Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, & Culture: 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.

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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."