Posted on 12/12/2002 9:21:38 AM PST by clintonbaiter
Not long after the tragic events of 9/11, The Guardian -- that last fanatical bastion of English left-wing obstinacy and foolishness -- published a unique book review honouring the latest Penguin edition of The Plague, the enduring fictional allegory of human suffering and sacrifice, written by French existentialist novelist Albert Camus.
It was particularly surprising that The Guardian, of all publications, would publish what was really a revised introduction to the latest English-language edition of The Plague, since Camus' unique philosophical and political point of view was always so different from that of most of today's Guardian contributors.
Like many other European intellectual heirs of Heidegger at the end of World War II, Camus philosophically travelled to the very edge of the ontological abyss and resolutely confronted a black Nietzschean vision of the death of God and the end of all conventional morality (a bleak vision sparked by the horrors of the Nazi era and the complicity of so many "ordinary" citizens in the cruelties of the holocaust). But unlike such existentialist contemporaries as Jean Paul Sartre, Camus did not cope with the "anxiety", "nausea" and "dread" that accompanied this nihilistic vision by taking refuge in the most popular left-wing "isms" of his day.
As reviewer Tony Judd appropriately noted in his Guardian piece, Camus' point of view in The Plague is particularly worth careful study after the events of 9/11. If nothing else, it demonstrates that if he had somehow still been alive on the day of that terrorist nightmare, he -- unlike most leftist thinkers of yesterday and today -- would have had no problem making judgements about who was at fault and why. And it is very unlikely that he would have been tempted to justify (or rationalize) the horrific actions of al-Qaeda by proffering the well-worn slander, so popular on the Continent, that the United States somehow deserved what it got.
Of course, there's no doubt that Camus was definitely a man of the political left. He had been raised in grinding poverty in Algeria. And he was briefly a member of the Communist Party in pre-War Algeria. But unlike Sartre and his pampered middle-class friends, Camus didn't existentially seek an awareness of "being" by means of a dogmatic ideological mission to redress human misery through the totalitarian Stalinist revolutionary solution (with all the doublethink and violence this ideological undertaking involved). Instead, Camus -- to use his mode of expression -- "revolted" against the "no" in life by embracing the "yes" in existence.
Camus would not take the easy way out intellectually, by abandoning all notions of morality and ethics in politics for the sake of the ultimate good (the revolution). Unlike Sartre and company, he rejected the era's most beckoning diversion from the phenomenological nihilist nightmare -- an intellectual fun ride on the deterministic Marxist roller coaster of historical inevitability, an intellectual adventure during which one immersed oneself in the extremes of a historical dialectic in which the end (the revolution) justified any means (murder, show trials and the extermination of all who got in the way).
As existentialists, intellectual contemporaries such as Sartre may well have attempted to confront the angst-inducing vision of the godless, nihilistic hellhole that represented "existence" for free thinkers in post-Nazi Europe. However, Sartre and his followers flinched. They turned away from this depressing nightmare, and found an escape from free will in the siren call of the dialectical "historical" struggle and all the comforting certainties (and rigidities) that the Stalinist strain of Communism offered them at the time. And by throwing themselves into the pursuit of the revolutionary end, they and their myriad compatriots in the class struggle were freed to pursue any means. In their minds, they and political idols like Stalin were unrestrained by the limits of everyday morality from pursuing the extremes of human cruelty that the revolutionary mission might demand.
In the class struggle, they could find "meaning" and "aliveness" in being. They could experience a Nietzschean "vitality" that only intellectual Ubermensches of revolutionary culture like themselves could truly appreciate. And through the struggle for revolution, they could transcend the empty nothingness of everyday bourgeois existence that so upset them.
Camus too came face to face with the same nihilistic vision that bedeviled most European freethinkers in the aftermath of World War II -- the dark, rootless path of constant suffering that was life, which ended only in the fear and trembling that attended godless death. But -- to use his language -- he "revolted" against this nihilistic dead end, the absurdity of existence that comprises the vale of tears of human life.
Instead of succumbing to the darkness of this nihilistic vision, by affirming the "no" in life, he turned to what he considered to be the "yes" in life -- the a-priori light of human existence: others. He said "yes" to the intrinsic sense of solidarity he experienced toward his fellow humans (no matter how imperfect they were), and otherwise strived to accept the unalterable "limitations" of human existence.
Rebellion for Camus was not the inhumane "ends-justifies-the-means" action demanded by the historical struggle for the perfect revolutionary social order -- with all the murderous extremes that such a struggle inevitably encompassed. Camus' notion of rebellion resisted the nihilistic call, by affirming the relatedness of self to others and to nature. One strived to accept the limitations of human existence, all the while savoring every joy in life and fighting against every private or civic action that brought unjust suffering to others.
For Camus, the true "rebel" embraced human solidarity, as both means and ends, in a continuing "revolt" against the nihilistic shadow. The rebel could feel most alive by transcending the nothingness of being and finding meaning in relatedness to his or her fellows. And within Camus' humanistic world view, even the unceasing dialectical march of revolutionary history had to come to a halt when confronted by the exigencies of an even more basic a-priori truth of existence -- each human's essential solidarity with and obligation to the other.
Of course, after wading through this somewhat arcane discussion, you're probably thinking by now: "So what? It's 2002. Why bother ourselves with outdated writings from more than 50 years ago? Why refight the philosophical and political battles of post-War Europe now?"
The answer is twofold. First of all, after a careful reading of Camus, it's not difficult to come to the conclusion that despite his life-long leftist political leanings, he was a philosophical conservative by nature. And secondly, he still remains one of the best intellectual antidotes for budding college-age intellects searching for "meaning" amidst the empty, sterile conformity that comprises life in contemporary capitalist society (in their minds anyway).
Camus is a cautionary literary and philosophical footnote to the post-Heidegger European intellectual quest that has bequeathed to us the intellectual poison of Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and the soul-destroying theorems of deconstruction. He is an energizing antidote to the paralyzing non-judgmentalism of post-modernist political thought that produced the strange ambivalence (if not satisfaction) of North American intellectuals regarding the events of 9/11.......
(Excerpt) Read more at american-partisan.com ...
Camus was excommunicated from fashionable Parisian opinion when he opposed the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He was forced to leave the cafe where he and Sartre used to eat and converse, and move to a new cafe a block away.
Camus temperament was fairly similar to George Orwell's - he was one of that rare breed known as the honest leftist.
There is an abiding rumor that Camus had expressed interest in Christianity in the months preceding his untimely death.
His fiction also seems crude and uninspired compared to Camus and Duras - the Stranger will always be considered the classic of French existentialist fiction.
His dramatic works are painfully trite in retrospect - there are constant revivals of Beckett and Ionesco in France, but Sartre's plays are only performed in American high schools.
His political and social essays are also extremely dated and uninteresting. He merely regurgitated the Stalinist party line. Writers like Gramsci, DeBord and Foucault have completely left him in the dust - he is no longer discussed as a serious social theorist.
His literary criticism has been debunked as superficial and narrowly ideological again and again by leftists. Blanchot is now remembered as the great French literary critic of the day.
As far as his life is concerned, he was not nearly as active in the Resistance as he made himself out to be, while it turns out that Beckett and Camus - who never trumpeted their involvement to anyone but kept humbly quiet - have a more enduring legacy as resisters.
And Sartre's lifestyle - i.e. living in sin - wasn't even radical when he was alive. In fact, Simone deBeauvoir's memoirs paint him as a jealous misogynist.
Sartre was a very small man whose only talent was for self-promotion.
But Orwell first saw Stalinism up close and personal in Spain and immediately rejected it as evil.
Orwell was a Red who was capable of seeing the evil of communism, of changing his point of view and acknowledging what was wrong.
To my knowledge Hemingway never repudiated his stupidity and remained proud to have fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Communists until his suiciding day.
Heidegger was a pretentious windbag - I always thought it was hilarious that he was a Nazi sympathizer and a pagan but that the two greatest influences on his thought were Bergson and Husserl, a Jew and a Jewish convert to Christianity.
Franco wasn't a fascist - which is why he refused to ally himself with Hitler or Mussolini in WWII.
His ideological bent was closest to the French Monarchism of the 1870s, not the Italian Fascism of the 1920s.
If Spain had fallen to the Reds in the 1930s it's quite likely that all of continental Europe would have been Communist after WWII and that the Soviet Union would have been a much more powerful force - by a factor of 3x - than it was.
Spain is a free and prosperous country today, and the Spanish have only one man to thank for it: El Caudillo.
He was more cosmopolitan than Hemingway - but he wasn't an elitist. Read The Road to Wigan Pier. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
He held one line from Sarte's play "Nausea" in particular contempt: the last line.
"Hell is other people"
I can't think of a more un-Christian statement than that.
Quite so. Beckett played a very dangerous game, which almost cost him his life, during the early part of the German occupation of Paris, but recoiled in horror if unwanted attention was drawn to it.
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