Sartre and Camus: Freedom and Justice

Albert Camus

     

Jean-Paul Sartre

 

 

Camus and Sartre: two figures could not be so different in history, and yet talk about the same subject, existentialism, in a time where the Western world hungered for an answer to the question 'what is the meaning of the life?' (The question of 'what is meaning at all' would come from the German philosophers and poets)

I read a very excellent article called 'How Camus and Sartre Split on the question of How to Be Free' and it reminded, in one phrase, how the problems of the past are once again our problems:

In October 1951, Camus published The Rebel. In it, he gave voice to a roughly drawn ‘philosophy of revolt’. This wasn’t a philosophical system per se, but an amalgamation of philosophical and political ideas: every human is free, but freedom itself is relative; one must embrace limits, moderation, ‘calculated risk’; absolutes are anti-human. Most of all, Camus condemned revolutionary violence. Violence might be used in extreme circumstances (he supported the French war effort, after all) but the use of revolutionary violence to nudge history in the direction you desire is utopian, absolutist, and a betrayal of yourself.

 

For Sartre,  revolution required much more than what might be a middle way by Camus.  Sartre was a radical of belief, and I'm not sure it served him well.

Sartre read The Rebel with disgust. As far as he was concerned, it was possible to achieve perfect justice and freedom – that described the achievement of communism. Under capitalism, and in poverty, workers could not be free. Their options were unpalatable and inhumane: to work a pitiless and alienating job, or to die. But by removing the oppressors and broadly returning autonomy to the workers, communism allows each individual to live without material want, and therefore to choose how best they can realise themselves. This makes them free, and through this unbending equality, it is also just.

It's troubling that the Sartre's answer to radical freedom in the west was communism. Radical freedom, by its nature, is a burden.  A world with burdens cannot have a utopian ideal: they go together like oil and water.

France has had many kinds of revolutions, many of them bloody, some of them odd, and the one pivotal idea every citizen of Western belief has burned in them, the inalienable rights of humankind.  It's all very common sense today...that no one is really so much better than everyone else.  But at the time it was such a startling way of thinking.

Today, in the light of yellow vests, BLM, Proud Boys, Antifa, and COVID-19, there's so much confusion, real social confusion, about the way forward.  And it's interesting because there are radical thinkers that think communism could definitely work for America, or that abolishing capitalism, or revisionism of whole monetary debt systems will solve social problems. 

The reality is much simpler than that.  Ethics and moral systems that value people's inalienable rights and freedoms need to be present.  And right now, instead of a world of capitalism vs communism, the debate between Sartre and Camus reminds me that revolution as violence will never be the final answer.  If it was, there would be no verse of turning swords into plowshares...we would live on swords and fire alone.