A Life Worth Living by Robert Zaretsky

Author:Robert Zaretsky [Zaretsky, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2013-11-06T23:00:00+00:00

As Philippe Vanney has recently suggested, a truce is the legal expression of the mean, at least at times of war.41 Inevitably, perhaps, French Algeria was no more able to act on this exhortation than was ancient Athens. Perhaps no less inevitably, Camus eventually withdrew from the public arena, refusing to speak again on what he called his “personal tragedy.”42 In 1960, when he died in a car crash in southern France, his silence suddenly became his final public position on Algeria. It is a silence in which echoes the fate of political and philosophical moderation.

As a political value or philosophical concept, moderation is notoriously elusive. Is it, in fact, a full-bodied theory or worldview? Or, instead, is it little more than a personality trait? Is there, moreover, something questionable about the very desirability of moderation? It is not always the case, after all, that one of the extremes that define a mean is wrong. Or, for that matter, the mean is not always the most desirable end. Ultimately, is it something more than a disposition to avoid extremes, whether or not one of those extremes is desirable?

In a recent work, the political theorist Aurelian Craiutu insists that moderation is a positive theory, one based on the intrinsic values of pluralism, gradualism, and toleration. A moderate, Craiutu suggests, is a thinker who embraces “fallibilism as a middle way between radical skepticism and epistemological absolutism, and acknowledge[s] the limits of political action and the imperfection of the human condition.”43

Most discussions of ethical or philosophical moderation find their source in Aristotle, particularly his Nicomachean Ethics. For the Greek thinker, “excess and deficiency are characteristic of vice” while “the mean is virtue.” The mean, however, is not a theoretical or abstract ideal, but a state reached through practice and experience. There is, for Aristotle, no science of the mean; instead, there is only the never-ending series of efforts to reach this state. Inevitably, the individual seeking the mean will at times sin by excess or prudence. This is only natural, Aristotle reassures, for “so shall we most easily hit the mean and what is right.”44

Remarkably for someone who claimed to be so deeply influenced by ancient Greek thought, Camus never cites Aristotle’s locus classicus on the subject of moderation. This is not surprising, however: Camus insisted repeatedly that he was not a philosopher.45 At the very least, it was certainly true that he was not a systematic reader of ancient philosophy. As Paul Archambault justly observes, “Nothing seems to indicate that Camus had anything but a passing acquaintance with Greek thought between the death of Plato and the Christian era.”46

Camus instead fastened onto Aeschylus and Sophocles. (Perhaps influenced by his reading of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, Camus had a low opinion of Euripides, dismissing his “rationalist” approach to human drama.) Of course, neither the Oresteia nor Oedipus plays offers a fully consistent or cogent “philosophy.” The Greek tragedians were, in this regard, no more “philosophers” than Camus was. But their work is nevertheless

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