifestations of religion but not its language. This language, when cleansed of its particularistic religious representations, teaches a basic lesson about human existence per se, such as the absurd. On what grounds, then, does Camus reject Christianity? How could a man so deeply sensitive to secular religiosity criticize Christianity so harshly? Pinpointing the time at which Camus launches his scathing critique of Christianity may help us to answer this question. Although he grew up in a secular family, Camus showed great interest in Christianity. As early as 1936, when at the University of Algiers, he wrote his

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dissertation on the subject of Christian metaphysics and Neoplatonism, which was published in Essais under the title "Entre Plotin et Saint Augustin" (see Camus, 1965). In this work, which is not remarkably original, the young Camus is concerned with the development of early Christian thought and its influence on late Greek philosophy. His advisor was his teacher Jean Grenier, a deeply religious man who, at the time, taught philosophy at the University of Algiers. As Jacques Hardre shows (1967), intimations of Camus's attitude to Christianity and of his intense admiration for Hellenistic tradition are already latent in this work. This plunge into Christian thought, despite his thoroughly secular upbringing, is surprising, and indicative of Camus's openness and sensitivity to religion. Given Camus's later critique of Christianity, which I discuss below, his obliviousness to it in The Myth of Sisyphus is puzzling. He relates to Christianity only indirectly in this work, through his critique of religious existentialists such as S0ren Kierkegaard, Leon Chestov, and others (The Myth of Sisyphus, pp. 27-28, 35-42). He defmes religious existentialism, because of its relinquishment of consciousness, as "philosophical suicide." Instead of an absurd life, religious existentialism offers renunciation, a leap into faith, and the hope of salvation. The denial of rationality establishes religiosity, and Camus cannot agree to this (see p. 62 above). Clifford Geertz describes breakdown moments: There are at least three points where chaos - a tumult of events which lack not just interpretations but interpretability - threatens to break in upon man: at the limits of his analytic capacities, at the limits of his powers of endurance, and at the limits of his moral insight. (Geertz 1973, p. 100). According to Geertz, deep and prolonged experiences of these points undermine our confidence in life as intelligible, and are a constant challenge to all religions. When they fail to contend with this challenge, religions lose their vitality. Relating to the first of these points, Geertz argues: "the disquieting sense that cognitive resources may prove unavailing" is awakened not only by extraordinary events: More commonly it is a persistent, constantly re-experienced difficulty in grasping certain aspects of nature, self, and society, in bringing certain elusive phenomena within the sphere of culturally formulatable fact, which renders man chronically uneasy... sets ordinary human experience in a permanent context of metaphysical concern and raises the dim, backof-the-mind suspicions that one may be adrift in an absurd world. (Ibid., p. 102)

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Like Geertz, Camus is aware of suspicions and unease in this regard, yet holds we should remain within it and assume the yoke of the absurd. Even if religions do contend with the challenge of the absurd, as Geertz accurately points out, Camus does not consider this a sufficient reason for endorsing a religious approach. The limitations of our analytic capabilities are not a sufficient reason for affirming religion. The religion claiming it "compensates" for this deficiency is eluding the truth about the human condition. Camus, then, is not exceptionally harsh in his religious criticism. He understands the appeal of religion in the face of the absurd but, in the wake of the cautious analysis presented in Chapter Seven above, he concludes that religion is an unacceptable solution to the absurdity of existence. The crucifixion is the foundation of Christianity. Through this event, Christianity turned suffering into the constitutive event of religiosity, a view Camus frods morally unacceptable. Camus relates to Jesus with great admiration in many passages in his writings, but this appreciation does not extend to the crucifIXion. Jesus becomes a mediator between heaven and earth, a "no man" who closed the gap between the demand for justice and an unjust world. He discusses this point in several places in The Rebel: For as long as the Western World has been Christian, the Gospels have been the interpreter between heaven and earth. Each time a solitary cry of rebellion was uttered, the answer came in the form of an even more terrible suffering. In that Christ had suffered, and had suffered voluntarily, suffering was no longer unjust and all pain was necessary. In one sense, Christianity's bitter intuition and legitimate pessimism concerning human behavior is based on the assumption that over-all injustice is as satisfying to man as total justice. Only the sacrifice of an innocent God could justify the endless and universal torture of innocence. Only the most abject suffering by God could assuage man's agony. (The Rebel, p. 34) Camus accuses Christianity of forsaking human beings, of using Christ's agony to allow and condone human suffering in all its forms. Instead of enjoining Christians to struggle against suffering, Christianity requires them to make a habit of it, identify with it, and view it as the decisive moment in a life of faith - imitatio Dei. Camus's critique of religion rests on his humanism, on the refusal to accept a reality that can justify, in any way, the killing of the innocent. This world, where innocent children are murdered, has no justification. He quotes Ivan Karamazov: "If the suffering of children serves to complete the sum of suffering necessary for the acquisition of truth, I affirm from now onward that truth is not worth such a price," to which Camus adds: "Ivan rejects the basic interdependence, introduced by Christianity, between suffering and truth (ibid, p.56).

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In The Plague, Camus offers an unsparing analysis oftheodicy. Paneloux, the Jesuit priest, preaches two sennons on suffering. In the first (The Plague, pp. 80-84), he tries to claim that the pain of the afflicted is justified. Like Job's friends, he argues that the plague is an inevitable retribution for the wickedness of the people of Oran. God is forbearing and waited for the sinners's repentance but, when it proved late in coming, he sent them the plague as "punishment for their sins" (ibid., p. 83). Wearied of waiting for you to come to Him, He loosed on you this visitation; as He has visited all the cities that offended against Him, since the dawn of history. Now you are learning your lesson, the lesson that was learnt by Cain and his offspring, by the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, by Job and Pharaoh, by all that hardened their hearts against Him. (Ibid., p.82) Some people found this notion repulsive. They could not accept "they had been sentenced, for an unknown crime, to an indetenninate period of punishment" (ibid., p. 84). Rieux was even more emphatic: "I've seen too much of hospitals to relish any idea of collective punishment" (ibid., p. 105). He will not accept any justification for the death of the innocent. What Rieux is truly saying is that justifying evil is tantamount to deserting human beings, and faith in God requires us to forsake humanity (ibid., pp. 106-107). Paneloux is a member of the Jesuit order, which champions human action in the world and, accordingly, becomes Rieux's partner in the persistent struggle against the plague and against evil. Rieux, however, claims that this struggle is incompatible with a theology of theodicy: if God is always just, and if the plague is a justified punishment for human sin, to struggle against the plague is to struggle against a just God. How could Paneloux do this? As Rieux shrewdly remarks, however, "no one in the world believed in a God of that sort; no, not even Paneloux, who believed that he believed in such a God" (ibid., p. 106). Paneloux, then, is better than his beliefs; his caring and solidarity do not originate in the theodicy he supports. But Paneloux does not renounce the attempt to defend his religious faith. In his second sennon, he consciously gives up a rational religious view, and returns to the basic thesis of the crucifixion: We see no reason for a child's suffering. And truth to tell, nothing was more important on earth than a child's suffering, the horror it inspires in us, and the reasons we must find to account for it .... He [Paneloux] might easily have assured them that the child's sufferings would be compensated for by an eternity of bliss awaiting him. But how could he give that assurance when, to tell the truth, he knew nothing about it? For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering? (Ibid., p. 183)

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Contrary to the rational approach he had presented in his fIrst sermon, Paneloux now presents a thesis whereby faith implies the endorsement of the incomprehensible. Christian faith means: total acceptance ... the Christian should yield himself wholly to the divine will, even though it passed his understanding. It was wrong to say, "This I understand, but that I cannot accept"; we must go straight to the heart of that which is unacceptable, precisely because it is thus that we are constrained to make our choice. The sufferings of children were our bread of affliction, but without this bread our souls would die of spiritual hunger. (Ibid., pp. 184-185, emphasis in the original. See also ibid., pp. 186-187) Paneloux now offers a thesis that enables human action together with faith. Pain and evil is a test of faith for believers: will they renounce their mind and their moral and rational consciousness and affirm faith, or will they reject faith? According to the second sermon, believers give up the pretense of understanding, renouncing the rational, divine perspective embraced in the fIrst sermon. Believers, according to the second sermon, are ready for the hardest of renunciations: they are willing to waive their consciousness, thereby demonstrating their religious faith. The paradigm of a life of faith in the second sermon is the crucifIxion. Jesus learned, in his flesh, the intensity of torment and the lack of reward for it. The believer, therefore "would keep faith with that great symbol of all suffering, the tortured body on the Cross; he would stand fast, his back to the wall, and face honestly the terrible problem of a child's agony" (ibid., p. 183). Tarrou is the one who reacts to this sermon: Tarrou, when told by Rieux what Paneloux had said, remarked that he'd known a priest who had lost his faith during the war, as the result of seeing a young man's face with both eyes destroyed. "Paneloux is right," Tarrou continued. "When an innocent youth can have his eyes destroyed, a Christian should either lose his faith or consent to having his eyes destroyed." (Ibid., p. 187) This response leaves no room for doubt: no justifIcation exists, nor could exist, for the suffering and death of the innocent. When Tarrou reports the priest's loss of faith, he is speaking in Paneloux's repressed voice. In his notes, Camus records plans for a story about a priest losing his faith when confronted with human suffering, and in the fIrst version of The Plague, which he wrote in 1941, the priest does lose his faith (see Onimus, 1970, pp. 45-46). In the fInal version, however, Paneloux does not lose his faith, and Camus sets the fundamentalist priest against such humanists as Tarrou and Rieux. Camus's repudiation of Christianity is radical and profound. He rejects it categorically and unreservedly, as a position that justifIes suffering and evil, is

