Rev Left Radio - Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, & Existentialism (w/ Existential Comics)

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

Existential Comics (aka Corey Mohler) joins Brett to discuss the philosophy, politics, and historical context of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Together they investigate the contradictions between Marxism and Existentialism and discuss the public dispute that ended Camus and Sartre's friendship. Find and Support Existential Comics here: https://www.patreon.com/ExistentialComics Follow Existential Comics on Twitter @ExistentialComs here: https://twitter.com/existentialcoms ------- Outro Song: "Emptiness pt. 2" by Mount Eerie Listen to and support Mount Eerie here: https://pwelverumandsun.bandcamp.com/album/a-crow-looked-at-me As well as here: http://www.pwelverumandsun.com ------------------ Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com Please Rate and Review our show on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/

Capitalism has become so hegemonic that liberals can't even conceive, right, of socialism. And then it's like literally none of them. They were all socialists, except for Heidegger, who was a Nazi. It's the only one. So you look back at them and you're like, I want to admire these people, but what in the world is going on? Like, why did not a single one of them think market capitalism was any good at all? For liberals. Yeah.

and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. Today, our episode is on Sartra and Camus, Existentialism and Marxism. And for this wonderful episode, we have a wonderful guest. Corey Muller, aka Existential Comics, is our guest for this episode. This is an incredible episode. It's sort of mixing two of my loves, politics, and philosophy. We address the political beef between Sartre and Camus. We talk about what existentialism, some of the contradictions between what existentialism stands for

and what Marxism stands for. Overall, I think it's a really interesting, fascinating episode. As always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can always support us on patreon.com for slash Revolutionary Left Radio. We have a book club. Right now, we're reading Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxembourg. We have a bonus monthly question and answer episode with me in an ever-changing cast of guests.

We also have a private Facebook group where we can discuss episodes, talk politics, share memes, and more. So if you want to support the show and get a bunch of cool shit in return, check it out. Now to our discussion on Sartra and Camus featuring Existential Comics. All right, I'm Corey Bolwer, best known as that one dude who makes existential comics and has, for whatever reason, an enormous amount of Twitter followers. Yeah, well, you know, it's really an honor to have you on the show.

Like I said before we started recording, I've been a fan of existential comments since, I'm pretty sure, since day one. So it's really cool to finally put a face to the, to the existential comics and a voice to it and to have this conversation with you. I thought this was sort of a perfect way that our two worlds can kind of cross and collide. There's politics and philosophy overlapping in this discussion. So I'm really excited to have you on. Before we get into Sartre and Camus and all of that, maybe just some upfront questions about existential comics. So why did you start existential comics and how surprised have you been by its longstanding popularity? Well, I guess I basically started it because I kind of wanted to do something creative and

write. And I guess if you look around on the internet, say you wanted to write short stories. If I go and share my short short story online, like nobody's going to fucking read it. Nobody will. But if you draw a few pictures next to it, everybody will give you a chance. I found that to be very true. Like the first comic I did was popular right away. And if I had written it as a short story, which it really was a short story, nobody would have read it. Right. So that's basically the reason. And then of course it transformed more and more into jokes. Yeah. And the other one is, like Zach Weiner, the guy who does SMBC, he was asked this question, and he said, well, I looked around at the other web comics that were, like, super popular, and I just thought to myself, like,

shit, I could do that, you know? Right. That's basically the same for me. I'm like, I could do this. That's basically it. As far as being surprised by his popularity, I thought the ceiling was much, much lower than it was. I mean, one thing that's interesting is that people are willing to read, like, comics about philosophical figures that they don't know about, which is why the ceiling is much higher than you would

think. I'm writing like about Karnap or something. You're like, who's going to read this? Because he knows who this is, but people will read it. And I think you also do a pretty cool thing or you have in the past where you sort of explain the joke at the end, which is like a little 101 philosophy lesson for people that, you know, use maybe the comic as a doorway into philosophy, but then start over time, get a good understanding of who these figures are, what the debates are, etc. And I absolutely converge with you about not only like looking at podcasts and being a fan of podcasts before this and being, hey, I can do that, but also this idea that, you know, I started off writing blogs that nobody read. And I think it's also just the time that we live in. People's

attention spans are shorter. And I was like, the much better way to get my ideas out instead of writing yet another blog post or yet another essay that maybe five people will read is do it into a format that people can find far more accessible and easy to access. And so I think both you and I have found ways into doing that. You know, one thing I've always wondered about, and certainly on Twitter, as I followed you, I can tell that you're politically of the left. But do you identify politically? If so, how do you identify politically? And do you consider yourself to be, as your name suggest, an existentialist? Well, as far as politically, I'm sort of in the position where I built up my audience, like, unlike, like, you guys or a lot of other people who are popular on

Twitter or elsewhere on the left, I built up my audience not from politics. So the main goal of mine is sort of propaganda, right? Because I can reach people with very left-wing messages who don't necessarily already, have already been exposed to those ideas. Right. So I'm not going to, I don't find it particularly useful to, like, come out and say, I'm a Marxist-Leninist or something like that and this is the correct politics. Like, it's just not my role. My role is sort of to introduce these ideas to people who haven't thought of them. So I don't really get into like what my real ideas are or anything like that politically. I just don't think it's very useful. As far as being an existentialist, an existentialist is sort of like a hipster. The real existentialists don't identify

as existentialists and reject the label. So I'll just say, no, I'm not an existentialist. Let you figure out that for yourself. Sure. And yeah, as for the, the political thing, like, you know, I have my own tendency, but I also kind of do this pan-leftist approach to politics where I have on people all over the left spectrum to learn from one another. And while that gets criticized by some, I think it also allows a more welcoming environment for people to step into and engage with these ideas. I do wonder, though, because you did start off as an explicitly sort of philosophy platform, have you had any, like, pushback from people who got into you through philosophy, but then see your leftism and hate it or

whatever. Clearly you guys have not read my Facebook page. No, I have not. They fucking hate me. I have so many libertarians following me, just trashing it every day. I don't know why they still follow this page. Oh yeah. My audience is, well, on Twitter, it's a little different, I guess. I don't know why. On Facebook, they hate me. I mean, they just, just garbage every day getting posted on my wall. I would delete it, but it's like too much work. I mean, there's just no way. But yes, like I said, My audience is, I have a lot of libertarians and obviously a lot of liberals who either just hate socialism or, you know, think it's misguided or whatever you, whatever, all along the spectrum. Yeah, that's kind of what I expected. Yeah, that whole milieu, there's lots of libertarians

and liberals represented in the people who are just generally interested in philosophy. Yeah, I almost wanted to make a, I had one idea to make like a bot that would search for the word, a hundred million you know you guys probably know why absolutely hundred million dead and scrape the photos of all the people you know with the idea that it would be 99% they would kind of all look the same photo you know like young white men yes but it didn't come together also because i couldn't distinguish the people who were making fun of them from the people who were doing it authentically sure sure yeah well that's a that's hilarious and i feel for you that's a problem we don't have for being an explicitly left-wing podcast i mean we get

pushback, but people don't come in from different points of view and attack us like that, but I was pretty sure that you had to deal with that. But, you know, let's just go ahead and dive in. We have a lot to cover here. I like to introduce terms for people that might not have, you know, virtually any understanding of what existentialism. So sort of what is existentialism? Yeah, so I guess it's sort of used in three ways, the word. The first is sort of the pop culture sense where it's like, what is the meaning of life. That's sort of what I guess in pop culture people think of it as, which is kind of weird because that question hardly ever comes up for any of them. The second would just be like a broad movement, I guess in the late 18th, 19th, 20th century of sort of a philosophy about how we should

live our lives or a philosophy about our lives that's kind of divorced from ethics. So you have like the ancient Greek philosophers would say, how should we live our life? And that question was tied up into how to be a moral person. And the existentialists say, look, we don't know either they're explicitly atheist. We don't know if there's a god. We don't really follow any moral system. How should we live our lives anyway? That's sort of a broad way to think of it. And there's people like Kyrgyzegard is maybe the early one and Nietzsche. And of course, Jean-Belsart, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and then like Dostoyeski, maybe too, and a bunch of other people. That's sort of the broad one. But then if you kind of look at the actual figures,

this is like a lot of philosophical traditions. Like if you ask, well, if you, If you ask Camus, for example, are you an existentialist? He would say, no, no, of course not, because he thinks of existentialism as what Jean-Belsart is doing. They all disagree with each other, of course, a lot. And so the third way to define existentialism, if I'm using the word in this podcast, this is what I'm going to probably mean, which is the philosophy of Jean-Bal-Sart who coined the term. And you mentioned Nietzsche, you mentioned Kierkegaard. We've done an episode on Nietzsche.

