Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Mental Disorder, Creativity and Evolutionary Trade-offs: Just-So Story or Testable Hypothesis?

The circumstantial evidence begins to mount that what we call mental illness is in fact "too much of a good thing." In other words there is a fine line between physiological attributes of mental disorders that lead to behaviors we consider dysfunctional, and behavioral attributes that we generally define as "good" (i.e. "inventive," creative," or "perceptive"), but originate in the same physiological processes that are connected with mental illness. Below are quotes from reports on three recent studies that lead to this conclusion. Taken together these quotes are tempting to an evolutionary psychologist but I will argue that the temptation should be resisted. We should not completely dismiss speculation about these matters but we should keep clear the line between speculation, hypothesis, and theory.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown for the first time that a sample of children who either have or are at high risk for bipolar disorder score higher on a creativity index than healthy children. The findings add to existing evidence that a link exists between mood disorders and creativity.
***
Many scientists believe that a relationship exists between creativity and bipolar disorder, which was formerly called manic-depressive illness and is marked by dramatic shifts in a person's mood, energy and ability to function. Numerous studies have examined this link; several have shown that artists and writers may have two to three times more incidences of psychosis, mood disorders or suicide when compared with people in less creative professions. Children of bipolar parents score higher on creativity test


The more creative a person is, the more sexual partners they are likely to have...
***
The lead author of the study, Dr Daniel Nettle (pictured), lecturer in psychology with Newcastle University’s School of Biology, suggested two key reasons for the findings. He said: “Creative people are often considered to be very attractive and get lots of attention as a result. They tend to be charismatic and produce art and poetry that grabs people’s interest.The lead author of the study, Dr Daniel Nettle (pictured), lecturer in psychology with Newcastle University’s School of Biology, suggested two key reasons for the findings. He said: “Creative people are often considered to be very attractive and get lots of attention as a result. They tend to be charismatic and produce art and poetry that grabs people’s interest.
***
Dr Nettle added that the results suggested an evolutionary reason for why certain personality traits that serious artists and poets were found to share with schizophrenic patients perpetuated in society.
He added: “These personality traits can manifest themselves in negative ways, in that a person with them is likely to be prone to the shadows of full-blown mental illness such as depression and suicidal thoughts. This research shows there are positive reasons, such as their role in mate attraction and species survival, for why these characteristics are still around.”
Yet although some 'schizotypal' traits are linked with high numbers of partners, schizophrenic patients do not experience this level of sexual activity. These people tend to suffer from acute social withdrawal and emotional flatness - characteristics that the researchers found were linked with a reduced number of sexual partners.Creativity determines sexual success


(Also see the article in Nature - Write poems, get lucky - They may be badly paid, but artists have more sexual success by Tom Simonite.)


Surprisingly, people with mild depression are actually more tuned into the feelings of others than those who aren’t depressed, a team of Queen’s psychologists has discovered.

“This was quite unexpected because we tend to think that the opposite is true,” says lead researcher Kate Harkness. “For example, people with depression are more likely to have problems in a number of social areas.”

The researchers were so taken aback by the findings, they decided to replicate the study with another group of participants. The second study produced the same results: People with mild symptoms of depression pay more attention to details of their social environment than those who are not depressed.


The basic speculation among evolutionary psychologists is that "mental illness" is an evolutionary trade-off. The best example of an evolutionary trade-off is the sickle cell gene. Inheriting a sickle cell gene from a single parent promotes resistance to malaria. Inheriting a sickle cell gene from both parents causes anemia and death. In geographical regions of heavy malaria there is a trade off between resistance to malaria provided by the sickle cell gene and the possibility of death from sickle cell anemia - more people sexually reproduce if they have one sickle cell gene and they are able to resist malaria than if they have two sickle cell genes and die of anemia or no sickle cell genes and are not able to resist malaria. (For full explanations see the following links: The Mosquito and the Bottle. The Loom: -Carl Zimmer ; An Immune Basis for Malaria Protection by the Sickle Cell Trait; Malaria and the Human Genome - PDF.