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impervious to the death of the innocent, and turns pain into a gesture of faith. The barbarity of the Second World War is at the root of this view. Camus discovered, to his astonishment, that Christians had remained silent and unmoved by its iniquities (Camus, 1966, pp. 69-74). Camus explained this bizarre stance by pointing to the contrast between himself and Christianity: "If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man" (ibid., p. 73). For Camus, Christianity is a doctrine that has given up concrete human being in favor of a redeemed future. The crucifixion ensures future human redemption at the horrid price of renouncing the lives of concrete human beings or, more precisely, at the cost of renouncing justice. He went as far as to place the Germans beside God: "You chose injustice and sided with the gods. Your logic was merely apparent" (ibid., p. 28). The iniquity of the Nazis is a reincarnation of the basic injustice of the Christian god. We must therefore struggle against Christianity and reject it, not because of its falsity but because its values are unacceptable. In The Rebel, Camus takes this approach to its extreme conclusions. His critique of Christianity leads him to rethink the social and metaphysical role of religion. Through this critique, Camus becomes aware of the meaning and decisive role of religion, which is now in the eye of the storm, contrary to his stance in The Myth ofSisyphus. And yet, a closer reading shows that Camus still preserves elements from The Myth of Sisyphus in The Rebel. Religion is for Camus one manifestation of the passion for rationality, order, and coherence. The thirst for lucidity and full understanding, which is one of the constitutive poles of the absurd, concretizes historically in religion. It reflects order, unity, and harmony. But religion has one advantage over philosophy: it ensures the existence of a personal God warranting justice and morality. The direct relationship between rebellion and religion takes several forms. Analytically, only if we assume a personal God guaranteeing justice do protest and rebellion make any sense (see pp. 122, 124 above). In this sense, the phenomenon of rebellion is itself the expression of the initial religious attitude, fully conveying the disappointment evoked by religious justifications of suffering. Phenomenologically, this very disappointment is an expectation of a higher religiosity; the deep motivation to rebel is a desperate yearning for a perfect religiosity: The rebel obstinately confronts a world condemned to death and the impenetrable obscurity of the human condition with his demand for life and absolute clarity .... Therefore, if the rebel blasphemes, it is in the hope offmding a new god. (Ibid., p. 101) In this context, Camus's stress on the difference between atheism and rebellion is understandable. The rebel is struggling against God:

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The metaphysical rebel is therefore not defmitely an atheist, as one might think him, but he is inevitably a blasphemer. Quite simply, he blasphemes primarily in the name of order, denouncing God as the father of death and as the supreme outrage. (Ibid., p. 24) Camus's attention to the religious phenomenon leads him to acknowledge the socio-political role of religions in the history of revolutions. For instance, he refers to Rousseau's The Social Contract as ''The New Gospel" (ibid., p. 114), and describes it as a new kind of dogmatic catechism (ibid., p. 115). According to the view that Rousseau endorses in this work, "the body politic [thus defmed], whose laws are sacred commandments, is only a by-product of the mystic body of temporal Christianity" (ibid., p. 116). In a deep insight, Camus emphasizes that religious perceptions shift from traditional religion to other institutions, mainly political ones. Even if the concrete embodiment of religion is unacceptable, religious constructs, such as the yearning for rationality and transparency, reflect basic thought patterns. Yet, together with this recognition of religion's function in sparking rebellion, the available options are now evident: "only two possible worlds can exist for the human mind: the sacred (or to speak in Christian terms, the world of grace) and the world of rebellion" (ibid., p. 21). Although Camus holds we must choose rebellion because religion has proven morally disappointing, he is also aware of the crucial question facing humanity: "Is it possible to fmd a rule of conduct outside the realm of religion and its absolute values?" (ibid.). In Camus's view, this is the very question at the core of the rebellion. The comparison between The Rebel and The Plague on this point is enlightening. In The Plague, Tarrou raises this issue, when he wonders how to become a saint, and whether God is a required component in this process (see p. 122 above). Rieux rejects this stance and confmes himself to stating; : "Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is - being a man" (ibid., p. 209). Tarrou acknowledges the might of religion and ponders whether its power and holiness can be preserved without God. Rieux, who believes in human solidarity, dismisses the question outright. He is not laboring for human redemption, nor in order to become a saint: "What I hate is death and disease" (ibid., pp. 178-179). Tarrou and Rieux disagree on whether human activity is at all possible if bereft of any religious pathos. Tarrou holds this is a serious question, while Rieux dismisses it as irrelevant. By contrast, in The Rebel, Camus endorses a complex stance. He does recognize the power of human solidarity to bring about action and, like Rieux, accepts that human beings are called upon to act. Yet, he also agrees with Tarrou's approach, whereby the normative commitment found at the core of rebellion, which leads to solidarity, is suffused with religious pathos. Camus understands that humanism draws power and

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sustenance from its rejection of religiosity, but he also knows that rebellion could end up in the mass murder it set about to oppose. Rebellion and solidarity are an attempt to create a just world instead of a world of divine grace. Unlike the world of divine grace, where God is active, creating a just world is a human task. Even if our victories against evil and iniquity are only temporary, this is no reason to halt the struggle, "raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence" (The Plague, p. 108). Camus's attitude to religion undergoes a profound shift in The Fall. As noted in the previous chapter, Clamence is the shadow of John the Baptist, who calls for repentance and heralds the coming of redemption. Unlike John, however, Clamence's gospel renounces redemption; he is the "prophef' of selfaware consciousness, lacking religious pathos, a prophet who renounces rebellion and the readiness to struggle. The hero of The Fall has lost the moral power animating Rieux and Tarrou. As Camus simultaneously builds and subverts his thesis of rebellion and solidarity, his questioning of religion intensifies. The figure of Jesus on the cross loses whatever value it had held for him, and he no longer views the crucifixion as an innocent acceptance of suffering: Say, do you know why he was crucified - the one you are perhaps thinking of at this moment?.. Besides the reasons that have been very well explained to us for the past two thousand years, there was a major one for that terrible agony .... The real reason is that he knew he was not altogether innocent. If he did not bear the weight of the crime he was accused of, he had committed others--even though he didn't know which ones. Did he really not know them? He was at the source, after all; he must have heard of a certain slaughter of the innocents. The children of Judea massacred while his parents were taking him to a safe place - why did they die if not because of him? .. I am sure he could not forget them. And as for that sadness that can be felt in his every act, wasn't it the incurable melancholy of a man who heard night after night the voice of Rachel weeping for her children and refusing all comfort? (The Fall, pp. 83-84) Camus blatantly accuses Jesus: he is responsible for the death of others and, therefore, cannot be innocent. Who are these others, "the children of Judea massacred"? Camus is speaking of a distant past, but a more recent present resonates between the lines. Jesus and Christianity are responsible for the death of the Jews. The crucifixion, therefore, does not justify future suffering or express blameless pain. Christianity does not rest on the suffering of the innocent, but on guilt. In this light, Camus views religion as concerned with a persistent effort to erase guilt: "I am inclined to see religion rather as a huge laundering venture" (ibid., p. 83). Religion is an endless human attempt to reject guilt, namely, to renounce freedom and personal responsibility, since only a free creature can be

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guilty, and only a person who can be guilty can also be free. Like Nietzsche, Camus emphasizes that religion is an escape from freedom, responsibility, and guilt: "Without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful" (ibid., p. 99). Clamence is the prophet of a doctrine "that refuses to grant man innocence" (ibid.). He is the prophet of consciousness and freedom, and of a religion devoid of pathos and solidarity. At best, human beings are dubious creatures; instead of a conscience, they bear the burden of a critical selfconsciousness that hinders their spontaneity and their responsiveness to the demand of their fellows. Camus's critique of religion concludes with his renewed critique of the human ability to mobilize into action against evil. A correlation is evident between Camus's attitude to religion and his appraisal of rebellion. Revolt is meaningful when confronting a religion that, at least ostensibly, poses a challenge of justice and harmony. The critique of rebellion emerges together with the renunciation of the initial assumption concerning the meaning of religion. Religion is now nothing more than an expression of the basic human attempt to escape freedom and responsibility when faced with a demand from the other. After Auschwitz, rebellion, like religion, attests to human weakness.

