
How Camus and Sartre split up over the question of how to be free - lermontov
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-camus-and-sartre-split-up-over-the-question-of-how-to-be-free
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samirillian
I always thought the real intellectual differences related to Marxism were
between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, the former having introduced Sartre to
Marxism and later publicly breaking with him for his "ultra-bolshevism." Camus
and Sartre seemed to have more personal differences, viz., Sartre generally
being an asshole. Among other things, he considered Camus a notch beneath him
intellectually, and Ive always personally believed that a big reason Sartre
turned down the Nobel prize was because Camus already had one.

Ive always struggled to understand Sartre's popularity even among other
philosophers I respect.

~~~
dgfgfdagasdfgfa
> Ive always struggled to understand Sartre's popularity even among other
> philosophers I respect.

I agree completely.

It is completely rankling when considering how he is compared to Simone de
Beauvoir. Her "Second Sex" is considered a feminist work—and for good
reason—but it surpasses any of what Sarte wrote as a philosophical work. While
he did build on the backs of others, his ideas remain small compared to his
contemporaries.

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coldtea
> _Sartre remained unpredictable, however, and was engaged in a long, bizarre
> dalliance with hardline Maoism when he died in 1980._

Bizarre in what way exactly? At the time (late-60s to late-70s) in France
maoism was as popular between students and scholars as Marvel movies are in
the US today...

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Cozumel
It's worth noting Sartre spent 9 months as a POW, that influenced his outlook
on freedom a fair bit.

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RamshackleJ
what are the public academic debates that we are having today? creationism vs
evolution? populism vs neo-liberalism?

I hate to reminisce but having two existentialist philosophers debating about
socialism vs communism makes me jelly.

~~~
pmoriarty
You have to remember that these were two French intellectuals, debating in a
country, culture, and time period where Socialism vs Communism was very much a
live issue.

That's not really true in the United States today, where even Socialism is
generally held in contempt, and Communism is considered to be a demonstratably
failed ideology which doesn't even deserve to be taken seriously.

On top of this, intellectualism itself is viewed with great suspicion by many
Americans, who much prefer to hear celebrity gossip, or watch sports and
reality shows. As a result, the "public" intellectual debates of the era are
dumbed down and infotainmentized by a media mostly concerned with ratings and
pandering to the lowest common denominator.

There still are plenty of debates in academia in the United States today, but
they're not very public, and mostly take place in academic journals which most
of the public would rather die before reading.

I've heard that France is still a culture that greatly respects their
intellectuals, so I would expect they still have many public intellectual
debates these days. Maybe someone who keeps current with them could comment.

~~~
wahern
I agree with everything you said. But I'd suggest that not only are the
debates in academia alive, they're actually too vigorous and too radical.

I think one of the contributors to the current political situation is the
increasing influence of academia on politics and the law. Instead of having a
few big ideas that we wrestle with, every politician and lawyer is a little
Leninist bent on burning everything down in favor of their ever-changing pet
political philosophies. And the notion of moderation has somehow become
radicalized, I think; a dirty word for some people and a rallying cry for
others.

The vigorous creativity of scholarship provides an endless supply of fodder in
terms of new ideas, new reasoning, new justifications, and most recently new
"facts". If we were a nation of philosophers it'd be some kind of paradise.
But we're not, and it's ripping apart our core social institutions.

I'm not dissing the scholarship, or trying to suggest it's all bunk. I mean,
even bunk can be valuable by challenging assumptions or by making conspicuous
assumptions itself. But too much of that debate is bleeding out into the
culture. A whole new layer of public policy institutions and media outlets
feeds off and disseminates the half-baked ideas. There's never any time or
energy to winnow the chaff. And so it's effectively poisoning the social and
political culture.

~~~
ZenoArrow
>"A whole new layer of public policy institutions and media outlets feeds off
and disseminates the half-baked ideas. There's never any time or energy to
winnow the chaff. And so it's effectively poisoning the social and political
culture."

Can you name one cultural meme that's emerged from academia in the last 10
years? I certainly can't. I simply don't think academic debates have that
great a cultural impact in our modern society, regardless of this increased
vigor you're referring to.

