11 ms·

How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free

122 points by lermontov 10y ago

RamshackleJ 10y ago
what are the public academic debates that we are having today? creationism vs evolution? populism vs neo-liberalism? I hate to reminisce but having two existentialist philosophers debating about socialism vs communism makes me jelly.
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  You have to remember that these were two French intellectuals, debating in a country, culture, and time period where Socialism vs Communism was very much a live issue. That's not really true in the United States today, where even Socialism is generally held in contempt, and Communism is considered to be a demonstratably failed ideology which doesn't even deserve to be taken seriously. On top of this, intellectualism itself is viewed with great suspicion by many Americans, who much prefer to hear celebrity gossip, or watch sports and reality shows. As a result, the "public" intellectual debates of the era are dumbed down and infotainmentized by a media mostly concerned with ratings and pandering to the lowest common denominator. There still are plenty of debates in academia in the United States today, but they're not very public, and mostly take place in academic journals which most of the public would rather die before reading. I've heard that France is still a culture that greatly respects their intellectuals, so I would expect they still have many public intellectual debates these days. Maybe someone who keeps current with them could comment.
  - enqk 10y ago
    It is quite illuminating to see the exchange for instance between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky to get a sense of the difference of tone and focus between european and american intellectuals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8
    - mlmlmasd 10y ago
      What difference in tone and focus are you referring to? Noam Chomsky seems like a much more 'European-style' (academic?) intellectual then the pop/celeb 'intellectuals' popular in America such as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, etc.
  - wahern 10y ago
    I agree with everything you said. But I'd suggest that not only are the debates in academia alive, they're actually too vigorous and too radical. I think one of the contributors to the current political situation is the increasing influence of academia on politics and the law. Instead of having a few big ideas that we wrestle with, every politician and lawyer is a little Leninist bent on burning everything down in favor of their ever-changing pet political philosophies. And the notion of moderation has somehow become radicalized, I think; a dirty word for some people and a rallying cry for others. The vigorous creativity of scholarship provides an endless supply of fodder in terms of new ideas, new reasoning, new justifications, and most recently new "facts". If we were a nation of philosophers it'd be some kind of paradise. But we're not, and it's ripping apart our core social institutions. I'm not dissing the scholarship, or trying to suggest it's all bunk. I mean, even bunk can be valuable by challenging assumptions or by making conspicuous assumptions itself. But too much of that debate is bleeding out into the culture. A whole new layer of public policy institutions and media outlets feeds off and disseminates the half-baked ideas. There's never any time or energy to winnow the chaff. And so it's effectively poisoning the social and political culture.
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      >"A whole new layer of public policy institutions and media outlets feeds off and disseminates the half-baked ideas. There's never any time or energy to winnow the chaff. And so it's effectively poisoning the social and political culture." Can you name one cultural meme that's emerged from academia in the last 10 years? I certainly can't. I simply don't think academic debates have that great a cultural impact in our modern society, regardless of this increased vigor you're referring to. On the other hand, I can think of recent cultural memes that have emerged from the political sphere, pushed by a diverse range of people (from corporate interests to grass roots activists). Very few politically active people seem to be waiting around for answers from academia, they've got their own agendas to push.
