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Title
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THE ETHICAL PRAGMATISM OF ALBERT CAMUS: TWO STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS (FRENCH TEXT).
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Identifier
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AAI8014993
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identifier
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8014993
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Creator
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VASIL, DEAN.
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Contributor
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Henri Peyre
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Date
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1980
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Romance
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Abstract
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"I claim," writes Bernard-Henri Levy in Barbarism with a Human Face, "that the antibarbarian intellectual, finally, will be a moraliste, and when I say moraliste I mean it in the classic sense, like Kant, Camus, or Merleau-Ponty." I do not claim as much, for I am as "fully aware" as Levy of what he himself calls "the secrets and the trickeries of the categorical imperative." But if "the virtues of an atheist spiritualism" were not foreign to me (for I do not consider that "God has been dead since Nietzsche," nor that He was even dead before him), then I, like Levy, would "prefer that lie"--the lie, that is, of a moral imperative without God--"to the lie of historicist superstition"--or the lie of "becoming" God in His place. The first is illogical, but the second is irrational, "la predication de la surhumanite," as Camus says, "aboutissant a la fabrication methodique des sous-hommes." And so the first is the real preference of Camus as well, what Levy defines as "a morality of courage and duty confronting the dismal cowardice of submission to facts"; and it is the subject of the two studies in the present essay.;The first of these studies does claim for Camus, then, what that of Isaiah Berlin claims for Tolstoy, that his "was the spirit of empirical inquiry which animated the great anti-theological and anti-metaphysical thinkers of the eighteenth century," and that his "realism and inability to be taken in by shadows made him their natural disciple." And it is here that I disagree with Levy, who asserts that most of these thinkers were the ancestors of the men to whom Camus was so steadfastly opposed, the "murderers of souls and torturers of bodies" whose spirit is "pure fidelity . . . to excess, to the idea of progress as it was thought out in the Enlightenment." But it was Camus himself who, in L'Homme Revolte, carefully distinguished the moderate wing of that movement from its extremists and their descendants. The Constituants, for example, might well have said of their revolt what Camus did say of its modern version: "Elle prend le parti d'une limite ou s'etablit la communaute des hommes." Like that of Camus, it was not one of excess, but of measure, not one of faith in "historical," but in human reason. And it was animated by the same critical spirit, the spirit of its philosophical allies, of Voltaire and Montesquieu, of Kant, and even of Rousseau, of those whom we may include among the moderates of the Enlightenment. Their universe, like that of Camus, "est celui du relatif.".;And yet as he well knew, and as I show in the second study of this essay, it is but one step from their "disenchanted" view of it to that of its absurdity, a view which most of them had not fully accepted, but whose moral consequences had already been drawn by some of the extremists to whom they were opposed. Sade, for example, was a progenitor of that nihilism which in despair of the world and of man as a part of it seeks refuge in their "transformation" through history.;And so if unlike most of his own predecessors Camus does fully accept the world's absurdity he also rejects the moral consequences which some of their enemies drew from it as a far greater evasion, as a flight from reality that has become a negation of the world and of man as its only end, but the very end in whom Camus reaffirms the faith of his ancestors against the descendants of those who opposed them.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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French
