Since killing and being killed would amount to the same thing in the end, that murderers and murdered would all eventually suffer the same defeat. The problem was no longer whether to accept or reject this condition and this world, but rather to know what reason we might have to oppose it. This is why we have looked for our reasons in the very revolt that led us, for no apparent reason, to choose to fight evil. And we understood that we were rebelling not only for ourselves but for something shared by all men.
How did this happen?
In this world stripped of values, in this desert of the heart in which we dwelled, what in fact could revolt signify? It made us into people who said no, but at the same time, we were people who said yes. We said no to the world, to its essential absurdity, to the abstractions that threatened us, to the civilization of death that was being prepared for us. By saying no we declared that things had lasted long enough, and there was a line that could not be crossed, but at the same time we affirmed everything that felt short of that line. We affirmed that there was something within us that rejected the scandal of human suffering and could not be humiliated for too long.
Of course, this contradiction should have given us pause. We thought the world existed and struggled without any real values. And yet there we were, in a struggle against Germany. The French I knew in the resistance, who read Montaigne in the train while smuggling their pamphlets, proved that we could, at least in our country, understand the skeptics while retaining a sense of honor. And all of us consequently by virtue of the simple fact that we lived, hoped, and fought, were affirming something. But did this something have general value? Was it more than the opinion of an individual and could it serve as a rule of conduct?
The response is quite simply.
The men who I am speaking about were ready to die in the course of their revolt. Death would prove that they sacrificed themselves for a truth greater than their individual existence, and that exceeded their individual destiny. What our rebels were defending against a hostile fate was a value common to all people. When men were tortured in the presence of their housekeeper; when ears were hacked with diligence; when mothers were forced to condemn their children to death; when the just were buried like pigs; these men in revolt judged that something in them was being denied.
Something that belonged not only to them but was a common good through which all men could achieve solidarity.
Yes, that was the great lesson of those disastrous years. That an insult aimed at a student in Prague affected a worker in the Paris suburbs. That blood spilled somewhere in the banks of an Eastern European river could lead a Texas farmer to spill his own on the ground of the Ardennes that he just got to know. And even this was absurd and crazy, impossible or nearly impossible to contemplate. But at the same time, there was, in that absurdity, the lesson that we found ourselves in a collective tragedy where a sense of shared dignity was at stake. A communion among men that had to be defended and sustained. With that in mind, we knew how to act and we learned that people, even in situations of absolute moral degradation, can find sufficient values to guide their conduct.
Once people began to realize the truth lay in communicating with each other, and mutual recognition of each other’s dignity, it became clear that this very communication was what had to be served. To maintain this communication, men needed to be free, since a master and a slave have nothing in common. And one cannot speak and communicate with a slave. Yes, bondage is a silence. The most terrible silence of all. To maintain this communication we had to eliminate injustice because there is no contact between the oppressed and the profiteer. Need is also relegated to silence. To maintain this communication we had to eliminate lying and violence. For the man who lies closes himself off from other men, and he who tortures and constrains imposes an irrevocable silence. From the negative impetus that was the starting point of our revolt, we drew an ethos of liberty and sincerity.
Yes, it was the act of communication that was needed to oppose the murderous world. That’s what we understood going forward, and this communication must be maintained today if we are to protect ourselves from murder.
As we know now, we must fight against injustice, against slavery and terror. Because these 3 scourges are what makes silence reign among men, what builds barriers between them, what renders them invisible to one another and prevent them from finding the only value that might save them from this desperate world: the extended of man’s struggling against fate.
At the end of this long night, we finally know that what we must do in the face of this crisis torn world. What must we do? Call things by their name and understand that we kill millions of people each time we agree to think certain thoughts. You don’t think badly because you think you are a murderer, you are a murderer because you think badly. Hence, you can be a murderer without ever having killed, and this is why we are all more or less murderers.
The first thing to do is simply to reject in thought and action any acquiescent or fatalistic way of thinking.
The second thing to do is to unburden the world of the terror that reigns today and prevents clear thought.
And since I’ve been told that the United Nations is holding an important session in this very city, we might suggest that the first written text of this global organization should solemnly proclaim, in the wake of the Nuremberg trial, a worldwide abolition of capital punishment.
The third thing to do, whenever possible, is to put politics back in its true place, a secondary one. We need not furnish the world with a political or moral gospel or catechism. The great misfortune of our time is precisely that politics pretends to provide us with a catechism, with a complete philosophy, and sometimes even with rules for loving. But the role of politics is to keep things in order, and not to regulate our inner problems. As for me, I don’t know if there is any absolute. If there is one, I know that it is not of a political order. The absolute is not something that we can decide on as a whole, it’s for each of us to think of individually. Each of us has the inner freedom to reflect on the meaning of the absolute. And our external relationships should allow us that freedom.
Our life undoubtedly belongs to others, and it is right to sacrifice it if necessary. But our death belongs only to us. This is my definition of freedom.
The fourth thing to be done is to seek out and to create, on the very foundation of our negativity, positive values that will reconcile negative thought with the potential for positive action. That is the work of philosophers, which I have barely touched upon here.
The fifth thing is to fully understand that this attitude means creating a universalism in which all people of good will can come together. To leave solitude behind we must speak. But we must always speak frankly and on all occasions never lie and always say everything we know to be true. But we can only speak a truth in a world in which it is defined and found in values shared by everyone. It isn’t Mr. Hitler who decides what’s true or false. Nobody in this world, now or ever, should have the right to decide that their own truth is good enough to impose on others. For only the shared consciousness of men and women can realize this ambition. The values sustaining this shared consciousness must be rediscovered. The freedom we must finally win is the freedom not to lie. Only then can we discover our reasons for living and for dying.
So here is where we stand, and I probably took the long way there, but after all the history of mankind is the history of its errors, not its truths. Truth is probably like happiness, simple and without a history. Does this mean we’ve resolved all of our problems? No, of course not. The world is neither better nor more reasonable. We still haven’t left absurdity behind, but we have at least one reason to force ourselves to change our behavior, and this is the reason we’ve been missing. The world would still be a desperate place if men and women didn’t exist. But they do, along with their passions, their dreams, and their communion. A few of us in Europe have combined a pessimistic view of the world with a profound optimism for humankind.
We can’t pretend to escape from history for we are in history. We can only aspire to do battle in the arena of history to save from it that part of man which does not belong to it. We want only to rediscover the paths to civilization where man, without turning his back on
