Episode #088 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode is on the great post-World War II debate between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. I had a lot of fun making this episode today, and I hope you guys love it.

So, let’s start out the episode today with a thought experiment. Hypothetical situation. By the way, if you’re not a capitalist, switch up the thought experiment accordingly. Hypothetical situation. Let’s say that Obama’s grand, secret plan that he’s been cooking up for the last eight years that we’re all waiting for -- let’s say it finally comes to fruition. Let’s say he imposes martial law. Finally. Military presence on every street corner. We will henceforth refer to him as King Obama. I believe he’s earned it. He implements some sort of communist-style system. The notion of private property goes out the window. The means of production are controlled by the state now. And he creates hundreds of these forced-labor camps where people toil away all day being entirely exploited for their labor by a small handful of people in the upper echelons of government.

Now, being a proponent of capitalism, like me -- Stephen West, capitalist, only someone who jokes about being a Marxist -- being someone who has seen the prosperity afforded by a bustling capitalistic system, you can’t help but look around you in this little vacation resort that Obama’s created, and you can’t help but think, “This is just wrong. This is not okay. It is not okay for millions and millions of people to be forced to work day after day, for millions of people to be exploited day after day. Something has got to be done about this.”

Now, for the sake of the thought experiment, let’s also say that our benevolent Lord Jesus Christ descends from the heavens and says to us in his baritone, soothing voice, “I can fix this. I can fix this once and for all. I will personally guarantee that this world will be transformed back not just to the days of yore when capitalism roamed free, but this time it will be a better capitalism, a version of capitalism the likes of which you’ve never seen, a veritable capitalist utopia. But there’s one problem, my child. I’m going to need something from you for me to do this. I’m going to need you to allow one innocent person to be killed. You won’t know the guy. You won’t know the guy; don’t worry. He’s probably one of those people that drives too slow anyway. Point is, I’m going to need you to be okay with me killing one innocent person in the name of this transformation that will occur that will eventually lead to the elimination of the suffering of millions now and billions yet to be born. Do I have your okay?”

Well, what would you say to his kingship Jesus Christ? Is the unfortunate cost of ending one innocent person’s life now worth the elimination of the suffering of billions of people to come? Now, if you feel yourself leaning towards the “yes” in answer to this question, consider this: how about 100 lives to end the suffering of billions? How about 10,000? How about 10,000,000 lives? You know, I don’t know if much changes about the moral underpinnings of that choice. But the way we feel about it certainly does, right? Still, there’s probably tons of people out there listening to this that would be willing to sacrifice a million lives if it meant bringing about a world where at least there’s a semblance of justice. At least millions aren’t being exploited for their labor every day. Then again, there’s other people out there that would think that this is the very definition of barbarism.

Now, the point of this thought experiment is not to arrive at any conclusions right now. It’s about us keeping an open mind when we try to understand the very difficult choice that Sartre had to make in post-World War II Europe. Because if I just told you that the main point of disagreement between Sartre and Camus in this debate was that Sartre thought that we should allow for the killing of millions in the interest of eventually bringing about a better world in the future and that Camus didn’t think it was okay to kill people, it might be tempting to just sort of, you know, hitch your wagon to Camus and say, “Heh, look, Sartre. Look, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about. It is never justifiable to kill millions of people.”

But just consider for a second where Sartre’s coming from. World War II ends and Sartre find himself living in a world not unlike the thought experiment we just talked about. The Soviets and the Red Army seize Berlin. They’re led by a communist economic structure. At the helm is Joseph Stalin, a guy that many see retrospectively as one of the most notorious mass murderers in the history of the world. And you hear these stories -- you hear these stories that sort of foreshadow what was to come. You know, there’s that infamous one of Stalin right after the Red Army seized Berlin, and, you know, they’re surveying the land that they just took over. And one of his top generals turns to him and says, “Hey, Stalin! Hey! You must be happy, man. Look at us. We’re in Berlin. And, ah! Look where we are! The war’s over!” Stalin turns back to him and says, “Tsar Alexander got all the way to Paris.”

Now, put yourself in Stalin’s shoes for a second. Alright? If you are an imperialistic pseudo-dictator with conquest on the mind, post-World War II Europe looks pretty good to you. I mean, it’s a place rife with opportunity for you. First of all, you already have military control over everything east of Berlin. Couple this with the fact that every country west of Berlin has just been ravaged by the most gruesome war the planet has ever seen. Poverty is rampant. Starvation is rampant. Many cities have been practically reduced to ash. So the infrastructure and agriculture production needed to maintain a population -- it’s far from adequate at this point. Just a few years ago in the West, Stalin was our ally. He was fighting along the Eastern Front against the Germans and in Siberia against the Japanese.