      - pm90 10y ago
        Cultural memes aren't really the measure of progress, or worth, of academia. And "academia" itself is a pretty broad term: are you referring to Philosophy, or the Social Sciences or what?
  - fspear 10y ago
    >On top of this, intellectualism itself is viewed with great suspicion by many Americans, who much prefer to hear celebrity gossip, or watch sports and reality shows. As a result, the "public" intellectual debates of the era are dumbed down and infotainmentized by a media mostly concerned with ratings and pandering to the lowest common denominator. What a brave new world we live in...
    - defen 10y ago
      It's not really new...Richard Hofstadter won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for Anti-intellectualism in American Life wherein he argued that it was fundamentally embedded into the American character due to the democratization of education and our evangelical Protestant heritage.
- jplasmeier 10y ago
  I believe it's vim vs. emacs :P
lngnmn 10y ago
Those guys were writers, not philosophers in the first place. Unlimited, pure freedom does not exist and hence the absolute Free Will. It is an empty concept. Freedom is bound by the mind, the mind is bound by biology. Biology is bound by physics and other constraints of the environment. The Universe of Ideas is mere a hallucination. Suicide as an ultimate act of freedom, which is the canonical illustration - the only freedom man have. Not much freedom, after all.
- Cozumel 10y ago
  Camus said the only freedom is suicide. (The Myth of Sisyphus)
  - foreverarock 10y ago
    I think you are mistaken. At least from my reading of The Stranger I remember Camus stating suicide is a cowardly act. Wikipedia[1] states Camus viewed suicide as a rejection of freedom. Also the myth of sisyphus doesn't have much to do with suicide does it? I may be mistaken. I thought it was more of an analogy to the condition of man, not so much a suggestion to commit suicide to avoid it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_suicide#Absurdism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_suicide#Absurdis...
    - lbotos 10y ago
      Having just read Myth of Sisyphus, the first 3rd is essentially dedicated to the idea of suicide and how to process that choice in the face of "meaning".
  - vga805 10y ago
    He said suicide is the most interesting and pressing philosophical question. The ultimate act of rebellion he seems to advise is to live free in the face of and with the full consciousness of the absurdity of this existence, like pushing a rock up a hill over and over again.
  - wahern 10y ago
Cozumel 10y ago
It's worth noting Sartre spent 9 months as a POW, that influenced his outlook on freedom a fair bit.
jplasmeier 10y ago
Freedom is an awful word (to use in rigorous discourse) because it simultaneously means two very different, if not in some way opposite things. Freedom can be used in the sense of having many options to execute your will, or it can be used in the sense of having nothing to lose by executing your will[0]. [0] - http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/kriskristofferson/meandbobbymcgee.html http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/kriskristofferson/meandbobbym...
- Veen 10y ago
  That's easily remedied by defining what's meant by freedom, which was a major part of the existentialist project.
samirillian 10y ago
I always thought the real intellectual differences related to Marxism were between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, the former having introduced Sartre to Marxism and later publicly breaking with him for his "ultra-bolshevism." Camus and Sartre seemed to have more personal differences, viz., Sartre generally being an asshole. Among other things, he considered Camus a notch beneath him intellectually, and Ive always personally believed that a big reason Sartre turned down the Nobel prize was because Camus already had one. Ive always struggled to understand Sartre's popularity even among other philosophers I respect.
- dgfgfdagasdfgfa 10y ago
  > Ive always struggled to understand Sartre's popularity even among other philosophers I respect. I agree completely. It is completely rankling when considering how he is compared to Simone de Beauvoir. Her "Second Sex" is considered a feminist work—and for good reason—but it surpasses any of what Sarte wrote as a philosophical work. While he did build on the backs of others, his ideas remain small compared to his contemporaries.