Obviously, this is very shallow, but Nietzsche talks about, you know, God being being dead and wonders about, you know, human societies after the death of God. Kierkegaard talks about anxiety and despair. He even has that wonderful quote, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. And those are taken on board of the existentialist project, sort of assume that there's no God and then wrestles with these ideas of what it means to truly be free or authentic, what anxiety, despair is, etc. Would you also say, though, that not to get too far afield, but that it is ultimately rooted or Sartre was deeply inspired by phenomenology, which kind of takes as its starting point the subjective experiential conscious awareness of the individual

as sort of a starting point just to start doing philosophy and Sartre kind of takes that on board. Would you agree with that? Yeah, that's basically right. Probably Husserol, who is the guy who started phenomenology, is one of the most important philosophers for Sarts project. Like in being a nothingness, basically the three people he's mentioning are Hegel, Husserol, and Heidegger. That's where he's coming out of philosophically. It's based around how we experience the world and how we experience freedom. And we'll get into some of the contradictions between that and Marxism later on, but just sort of continuing to flesh out this foundation of what existentialism is.

I think it was Plato who originally said the phrase, Essence precedes existence, and Sartre flipped that on its head. And if you can boil existentialism in the Sartrean sense down to one phrase, it's that reverse. existence precedes essence. Can you talk a little bit about what exactly Sartra is meaning when he says that sentence? He's talking about for human beings specifically. Plato was talking about for everything, but for human beings, what he essentially means is that you exist first, right? You are thrown into the world, to use a Heidegarian term, right? You're thrown into the world.

You find yourself existing. And then after the fact, you have to decide what is the essence of your existence. In other words, what kind of being am I? Am I a moral being? Am I pursuing an aesthetic life? Or am I some other kind of being at all? What am I? And for Sart, this is the very foundation of his philosophy is deciding this question of what we will be and what we will do with our lives, essentially. Yeah, and it's like, you know, you create yourself, you're born, and then you go about creating your own self, your own being. You can do so consciously or you can sort of act in bad faith or have other people dictate what you are to you

and that's where freedom comes in. But, you know, it does remind me of this Mark's quote. We're not going to get too deep into the differences here right now, but Mark's had this quote that you would think on the face might echo this idea, but actually contradicts it in interesting ways. Marks famously said, it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. Here, Marx is saying that your ideas, your personality, your morality,

these things are ultimately determined by the sort of material conditions that you're born into. And while it might sound like he's saying something similar to Sartra just by taking those two quotes decontextualized, he's actually saying something very different because Sartra is saying there's almost this radical openness with who you could be. And Marx is saying, you know, your being who you think you are is actually pretty constrained by the material conditions and the historical situation that you're living in. Yeah, that's right. They're quite radically different in some ways.

And of course, Marks, you know, he allows for some freedom within that socially situated context. But for SART, the idea of radical freedom is that you can sort of in some ways totally break free. You can choose to reject your culture, your social situation, and really everything. He says even if you're in prison, you still have the freedom to interpret your imprisonment, right? Right. Very far away from Marx, his conception of freedom, where it's much more open. and Marx thinks it's much more culturally determined, I guess you would say. Yep, so listeners can keep that in mind, and we'll definitely come back to that a little later.

But let's just go ahead and talk about Sartre and Camus, since they're the centerpieces of this discussion. Who are Sartre and Camus, not as philosophers yet, but just as people? Where did they come from? What did they do for a living? You know, how did they meet one another? Yeah, so I guess Sart is sort of the prototypical bourgeois elite French philosopher. He went to the elite schools in Paris. he was the top of his class

you know he was sort of learning the most exciting cutting edge philosophy of the time which was phenomenology his whole path has sort of become a great philosopher of France and he was pretty well off as well not super rich or anything but definitely in the upper class

Camus sort of was born in Algeria was more poor he went to the university of in Algeria University of Algeria I think it's called he studied Thomas Aquinas and the classics the Greek philosophers so he wasn't he was more like a, I guess like a normal student, you know, like you could think of them just as someone, like maybe in America, it would be like someone at Harvard philosophy studying under, I don't know, under Rawls or something, you know, compared to someone who's like maybe on the West Coast

just learning, getting a graduate in philosophy. Start was sort of this great intellectual, born in the right circumstances, went to the right school, Camus was sort of off in Algeria, playing soccer, doing sports, dating girls. And then they met during the occupation. So when Germany came into France, Sartt was drafted into the army. Anyone who's seen kind of what Sart looks like and knows a little about him. You're not really expecting him to shoot any Nazis. So what they do with these intellectuals is they put them like in charge of the equipment.

So his job was like to monitor the weather balloons to like tell the pilots if they could fly or something like that. And he was captured and became prisoner of war for a year. And then went back to Paris and started writing enormous. during that period and met Camus. So Sart had this magazine called La Temps Madernet, Madernet, I guess. I don't know. I'm terrible pronouncing French. Same, same.

Sort of through that, he gave Camus his break in literature. And took Camus under his wing, made him popular. Sart was already very popular. I had published novels. And Camus was the editor of the Combat Magazine or Combat Newspaper, which was like a resistance newspaper that they both wrote articles for. So that sort of was the foundation of their friendship. Right.

And just to continue to flesh that out a little bit, you know, Sartre was conventionally a pretty ugly guy. He's only five feet tall. And he was sort of very self-conscious of his of his looks. And when it comes later talking about his philosophy and how he viewed the self and how he, you know, his famous quote, hell as other people, that I think that does come into play sort of this neuroticism about his own looks. Camus, on the other hand, look like this Humphrey Bogart figure, this really pretty man. And like he said, he was into sports. Camus grew up working class in Algeria, which was a French colony at the time, but he was of European descent. I think the term, and I think you and I are both going to fuck up French pronunciations this entire

episode, but I think it was like Pied noir or something, which meant like somebody living in a colony of European descent. So he kind of got a firsthand experience of poverty and living in this colonial place while Sartre, as you said, was more bourgeois upbringing. But Sartre did lose his father at a young age and his stepfather that came in soon thereafter was somebody that Sartre hated. And yeah, they both joined the resistance, although in different capacities, and that's where they came out. And they both sort of came out of the resistance after the occupation by the Nazis ended. They really came out and that sort of launched them into, you know, the public eye and they became famous there. And as Americans, we don't really fully have an analogy to what it means

to have a public intellectual in the way that Sartre and Camus and Simone de Beau were. Really, like they were French celebrities and also intellectuals philosophers. In the U.S., there's sort of this anti-intellectual current that makes it very difficult for an intellectual to become also a celebrity, but they very much were. Yeah, so like when Sart died, thousands and thousands of people came for his funeral procession. You can look up pictures online. It's pretty wild. Yeah. Yeah, but like probably the closest we have is Noam Chomsky, right? That's like the closest we can get as Americans. You wouldn't really call him a celebrity, but a lot of people know who he is. And he's sort of like them to where he's kind of an outsider to maybe mainstream leftist groups. I don't know. He's

similar in some ways, actually. But when Noam Chomsky dies, who's it going to be, right? Nobody. Exactly. Nobody. And that's as close as you can get, though. But in France, they have a culture of having celebrity intellectuals. Derry Dahl was very popular and famous household name. We just don't have that sort of thing. Yeah, Lacan as well. I imagine ABC News having an entire documentary on Lacan, for example, it's unthinkable to us as Americans, but it's a different, different culture. So let's just go ahead and kind of put their philosophies on the table, at least like a 101 summary of both Sartre and Camus philosophies, drawing out their most prominent ideas and works and sort of explaining what made them famous, not just as people, but as thinkers. So let's kind of

start with Sartra. Which works are his most celebrated and what were his biggest contributions to philosophy and, you know, to existentialism as the creator of it? Yeah, I think for both of them, their contributions to philosophy as an academic discipline are actually pretty small. Like, you're not going to get a lot of people in grad schools reading, being in nothingness, or doing work on it these days. And they didn't really change sort of traditional philosophical questions much, especially, I mean, Camus not at all. He doesn't even consider himself a philosopher.

