“You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you
therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent
and that good and evil could be defined according to one’s
wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or
divine code the only values were those of the animal world –
in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded
that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed,
that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the
individual was the adventure of power and his only morality,
the realism of conquests. And, to tell the truth, I, believing
I thought as you did, saw no valid argument to answer you
except a fierce love of justice which, after all, seemed to me
as unreasonable as the most sudden passion.
“Where lay the difference? Simply that you readily accepted
despair and I never yielded to it. Simply that you saw the
injustice of our condition to the point of being willing to add
to it, whereas it seemed to me that man must exalt justice in
order to fight against eternal injustice, create happiness in
order to protest against the universe of unhappiness. Because
you turned your despair into intoxication, because you freed
yourself from it by making a principle of it, you were willing
to destroy man’s works and to fight him in order to add to his
basic misery. Meanwhile, refusing to accept that despair and
that tortured world, I merely wanted men to rediscover their
solidarity in order to wage war against their revolting fate.
“As you can see, from the same principles we derived quite
different codes. Because you were tired of fighting heaven,
you chose injustice and sided with the gods.
“I, on the contrary, chose justice in order to remain faithful to
the world. I continue to believe that this world has no
ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a
meaning, and that is man, because he is the only creature
to insist on having one. This world has at least the truth of
man, and our task is to provide its justifications against fate
itself. And it has no justification but man; hence he must be
saved if we want to save the idea we have of life. With your
scornful smile you will ask me: What do you mean by saving
man? And with all my being I shout to you that I mean not
mutilating him and yet giving a chance to the justice that
man alone can conceive.”
Alber Camus, “A Letter to a Friend”
Setemheb 