Comparison of Sartre and Camus - Essay Example

SARTRE and CAMUS Jean Paul Sartre was one of the 20th century’s great philosophers. Not only was he a powerful and personality, but he was thefounder of one the great strains of thought in recent times: existentialism. In this bleak and sad philosophy, there is no God, nor is there any meaning to life. In works like Being and Nothingness and also in the famous play No Exit, Sartre expounds on such themes. But does this philosophy make sense? Is it in any way a good way to live? There is another way and that involves the thinking of Sartres fellow existentialist, Albert Camus. Camus took a more humanist approach to the philosophy and believed that there were certain acts that could have meaning even if life was generally devoid of it. Is this all there is? Is the world we see around us all there is? No God, nothing more stronger or powerful than our own lives? We simply are born and die and there is no purpose to anything—this is what Jean-Paul Sartre believed despite the fact that there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. He essentially made up his philosophy in his own mind without looking to external evidence to solidify his own ideas. He even says this in Being and Nothingness, “Life has no meaning a priori … It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”1 This is also clear when he writes, “Nothingness haunts being.”2 But these ideas do not take into account how much of the world is designed directly for us. A lot of the science around the alternative philosophy of anthrocentrism suggests that everything in our world is calibrated for us. If there was 1 % more oxygen in the air we probably wouldn’t be alive. Now why would this be? So that we can be even more tortured by the meaninglessness of life?—or is because there is a higher power who created and watches over us? It isn’t surprising that Sartre came up with such a bleak philosophy: he lived through the Second World War and probably saw a lot of sadness and misery. His old world was destroyed and he literally had to try to come up with new values for a new world. It is just a bit disappointing that these new values are not based in the past and are cut free from any tradition or original truth like the existence of God. One of the most famous quotations from Being and Nothingness is “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”3 The idea that freedom is a negative thing, is something that a person is condemned to, is very strange. It is a bit like saying light is darkness or absence is presence. What Sartre means is that freedom is a terrible responsibility if all you have is your one life and nothing more. But this doesn’t make too much sense, if a person believes, like Sartre, that the world is meaningless. The nausea of seeing yourself and your perceptions reflected back in the world or the world filling with yourself is also something to be disagreed with. In a way the kind of existentialism Sartre complains about is really solipsism: the belief that you are the only thing in the world, or the only thing that exists. If Sartre stopped for a moment to look at the world, he wouldn’t see his own ugly face reflected back in the petal of a flower or in a sunrise: he would see a dazzling display of the natural world and the fact that people are part of it all, that this is designed to be our world where we should be happy. Camus thinks of things a bit differently. The drudgery and meaningless of his current existence plagues Merseault, the main character of his most famous book The Stranger. Although his lack of belief, or exclusive self-belief, inspires the notion that he is free and has the will to choose how he would like to live, instead his life is circumscribed by things beyond his control. There is always the temptation to desperation, but it is an attitude or perspective that Camus ultimately rejects. He says that the only philosophical question is that of suicide, and using philosophy comes to the conclusion that suicide is not a correct approach to life. This is the message of The Stranger. Merseault, convicted of murder (and of having no emotions), could resign himself to death, even embrace it. Instead, in the strange final words of the book he does not. He sets himself against extinction with a different attitude. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself — so like a brother, really — I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate. This is the scorn that Camus talks about in his philosophy. Knowing his fate and knowing he will be subject to it, no matter what else happens, Merseault does no embrace. Instead, he welcomes the scorn of the crowd and returns it. This is the independence of spirit that makes life worth living, Camus seems to be saying. Camus’ early philosophy is not without its critics. They see the proud scorn of Merseault as overly romantic and too much of an embrace of violence. Merseault is a seductive figure and seems to imply that there is no such thing as guilt. What is murder, Camus seems to be saying, just something that happens; one cannot be guilty of it as guilt is only constructed by the social machine. The critic English Showalter find the “pose of indifference, the concealed longing for recognition, the devious provocations, all [characterizing] the not-yet successful young writer . . .” that Camus then was before The Stranger’s publication. He believes Camus later set out to correct this novel. By the time he wrote The Fall, Camus recognized the inadequacy of his presentation in The Stranger, in part perhaps because he had outgrown his youthful romanticism. When he returns to the problem in The Fall, however, it is not only because he wants to correct an earlier mistake but also because the “innocent murderer” still haunts his conscience.4 We can see in his style how Camus reifies his own philosophy. As the years go by and he has made his point, his style too changes. The world of [his] fiction [is] perceived by the reader as through a glass darkly, a glass that, in the case of L’Etranger, Sartre had likened to the glass door of a telephone booth. The reader’s vision of that world was somehow blurred, his angle of vision oblique.5 In later novels, however, Camus’s style becomes more distinct and unequivocal. As Fitch says, it takes on “a certain opacity.” Having decided to exist, it points to its own existence. “With this relative opacification of the language of the text, language drew attention to itself and away from the fiction that provided its ostensible raison d’etre.”6 In effect, Camus is using himself up. It would indeed be curious to see what he would have been able to write had he lived longer. Both Sartre and Camus were clearly very smart men, but the first was too much a product of his time and unable to get outside of his gloomy state of mind to see the world as it really is. There is so much wonder and strangeness in the world that it is actually quite difficult to do what he did: reduce it all to ash. If he could simply see how the world is designed for us to live in and enjoy, he would have changed his mind. Likewise, if he could just look at the beauty around him and stop worrying about his own problems he would have felt better. Camus was in the end only a little better. He took a harder look at things and tried to come up with solutions, unlike Sartre. Work Consulted Braun, Lev. Witness of Decline. Rutherford: Dickinson University Press, 1974. Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Trans. Matthew Ward. New York: Vintage, 1989. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. http://www.nyu.edu/classes/keefer/hell/camus.html Carruth, Hayden. After the Stranger. New York: MacMillan, 1965. Fitch, Brian. The Narcissistic Text. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1982. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. New York: Routledge, 1969. Showalter, English. Exiles and Strangers. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1984. Read More