But even Sart, not really an important, I would say, philosopher as a philosopher. But certainly existentialism has influenced the world. widely, especially at the time. So he had this philosophy of freedom. Like we said, it starts with existence precedes essence. And that was a very, he was sort of like the right philosopher for the right time. After World War II ended, there was this atmosphere of we can recreate society. We can recreate ourselves. We're all free. We can just do anything we want, right? And that was a political atmosphere and a personal atmosphere. And Sart's message really swept across the world, and he became a huge celebrity, not just in France, but eventually in America as well,

for people who this message really resonated with. Yeah, his major book is being in nothingness, which is sort of his philosophical justification of it all, but he's probably best known for his novels. And if people are looking to get into this or to read a little bit, existentialism is a humanism is the one to read. It's like a speech he gives. And like most of these sort of French philosophers, their books are very dense, but if you can force them to give a talk, they feel embarrassed to use all their technical language and they actually explain it pretty well. Yeah. So if people don't know anything about SART and they want to read one thing, existentialism is a humanism is definitely the thing to read.

Yeah. And, you know, Nausea was the novel that was very well known for Nausea in it. He puts into novel form some of his ideas, this idea of no pre-experiential concept of things, of sort of draining the mind of preconceived ideas of what things are, having this visceral engagement with nature and with objects that, you know, escape this conceptual idea. So he talks about a tree and then he talks about it, seeing it from this perspective, which I think, you know, is pretty interesting and it's probably worth reading. He also has his interesting ideas of the self.

We mentioned a little bit earlier that there's no core self. There's no unchanging core to who you are, but yourself is what you create. It's a sort of a responsibility that you have to create. yourself through your actions. And then I mentioned earlier his sort of self-consciousness. And there's this really interesting way that he talks about this. He has this example where there's this voyeur peering through the keyhole of a hotel door and watching, you know, two people engage in sexual conduct. And as he's in that moment, there's nobody else in this dark hall. He's looking through the people. And he's just this concentrated subject looking at this

other thing. And then a door opens behind him and somebody sees him doing this. And immediately, there's a self-consciousness that comes into play this switching of the mental capacity to not only be, you're not just focusing on a thing anymore but you suddenly become aware of yourself as an object and somebody else's consciousness. Such tells this story about someone, I think it's in a hotel corridor

with their eye to a keyhole completely absorbed in what's going on in the bedroom behind and then they hear a step on the stairs behind them and they suddenly become aware that they are a person looking at a bedroom scene behind a closed door, whereas before they were just looking at the scene. And he's instantly transformed

from being something that's just concentrated on trying to hear, to being a human performing a shameful act. And he feels shame. And the very existence of shame proves that we are always under the eyes of other people.

even feel shame. This means we know that other people are looking at us, thinking about us. We start thinking of ourselves as though we were an object and so we construct an idea of ourselves as an item in someone else's world and that's the point at which something like a self comes into being. The implication of this is that there is no way that there is no way that people can in the end be comfortable with each other. It is always going to be impossible to think of yourself simultaneously as someone who is going around the world,

acting in it and being an agent, and also to think of yourself as being an object that other people are observing. So there is always a conflict, and there's no such thing as human relations that don't involve this kind of conflict. And this is why at the end of Wiclo, hell is other people, because we can't get away from this terrible gaze of other people on us all the time.

Again, we're not going to be able to address all of his philosophical contributions, but this is just sort of a 101 bird's-eye view of things. But let's kind of go over to Camus now. So same question. What are Camus' most celebrated works and what were his biggest contributions to, maybe not philosophy proper, but to just intellectual ideas and whatnot at the time. Yeah, so Camus arrived on the scene with The Stranger, which was an enormously popular novel. And actually, Jean-Belsart wrote a review of it initially in his literary magazine,

where he was just like, I don't, I have no clue what is going on in this novel. So if anybody reads The Stranger and doesn't have a clue at the end of it, don't worry. You're right there with Jean-Bulsar, one of the greatest intellectuals of the time. But then Camus published the myth of Sisyphus, which is sort of a companion piece where he explains it. And Sart went back and rewrote his review and said, no, this is one of the greatest, most important novels. And actually, I encourage everyone to read that review because it's really a great explanation of The Stranger. But Camus starts with a very different starting point, whereas Sart starts with the premise that we're all free, and it's an exploration about freedom. Camus starts with the question in the myth of Sisyphus.

why should we not kill ourselves, right? This is the beginning point of his philosophy. What reason do we have for not just killing ourselves? In his opinion, the world is deterministic, made of matter. Actually, he denies freedom. Well, certainly, this is a big difference between him and Sart. He doesn't even think we're free at all, right? Most likely he doesn't.

And so he says, look, it's just Adams bouncing around. Why not just kill ourselves? Any philosophy that doesn't start with that question, he says, can't justify anything further, right? If we should all just kill ourselves immediately, why do any other philosophy? So he thinks, as a starting point to all kind of human activity, we have to answer this question first. He basically stretches it out as a kind of like a metaphysical rebellion, where you're kind of rebelling against this absurd, pointless world, and this contradiction between like the stories

we tell ourselves, like even basic stories like I got up this morning, I went to work, I was annoyed, he basically thinks these stories are kind of fictional, like they're kind of invented after the fact as narratives. The real reality, like the brute reality, is kind of incomprehensible to us, and it's just a bunch of coincidental things happening. So he says we should rebel against this sort of absurd state and just be happy anyway, or live a great life, you know, like a romantic life anyway, despite the absurdity of it all. That's sort of his central philosophical thesis. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the notion of absurdism is sort of poorly understood. I think some people just might have a colloquial understanding of absurdism out

of Camus is just like life is absurd. But I think it's actually a little bit more detailed than that. Camus asserts that the absurdity of life, right? Absurdism arises from the tension between like our inherent human need and search for meaning plus the fact that meaning doesn't exist in the universe. So on one hand, you have this inborn need to find meaning. And on the other hand, you have this empirical reality that it doesn't exist. And that clash creates. the absurd. And he talks about life as a Sisyphian task of pushing this boulder up the hill. When you get to the top, the boulder rolls back down again. And then he says, instead of killing yourself in the face of this absurdity, you must imagine Sisyphus happy. You must imagine Sisyphus smiling.

And then he has this philosophy of sort of engaging with life after you've come to terms with its absurdity, with its inherent meaninglessness. And he loves sunlight. He loves beaches. He loves drinking coffee and having sex and being with friends and he's this is this is how to live a life after you've confronted the absurdity of it and you're not living in this diluted world where the world has inherent meaning not only is that interesting still for us today just as human beings but especially in the context of world war two after the absolute disasters of the European war and you know France and much of Europe laying in complete ruins and the slaughter of countless human beings for little to no reason

And, you know, this philosophy is especially appealing to people coming out of that situation, I think. Right. Well, sort of like Camus' philosophy could be a way of dealing or coping with that situation. Everything is absurd and we're going to continue our lives anyway. And Sart's philosophy was appealing sort of for a different reason after the war, which is we're going to use our freedom to build something new. And, yeah, I think that might go on to sort of inform the political beef they had. So before they're split, Sartre Camus and Simone de Beauvoir were close friends. Can you talk a bit about their actual friendship over the years, what they would all do together, and just how close they were as human beings?

