2929259

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Sartre-Camus Resartus Author(s): Robert Greer Cohn Source: Yale French Studies, No. 30, J.-P. Sartre (1963), pp. 73-77Published by: Yale University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2929259Accessed: 13-04-2015 13:20 UTC

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ROBERT GREER COHN

Sartre-Camus Resartus

Over a period of thirty years or more, Jean-Paul Sartre has been patiently but stubbornly working at an understanding of reality from the roots up. The monumental Being and Nothingness, the likewise Critique de la raison dialectique, and a dozen other works stand wit- ness to the man's progress. And still Sartre is so beset with qualms as to what best to do that his long-announced book on Ethics has yet to appear (though rumor says it is well advanced). In 1952, after he had gone over the problem of how to become morally or politi- cally involved without losing one's liberty, with a Kantian or Husserlian thoroughness and a modern anguish, up popped his quon- dam friend and ally Albert Camus to announce that Sartre's treat- ment of the whole issue was based on a contradiction: "As long as you have not clarified or eliminated the contradiction [roughly, liberty versus historical determinism], defined your notion of history, assimi- lated Marxism, or rejected it, how can we be deprived of the right to contend that, no matter what you do, you remain within the boundaries of nihilism?"

Since Camus has, in his L'Homme revolte, peremptorily relegated all the major minds from Hegel to Nietzsche and beyond "within the boundaries of nihilism," Sartre may not have taken this proscription too much to heart; but is it really fair to ask a man to solve a kind of Zeno's paradox in the metaphysical realm before making an ethi- cal move? Is it not rather the intensity with which a man attempts to solve a dilemma that counts most in our estimation of his fitness to judge and to act?

So Sartre: "I don't advise you to read Being and Nothingness, the reading would seem pointlessly arduous to you: you detest difficulties of thought.... But I explained there precisely the conditions of this break [between liberty and determinism]." And Sartre yet again patiently summarized the paradox of freedom-and-involvement with which he has more stubbornly wrestled than anyone in our time: "the paradoxical aspect of this formula expresses simply the paradox of our historical condition," meaning that, in the realm of praxis there are no absolute solutions, try as we may, and must, for them.

As for extending his theoretical position into the domain of ethics and politics, few writers have committed themselves as frequently and concernedly as J.-P. Sartre. The texts in which he had explained his attitudes toward history and contemporary ideology are both num-

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erous and weighty; they range from the "Preface" to the first issue of Les Temps Modernes, Existentialism Is a Humanism, What Is Literature?, Entretiens sur la politique, to various editorials, and a book-length article on "Les Communistes et la paix," from which we shall quote.

But Camus was oblivious: here is the way he ends the "Letter to the Editor of Les Temps Modernes" which set off the fireworks: "For we shall never surpass anything, in ourselves and in our time, if we permit ourselves, however little, to forget our contradictions, to use in the combats of intelligence the arguments and a method for which we do not accept otherwise the philosophic justifications, if we con- sent to liberate theoretically the individual all the while admitting practically that man can be enslaved under certain conditions... This "if we permit ourselves to forget, however little, our contradictions" is made palpable nonsense by Camus himself in the Intro- duction to L'Homme re'volte': "the absurd position, as an act, is un- imaginable."

No wonder Sartre got irritated at all this purity - what happens to the famed "Mediterranean temperateness?" Camus seemed to be saying farewell, in readiness, as soon as the last word was deftly re- corded, to zoom straight up into the air in the wake of St. Leopold Bloom "like a shot off a shovel." Hence Sartre's incredulous "who are you Camus?" But Camus is already out of sight, amid the angels on whose side he so consistently and prematurely puts himself.

Sartre recovers his breath, and muses: "I didn't understand your dilemma - 'either History has a sense or else it hasn't, etc.' - until I reread your Letters to a German Friend. But it all became clear to me when I found this phrase you addressed to a Nazi soldier: 'for years you have tried to make me enter History.' Parbleu, I said to myself, since he believes himself to be outside, it's normal for him to lay down conditions before going inside. . . . But supposing I'm already in, suppose that from my point of view your very sulking is the proof of your historicity. . . . We will not discuss whether there are values transcending History: we will simply note that if there are any, they manifest themselves through human actions which are by definition historical.... If you say that this world is unjust, you have lost the match: you are already outside, comparing a world without justice to a Justice without content."

But Camus has a trump: Sartre has "les mains sales," - there are slave camps. The way Camus wields this trump (a club, as it were) is not very edifying. He first accuses Sartre's "disciple" Jeanson of not talking about the camps while discussing L'Homme revolte, ignor- ing the fact that Jeanson was writing a review of a highly theoretical book. By association, Sartre is then judged guilty of his disciple's omissions.

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Sartre's reaction is typical Sartre-as-polemicist: "We are on the Quai des Orfevres, the cop walks and his shoes creak like in the movies: 'We know everything, I tell you. It's your silence that is suspicious. Come on, admit you're an accomplice. You know about those camps, eh? Say it, it'll be finished, and then the court will settle with you for your admissions.' My God, Camus, how serious you are and, to use one of your own expressions, how frivolous. ...

