The most petty and dramatic feuds are those
that come between friends.
And there’s no better bust-up in the annals of philosophy than the row between
two titans of existentialism,
Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Camus was from a poor Algerian family; Sartre,
from a bourgeois French background.
They both sided with the French Resistance during World War Two, had communist sympathies,
and thought cigarettes were extraordinarily dope. They
womanized together and liked each other.
The only bump before the blow-up came when Simone
Du Beauvoir, Sartre’s lover, offered to
sleep with Camus – but what displeased Sartre
was that Camus turned her down,
not that she’d offered in the first place.
Both men were existentialists, although they
disliked the term. "I am not what I am," said Sartre.
"I am a stranger to myself,” Camus
echoed. They worried about how to make meaning
in an essentially absurd, godless world. It
must be created authentically from within,
they claimed, because we are all condemned
to be free.
It was this last bit that sparked the breakup,
in 1952. As an existentialist, Sartre cared
about the radical freedom of man. But he was
also a Marxist, who thought history was at
the mercy of material historical forces – leaving
little room for personal autonomy.
At the time he was a fan of the Soviet Union and
Stalin, the guy that crushed Eastern Europe
and imprisoned his people in gulags. Camus
couldn’t wrap his head around Sartre’s
support for Russia’s twisted version of communism.
When Camus pointed out the contradiction, Sartre told him to shove it.
So what’s the real issue? On one level it
was about the value of human life.
Is it alright to sacrifice people for the sake of principles?
Or is life so valuable that killing can’t
be justified in the name of an ideal? Looked at another way, the dispute was about pessimism versus optimism.
Sartre didn’t think much of human nature
– hell is other people, he wrote.
But Camus had a slightly more upbeat, humanist outlook. Because Sartre valued individual humans less,
it was easier for him to embrace
the killing that came with communism;
Camus thought that was nuts.
It was the end. A few years later, when Camus
was receiving his Nobel Prize, he said his
relationship to Sartre was “outstanding”
– “because the best relationships are
those in which we do not see one other.”
Camus died in a car accident in 1960.
A few years before his own death twenty years later,
Sartre reflected on his former rival.
He was "probably my last good friend,” he said.