Yeah, they were basically best of friends. I mean, really throughout the war and then after the war, they, you know, would go to cafes, talk about literature, stay up until four or five in the morning, drinking, going to dance clubs, to jazz halls. They love jazz because of its freedom, by the way. The start was very attracted to it. because it had you could improvise you know they would lure young women into their apartment with huge blocks of camember cheese that was another thing so during this is i got this from uh there's a

book called uh at the existentialist cafe that sort of uh summarizes all their lives as well as heidegger and everybody and apparently sart one of his plans during the war you know like uh rations were kind of you know you didn't always have the best food available i guess during the occupation and he had these huge blocks of this cheese and he thought if he put it in his apartment maybe women would come smell the cheese and then they'd get talking and one thing would lead to another you know that was one of his schemes i guess i did do a comic on that like uh it's not recorded if it worked or not lost to history whether this plan worked but kammu i don't think needed the schemes sorry needed the scheme like you said he was an ugly guy he needed a little more uh help

maybe a block of cheese as a little prop can help you out yeah absolutely and um you know sartram and Beauvoir had a very close, intimate, and sexual relationship, but they had also an open relationship. They both would see each other and see other people. I think at one point, even Camus and Beauvoir proposition Camus and Camus, I think, turned it down. And Sartre wasn't angry that Bovar had proposition Camus, but rather that Camus had turned it down. So it was this really interesting relationship where they're all really good friends, and they had a broader circle of people much bigger than these three who would all intellectualize and philosophize together, but also get drunk and engage in, you know, sexual activity together. And it was just sort of this really

happening hodgepodge of really cool, intelligent people having a lot of fun together and really enjoying life. And they're very accessible in Paris. They would, you know, go to the same coffee shops and people knew where all these intellectuals lived. And so there's very much a public engagement with these intellectuals. They were just out and about among the regular people. They were very, very close. I think Camus, and we might get into it a little bit later during the split, but, you know, Camus was very sensitive. Camus was very much valuing of loyalty and friendship, and Camus had a very hard time separating philosophical criticism from personal criticism.

And on the other hand, Sartre and Beauvoir also had this developed over time, but this idea that if you had a disagreement about fundamental things with a friend about politics, that at some point it would strain the friendship such that it couldn't go on any further. And we'll get in later to how they broke up as friends, and it was kind of tragic in its own way, but to sort of keep that in mind, there's very interesting personalities at play here. I know you touched on it a little bit in some previous answers, but let's go a little deeper into it. How exactly did World War II influence the development of existentialism? If people are interested in this, in their lives after this, or actually this whole episode

in general, Simone Dubois's novel, The Mandarin's, is sort of a fictionalized account of this entire thing. The split is covered and sort of their post-war life. The title refers to like this intellectual group in China that kind of provided, I guess, the grounding for society, and they wanted to be that in France. So they wanted to kind of, they had this illusion that the intellectuals were going to take over after the war and shepherd them into a new, better society. But essentially, so before the war, they were very much concerned with this question of freedom. They were concerned about phenomenology, sort of working on regular philosophical problems. And then I guess you can say just after the war, once you go through.

through an experience like that where France not only was occupied but of course the Nazi camps and everything, you just can't go back to that kind of philosophy. You can't say, look, we're all just free in the naive sense and we can all just live

our lives and be creatively doing whatever we want to do. Once you see the Nazis, there has to be something else, right? Your freedom has to be able to cope with the world. You have to exist in the world. Like Simone Duboisr says, we all have our projects that we want to creatively pursue. But everyone's project depends on everyone else's

project. Everyone has to get essentially society's permission to carry out their personal freedom. So we're all very embedded. Everyone's freedom is embedded together. And that's what they realized that they had sort of missed before the war. Like Sart, in being a nothingness, like he's giving an example of phenomenology where you go to a cafe and you're looking for your friend Pierre, right, and he's late or he's not there, he's missing. So you're looking around the cafe and you see like a chair. And the way that you experience the chair in your mind is not just of a chair, but of not Pierre. Right? So you're looking at the chair and the way we normally look at a chair, like someone who's sort of a maybe like an analytic philosopher to say,

what is a chair, well, it's four legs. Well, the phenomenologists weren't interested in what a chair physically is, but how it appears to our mind. And Sart says how it appears to our mind is, not Pierre. That's the only thing you're really concerned about. Right. And this was largely what he wrote about. But after the Nazis, you just can't be as concerned about not Pierre. You know what I mean? Like, it's just not as important. There's this great Adorno quote where he says, the primary goal of all politics must be for Auschwitz to not happen. So when you ask a lot of people like what politics is, they might say, oh, well, you want to develop freedom or you want to develop personal liberty or material conditions. Adorno says, no, no, no, you want Auschwitz to not happen,

and then you want to do that stuff. So Sergeant Beauvoir, we're sort of have it coming to the same idea. Like existentialism, if it's going to be a real philosophy for life, has to be able to cope with war. It has to be able to cope with togetherness, with community, all these other things, with morality. He tried to write books on morality his entire life, and it's very difficult to do in existentialism, because existentialism leads it open to reject morality. That's sort of built into it. Simone Du Bois wrote the ethics of ambiguity after the war, and that's pretty good, as pretty as good as you can get. I think it's a great book, actually, but they had to cope with these questions after the war. They just had to, because what they had seen, again, you can't just be

saying my philosophy is to just create yourself and do whatever you want. It's just not good enough. Absolutely. And, you know, that's the sort of individualism, as you're mentioning in existentialism, had to confront this mass carnage and this notion of collective liberation, occupation. And so you really see, with Sartre especially, these two periods of his life, you know, before the war and after the war. And as you said, this is somebody who was literally in a Nazi prison camp. I should say, though, it was a pretty mild prison camp. Yeah, it wasn't a concentration camp. He's not in a concentration camp. He was reading and writing. and drinking coffee and wrote books. He actually pretty much lived how he did outside the war. And he said, oh, actually, I got a lot of writing done, you know? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and he said he was, like, actually more free in the camp than he was outside of it for various reasons.

And so, yeah, it's very important to note that this is not a concentration camp. But a lot of his intellectual friends had lived through, like Martin Buber was in a real concentration camp. So he knew people that went through very grim things. Yeah, and it deeply affected him. And so I think this is going to sort of mark a transition in this conversation that sort of reflects a transition in their lives, which is this transition over into serious politics. So, you know, Sartre picked up the mantle of Marxism and we'll talk about how this developed over time. But I think a good way to start this conversation or this segment is to talk about the contradictions between the two philosophies. So what are the contradictions between existentialism and Marxism?

How did Sartre try to solve these contradictions? and ultimately, did he succeed in your opinion? So I think, like we've already talked about a little bit, like touched on, Sart was coming out of this different kind of branch of philosophy. So like I said, the main philosophers he was quoting are Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, who are the German idealist. So he's working within this idealist tradition. And this already puts him at odds with Marxism.

Marxism is a materialist philosophy that is sort of positioning itself as against Hegel, Hegel's idealism and it talks about material conditions determining things and there's no spirit involved at all. And Sart's philosophy is one of freedom which comes from that spiritual realm

not in a religious sense but in like a free consciousness right? So that already is a cleavage and in a certain sense it can't be reconciled because it's just it's like they're working in different fields almost so like the way I would say is like

you can look at Marx and Hegel and say what how do Marx and Hegel disagree and you can say Marx disagrees with Hegel in that Hegel thinks ideas are kind of the driving engine of history and Marx thinks material conditions are the driving engine of history right so their disagreement is between materialism and idealism itself but then if you look at the later idealist philosophers and you were to ask a question like how does Marx disagree with Husseril right who's like kind of later on in the idealist project where this is kind of like after they've already split. Right. You can't even answer the

question. Exactly. Because Marx is talking about, again, like the material conditions of life, driving history, communism, all this stuff. Husserl is talking about how a candle appears to our mind. You know what I mean? They're working on totally different projects.

So in a certain sense, Sart is kind of too far down the materialist line to even come back to Marx. So from a, that's sort of from a philosophical perspective. They can't, you can't really merge these two philosophical projects. But from a political perspective, like we said, existentialism is a very individualistic philosophy. It's all about individual freedom. How can we be free? And you can talk about how can we be free within a society, within a community, existing with others. But again,

it's about an individual being free in those contexts. Whereas Marxism is completely the opposite. you know, the Marxists don't want to talk about individuals at all. They say, this is how a society is going to work. This is how material conditions are going to evolve, stuff like that. This is why most of the communists hated existentialism and they hated Sart. Because they're like, this is all about, it's bourgeois philosophy. Yep. Because it's all about the individual. And that is the pinnacle of bourgeois philosophy.

