Camus versus Sartre The Unresolved Conflict RONALD ARONSON By what incredible foresight did the most significant intellectual quarrel of the twentieth century anticipate the major issue of the twenty-first? When Camus and Sartre parted ways in 1952, the main question dividing them was political violence—specifically, that of communism. And as they continued to jibe at cach other during the next decade, especially during the war in Algeria, one of the major issues between them became terrorism. The 1957 and 1964 Nobel Laureates were divided sharply over which violence most urgently demanded to be addressed and attacked—the humiliations and oppressions, often masked, that Sartre described as systematically built into daily life under capitalism and colonialism, or the brutal and abstract calculus of murder seen by Camus as built into some of the movements that claimed to liberate people from capitalist and colonial oppression Given Camus’ preoccupation with today’s most publicized issue, it is no acci- dent that one of his recently published books is a collection of his writings on terrorism.! Nor is it surprising that Camus is the intellectual guiding light of Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, that American liberal’s declaration of war on Islamist fundamentalism? And given his support for revolutionary violence, and even terrorism, it is equally appropriate that one of Sartre’s most recently translated books contains his essays on colonialism and anti-colonial struggles.* Or that finally, the story of the Camus-Sartre conflict is being told, not only by myseltin Cantus and Sartre: The Story of @ Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended IA but also by David A. Sprintzen’ and Adrian van den Hoven in Sartre and Camus: A Historie Confi which at long last presents the documents of the break, and by Ronald Santoni in his discussion of Sartre's ambiguous attitude toward violence, which, among other things, manages to demonstrate that the Sartre-Camus conflict remains, fifty years later, philosophically unresolved. And Sartre Studies International, Volume 11, Issucs 1 & 2, 2005, 302-310Camus versus Sartre | 303 I would argue—against today’s conventional wisdom so persistently asserted by ‘Tony Judt—it is also historically unresolved, despite today’s American fashion of retrospectively condemning Sartre and venerating Camus.” heir debate remains unresolved because, first, if the issue of violence is to be discussed fully and honestly today, and if the worldwide politics of violence is to be grasped, all forms of violence deserve to be placed under the microscope, the systemic kinds singled out for attack by Sartre no less than those anti-systemic on ribed by Camus. The intentional violence of terrorism demands to be interrogated alongside the violences inscribed in routine social practices and the violence of wars against terrorism. I am not asserting that these are all therefore the same, or that distinctions of kind and degree are obviated, or that one type of violence therefore justifies another. But we should at least understand the political-moral stance of those who criticize the American response to 9/11 as forcefully as they sympathized with the United States afier 9/1 1—which within cightecn months turned Le Monde’s “We are all Americans” into sharp criticism of President Bush for seeking war in Iraq “with or without the UN.” Since both Camus and Sartre were of the Left, an equally appropriate way to highlight the continuing salience of their debate leads us to those now-vanished radicals who exclaimed, at the Berlin Wall in November 1989, “One down, one to go!” Their point, which both Sartre and Camus would have immediately appreciated, was that while the fossilized structures created by the communist revolutionary violence about which Camus wrote so powerfully were in the process of being overcome, the various forms of systemic violence about which Sartre wrote so penetratingly still awaited their time of reckoning. And today we may add that the terrorist violence decried by Camus is very much with us, as is the state violence decried by Sartre. ‘To say that their conflict is unresolved is also to say that when either one, Sartre or Camus, appears to win their debate, we all lose. Each man described and denounced a single dimension of contemporary violence, Camus targeting revolutionary violence and Sartre targeting, the violence structurally imposed by social systems based on inequality. Each man had a dazzling, yet partial, insight, and each was blind to the other’s insight This is more than a matter of chance. After all, they were close during the decisive years of their political formation (1943 to 1947), they were part of each other’s space until their break in 1952, and they were France’s two lead- ing political intellectuals on the Left until Camus’ death in 1960. As [ argue in Carus and Sartre, cach man shaped himself against the other—and each one’s understanding called for being completed by the other's. But the either/or demands of the Cold War and the fact that each man developed his views in part against the other's, both before and after the two of them broke, guar- anteed that each would possess no more than a half-truth.’ And so Sartre kept silent about or excused the atrocities committed by movements of national liberation, while fiercely denouncing, every misstep of the French government, and Camus came close to being obsessed by anti-communism, never question- ing the (violently imposed and maintained) Frenchness of Algeria and dismiss ng as irrational the Algerian demand for independence. des304 | Ronald Aronson Like the factions that embraced them during the Cold War, cach man obscured his contradictions by employing a double standard of judgment, accepting, behaviors on the one side that he declared reprehensible on the other. The fact that both men did so with almost perfect symmetry in relation to cach other suggests that each one was—I cannot avoid the expression—act- ing in bad faith, intentionally hiding from an uncomfortable part of the truth. It also suggests that their conflict’s resolution waits on more than the victory of one side, and on more than our own theoretical as well as historical com- prehension of the truths and distortions on both sides. In the end, the Camus- Sartre conflict will be resolved only as the concerns of both men—their insights as well as their blindnesses—are placed on the political agenda at the same time, in this world that has fallen under the spell of September 11 While not ev hing, has changed since 9/11, something is fatefully new: the American perception of permanent vulnerability, Al Qaeda has declared a non-state and non-revolutionary war on the United States and its citizens, and for now seems able to draw on an endless supply of suicidal cannon fodder, wealth, and energy, as well as. a bottomless pool of popular support. Though completely hegemonic since the end of the Cold War and not remotely chal lenged by any other state, the United States is nevertheless threatened today by a movement of suicidal religious martyrs. Because of these developments, it has been tempting to see a new departure in events since 9/11, including, President Bush’s “with us or against us” speech and the two subsequent invasions that have killed several times as many innocent people as the Trade Center/Penta- gon attacks without making Americans any safer. The Bush administration has declared a permanent state of war, at the same time implementing a new and ambitious strategic vision. Still, any claims that the present US forcign and military policy is a dramatic departure in response to (or taking advantage of) a new situation, for example, s expressed by the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century, must not ignore an older fact—that “our country’s battles,” in the words of the US Marine Corps Hymn, have always extended “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.” Any analysis of today’s “war against terrorism” must ponder American history, including the continental and then overseas expan- sion of the nineteenth century, the hegemony proclaimed as a result of wo world wars, and then the Cold War half-century, which, in the Western Hemi- sphere alone, saw American-supported disasters in Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala; the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile; the systematic strangulation of Cuba; the not-so-secret war against Sandinista Nicaragua; and the invasion of the Dominican Republic and Grenada. During this time, Ameri- can intervention in the Middle East and South Asia has also taken a myriad of forms, from US involvement in the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and support for the Saudi dynastic state and the Israeli domination of the Pales- tinians, to support for Islamist fundamentalism in Afghanistan and the military dictatorship in Pakistan. Thus, the invasion of Iraq is arguably inseparable from other aspects of the North’s domination of the South, especially the American quest to control much of the world’s oil supply.amus versus Sartre | 305 In other words, while Camus? insights into the mentality behind terrorism might introduce a study secking to understand violence in the present, a seri ous examination of the subject would make equal use of Sartre’s insights into the violence built into our economic and social systems. Berman appropriately starts from Camus? The Rebel in his argument advocating ideological combat against Islamist fundamentalism. ‘To make his analysis more than a half-truth and to understand what it means to struggle against the structural oppression of global capitalism, we need also to start from Sartre’s The Communists and Peace and Critique of Dialectical Reason. At the beginning of September 1952, Les Temps modernes published its August issue, containing the seventy pages of the Sartre-Camus rapture— Camus” seventeen-page reply to Francis Jeanson’s April review of The Rebel, and Sartre’s and Jeanson’s even longer replies to Camus.” This conflict that broke up a friendship also confirmed a split among the French and the interna- tional Left. It went so deep and became so ugly as to be almost Manichaean: just before replying, to Camus, Sartre, after saying that “an anti-communist is dog,” famously “swore a hatred of the bourgeoisie” that he insisted he would carry to his grave. Returning to political writing two and a half years after being silenced by Sartre, Camus used the worst insult possible in 1950s France—that politically and morally, the pro-communist Left resembled the pro-Nazi col- laborators of 1940. Although one’s own side in this debate was never wholly good, the other side, the enemy, was certainly regarded by both men as totally evil. Camus never embraced capitalism and saw the existing system of parliamentary democracy as the least bad one, but for ten years after 1945, his main political energies were directed against communism. Then, during the war in Algeria, he red-baited the Front de libération nationale (FLN, National Liberation Front), He was willing to support Mendés- France for prime minister, because he called vaguely for peace, and to meet with Algerian Governor-General Jacques Soustelle and even Charles de Gaulle, as the general awaited the call to lead