SARTRE VS. CAMUS
From Socrates to Bertrand Russell, most philosophers in the Western tradition based their views on examples drawn from everyday life. They have sought to correct linguistic confusions and to clarify our assumptions about what we can know and what we ought to value. The Existentialists sometimes analyzed ordinary situations, as Sartre did in his famous analysis of the waiter in Being and Nothingness, but they often preferred to start with extreme situations. (See Sartre’s short story "The Wall," in which he depicts a group of prisoners facing imminent execution.)
In the early 1940s, with France occupied by the Nazis, a common reaction was to ignore the Occupation as much as possible and to carry on with work and family life in a situation of considerable privation. But those who resisted the Nazis faced harsher choices: to be captured was to face the prospect of torture. Would one crack and give away one’s comrades (thereby exposing them to torture and death) under the pressure of intolerable pain? Existentialism is the philosophy that insists on the freedom and responsibility of choice even (and perhaps especially) in extreme situations. Even in confinement, shackled to a wall, or pushing a boulder up a hill, as long as one is conscious one still has choices to make. One can’t choose one’s circumstances–one is "thrown into" the world–but one can choose the attitude one takes toward those circumstances, and one’s response to them.
And this means, as Sartre says, that Existentialism is a humanism. For since the Renaissance the humanist tradition has associated freedom with dignity. Sartre and Camus offer the last version of that tradition in France before the anti-humanist wave set in with Foucault and his colleagues in the 1960s.
Existentialism is primarily a twentieth-century phenomenon, but it has nineteenth-century roots in Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky. In this perspective, human beings are not primarily rational creatures but passionate ones. Again, for Bertrand Russell, epistemology had been the central philosophical subject: what can we know and with what degree of certainty? For the Existentialists, the central problem is being rather than knowing. We are not detached observers of the world, but actors in the world. Unlike rocks and trees, we are open to the world, and we have consciousness of it. (Consciousness, for Existentialists, is always about something in the world.) We are also open to the future, which we determine to some extent by our choices and actions. Again, unlike rocks and trees, or even animals, we are not entities with a fixed nature or essence that determines what we are and what we do. In Sartre’s formula, "existence precedes essence": we make ourselves with our decisions, our actions, and our purposes. To follow the herd is to act in "bad faith," and to limit one’s choices. To act in bad faith is to assume that one is identical with one’s role (say, a waiter) the way a tree is a tree, rather than a radically free agent.
Most twentieth-century Existentialists, and certainly Sartre, take for granted Nietzsche’s "death of God." Hence the characteristic vocabulary of Existentialism, with its emphasis on the absurd or extreme condition of humanity in an indifferent universe: words such as dread, anguish, nothingness, nausea are pervasive in this lexicon. "Anguish" is the recognition that we cannot simply inherit our values or derive them from the way the world is: things have the meanings and values we give them and situations change from moment to moment. There are, to be sure, certain aspects of our situation that do not change: the fact that we are going to die and that we know it; the fact that we have to make moral decisions without having them guaranteed. In any case we are condemned to freedom, to responsibility, without excuses or alibis. Human beings are perpetual projects, and we must constantly reinvent the image of our humanity.
Since his death in 1980, Sartre has been out of fashion–and perhaps that fall from grace was inevitable given the extent of his fame. He was not only a philosopher, but also a playwright and novelist, a founder and editor of one of the most important journals in France, a celebrated public intellectual who commented on every major political issue of his time. He popularized the ethos of engagement or commitment, the obligation of the intellectual to take sides in the political struggle. And he lived long enough, unlike Camus, to see his most radical insights become cliches. He made literature and philosophy into media events, and gave endless interviews. For Sartre, Denis Hollier has suggested, the microphone was what the madeleine and the cup of tea were for Proust.
In 1939, when the Second World War broke out, he was thirty-four years old and relatively obscure, though he had already published his most important novel Nausea and his short story "The Wall." He spent the first part of the war in a prison camp, reading the German philosopher Heidegger, and the rest of it writing in cafes: his seminal treatise Being and Nothingness, and his plays The Flies and No Exit. And when the war ended his lecture "Existentialism is a Humanism" spread his fame to the Anglophone world.
He was born in 1905, and lost his father, who died in Indochina, a year later. The family background was Protestant–unusual in France–and probably significant for the development of his sensibility even after he rejected religious belief. "Throughout his life," the great Mexican critic and poet Octavio Paz has suggested, "he practiced with great severity the examination of conscience, axis of the spiritual life of his Huguenot ancestors. His criticism… follows the intellectual and moral scheme of the examination of conscience: it begins with a watchfulness, a tearing off of the veils and masks, not in search of nakedness but of the hidden ulcer, and it ends, inexorably, in a judgment. For the Protestant religious conscience, to know the world is to judge it and to judge it is to condemn it. The center of his thought was the complementary opposition between the situation (predestination) and liberty; this too was the theme of the Calvinists and the nub of their argument with the Jesuits. Sartre inherited from Christianity not transcendence, the affirmation of another reality and another world, but the negation of this world and the abhorrence of our earthly reality. In accusing himself and his class, Sartre accuses himself with the violence of a penitent."
His relationship with his mother was unusually close, and except for the loss of his father and his mother’s remarriage in 1917 he had an idyllic childhood. Perhaps it’s not fanciful to suggest that his hatred of his stepfather later expanded into a rejection of the whole social order of bourgeois France. School brought the double revelation of physical ugliness and intellectual distinction. He attended the Ecole Normale in the late 1920s, and there he counted among his classmates Simone de Beauvoir (who became his partner, but not an exclusive one), Simone Weil, the future anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, and a future rival, the philosopher/historian/sociologist/journalist Raymond Aron. Throughout his life he had difficulty in accepting rivals as equals, and preferred to surround himself with younger acolytes.