And Sart had to deal with this criticism his entire life. And I would say, like, this is the best example of this, right? Simone Veix, if you guys know her, she was a student at the same time as Beauvoir and Sart. And this is when they were very young. This is like they're 20 years old, just doing philosophy. And Simone Veix says they're in a debate at the school. She says, the only thing that mattered was a revolution that would feed all of the human race, right? Simone de Beauvoir says, our goal is not to make men happy, but to find a reason for their existence, the goal of existentialism. Simone Vei sort of looks her up and down and says it's easy to see you've never been hungry right and then that was the end of their friendship they never they never spoke again essentially

Simone vay hated them and they loved her by the way if you don't know anything about Simone vei Camus called her the spirit of the age and they admired her her her entire life and then by the way she died of starvation damn we don't really know why but one of the stories is that she starved herself to death on purpose out of solidarity with the victims of the war. Damn. She actually, ironically, lived a much more existential life. Like, if you were to write a novel about a existential hero, Simone Veix would be the person. She joined the Spanish army, you know, to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

She went to factories to work with the workers. When she heard about the Chinese famine, she collapsed on the ground in tears. And Simone de Beauvoir was like, I wish I could be like her, that my heart could be all the way around the world for these people. but I just don't, I don't care enough. So Simone Bay was actually, she hated existentialism, but she was actually a much better existentialist than her life.

Whereas Simone de Vars and Sart, they basically just wrote novels their entire life. You know what I mean? Right. Yeah. And, you know, like talking about existentialism and trying to align it with any sort of radical politic, sort of decontextualized from the actual events that they were in,

it's almost like existentialism could be more conducive to perhaps maybe like individualist forms of anarchism, like egoism, or even, and post-modernism broadly, then it is conducive with Marxism. And Camus never really felt any tension there, because I don't think Camus was ever. I mean, a Marxist, he had communist sympathies.

He's in the resistance. But for him, it was very easy to pick one of these broad sides. Whereas Sartre and Bouvar were really committed to Marxism, and it really put a lot of trouble for them. How do you combine these two things? And as you say, they got a lot of shit from actual Marxists, the French Communist Party, etc., even though they were very sympathetic to that.

project and wanted to be a part of it. And as time went on, certainly Sartre was involved in a lot of communist or left-wing activity in various forms. We'll get into that later. I just want to read a couple paragraphs here from George Novak, who's an American Marxist, and he tackled this issue of what the differences were between existentialism and Marxism and why they're irreconcilable. And I'm just going to read this. And I think it's really important because it really lays down in concrete terms, the contrast and the tension here. George Novak, the Marxist, says, existentialism and Marxism take irreconcilable views on the nature of the relationship between the objective and subjective sides of human life, on the status, the interconnection, and the relative importance of the public and

private worlds. Marxism says that nature is prior to and independent of humanity. Human existence as a product and part of nature is necessarily dependent upon it. Existentialism holds that the objective and subjective components of being do not exist apart from each other and that in fact the subject makes the world what it is. The contrast between the idealistic, subjectivity of the existentialist thinkers and the materialist objectivity of Marxism can be seen in the following assertion of Heidegger in an introduction of metaphysics, where Heidegger says, quote, it is in words and language that things first come into being and are, end quote. In accord with the conception that other aspects of reality acquire existence only to the extent

that they enter human experience, Heidegger makes not simply the meaning, but the very existence of things emanate from our verbal expression of them. To a materialist, such human functions, as speech and thought reflect the traits of things, but do not create them. The external world exists regardless of our relations with it and apart from the uses we make of its elements. The whole of existentialism revolves around the absolute primacy of the conscious subject over everything objective, whether it be physical or social. The truth and values of existence are to be sought exclusively within the experiences of the individual in our self-discovery and self-creation of what we authentically are. Marxism takes the reverse position. It gives

existential priority as any consistent materialism must to nature over society and to society over any single person within it. Nature, society, and the individual coexist in the closest reciprocal relationship, which is characterized by the action of human beings and changing the world. In the process of subduing objective reality for their own ends, they change themselves. The subjective comes out of the objective, is in constant interaction and unbreakable communion with it, and is ultimately controlled by it. So I think that's a really nice breakdown of this subjective, objective, individual and collective tension between Marxism and existentialism. Yeah, that's really good. And again, Sart was never willing to abandon the philosophical roots

of Husserl and Heidegger in how he understood the human subject. So he was never, ever going to be reconciled philosophically with Marxism. Again, he was sort of a committed Marxist politically at various times. And ironically, like you said, Camus has no tension in his philosophy. with Marxism. He could have easily adopted Marxism. In fact, he sort of was a materialist in a sense, his philosophy. But he didn't as much. Sart was much more motivated to be

a Marxist. Camus was sort of wishy-washy there. But, yeah, Sart spent years and years and years trying to reconcile them. He could even really reconcile existentialism with morality, much less Marxism. And in a search for a method, this is in 1953, he wrote this sort of

as an attempt. He quotes Marx here. The reign of freedom does not begin in fact until the time when the work imposed by necessity and external finality shall cease. So we can't be free. We can't really be free until the material dialectic is sort of at an end almost, right? Right. And Sart basically agrees with this and says the philosophy of the future, like the real philosophy, the real human philosophy, will be taking place at this time when human needs are no longer in this struggle, right? And he says, at this point, we can't even conceive

of what that philosophy of freedom would look like, which is a weird thing for him to say if he wrote an entire 800-page book on a philosophy of freedom. So in a way, he sort of reconciles Marxism and existentialism by abandoning existentialism. Again, these existentialists are kind of severe people. They go all...

If you're going to go, you're going to go all the way. You know what I mean? So he knows there's no way to really reconcile them. So he says maybe we have to be committed Marxists and at some point in the future we'll get back to this existentialism. But it has to be after the revolution, essentially. Yeah, that's incredibly fascinating. And towards the end of his life, he was asked, you know,

looking back on his life, if he made any errors, what were they? And he says, I'm paraphrasing. But like in every instance where I did make an error, it was because I wasn't radical enough. And so that sort of gets a... That's the existential mindset. Yeah, it is. But it's also this interesting, like, revolutionary

leftist mindset as well. Like this is this radical approach to politics and he goes on to to be this really interesting defender of like political terrorism and social violence, which we'll get into here in a second. So it's just a very interesting part of who Sartre was. But moving on, if Sartre did not succeed in solving the contradictions between the two philosophies and therefore couldn't maybe, or you said he abandoned existentialism, but maybe he wasn't also a proper Marxist, what was he politically in your opinion? And for that matter, what was Camus politically. So SART held many different political opinions, I guess, throughout his life. He oscillated between extremes, always staying within a radical leftist. I mean, he never was going to the right

or supported capitalism at all. Definitely. But he definitely did not hold a consistent opinion throughout his life. But at the time of these events, like right after the war, him and Beauvoir and Camus founded what was the called the RDR. It's sort of like a political organization. It's like the Revolutionary Democratic Assembly in English, which was sort of an alternative to the Communist Party in France, which was the biggest left-wing party, I guess you would say, where they wanted to maybe not quite be like Lenin, but be kind of democratic. I'm not totally sure all their stances, but basically some kind of more democratic, open Leninist society. They wanted to not take power. They had no illusions about that, but they wanted to form a space for leftists to be an

Opposition Party to the Communist Party of France. It had 4,000 members of the most, so it wasn't a huge organization. It was kind of tied to this newspaper and that Camus was running and Sart's own literary magazine. But I would say through all the ups and downs and the turns, he sort of had three principles that I think he stuck by, three sort of rules of how to do politics, right? And the first one was probably the most important. It's called The Eyes of the Least Favored.

And this was his belief that, and this is in a very radical way, even epistemically, if there are two groups, you not only take the side of the more oppressed group, but you believe the more oppressed group, right? An obvious one would be at the time, Algeria, they were still a colony of France, and they were going to have this war of independence. And he's like, look, how do we know if France should hold on to this? maybe the Algerian revolutionaries don't all have the best politics, too. Who should we believe? And he's like, well, it's easy. You believe the Algerians because we're the oppressors. I think an easy way to understand this like today, in a sort of modern one, is like you'll have this question that people will get asked, like, does political correctness go too far?

And say you do a survey and 50% of people say yes, 50% say no. But then you drill down in the survey, right? And it's like all white dudes saying political correctness has gone too far. Yeah. And this is reality, of course. Definitely. And then all the black women say, no, I don't really think so. I think we do need political correctness.