France again, But Camus could not bring himself to pronounce the name “Front de libération nationale,” to include the rebels in his calls for negotiations, or to speak the forb iden word “independence.” From 1952 to 1956, fellow traveler Sartre not only gave scandalous inter views extolling Sovict life but also, as he later admitted, “blocked out all ideas of morality” with regard to politics. At the time of the Rosenbergs? execution in the United States and the East German uprising (June 1953), he could be heard violently denouncing the one while remaining silent about the other. As prominent Communist Pierre Hervé was being expelled for daring to call for more democracy, Sartre added his voice to the party chorus of condemnation, dismissing Hervé as a mediocre writer and a reformist. Having vowed hatred for his own class and having decided to support the French workers, the bulk of whom were in the Parti communiste frangais, during this period Sartre lined up behind the party, embraced the Soviet Union, and ignored the show trials in Zastern Europe, the anti-Semitic Doctors’ Plot in the Soviet Union, and, three rs later, Khrushchev’s “secret speech” about Stalin’s crimes.306 1 Ronald Aronson In acquiescing to the Cold Wa became leade! *s demand to choose sides, Sartre and Camus s of their respective factions, Sartre of the fellow-traveling, Left and Camus of the anticommunist Left, and in the process rose to their full height as political intellectuals, They became Sartre and Camus as we know them today. For all of their (very different) insights and powers, they at times also became classic examples of bad faith—judging according to a double stan- dard, conjuring away uncomfortable facts, remaining silent about evils they should have protested, travestying their commitments to freedom and to truth. Choosing sides and the resulting Manichacanism diminished each man sign cantly, mufiled and distorted his voice, and compromised what he had to say. Yet cach stopped short of losing his way completely. Camus never joined up in the Cold War (he refused to become part of the organized anti-communist establishment in France) and never approved of the arms race, while sloughed off his four years of fellow traveling to write several of his greatest works and become one of the world’s great independent political voices of the late 1950s and 1960s. Inde -d, as | explain in Camus and Sartre, the Cold War itself, its demand that everyone take sides in a pitched struggle of good against evil—to which Sartre and Camus fell victim and became accomplices in their distinctive w converted the authors? tragic world-histori cal conflict into a mere morality play.! If one was right, it seemed, then the other had to be wrong, and their story lacked complexity and interest. No wonder no one has felt compelled to tell it in full. And as we know today, the two men left burdens of interpretation and explanation for their followers, bequeathing them the task of untangling their strengths from their weaknesses, their true insights from their false ones, Both adversari rve to be seen with understanding and sympathy, well as critically. Each one struggled against the demand to takes sides and the looming personal split for several yet at the same time each continued to develop and respond to events in ways that made the split more likely. A histori cal logic animated the controversy as Sartre and Camus, avoiding the clichés of communism and capitalism, were impelled to voice the deepest reasons why thoughtful people, intellectuals committed to the broadest possible freedom and social justice, would support communism or become anti-communists. After their split, the Cold War’s cither/or demands would dominate the Left: supporting revolutionary social change often meant becoming indiffer- ent to political freedom; defending political freedom often meant rejecting the only significant project challenging capitalism. Much of the Left learned to justify one side or the other. Thus were the hopes of a generation to mov toward socialism and freedom—both Sartre’s and Camus’ hope in the postwar period—to be dashed. People on the Lefi were pressured to make an impos- sible choice between what became Sartre’s grim realism (communism as the only path to meaningful change) and Camus’ visceral rejection of communism (which left him unable to identify himself with any significant force strug- gling for change). Sartre and Camus voiced the half-rights and half-wrongs, the half-truths and half-lies of what became the tragedy of the Left—not only in France but across the world—for at least the next generation. Camus and desCamus versus Sartre | 307 Sartre came to insist that there were only two alternatives—Camus’ rebel and Sartre’s revolutionary—as reflected in their plays, Camus? The Just Assassins and Sartre’s The Devil and the Good Lord, and theorized in The Rebel and The Communists and Peace. These historical issues take on an urgent meaning today as we try to come to grips with terrorism and the war against it. Manichacanism again stalks the world, with its either/or demands to side for or against the United States, for good and against evil. And an inability to think about violence coherently is widespread. There may not be any direct link between Sartre’s and Camus? half-truths and double standards and the Manichaeanisms put forth by sup- porters of US policies and by those who rationalize terrorism. But it is certainly striking that supporters of the “war on terrorism” invoke Camus, and those who say that terrorist tactics are “the only ones” available to oppressed people sound so much like Sartre. And it is undeniable that much current Ame pro-war thinking concerning Iraq is based on Cold War models, and that some} nes this brings people back to Camus. After reading my book, Edward Rothstein, writing in the New York Times, commended Camus to today’s neo- conservatives."