Similarly, there are aspects of brain physiology that lead to creativity or the ability to perceive the world "realistically", or to perceive the social environment more empathetically, etc. These same aspects of brain physiology also are traits that are associated with various kinds of mental "illness," such as "manic-ness" and depression. If pushed beyond a tipping point these same aspects of brain physiology lead to dysfunctional mental breakdowns. The reproductive success and sexual attractiveness that rebounds to the person who is very creative or socially perceptive is offset by the possibility of dysfunctional (or non-functional) mental illness.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it is a good story but as a story but it is as yet not a testable hypothesis. We can test the correlation between creativity and bipolar mental disorder in various ways, ranging from statistical studies to studies of the physiology of the brain. But I have yet to see a research program to test the hypothesis of evolutionary trade-offs in relation to mental illness. The hypothesis is a good beginning but too broad. I am very skeptical that an evolutionary theory of mental illness can be developed by focusing on human beings at the level of behavior. I think that the level where such hypotheses can be tested is at the physiological level or perhaps at the "modular" level of a mental system.

To illustrate the problem of the appropriate level of study it is only necessary to observe why we know so much about sickle cell anemia. We know the genes that must be inherited in order to produce sickle cell anemia and the shape of a human blood cell when the genes are inherited from both parents. Further, we know the shape of the cell when the gene for sickle cell is inherited from only one parent. We know the geographical spread of sickle cell anemia and we can calculate the differential between resistance to malaria provided by one gene and the possibility of inheriting two genes with the result of early death. In other words we have a good way of estimating the differential of reproductive success between a sickle cell population and a non-sickle cell population in geographical regions rife with malaria. We can trace this back to the physiological and genetic level.

The problem with this line of reasoning about mental disorders is that for the most part we are only beginning to learn what mental disorders are and how they exhibit themselves in behavior. The basic descriptive problems of defining mental illness are well known. But the descriptive problems in defining such vague notions as "creativity" or "inventiveness" are even greater. We know creativity when we see it, but that is about all. I am not saying that an evolutionary explanation of mental disorder is impossible only that at this point we must content ourselves with good hints and interesting stories. Turning a just-so story into a testable hypothesis is the hardest part of any scientific project.


New York City
2 December 2005

Selected by
See Tangled Bank #43 @ Rural Rambles


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Why pay attention to the New York Times? Organization, Normalization, Ideology

Edward Herman does his usual incisive work in decoding the New York Times.

"The biases of the New York Times surface in one or another fashion on a daily basis, but while sometimes awfully crude, these manifestations of bias are often sufficiently subtle and self-assured, with facts galore thrown in, that it is easy to get fooled by them. Analyzing them is still a useful enterprise to keep us alert to the paper’s ideological premises and numerous crimes of omission, selectivity, gullible acceptance of convenient disinformation, and pursuit of a discernible political agenda in many spheres that it covers."
From Fog Watch - The New York Times Versus The Civil Society: Protests, tribunals, labor, and militarization and wars - By Edward S. Herman Z Magazine -


But here is my basic question. Why? We need information but why look at the New York Times at all? Why worry about it?

1) Because it has so much influence over the governing elite? Is this true anymore? Perhaps it guides the governing elite.

2) Perhaps by reading the NYT and the WSJ critically we gain insight into the ruling class and its aims? Is this true? In that case if we can use those insights as an organizing tool then we are doing ourselves a service.

3) Because we don't have counter-hegemonic media of our own that establishes a grand world view for radical change and will set to crumbling the world view of the New York Times? This goes back to to point one and the overwhelming influence the times have on governing elites. That influence is bound to seep through to those who oppose the Rulers and Bosses, unless we counter the distortions and ideological spin and outright lies.

4) But in the end the reason we have to spend so much time decoding the New York Times and other media of ruling class ideological "information", is because we are too weak to establish our own media for organizing and information.

So in short: Why pay attention to the New York Times? Because of the failure of the left to organize.

Famously, in Lenin's What is to be done? he argued that a regular paper of a working class party is an organizing tool. Bolshevik party organization, was bound to be dictatorial as Rosa Luxembourg realized early on, but the fact is that Lenin, before he took power had deep insight in how to organize. It is part of the tragedy of Bolshevism and the atrocity of Stalinism that these organizational insights have been lost. The fact is that as the left stands today in the Western capitalist republics, there is no network of radical media that is also used as an organizing tool. There are small networks of radical media and they are very loosely connected to organizing networks. But unless the organizing networks and the media networks are organically related we will never be able to make the first step toward constructing a counter-hegemonic world view.

The South End Press collective and the people at Z Magazine have been trying to build such integrated networks for years but unfortunately the network is too small and too loosely connected to other cooperative organizations and to unions. It is not there fault. People such as Michael Albert and Lydia Sargent seem to me to be near heroic in their commitment to a vision of radical democracy. But over and over again I keep on coming back to the same point in my mind - we on the left must not be organizing correctly if we are not organizing better than say the right wing Christers.

