Sartre's French Contemporaries and Enduring Influences

Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Debeauvoir & Enduring Influences

William L. McBride

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135632175
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Sartre's French Contemporaries and EnduringInfluences
This final volume examines Sartre's best-known philosophical contemporaries in France-Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir-in terms of both their own philosophical insights and their relationship to Sartre's thought. The articles also offer some suggestive connections between Sartre's thought and subsequent developments in European philosophy, notably structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. The comparatively recent nature of much of this scholarship is solid testimony to the enduring influence of Sartrean existentialism.

ALBERT CAMUS

MAN IN REVOLT

THOMAS HANNA

THOMAS HANNA. Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Florida, was previously departmental chairman at Hollins College. He studied philosophy at Texas Christian University and the University of Chicago, where he received his B.A. and Ph.D. For five years he has lived part of the time in Europe where he has been director of a club for refugee students at the University of Paris, supervisor in a Brussels, Belgium, orphanage, student in Mainz, Germany, and director of an overseas study program in France. During the period 1964—65 he was a writer-in-residence at Chapel Hill under the Cooperative Program in the Humanities, sponsored jointly by Duke University and the University of North Carolina. Mr. Hanna's publications include The Thought and Art of Albert Camus (Regnery, 1958); The Bergsonian Heritage (Columbia University Press, 1963); and The Lyrical Existentialists (Atheneum, 1963).

PART ONE

GYMNOSOPHY

Customarily, philosophy and modesty have gone their separate ways. When, as may sometimes happen, a modest philosophy makes its appearance, the trained philosopher is put on his guard; naturally, he is suspicious. His instincts tell him that somehow this is not really philosophy.

This, of course, is understandable. Rather than modesty, it is pretentiousness that most frequently characterizes philosophizing. When the professional philosopher puts pen to paper, his prose becomes garbed with a choice of words, syntax, jargon, and allusions which clearly mark him as a philosopher. The knight, before the battle, shrugs and clanks his way into plumed helmet, mail, breastplate, gauntlets, and pointed shoes—not to be more effective, surely, but because his opponents expect it of him and will be garbed the same way. Normally, the professional philosopher goes to battle in his own regalia, letting his potential opponents know that in terms of plumes, bucklers, and historical insignia he is equipped with the best.

This is clanking good fun; it is also pretension. And often it is wise not to be overawed by the weight of the armor, forgetting the conscious sinew inside. It is the man inside who counts and must not be forgotten. Readers of philosophy must often experience the extreme of this: the suspicion that if they open the visor and peer inside they will find no one there.

This is why a modest philosopher appears suspect, and Albert Camus seems naked and defenseless in the midst of the clanking knights of philosophy. This, also, is why Albert Camus—despite much evidence to the contrary—resolutely maintained that he was an artist and not a philosopher. But the fact that Camus’ graduate studies were in philosophy, that he published two long philosophical essays and numerous short articles on moral and political philosophy, and that his literary production is permeated with philosophical concerns—all this suggests that he was not merely an artist. Camus was a moral and metaphysical thinker of considerable force and excitement, and the modesty of his philosophy should not blind us to this. For all his lack of armor Camus is not less than a philosopher; being an artist too, he becomes a philosopher and something more; it is this peculiar amalgamation of thought and art that characterizes Camus as such a striking thinker and human being. In his works the frail and inconstant groping that is authentic philosophy recreates itself beneath our eyes, and we see philosophizing in its simplicity and nakedness. Alexander the Great in one of his excursions of conquest into India was startled to see men of the Jainist religious sect wandering about, as was their custom, unclothed. He called them “gymnosophists,” the “naked wise men.” Such a one was Camus: the unpretentious and deliberate nakedness of his thought is a sign of his wisdom, not of the lack of it.

Witness: “One goes through life with a few ideas that are one's own. Two or three. As one encounters other men and other realms they are polished and transformed. It takes ten years to have an idea that is really one's own—one about which you can talk. Naturally, this is a little discouraging.”¹ This is Camus, the gymnosophist, speaking, and the final sentence is said with a slight grimace and shrug. But it is also said with a clear irony—with one eye on his own barrenness and another on the pretentious clanking of the knights of philosophy.

From the novel, The Stranger, notice the same attitude, directed this time not toward philosophy but toward Christian theology. The prisoner, Meursault, says of the prison chaplain, “He seemed so certain, didn't he? But not one of his certainties was worth a single strand of a woman's hair.… Of course, it looked like my hands were empty, but I was sure of myself, sure of everything, more sure than he, sure of all I had, but I held on to this truth even as it held on to me. I had been right, I was still right, I would always be right.”²

With “two or three” ideas “it looked like my hands were empty,” but “I was still right”—these words sketch out an attitude toward the Western traditions of philosophy and theology that is, in fact, the attitude of a man in full revolt against the intellectual past. It is a revolt which seems to have empty hands, but which proclaims that the pittance which these rebellious hands hold is, in the balance, far weightier, far truer than the cumulative mass of two millennia of philosophy and theology. Such a claim is patently absurd, but if it be absurd, Camus is not alone in affirming it; for this is the basic affirmation explicitly or implicitly proclaimed throughout existential philosophy.