! Some moderate leftists who are deeply disturbed about Islamist fundamentalism and are determined to combat it have signed on to the disas- trous American invasion of Iraq. And there are some on the Left, courageous enough to confront American domination head-on, who remain mute about the horrific nature of Al Qaeda’s terrorism, as if American misdeeds rule out an equally moral analysis of Al Qaeda’s nihilistic violence, the post-9/ 11 com- ments of Noam Chomsky being, a famous example.!? These are traps waiting for us in today’s “need to choose”—similar to what Sartre and Camus expe- ienced—that can impose itself in ways that drive people to distort and lie. As ri were Sartre and Camus, we are often invited, or demanded, to embrace half a truth at the expense of a fuller truth. ‘The current double standards about political violence give us reason to ask how similar habits developed in Sartre and Camus. At first, the two men sted choosing sides. In 1944, Combar’s motto was “From Resistance to Revolution,” and Camus’ editorials spoke clearly about combining socialism and individual freedom. Even so, as in “Letters to a German Friend,” Camus insisted on turning to violence only as a last resort. After mid-1945, both he and the Communists had begun to exclude each other from the coalitions they would be willing to embrace, but Camus did not yet see the Communists as an enemy, let alone the main enemy. And even as he began to do so, Camus would continue to look for a third way between communism and capitalism for another several years. Touchy and self-righteous about being criticized, Camus started ruminating about the incompatibility of communism and freedom after he was sharply attacked by Communist editor Pierre Hervé in Action in June 1945. Camus had already abandoned his high hopes for postwar change, and soon communism— not capitalism or colonialism—became the problem for him. In 1938 and 1945, he had written some of the most enlightened newspaper articles about Algeria to appear in the French press, including, the Communist press. Despite his farsightedness about colonialism, and for all his308 | Ronald Aronson principled clarity about war and revolutionary violence, Camus never applied a similar analysis to colonial daily life, even after rendering it so unforgettably in The Stranger. Rather, his personal hurt about communist attacks combined with an aversion to overt violence and especially to abstract and necessitarian justifications for revolutionary violence. And then his development into the mid-century’s foremost critic of communist violence was sharpened by his rela- tionship with someone who was moving, though more slowly than Camus, in the opposite direction—Sartre. In The Flies, Sartre had presented violence in an almost metaphysical way, as Orestes’ path to becoming real. As Sartre became political, his support for revo- lutionary change was connected with his deep unde dimension of existence against the French Communist Party’s “dialectical mate- rialism,” in writings such as “Materialism and Revolution.” He puzzled over the relationship of objective realities and individual action, and always insisted on the human ability to make oneself from what one has been made, on the fact of choice. And then, in The Communists and Peace, Sartre began his unique con- tribution to the problem of violence, conceptually grasping and demonstrat- ing the structural violence imposed by bourgeois society on workers. Armed with his insights, Sartre for the first time appreciated communist violence as a response, the only effective one, to bourgeois violence. But absorbing history and society into his thought was no casy matter, nor was declaring his support for the Communist Party and, later, the Algerian rebels, In the either/or ¢li- mate nurtured by the Cold War, he went overboard. He extolled revolutionary violence as “the beginning of humanity,” refused to criticize terrorism, gave a blank check to anti-colonial rebels for any and all atrocities, and even accepted the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes as the “only means of struggle” by an oppressed people. Sartre held that the oppressed can overthrow the structural violence imposed on them only through turning this violence back on their oppressors. To demand from the outside that such violence be measured and controlled is to undermine their capacity to struggle. Sartre’s logic was sweep- ing: non-violence only perpetuates oppression; violence, the tool of oppression, is the only possible path of liberation. Camus’ blind spot lay in the other direction. For all his courageous efforts to resolve the Algerian conflict with a minimum of violence, Camus never accepted Algerian independence, toyed with solutions that would keep Alge under French control, and—as French Algeria’s most famous son—refused to tell the truth about colonial privileges to his pied-noir community. He repressed the reality of the FLN. He refused to connect their violence with the facts of Arab life in French-ruled Algeria, and he ignored connection of either with the daily violence-imposed privileges of his pied-noir communi In his principled, almost deontological opposition to overt violence, he never talked about daily life. Such were the blind spots about violence of these two brilliant critics of violence, Camus managed to combine his insight and bad faith in a single provocative statement during his Nobel Prize visit