Since his lonely interlude in Paris in 1940, Camus had travelled to and from Algeria a few times. His wife Francine was still there, having become stuck in the country when Allied forces captured it — Albert being near Lyons at the time, receiving treatment for a bout of the tuberculosis from which he suffered throughout life. He had now finished the ‘absurds’ he had been working on three years earlier; these spoke above all of his dislocated experience as a French Algerian, caught between two countries and never fully at home in either. They also reflected his early experience of poverty: the Camus family had never been well off, but their situation had become dire after Camus’ father Lucien died in the first year of the First World War. (Being recruited into an Algerian regiment, he was sent into battle wearing a picturesque colonial uniform of red trousers and a bright blue waistcoat, fatally inappropriate for the grey mud of northern France.) Albert, born on 7 November 1913, was then less than a year old. He grew up in a sordid apartment in Algiers with his brother, his grieving illiterate and deaf mother, and his grandmother, who was both illiterate and violent.
Thus, while the bourgeois young Sartre had his dreams of literary derring-do, and Merleau-Ponty had his happiness at being unconditionally loved, and Beauvoir had her books and sweet-shop windows, Camus grew up into a world of silence and absences. His family had no electricity, no running water, no newspapers, no books, no radio, few visitors at home, and no sense of the wider ‘life-worlds’ of others. He did manage to escape, to a lycée in Algiers and then to a career as a journalist and writer, but his childhood marked him. The very first entry of his first diary, written when he was twenty-two, contains the remark, ‘A certain number of years lived without money are enough to create a whole sensibility.’
(Illustrations Credit 7.1)
Camus went on to spend much of his life in France, but he always felt an outsider there, lost without the brilliant-white Mediterranean sun that had been the one compensation in his early life. The sun became almost a character in his fiction, especially in his first novel, The Stranger. This tells of a French-Algerian called Meursault (his first name is never given), who gets into a confrontation on a beach with a knife-wielding ‘Arab’ — whose name is never given at all. Meursault, who happens to have a friend’s gun, shoots the man almost absent-mindedly while dazzled by the light glancing off the sea and the knife blade. Arrested and put on trial, he confusedly tells the judge that he did it because of the sun. As this shows, Meursault does not put his defence case well, and his lawyer is not much better. The court’s attention is allowed to move away from the actual killing and on to Meursault’s apparent lack of remorse for it, or indeed of an appropriate emotional response to anything at all, including his mother’s recent death. Found guilty, he is sentenced to execution by guillotine: a killing just as cold and inhuman as Meursault’s own crime, although no one points this out to the judge. The novel ends with Meursault in his cell awaiting death. He is afraid, yet finds a perverse consolation as he looks up at the sky and opens himself ‘to the tender indifference of the world’.
It may seem odd that the man Beauvoir described as warm, funny and gushingly emotional should have been able to write so well about a man who is an affectless blank — or who, at least, cannot express emotion in the ways society expects. It is not hard to find possible reasons in his background: his father’s pointless death, his own recurrent life-threatening illness, and his whole family’s silence and disconnection. Yet the novel also captures something of the French wartime experience in general: again there is that seemingly bland surface, under which the abyss lurks.
In the same year as publishing The Stranger, 1942, Camus developed his ideas further in The Myth of Sisyphus. This too was short, though it would have been longer had he not agreed to drop a chapter on Franz Kafka because the censors would not accept material about a Jew. Camus, like Sartre and many others, learned to make compromises. Later, in a preface to the English translation in 1955, he would remark that Sisyphus owed much to his discovery, while working on the book during the French defeat, that ‘even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism’.
The book’s title refers to a story from Homer’s Odyssey. King Sisyphus, having arrogantly defied the gods, is punished by being condemned to roll a boulder endlessly up a hill. Each time it gets near the top, it slips out of his grasp and rolls down, so he has to plod back and begin again. Camus asks: if life is revealed to be as futile as the labour of Sisyphus, how should we respond?