Now, just a few short years later, people are starting to ask the question: what does this Stalin guy have in store for the world? So, famously, an Iron Curtain descends across Europe. Two ideologies take center stage, right? Capitalism and communism. And, if you’re a capitalist living in the United States during this time, you start to worry about what the people of western Europe might do out of desperation. You worry about the fact that, if you’re a population that is disenfranchised, poverty stricken, crippled from the wages of war, this is a hotbed for rash political actions that may have serious consequences. I mean, this is how totalitarian dictators ascend to power in the first place.

You know, people are starving and desperate, and here’s some charismatic dude with a mustache; he’s got a secret handshake, and he can talk really well. He comes along, and he gives the people a message of hope. And, think about it, this message of communism in particular -- the message of the eradication of private property, the elimination of the exploitation of the worker, jobs and certain basic services for everyone -- this is a very alluring concept if you’re part of a post-World War II, disenfranchised population, especially when it’s on your front doorstep.

The fear of the West during this time is that Stalin, who’s at the head of this communist revolution, is going to continue to try to extend his sphere of influence and ride this communism momentum as far and as long into Europe as he possibly could. In other words, somebody living on the capitalistic side of that Iron Curtain, they may have felt like there is this coercive ideology founded on exploitation called communism that’s trying to take over the world. We have to stop them! But consider the fact that, to Sartre, a staunch proponent of communism all throughout his life but particularly post-World War II, he found himself on the other side of this Iron Curtain. And what’s interesting to think about is that he would have felt the exact same way about capitalism that somebody in the West would have felt about communism.

Think about it. What is capitalism to Sartre? Capitalism is a system hell-bent on growth and expansion. It’s a system that benefits from evangelizing itself and recruiting more nations to become capitalist because, well, it gives them more customers. It’s a system founded on exploitation of the worker by a handful of people at the top. Sartre, yeah, he too was afraid that a coercive ideology that exploits people was trying to take over the world. And he was going to do anything he could to try to stop it.

Now, I know what you’re thinking if you already know that Sartre backed Stalin: “Why does this have to be an either/or, Sartre? I mean, look, I get that you’re against capitalism, Sartre. But why does that mean you have to fall in line with Stalin’s communism? You know, I’ve read the Communist Manifesto. Nowhere in there does it say anything about killing tens of millions of people. Why’d you have to side with Stalin, Sartre?”

Well, make no mistake, Sartre tried desperately not to. He privately denounced a lot of what Stalin did. He went so far as to try to start his own political party. But, alas, you know, just like that guy you used to go to high school with that tried to start his very own vape store, it failed. It failed so, so badly. Aw, man, vape store.

So, Sartre finds himself in a predicament. The world’s already the way that it is. It’s not like after World War II ends everything resets and goes back to normal. No. Just a few years ago things were in chaos. Just a few years ago in order to not be literally extinguished from the world by Hitler we had to side with this guy named Stalin, a guy that, yes, we eventually found out might be a little off. And, on top of that, he has occupational control over most of Europe. He has the most powerful army in the world, and he happens to love the idea of his face being on a giant poster on the side of a building.

But, despite all of this, at least he’s a communist, to Sartre, right? He’s the only guy that’s talking about revolution. And with the Cold War looming and all of his other attempts failing at backing a communism that Stalin wasn’t a part of, Sartre found himself in a position where he needed to take a side as a prominent intellectual at the time. And, to Sartre, in this Iron Curtain world where these two ideologies are in a struggle for dominance, you only have two real sides to choose from. And anything that weakened the Soviets directly helped the enemy, to Sartre. And if Sartre’s got to choose between a communist system with the wrong leader or a capitalist system founded on the exploitation of the masses, that choice was easy for him to make.

Now, as I said before, the key disagreement that started this debate between Sartre and Camus was this question: Is it justifiable to kill innocent people as a political means to an end -- killing innocent people or saying nothing when innocents are killed in the interest of bringing about a much better world in the future? This was the question they were answering when it all came to a head in 1952. But what’s interesting is, despite them being very good friends for many years -- you know, both of them are very similar people; both of them were prominent voices of the resistance during the years of German occupation during World War II -- what’s interesting to me is that this disagreement that was played out publicly in 1952, if you look at their philosophy closely, it was actually there the whole time. And to better understand the root of what this disagreement was, I think we got to take a look at probably the most famous work of Albert Camus: The Stranger, or a better translation would be The Outsider.

Camus tells a story about a main character where -- a pretty good way to describe him would be an outsider, an outsider to the games we often play as human beings. Probably more so than any other game though, you know -- in a culture where it is often widely accepted if not expected for you to misrepresent your feelings on behalf of somebody else, you know -- “Hi, how are you?” “Oh, I’m good! How about you?” “I’m good!” I care about what’s happening in your life, stranger -- in that world, Meursault, the main character of the book, refuses to. The book has one of the most famous opening lines ever. It perfectly encapsulates Meursault as a character. It says, “Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.”