- bykovich 10y ago
  I recall reading a criticism of Sartre essentially to the effect of "he elevated anxieties of the early 20th century to eternal truths." It's an insightful observation that does double labor, serving both as grounds for serious concern about Sartre's work and as an explanation for much of its popularity.
- woodandsteel 10y ago
  >I always thought the real intellectual differences related to Marxism were between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, the former having introduced Sartre to Marxism and later publicly breaking with him for his "ultra-bolshevism." Merleau-Ponty was definitely more connected to actual lived reality than Sartre was. When Marxist theory produced a horror, not paradise, he actually sort of admitted it was happening.
- polarisrising 10y ago
  WW2: Heidegger is the premier, German philosopher. And he's a Nazi. So the question is: what does it mean for the projector of philosophy that the leading light is also a fascist? Enter Satre who "rejects" Heigger but "keeps" with Hegel. Being and Nothingness, as far as I understand, was a response in part to Heidegger's Being and Time. My philosophy may be rusty, but to answer the question you asked, I think history is the reason why others held him in regard.
entropyneur 10y ago
Oh, not this again. Moderation improves only wrong ideas. Yes, experiments with social order are costly, but it absolutely doesn't mean that "even the most venerable and worthy ideas need to be balanced against one another".
narrator 10y ago
I think Camus knew that there were things that he didn't know about political economy while Sartre was more certain that the vast oversimplification of reality that is marxist economics could somehow be hammered somehow into the mold of reality. The problem of economic calculation is deceptively easy to hand-wave away.
- coldtea 10y ago
  The problem with the communists wasn't the "oversimplification of marxist economics", after all capitalist policies are based on similar oversimplifications. It was the power struggles, and the controlling party elites.
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    Other than human nature, it had everything going for it.
    - narrator 10y ago
      The subtler arguments against socialism are not amenable to sound bites. The one that was initially penned in the 1920s and has stood the test of time the best is "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth"[1]. This kicked off the Socialist calculation debate[2] which was on-going during the 20th century. It was largely settled in favor of the anti-central planners with the collapse of communism and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in China. [1]https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth/html https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-com... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_calculation_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_calculation_debate
      - sien 10y ago
        It is remarkable how little attention this gets. Marxism has nice slogans, but very little attention is given to the details of what is the value of good quality paper clips or whatever. The assumption of perfect knowledge and that wise central planners can beat bottom up and local knowledge is wrong. It's interesting what a common assumption it is too. Even though government and large organisation inefficiency is often remarked about.
coldtea 10y ago
>Sartre remained unpredictable, however, and was engaged in a long, bizarre dalliance with hardline Maoism when he died in 1980. Bizarre in what way exactly? At the time (late-60s to late-70s) in France maoism was as popular between students and scholars as Marvel movies are in the US today...
emmelaich 10y ago
So Camus against violence and Sartre for. Makes sense; the philosopher or revolutionary most in favour of violence comes from the middle or upper classes, not the lower.
- emmelaich 10y ago
  Rereading my comment I see it can be interpreted different ways. So to clarify I was thinking of middle-class advocates of radical left wing causes - such as Che Guevera.