On the other hand, I can think of recent cultural memes that have emerged from
the political sphere, pushed by a diverse range of people (from corporate
interests to grass roots activists). Very few politically active people seem
to be waiting around for answers from academia, they've got their own agendas
to push.

~~~
pm90
Cultural memes aren't really the measure of progress, or worth, of academia.
And "academia" itself is a pretty broad term: are you referring to Philosophy,
or the Social Sciences or what?

~~~
ZenoArrow
>"Cultural memes aren't really the measure of progress, or worth, of
academia."

I didn't say they were a measure of the worth of academia. However, they are a
way to track the evolution of public debate. For example, the '1%' meme (about
the top 1% owning more than the remaining 99%) has shaped public debate around
wealth inequality. If academia has been a big influence on public debate, my
argument is that we should see this play out in cultural memes. Cultural memes
are just ideas which are commonly known in our shared culture. The GP
indicated that the restlessness of academia was damaging public debate, my
argument was that the general public was largely indifferent to this activity.

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narrator
I think Camus knew that there were things that he didn't know about political
economy while Sartre was more certain that the vast oversimplification of
reality that is marxist economics could somehow be hammered somehow into the
mold of reality. The problem of economic calculation is deceptively easy to
hand-wave away.

~~~
coldtea
The problem with the communists wasn't the "oversimplification of marxist
economics", after all capitalist policies are based on similar
oversimplifications. It was the power struggles, and the controlling party
elites.

~~~
Nomentatus
Other than human nature, it had everything going for it.

~~~
narrator
The subtler arguments against socialism are not amenable to sound bites. The
one that was initially penned in the 1920s and has stood the test of time the
best is "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth"[1]. This kicked
off the Socialist calculation debate[2] which was on-going during the 20th
century. It was largely settled in favor of the anti-central planners with the
collapse of communism and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in China.

[1][https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-
com...](https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-
commonwealth/html)

[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_calculation_debate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_calculation_debate)

~~~
wahern
It really all comes down to pricing theory, right? Marxism says that labor has
intrinsic economic value. That's fundamental to Marxist communist thought,
from economics to social theory to theories of history.

Liberal economic theory says that there's no such thing as intrinsic economic
value. See Diamond Fallacy. Optimal price signaling through a free market
would be a necessary corollary. (And I think the Halting Problem could be used
to prove that.)

Neither seem right to me, but Marxism definitely seems far more wrong.
Nonetheless, concepts like dignity and justice wouldn't exist if labor and
other activities didn't have some kind of intrinsic value, however indefinite
or indeterminable. The vast majority of people in capitalist societies,
especially those in ultra capitalist societies, and particularly Americans,
believe in an intrinsic worth to labor. And human concepts such as dignity,
justice, and "the value of human life" exist precisely to define what we
perceive as intrinsic value. And perhaps that's what democracy is about--a
hack bolted onto free market capitalism to aggregate (in a very poor manner)
our normative assessments of different kinds of intrinsic values, and to pay
those costs more optimally than capitalism alone could manage.

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narrator
The truth is is that all labor is of equal COST, that being one hour of a
person's time, but all labor is not of equal VALUE. Someone building a machine
to do something is more valuable then the equivalent time spent doing the task
by hand for example. The calculation of whether the machine should be built
and then what it should be used for, especially if its function is very non-
specific, such as a lathe, is where socialism gets messy and capitalism does
better.

~~~
Nomentatus
Touch of ableism here.

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entropyneur
Oh, not this again. Moderation improves only wrong ideas. Yes, experiments
with social order are costly, but it absolutely doesn't mean that "even the
most venerable and worthy ideas need to be balanced against one another".

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jplasmeier
Freedom is an awful word (to use in rigorous discourse) because it
simultaneously means two very different, if not in some way opposite things.
Freedom can be used in the sense of having many options to execute your will,
or it can be used in the sense of having nothing to lose by executing your
will[0].

[0] -
[http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/kriskristofferson/meandbobbym...](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/kriskristofferson/meandbobbymcgee.html)

~~~
Veen
That's easily remedied by defining what's meant by freedom, which was a major
part of the existentialist project.

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emmelaich
So Camus against violence and Sartre for.

