Sartre and Camus: Revolution and Revolt

...Sartre and Camus seem to have agreed, in short, that they should be thought of not in terms of similarity but of opposition and even conflict...

...Camus emphasized, for instance, that Existentialism and Marxism offer mutually incompatible interpretations of history...

...in the second, it is "closed...

...Briefly stated, Camus' argument is that political revolution, whatever its original ideals, ends up by employing the guillotine or the purge because it makes history its god and must eventually sacrifice the present to the future and means to ends...

...The essay on Baudelaire, for example, takes an opposite view to that of Camus on the relative merits of (metaphysical) revolt and (political) revolution...

...Two of these were ethical questions: the place of moral purity in politics and the problem of political efficacy...

...It is not surprising, then, that Sartre and Camus should have quarrelled violently over the moral and political ideas contained in the latter's L'Homme revolte, published in 1951...

...Terms such as "freedom," "progress," "justice," "necessity," "happiness," are used in explanation of actions which ordinary people experience as their opposites...

...Sartre opts for collective endeavor, at the risk of injustice and suffering, and the creation of values through action in time...

...The political revolutionary, on the other hand, is actively concerned to change the society of which he disapproves...

...In the first case, history is "open...

...Camus ends with a somewhat ill-defined plea for gradualism rather than dialectical materialism, the substitution of nature for the Hegelian-Marxist interpretation of history, and the cultivation of the "Mediterranean values" of dignity, fraternity, relativity and moderation...

...This book, translated into English as The Rebel, might be taken as a commentary on Raymond Aron's statement that "experience has unfortunately refused to produce any example of revolution which conforms either with Marxist prophecy or humanitarian hopes...

...No doubt the main value of the Sartre-Camus controversy is its sharp reminder, on the highest level, of the eternal conflict in all political debate between principle and practice, morality and expediency, abstract theory and concrete human experience...

...Sartre regards Camus' preference for revolt rather than revolution as sentimental in essence, ineffectual in practice, and even an example of "bad faith" in the existentialist sense...

...the third, the nature of historical change, was a more metaphysical issue...

...His view of the nature of historical processes convinces him that men can only realize their goals by "entering history" (i.e., by concrete political action...

...He says of the absurd: "I do not recognize the absurd in the sense of scandal and disillusionment that Camus attributes to it...

...The term "existentialist," rightly applied to Sartre, is quite misleading in the case of Camus...

...Sartre has levelled the charge of political abstentionism against Camus, writing in an obituary note: "This Descartes of the Absurd refused to leave the safe ground of morality and venture on the uncertain paths of practicality...

...At different times both Sartre and Camus have been at pains to emphasize the differences separating them...

...On the issue of efficacy again, Sartre resembles the commissar and Camus the yogi...

...Sartre is a logician where Camus was a lyrical idealist...

...An intellectualism which minimizes human suffering, and accepts political expediency so long as it is practiced by the left, remains a continuing temptation for many progressive European intellectuals...

...Now since the Communist party is the only effective working-class party in France, Sartre maintained against Camus (this was four years before the Hungarian rising) that all possible support for the Communist party is a duty for the non-Communist left-wing intellectual...

...This makes it clear that Sartre and Camus disagreed on three different topics...

...SARTRE'S REACTIONS to Camus' ideas were colored above all by his belief in historical inevitability...

...In 1945, about a year after his first meeting with Sartre, Camus said in an interview: "Sartre and I are continually astonished to see out-names associated together...

...The differences between Sartre and Camus were debated in Les Temps Modernes of August 1952 following a harshly critical review of L'Homme revolte by Francis Jeanson in the May issue of the same periodical...

...Sartre is a metaphysician where Camus was a moralist...

...His view of revolt is equally categorical...

...Sartre, for his part, has quarrelled with the two main concepts of Camus' thought— the absurd and revolt...

...On the first topic, Sartre speaks as a political technician and Camus as a moralist...

...Camus finds his values in the individual consciousness, independent of action and history...

...Yet it may not be without significance that Sartre should have written of Camus eight years after their quarrel: "His was also a reaffirmation, at the heart of our epoch, of the existence of the moral fact, against the Machiavellians...

...Not least important, Sartre has a Nordic confidence in history, Camus a Mediterranean belief in nature, and it was to emphasize the illogicality and ingenuousness of Camus that Sartre wrote: "He was in this century, and against history...

...lor Marxism, it is the necessary, inevitable unfolding of the dialectic...

...Author, Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt MOST OF US are tempted, at one time or another, to seek refuge from the untidiness of fact in the neatness of classification...

...Sartre replied: "You blame the European proletariat for not having publicly denounced the Soviets, but you also blame the governments of Europe for admitting Spain to UNESCO: in these circumstances I see only one solution for you: the Galapagos Islands...

...It is this impulse, perhaps, that has led so many critics and readers to speak of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus as if they agreed on fundamental issues...

...Nothing could be further from the truth...

...Given the continuing theory and practice of Communism, it was no adequate answer to say, as Sartre did, that Marx only ascribed a foreseeable end to "prehistory" (i.e., history up to the establishment of the Marxist state), nor was it enough to quote Marx as saying that history is simply man's pursuit of his own ends and to argue that if one rejects the Marxist interpretation of history one is ignoring oppressed humanity...

...Sartre emerges as the more skillful debater by the dubious means of setting up highly abstract and intellectualized arguments against a response in terms of direct human feeling and experience...

...Perhaps Sartre was as certain to win in terms of logic as Camus was in ethical terms...

...Since, as an article of faith, Sartre identified the interests of the proletariat with the Communist party, he regarded revolution, with the Communist party as its instrument, as the only efficacious means of providing the workers with proper conditions and authority...

...This may mean moral compromise on occasions, but "on this earth and at this time, good and evil are inseparable...

...On the central moral issues, then, Sartre displays a realism, a logic and a polemical skill which appear to weaken Camus' position...

...On the third point—the nature of historical change—Camus showed that if Sartre's logic could pick holes in certain moral arguments, logic itself could be used against Sartre on other points...

...Camus commented on this view: "I believe, for my part, that revolution will regain its grandeur and efficacy only when it renounces the cynicism and opportunism which it has made its rule in the twentieth century, when it reforms its outworn ideological material corrupted by half a century of compromise and when, finally, it puts in the center of its movement an irreducible passion for liberty...

...He added: "I have little liking for the over famous existential philosophy and...

...to speak frankly, I think its conclusions are false...

...For Sartre the (perhaps unconscious) aim of the metaphysical rebel is to preserve those abuses which may cause his suffering but are also his raison d'etre...

...Camus thus gives the impression, from a "realist" standpoint, of advocating a largely ineffectual moral austerity...

...For Existentialism, the passage of history is a succession of free choices...

...Sartre is a political theorist and Camus was first and foremost an artist...

...Camus performed a real service in uncovering it so clearly, even if he failed to refute it logically...