How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free - by Sam Dresser
They were an odd pair.
Albert Camus was French Algerian, a pied-noir born into
poverty who effortlessly charmed with his Bogart-esque features. Jean-Paul
Sartre, from the upper reaches of French society, was never mistaken for a
handsome man. They met in Paris during the Occupation and grew closer after the
Second World War. In those days, when the lights of the city were slowly
turning back on, Camus was Sartre’s closest friend. ‘How we loved you then,’
Sartre later wrote.
They were gleaming
icons of the era. Newspapers reported on their daily movements: Sartre
holed up at Les Deux Magots, Camus the peripatetic of Paris. As the city began
to rebuild, Sartre and Camus gave voice to the mood of the day. Europe had been
immolated, but the ashes left by war created the space to imagine a new world.
Readers looked to Sartre and Camus to articulate what that new world might look
like. ‘We were,’ remembered the fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, ‘to
provide the postwar era with its ideology.’
It came in the form of
existentialism. Sartre, Camus and their intellectual companions rejected
religion, staged new and unnerving plays, challenged readers to live
authentically, and wrote about the absurdity of the world – a world without purpose
and without value. ‘[There are] only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the
hand can touch,’ Camus wrote. We must choose to live in this world and to
project our own meaning and value onto it in order to make sense of it. This
means that people are free and burdened by it, since with
freedom there is a terrible, even debilitating, responsibility to live and act
authentically.
If the idea of freedom
bound Camus and Sartre philosophically, then the fight for justice united them
politically. They were committed to confronting and curing injustice, and, in
their eyes, no group of people was more unjustly treated than the workers, the
proletariat. Camus and Sartre thought of them as shackled to their labour and
shorn of their humanity. In order to free them, new political systems must be
constructed.
In October 1951, Camus
published The Rebel. In it, he gave voice to a roughly drawn
‘philosophy of revolt’. This wasn’t a philosophical system per se,
but an amalgamation of philosophical and political ideas: every human is free,
but freedom itself is relative; one must embrace limits, moderation,
‘calculated risk’; absolutes are anti-human. Most of all, Camus condemned
revolutionary violence. Violence might be used in extreme circumstances (he
supported the French war effort, after all) but the use of revolutionary
violence to nudge history in the direction you desire is utopian, absolutist,
and a betrayal of yourself.
‘Absolute freedom is
the right of the strongest to dominate,’ Camus wrote, while ‘absolute justice
is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys
freedom.’ The conflict between justice and freedom required constant
re-balancing, political moderation, an acceptance and celebration of that which
limits the most: our humanity. ‘To live and let live,’ he said, ‘in order to
create what we are.’
Sartre read The
Rebel with disgust. As far as he was concerned, it was possible
to achieve perfect justice and freedom – that described the achievement of
communism. Under capitalism, and in poverty, workers could not be free. Their
options were unpalatable and inhumane: to work a pitiless and alienating job,
or to die. But by removing the oppressors and broadly returning autonomy to the
workers, communism allows each individual to live without material want, and
therefore to choose how best they can realise themselves. This makes them free,
and through this unbending equality, it is also just.
The problem is that,
for Sartre and many others on the Left, communism required revolutionary
violence to achieve because the existing order must be smashed. Not all
leftists, of course, endorsed such violence. This division between hardline and
moderate leftists – broadly, between communists and socialists – was nothing
new. The 1930s and early ’40s, however, had seen the Left temporarily united
against fascism. With the destruction of fascism, the rupture between hardline
leftists willing to condone violence and moderates who condemned it returned.
This split was made all the more dramatic by the practical disappearance of the
Right and the ascendancy of the Soviet Union – which empowered hardliners
throughout Europe, but raised disquieting questions for communists as the
horrors of gulags, terror and show trials came to light. The question for every
leftist of the postwar era was simple: which side are you on?
With the publication
of The Rebel, Camus declared for a peaceful socialism that would
not resort to revolutionary violence. He was appalled by the stories emerging
from the USSR: it was not a country of hand-in-hand communists, living freely,
but a country with no freedom at all. Sartre, meanwhile, would fight for
communism, and he was prepared to endorse violence to do so. The split between the
two friends was a media sensation. Les Temps Modernes – the
journal edited by Sartre, which published a critical review of The
Rebel – sold out three times over.
Le Monde and L’Observateur both
breathlessly covered the falling out. It’s hard to imagine an intellectual feud
capturing that degree of public attention today, but, in this disagreement,
many readers saw the political crises of the times reflected back at them. It
was a way of seeing politics played out in the world of ideas, and a measure of
the worth of ideas. If you are thoroughly committed to an idea, are you
compelled to kill for it? What price for justice? What price for freedom?
Sartre’s position was
shot through with contradiction, with which he struggled for the remainder of
his life. Sartre, the existentialist, who said that humans are condemned to be
free, was also Sartre, the Marxist, who thought that history does not allow
much space for true freedom in the existential sense. Though he never actually
joined the French Communist Party, he would continue to defend communism
throughout Europe until 1956, when the Soviet tanks in Budapest convinced him,
finally, that the USSR did not hold the way forward. (Indeed, he was dismayed
by the Soviets in Hungary because they were acting like Americans, he said.)
Sartre would remain a powerful voice on the Left throughout his life, and chose
the French president Charles de Gaulle as his favourite whipping boy. (After
one particularly vicious attack, de Gaulle was asked to arrest Sartre. ‘One
does not imprison Voltaire,’ he responded.) Sartre remained unpredictable,
however, and was engaged in a long, bizarre dalliance with hardline Maoism when
he died in 1980. Though Sartre moved away from the USSR, he never completely
abandoned the idea that revolutionary violence might be warranted.
Philosophy Feud:
Sartre vs Camus from Aeon
Video on Vimeo.
The violence of
communism sent Camus on a different trajectory. ‘Finally,’ he wrote in The
Rebel, ‘I choose freedom. For even if justice is not realised, freedom
maintains the power of protest against injustice and keeps communication open.’
From the other side of the Cold War, it is hard not to sympathise with Camus,
and to wonder at the fervour with which Sartre remained a loyal communist.
Camus’s embrace of sober political reality, of moral humility, of limits and
fallible humanity, remains a message well-heeded today. Even the most venerable
and worthy ideas need to be balanced against one another. Absolutism, and the
impossible idealism it inspires, is a dangerous path forward – and the reason
Europe lay in ashes, as Camus and Sartre struggled to envision a fairer and
freer world.