Fourteen BETWEEN AN ETHICS OF COMPASSION AND AN ETHICS OF mSTICE In this chapter, I examine Camus's thought through the perspective of three conceptual frames: compassion, the ethics of compassion, and the ethics of justice. What is compassion? Is it a worthy moral quality? What type of interpersonal discourse does compassion shape? Benedict de Spinoza offers a basic description of compassion as "sorrow which springs from another's loss" (Spinoza, 1927, Schol., Prop. xxii, p. 125). For Spinoza, then, compassion is a type of sadness, different because its cause is the distress of the other. According to this definition, compassion is an affection of the compassionate person, an inner event that does not necessarily imply changes in attitude toward the suffering other, because in compassion we do not exceed the bounds of our circumscribed being. If the compassionate person does mobilize into action in favor of a troubled other, this is a random event, which does not ensue from the basic structure of compassion. Two different critiques addressed Spinoza's view of compassion. The first assumed his perception of compassion is correct but argued that, due to its character, compassion could not be a basis for morality. The second claimed that Spinoza's analysis of compassion as a concept was fundamentally flawed. The classic representative of the first critique is Immanuel Kant, who holds that morality must derive from objective, rational principles. Feelings such as compassion are purely subjective, and cannot be the basis for stable moral activity and for a universally valid system: Morals themselves are liable to all kinds of corruption as long as the guide and supreme norm for correctly estimating them are missing. For in the case of what is to be morally good, that it conforms to the moral law is not enough; it must also be done for the sake of the moral law. Otherwise that conformity is only very contingent and uncertain, since the non-moral ground may now and then produce actions that conform with the law but quite often produces actions that are contrary to the law. (Kant, 1981, p. 3) Kant's critique of virtues that do not rest on a universal obligation is twofold. First, these virtues are random and unstable; a person can be compassionate but can also remain indifferent to the other's sorrow. Second,

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non-rational reasons ultimately rest on selfish foundations. When we act out of compassion, we do not acknowledge an obligation toward the other; our action springs from "some selfish purpose" (ibid., p. 10). Kant remarks that, when feelings move us, "we everywhere come upon the dear self, which is always turning up, and upon which the intent of our actions is based rather than upon the strict command of duty (which would often require self-denial)" (ibid., p. 20). According to Kant, feelings based on affections convey a focus on the self, who is the subject and the object of the feeling. For instance, the true object of compassion is the self sensing its sadness. Although this feeling may at times lead to action, this concentration on ourselves may often lead us to behave in immoral ways. Kant does not deny that some individuals have an inclination to be caring due to a naturally compassionate nature. Yet, he argues that an inclination to be caring is not, in principle, ethically preferable to an inclination for honor, since it lacks the foundation that makes this act ethicalacting out of obligation instead of out of an inclination (ibid., p. 11). Only actions motivated by an obligation override the subjective element and endow action with moral value. Kant is aware of the repeated scriptural enjoinments to love our neighbor (see Matthew 5:44--48; 22:37-39; Mark 12:30ff.), but he rejects the interpretation of these texts as imposing an obligation to foster natural inclinations toward love and compassion: Love as an inclination cannot be commanded; but beneficence from duty, when no inclination impels us and even when a natural and unconquerable aversion opposes such beneficence, is practical, and not pathological, love. Such love resides in the will and not in the propensities of feeling, in principles of action and not in tender sympathy; and only this practical love can be commanded. (Ibid., p. 12) Beyond this general critique of inclinations, Kant formulates a specific critique against compassion: In fact, when another suffers and, although I cannot help him, I let myself be infected by his pain (through my imagination), then two of us suffer, though the trouble really (in nature) affects only one. But there cannot possibly be a duty to increase the ills in the world and so to do good from compassion. This would also be an insulting kind of beneficence, since it expresses the kind of benevolence one has toward someone unworthy, called pity; and this has no place in people's relations with one another, since they are not to make a display of their worthiness to be happy. (Kant, 1996b, p. 205, emphasis in the original)

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Kant points out several flaws in compassion. First, it increases anguish and sorrow in the world; second, it openly fixates the inferiority of the object of compassion, thereby leading to improper human relationships. Friedrich Nietzsche was influenced by this critique and reformulated it in reference to Kant although, as usual, he was much more emphatic when drawing conclusions: Pity a squandering of feeling, a parasite harmful to moral health, "it cannot possibly be our duty to increase the evil in the world." If one does good merely out of pity, it is oneself one really does good to, and not the other. Pity does not depend upon maxims but upon affects; it is pathological. The suffering of others infects us, pity is an infection. (Nietzsche, 1968,2:368) Elsewhere, Nietzsche points to the link between autonomy and control of feelings, including compassion: A higher stage [beyond following one's feelings] is: to overcome this pressure within us and to perform a heroic act not on impulse--but coldly, raisonnable, without being overwhelmed by stormy feelings of pleasure. The same applies to compassion: it must first be habitually sifted by reason; otherwise it is just as dangerous as any other affect. Blind indulgence of an affect, totally regardless of whether it be a generous and compassionate or a hostile affect, is the cause of the greatest evils. Greatness of character does not consist in not possessing these affects - on the contrary, one possesses them to the highest degree but in having them under control. (Ibid., 4:928) Kant and the ensuing Kantian tradition set up a dichotomy between actions motivated by natural inclinations and feelings, and actions motivated by the acknowledgement of a moral obligation, which are the only ones possessing moral value. Not surprisingly, this tradition entirely rejects the moral value of compassion. Kant rejects compassion by relying on Spinoza's view, namely, on the perception of compassion as a natural feeling that functions like any other. But is this an accurate description of this feeling? Hermann Cohen's analysis shows that Spinoza had misunderstood compassion. Cohen indicates that, according to Spinoza, the antithesis of compassion is envy. In compassion, the individual senses the deprivation and the grievance in the plight of the other, whereas in envy, slbe senses the other's excessive abundance: envy is "therefore nothing but hatred in so far as it is considered to dispose a man so that he rejoices over the evil and is saddened by the good which befalls another" eSpinoza, 1927, Schol., Prop.

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xxiv, p. 127). According to Cohen, then, Spinoza assumes "compassion ... stems from the same source as envy" (Cohen, 1972, p. 140), since both are selfish traits: "Just this, however, shows the abyss in his thinking; he does not see the chasm that exists between compassion and envy. This comparison is only possible when one does not think about social suffering" (ibid.) For Cohen, compassion is mitleiden, suffering with (ibid., p. 139. In my quotations of Cohen's English translation, I changed the original German mitleiden from pity to compassion). The compassionate person becomes a partner in the suffering of the object of compassion. Kant, as noted, had already acknowledged this, but Cohen adds that, through this partnership in suffering, we discover the other as a human being. This perception clashes with the views of Spinoza and Kant, who had argued that compassion is an inner affection of the compassionate person (see ibid.). Compassion denotes participation in "social suffering." Instead of describing compassion as a reflective quality wherein the individual is the subject and the object of the feeling, Cohen offers a radically different reading, which contemporary philosophy has adopted without troubling to quote him. Another approach to compassion had already developed during the eighteenth century, parallel to the tradition of Spinoza and Kant, positing a third option between the natural inclination that Kant had rejected, and the rationality of duty. This approach had assumed "that men irresistibly have compassion for the suffering of others and are equally irresistibly moved to alleviate that suffering" (Fiering, 1976, p. 195). Arthur Schopenbauer ascribes a crucial role to compassion in the development of morality. Schopenbauer rejects the Kantian position, which assumes that abstract rules or principles might guide moral behavior. He holds that, just as knowledge of aesthetic rules and principles will not turn us into artists, neither will knowledge of moral laws and rules turn us into moral creatures (Schopenbauer, 1965, pp. 187-198). According to Schopenbauer, compassion, namely, yearning for the other's well-being (ibid., p. 145), is a criterion for estimating the value of a moral action: "only insofar as an action has sprung from compassion does it have moral value, and every action resulting from any other motive had none" (ibid., p. 144). In sum, unlike Kant, who seeks to anchor moral action in abstract moral principles, Schopenbauer shares with many others the view that moral action has an empirical basis in moral character (ibid., p. 130). Cohen and other contemporary philosophers offer a phenomenological description of compassion that confirms these intuitions, pointing to its origins in the distress of the other. The object of compassion is the other's pain, sorrow, anguish, or vulnerability. In the words of the biblical exegete Samuel David Luzzato (Italy, 1800-1865): "for the compassionate man identifies himself with the suffering person and does not rest until he helps him, and alleviates his pain" (Luzzato, 1965, p. 157). Luzzato's analysis may have influenced Cohen. See