The Process of "Normalization": A suggestion for using Herman's & Chomsky's model to study legal institutions:

Edward Herman continues:

One very important feature of an establishment institution is that it gives heavy weight to official and corporate news and opinion and little attention to facts and opinions put forward by those disagreeing with the official/corporate view. Government and corporate officials are “primary definers” of the news, and experts affiliated with, funded by, and/or supporting them function to institutionalize those views. In a perverse process, the links of these experts to official and corporate sources give them a preferred position in the media despite the built-in conflict-of-interest, unrecognized by establishment institutions. (PBS has repeatedly turned down labor-funded programs on grounds of conflict-of-interest, but doesn’t do the same for corporate-funded programs, as PBS officials have internalized the establishment’s normalization of conflicts-of-interest involving the dominant institutions of society.) Those in opposition, even if representing very large numbers, even a majority of the population, have difficulty gaining access. Another way of expressing this is to say that the media, as part of the establishment, align themselves with other constituents of the establishment, and are very often at odds with and give little voice to the civil society.


First a criticism. It is true that we can put this problem in terms of a conflict between "State" and "Civil Society." There is a long tradition of the radical Enlightenment for doing so. It is part of our tradition and we should claim it. (On this matter I would suggest two books Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 by Jonathan I. Israel and A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509-1688 by Ellen Meiksins Wood & Neal Wood.) But this can be done only if we define the business entity that we call "the Corporation" as a state entity. In fact such corporate entities are very much like states, and act as little sovereignties with their own laws and arbitrary punishments. (This is a fact that right wing libertarians will never comprehend.) Even so the conflict is not simply between "state" and "civil society" but between those who own and manage society - its property, its productive resources and its capital - and those who don't . (Notice I am stating this conflict from a tradition that follows Marx but does not accept his terms as "scientific.")

The reason I begin with this criticism, a criticism that Herman would amend in his own way, is that when we try to understand the "normalization" of business interests we must understand that they are normalized as if they were the interests of society as a whole, i.e. civil society. Thus the national interest is the interest of "business" (meaning big corporate profiteering) as a whole. A person such as Herman who speaks in defense of Civil Society, cannot even be heard by the editors of the New York Times because as far as those editors are concerned, they are civil society and so is the totalization of interests that surround General Electric, Disney, CBS, Microsoft, et. al. As long as the worker of a corporation is considered to be a part of that corporation, or a small business owner is considered to be a part of business interests, then they are a part of civil society. But the immigrant who tries to form a union is not part of civil society and therefore does not deserve a voice equal to the New York Times. The same is true of the woman who gets fired from a corporation because she wishes to take care of her child before she arrives at work.

How such terms as "conflict-of-interest" are internalized and normalized is in fact the crucial question both here and when studying the ideological normalization of similar terms in legal institutions. The processes are not the same but they are similar. I would suggest that one could write a study of legal institutions and their ideological filtering systems similar to Edward S. Herman's and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media. One might call it Manufacturing Legitmacy: The Political & Social Economy of Legal Institutions. The problem is that there are too many aspects of legal institutions that we would like to account for - not only courts and judges, but Law Schools, law firms, police departments, private "security" forces, administrative agencies, corporate imposed "non-state" rules and regulations (both for workers and consumers), private and negotiated law such as emegers from contracts, etc. etc. Each institution should be studied discretely of course but I propose that an entry problem is distinguishing 'non-state' law from state law and showing how all of this integrates into the current political and social economy.

On the ideological level the problem is the same. How do we describe the normalization of an ideological view, accurately and in detail, in a way that can lead to understanding and not further obscurity?


New York City
2 December 2005



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The Break Between Sartre and Camus: Gossip, Invective, and the Meaning of History

A young friend who is writing a paper on existentiallism asked me to explain the Sartre and Camus break-up to her. So I did. This is material that has been covered so often that I don't know if I have offered anything knew. Never-the-less I decided to post it here for those who might be interested. As an aside, it might be interesting to write an essay taking off from this about the whole notion of "choosing" with "in" history. This idea about history seems to me especially religious... as if history was a kind of god.
The Break Between Sartre and Camus: Gossip, Invective, and the Meaning of History. : A Question from a Young Friend


Your question: "Why did Sartre and Camus argue and split (or, as you put it. "have a falling out")?"