Sart would look at it and say, look, you don't need to be a philosopher or you don't need to do any further analysis. You just look at what the people who are affected by the oppression believe, and you believe them. It's pretty obvious, right? So that was his first principle. The second one is no organizing for an oppressed group without their participation. And this is an important one for Sart because, like, as an elite intellectual, there's

always a temptation to be very paternalistic and tell the workers, the uneducated workers, or maybe the Algerians, just explain to them what's the best for them because you're the intellectual you know, right? Holding back is natural. All people in that position's natural tendency. And that's actually an important one because it's important to keep in mind in this that the Communist Party of France is the largest organization of French proletariat. So he doesn't want to dictate to them what to do. He doesn't want to dictate to the workers, I know what's best. Believe me. And the third one is one that he got from Lenin, which is the first enemy is at home, right? So fight your own battles. Don't be telling people around the world what to do. Don't be worried about what's going on in China. We're the French.

Let's try to make our politics good first. And that's, of course, going to be also very important for this debate, because this is about, of course, a debate about what's going on in Russia. And as far as Camus, his politics also, like I said, he was part of this RDR. later on he sort of shifted right I guess you might say and was kind of wishy-washy or but right now his politics are aligned with France at the beginning of this story right after the war right yeah and so there's lots of interesting stuff here and like we could do an entire episode on just Camus and Sartre's political evolutions over time and the things they said about about politics you know whereas Sartre was very ready always to come to the defense of

political terrorism and social violence in the name of a greater good Camus was very very, because I think he did take this, the subjective viewpoint a lot, like the, the position of people, even on the other side, whereas Sartre and Beauvoir would be like, you know, fuck them. Camus still had this sentimentality about him that disallowed him from totally disregarding people's subjective experience, I think is fair to say. And like when they're talking about political violence and Algeria, when there was uprisings against, you know, French colonialism, and some of the anti-colonial fighters were engaging in terrorism. You know, Camus had this famous line when they were like talking about blowing up tramways and stuff, he had this line where he's like,

my mother who still lives there might be on one of those tramways. If I have to choose between justice and my mother, I choose my mother. And this is something that, you know, for Sartre and Bavar would be pretty disgusting way to look at things. And actually what's important about the second part of that quote is that he says, not only do I choose my mother, but I still want to choose the Algerian. He wanted to choose both. Right, right. And for Sartre, that was an impossibility. You can't choose your mother and still say, well, I want them to be free. I want the Algerians to be free. Exactly. Yeah. And on the other side, Sartre, you know, this is Sartre is somebody that met with Che. He met with Fidel. He went to China in 1955 after, after Mao and the revolution was

successful there with Beauvoir. And he also was friends or met up with France Phenon, the famous post-colonial writer who wrote The Wretched of the Earth. And Sartre actually wrote the foreword for Retched of the Earth, which is super interesting. And speaking of, you mentioned earlier, the Existcialist Cafe, which I have right here. I just want to read this quick passage because I think it touches on Sartre's relationship with Fanon and then also this idea of political violence. So it goes, Beauvoir recalled Fanon saying in Rome, we have claims on you. Just the sort of thing that they love to hear.

That burning intensity and the willingness to make demands and to assign guilt, if necessary, was what had attracted Beauvoir to landsmen. Now it thrilled Sartre to. Perhaps it took them back to their war years, a time when everything mattered. Sartre certainly embraced Fanon's militant arguments, which in this book included the notion that anti-imperial revolution must inevitably be violent, not just because violence was effective, though that was one reason, but because it helped the colonize to shake off the paralysis of oppression and forge a new shared identity. Without glorifying violence, Fanon considered it essential to political change. He had little sympathy for Gandhi's ideas of nonviolent resistance as a source of power. In his contribution, Sartre endorsed Fanon's view so enthusiastically that he had little sympathy for Gandhi's ideas of nonviolent resistance as a source of power.

he outdid the original, shifting the emphasis so as to praise violence for its own sake. Sartre seemed to see the violence of the oppressed as a Nietzschean act of self-creation. Like Phonan, he also contrasted it with the hidden brutality of colonialism. And, as in Black Orpheus, he invited his readers, presumed white, to imagine the gaze of the oppressed turned against them, stripping away their bourgeois hypocrisy and revealing them as monsters of greed and self-interest. And I think that speaks, as you were saying earlier, to this notion that taking the eyes of the least favored was an approach that Sartre pretty much held onto for his entire life,

even as his formal politics and political allegiances shifted. Yeah, I think that's basically right, yeah. All right. Well, let's go ahead and talk about the riff in their friendship, because this is all sort of leading up to why they stopped being friends. And again, we can't overstate how close at certain times in their lives Beauvoir, Sartra, and Camus were. So let's talk about that riff. What led up to it?

How did it develop over time? And what role did politics play in it? Yeah, so essentially the main catalyst for the Rift was, news coming to France that in Soviet Russia there were these huge slave camps how they were being referred to

in this report was basically 10 million they basically said the Soviets have 10 million people who are basically slaves performing labor and in horrible conditions like this report came into France and in the Mandarins

which is the novel the fictional novel by Simone de Beauvoir about this She sort of frames it in the ideal possible way, where Camus is the editor of Combat Newspaper, essentially. All the names are changed. And it's up to him to decide whether to publish the story or not. And Camus just immediately sees no possible way to not publish the story. Why wouldn't you, after all?

Before this time, what was going on in Russia was not very well known in Europe. So they had this great revolution that was very important. admired by everyone in the left, but nobody really knew what was happening. Like, there were these wars in between. Information was basically cut off. But after World War II, people started going over there, and more information started to come back. Not all of it, of course, super accurate.

We don't have to worry about the accuracy of these claims, I think, in this, right? But the information they had was that there were 10 million slaves, which is one in 20 citizens, essentially, were a slave. And Camus says, I'm going to publish this. and criticize Russia. And Sart says, I don't really think we should. And his reasoning was,

all this is going to do is serve as anti-communist propaganda. And all we're really going to be doing is be giving a gift to the right, the French right, to criticize the French Communist Party. That's going to be the effect of us coming out,

swinging hard against Stalin, essentially. Because you can just see the right. They do this now still, you know? Communism is just people in gulags. The French, the editor of Sart's Literary magazine was the first person to use the word gulag in French. But from Sart's point of view, he's looking at the effect only of the action. Like in the

novel, Camus says, like indignantly, how can you do this? If these camps were anywhere else, if they were in America, in China, if they were here in France, if they were in Algeria, you would immediately publish because it's a great story, right? And you would condemn them. How can you do this morally? How can you not condemn these camps? And Sartz just kind of looks at him almost like he's a child like I have no concern whatsoever for morality I only have a concern for what's the effect of this action going to be

and this is right at the heart of existentialism you can't make any bad faith decisions you can't make any bad faith choices so if you're going to be free understand why you're making the decision and for Sart that was understanding the effect you want the decision to have and the effect he wanted

was to make sure that the Communist Party in France was strong because there was a very real threat at this time that Charles de Gaulle was going to win the election and dissolved democracy. They were worried about that like a dictatorship. They needed the French Communist Party to be strong and he's like I'm not going to participate in anti-communist propaganda even if I disagree with these camps. It just doesn't matter because I'm interested in the effect. Camus as his philosophy

sort of dictates he rebels against the world. He's like I'm I can't be the kind of person who stays silent while 10 million people suffer. Right? I can't be the kind of person. Sart doesn't care what kind of person he's going to be. He cares about the choice because his philosophy is based on freedom. So he breaks with Camus. At this point, combat newspaper breaks with the RDR like the political organization and they don't speak to each other basically. This is basically the main breaking point. Were they at all suspicious of those claims? Like did Sartre have any like did he ever rely on empirical like well hold on this actually might not even be true? So even if you actually read what they wrote about them as kind of of funny because they don't sound that different. Like, even Camus, like, they, so the main thing that Sart was worried about was, they were both worried how

true it was. So, there was no information at the time of how many of the 10 million were legitimate prisoners, political prisoners, counter-revolutionaries. There was no, the conditions of the camp were reported to be very bad, but they weren't totally sure. You know, it was just an initial report, but they trusted the report.