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also Blum, 1987, p. 230). Compassion is in the category of feelings whose object is the other's negative condition, and not the other as a person in general (Snow, 1991, pp. 195-196). But what is the special relationship between the compassionate person and the object of hislber compassion? How, if at all, does compassion differ from pity? As Adrian M. S. Piper indicates, compassion is a process involving the following stages: (1) Empathic understanding of the other's condition. (2) A sense of suffering resembling that sensed by the object of compassion, which rests on sympathy. (3) A change in the disposition of the compassionate person from neutrality to action: "compassion includes cognitive, affective and conative components, respectively" (Piper, 1991, p. 743). These stages expose an increasing identification between the compassionate person and the object of compassion, eventually eliminating the distance between them. The first stage points to an understanding of the other's suffering, and the second denotes identification with this suffering. The compassionate person feels that slbe is a partner to the other's pain (Snow, 1991, p. 198), and this identification translates into action. Imagination is what makes this identification possible (Blum, 1987, pp. 231-232). Compassion is not an ordinary feeling; it requires the compassionate person to vividly envisage the sufferer's plight. This imaging, however, does not necessarily rest on experience, and we can feel compassion for the other enduring a pain we have never experienced. Compassion, then, does not rely on a shared experience but on the similarity through which the compassionate person senses that the suffering other is a human creature, hislber partner to human existence (see Blum, 1987, pp. 231-232). Cohen articulates Spinoza's premise that compassion does not necessarily rely on previous experiences (Spinoza, 1927, Schol., Prop. xxii, p. 125). In Cohen's view, Schopenhauer's mistake was his perception of compassion as an expansion of the self: "Compassion should only reveal to me that the other is rather myself. Therefore if I have compassion for him, I have it rather for myself' (Cohen, 1972, p. 140). The root of this error is in the perception of compassion, which Schopenhauer and Spinoza share, as an affect resting within the self: "Every metaphysical and ethical misunderstanding of compassion originates in the erroneous view that compassion is only reflexive and is only incited in and by myself' (ibid., p. 142). When feeling compassion, we transcend our boundaries and experience the suffering of the other. Compassion is not a reaction to an inner event but an opening up to the other and herlbis negative condition, involving a deep transformation of our self-identity. In a creature constituted by the self and through the self, compassion engenders an experience of partnership. The compassionate subject identifies with the affliction of the object of compassion, grasping it as a condition that could affect every human being. This suffering could have been, or could become, mine in the future; we are all equally vulnerable (see Snow, 1991, pp. 197-199). Compassion is a

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change in the basic disposition of human beings toward themselves. We discover our fragility and our membership in a broader human community; we discover the "we" that precedes the "I" (see Drengson, 1981, p. 39). In this sense, compassion is not only an act of imagination, based on a fortuitous ability to imagine the condition of the other and identify with it. Compassion rests on the rational recognition of shared human existence as vulnerable and uncertain (Snow, 1991), a recognition manifest in the willingness of human beings to exceed their boundaries and be ready for enormous sacrifices, often even their lives, in the name of compassion. Although Kant had argued that inclinations do not lead to self-denial, my analysis of compassion here presupposes self-transformation .. Compassion redefmes the status of the parties in a relationship. For Kant, the object of the moral obligation is the human being, deserving respect because of her/his intrinsic value as a rational creature. Kantian love of the other is thus love for an abstract entity. Loving means I am unaware of the unique face of the object of my love, whom I love as a human being but not as a specific creature; duty demands that I dismiss the other's concrete SUbjectivity. Similarly, when I love out of duty, I do not love as a specific entity but as a rational being. The interpersonal relationship created through duty is alienating and alienated from the concrete experience of its partners (see also Drengson, pp. 38-41). By contrast, Cohen describes the relationship of compassion as one that constitutes the other as a fellow: Compassion is so little reflexive from the other man back to the self that, rather, the other man, who supposedly merely drives me back to myself, and who until now counts only as the next man and does not yet exist as the fellowman, is to be created through compassion as the fellowman. (Cohen, 1972,p. 142) Compassion changes the attitude to the other. Before compassion, the other was a random, undefmed entity (ibid., pp. 16-19). After compassion, the other becomes a "thou," a concrete human creature with a unique face, because compassion directs us to the pain implanted in the other's concrete existence. Simultaneously and, in Cohen's view, because of the other's transformation into a fellow (Cohen, 1972, pp. 19-20), the compassionate person also undergoes a change. Feeling compassion toward the other's pain redirects me to my concrete being: If now, however, through suffering and compassion, the Thou in man is discovered, then the I may reappear liberated from the shadow of selfishness. Furthermore, even one's own suffering need not now be accepted with plain indifference. To have compassion with one's own

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suffering does not have .to be simply inert and fruitless sentimentality. Corporeality belongs, as matters stand, to the soul of the individual and soul is neglected when the affliction of the body is neglected. Humanity requires consideration for one's own suffering. (Cohen, 1972, p. 19) Compassion makes human beings aware of their circumscribed corporeal existence, dismisses perceptions originating in the rarefied heights of abstract universal obligations, and returns them to the temporality of their lives. Compassion is no longer one feeling among many. It constitutes a renewed humanity in which full, concrete human creatures turn to one another out of understanding and identification, willing to commit themselves to action in the concrete world. Compassion restrains the passion for a metaphysical understanding of suffering, and redirects us to our responsibility for the other's existence. What is the relationship between compassion and pity? Kant and Nietzsche drew no distinction between them, as noted. Kant even assumed that compassion/pity leads to improper relationships precisely because it exposes the hierarchical ties prevailing between the compassionate or pitying person and the object of compassion or pity. In light of the differences noted here between compassion and pity, however, Kant's and Nietzsche's critique may apply, if at all, only to pity. Lawrence Blum points out several differences between compassion and pity (Blum, 1987, p. 233). First, compassion transcends differences and acknowledges a basic human equality. Compassion assumes our equal vulnerability to the possibility of suffering, whereas pity perpetuates the inferiority of the object of pity. Without the empathy and sympathy present in compassion, pity rests on the mutual distance between the parties. Second, pity rests on an explicit or implicit assumption, whereby people in need of pity have brought their misfortune upon themselves through ill-considered actions - they failed to prevent their misery, or they deserved what befell them. A negative judgment, or an accusation, often accompany pity; both sides assume that the misfortune afflicting the object of pity is not wholly unfair, and the pity slhe receives goes beyond the requirements of justice (Rainbolt, 1990, p. 169). Compassion, however, instead of a judgmental act that locates the object of compassion within hislher affliction, is an act of participation and identification with the sufferer in herlhis pain, in an acknowledgement that this pain could also befall others. This recognition precludes accusations: "The book of guilt must be destroyed... the question of gUilt... cannot be considered in this connection, because thereby the discovery of the fellowman would be missed" (Cohen, 1972, p. 137). Accusing the suffering other is an attempt to justify hislher pain, which allows us to disengage and remain indifferent. Compassion is radically different-it involves a partnership of understanding and identification, and entails no blame.

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Third, pity is a passing, episodic feeling attuned to affections, whereas the characteristic of compassion, because of its roots in participation and identification with its object, is the continuity of the feeling and the ensuing action (see Ben-Zeev, 2000, ch. 11). In addition to the features noted by Blum, two other differences emerge from this characterization of compassion. The first is that we direct compassion toward a specific person afflicted by a particular pain. Compassion emerges in response to the demand evoked by the sufferer's plight, according to herlhis unique circumstances. It assumes the other is an individual and, therefore, it neither rests on nor strives for generalizations. Pity, however, rests on affections evoked by the pain of the other, while blurring the sufferer's concrete, particular pain, and thus hislher individual character. Pity can easily shift from one object to another without sensing a specific demand, because its driving force is the experience of an individual feeling pity instead of the sufferer's pain. Pity, therefore, tends to generalization (see Arendt, 1990, pp. 85-95). The second difference is that, whereas pity is ''talkative and argumentative" (ibid., p. 86), compassion is manifest chiefly in action. Luc Boltanski concluded from this characterization that pity is manifest in the distance between the sufferer and the actor. Pity rests on a distant perspective, which distinguishes the parties from one another, while compassion minimizes the gap, creating closeness and cooperation (Boltanski, 1999, pp. 3-7). Relying on the analysis so far, we can formulate a response to Kant's critique of feelings, at least concerning compassion. As noted, Kant viewed randomness and selfishness as the two flaws marring feelings and, for this reason, denied feelings any moral value. But compassion is not random. Identification with the other and participation in herlhis pain is not a random event, not when we acknowledge that all human beings share an equal potential for suffering. Feeling compassion is no less rational than acknowledging a universal duty (see Snow, 1991): what could be more rational than action driven by the consciousness of human fellowship? Kant argues that feelings are not universally valid principles of action, they change and differ and, therefore, "feelings are not capable of providing a uniform measure of good and eviL.. one man cannot by his feeling judge validly at all for other men" (Kant, 1981, p. 46). Underlying compassion, however, is not only the ability to imagine the other's suffering but also an awareness of human equality. Compassion, then, provides a fixed and stable principle of action. Because it focuses on the misfortune of the other and makes the other's healing its constitutive principle of action, compassion is not selfish either. Compassion lays the ground for an "ethics of suffering" or an "ethics of compassion" (compare Boltanski, 1999, p. 5), founded on several elements: (1) An acknowledgement of human suffering as a genuine phenomenon that no cultural, sociological, or metaphysical explanations can deny (see Soloveitchik, 1998, p. 15). (2) A determined refusal to view suffering as