It is a bit like saying light is darkness or absence is presence. What Sartre means is that freedom is a terrible responsibility if all you have is your one life and nothing more. But this doesn’t make too much sense, if a person believes, like Sartre, that the world is meaningless. The nausea of seeing yourself and your perceptions reflected back in the world or the world filling with yourself is also something to be disagreed with. In a way the kind of existentialism Sartre complains about is really solipsism: the belief that you are the only thing in the world, or the only thing that exists.

If Sartre stopped for a moment to look at the world, he wouldn’t see his own ugly face reflected back in the petal of a flower or in a sunrise: he would see a dazzling display of the natural world and the fact that people are part of it all, that this is designed to be our world where we should be happy. Camus thinks of things a bit differently. The drudgery and meaningless of his current existence plagues Merseault, the main character of his most famous book The Stranger. Although his lack of belief, or exclusive self-belief, inspires the notion that he is free and has the will to choose how he would like to live, instead his life is circumscribed by things beyond his control.

There is always the temptation to desperation, but it is an attitude or perspective that Camus ultimately rejects. He says that the only philosophical question is that of suicide, and using philosophy comes to the conclusion that suicide is not a correct approach to life. This is the message of The Stranger. Merseault, convicted of murder (and of having no emotions), could resign himself to death, even embrace it. Instead, in the strange final words of the book he does not. He sets himself against extinction with a different attitude.

As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself — so like a brother, really — I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate. This is the scorn that Camus talks about in his philosophy.

Knowing his fate and knowing he will be subject to it, no matter what else happens, Merseault does no embrace. Instead, he welcomes the scorn of the crowd and returns it. This is the independence of spirit that makes life worth living, Camus seems to be saying. Camus’ early philosophy is not without its critics. They see the proud scorn of Merseault as overly romantic and too much of an embrace of violence. Merseault is a seductive figure and seems to imply that there is no such thing as guilt.

What is murder, Camus seems to be saying, just something that happens; one cannot be guilty of it as guilt is only constructed by the social machine. The critic English Showalter find the “pose of indifference, the concealed longing for recognition, the devious provocations, all [characterizing] the not-yet successful young writer . . .” that Camus then was before The Stranger’s publication. He believes Camus later set out to correct this novel. By the time he wrote The Fall, Camus recognized the inadequacy of his presentation in The Stranger, in part perhaps because he had outgrown his youthful romanticism.

When he returns to the problem in The Fall, however, it is not only because he wants to correct an earlier mistake but also because the “innocent murderer” still haunts his conscience.4 We can see in his style how Camus reifies his own philosophy. As the years go by and he has made his point, his style too changes. The world of [his] fiction [is] perceived by the reader as through a glass darkly, a glass that, in the case of L’Etranger, Sartre had likened to the glass door of a telephone booth.

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