ANNIVERSARY
ALBERT CAMUS

“What
Interests
Me is Being
a Man”
Living is not a condition, but a question, one that makes the emperor Caligula cry out, “There’s nothing in this world, or in the other, made to my stature. And yet I know, and you, too, know that all I need is for the impossible to be.” One hundred years after Camus’ birth, we go to the heart  of the French author’s work.

by Fabrizio Sinisi

There is a thin yet tenacious thread that links two phrases of the two most important maîtres à penser after World War II, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. While the former, in the brief 1946 manifesto, Existentialism is a Humanism, wrote that “what is not possible for man is not to choose,” the latter put these words into the mouth of one of the protagonists of The Plague (1947): “What interests me is being a man.” If now, at the centennial of his birth, there exists the possibility to finally separate Albert Camus from the bundle of French existentialism (into which he is always too hastily placed), then it lies precisely in his eminently dramatic conception of the notion of humanity. To be human, for Camus, is not a condition–it is a question.    It is common practice to link the name of Camus–journalist, writer, playwright, and much more–to his political positions: from militancy in the partisan cell Combat to resignation from UNESCO in protest over the entrance of Franco’s Spain into the UN, to criticism of the Soviets, to repeated opposition to the death penalty. But there is an obstinate and continuous note at the origin of his enthusiasm, and of which his works are a persistent witness: it is this question about being human, about the reasons for his being in the world–issues that preoccupy him even before all sociopolitical arguments. And this is a question that the human being has the duty to ask himself, first of all, as Camus wrote in 1942 in The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

Everything or nothing. Rationality asks, or rather requires, that it itself be overcome–the invocation of a beyond that history as it is seems to deny. Camus states, “I want everything to be explained to me or nothing. And reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart.... Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” He then–significantly–adds, as a convinced atheist, to those who, in flattering him, labeled him a theorizer of the absurd: “The absurd is sin without God.”
For this reason, in light of these 100 years (he was born on November 7th, in Algeria) that finally permit us to read Camus with the detachment that he deserves, he appears to us to be the receptor of a question about man that leaves no room for escape. If, as he wrote in his Notebooks, “culture is the cry of men in the face of their destiny,” then it is precisely within culture that the insufficiency of a neo-positivism–of which Camus finds himself living, contemporaneously, the catastrophe and the temptation–will be verified. “I need to feel my being in the measure in which it expresses the sentiment of that which eludes me. I need to write things that elude me in part, but that represent a proof of what, in me, is stronger than me.” “I call the imbecile,” he says, “that man who is afraid of joy”–a joy for which man is made, for which it is worth fighting. Moreover, making art is, in itself, the stigma of this struggle. “Literature of despair,” he writes in Summer, “is a contradiction in terms.”
There is a work to which Camus returned more than once, to the point of writing three distinct versions of it–the play Caligula. The character of the mad emperor became for him the place to verify a fundamental intuition, that is, that despair can be a possibility for knowledge that satisfaction, on the other hand, does not permit. Caligula is at the origin of every vitalistic or heroic interpretation of his behavior. He is serious and obstinate, and we could say “loyal” to his despair: after the death of his beloved Drusilla, his attitude and management of power seem oriented toward the one goal of testing the limits of a freedom so unlimited that it becomes insignificant; a freedom so virtual that it assumes the characteristics of a prison. “The world as it is is unbearable.... Men die and they are not happy.... How to get out of it? Make a contract with one’s own solitude, no? Make an agreement with life. Give oneself reasons, choose a tranquil existence, console oneself.”
But consolation cannot suffocate a desire that seems to surpass the forms themselves of what is known: “I know only too well my own passion for life; it could never be content with nature.”
Caligula conceives of himself on the basis of the burn of an unquenchable desire, a void in which he unwillingly finds himself consisting. And it is here, starting from this realization, that the division between Caligula the emperor and Caligula the man occurs–the emperor vanishes, and what emerges is all of the arrogant intrusiveness of an “I” that is lacking, an abyss of nostalgia. “I have come to nothing.... But where could I quench this thirst? What human heart, what god, would have for me the depth of a great lake? There’s nothing in this world, or in the other, made to my stature. And yet I know, and you, too, know, that all I need is for the impossible to be. The impossible! I’ve searched for it at the confines of the world, in the secret places of my heart. I’ve stretched out my hands; see, I stretch out my hands, but it’s always you I find, you only, confronting me, and I’ve come to hate you.”
The same will happen in Camus’ other great character-myth, the mild-mannered assassin Meursault, protagonist of The Stranger: man alienated from his own desire ends up alienated from himself; his own “I” is as far removed from him as reality itself becomes distant and unreachable. Unless he puts down roots in the turmoil of his own shortcoming, man becomes like Meursault–a pure filling of space, a neutral subject for whom there is no difference between a swim in the ocean and a homicide.
Therefore, despair, according to Camus, has the terms of the alternative between Caligula and Meursault: the alternative between an extreme suffering and the blindness of torpor.
In his extraordinary 1947 novel The Plague, Camus recounts the arrival of the bubonic plague in the Algerian city of Oran. Isolated from the outside world in order to prevent the spread of the disease, the city becomes the prisoner of its evil. The plague becomes, paradoxically, an exceptional and dramatic observation post in which to interrogate the nature of man, to place him in a condition of permanent emergency. How does one react to the plague? What is man, and how does he behave when he is catastrophically placed in such intimacy with death?
In a panorama in which “the plague had eliminated every value judgment,” it immediately becomes clear that a purely voluntaristic attitude is insufficient. “I’ve seen enough of people who die for an idea. I don’t believe in heroism; I know it’s easy and I’ve learned it can be murderous. What interests me is living and dying for what one loves.... Man isn’t an idea, Rambert.”

The time has come. And it is precisely the character Rambert, a journalist who happened to be in Oran and is forced by the epidemic to remain in the city, who reveals how evil can unleash what is strongest and most personal in man. Having succeeded, after many attempts, at finding a way to flee from Oran, Rambert decides not to leave, but to stay in the infected city. “Rambert said... if he went away, he would feel ashamed of himself, and that would embarrass his relations with the woman he loved.” This drama is also underlined by the cultured Jesuit, Fr. Paneloux, who first accuses his fellow citizens of having deserved divine punishment, and only after having witnessed the terrible death of a child is able to look at the plague with new eyes, without backing away. Shifting significantly from “you” to “we,” he affirms the radicality that is asked of faith in a moment so definitive and dramatic. “My brothers, the time has come. We must believe everything or deny everything.”
The plague will pass. But Dr. Rieux, another main character, understands that the point of the matter has not passed at all. There is something that endures, and that the plague was able to bring to light and render crucial: the reason for which life is worth living, a valid reason not to die, the object of every human hope to remain in the world. “Certainly he’d take a rest ‘over there.’ It, too, would be a pretext for memory. But if that was what it meant, winning the match–how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for! ...There can be no peace without hope.”