The Mandate of Camus

For Albert Camus there were always two tyrants: history and the universe. The winner of the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature found the deck stacked against contemporarty man, and then demanded that man fight for his freedom.

He wrote The Rebel in 1956, picturing man as the victim of a political and social world in which even his saviors seek to debase and enslave him. But he required that man revolt. He himself participated in the French underground during World War II, and in 1957 he quoted the words of Richard Hilary: "We were fighting this lie in the name of a half-truth." But he went on to say" "There are even occasions when a lie must be fought in the name of a quarter-truth. The quarter-truth...is called freedom. And freedom is the road, the only road, perfectibility."

Because he was a merciless critic of the ways of man, he nowhere suggested that his rebel is without sin, pure in his revolt against oppression. But at the end of The Plague he wrote: "There are in man more things to be admired than things to be scorned." Scorn was reserved for death, while man, with all his deceit and selfishness, was always worth the saving of himself.

In The Myth of Sisyphus he confronted a still greater enemy: the universe itself. "In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger." Yet named man, he said, must not abandon the struggle against the irrational and pitiless place that he inhabits. Camus rejected both the Leap of Faith, which begs the question, and the suicide which follows logically from despair. The hero of his existential battle gets one lucid glimpse of the finality of his situation, realizes that he is an incongruity in the universe, and then rebels against it with all his being.

He wrote: "The aim of art--and the aim of (my) life--can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility that is in every man and in the world." For him responsibility was the counter-part of freedom, both political and existential. "We must condemn what deserves condemnation; it should be done with vigor and then put aside. But what still deserves to be praised should be exalted at length...I have never been able to make up my mind to spit, as so many have done, on the world 'honor.'"

Camus posed the most difficult of all questions, slavery, and offered the most difficult of all answers, rebellion. Life was meaningless without two things--its senseless suffering, and the honorable facing of suffering.

He once said: "I, for one, have never ceased to struggle against degradation, and I hate only the cruel...Not out of virtue, or because I am blessed with rare loftiness of spirit, but because of an instinctive fidelity to the light which shines at our birth, and which...has taught men to hail life, even in suffering."

The most normal reaction to such words is one of passive administration, and this is what is most to be feared. For Camus himself delivers a mandate of direct and immediate response: we must live the demands of the revolt he describes. In this sense he acted as the conscience of the times.

In 1957 a critic wrote: "Camus has forced man to the mirror. Good or so long as he writes, there will be no rest." Rest is precisely the thing which can make irrevocable man's slavery. And we can justly fear that without the relentless voice of Camus, the temptation to abandon the struggle is a little nearer to being overpowering.