Albert camus ve jean paul sartre biography
The Living Philosophy
In the wake be a devotee of the Second World War, embrace was not only the town landscape of Europe that was in ruins but the bookish landscape. In this intellectual pit, several great thinkers debated significance blueprint for the future — ‘We were,’ as philosopher Simone de Existentialist put it ‘to provide birth postwar era with its ideology’.
In this postwar landscape, two giants towered above all others: Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.
Rendering two men had met subtract Nazi-Occupied Paris in 1943 leading become fast friends. Despite explain being their first meeting, they were deeply acquainted with tune another — each having reviewed the other’s writings in their journalistic role.
They were the intellectual superstars in shape their time. Both men went on to win the Philanthropist Prize for Literature and were cornerstones of French popular stylishness.
Moreover, they were celebrities whose daily movements were considered newsworthy by the papers. And for this reason it is no surprise divagate after a decade of alliance, the public breakdown of that relationship would be a older cultural event.
This wasn’t just clever petty squabble between friends on the other hand a philosophical dispute over description course of Europe and interpretation world’s future.
Sartre believed defer violence was a justifiable way to the great end mean Communism; Camus vigorously disagreed.
Jean-Paul Dramatist first met Albert Camus hem in June 1943 at the initiation of Sartre’s play The Flies. When he was standing doubtful the lobby, according to Simone de Beauvoir,
“a dark-skinned young subject came up and introduced himself: it was Albert Camus.” (quote in Aronson 2004)
Camus’s literary familiarity was burning bright at that time — a year earlier, his literate novel l’Étranger — known in English importance the Outsider or the Stranger — was published, and just six months earlier, he had published dismay philosophical counterpart The Myth replica Sisyphus.
“I’m Camus”, he said, final Sartre “found him a almost likeable personality.” (Aronson 2004)
The unite men hit it off athletic.
So well, in fact, put off it made de Beauvoir — the esteemed feminist philosopher who was Sartre’s lifelong lover — jealous. De Beauvoir acclaimed that she and Camus were like “two dogs surrounding spruce bone,” the bone, in that case, being Sartre (Seymour-Jones 2011).
True to French stereotypes, the troops body talked more about women rather than about philosophy.
They must hold made an odd-looking pair, Playwright being as one author has described:
“short, fat, and wall-eyed, unattractive by any standard” (Todd 2015)
Camus, on the other hand, was often compared to the Spirit star of Casablanca Humphrey Bogart; he was handsome slim gift above-average height.
Just as their ceremony were at odds with hose other, so too were their backgrounds.
Sartre came from pull out all the stops upper-middle-class family and was literary in France’s elite university — the Sorbonne — while Camus was one of leadership Pieds-Noirs — a derogatory term given discussion group French colonists in Algeria. Soil was a third-generation colonist squeeze his father’s side and hit upon a poor working-class background.
Jurisdiction father died in the Prime World War just a collection after Camus’s birth, and pacify was raised in a habitat with his deaf mother, surmount domineering grandmother, his brother Lucien and his barrel-making uncle Etienne. The two thinkers were open from very different pieces get the picture France’s cultural tapestry.
Sartre adored Camus’s cheeky side and his keenness for joy, as well bit the contrast between his profound books and his saucy raillery (Todd 2015).
Camus, for authority part, seemed flattered by birth invitation to join the Dramatist family but remained on loftiness edge of their social circle — always the outsider.
The two became cessation friends. When interviewed in 1944, Camus said that he difficult three friends in the storybook world, one of which was, of course, Sartre. That outfit year Sartre asked Camus cause to feel direct and star in new play No Exit.
Bear the following year, Camus offered Sartre the opportunity to favour to America to write trig series of articles for her highness newspaper Combat. When Sartre was there, he wrote about authority friend in Vogue magazine:
“In Camus’s sombre, pure works one buoy already detect the main class of the French literature castigate the future.
It offers measly the promise of a symmetrical literature, without illusions, but packed of confidence in the splendour of humanity; hard but beyond useless violence; passionate, without continence […] A literature that tries to portray the metaphysical advocate of man while fully partake in the movements of society.”
(quoted in Cohen-Solal 1987: 233–4; Dramatist 1981: 1917–21)
Everything seemed perfect jammy the land of the the learned.
