VARIETY
ALBERT CAMUS AND
MODERATION
The publication of
The Plague
in America will probably be the
occasion of much the same kind
of argument about Camus' "mes–
sage" as took place in France. The
readers of PR may be interested
in hearing something on the sub–
ject from Camus himself.
In France, after
The Plague
carne out (and after a series of
articles entitled
Neither Victims
nor Executioners),
Albert Camus
had to defend himself against the
accusation of advocating non-vio–
lence, and of taking refuge from
the present crisis in the myth of
the "saint without God." Camus
insisted on defending himself, be–
cause he dislikes very much having
his words carried to some ultimate
logical conclusion, and thrown
back at him in the form of a dilem–
ma. Far from aiming at stating
dilemmas, Camus aims at the op–
posite, a consistent "neither/ nor."
He knows that this is a defensive
form of argument, but he would
be willing to maintain that today
we are still in the phase of the
"resistance," when one must de–
fend a certain stability and norm–
alcy of human existence against
1142
the catastrophic automatism of
History.
To a Communist intellectual
who insisted it was the writer's
duty to wrest the (proletarian) vic–
tim from the (capitalist) execu–
tioner, and who accused Camus of
shirking this task by remaining at
an equal distance between the op–
pressed and the oppressor under
pretext of condemning all violence,
he replied that what he condemned
was not
all
violence, but rather all
"legitimation of violence, be the
legitimation dt>rived from an abso–
lute
raison d'Etat
or from a to–
talitarian philosophy." "I detest
those whose words go farther than
their acts," added the author
of
Th e Plague.
His target was a cer–
tain kind of intell ectual, whom
he called "the absolute rationalist,"
even more than the hangman,
whose moral infamy is a matter of
simple evidence.
"If
history today
is so bloody," he said, "it is be–
cause the European intelligentsia
has betrayed its heritage and its
vocation, and by yielding to pathos
and exaltation, has chosen hybris,"
the totalitarian perspectives of ab–
solute rationalism, instead of re–
maining faithful to "the truth of
the moment." The only question
that makes sense
tod~y,
insisted
Camus in his polemic, is the ques–
tion of what can be the meaning of
an ideal whose realization would
require another war. "I have asked
myself this question, and I have
come to the conclusion that I have
