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Life is absurd! Who can disagree with that, especially if you are plowing through middle-age? Although this is a simplistic reduction of Camus’s philosophy, it is the charming proposition by which most of us know the man, and it perhaps does fairly capture an essential character of his thought, of man in his existential dilemma. However, Camus was also perhaps more of an artist than a philosopher, in contrast to, say, Sartre. In this excerpt, we see Francis Jeanson taking exception to Camus’s position.
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Jeanson was a penetrating and original thinker. He was probably the first writer to highlight the difference between early Sartre and Camus on absurdity: in his first book on Sartre he said that Sartre thought humans could in some way overcome absurdity, whereas Camus insisted on its centrality to all human experience. In articles published in early 1947, shortly before his book was finished, Jeanson made a telling criticism of Camus, far beyond anything Sartre was to say for many years.
For Jeanson, Camus’s insistence on “maintaining the absurd” did not imply consenting to the facts of experience but meant abandoning philosophical thought itself, renouncing “the mind’s vocation.” To him, Camus subscribed to a form of defeatism that led to “absurdism” by converting the fact of absurdity into a value. “To pose the absurd, even to consent to it, is still to will it.”
-- Ronald Aronson, “Camus and Sartre”
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Sometimes the artist can have it over the philosopher, and this may be one of those times. If Sartre and Jeanson were more modest in what can be achieved in this world by governments, maybe they would not have fallen into Stalin’s orbit.
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Jeanson was a penetrating and original thinker. He was probably the first writer to highlight the difference between early Sartre and Camus on absurdity: in his first book on Sartre he said that Sartre thought humans could in some way overcome absurdity, whereas Camus insisted on its centrality to all human experience. In articles published in early 1947, shortly before his book was finished, Jeanson made a telling criticism of Camus, far beyond anything Sartre was to say for many years.
For Jeanson, Camus’s insistence on “maintaining the absurd” did not imply consenting to the facts of experience but meant abandoning philosophical thought itself, renouncing “the mind’s vocation.” To him, Camus subscribed to a form of defeatism that led to “absurdism” by converting the fact of absurdity into a value. “To pose the absurd, even to consent to it, is still to will it.”
-- Ronald Aronson, “Camus and Sartre”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sometimes the artist can have it over the philosopher, and this may be one of those times. If Sartre and Jeanson were more modest in what can be achieved in this world by governments, maybe they would not have fallen into Stalin’s orbit.