Someday I would like to write an essay about intellectual fame and literary gossip and its meaning for philosophical issues... I think the "true meaning" of the "split" between Sartre and Camus, tells us more about the subject of the "literary star system" and the "ghost of gossip" that haunts every petty bourgeois intellectual enterprise than it tells us about the important historical issues behind the parting of ways . But some other time.

Basically the feud between Sartre and Camus was about each individual's relation to resistance and violence, history and action. Sartre and Camus argued over some of the following issues -- political commitment, the nature of history, the relation of the "writer" to the struggles of the oppressed, the nature of violence and terrorism, the role of the individual, etc. All of this was in the context of the growing anti-colonial movements, especially movements against French Imperialism in Africa and Indochina and the postwar influence of Stalinism over the European working class and these same anti-colonialist movements. Sartre's emphasis was on opposing oppression in France and opposing French imperialism. Camus' emphasis was on opposing the tyranny of Stalinism and similar totalitarian tyrannies and would not support an anti-imperialist movement that would simply lead to another form of oppression. For Sartre, Camus' moral position provided backhanded political support for imperial oppression. For Camus, Sartre's political position provided moral cover for Stalinist domination. From this distance we can see that they were both correct and both fundamentally confused.

These I believe are the important issues in a nutshell. Readers can stop here if they feel no need to learn more about the interesting gossip or the entangled history.

Like all else in the literary world the break between Sartre and Camus began as a feud over a bad book review, the book we know in English as Albert Camus' "The Rebel." In 1951 Camus published "L'Homme revolte". In 1952, soon after the publication, France was deep within one of its periodic political crises, involving Indochina, Algeria and national strikes. In the mean time the only writers with moral credit among the French working and middle classes were the intellectuals who had in one way or another participated in the fight against the Nazis. In this respect Sartre and Camus were the pre-eminent literary stars of the post-war era. They were often paired together as representing a style of revolt among the rising young intellectuals. The radical youth of the era grabbed at existentialism as representing their moral disgust at the hypocrisy of a bourgeoisie that so easily collaborated with Nazi occupation and representing their need for freedom of thought against the stultification of a mechanical Marxism as represented by the PCF.

It was in this situation that Francois Jensen wrote a scathing review of Camus' book in Sartre's journal "Les Temps Moderns." Camus in response wrote to Sartre accusing him of making a personal attack in order to gain political points with his leftist friends. Sartre wrote back accusing Camus of betraying the cause of the oppressed in order to advance his career as the popular writer of petty bourgeois angst. Well, all of this is the usual literary gossip, and the Parisian literary culture can be especially vicious, probably because French "intellectuals" are not only "writers," "philosophers," and "artists" but are also caught in the frenzy of fame that elevates the writer to the equivalent of a rock star. It's hard to imagine now but "Paris Intellectual Culture" once held an analogous place in French Society that "Hollywood Star Culture" holds in the U.S. This meant that the friendship between Sartre and Camus was broken in public and the events were played out in the newspapers and broadcast from the lecture halls, in a way that is hard to imagine for a present day American. It would be as if some imagined feud between Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish were to be covered by the New York Times, the Daily News, and the Fox News channel. More than anything else this magnified the bitterness of the break. It also tended to obscure the issues behind the break, then and now.

Beneath the posturing, gossip, and frenzy of fame there were actually a few serious philosophical and political questions. And as far as those are concerned it is not easy to say who was more wrong-headed Camus or Sartre. In current intellectual culture, with its automatic bourgeois self-satisfaction (which parades as democratic righteousness while obliterating democracy everywhere) it is usually Camus who is given the last word. Many U.S. writers today (especially those around the oddly jesuitical "New Republic" magazine) would turn him into Saint Camus. Yet when I was coming to awareness intellectually in the 1970s, at a time when U.S. atrocities in the Vietnam war were still obvious to U.S. intellectuals, Sartre was looked upon as the model of the committed intellectual and Camus was considered a naive, if unwitting apologist for imperialism. Much of this is simply the clouded sensorium that is the politics of literary reputation and has more to do with our current ideological battles than with history or moral principle. The issues behind the rise and fall of literary reputation are interesting, but not important for this particular post.