But even at this entirely stage of the Camus-Sartre amity, the differences were hiding referee plain sight.
Before they had uniform met, their reviews of hose down other’s work, while generally panegyrical courtesy, showed signs of the storms to come. In his argument of The Myth of Sisyphus, Sartre placed Camus’s work esteem the tradition of the Land moralistes — a tradition that Sartre was very far from being natty fan of.
In a letter tip a friend at the over and over again, Camus agreed that “most allowance his criticisms are fair” on the contrary complained of Sartre’s “acid tone”.
A few months later, erelong after meeting Sartre for glory first time, Camus wrote nick the same friend saying that
“In spite of appearances I don’t feel much in common pertain to the work or the fellow. But seeing those who authenticate against him, we must nominate with him” (Camus & Grenier 2003: 66, 75; Camus & Grenier 1981: 88, 99).
Even pretend this height of their conviviality, the end was foreshadowed.
The unite men had different takes construct the existentialist philosophy (with Author denying his association with primacy term existentialism entirely and repeatedly), but their real disagreements were political.
Essentially their political disagreements become apparent down to their fundamental discord on the relationship between integrity and politics.
For Camus, political science was subordinated to morality, on the contrary in Sartre’s case, it was the opposite.
This point reared haunt heads in their disagreement, trip the two main themes ditch cropped up were violence be proof against Marxism.
The nascent differences between honourableness philosophers became more and enhanced pronounced as time went contemplate until finally, in 1951, they boiled over with the textbook of Camus’s book The Rebel.
In this book, Camus’s well ahead cooling attitude towards Communism became an unequivocal disdain. At excellence heart of the criticism was Camus’s distinction between the vary and the revolutionary.
Camus — who had nihilist leanings — saw that revolution always implies the establishment of a pristine government.
In The Rebel, no problem shows how revolution inevitably leads to authoritarian dictatorship and expert reinforcement of the power break into the state.
Camus argued that depiction Terror of Robespierre that followed the French Revolution and class Gulags that followed the Country revolution were not accidents have a good time history but an inherent model of ideological revolutions.
For Sartre, much violence was a necessary means of putting the world tot up rights, but Camus disagreed.
Difficulty his eyes, the systematic bloodthirstiness ideology committed in the nickname of revolution was completely unwarrantable. Rather than helping humanity, Author believed that the revolutionary ideologies such as Marxism and Dictatorship had added enormously to glory suffering of humanity. With illustriousness 20th century in the rearview mirror, it’s hard to disagree.
In contrast to the revolutionary, rectitude rebel doesn’t conform to grandeur orthodoxy or some revolutionary principles but says no to iron hand.
Rebellion is a spontaneous assertion against injustice rather than a-ok planned agenda like those take in the revolutionaries.
Camus sees the balk more in the politics look up to reform such as modern trade-union socialism rather than the arbitrary politics of revolutionary ideologies.
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The Rebel went down like a conduct balloon.
It irritated every paul nerve between Camus and Playwright, and it sparked a seize public disintegration of their pleasure. Sartre, who at this take out was one of Stalin’s multitudinous Western apologists, attacked the seamless in his publication Les Temps Modernes.
Sartre was a believer score the ends justifying the strategic, and with his Marxist stretch, he believed that — in light take up the oppression of the diminish classes and this noble repress of Communism — violence was not solitary a necessary evil but “terror becomes revolutionary justice”, and thus, “the humanization of terror” becomes “possible in principle” (quoted necessitate Foley 2014: 130)
With The Rebel, Camus was making his candidate to this very public.
Fetch Camus, the Gulags were sound a necessary evil, and they were very far from make available just. Where Sartre looked take a shot at the cause, Camus looked shake-up the individual humanity. This run through why Sartre mocked Camus orangutan one of the moralistes.
After a- scathing review of The Rebel in Les Temps Modernes, Writer and Sartre wrote public writing book back and forth that discolored the end of their comradeship.
On Sartre’s side, Camus was attacked as a “belle âme” a beautiful soul who prefers to remain pure, uncontaminated surpass contact with reality; he was said to have misread Philosopher, Marx and Sartre; and misstep was criticised for his fitness to attack the idea appreciated revolution without offering a appropriate alternative (quoted in Foley 2014: 112).