to Sweden in Des 1957: “1 have alway anding of the subjective ember s condemned terror. | must also condemn a terrorism thatCamus versus Sartre | 309 is carried out blindly—in the streets of Algiers for exampl strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but Iw before justice.” Sartre’s most outrageous statement appeared in his 1961 pref- ace to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. This stunning essay starts by analyzing and denouncing colonial violence, asserts that its damage was being undone by the natives? own violence, and then celebrates that violence being turned against Europeans. It is one of Sartre’s most vivid and brutal pieces of writing, both in its argument and its worldview. Camus tried to ignore the violence perpetrated by settlers, but Sartre now eulo gized violence as liberation and therapy. Writing, as always from on high, Camus laid down rules for conducting, conflict, while Sartre, the total partisan, called for the natives doing, away with colonialism “by every means within their power.” Camus moderated his vision and his statements according, to what he thought was his own picd-noir community’s intolerance, but Sartre assailed his own commu- ity while making himself the foremost European voice of the Third World. If Camus’ anti-communism masked his inability to treat the natives in any other way than patronizingly, Sartre gave a pass to the worst anti-colonial atrocities. ‘The theme of “dirty hands” had been Sartre’s way of understanding the role played by violence in struggles for social change, but he now cast it into an ethic of struggle, even beyond the claim that the ends justified the means: he gave violence itself an ethical and psychological value, a liberating function. vamus had sought to keep his and France’s hands clean during the Resistance, but as this determination led him toward anti-communism, he more or less lost interest in workers’ struggles except for those, as in East Germany and Hun- gary, that rebelled against the Communist Party. And in Algeria, his insistence fon clean hands coincided with his continued support for the French colonial presence, despite his frequent denunciations of colonialism. —and may one day defend my mother We are not done with the Camus-Sartre debate today, because its issues have not yet been resolved. As the facts of contemporary terrorism and the “war against terror” make compellingly clear, something is even more awry in our world than during the Cold War. However new may be its details and some of its features, we continue to be plagued by core issues of the twentieth cen- tury. Camus, for one, would turn over in his grave to see his ideas used, even indirectly, to justify the American war in Iraq. Yet his half of the truth about violence has played nicely into the hands of the neo-conservatives dominating the US Defense Department's strategic thinking after September 11 and dur- ing the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Because we still live amidst the Cold War’s obfuscation of violence on both sides, we are all at risk. The victors have continued to taboo any serious talk about systemic violence and to self-rightcously inveigh against violence commit- ted by the world’s underclass. The “war against terrorism” seeks to delegitimize any and all anti-systemic acts of violence in advance, even when no effective alternatives exist. And those on the other side sometimes go soft on terror ism.310 | Ronald Aronson As we remain caught between antithetical positions, we can see that neither man really won the Sartre-Camus debate. Rather than any historical working through, which might genuinely move us beyond their opposing, insights, our collective comprehension is still stuck. But what would it take to go beyond this? I have been pointing to a theoretical bringing together of Sartre’s and Camus? halves of the truth, but to bear fruit, this must eventually take place within a political process that decides it needs both men’s insights, and that it will benefit by bringing them together rather than by keeping them at loggerheads. Only then will we be able to genuinely see both men appreciatively and critically at one and the same time, and to see how the two, taken together, might lead to more productive ways of thinking and acting. ‘The successful accomplishment of this goal presupposes a political movement animated by a single moral standard—a movement that rejects terrorism and wars against terrorism alike. Notes Albert Camus, Réflexions sur le terrorisme (Paris: Nivolas Philippe, 2002) Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neo-colonialion (New York: Routledge, 2001) “anus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended Ie( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), David A. Sprintzen and Adrian van den Hoven, eds. and trans., Sartre and Camus: A His toric Confrontation (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004). 6, Ronald Samtoni, Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent (Unive: University Press, 2003). 7. Today’s writers tum the tables on the prevailing Parisian fashion of the carly 1950s. See Herbert R. Lottman, Alert Camus: A Biography (Comte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1997), xiv-xv; and Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago: U Chicago Press, 1998) 8. Aronson, Camus and Sartre. 9. Ibid. 10, n wee = Park: Penn State Sce Sprintzen and van den Hoven, Sartre and Camus ward Rothstein, “Connections: Camus and the Neo-Cons: More in C ‘They Might Suspect,” New York Times, 7 February 2004. 12. See Noam Chomsky, 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001). mon ‘Than