To understand the historical issues that give the little literary feud between Sartre and Camus some historical significance it is necessary to understand what most left-leaning French intellectuals understood in the postwar years. They all knew that the French "bourgeoisie" had quickly given in to the Fascists, and collaborated with German occupation. Most believed this was because the bourgeoisie feared the communists more than the fascists. They all believed that in the countries occupied by the Germans it was the communists and the socialists who organized the underground resistance to the Fascists. In short the Stalinist Communist parties emerged from World War II with moral credit for their resistance to the Nazis and the ruling classes of France and Italy were largely discredited. For independent intellectuals, such as Sartre and Camus, who opposed the Nazi occupation with varying degrees of risk to their own lives, the significant question was, what attitude should be taken to the PCF, the French Communist Party. The best known of this group of independent intellectuals, beside Camus and Sartre, were Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron. But there were others who would make their reputations much later such as Cornelius Castoriadis and the intellectuals around a little known but very interesting group called "Socialisme ou Barberie". I mention this group because it was one of the few left intellectual formations that offered commentary on these issues that more than holds up today.

The first break between Camus and Raymond Aron on one side and Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on the other took place over how to characterize the Stalinist party and what attitude to take toward the newly reconstructing "bourgeois" parties. Basically, Sartre believed (at least up until 1956 and the Hungarian Workers Rebellion against the Stalinist Communist Party) that the Communists were an oppressive party but were the only game going and represented the interests of the oppressed. Camus believed that all political parties were basically oppressive and that the leaders of these parties cynically claimed to represent the interests of the oppressed in order to become oppressors themselves. (I am highly oversimplifying.)

But being writers and intellectuals who were also French, Sartre and Camus were bound to create a theory of their disagreement that would bring it back to fundamental philosophical differences with world historical import.

For Camus, individual rebellion, the ability of the individual to say "No" to the oppressive regime was the highest value. (I suppose one could make Antigone the great patron saint of this attitude.) But the history of the previous 200 years seemed to Camus to call into question the very basis of "rebellion" as a collective act of liberation -- of revolution. Collective rebellion, would simply result in organized murder and, therefore, even though the individual "Rebel" should be honored for his act of resistance -- that act of resistance being the basis for asserting human dignity -- revolution itself would fail to constitute justice. For Camus, all collective action could only constitute more injustice. If Camus was willing to take collective action against the Nazis it was only because Nazi injustice was all invasive and total. This meant that any kind of rebellion at all was a Pascallian wager that had to be accepted. In fact for Camus, the Nazis proved his point about the futility of collective rebellion, since the Nazis were simply one more example of that futility. All revolution led to greater terror, even when it was a reaction to the terror of the status quo.

Camus' solution to this "paradox" between individual rebellion, which establishes the basis for human dignity, and collective rebellion, which creates the basis for increasing repression, was the solution Sartre regarded as typical of the petty-bourgeois writer. Camus believed that one should essentially "privatize" rebellion, make rebellion into a moral standard of ones own life that could be expressed in the ethics of one's art. Rebellion in Camus' view could not establish a world of justice, but when the rebellion of the individual is turned into the directed energy of human art, it can create a universe of meaning.

Sartre believed that the only way to resist oppression was to make a moral choice. So far he agreed with Camus. Sartre also believed that collective rebellion would inevitably lead to violence. But far from shrinking from this violence Sartre tended to think that collective violence was one of the motors of history and the only choice to make was on which side of history the individual would choose to fight. For Sartre and Camus the choice was moral, as well as political. But for Sartre the choice of rebellion was also the choice of history. It sounded to Sartre like a betrayal of the values of the Resistance to Nazi occupation to say that collective rebellion only leads to more violence. Later it would sound like a betrayal of the liberation movement of the anti-French Algerians, to say to them that they should not rebel collectively. For Sartre it was merely a choice between supporting the violence and terrorism of the Algerian rebels against the French oppressors or supporting the violence and atrocities of the French colonialists against the Algerian people. To say that one should retreat into one's own art was simply to make a choice by default, it was to engage in an act of bad faith by pretending not to choose. For Sartre personal retreat into art was merely another way of supporting the violence of the status quo.

If one remembers that, at this time (1952), France was actively trying to recover its empire in Indochina and Africa, and that Sartre was actively opposing French colonialism, whereas Camus believed that the anti-colonialists had no "moral legitimacy", then one can get a sense of what the feud was "really" about from Sartre's point of view. If one remembers that Sartre was trying to "existentialize" Marxism and therefore not offering very acute criticism of the "political acts" of the Stalinists, then one can get a sense of what the feud was "really" about from Camus' point of view. For both writers the basic principle was "how" to oppose oppression. For Camus "collective resistance" to oppression only leads to more oppression. For Sartre Camus' "quietism" could only lead to the triumph of the oppressors. Camus believed that Sartre had become an ideologue giving cover to Stalinist domination, while he, Camus, was the advocate of individual human dignity. Sartre believed, that Camus was an apologist for French Imperialism, while he, Sartre was simply choosing to be "in" history and Camus was choosing in "bad faith. "

The question of who was "correct" in this argument is not the correct question. The question is how can we come to an historical understanding of the moral issues presented by Camus and how can we come to a moral understanding of the historical issues presented by Sartre. In many ways, in 1952, each represented the missing center in each other's thought. Camus' refusal to see that any fight for the oppressed could be meaningful, and Sartre's refusal to see that his uncritical support of the "resistance" of the oppressed could lead to a glorification of violence, seems to me to dance around the same basic absence in the world view of each philosopher.