122 points by lermontov 10y ago

what are the public academic debates that we are having today? creationism vs evolution? populism vs neo-liberalism? I hate to reminisce but having two existentialist philosophers debating about socialism vs communism makes me jelly.

pmoriarty 10y ago
You have to remember that these were two French intellectuals, debating in a country, culture, and time period where Socialism vs Communism was very much a live issue. That's not really true in the United States today, where even Socialism is generally held in contempt, and Communism is considered to be a demonstratably failed ideology which doesn't even deserve to be taken seriously. On top of this, intellectualism itself is viewed with great suspicion by many Americans, who much prefer to hear celebrity gossip, or watch sports and reality shows. As a result, the "public" intellectual debates of the era are dumbed down and infotainmentized by a media mostly concerned with ratings and pandering to the lowest common denominator. There still are plenty of debates in academia in the United States today, but they're not very public, and mostly take place in academic journals which most of the public would rather die before reading. I've heard that France is still a culture that greatly respects their intellectuals, so I would expect they still have many public intellectual debates these days. Maybe someone who keeps current with them could comment.
- enqk 10y ago
  It is quite illuminating to see the exchange for instance between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky to get a sense of the difference of tone and focus between european and american intellectuals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8
  - mlmlmasd 10y ago
    What difference in tone and focus are you referring to? Noam Chomsky seems like a much more 'European-style' (academic?) intellectual then the pop/celeb 'intellectuals' popular in America such as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, etc.
- wahern 10y ago
  I agree with everything you said. But I'd suggest that not only are the debates in academia alive, they're actually too vigorous and too radical. I think one of the contributors to the current political situation is the increasing influence of academia on politics and the law. Instead of having a few big ideas that we wrestle with, every politician and lawyer is a little Leninist bent on burning everything down in favor of their ever-changing pet political philosophies. And the notion of moderation has somehow become radicalized, I think; a dirty word for some people and a rallying cry for others. The vigorous creativity of scholarship provides an endless supply of fodder in terms of new ideas, new reasoning, new justifications, and most recently new "facts". If we were a nation of philosophers it'd be some kind of paradise. But we're not, and it's ripping apart our core social institutions. I'm not dissing the scholarship, or trying to suggest it's all bunk. I mean, even bunk can be valuable by challenging assumptions or by making conspicuous assumptions itself. But too much of that debate is bleeding out into the culture. A whole new layer of public policy institutions and media outlets feeds off and disseminates the half-baked ideas. There's never any time or energy to winnow the chaff. And so it's effectively poisoning the social and political culture.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    >"A whole new layer of public policy institutions and media outlets feeds off and disseminates the half-baked ideas. There's never any time or energy to winnow the chaff. And so it's effectively poisoning the social and political culture." Can you name one cultural meme that's emerged from academia in the last 10 years? I certainly can't. I simply don't think academic debates have that great a cultural impact in our modern society, regardless of this increased vigor you're referring to. On the other hand, I can think of recent cultural memes that have emerged from the political sphere, pushed by a diverse range of people (from corporate interests to grass roots activists). Very few politically active people seem to be waiting around for answers from academia, they've got their own agendas to push.
    - pm90 10y ago
      Cultural memes aren't really the measure of progress, or worth, of academia. And "academia" itself is a pretty broad term: are you referring to Philosophy, or the Social Sciences or what?
- fspear 10y ago
  >On top of this, intellectualism itself is viewed with great suspicion by many Americans, who much prefer to hear celebrity gossip, or watch sports and reality shows. As a result, the "public" intellectual debates of the era are dumbed down and infotainmentized by a media mostly concerned with ratings and pandering to the lowest common denominator. What a brave new world we live in...
  - defen 10y ago
    It's not really new...Richard Hofstadter won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for Anti-intellectualism in American Life wherein he argued that it was fundamentally embedded into the American character due to the democratization of education and our evangelical Protestant heritage.
jplasmeier 10y ago
I believe it's vim vs. emacs :P

lngnmn 10y ago

Those guys were writers, not philosophers in the first place. Unlimited, pure freedom does not exist and hence the absolute Free Will. It is an empty concept. Freedom is bound by the mind, the mind is bound by biology. Biology is bound by physics and other constraints of the environment. The Universe of Ideas is mere a hallucination. Suicide as an ultimate act of freedom, which is the canonical illustration - the only freedom man have. Not much freedom, after all.

Cozumel 10y ago
Camus said the only freedom is suicide. (The Myth of Sisyphus)
- foreverarock 10y ago
  I think you are mistaken. At least from my reading of The Stranger I remember Camus stating suicide is a cowardly act. Wikipedia[1] states Camus viewed suicide as a rejection of freedom. Also the myth of sisyphus doesn't have much to do with suicide does it? I may be mistaken. I thought it was more of an analogy to the condition of man, not so much a suggestion to commit suicide to avoid it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_suicide#Absurdism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_suicide#Absurdis...
  - lbotos 10y ago
    Having just read Myth of Sisyphus, the first 3rd is essentially dedicated to the idea of suicide and how to process that choice in the face of "meaning".
- vga805 10y ago
  He said suicide is the most interesting and pressing philosophical question. The ultimate act of rebellion he seems to advise is to live free in the face of and with the full consciousness of the absurdity of this existence, like pushing a rock up a hill over and over again.
- wahern 10y ago

Cozumel 10y ago

It's worth noting Sartre spent 9 months as a POW, that influenced his outlook on freedom a fair bit.

jplasmeier 10y ago

Freedom is an awful word (to use in rigorous discourse) because it simultaneously means two very different, if not in some way opposite things. Freedom can be used in the sense of having many options to execute your will, or it can be used in the sense of having nothing to lose by executing your will[0]. [0] - http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/kriskristofferson/meandbobbymcgee.html http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/kriskristofferson/meandbobbym...