In his philosophy of revolt Albert Camus has in a simple and lucid manner expressed the basic attitude uniting all the many thinkers who are identified with the movement called “existentialism.” To understand Camus’ modest but fundamental place in this movement, we should view him in three stages. First, we must make clear his attitude toward the Hellenic and Judaic-Christian heritage of Western civilization; second, we must understand the positive meaning of what he calls “revolt,” and third, we should examine the effective critical use which Camus makes of his positive philosophy of revolt.

First, then, let us come to terms with that rebellious attitude which stands before the past with empty hands, and yet is persuaded that these hands are fuller than the massive body of Western civilization.

PART TWO

THE EXISTENTIAL REFLEX

If one understands Nietzsche's pronouncement, “God is dead,” in the way Nietzsche intended it to be understood, one is aware that this is the most important single event in the course of Western culture. But as Nietzsche himself knew, the event “God is dead” is so fundamental and intimate a happening that the pronouncement of it falls on deaf ears; even those who nod in agreement with it do not necessarily realize what it means. The intervening three-quarters of a century have hardly made this observation less true, for, as Camus has noted, even our most militant atheists secretly believe in God without being conscious of it.

In pronouncing the death of God, Nietzsche made a complex judgment which was at once historical and psychological; that is, it had to do with the basic intellectual transformation brought about by modern history, and it also had to do with a specific psychological tendency of Western men. Obviously, Nietzsche is not making an objective historical judgment—as if there once had been a God which has now ceased to exist. Moreover, Nietzsche is not proclaiming atheism in the sense of a rebellion against a theos; neither negation nor denial are implied: if there be no God, then there is nothing against which to rebel. The dramatic statement, “God is dead,” has nothing to do with a god; it has everything to do with men.

The “God” about which Nietzsche is speaking is the presumed absolute power center, wholly or partially transcendent of human history, which in some fashion is the source of, preservation of, and destiny of this world and its history. This “God,” visible or invisible, miraculously intervening or impassively aloof, personally active or impersonally quiescent—this “God,” Christian and Hellenic, does not exist. Indeed, this “God” never existed, but, notwithstanding, men have until recent centuries been capable of believing in this “God” without any serious intellectual blocks. The fact that since the renaissance of human inquiry serious intellectual barriers have arisen is testimony that something has happened to men in their ability to believe. Thus, it is a transformation of man, not God, that Nietzsche points to, and, putting precision in the place of drama in Nietzsche's pronouncement, we should not say that “God is dead,” but rather that “the foundations for belief are dead.” This is what Nietzsche meant. And it is the awareness of this transformation which is at the heart of the existentialist attitude.

So, then, the intellectual event involved in this pronouncement is an old and familiar story. But old as it may be, it is the story of modern history itself in its still-continuing struggle to come to terms with its disillusionment. In the Renaissance it was not hope that the new Pandora's box released into modern history, it was freedom, specifically the freedom to shrug off all previous answers, all authoritarian tradition, and to inquire anew into the nature of men and their world. The result of this new inquiry was men's rediscovery of the world, a world whose origin, nature, and destiny showed itself to be radically different from that world which previous philosophy and theology had depicted. The complex “God” which the Judaic-Christian and Hellenic traditions had posited and Whose transcendent existence was believed attested to by His immanent activities in the world—this “God” was bit by bit divested of the immanent proofs of His existence. His inexplicable miraculous acts were now explicable not as the miracles of God, but as the illusions, conceits, and deceits of men. And the inexplicable functions of the universe were now explicable not as the cosmic actions of a transcendent power, but as the predictable actions of natural laws which were autonomous and had no reference to some supporting transcendent power.

The old and familiar story of modern history is, then, an intellectual discovery: that the evidences supporting belief in a transcendent substance or power have disappeared, and that as these props were gradually removed, the “God” which they were supposed to support was also removed. When, through free inquiry and the development of scientific criticism and research, the intellectual props disappeared, the foundation for belief disappeared. It is in this sense that “God died.”

The obvious result of this intellectual transformation would, one might think, be a generalized atheism, that is, a total lack of belief in any transcendent substances or powers. But this has not been the result, and the fact that it has not is a perplexing question, most of all, perhaps, for the innocent-minded atheists of our century. Clearly, the event of “God's death” is more complex than it appears. As an event which concerns men and not “God,” there is yet something more which this event should reveal about the nature of men. For if Nietzsche was simply pointing out the intellectual consequences of free scientific criticism, then his pronouncement is, indeed, banal.

The points is this: “The foundations for belief are dead,” but men go on believing, even those who are aware that the foundations for belief no longer exist. This is why Nietzsche observes that although God is dead, even those who agree to this do not understand what is said; the news has not yet hit home. This is the complex situation which Nietzsche has delineated: that men cannot exist in terms of what they know. This is the unresolved paradox which inheres in modern history, and it is this inner conflict which Albert Camus, more than any other thinker since Nietzsche, has understood and deftly elaborated against the background of recent history.

