682
PARTISAN
REVIEW
one, and deserves to be discussed seriously at least by those people today
who, while not pretending to have at their disposal any new systematic
certainty, are aware of the sterility of the old political dogmas. Let',
notice in passing that until recently Jean-Paul Sartre was not
un–
willing to recognize that he belonged in the company of these people.
As a matter of fact, he went so far as to write that the biggest party
in
France was that of those who abstained from voting, which proved hpw
deep among the people was the disgust with the old parties, their
methods and their ideologies; a new Left, he added, should try to
reach
those masses.
An attentive reader of
L'Homme Revoltt
will not fail to notice
that, in
his
own peculiar language, and in terms of general ideas rather
than of specific moral problems, Camus formulates against the modern
world the same indictment as Tolstoy. For Camus, as for Tolstoy,
modern society does not recognize any other norm than violence and
the accomplished fact, hence it can legitimately be said that it
i6
founded
on murder. Which is tantamount to saying that human life in it has
become a senseless affair. Tolstoy, however, believed that, besides re–
taining an "eternal" value, Christianity was still alive in the depths of
our society among the humble; hence he thought that a radical Christian
morality: non-violence, could offer a way out. Camus is not religious,
and much more skeptical than Tolstoy as to the moral resources of
the modern world. He does not advocate non-violence. He simply points
out the reappearance, through nihilistic reduction to absurdity, of the
need for a new sense of limit and of "nature."
No matter how uncertain one might consider Camus' conclusions,
his
attack on the modern ideological craze appears both strong and eloquent.
Of course,
if
one believes in progress, one might still maintain that
Nazism and Stalinism were the result of contingencies, factual erron,
and residual wickedness. But progressive optimism is precisely the
notion that Camus vigorously questions. His arguments cannot
be
easily dismissed by a philosophy like existentialism, which stresses
so resolutely the discontinuity between human consciousness and any
"process" whatsoever, and which in any case makes it very difficult
to go back to the notion that man's ethical task is to "change the
world" through historical action. This not only because the idea of
"changing the world" is a radically optimistic one in that it presupposes
precisely that fundamental harmony between man and the world which
existentialism denies; but because only
if
man is "historical" through
and through (as Hegel and Marx assumed) is the definition of a
"historical task" possible at all. Now, the main existentialist
claim
was