Makes sense; the philosopher or revolutionary most in favour of violence comes
from the middle or upper classes, not the lower.

~~~
emmelaich
Rereading my comment I see it can be interpreted different ways.

So to clarify I was thinking of middle-class advocates of radical left wing
causes - such as Che Guevera.

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lngnmn
Those guys were writers, not philosophers in the first place.

Unlimited, pure freedom does not exist and hence the absolute Free Will. It is
an empty concept. Freedom is bound by the mind, the mind is bound by biology.
Biology is bound by physics and other constraints of the environment. The
Universe of Ideas is mere a hallucination. Suicide as an ultimate act of
freedom, which is the canonical illustration - the only freedom man have. Not
much freedom, after all.

~~~
Cozumel
Camus said the only freedom is suicide. (The Myth of Sisyphus)

~~~
wahern
I agree with the others. The way I like to put it is that the only true
freedom is in the _choice_ of suicide. The corollary is that to find any
meaning in life you have to first come to terms with that grim reality. If and
how you come to terms with that reality shapes the meaning of your life.

You can, of course, choose suicide. But then it's lights-out and so there's
not much to discuss in that case. I don't think either Sartre or Camus saw
suicide as cowardly, but maybe I'm wrong about that. As far as I see it,
perceiving suicide as cowardly is sort of at odds with existentialist claim.
If suicide is cowardly then suicide isn't much of a choice at all and then
there really isn't any freedom at all.

(Of course, being animals with an intrinsic evolutionary predisposition to
avoid death, suicide isn't much of a choice at all. Unless you're mentally
ill, it's _really_ difficult to convince yourself to die. The lack of freedom
in this world is actually much more grim than even existentialists wish to
admit. But I'm happy to adopt the existentialist conceit as I think
existentialism says something profound and profoundly concise about how to
find meaning in life.)

~~~
ZenoArrow
>"If suicide is cowardly then suicide isn't much of a choice at all and then
there really isn't any freedom at all."

A cowardly choice is still a choice, it's still a possibility. Freedom is
freedom to choose, it imposes no limits on what motivates you.

Aside from this, cowardly doesn't seem to fit suicide, if we're going for
negative connotations then self-absorbed seems more appropriate IMO.

>"The lack of freedom in this world is actually much more grim than even
existentialists wish to admit."

What do you mean by this? What freedom do you feel you lack?

~~~
wahern
One freedom I lack is the freedom from the limitations of my brain,
limitations which I can barely even fathom.

But the limitation I was specifically referring too was that suicide isn't
like other personal choices because your body and mind act in concert against
self-agency. And thank goodness that they do, but the point is that like
infants we're trapped in an environment that is constitutionally hostile to
any capacity for killing ourselves.

I do agree that a cowardly choice is still a choice, and that existentialism
doesn't preclude seeing suicide as cowardly. But what does cowardly mean? Why
might it be relevant to questions of freedom? And if relevant, how? Those are
big question that hint at 1) another aspect to our rationality and self-
agency, namely how they're culturally informed and intertwined with
considerations of others' opinions, desires, and needs; and more generally 2)
that a definition of freedom implicates other questions about the source and
function of morality wrt rationality and agency.

I don't think existentialism is particularly concerned with those questions.
They're not really within it's ambit. Camus and Sartre had different, even
contradictory, moral philosophies even though both were authentically
existentialist.

~~~
ZenoArrow
>"One freedom I lack is the freedom from the limitations of my brain,
limitations which I can barely even fathom."

Okay, let's play along with this. If you feel your brain is holding you back,
you must have an idea of what it's holding you back from, otherwise you
wouldn't see it as limiting. In other words, it's only limiting in comparison
with another way of being.

With this in mind, if your consciousness could expand beyond your brain, what
would you hope to experience? What knowledge or experience would you hope to
gain?

~~~
wahern
I don't know. Perhaps it's not a relevant limitation, or perhaps it's not a
limitation relevant to the notion or my experience of freedom. Or perhaps it's
a limitation that channels choice and thus enhances or even defines freedom.

What I do know is that I'm tired and stressed this afternoon and can't even
_think_ about that question... ;)