Okay. But they, they were very worried about the truth. But internally, what Sart was really worried about wasn't whether it was true or not, but whether it was necessary or not. So Simone de Beauvoir goes into his mindset a lot in the novel, and she says, Sart agonized over whether or not the Soviet economy needed the camps. So in other words, whether a Soviet-style communism needed a slave, a reserve slave labor to even function.

And his mindset was it didn't, right? the slave camps even if they're true as reported exactly are contingent they can be gotten rid of and communism Soviet-style communism can survive without them that was Sart's opinion so therefore

the best chance is to support the communists right the communists meaning again when I use the word communist it's sort of like existentialist I'm using it to refer to the Communist Party in France so like the Marxist-Leninists to support the

communists and because they're the only hope against capitalist hegemony and we have to support them and then try to get rid of the camps. If he had believed that the slave camps were necessary, he would have taken Camus's side, but that's the only reason he would have taken Camus side. Yeah. And so this led also to Camus writing a book, a book long essay basically called The Rebel. And in it, it was basically an attack on communist, Marxist ideology, sort of denouncing both the problems of capitalism and communism. I mean, Camus at one point even went so far as to help form a group called the Group for International Liaisons, which denounce both ideologies of the USSR and the USA.

And this book, The Rebel, was taken by Sartra and his sort of comrades at that time as an attack on them personally. And instead of Sartra writing the response to Camus, as I think everybody expected, It was sort of a sly way to not only dis Camus a little bit because this was very personal at this point, but also to hand off the responsibility of attacking Camus to one of his younger followers, Jensen. So Jensen wrote a response to Camus of the rebel and just sort of lambasted Camus' misunderstanding of Hagle and Marxism view of history and basically said he was naive and his idea of revolt was vague and sort of a child. childish thing. And then Camus responded and then Sartre finally got into it and responded. And

then Camus wrote up a whole response to Sartre, but actually never sent it. And in the response, the final response that was published, which was Sartre's to Camus, he threw in these lines, right? So as he was attacking his philosophy, he's also saying stuff like, like, you know, me and your friendship was so wonderful. I'm really going to miss it. So he was really taking this personally. And Camus, as I said earlier, was extremely sensitive. And even though he wrote up the response, he decided that publishing it would just be to no avail. And he, in private letters, he talked about how the responses to his book, The Rebel, really, like, hurt him personally and how he filled them with doubt and self-doubt about his

abilities and that he couldn't imagine why Sartre, who he considered a friend, would attack him like this. And they both sort of took it personally, but Camus very much so. Here is Jensen's response to Camus, the Rebel. Camus blames the Stalinists for being totally captive of history. But they're no more so than he is. If Camus' revolt wishes to be deliberately static, it can only concern Camus himself. The rebel is an aborted great book. Camus' response.

Monsieur le director, I am beginning to be a little tired of seeing myself and other veteran militants who never walked away from the struggles of their times, receiving lessons in efficacy from critics who never could. placed anything more than their armchair in the tide of history. Sartra's response, Friendship can also become totalitarian. A mixture of somber conceit and vulnerability has always discouraged anyone from telling you whole truths. The result is that you have become the victim of bleak immigration.

Camus to his wife Francine in private letters. It seems I am to pay dearly for this poor book. today I'm full of doubt about it and full of doubt about myself but I have nothing to say if people put me personally on trial any defense becomes a self-justification and what is striking is this explosion of long repressed loathing all this goes to prove that these people have never been my friends and that was the that was the as you said the end of their relationship

but in our talking back and forth about this episode you said that this dispute has actually been pretty misrepresented in your opinion. Can you talk about how that dispute between Camus and Sartre has been misrepresented? Well, first of all, it's been misrepresented as sort of like I alluded to, a lot of it is a philosophical dispute between the two, whereas Sart must make a choice. And Camus, due to his philosophy, doesn't necessarily have to. But it's also misrepresented sort of politically. Like I think, especially sort of by liberals, they look at it, they look back and be like, here we have the Soviet Union, which as we all know, was horrible.

And you have Camus, the wise, who was correct and gallantly stood up to kind of the Soviet gulags. And you had Sart who had a bad take and loved Stalin. And today, look how stupid Sart looks, because, as we all know, the Soviet Union was bad, right? That's sort of the line that you often get. First of all, I'd say it's wrong in a lot of ways. Camus was not this correct leftist who knew that the Soviet. Union was bad or whatever and knew that we had to be like anarcho syndicalist or something he was always sympathetic to that but he was he didn't have that strong of a point of view in general

and for one it's kind of funny to say Camus was correct because you know he was against authoritarian communism one of the ways is funny is like we don't live in an anarchist syndicist utopia we're not living in one Camus would have been correct if this had all turned out great right right we're not living in Camus vision of society if anything SART was right. The Soviet Union was the only way to stop capitalism, right? Capitalism totally over through the world. So in that sense, I don't see that Camus really has much of an opinion at all, aside from being personally unable to not condemn the camps. But that's not really a political position, right? It's just his own, it's more an inward position. And then the other thing is that

Sart was not a fan of Stalin, right? He didn't love the Soviet Union. He didn't love the Soviet Union. never liked Stalin. He hated the communists. The communist hated him. His entire philosophy is based around the freedom of the individual. So what do you think he's going to think of like top-down bureaucratic socialism, right? He very directly had an antagonistic relationship with the communists his entire life, basically. I mean, he worked with them sometimes. He just hated it all. And so this idea that it was like, Sart loved the Soviet Union, Camus hated the Soviet Union, that's not really where the dispute lies. Again, To reiterate, it was weak on the gulags for one reason, which is that he saw the French Communist Party was the largest organization of the French proletariat, and it had to win in France.

So that means his propaganda efforts should be against the right wing. It's like any, he said like anyone positioning themselves to the left of the PCF, thus the French Communist Party, found themselves moving to the right. Over and over, he saw these people like left communists or whatever they were, or anarchists, whatever they wanted to tell themselves. If they were saying, I'm left of the Communist Party, he said all their time and energy was serving the right, because all they did was attack the communists and feed into this anti-communist propaganda. Or as Simone de Beauvoir puts it in the novel, in the dispute with Camus, she says you can't become an extra communist without becoming an anti-communist. And this is in the conditions at the time, they're like, you just can't, if you're going to go out attacking the Communist Party, you're not working in the interest of the proletariat. might call yourself left communist or left of them, but really

you're working against their interests. That's why Sartre did what he did, not because he liked Stalin, right? And the reason Camus did what he did wasn't because he hated the Communist Party, or he was against the French proletariat. So they actually had no dispute. They both wanted the French proletariat

to succeed. Neither of them liked the camps. If the camps existed like it was reported, both of them hated that. So they agreed about everything except for what to do. The political difference between them is you can't look back and say, Camus had the correct politics, Sart had these bad politics, whatever you think of the Soviet Union, you know, obviously most Americans don't like the Soviet Union. So if you're an anti-Soviet American, like liberal or even whatever kind of leftists, you can't look back and say, Sart was wrong for supporting the Soviet Union. Camus was right for being against it because that wasn't what they were debating about.

They were debating about what manner of action to take, even though they agreed about all the facts. Yeah, and that's an incredibly important correction to this revisionist history. And, you know, in some ways, I think liberals pick up Camus and run with them in the same way they do with, like, Orwell. I mean, you'll even see George Orwell quoted by right-wingers that are just sort of trying to decontextualize him and make them fit their own political project. That exactly fits in to Sart's point, right? Orwell, we're trying to position himself to the left of the Communist Party, right? And he has been one of the most successful right-wing propaganda pieces. of the last century.

Yep. Everybody learns animal farm in school for the sole purpose of attacking communism. Exactly right. So this is exactly, if you look back at history and you say, who was right? It's like Jean-Paul Sartre was right. He was much more right than Camus. Camus doesn't even have a position on this aside from, I don't like slaves. That's not being right.