Veen 10y ago
That's easily remedied by defining what's meant by freedom, which was a major part of the existentialist project.

samirillian 10y ago

I always thought the real intellectual differences related to Marxism were between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, the former having introduced Sartre to Marxism and later publicly breaking with him for his "ultra-bolshevism." Camus and Sartre seemed to have more personal differences, viz., Sartre generally being an asshole. Among other things, he considered Camus a notch beneath him intellectually, and Ive always personally believed that a big reason Sartre turned down the Nobel prize was because Camus already had one. Ive always struggled to understand Sartre's popularity even among other philosophers I respect.

dgfgfdagasdfgfa 10y ago
> Ive always struggled to understand Sartre's popularity even among other philosophers I respect. I agree completely. It is completely rankling when considering how he is compared to Simone de Beauvoir. Her "Second Sex" is considered a feminist work—and for good reason—but it surpasses any of what Sarte wrote as a philosophical work. While he did build on the backs of others, his ideas remain small compared to his contemporaries.
bykovich 10y ago
I recall reading a criticism of Sartre essentially to the effect of "he elevated anxieties of the early 20th century to eternal truths." It's an insightful observation that does double labor, serving both as grounds for serious concern about Sartre's work and as an explanation for much of its popularity.
woodandsteel 10y ago
>I always thought the real intellectual differences related to Marxism were between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, the former having introduced Sartre to Marxism and later publicly breaking with him for his "ultra-bolshevism." Merleau-Ponty was definitely more connected to actual lived reality than Sartre was. When Marxist theory produced a horror, not paradise, he actually sort of admitted it was happening.
polarisrising 10y ago
WW2: Heidegger is the premier, German philosopher. And he's a Nazi. So the question is: what does it mean for the projector of philosophy that the leading light is also a fascist? Enter Satre who "rejects" Heigger but "keeps" with Hegel. Being and Nothingness, as far as I understand, was a response in part to Heidegger's Being and Time. My philosophy may be rusty, but to answer the question you asked, I think history is the reason why others held him in regard.

entropyneur 10y ago

Oh, not this again. Moderation improves only wrong ideas. Yes, experiments with social order are costly, but it absolutely doesn't mean that "even the most venerable and worthy ideas need to be balanced against one another".

narrator 10y ago

I think Camus knew that there were things that he didn't know about political economy while Sartre was more certain that the vast oversimplification of reality that is marxist economics could somehow be hammered somehow into the mold of reality. The problem of economic calculation is deceptively easy to hand-wave away.

coldtea 10y ago
The problem with the communists wasn't the "oversimplification of marxist economics", after all capitalist policies are based on similar oversimplifications. It was the power struggles, and the controlling party elites.
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  Other than human nature, it had everything going for it.
  - narrator 10y ago
    The subtler arguments against socialism are not amenable to sound bites. The one that was initially penned in the 1920s and has stood the test of time the best is "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth"[1]. This kicked off the Socialist calculation debate[2] which was on-going during the 20th century. It was largely settled in favor of the anti-central planners with the collapse of communism and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in China. [1]https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth/html https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-com... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_calculation_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_calculation_debate
    - sien 10y ago
      It is remarkable how little attention this gets. Marxism has nice slogans, but very little attention is given to the details of what is the value of good quality paper clips or whatever. The assumption of perfect knowledge and that wise central planners can beat bottom up and local knowledge is wrong. It's interesting what a common assumption it is too. Even though government and large organisation inefficiency is often remarked about.

coldtea 10y ago

>Sartre remained unpredictable, however, and was engaged in a long, bizarre dalliance with hardline Maoism when he died in 1980. Bizarre in what way exactly? At the time (late-60s to late-70s) in France maoism was as popular between students and scholars as Marvel movies are in the US today...

emmelaich 10y ago

So Camus against violence and Sartre for. Makes sense; the philosopher or revolutionary most in favour of violence comes from the middle or upper classes, not the lower.

emmelaich 10y ago
Rereading my comment I see it can be interpreted different ways. So to clarify I was thinking of middle-class advocates of radical left wing causes - such as Che Guevera.