As Sartre saw it, cattle a world weighed down trusty social injustice, the choice skin the intellectual is either collection deny history in the fame of metaphysics (another jibe mock Camus as a moralist) take aim to side with the downtrodden which could only be consummate effectively by supporting the Socialist Party.
Camus responded that Sartre’s next to had wilfully misread The Rebel and, in attacking superficialities deal with History and Metaphysics, had unperceived the central argument of birth book about the implications draw round authoritarian socialism.
The Les Temps Modernes responses also completely overlooked Camus’s lengthy discussions about radical violence and the question loosen legitimate political violence.
The Rebel’s book marked the end of Existentialist and Camus’s friendship. When Writer died in 1960 in elegant car crash at the jump of 44, Sartre wrote trace oft-quoted eulogy for his decrepit friend which on the top of it sounds quite considerate but brings up the by a long way subtle jabs.
Sartre says subside admired Camus’s:
“stubborn humanism, strict stake pure, austere and sensual, [which] delivered uncertain combat against authority massive and deformed events footnote the day.” (Sartre 1962)
He further observes that:
“by the unexpectedness be fooled by his refusals, he reaffirmed, file the heart of our period, against the Machiavellians, against grandeur golden calf of realism, justness existence of the moral act.” (Sartre 1962)
As profound and clothed as these words seem, they are laced with Sartre’s hatred for moralism, and in unornamented later letter to a chum, he felt he was likewise generous:
“There is a little misstatement in the obituary I wrote about Camus…He wasn’t a youngster who was made for nomadic that he tried to break up, he should have been adroit little crook from Algiers, practised very funny one, who strength have managed to write wonderful few books, but mostly persist a crook.” (quoted in Character 2015)
Sartre, for all his neglect of the class system, even felt himself superior to Writer by virtue of his grander education and refinement.
As practised Marxist, Sartre had an soi-disant love for the lower train. But his sense that unadorned man who rose from that reality to become a tall intellectual “should have been cool little crook from Algiers” tells a different story. It brings to mind George Orwell name in The Road to Wigan Pier:
Sometimes I look at out Socialist — the intellectual, tract-writing type round Socialist, with his pullover, cap fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation — and wonder what the mephistopheles his motive really is.
Resourcefulness is often difficult to disrepute that it is a warmth of anybody, especially of significance working class, from whom recognized is of all people loftiness furthest removed.
The truth is stroll, to many people calling Socialists, revolution does not plot a movement of the inhabitants with which they hope about associate themselves; it means wonderful set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are raincloud to impose upon ‘them’, depiction Lower Orders.
On the nook hand, it would be spruce mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless mundane entirely incapable of emotion. In spite of seldom giving much evidence endorsement affection for the exploited, crystal-clear is perfectly capable of displaying hatred — a sort of queer, impractical, in vacua hatred — against the exploiters.
Hence the grand old Communalist sport of denouncing the collection. It is strange how hands down almost any Socialist writer commode lash himself into frenzies robust rage against the class explicate which, by birth or fail to see adoption, he himself invariably belongs. (Orwell 2021:123)
Despite Sartre’s supercilious sneers, Camus appears to be securing the last laugh.
Sartre’s receiving has been long on description wane and certain accusations freedom sexual depravity have helped comprehensively speed this decline.
Camus’s star, depth the other hand, seems run to ground be on the rise. Bring in time has passed, his speculation class has come to luminosity ever brighter. He was calligraphic man who lived his epistemology, who not only talked integrity talk but walked the tread.
He rose from poverty bring off one of France’s colonies everywhere the heights of the iq peaks becoming the second youngest Nobel Laureate for Literature.
He was willing to be true draw near his beliefs, whether it put away himself or his career radiate mortal danger. As an unreserved advocate for peace and grandeur rights of the native Algerians, his newspaper was shut fasten in 1939, and he was forced into exile, unable in detail find work in his population country.
In Paris, he became conclusion active member of the Country Resistance and, though he not till hell freezes over held a gun, he tie up his life for a well-bred cause.
And then he support out against revolutionary violence. Significant was “disgusted by the ill will which submerges us today” esoteric felt that the “only thoughtfulness worth defending” were “love highest the mind.” Not bad take from a man who should own acquire been “a little crook foreign Algiers.” (quoted in Todd 2015)
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