Nobody likes slaves. Nobody says, I wish there were more slaves under communism. Right. That's not a political position. It's nothing. Camus, again, it makes sense for him because he's rebelling against it. He says, I can't be the kind of person that supports this. I'm going to rebel against this absurd condition of the only hope of the proletariat, also having

these horrible things supposedly going on. But John Paul Sartre was pretty much dead on in what would happen if they spent all their energy attacking the Communist Party, which was that they would serve the interests of the anti-communists. Exactly right. And I'm incredibly sympathetic with Sartre on that argument 100%. But, you know, in the preparation for this conversation, you also said that the philosophical projects of each of them very much informs the debate and all that dispute wasn't merely about politics at all. Can you talk about that? I know you've touched on it a little bit, but can you talk

about their different philosophical projects broadly from like a bird's eye view and why their political disagreements were ultimately manifestations of those deeper projects? Right. I've sort of already touched on it a little bit. Like I said, they agreed about everything. They were politically the same at this point in time. They were both members of this RDR, this sort of democratic socialist movement. They didn't really disagree about any of the facts. Both of them wanted to investigate more about the camps, see what was true. Like I said, Camus's response was like, well, look, we have to look into it more. But if things are the way they're reported, you know, he was pretty guarded about it. So what was their disagreement? Well, starting from the point of freedom, like I said,

at the beginning of the episode, if that's the center of your philosophical thought, then the choice is the center of your philosophical action. So he was only interested in what the effects of the choice would have. Camus was only interested starting from this project of rebelling against a deeply ingrained, almost metaphysical absurdity of existence. How can we live a good life, right? And for Camus, living a good life is not hiding, you know, like almost lying about whether you know, about these slave camps or engaging in apologetics of stuff that you really hate yourself for

a political end. You know what I mean? Like kind of being sleazy about it. So Camus wants to rebel against both sides and just sort of have his cake and eat it too. The same way he did in Algeria, right? He says, I'm against colonialism, but I'm for my mother. I'm against the camps, but I'm for communism. And there was no problem for Camus. When you read the myth of Sisyphus, this is perfect. It makes perfect sense. He's going to be happy anyway. And so then he goes on and sleeps with actresses, right? And for Sart, that's like almost a textbook example of living in bad faith and performing actions where the reason for the action doesn't align with the action itself. So he would say, Camus, you're just not operating in good faith. You're not operating in

authentic existential freedom, which of course Camus doesn't care about at all. But Sart would say, you have to know what you're choosing. And Sartre knew exactly what he was doing. He says, I will bite the bullet. I will bite any bullet my entire life. Because I have to live in this existential freedom where you have to know what you're doing with a directed willfulness towards your decisions.

You can't kind of hide from yourself, which is what, in his opinion, Camus was doing. Hiding from himself saying, I want communism to succeed, but I don't like the camps, but I don't like these. I'll just do this anyway. Sart says no. You can't hide from yourself. You have to make a real decision and you have to accept fully the responsibility of what that decision is. Absolutely. And, you know, that led to them

literally like never talking again. Sartre and Bavar dropped many friends over time over politics. And this was one of probably the one that might have hurt Sartre the most because when Camus ultimately did die in 1960, Sartre wrote an obituary that said that Camus, or at least he said in an interview, that Camus was, quote, my last good friend, and it's worth noting how they both died. Camus died in a car crash with a train ticket in his pocket, right? It's almost this absurd death. He was about to take this train, and at the last minute, I think, like his agent or something, said, let's just jump in the car and we'll go together.

And so last minute, even with the train ticket already bought, he jumped in the car. That car ended up crashing, and this is in 1960. At the age of 46, Camus dies. So even if there was later in life a wish to sort of reconcile their differences, it was never to be. Sartre lived another 20 years, died in 1980 at the age of 74. As you mentioned, 50,000 people at his funeral procession, millions watching on TV. In those between years, between 60 and 80, you know, May 68, which we've done an episode on occurred. And Sartre was very, and Beauvoir were very involved in 68. There was a flirtation with Maoism in the 70s that Sartre had.

But until his dying day, Sartre was a political radical and reading some of the interviews, with him about politics throughout the 70s leading up to his death, is this really fascinating. And I really admire his commitment to the cause. He never gave up on it in the way that I think you sort of alluded that Camus can sort of walk away from this stuff. And Sartre never saw that as a possibility or something that he would even want. And I think in that sense, it's really worth admiring Sartre and Bavar's dedication to the cause. Yeah, for sure. He was definitely more strong in that sense. And also, you did maybe a little bit leave out that's relevant. SART did turn against the Soviet Union in 52 when they put down the Hungarian revolution

or invaded Hungary, however you want to phrase it. Was that 56 or 52? 56. Okay, yeah. Yeah. So that's another way where people often will look back and be like, Sart was wrong because eventually he even considered himself wrong because he turned against the Soviet Union. It's like, no, no, no, no.

The point wasn't that he was for the Soviet Union. It said he was against doing anti-communist propaganda. So he didn't change his mind necessarily about that, even though he changed his mind about the Soviet Union. Right. And, you know, it's kind of funny. too, because that invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union in 56 is weirdly where the term tankie comes from, because that was a defining moment for the international left, that the people

that were still supporting the Soviet Union at that time, that was a sort of decisive moment where a lot of people, including Sartra, turned their back on the Soviet Union when they went in and put down those protests. So it's kind of funny that that term tankie literally comes from that historical moment, and Sartra did the thing that made him, you know, in lack of a better term, not a tankie. He turned away from the Soviet Union. at that moment. Whether you agree or not, it's just interesting historical facts. And Sart was also right. As the European left turned away from the Soviet Union, the communist parties in Europe collapsed. 56 was also the last year that the French Communist Party had

not the majority, but they had the most share of the French vote at 29%. And then after 1956, because of this, because a lot of the leftists turned against the Soviet Union, it just all declined. So he was sort of right about that too. And I think that's also kind of where he got into or he started being interested in the in the Chinese project. Thank you so much for coming on. It's been an incredibly interesting conversation. I'm really honored to be able to finally talk to you after being a fan of your work for years. Before we let you go, what are some recommendations for listeners who want to learn more about anything we've discussed today? And where can listeners find you in your work online? Yeah, well, I'm at Existcial Comics and on Twitter.

If you want to know about the Existentialists in general, the Existatentialist Cafe at the Exist Cafe is definitely a good work that goes through all their lives. When she talks about communism, if you're a leftist, you might get a little, cringe a little bit. As I was. It's kind of funny, because she's obviously super liberal. It's funny, like, all of these people, none of them were capitalists. And I think it's a hard, people have a hard time going back and seeing why this was, because sort of the idea, capitalism has become so hegemonic that liberals can't even conceive, right, of socialism.

Yep. And then it's like literally none of them. They were all socialists, except for Heidegger, who was a Nazi, right? It's the only one. So you look back at them and you're like, I want to admire these people, but what in the world is going on? Like, why did not a single one of them think market capitalism was any good at all? Poor liberals. Yeah.

But they just, yeah. But it's a great job sort of covering all that in a way that's accessible. The novel, the mandarins, like I said, really gets into detail about especially what Simone de Vois and Sart were thinking internally as they go through this period. of trying to become political and grappling with these questions, those would probably be the best two sources, I would say. Yeah, and I would encourage people to, you know, check out The Stranger, read Nausea by Sartre, and read The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir.

And yeah, as you were saying with the Existatialist Cafe, there was lots of moments where, you know, it just makes me cringe. But it's sort of this, you know, she comes, Sarah Bakewell, very good writer, good philosopher, but she comes from this very liberal perspective that you can clearly see there's no actual deep understanding of political philosophy. anything she's a philosopher interested in philosophy and she just sort of takes on

board the the you know ambient anti-communism of our time and so it's it's annoying but like anything critically engaged yeah critically engaged with everything and you'll find a lot of interesting stuff in here all right well Corey thank you so much for coming on keep up the great work with existential comics and maybe we can collaborate in the future again all right yeah I had a good time too thanks for having me on is a dream of self-negation to see the world without us how it churns and blossoms

without anyone looking on. It's why I've gone on It's why I've gone on and on and why I've climbed up alone But actual negation When your person is gone And the bedroom door yawns There is nothing to learn.

Her absence is a scream. Her absence is a scream. Saying nothing. Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about. Back before I knew my way around these hospitals, I would like to forget and go back into imagining that snow shining permanently alone could save you. say something to me true and comforting. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.