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inevitable, endorsing a human obligation to resist it (ibid., p. 15). The ethics of suffering accepts the impossibility of metamorphosis, and opts for piecemeal, localized, and hence ongoing, change. (3) The realization that the struggle to mend the world could fail: "If man loses a battle from time to time and evil triumph over him, he must bear defeat with dignity and humility" (ibid., p. 16). This humility is usually missing among utopian dreamers, who seek divine powers to create a new world without human failure. An ethics of suffering means a return to humility, and thus to typically human ways correction, development, and continuous struggle, instead of new creations. Bearing defeat with dignity is humility's complementary feature. Defeat after relentless effort attests to the uniqueness of the human creature, bound to failure but also able to overcome it and return to the Sisyphean struggle against evil. (4) The ethics of compassion rests on hope, as evinced by its turn to the future in an attempt to reshape reality, and by its belief that we can mend the future. This hope, however, is not synonymous with the Kantian postulate assuming a future wherein moral good equals happiness (Kant, 1956, pp. 128-136). An ethics of suffering is not part of a general plan for world redemption. It does look to the future, but to a possible, inunediate future, closely linked to concrete reality. (5) The ethics of compassion assumes that every human being is responsible for her/his life, replacing the yearning to transcend reality and replace it with a different, better world. This responsibility implies an acceptance of the present reality as the totality of existence, and has a bearing on the relationship of human beings with themselves and with their fellows. Human beings are "thrown" into this world, and doomed to remain in it. This approach denotes a change in our basic disposition toward the world: the organization and regulation of reality become a human concern, diverting us from metaphysical speculation and imaginary constructs to the practice of everyday life. (6) Finally, this ethics addresses the other as a real and individual being, and approaches human communities as concrete entities that do not hide behind a veil of ignorance. The demand ensuing from the reality of a suffering other is the constitutive element of an ethics of suffering, instead of concepts of obligation or abstract ideas. Human pain provides the decisive justification for action, and even encourages it. Seeking motivations for action in a metaphysical idea instead of in concrete reality implies, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's terms, ''to make a man a philosopher before making him a man" (Rousseau, 1964, p. 96). Human beings act, above all, driven by compassion, care, and a sense of responsibility toward concrete human beings around them. Let us now consider Camus's philosophy through the perspective of this conceptual framework. In The Outsider and The Myth of Sisyphus, which represent the first stage of Camus's thought, neither compassion nor the ethics of suffering are mentioned at all. The absurd hero of The Myth of Sisyphus is not a compassionate figure, nor is the ethics of suffering his guiding principle. He is the traditional Cartesian hero living in a solipsistic framework. From

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Rene Descartes onward, the classic hero of modem philosophy is the individual, the "I" instead of the interpersonal "we." Descartes's hero, seeking a conscious anchor in the world to substantiate a metaphysics that collapsed because it could be doubted, finds the individual - cogito ergo sum. The thinking individual is free from the trap of imagination and identified as an existing entity. S/he is now the hero assuming the weight of the world, who learns about the existence of the world from her/his existence. The early Camus accepts this world picture, and his hero is therefore the individual. He also accepts the metaphysical pathos bequeathed by Descartes. Descartes and the rationalist tradition, however, had thought this pathos could become manifest in concrete reality; Camus, philosophizing after Kant and Nietzsche, acknowledges that the individual yearns for metaphysics but cannot fully understand reality. But this understanding does not lead Camus to change the figure of the Cartesian hero. Instead, it leads to a change in consciousness itself. The absurd hero, unlike the Cartesian one, admits the limits of his world and his consciousness, recognizing that he lives in a world he will not understand. This new consciousness could release human beings from the shackles of metaphysical passion. A lucid acceptance of the finitude and limits of existence will open them up to the full experience of the present. In a sense, the absurd hero turns the Cartesian picture upside down, adopting the given without yearning for a non-existent metaphysical certainty. Cartesian, solipsistic thought leaves no room for compassion or for an ethics of suffering. The only "suffering" possible in this weltanschauung is conscious "suffering," and not the one originating in the evil experienced by a concrete other. The other is not even there. The figure of the absurd hero does not constitute her experience together with the other and through participation in the other's suffering; she is a lonely figure, and finds "redemption" in her loneliness and her new self-consciousness. Compassion and an ethics of compassion appear at the second stage of Camus's thought, mainly in The Plague, which fits the scheme represented by the two concepts I have suggested. The Plague is an opportunity to show compassion and identify with an ethics of suffering: "Being ill is never agreeable, but there are towns which stand by you, so to speak, when you are sick; in which you can, after a fashion, let yourself go. An invalid needs small attentions, he likes to have something to rely on." (The Plague, p. 6) Illness tests the healthy person, who can commiserate with the pain of the sick, but can also turn away from them and ignore their condition. This disregard need not imply a spatial distance separating the sick from the healthy and is mainly evident in an existential distance, in the casual discourse of the Heideggerian "idle talk" (Heidegger, 1962, p. 211-213). Trite, generalized talk replaces action founded on compassion. According to Camus's description, most people in Oran failed the test of the plague:

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This sense of being abandoned, which might in time have given characters a finer temper, began, however, by sapping them to the point of futility ... in this extremity of solitude none could count on any help from his neighbor.... So, in these cases, too, even the sincerest grief had to make do with the set phrases of ordinary conversation. Only on these terms could the prisoners of the plague ensure the sympathy of their doorporter and the interest of their hearers. (The Plague, pp. 63-64) This failure is a rebuttal of compassion, harming the other and leading to alienation from the self: "The fIrst thing the plague brought to our town was exile"(ibid., p. 60), estrangement, "emptiness"(ibid., p. 64). Because of the plague, they ceased to be attentive to one another: For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments. (Ibid., p. 150) Against this backdrop, Camus draws characters such as Rieux, Tarrou, and even Paneloux, who captured the augenblick, the unique situation that demanded from them compassion and an ethics of suffering. The main, though not the only, character who conveys this is Rieux. In terse sentences describing Rieux, Camus turns him into the epitome of compassion and its deriving ethics: The language he used was that of a man who was sick and tired of the world he lived in-though he had much liking for his fellow-men - and had resolved, for his part, to have no truck with injustice and compromises with the truth. (Ibid., p. 13) Rieux, as we know, refuses to participate in speculative discussions. He feels no need to adduce theoretical arguments to justifY his actions (see Chapters Ten and Eleven above). When Rieux claims, "there are sick people and they need curing" (ibid., p. 107) we hear echoes from Rousseau, who had argued that the basis of ethics is not philosophical reflection but suffering and misfortune. When Tarrou asks Rieux: "Who taught you all this, doctor?" he answers briefly, "Suffering." (ibid., p. 108). This is the suffering of concrete human beings, and Rieux has a guideline for action: "Man isn't an idea" (ibid., p. 136). Acting within an ethics of compassion, Rieux and his friends understand that this ethics is practical, fragmented, and ongoing. In the central dialogue on this question between Tarrou and Rieux, Tarrou says: "But your victories will never be lasting," to which Rieux answers: "Yes, I know that. But it's no reason for giving up the struggle." (ibid., p. 108).

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We do not know whether Camus drew an explicit distinction between pity and compassion, but something of this distinction did enter the novel. Camus, who reports on Rieux's consciousness, writes: "Of course he had pity. But what purpose could it serve?" (ibid., p. 75). And then: "Rieux had learnt that he need no longer steel himself against pity. One grows out of pity when it's useless" (ibid., p. 76). Rieux understands that real action is required, reflecting participation in the other's suffering and not pity, which would have led to passivity. The compassion and the ethics of suffering evident at this stage of his thought undergo a slight transformation in The Rebel. This work outlines another ethics, to which I will refer as an "ethics of justice" (compare Boltanski, 1999, pp. 3-5). This ethics views the concrete suffering of the individual as one instance of a more general, essential flaw, and chooses to focus instead on the restructuring of reality, striving for harmony and general unity through the imposition of a just law. Aristotle notes that the law is just because it is general (Aristotle, 1955, 10:4-5; see also Perelman, 1980), and yet, on these very grounds, the law could be unjust in individual cases. Several approaches have attempted to solve this dilemma, but their discussion exceeds the scope of this work. The main issue is that the "politics of justice" in Boltanski's terminology, or the "ethics of justice" in mine, are concerned with general solutions. In this sense, an ethics of justice disengages from private suffering, and seeks to regulate social life through the law and not through compassion. In The Rebel, as noted, Camus contends with the problem of evil and human suffering through an "ethics of justice," evident in the basic pathos of rebellion as a metaphysical revolt. His aspirations transcend individual suffering, and he aims for radical structural changes. Rebellion seeks to return the harmony and unity of a reality flawed by evil. Aware that rebellion represents an ethics of justice, Camus points to the links between this ethics and the possibility of licensing murder. An ethics of compassion could never confer legitimation on any form of harm to the other, but an ethics of justice, seeking to regulate order as a whole, could allow murder as part of a process to return balance and harmony. The Rebel, then, reflects Camus's effort to redraw the boundaries of this ethics so as to preclude the legitimation of murder. Due to the basic premises and goals of rebellion, Camus does not hold that compassion is constitutive of action or restrains rebellion. He offers metaphysical solidarity instead, which rests on a recognition of the human partnership and not on a direct attachment to a concrete other and to individualized suffering. In a crucial passage, quoted above, Camus states: "Injustices done to men whom we consider enemies can, actually, be profoundly repugnant to us. There is only identification of one's destiny with that of others and a choice of sides" (The Rebel, p. 17). Unlike compassion, rebellion is reflective and talkative in the extreme. It cannot begin without extensively discussing its justification, and The Rebel is