"I've seen them rejoicing, the anticommunists, over the existence of these slave camps; I have seen them use them to give themselves a ,good conscience; and I didn't get the impression that they were helping the Turkmens, but that they were exploiting their misfortune as the USSR exploits their labor. . . . If one opened one's mouth to protest over some extortion, he had it clapped shut with: 'And the camps0' . . . About that time I began to find these master blackmail- ers abject. For, to me, the scandal of the camps is the problem of all of us. You as well as me. And all the others; the iron curtain is only a mirror, and each half of the world reflects the other half.... The one who condemns today must know that our situation will oblige him tomorrow to do worse than what he has condemned." This "worse" has not yet occurred, but there have been further signs of the pos- sibility.

Sartre demonstrated his good faith in regard to his concern for universal decency: "we devoted an editorial to the camps which committed me entirely, and several articles. . . . We put the question of the camps and took a position at the very moment French opinion discovered them. We came back to the subject several months later in another editorial and we made our views clear in articles and notes. The existence of these camps can make us indignant, horrify us; it may be that we are obsessed by them; but why should they em- barrass us? Have I ever recoiled when it came to saying what I thought of the communist attitude? And if I am a fellow-traveller, a crypto-communist, an ashamed sympathizer, whence comes it that it is me they hate and not you?"

At this point Nicola Chiaromonte entered the fray with a "Letter from Paris" (Partisan Review, Nov.-Dec. 1952) and a pretty good silencing technique of his own. After citing exactly five and one-half lines of Sartre's nineteen-page (large format) "Letter to Camus," as against whole pages of Camus' "Letter," Chiaromonte dramatically proclaimed: "It remains that Jean-Paul Sartre has not answered Albert Camus."

From here on it was easy coasting to persuade an American public that "Sartre . . . is ready to swallow a totalitarian ideology plus a totalitarian organization" or that "the amateur communist [Sartrel considers it obvious that the Soviet Union is a fundamentally just state."

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This is, to put it mildly, an oversimplification of Sartre's position, as the following excerpts from his article, "Les Communistes et la paix," would alone indicate: "the workers . . . want the Russians in the USSR and the Americans in the USA." Next, Sartre defines the relation between revolutionary forces in the West and Russia,. making it clear that any alliance between the two is historical, i.e. temporary, and not necessary: "the more severe her demands, the more she will tend to appear in the eyes of the popular democracies and the pro- letariats as simply a particular nation . . . the identification of the USSR and the revolutionary cause will never be complete . . . the USSR can disappear." After the Hungarian revolt, he seemed to hope it would disappear.

Further, it is important to note that Sartre is trying in this part of his article - and indeed to a certain extent throughout it - to do justice to the views of a Western revolutionary who is not quite Sartre himself. This is not merely a fence-sitting device, but the ex- pression of a dialectic which is internal as well as external, the 'same that we see projected in the characters of Mathieu vis-a'-vis Brunet in the novel series, Les Chemins de la liberte. Of course, a commit- ment emerges from all this just as from Camus' contradictions-ab- surdity. The important thing is that: 1) Sartre realized it and Camus did not; 2) he had earned the right to choose more than anybody one can easily think of, not excluding Camus; 3) we are in trouble if we allow an intellectual McCarran Act to be enacted, shutting out all but a remote echo of European voices like Sartre's.

For these reasons, I find Chiaromonte's following remarks un- helpful: "having reached the conclusion that 'participation' in the Communist system is the most effective way to pacify his political conscience, it follows that the philosopher of 'anguished freedom' participates in the moral smugness which the system grants its prose- lytes." No Frenchman had ever thought of calling Sartre smug, so far as I know (even Mauriac speaks of his "tormented soul"), and the utter uselessness of the charge becomes apparent when we discover that Camus had already remarked on Jeanson's "curious com- plex in which repentance and smugness mingle;" and Sartre on Camus: "a mixture of somber self-sufficiency and vulnerability."

Well, people took themselves very seriously then, tempers were running high; all that ad hominem stuff is best forgotten. The issues, of course, are still very much with us and undoubtedly Sartre, like the rest of us, regrets that Camus is no longer around to speak his mind. While he was alive, Camus was more richly rewarded than all but a few writers - not always the best - ever were. As much as we admire the man, we know that reputations are apt to suffer in the long run from this sort of early adulation. Sartre, on the other hand, has received far less than his due, particularly from Americans.

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He was handicapped here by not being a football player, nor hand- some, as well as for other obvious reasons. But if we can look past these things, to not a few of us he is still the Frenchman to watch.

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Article Contentsp. 73p. 74p. 75p. 76p. 77

Issue Table of ContentsYale French Studies, No. 30 (1963) pp. 3-120Front Matter [pp. ]Hell and Bastardy [pp. 5-20]The Sartre of Madame de Beauvoir [pp. 21-29]`To Show, to Demonstrate...' [pp. 30-44]From Solitude to Salvation: A Study in Development [pp. 45-55]Abandon Hope, All Ye... [pp. 56-60]Madness in Sartre: Sequestration and the Room [pp. 61-67]Criticism of Anti-Semite and Jew [pp. 68-72]Sartre-Camus Resartus [pp. 73-77]Of Rats and Men: Notes on the Prefaces [pp. 78-85]Sartre and Surrealism [pp. 86-95]A Reader's Hesitations [pp. 96-107][Sartre Bibliography] [pp. 108-119]Back Matter [pp. ]

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