Camus and Sartre: A Friendship Lost Over the Clash Of Ideas

JR notes: This little piece is an excerpt from a letter I sent to a former teacher of mine. He must not have thought much of it, because he never wrote me back. But I liked it at the time, enough to xerox the thing, file it away, and type it in years later. Recently, I toyed with it a bit and cleaned it up enough to print it. While I have yet to flesh out the ideas in this piece or express them in a way that I'm truly happy with, I think the basic ideas are fairly compelling. Please note that while I know a fair amount about both Camus and Sartre, I am not presenting this as definitive academic information. What I'm really trying to do here is to use their thinking as a springboard for contrasting life philosophies, so no offense is intended to those who find my summaries of their philosophies simplistic. Perhaps this essay doesn't quite fit into any of the categories on my web site, but since it's sort of about a friendship, it seems to fit in the "friends and family" section as well as any.

To find a moment when the “clash of philosophical ideas” really captured the public imagination, you might have to go back to the celebrated dialogue between Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in World War II era France.

I admire how Albert Camus’ thought evolved from theories of the absurdity of the individual life to the question of moral responsibility and, ultimately, into the philosophy of revolt. Sartre always seemed to bring you back into the despair of the absurd existence. To his credit, in his political life, Sartre took his existentialism into a broader, if ideologically rigid, context, but the writing I remember Sartre most for is in Nausea, where he portrayed the crippling self-hatred and nausea of the individual in the face of life’s absurdity.

That’s why I thought Camus’ The Plague was so important - after too much time lost in the implied despair of the absurd life, you need a modicum of meaning to make sense of it all, and that meaning might come from what you are moved to do in response to the suffering of others. I always thought the ending of Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, the philosophical treatise that summarized his early thinking, didn’t really ring true. I don’t agree with Camus’ conclusion that “we must imagine Sisyphus happy.” His fate (rolling a rock up the hill every day only to have to repeat the task for eternity) is just too absurd.

But Camus’ philosophy then evolved into a theory of finding meaning through revolt. That rings much truer to me. How many times have we been jolted out of our own self-preoccupations and despair due to our sense of responsibility towards a broader issue of social injustice, or due to our desire to ease someone else's suffering?

But I’ve come to believe that a primary difference between these two thinkers is the relationship to Eros and the body. At times, Sartre seemed to feel intense dread and even repugnance for his physical self. He struck me as the classic disembodied academic. Camus, on the other hand, grew up on the beaches of Algiers. He was poor, but blessed aesthetically. The simple pleasures of Eros and the flesh, and perhaps the joys of love that can stem from them - these primal experiences kept Camus honest, and made him unable to yield only to absurdity, despair, and rigid political ideology. Camus implies much of this in his passionate “lyrical essays” about his youth. He once wrote that “History taught me that all was not well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.” Camus' appreciation of the aesthetic beauty of life was one reason why he continued to write novels until his death - an art form that Sartre eventually abandoned due to his concern that literature was ultimately a counter-revolutionary fetish of the bourgeoisie.

Camus' unwillingness to subordinate his natural anarchic tendencies was probably the key to his painful break with Sartre. The two friends never spoke again after their heated rift over communism, an ideology which Sartre supported wholeheartedly and Camus went out on a limb to criticize. In the face of the Nazi threat, this debate had life or death consequences. To me, a friendship that ends over cherished ideas is a friendship to admire. Perhaps Camus and Sartre were really just stubborn, ego-mad jackasses who didn’t have the humility to resolve their differences, but I don’t see too many friendships where people honestly challenge each other to live out a high ideal. Of course, Camus died in a car accident in 1960, thus ending any hope of reconciliation and leaving many questions unanswered. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the two were at odds due to passionately held beliefs, as opposed to petty squabbles. Although I suppose you could argue that their ideological conflicts did have a very petty aspect.

At any rate, while I admire both of them, I want to be more like Camus. It seems to me that you have to let the contradictions of life shape and change your philosophy - taking into account the sensual, happier sides of life even if it puts you at odds with the conventions of the day and makes you seem unfashionable to those commentators who cultivate a more cynical and sober persona.