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a description of the reflection and discourse of rebellion, which are inherent in the revolt. But The Rebel also contains passages where Camus points to direct bonds, established through "a communication between human being and human being which makes men both similar and united" (ibid., p. 281; see also ibid., p. 283). Elsewhere, Camus claims: Ivan's [Karamazov] drama, on the contrary, arises from the fact that there is too much love without an object. This love finding no outlet and God being denied, it is then decided to lavish it on human beings as a generous act of complicity. (Ibid., pp. 18-19). Ivan Karamazov, according to this analysis, diverts his unrequited love for the particularistic divine entity toward human beings, while discovering human solidarity. Although these and other statement apparently infuse an ethics of suffering and compassion into The Rebel, the ethics of justice remains dominant in this book, and is also used to reinterpret the few instances of an ethics of compassion. Interpersonal bonds and cooperation are the instrument for discovering the human metaphysical partnership. The dialogical stance does not stop at the I-Thou relationship of the Buber or Cohen variety, and moves forward to include humanity as a whole. Similarly, according to Camus, Ivan Karamazov does not direct his love toward a specific human creature suffering from a particular affliction but decides "to lavish it on human beings." What moved Camus to shift from an ethics of compassion to an ethics of justice? In line with the analysis I suggested in Chapter Eleven above, Camus's analysis of human action against evil and suffering in the course of history drove him to formulate a metaphysical stance. This action focuses not only on individual cases, and strives instead for radical changes to mend the reality that engendered evil. The ethics of justice, however, was not Camus's fmal position. As I argued in the previous chapter, Camus returns to an ethics of compassion in The Fall, where he sets up compassion and pity as opposites. In Clamence's previous life, the driving emotion had been pity. His activities on behalf of the needy, of which he speaks so often, emphasize his superiority and the gap separating him from others. As Clamence notes, his feeling of pity is a continued reaffirmation of his preferential status, but since his disposition is pity, he lacks compassion. Because of Clamence's focus on himself, and due to what Camus considers his character's excessive talkativeness and reflection, Clamence misses the chance to become a compassionate creature. Instead of acting, he thinks and talks about himself. In this sense, The Fall is a critique of The Rebel, of the ethics of justice, and of its underlying metaphysics. Although The Fall returns to an ethics of compassion, it does so

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laden with philosophical theories, leading us to forget the basic component of morality. The Rebel, which had sought to transcend the evil of particularistic reality to suggest a metaphysical rebellion, rests on the classic assumption that action originates in an overall idea. When human beings become philosophers, they may, like Jean Baptiste Clamence, miss the call for help and overlook concrete human suffering. According to Camus in The Fall, we are presently living as philosophers far beyond what is desirable. The "consolation" he offers us is that failure to respond to the other's demand may haunt us into an exile from which the only exit is a return to compassionate interpersonal relationships between concrete beings. At the last stage of his thought, then, Camus returns, wiser and more critical, to the starting point intimated in The Plague. The humanistic dimension of Camus's philosophy is again evident. Beyond its critique of suicide and its refusal to license murder, it returns to the demand addressed to human beings faced with the suffering of the other. Camus's thought, at least after The Myth a/Sisyphus, is an attempt to contend with the question of how to understand this suffering and how to act. Camus's discussion of ethics, like his discussion of other issues, reveals him as a critical thinker willing to reexamine his positions. He thereby realized the ideal of philosophy as a lasting pursuit.

Fifteen SUMMARY: "MY LIFE IS WHAT I HAVE MADE IT" The title of this chapter is a quotation from a letter Camus wrote in 1953 (Camus, 1968, pp. 342-343). 1 chose this sentence as the title of this summary because it succinctly conveys Camus's perception of himself as fully responsible for all the practical and theoretical dimensions of his life. Not surprisingly, Camus ends this sentence by saying: "I am the first person responsible for the way and the pace at which 1 spend it." Camus's philosophy is the articulation of this absolute responsibility. His philosophy does not develop in literary salons or in academic ivory towers. It springs from life and accompanies life, and represents a persistent effort to answer its challenging questions. Camus's existential philosophy is not a "philosophy" at all, if by philosophy we mean a theoretical, academic concern. When speaking about his plans in 1945, Camus noted they included a novel about the plague, and an essay on man in rebellion. Ironically, or perhaps derisively, he added: "And perhaps 1 ought to make my mind up to study existentialism ... " (ibid., p. 348). Although the target of this remark was probably Sartre, it also conveys Camus's opposition to existentialism. Philosophy is for him a part of life, and inseparable from the literary creativity that follows from it. The questions posed in such philosophical works as The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel concern Camus, as they do many others, in everyday life. His thought is moving and exciting precisely because he deals with existence itself, its questions following from the deepest anxieties of a specific human experience, Camus's own. He is the one asking the questions: Why choose life and not commit suicide? How to fight evil? Can we constitute a life of consciousness and responsibility? Camus is aware of the transitions in his thought. In a way, his work is an existential pilgrimage, a voyage of struggle. His thought moves with the pace of life. When writing The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus struggles with despair; when writing The Plague, he struggles with the problems of evil posed by a horrendous war. His thought and his literary oeuvre grow from, and return to, real life. His philosophy offers no theoretical solutions to theoretical problems; if it provides any answers, they emerge within concrete existence. The flow of Camus's thought with the rhythm of existence is evident in its closeness to concrete life and in its arresting sincerity. Camus is inconsistent, since latent in experience are new insights and new understandings. The absurd hero of The Myth ofSisyphus is not equipped to contend with the evil of human reality, which Camus experienced not only passively but

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also, and mainly, as a member of the Resistance. Camus's renunciation of his hero in The kfyth of Sisyphus is thus a renunciation demanded by life. A conscious hero may be suitable for quiet hours, when the waters of existence flow securely. In a world of turmoil, when the sea of evil threatens to flood existence, taking refuge in the shell of conscious isolation is no longer possible. Camus contends with the challenges of the surrounding reality with great candor and sensitivity. His philosophy is a form of attentiveness: as lonely individuals, we listen to the voices raising from existence, to the questions it poses, and to the demand we are asked to translate into action in our lives. Camus's work is a voyage of struggle integrating freedom and consciousness. Instead of an attempt to find the "self' hiding "out there," beyond the fringes of existence, this voyage is existence itself, an expression of freedom, of the individual's ability to face reality. In this voyage of consciousness, we learn about ourselves as struggling creatures contending with the freedom at our doorstep, which imposes on us absolute responsibility for the molding of our existence. Camus adamantly insists on the link between freedom and responsibility. He also points to the link between these two concepts and a third one, that of the other, knowing we bear as much responsibility for the other as we do for ourselves. Similarly, he knew that this responsibility marks the border of freedom. The existence of the other sets the borders of freedom: "freedom has its limits everywhere that a human being is to be found" (The Rebel, p. 284). Suffusing Camus's understanding of the voyage is his love for humanity. He does not love human beings as abstractions, but as worthy creatures struggling for their existence. Throughout his work, Camus develops a perception of human beings as deserving respect because they are intrinsically worthy, a view he shares with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Unlike Kant, however, Camus emphasizes that human beings deserve honor and respect not only because they share a universal feature of rationality they are bound to foster, but also, and mainly, because they are creatures struggling for existence. Human beings are free to mold their lives through their consciousness, and the slightly paradoxical combination of freedom and consciousness, activity and passivity, entitles them to respect. Two of his characters, Meursault and Clamence, can help us trace the course of Camus's existential voyage. Meursault represents innocence, the attachment to existence as is; Clamence represents guilt, an overdose of consciousness, and a loss of conscience. In some ways, Meursault represents the pole of existence at its inception, a primary innocence, while Clamence represents the pole wherein imagination and consciousness override primal living, a vanished innocence. Between them, the basic questions resurface: Can we bring together innocence and consciousness? Can we fully mobilize primal forces into action when we are focused solely on ourselves? In other words, can a person simultaneously be actor and object? Camus, then, is