Like Sartre in Nausea, he points out that mostly we don’t see the fundamental problem of life because we don’t stop to think about it. We get up, commute, work, eat, work, commute, sleep. But occasionally a breakdown occurs, a Chandos-like moment in which a beat is skipped and the question of purpose arises. At such moments, we experience ‘weariness tinged with amazement’, as we confront the most basic question of all: why exactly do we go on living?
In a way, this is Camus’ variant on Heidegger’s question of Being. Heidegger thought the questionable nature of existence looms up when a hammer breaks; Camus thought similarly basic collapses in everyday projects allow us to ask the biggest question in life. Also like Heidegger, he thought the answer took the form of a decision rather than a statement: for Camus, we must decide whether to give up or keep going. If we keep going, it must be on the basis of accepting that there is no ultimate meaning to what we do. Camus concludes his book with Sisyphus resuming his endless task while resigning himself to its absurdity. Thus: ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’
The main influence on Camus here was not Heidegger but Kierkegaard, especially in the 1843 essay Fear and Trembling. This too used a story to illuminate the ‘absurd’: Kierkegaard chose the Bible tale in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac rather than the more usual goat or sheep. Rather to God’s surprise, it seems, Abraham travels to the sacrifice site with Isaac, making no complaint. At the last moment, God lets him off, and Abraham and Isaac go home. What astounds Kierkegaard is neither the obedience nor the reprieve, but the way in which Abraham and Isaac seem able to return to the way things were before. They have been forced to depart entirely from the realm of ordinary humanity and fatherly protection, yet somehow Abraham is still confident in his love for his son. For Kierkegaard, the story shows that we must make this sort of impossible leap in order to continue with life after its flaws have been revealed. As he wrote, Abraham ‘resigned everything infinitely, and then took everything back on the strength of the absurd’. This was what Camus thought his modern readers needed to do, but in his case without any involvement of God. Here, too, one can see connections to life in Occupied France. Everything has been compromised, everything lost — yet there it all still seems to be. It is the sense that has gone. How do you live without sense? The answer offered by both Camus and Kierkegaard amounted to something like the motto in the British morale-boosting poster: Keep Calm and Carry On.
Camus’ ‘absurds’ proved lastingly popular, although the third of the trio is less well known today: Caligula, a play recreating Suetonius’ story of that depraved first-century emperor as a case study in freedom and meaninglessness pushed to their limits. The Stranger and Sisyphus remained bestsellers, appealing to readers for generations afterwards — including those grappling with nothing more unbearable than discontentment in suburbia. I was in that category when I first read them, at around the same time I read Sartre’s Nausea, and I took all these books in a similar spirit, although I felt myself to be much more of an ill-at-ease Roquentin than a cool blank Meursault.
What I didn’t realise was that important philosophical differences divided the work of Camus and Sartre. Much as they liked Camus personally, neither Sartre nor Beauvoir accepted his vision of absurdity. For them, life is not absurd, even when viewed on a cosmic scale, and nothing can be gained by saying it is. Life for them is full of real meaning, although that meaning emerges differently for each of us.
; As Sartre argued in his 1943 review of The Stranger, basic phenomenological principles show that experience comes to us already charged with significance. A piano sonata is a melancholy evocation of longing. If I watch a soccer match, I see it as a soccer match, not as a meaningless scene in which a number of people run around taking turns to apply their lower limbs to a spherical object. If the latter is what I’m seeing, then I am not watching some more essential, truer version of soccer; I am failing to watch it properly as soccer at all.
