Camus was looking for a way to distinguish himself from Sartre’s long shadow, and Sartre gave him the way when Sartre started to subordinate the individual to a greater social cause. Sartre held that the individual, especially the writer, ought to direct his talent in the service of a great cause of the day. In Sartre’s time, this will come to mean Soviet communism.
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In Camus’s view, Sartre’s demand for commitment placed history above the individual. Unlike nature, history prescribes responsibilities that the individual must meet, or it refers to the vast forces that subordinate the individual. According to Camus, Sartre, although he began with contingency, was untrue to his own starting point because he ended up with history with a capital H. Existentialism was no less guilty than Christianity or Marxism of evading absurdity in ways diagnosed by The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus asserted this in a famous interview in fall 1945. After insisting that he was not a philosopher because he did “not believe sufficiently in reason to believe in a system,” Camus pointed out that existentialism takes two forms, the religious and the atheistic. Atheistic existentialism, including that of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre also ends up with “divinization, but it is simply that of history.” Camus recognized the value of religion and acknowledged history’s importance, but he maintained he did not believe in either “in the absolute sense of the word.”
-- Ronald Aronson, “Camus and Sartre”
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Camus did not believe the individual ought to be subordinated to religions or great causes. As for the artist, he believed that humanity needs “bread of the heart”, beautiful literature and art for its own sake, without respect to religions or social movements. He also said that he preferred to see people committed to their daily lives. Camus keeps the premium on the individual and his freedom.
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