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concerned with the basic problem of modem and post-modem existence. He repeatedly asks the questions and compels us, his readers, to answer them in our lives by engaging us in a dialogue. A comparison between The Plague and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1960) may shed fresh light on this infinite, Sisyphean struggle. Both works describe a unique, isolated locale, almost beyond life. The Plague tells the story of Oran, a city in quarantine, whereas Mann's magic mountain is a healing place, even if sickness dwells in it. Two prominent characters in The Magic Mountain are Settembrini, the humanist, and Naphta, the Jesuit. Settembrini argues that human beings must take part in the struggle for existence although, in his view, this struggle is part of the more general cause of human progress: The League for the Organization of Progress deduces from Darwinian theory the philosophic concept that man's profoundest natural impulse is in the direction of self-realization. From this it follows that all those who seek satisfaction of this impulse must become co-laborers in the cause of human progress .... The League for the Organization of Progress, mindful of its task of furthering human happiness-in other words, of combating human suffering by the available social methods, to the end of finally eliminating it altogether; mindful also of the fact that this lofty task can only be accomplished by the aid of sociology, the end and aim of which is the perfect State, the League, in session at Barcelona, determined upon the publication of a series of volumes bearing the general title: The Sociology of Suffering. It should be the aim of the series to classifY human suffering according to classes and categories, and to treat it systematically and exclusively. (Mann, 1960, pp. 244-245) Settembrini, then, believes in the possibility of attaining a perfect human existence. In his view, the perfect state will solve all afflictions, as long as it manages to catalog properly all classes of human suffering. In some ways, Settembrini continues the rationalist, Hegelian legacy of belief in progress and salvation. This humanist too, acknowledges rebellion, but in the name of rationality and true nature, not against Creation. Settembrini describes rebellion through the character of Voltaire: He rebelled. Yes. He declined to accept that brutalfatum etfactum. His spirit refused to abdicate before it. He protested in the name of reason and the intellect against that scandalous dereliction of nature, to which were sacrificed thousands of human lives, and three-quarters of a flourishing city. (Mann, 1960, p. 250) So the rational humanist also rebels. He rebels in the name of rationality against displays of irrationality. He rebels against brutal nature in the name of

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the spirit (ibid.). But this rebellion, like the struggle for progress, is radically different from the rebellion and the struggle that concern Camus. Camus does not believe in progress, because his understanding commits him to modesty and to be satisfied with what is verifiable; progress and a reality of attainable perfection are not a verifiable datum. The evil and pain of reality move him to rebel, instead of relying on ontological assumptions concerning the feasibility of an ideal world. Camus does not assume that metaphysical beliefs are a condition of rebellion. Disenchantment with metaphysical beliefs and the refusal of metaphysical comfort nurture rebellion. In this sense, rebellion in The Myth of Sisyphus and in The Rebel convey a similar spirit: an insistence on lucidity and the refusal of any unfounded consolation. In a few terse lines, Camus sums up this idea: I do not have enough faith in reason to subscribe to a belief in progress or to any philosophy of history. I do believe at least that man's awareness of his destiny has never ceased to advance ... Our task as men is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been tom apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust.. .. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks men take a long time to accomplish, that's all. (Camus, 1968, p. 135) Revolt and struggle are not part of a process of integration within an overall rationality, nor do they articulate a unique understanding of the general order of history. Unlike Settembrini, Camus's characters hold that to revolt implies that human existence is meaningful or, more precisely, "man ... is the only creature to insist on having [meaning]" (Camus, 1966, p. 28). We do not fmd a given, comprehensive meaning, but we can make our lives meaningful through our struggle and our lucid consciousness and, above all, through the concrete modalities of our lives. What does Camus offer instead of metaphysics? Lucidity, a transparent consciousness well aware of its limits. This approach entails modesty and pride. Conscious modesty implies renouncing the will to shape human life from a divine perspective. Even if we yearn for eternity, we can learn selfrestraint, confming ourselves to the boundaries of the possible, taking pride in the wondrous human ability to stand before the abyss without tumbling into it through physical or philosophical suicide, rebelling against all odds. In his epigraph to the fourth of the Letters to a German Friend, Camus quotes Etiene Pivert de Senancour: "Man is mortal. That may be; but let us die resisting; and if our lot is complete annihilation, let us not behave in such a way that it seems justice!" (ibid., p. 26). This life of struggle, rebellion, and freedom rests on love, compassion, and the search for justice. Rieux succinctly formulates this idea in The Plague:

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A loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart. (The Plague, pp. 213-214) Love, compassion, and empathy enable human beings to live while engaged in a struggle. Camus's thought extols these feelings as a worthy human aim, and rests on them. Without them, we could not bear the burden of the parched days and nights wherein we raise against the world, struggle against existence, and realize our freedom. Camus offers an existence that gives human beings back their face. Without the face of the other, the face of the self will also be erased. Consciousness is not enough. Clamence symbolizes the last voyage of consciousness marching toward nothingness, unable to go back and hold on to existence. The other and the self may turn toward one another and, recognizing the existence of the "we," draw on reservoirs of identification and motivation for action. Camus tells us that the future of the world is in dialogue; without it, the world will turn around and kill those who experience dialogue, as it killed Socrates (Camus, 1966, p. 74). Camus advises his contemporaries, trapped in big cities in desperate loneliness, to love the other. Against some postmodernist trends that deconstruct all meaning and strip human beings bare, Camus offers a return to the elementary feelings of simple existence. He asks us to pay attention to the basic emotions of Mediterranean life, and decries Europeans: The men of Europe, abandoned to the shadows, have turned their backs upon the fixed and radiant point of the present. They forget the present for the future, the fate of humanity for the delusion of power, the misery of the slums for the mirage of the eternal city, ordinary justice for an empty promised land. They despair of personal freedom and dream of a strange freedom of the species .... They no longer believe in the things that exit in the world and in living man; the secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life. (The Rebel, p. 305) We may question some of Camus's statements, but we can hardly pass them by without thinking about them. Looking back at a haunted century, we understand that some basic, neglected truths about human existence could play a meaningful role in the creation of a fairer, happier, and more natural life. Camus speaks as a moralist, wandering around houses built by human beings in order to enclose themselves. He knocks on doors, peeps through windows, and poses the forgotten questions with unprecedented sincerity, lucidity, and courage.

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This book is an attempt to read Camus, to pay attention to the dialogue he opens up with us, his readers. I do not even pretend that this discussion has exhausted the prodigious diversity of one of the deepest and richest of contemporary philosophic and artistic legacies. All I tried to do is direct attention to a spiritual world not yet fully mapped out, which awaits Camus's readers and listeners. Is this not what he wanted?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Professor Avi Sagi teaches general and Jewish phiJosophy in the Department of Philosophy, Bar Han University, Israel. He is the founder and director of a graduate program of Hermeneutics at the university. He is also a senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Sagi has published many books and articles in several areas: continental philosophy, philosophy of religion and ethics, current Jewish philosophy, philosophy and sociology of Jewish la\\. Among his books: Religion and Aforality (with Daniel Statman): Judaism. Between Religion and Morality; Conversion and Jewish JdentiDJ (with Z"i Zohar); "Elu va-Elu .... A Study on the .Meaning of Halakhic Discourse; Multiculturalism in a Democratic and Jewish State (with Menachem Mautner and ROIlt::n Shamir); Kierkegaard. Religion. and i!..xistence: The Voyage of the Se(l .

INDEX anxiety, 18,30,32,33,50,51,53,69,

82-83 Aristotle, 39, 73, 76, 79, 128, 170 Arendt, Hannah, 166 Arnold, James A., 102 atheism, 97, 121 authenticity, 15,20,21,57,74,78,92, 133, 136, 140 Augustine, 26 A vineri, Shlomo, 16 Barrier, M. G., 93 Barthes, Roland, 36 being, 32, 33, 34, 56 Ben-Zeev, Aharon,

166

Berger, Peter, 20 Bergson, Henri, 59 Blanchot, Maurice, 133, 134 Blum, Lawrence, 163, 165, 166 Boltanski, Luc, 166, 170 Bree, Germaine, 25, 26 Brisville, Jean-Claude 146 Buber, Martin, 8, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17 Cassirer, Ernst, 64 Chestov, Leon, 62, 69, 150 Christ, 90, 151, 156 Christianity, 124, 145, 146, 149-154 Cohen, Hermann, 161-166, 171 Cruickshank, John, 59, 60, 71, 80, 109 culture, 6, 91-98 consciousness, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 16,

17-19,20,22,23,25,27,28,36, 39,47,51,53,62,63,67,68,70, 73,74,75-77, 79, 80, 81, 85,92, 99, 105, 108, 110, 112, 117, 125, 126, 133-139, 142, 143, 145, 147, 150,153,156,157,174,176,177 cosmos, 9, 37, 39 death, 3, 28, 31,49-51,99-100,103,

112,115,147,152,153,154,155, 156

Denton, Donald, 25 Descartes. 12,43,44,45,59, 108, 110,

168

Doubrowsky, Serge, 78 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 26, 28

dread, 33

Drengson, Alan R.,164 Duff: R. A., 72, III Eliade, Mircea, 142, 143 Engelberg, Edward, 133, 136 Esslin, Martin, 57 estrangement, 5, 6, 8-9, 14, 15, 18,22,

24,38,39,41,42,82,97-98

eternal recurrence, 81-84 ethics. 27, 45, 46, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78,

82,84,85,102,111,117,120,128, 129, 159, 166-172 existentialism, 14, 18, 20, 24, 26, 35, 36, 47, 68, 69, 73, 74, 78, 131, 132, 138,140,141,142,146,150,173 faith, 67, 69-70, 83, 121, 122, 145, 146,