Sartre knew very well that we can lose sight of the sense of things. If I am sufficiently upset at how my team is doing, or undergoing a crisis in my grasp of the world in general, I might stare hopelessly at the players as though they were indeed a group of random people running around. Many such moments occur in Nausea, when Roquentin finds himself flummoxed by a doorknob or a beer glass. But for Sartre, unlike for Camus, such collapses reveal a pathological state: they are failures of intentionality, not glimpses into a greater truth. Sartre therefore wrote in his review of The Stranger that Camus ‘is claiming to render raw experience and yet he is slyly filtering out all the meaningful connections which are also part of the experience’. Camus, he said, was too influenced by David Hume, who ‘announced that all he could find in experience was isolated impressions’. Sartre thinks life only looks pointillist like that when something has gone awry.
For Sartre, the awakened individual is neither Roquentin, fixating on objects in cafés and parks, nor Sisyphus, rolling a stone up the mountainside with the bogus cheerfulness of Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence. It is a person who is engaged in doing something purposeful, in the full confidence that it means something. It is the person who is truly free.
Freedom was the great subject of Sartre’s philosophy, above all — and this is no accident — during the period when France was not free. It is central to almost everything he wrote then: The Flies (the play that was in rehearsal when he met Camus), the Roads of Freedom novels, his many essays and lectures, and above all his masterwork Being and Nothingness, which he developed from his years of note-taking and published in June 1943. It seems extraordinary that a 665-page tome mainly about freedom could come out in the midst of an oppressive regime without raising an eyebrow among the censors, but that was what happened. Perhaps the title put them off closer inspection.
That title was, of course, a nod to Heidegger’s Being and Time, which Being and Nothingness resembles in size and weight. (Its American reviewer William Barrett would describe the published version at nearly 700 pages as ‘a first draft for a good book of 300 pages’.) Still, it is a rich and mostly stimulating work. It combines Sartre’s readings of Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel and Kierkegaard with a wealth of anecdotes and examples, often based on real-life incidents involving Simone de Beauvoir, Olga Kosakiewicz and others. The mood of Paris in wartime haunts it, with mini-scenes set in bars and in cafés, as well as in Parisian squares and gardens, and on the staircases of sleazy hotels. The atmosphere is often one of tension, desire or mistrust between people. Many key incidents could be scenes from a noir or nouvelle vague film.
Being and Nothingess shares something else with Being and Time: it is unfinished. Both works end by dangling the prospect of a second part which will complete the argument of the book. Heidegger promises to demonstrate his ultimate point: that the meaning of Being is Time. Sartre promises to provide a foundation for existentialist ethics. Neither keeps the promise. What we do get in Being and Nothingness is an extended examination of human freedom, precisely worked out on the basis of a simple vision. Sartre argues that freedom terrifies us, yet we cannot escape it, because we are it.
To make this point, he begins by dividing all of being into two realms. One is that of the pour-soi (‘for-itself’), defined only by the fact that it is free. This is us: it is where we find human consciousness. The other realm, that of the en-soi (‘in-itself’), is where we find everything else: rocks, penknives, bullets, cars, tree roots. (Sartre does not say much about other animals, but they too, from sponges to chimpanzees, seem mostly to be in this group.) These entities have no decisions to make: all they have to do is to be themselves.
For Sartre, the in-itself and the for-itself are as opposed as matter and antimatter. Heidegger at least wrote about Dasein as a kind of being, but for Sartre the for-itself is not a being at all. It is a ‘nothingness’, a vacuum-like hole in the world. Gabriel Marcel memorably described Sartre’s nothingness as an ‘air-pocket’ in the midst of being. It is, however, an active and specific nothingness — the sort of nothingness that goes out and plays soccer.
The notion of a specific nothingness sounds odd, but Sartre explains it with a story of Parisian café life. Let’s imagine, he suggests, that I have made an appointment to meet my friend Pierre at a certain café at four o’clock. I arrive fifteen minutes late and look around anxiously. Is Pierre still here? I perceive lots of other things: customers, tables, mirrors and lights, the café’s smoky atmosphere, the sound of rattling crockery and a general murmuring hubbub. But there is no Pierre. Those other things form a field against which one item blares out loud and clear: the Absence of Pierre. One thinks of those Czech women who disappeared from the Flore: their absence is much more eloquent and glaring than their habitual presence ever was.
