Sam Dresser: How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free
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.
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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... read more:
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-camus-and-sartre-split-up-over-the-question-of-how-to-be-free