150-153

Felman, Shoshana, 131, 132, 141 Feuerlicht, Ignace, 5, 6, 7, 22 Fiering, Norman S., 162 Fisch. Richard, 69 freedom, 76, 78, 82, 84, 85, 100-101,

131,136,138,174,177

Freud, Sigmund, 91, 92

Geertz, Clifford, 150-151 Gennep, Arnold van, 143 God, 7,9,13,14,44,68,84,96,99,104,

121, 122, 123, 126, 128, 145, 146, 151,152,154-157 Gurevich, A. J., 9-12 Hanna, Thomas, 76, 102, 131, 132 happiness, 38, 39, 41, 78-80, 99,103,

104,105-106

Hardre, Jacques, 150

192

Index

hannony, 26,32,34,37-39,41,42,68, 70, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 107, 138, 140, 141 Hauser, Arnold, 24 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 5, 6, 7, 16, 19-20,23,52,63, 139, 140 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 18, 19,20,21,24, 28,30,32,35,36,39,47,48,49, 50, 51,53-54,73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 96, 111, 136, 138, 139, 140, 168 Henry, Patrick, 59, 60, 61, 96 Hochberg, Herbert, 60, 61, 71, 107-108 Hudon, Louis, 96 humanism, 2 Hume,52 Husserl, Edmund, 35, 39, 44, 45, 47, 55, 56,60,61,75,76, 108, 123 Hyppolite, Jean, 8 immanence,35,38,48,82,83,84,85,99, 105,106, 146, 148, 149 individual, 1,2,6, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 1920,21,22,26,27,34,39,40,41, 45,98, 107, 108, 109, 112, 114, 115,116,117,118,120,125,126, 127, 129, 133, 134, 13~ 13~ 140 individualism, 12, 21, 129 intentionality, 55 Jaspers, Karl, 26, 62, 69 Kafka, Franz, 26, 28, 69 Kant, Immanuel, 52, 63, 83, 120, 128, 159-161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, 174 Kaufinan, Walter, 7, 83 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 1, 18,24,26-27,29, 32, 35, 36, 39, 46, 52, 62, 69, 70, 71, 73, 78, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 132, 136, 137, 138, 150 Kitching, G.N., 16 Lamont, Rosette c., 102 language, 52-53

Lazere, Donald, 108, 131, 132 Levinas, Emmanuel, 115, 129 litemture, 6, 12, 20, 27, 28 Loose, John, 145 Lopez, Robert Sabatino, 9 Lottman, Herbert R., 131 Love, Nancy Sue, 16 Luzatto, Samuel David, 162 Macquanie,John,16 Mann. Thomas, 175 Marcuse, Herbert, 21, 24, 92 Marshall, E., 72, III Marx, Karl, 5, 6, 7, 16, 19,20,21,23,24 May, Rollo, 19 McCarthy, Patrick, 36, 88 Mediterranean, 25, 29, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 42,45,50,146 Mill, John Stuart, 79 Montaigne, Michel de, 11, 12 moral, 2, 26, 73, 77, 78, 107, 111, 112 Nagel, Thomas, 57 natural law, 10 Neumann, Erich, 91 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 26, 29, 52, 59, 64, 65,81,82-83,84, 102, 146, 157, 161, 165, 168 O'Brien, Conor Cruise, 90, 92 Ofrat, Gideon, 31 Ollmann, Bertell, 6, 16 Onimus, Jean 132, 137, 145, 153 Pascal, Blaise, 11, 12-14, 15, 17,53,67 philosophy, 1,2,5, 14, 18,20,22,23,24, 25, ,26, 27, 28-29, 30, 34, 35, 43, 44,45,48,52,59,61,64, 102, 132 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 15 Piper, Adrian M. S., 163 Plamenatz, John Petrov, 16 Plotinus, 5, 37, 38, 39, 61 Popper, Karl, 60 Quilliot, Roger, 132, 133

Index Rainbolt, George Wo, 165 rationality, 55, 56, 57, 59-65, 67 rebellion, 39, 108, 110, 111, 112-113, 117,118,120-121,122-127,128, 129, 145, 151, 154-156, 157, 173, 175-176 redemption, 10, 14,45,46,49, 114, 139, 140, 143 religion, 68, 69-70,112,145,146,148, 149, 150, 151, 154, 155, 156, 157 repetition, 81-82, 13 7 responsibility, 40, 41,111,112,138,141, 156, 157, 165, 167 romanticism 20, 23-24 Rorty, Richard, 118-120, 123 Rotenstreich, Nathan, 5, 6 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6,15,16,92, 155, 167, 169 Sagi, Avi, 26, 46, 53, 69, 70, 81, 82, 88, 132, 136, 137, 138 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2-3, 28, 30, 43, 45, 48, 56,57,88-89,93,96,131,132,135 Schacht, Richard, 5, 6, 7, 22 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 162, 163 self, 1,2,8,9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18-21,25, 26,28-30,33,37,40,41,68,70, 74,76,77,78,80,81,82,83,84, 88,92,98,107,114,120, 125-129, 137, 141, 143 Snow, Nancy Eo, 163, 164, 166 solipsism, 1,26,29,39,40,46, 111, 114, 115, 167, 168

193

Solomon, Robert Co, 16, 87-88, 92, 93, 95 solidarity, 29, 39, 40, 41, 90, 94, 107, 111,113,117-125,128,129,142, 148, 152, 155, 156, 157 Soloveitchik, Joseph Bo, 166 Spinoza, Benedict de, 159, 161, 162, 163 Sprintzen, David, 88, 92, 93, 102, 108, 132,133 Stack, George 1., 73 Styron, William, 48-49 suicide, 30, 33, 34, 40, 48, 49, 67, 68, 70, 72,80, 107, 108, 114, 118 Taylor, Charles, 20 Thorson, Thomas Landon, 25 Tisson-Braun, Micheline, 35, 97, 147 transcendence, 27, 32, 34, 69, 82, 83, 84, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106 Turner, Victor Witter, 142 unity, 2, 6, 7, 9,18,23,37,38,39,41,42, 50,54,56,58,69, 77, 78, 81, 120, 121, 147, 148, 154 Vasil, Dean, 64 Watzlawick, Paul, 69 Weakland, John, 69 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 62 Woelfel, James Wo, 108 Zimmerman, Michael Eo, 21 Zweig, Stefan, 18

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1. Noel Balzer, The Human Being as a Logical Thinker 2. Archie 1. Bahm, Axiology: The Science of Values 3. H. P. P. (Hennie) Lotter, Justice for an Unjust Society 4. H. G. Callaway, Context for Meaning and Analysis: A Critical Study in the Philosophy of Language S. Benjamin S. Llarnzon, A Humane Case for Moral Intuition 6. James R. Watson, Between Auschwitz and Tradition: Postmodern Reflections on the Task of Thinking. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 7. Robert S. Hartman, Freedom to Live: The Robert Hartman Story, edited by Arthur R. Ellis. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 8. Archie 1. Bahm, Ethics: The Science of Oughtness 9. George David Miller, An Idiosyncratic Ethics; Or, the Lauramachean Ethics 10. Joseph P. DeMarco, A Coherence Theory in Ethics 11. Frank G. Forrest, Valuemetrics N: The Science ofPersonal and Professional Ethics. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies. 12. William Gerber, The Meaning of L(re: Insights of the World's Great Thinkers 13. Richard T. Hull, Editor, A Quarter Century of Value Inquiry: Presidential Addresses of the American Society for Value Inquiry. A volume in Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies 14. William Gerber, Nuggets of Wisdom from Great Jewish Thinkers: From Biblical Times to the Present IS. Sidney Axinn, The Logic of Hope: Extensions ofKant's View ofReligion 16. Messay Kebede, Meaning and Development

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116. Jon Mills, Editor, A Pedagogy of Becoming. A volume in Philosophy of Education 117. Robert T. Radford, Cicero: A Study in the Origins of Republican Philosophy. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 118. Arleen L. F. Salles and Maria Julia Bertomeu. Editors, Bioethics: Latin American Perspectives. A volume in Philosophy in Latin America 119. Nicola Abbagnano, The Human Project: The Year 2000, with an Interview by Guiseppe Grieco. Translated from Italian by Bruno Martini and Nino Langiulli. Edited with an Introduction by Nino Langiulli. A volume in Studies in the History of Western Philosophy 120. Daniel M. Haybron, Editor, Earth's Abominations: Philosophical Studies ofEvil. A volume in Personalist Studies 121. Anna T. Challenger, Philosophy and Art in Gurdjiej!'s Beelzebub: A Modern Sufi Odyssey

l22. George David Miller, Peace, Value, and Wisdom: The Educational Philosophy of Daisaku Ikeda. Avolume in Daisaku Ikeda Studies 123.

Haim Gordon and Rivca Gordon. Sophistry and Twentieth-Century Art

124. Thomas 0 Buford and Harold H. Oliver, Editors Personalism Revisited: Its Proponents and Critics. A volume in Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies 125. Avi Sagi, Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd. Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein