The Double Refuge 🎲 Almost Existential
Doctors of Revolt
Sartre: Existence Precedes Essence - Camus' Revolt
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Sartre: Existence Precedes Essence
Since the Renaissance, and especially since Darwin and the 19th Century, many religious people felt they had to take the scientific arguments seriously. Many felt they had to relinquish their faith and find whatever meaning they could in a Godless world. Others tried to keep both worlds by accepting the relativity and chaos around them, but in the face of it all making a leap toward faith. This is often referred to as a leap of faith, in which the doubter leaps from relative chaos to absolute order; from the many truths uncovered by science to the one sheltering Truth offered by religion. Double refugees understand this leap, yet they don’t see it in such an anguished light. They don’t see it as a fait accompli, but leap back and forth continuously. Like Camus, they see the duality, yet they are more than happy to muddle it up, to blur the dividing line. For them, redemption slips into chaos, and doubt slips into redemption.
The leap of faith written about by Kierkegaard (1813- 1855) is crucial to the existential notion that existence precedes essence, that is, to the belief that our physical bodies come before our spiritual selves. This was formulated by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) in his 1946 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism:
Qu'est-ce que signifie ici que l'existence précède l'essence? Cela signifie que l'homme existe d'abord, se rencontre, surgit dans le monde, et qu'il se définit après.
What does it mean here that existence precedes essence? This means that man exists to begin with, that he then encounters himself, that he moves into the world, and that he defines himself afterwards. (trans. RYC)
Existentialists believe that physical existence is all we’ve got, both on the small scale (the body) and on the large scale (the body politic and the universe). They believe there’s no essence guiding us — neither a personal spiritual essence (a soul), nor a cosmic omnipotent essence (a God). Despite the alienation, angst, and anomie (modernism's triple A) that this rudderless state of things induces, existentialists believe that we're still free to choose our own paths, to create our our meaning.
While this freedom may be daunting — Sartre says that we're condemned to freedom (Being and Nothingness, 1943) — Sartre believes that it's still better than being one of God's chosen or elect, who he says is a man pinned against the wall by the finger of God (Le Diable et le Bon Dieu / The Devil and the Good Lord, 1951). In his 1943 play Les Mouches (The Flies), Sartre writes that the painful secret of the Gods and kings is that men are free; / Le secret douloureux des Dieux et des rois: c'est que les hommes sont libres. This freedom comes at a high price, however: we forego the comforting belief that our lives are intrinsically meaningful. For Sartre, they simply aren't. Our lives are only what we make of them.
Kierkegaard would of course disagree, arguing instead that we are imprisoned in the sensuality of our existence, and that we find our freedom, as well as our moral centre, in the essence of religion.
Double refugees would take Sartre’s metaphor of being pinned against the wall and extend it. Whenever we feel pinned against the wall of Science’s evolution or against the wall of God’s predestination, we can look around us and see that there are two walls. There are in fact two choices. And where there are two walls there are most often four. We can refuse to see ourselves as subject to the pins and arrows of the lepidopterist in his lab coat or in his priest’s cloak. Instead, we are butterflies, flying from one wall to the next, into the corridor, and out the front door.
We can follow in the wake of Camus, who rejected the label of existentialist, a word which the anxious world wanted to pin onto his shirt. We can take flight, as he does in his Noces à Tipasa, that Algerian town where
the heliotrope [flower] pushes is round white head, and the red geraniums pour their blood onto what were once houses, temples, and public squares. Like those men who great doses of Science brought to God, the years have brought the ruins to the home of their Mother. Finally, today their past leaves them, and nothing distracts them from this profound source which brings them back to the centre of fallen things.
l'héliotrope pousse sa tête ronde et blanche, et les géraniums rouges versent leur sang sur ce qui fut maisons, temples et places publiques. Comme ces hommes que beaucoup de science ramène à Dieu, beaucoup d'années ont ramené les ruines à la maison de leur mère. Aujourd'hui enfin leur passé les quitte, et rien ne les distrait de cette force profonde qui les ramène au centre des choses qui tombent.
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Camus' Revolt
To a man without blinders, there's no finer sight than an intelligence grappling with a reality that transcends it. — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942
While Sartre's thinking seems to have pushed him onto a difficult path — one that led to angst, despair, and extreme politics — the other great French existentialist, Albert Camus (1913-1960) trod a more middle ground. Sartre's logic led him to utopian politics of an authoritarian type, which makes sense in a way: if you can't change the absurd condition of the human self, and if you can't change the absurd contract between the self that yearns for meaning and the world that gives none, you can at least try to change the world in which you live.
The falling out between Sartre and Camus reflects their different views on how to proceed in an absurd universe: Sartre continued to support Stalin's radical attempt to change the world, whereas Camus rejected Stalin's authoritarian program in which the ends were allowed to justify the means. Camus argues that
democracy is, after all, the person who admits that his adversary might be right. He therefore lets his adversary express himself, and thinks about the arguments he's made. When parties or men are so sure they're right that they violently shut the mouths of their adversaries, democracy's over. (Camus à "Combat," Albert Camus, Gallimard 2002, p. 665 — trans. RYC).
Camus' revolt against the absurdity of life is, to my mind at any rate, more subtle than that of Sartre. For while both existentialist realize, like Gilgamesh four thousand years before them, that one legitimate response to an uncaring, absurd universe is to engage with it anyway — in Camus terms, to grapple with the reality that transcends you — Camus doesn't prescribe a particular way that one must grapple. While both authors argue for justice and equality, Camus doesn't prescribe drastic manipulation as a means, nor does he imagine a particular goal that society must advance toward. His grappling is more liberal and democratic, which precludes supporting authoritarian versions of the perfect state.
In his essay, "Existentialisme Entre Nature et Culture: Camus Contre Sartre," Pierre Zima argues that while Sartre saw the cultural or intellectual domination of nature as a necessary response to alienation, absurdity, and chaos, Camus saw nature as a consolation or solution to these things. Zima writes:
Camus defends nature and human nature (human life) against the grand philosophic and political projects which tend to sacrifice the individual to the historical. At the same time, he defends philosophic, political and literary revolt against the type of revolution that invariably finishes by re-establishing the repressive system it pretended to abolish. (trans. RYC)
Zima suggests that Camus' revolt is in a sense more radical, since it doesn't prescribe any sort of pattern or program that might counteract the absurdity that comes from desiring meaning in a universe that doesn't supply it. Zima finishes his essay with a quote from The Rebel (L'Homme Révolté, 1951) in which he aligns Camus' thinking with Nietzsche and the Greeks rather than with Marx and Christianity: "For Marx, nature is what one subjugates to obey history; for Nietzsche, it's what one obeys to subjugate history. It's the difference between the Christian and the Greek." (trans. RYC)
Camus's revolt against the absurdity of our brief and limited existence is also more positive and empowering than that of Sartre. Here's a famous passage from The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), in which Camus likens our struggle to find meaning to the struggles of the Greek king who was condemned by Zeus to push a boulder again and again up a hill:
This universe, now without Master didn't seem to [Sisyphus] sterile or futile. Each grain of the rock, each mineral splendour of that mountain of night, to him alone formed the world. Even the struggle itself toward the summits were sufficient to fill the human heart. It's necessary to imagine that Sisyphus is happy. (trans. RYC)
Matthäus Loder: Sisyphus, Kupferstich; 1. H. 19. Jh., gestochen von Friedrich John, 19th Century (Wikimedia Commons)