As Nietzsche remarks in The Genealogy of Morals, man will even believe in nothingness rather than not believe at all. In Western men, in ourselves, there is a reflex of believing which is so deep-rooted that it goes on functioning even though the intellectual warrant for believing is no longer there. Washed in the wake of modern science, the world is transformed; it is scoured free of its old transcendent ties and stands out as a barren, self-sufficient cosmos. But men, clearly seeing this barren cosmos and assenting to it, cannot help believing in something, no matter what; the reflex is still there, undiminished. The reflex tells man that there must be something “out there” apart from him, a centrum of absolute meaning, to which he can give himself. The extraordinary Jean-Baptiste Clamence puts the matter clearly in Camus’ novel, The Fall:

Ah, dear sir, for someone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of the days is awful. One simply must find himself a master, God no longer being in style. The word, after all, doesn't even make sense any more; no sense to risk shocking somebody. Look. Our moralists— so serious, loving their neighbors and all that—nothing, really, distinguishes them from Christians, unless it's that they don't preach in churches.…

Oh! The little sneaks, actors, hypocrites, so touching in that fashion. Believe me, it's the same with all of them, even when they're setting fire to heaven. Whether they're atheists or churchgoers, Muscovites or Bostonians, all Christians from father to son. But that's just it: there isn't any father any longer, no more rulesl Everyone's free, so you have to get along as best as you can, but since they definitely don't want anything to do with freedom, they want their hand slapped by somebody, they invent frightening rules, they rush out to build funeral pyres to replace the churches.³

The paradox is that men have accepted intellectual freedom and are saturated with it, but they have rejected the final consequence of existential freedom and are frightened of it. They cannot exist in terms of what they know: that there is no absolute value or authority outside them to which they can give themselves. There is no authority, no longer any father, no longer any rules, and the existential consequence of this is to exist lucidly in terms of this lack of given values, to exist freely, supplying one's own authority, one's own rules. There is no longer anyone else to supply them.

But the reflex of belief, the deep-seated posture of dependence on some center of value external to oneself, is too fixed to be disturbed. For the Western individual, freedom does not feel “right,” it does not seem “natural” to him—life cannot be lived in that fashion. And so, “God no longer being in style,” one gives oneself to the same thing under a different name. God goes underground to reemerge in different guise. Intellectually, one knows that God is dead; existentially, one cannot accept this discovery, and the modus vivendi is the modern solution of giving oneself to some other “master” or authority than “God,” thus satisfying the Western existential reflex, while not offending the Western intellectual structure. It should be clear now why Nietzsche could say that God is dead, but that the news has not yet reached the men who actually perpetrated the murder.

Let us pause a moment and recontemplate the image we had of the rebel who stood facing the colossus of Western culture, holding a few ideas in hands that, to his opponents, seemed empty, but which the rebel knows to be fuller than the pretentious facade which stands behind him in the past. This rebel who is in revolt against the now futile pretense of the past is for Camus (as for the “free spirit” of Nietzsche) a man who has not only accepted the intellectual consequences of freedom, but has accepted its existential consequences. To understand Camus’ “rebel” is to understand the kind of hero projected in the writings of all the existentialistic or phenomenological thinkers. Even at second glance this rebel is difficult to understand, one focuses on him with difficulty; but when it becomes clear that the rebel not only intellectualizes his freedom but exists freely, then the focus becomes exact. Then it is understandable how the rebel in the mid-twentieth century can stand in opposition not only to the ostensible atheists, but to most of the rebellious intellectuals of recent history, with the accusation that they are not yet whole or complete, they are not yet fully and integrally men. The frightening freedom which has been discovered in recent centuries is not a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Introduction
• Volume Introduction
• Man and his Acts: Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus
• Albert Camus: Man in Revolt
• The Existential vs. the Absurd: The Aesthetics of Nietzsche and Camus
• Linguistic Analysis and Existentialism
• The Polemic in the Pages of Les Temps Modernes (1952) Concerning Francis Jeanson's Review of Camus’ The Rebel
• French Existentialism: Its Social Philosophies
• Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Human Freedom
• Situation and Temporality
• Merleau-Ponty's Existential Dialectic
• Merleau-Ponty and the Existential Conception of Science
• On Ontology and Politics: A Polemic
• Beauvoir and Sartre: The Philosophical Relationship
• Simone de Beauvoir and Existentialism
• Simone de Beauvoir: Teaching Sartre About Freedom
• Simone de Beauvoir's Autobiography as a Biography of Sartre
• Simone de Beauvoir's Adieux: A Funeral Rite and a Literary Challenge
• Philosophy Becomes Autobiography: The Development of the Self in the Writings of Simone de Beauvoir
• Sartrean Structuralism?
• Sartre and his Successors: Existential Marxism and Postmodernism at our Fin de Siècle
• Foreclosure of the Other: From Sartre to Deleuze
• Levinas, Sartre, and Understanding the Other
• Acknowledgments