-------------
Quotes from Sartre and Camus:
I offer below a few enjoyable quotes from Sartre's "Reply to Camus", which in French reads with the voyeuristic thrill of observing a distant intimacy, like hearing your best friends breaking up in the next room. Sartre constantly addresses Camus as "you, you, you,..." as if it were his version of "J'Accuse." These quotes are "fun" and the reader will get a good flavor of Sartre's side of the argument.

Sartre's "Reply to Albert Camus" is a polemic worth reading if only for its rhetoric of energizing invective.

Sartre tells us that Camus is claiming to be tired of the fight. Sartre replies:

"[I]f I were tired it seems to me that I would feel some shame in saying so There are so many who are wearier. If we are tired, Camus, then let us rest, since we have the means to do so. But let us not hope to shake the world by having it examine our fatigue."

"[T]he only way of helping the enslaved out there is to take sides with those who are here."

Sartre speaks of Camus' relation to history and to Camus secondary relation to his own personality "outside of history", as if Sartre could perform an existential psychoanalysis on Camus, in a way he would later write about Baudelaire, Jean Genet, and Flaubert.

"Your personality, alive and authentic as long as it was nourished by the event, became a mirage. In 1944, it was the future. In 1952, it is the past, and what seems to you the most intolerable injustice, is that all this is inflicted upon you from the outside, and without your having changed. ... Only memories are left for you, and a language which grows more and more abstract. Only half of you lives among us, and you are tempted to withdraw from us altogether, to retreat into some solitude where you can again find the drama which should have been that of man, and which is not even your own any more...."


Sartre continues:

"Just like the little girl who tries the water with her toe, while asking, "Is it hot?" you view history with distrust, you dabble a toe which you pull out very quickly and you ask, "Has it a meaning?" ... And I suppose that if I believed, with you, that History is a pool of filth and blood, I would do as you and look twice before diving in. But suppose that I am in it already, suppose that, from my point of view, even your sulking is proof of your historicity. Suppose one were to reply to you, like Marx,: "History does nothing... It is real and living man who does everything. History is only the activity of man pursuing his own ends.... It is only within historical action that the understanding of history is given. Does history have a meaning? Has it an objective? For me, these are questions which have no meaning. Because History, apart from the man who makes it, is only an abstract and static concept, of which it can neither be said that it has an objective, nor that it has not. And the problem is not to know its objective but to give it one."


With this invective, Sartre could carry the reader with him. What is not remembered about Sartre is that he was one of the great polemicists of our time and wrote best when he was personally angry. Thus the young intellectuals of the time were more likely to read Sartre's side of this argument rather than Camus' side. It was only later, when reacting against Sartre's supposed "communism," his commitment to fighting for the oppressed even if the oppressed used violence, that Camus' clear eyed anti-Stalinism was used as a bludgeon against Sartre's wrestle with the French Communist Party. Sartre could be naive. He could cheer any and all anti-colonial movements on the one hand and cheer Israel as an exemplar of overcoming oppression on the other. But simple ignorance of the history of the time usually prevents most people from understanding the "argument" between Sartre and Camus.

In the end, when Camus died, Sartre showed his grudging, and admiring respect for Camus. The following is a quote from the obituary Sartre wrote for Camus:

"He [Camus] represented in this century, and against History, the present heir of that long line of moralists whose works perhaps constitute what is most original in French letters. His stubborn humanism, narrow and pure, austere and sensual, waged a dubious battle against events of these times. But inversely, through the obstinacy of his refusals, he reaffirmed the existence of moral fact within the heart of our era and against the Machiavellians, against the golden calf of realism."


Some quotes from Albert Camus

"By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more."

"A free press can of course be good or bad, but most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad"

"The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily."

"A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world."

"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding."

"Stupidity has a knack of getting its way."



New York City
9 December 2005



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