Sartre also offers a more lightweight example: I look in my wallet and see 1,300 francs inside. That seems positive. But if I expected to find 1,500 francs, what looms up at me from the wallet is the non-being of 200 francs. A nice joke, adapted from an old one told in the Ernst Lubitsch film Ninotchka, illustrates the point. (Apologies to the adaptor, whom I haven’t been able to trace.) Jean-Paul Sartre walks into a café, and the waiter asks what he’d like to order. Sartre replies, ‘I’d like a cup of coffee with sugar, but no cream.’ The waiter goes off, but comes back apologising. ‘I’m sorry, Monsieur Sartre, we are all out of cream. How about with no milk?’ The joke hinges on the notion that the Absence of Cream and the Absence of Milk are two definite negativities, just as Cream and Milk are two definite positivities.
It is peculiar idea — but what Sartre is trying to get at is the structure of Husserlian intentionality, which defines consciousness as only an insubstantial ‘aboutness’. My consciousness is specifically mine, yet it has no real being: it is nothing but its tendency to reach out or point to things. If I look into myself and seem to see a mass of solidified qualities, of personality traits, tendencies, limitations, relics of past hurts and so on, all pinning me down to an identity, I am forgetting that none of these things can define me at all. In a reversal of Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am,’ Sartre argues, in effect, ‘I am nothing, therefore I am free.’
Not surprisingly, this radical freedom makes people nervous. It is difficult enough to think of oneself as free at all, but Sartre goes further by saying that I am literally nothing beyond what I decide to be. To realise the extent of my freedom is to be plunged into what both Heidegger and Kierkegaard called ‘anxiety’ — Angst or, in French, angoisse. This is not a fear of anything in particular, but a pervasive unease about oneself and one’s existence. Sartre borrows Kierkegaard’s image of dizziness: if I look over a cliff and feel vertigo, it tends to take the form of the sickening sensation that I might, compulsively and inexplicably, throw myself off the edge. The more freedom of movement I have, the worse this anxiety becomes.
In theory, if someone tied me down securely near the edge, my vertigo would disappear, for I would know that I could not throw myself off and could therefore relax. If we could try a similar trick with the anxiety of life in general, everything would seem a lot easier. But it is impossible: whatever resolutions I make, they can never tie me down like real ropes can. Sartre gives the example of a gambling addict who has long ago resolved never to yield to the addiction. But if this man finds himself near a casino and feels the pull of temptation, he has to renew his resolution all over again. He cannot just refer back to the original decision. I may choose to follow certain general dire
ctions in my life, but I can’t force myself to stick to them.
To avoid this problem, many of us try to convert our long-term decisions into real-world constraints of some kind. Sartre uses the example of an alarm clock: it goes off, and I roll out of bed as if I had no choice but to obey it, rather than freely considering whether I really want to get up or not. A similar idea lies behind more recent software applications that block you from helplessly watching videos of cats and puppies when you would rather be getting on with work. You can set it either to limit your time on particular sites, or to lock you out of the Internet altogether. With a nod to paradox, the most popular of these programs is called ‘Freedom’.
All these devices work because they allow us to pretend that we are not free. We know very well that we can always reset the alarm clock or disable the software, but we arrange things so that this option does not seem readily available. If we didn’t resort to such tricks, we would have to deal with the whole vast scope of our freedom at every instant, and that would make life extremely difficult. Most of us therefore keep ourselves entangled in all kinds of subtle ways throughout the day. Sartre gives examples: ‘I have an appointment this evening with Pierre. I must not forget to reply to Simon. I do not have the right to conceal the truth any longer from Claude.’ Such phrases imply that we are boxed in, but for Sartre they are ‘projections’ of my choices. They are, in his great vertiginous turn of phrase, ‘so many guard rails against anguish’.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails With Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others Page 17