Sartre and Clio by Hulliung Mark

Author:Hulliung, Mark.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-317-25256-6
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

The Camus Factor

The break between Sartre and Camus came in 1951 with the publication of L’Homme Révolté, or The Rebel, Camus choosing a position that was liberal in all but name, Sartre siding at the same time with revolution and the Soviet Union. So impassioned was the response of Sartre and his comrades on Les Temps Modernes that we forget how much the two writers had in common before the Cold War divided them. Remembering how much the two writers shared before their conflict adds insight into the intensity of Sartre’s hostile reaction. There was a sense on Sartre’s part that he had been betrayed by someone whose intellectual trajectory closely mimicked his own.

A great deal of thematic overlap is evident in the early works of Sartre and Camus. The notion that human existence is “absurd” is common to Nausea and The Myth of Sisyphus (1942),84 and the claim that we are de trop figures both in Nausea and The Stranger (1942).85 Similarly, just as Sartre declared in 1943 that it makes no difference whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations, Camus wrote a year before that “one life was as good as another,” meaning that “all experiences are unimportant,” all choices equally arbitrary.86 One may also detect an affinity between Sartre’s philosophy of consciousness and Camus’s statement, “Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.”87

Among the similarities between Sartre and Camus in the early 1940s is this: each man’s writings and life displayed a striking disunity of theory and practice. So far as theory is concerned, Sartre in Being and Nothingness depicted the human condition in most dire terms, and the same is true of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus; yet each author was at the same time moving toward political engagement: in Camus’s case as an editor of the Resistance newspaper Combat; in Sartre’s as supporter of the Resistance and initiator of a postwar political movement. Indeed, as Simone de Beauvoir’s account shows,88 Sartre had always had sympathies for the left, no matter what his formal philosophy might dictate. Likewise, it was a sign of Camus’s youthful attraction to political radicalism, briefly to the Communist party, that in Sisyphus he purloined the expression “permanent revolution” from anarchists and Marxists (see Chapter 5) and applied it to the apolitical, everyday life of persons facing up to the absurd: “The theme of permanent revolution is carried into individual experience.”89

By the late 1940s, Sartre had moved to a second, politicized formulation of the “human condition,” and Camus’s novel, with its allegory of fighting against the Nazis, did the same. For both men, Resistance was the perfect exemplar of their new understanding of the human condition; for both, it was the moment when their theory caught up with their practice. Four years later, however, when Sartre sided with the Communist party, he would surely have balked at the portions of Camus’s novel that came down hard not on the Nazis but on the Communists. Sartre “loved” The Plague in 1947; had it been published four years later, he very likely would have hated it.

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