He was thirty-eight when he published Being and Nothingness. The work is based on his reading of Heidegger, but it’s more concrete, especially in its examples of "bad faith." But more than one commentator has blamed him for ruining the clarity of the French language by importing German "obscurity, prolixity, apriorism and indifference to fact, ponderousness, pretentiousness, dogmatism, cliquishness, insularity, a silly idealization of the proletariat combined with a de facto intellectual elitism" (Ernest Gellner). Gellner quotes an example of Sartrean prose from the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). "In reality, racism is the colonial interest lived as a link of all the colonialists of the colony through serial flight of alterity. As such, like the living Idea it presents itself as infinite depth. But its depth is both petrified and strictly formal, because it is limited to producing itself as a negation of everyone by serial infinity."
But the real surprise about Sartre is not the degeneration of his prose style but rather the development of his politics. For "engagement" led him into apologies for Stalinism and later into justifications of terrorism and dictatorship in the Third World. The great champion of freedom became an apologist for some of the world’s ugliest tyrannies. He redeemed himself at the end, arguing in the seventies for a libertarian version of socialism. But his hatred of the bourgeois world from which he sprang clouded his political judgment and that of his many followers. It also led to a break with the other great hero of the Existentialist movement, Albert Camus.
The most basic fact about Albert Camus is that he was an outsider among Parisian intellectuals. The theme of exile is central to his fiction and his thinking. He was born in Algeria, then a French colony, in 1913. His father, an impoverished worker of Alsatian origin, was killed in the First World War; his mother, of Spanish descent, was illiterate and nearly mute. The young Camus was a scholarship boy, who worked his way up the educational ladder with the help of some inspiring teachers in the public schools. He never attended elite institutions like the Ecole Normale. He wrote lyrical essays about the Algerian countryside and the Mediterranean sea and sun, and loved sports; football, swimming, and boxing. (How different from Sartre, who found nature nauseating and never thought about sports at all!) He developed tuberculosis in 1930, so the awareness of death, so central to Existentialism, was especially vivid in him.
Camus became active in left-wing political circles in Algeria in the 1930s, and wrote, produced, and acted in plays for working class audiences. In the two years before the outbreak of the Second World War he served an apprenticeship as a journalist, reviewing some of Sartre’s early work and producing an important series of articles on social conditions among the Arabs of the Kabylie region. During the war he became editor of Combat, one of the most important journals of the Resistance, in Paris. He published his first novel, The Stranger (1942), a study of alienation, of a young man condemned to death less for shooting an Arab than for the fact that he never says more than he genuinely feels and refuses to conform to society’s demands. And that same year saw the publication of "The Myth of Sisyphus," his analysis of contemporary nihilism and the sense of the "absurd." His postwar novel, The Plague (1947) shifts the focus from nihilism to rebellion. It’s an allegory of resistance, an account of a struggle against an epidemic by characters whose importance lies less in the doubtful success with which they battle the disease than in their determined assertion of human dignity and solidarity. In this respect it echoes the theme of "The Myth of Sisyphus" and resembles Sartre’s view that one must choose and act even where hope seems absent.
But Sartre and Camus broke in 1951 when Camus published The Rebel, his attempt to formalize his position and to criticize the French romanticism about revolution and violence that had led many intellectuals–including Sartre–into apologies for Stalinism. Camus "attacked the ‘historicism’ of his contemporaries–their invocation of ‘History’ to justify their own public commitments and their indifference to the human costs of radical political choices" (Tony Judt). Sartre struck back at Camus’s Achilles’ heel, accusing him of sentimental moralizing and lack of philosophical rigor. The break became permanent in the mid-1950s when the brutal Algerian War broke out and Camus refused to take sides. His people, the pieds noirs, the French settlers in Algeria, had their rights too, even if they were historically in the wrong. He condemned the French use of torture, of course, but he also condemned the Algerians’ use of terror. In this period he wrote his brilliant short story "The Guest," a Hemingway-like tale of a tangle of hatreds that leaves a decent Frenchman in Algeria estranged from both French and Arabs, and his darkest novel, The Fall (1957), a confessional monologue. There was one more novel, The First Man, the manuscript of which was found in the wreckage of the automobile accident that took his life on January 4, 1960.
In the end, Camus may have lacked Sartre’s philosophical sophistication, but he was the better moralist. Tony Judt summarizes: "In conditions of extremity there are rarely to be found simple and comfortable categories of good and evil, guilty and innocent. Men may do the right thing from a mixture of motives and may with equal ease commit terrible mistakes and crimes with the best of intentions–or no intentions at all. It does not follow from this that the plagues that mankind brings down on itself are ‘natural’ or unavoidable. But assigning responsibility for them–and thus preventing them in the future–may not always be a simple business. At best, political labels and passions simplify and render crude and partial our understanding of human behavior and its motives. At worst, they contribute willfully to the very ailments they purport so confidently to address." This simple wisdom about politics and humanity was rare in the hyperpoliticized atmosphere of postwar Paris, but it connected Camus to an admirable fellowship of intellectual exiles: Hannah Arendt, Czeslaw Milosz, Nicola Chiaromonte, Manes Sperber, Witold Gombrowicz, Ignazio Silone, Boris Souvarine. Some of those names are virtually forgotten now, but they, rather than Sartre and his friends, have had the last word on the political catastrophes of the twentieth century.
RECOMMENDED:
Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French
Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1998).
Stanley Hoffmann, "A Hero Gone Out of Fashion," New York Times Book Review, 26 July 1987.