Let’s just think about that. Most of us, I’d like to think, if your mother died, you’d at least care enough about her death that you’d be able to remember the day that it happened. If it happened in the last couple days, right? But Meursault doesn’t. Now, I’d also like to think that, even if you didn’t care that much about the fact that your mom died, when you’re around the friends and family members in the subsequent weeks that are grieving the loss, I’d like to think most of us would put on at least kind of a somber tone out of respect. I mean, you probably wouldn’t be gleefully dancing around the house to some John Phillips Sousa, at least for a good couple weeks.

This first line of the book just shows the sort of apathy Meursault has of the people around him and his unwillingness to lie about feelings that he doesn’t have just for the sake of going along with everyone else. So, I’ll give you the abridged version. The book is filled with tons of these sorts of scenes that illustrate just how much Meursault doesn’t care about family or friendship or community or really anyone. And the story comes to a climax when Meursault actually shoots a guy, kills him, not because he has a problem with him. He actually doesn’t even know him. He shot him just to feel what it felt like to pull the trigger.

Now, aside from showing an example of somebody who has come to terms with the absurdity of the world, Camus’s main objective in The Stranger is to refute psychological egoism or the idea that humans do what they do because it’s the best thing for them and only them. Altruism is an illusion. It may seem like we’re doing something because we care about somebody else. We may tell ourselves that that’s the reason we’re doing it. But, in reality, ultimately, we’re doing it because it helps us in some way. You know, maybe we feel a feeling of superiority over other people when they’re dependent on us.

Now, Camus didn’t think this was the case. This is the reason he wrote the book this way. He thought that when people read the book, the fact that nearly everyone has a really hard time relating to the cold, disinterested feelings of Meursault, the main character, this shows that we don’t seem to just do things for ourselves and only ourselves. There seems to be something about our nature as a human being that cares for and does things for the sake of other people around us. But where does that come from if it’s there? Where does that come from?

Now, you can think any number of things, whether you think it’s a personal God that programmed into us a desire to care about other people around us; whether you think it’s this desire to care for others comes from the mammalian brain, you know, that it behooves the propagation of the species to care about and do things for other members of the species. Wherever you believe this came from, one thing’s for certain: Camus seems to be implying that caring for others is part of what makes us human, that it’s some sort of essential property that we have. He seems to be contradicting the idea that existence precedes essence.

This is the fundamental difference in their thinking that’s the cause of the disagreement. Sartre’s saying, look, World War II happened, alright? No question, this is not a perfect situation. But the fact remains, Stalin is in power whether we like it or not. So, if you see the Gulags and the forced-labor camps and anybody that disagrees with Stalin disappearing or being murdered, if you see all this stuff and you’re on the communist side of things, you’re really left with two choices. What are we going to do? We got to consider which of these two options is statistically more likely to yield a better world.

Do you just completely overthrow the government, risk somebody even worse coming to power or capitalism taking hold? Or do you say, yes, yes, this is a horrible situation, but we’re so close. Look at us. Maybe, much like Machiavelli talked about in The Prince, this is a phase, a temporary albeit unfortunate situation but a necessary phase that our government has to go through to eventually bring about a better world one day.

Now, on the other hand, for Camus, if we have this part of our nature that seems to care about others around us, you know, these connections where we care about others or our friendships, the people that we love, if we acknowledge how they’re one of the biggest potential sources of pleasure we have as human beings, how can we ever in good conscience accept bloody totalitarian revolutions where untold numbers of people suffer as a condition for our happiness? He says, look, Sartre, man, I get it. I get what you’re saying. Maybe the deaths of these people are a necessary means to an end to bring about a better world. But here’s the problem with that. You don’t know whether that world is ever going to exist. It hasn’t happened yet. Nothing guarantees it will happen. How can you so cavalierly throw around people’s lives on a maybe?

He said, this notion, the idea that if only we kill a couple more million people, then we’re going to be at some sort of political utopia, this is nothing more than committing philosophical suicide. You’re suspending your critical thinking about the absurd. You’re looking to some future utopian world that doesn’t exist and pretending as though it does because you don’t want to contend with this one. Camus says he thinks this sort of idealistic political thinking ultimately can be traced back to Hegel and Marx because, as far as he can tell, they were the first person to talk about this alternative view of history where reality is this historical process that’s all leading to some sort of concrete end point. But the problem, Camus says, again, is what if you’re wrong about that? What if there is no concrete end point?

He said, all these people have really done is say, hey, hey, we don’t like these old absolutist ways of looking at politics, you know, things like the divine right of kings. Let’s replace it with some new type of absolutism. He thought, you know what happened to these people? What happened to these people? Because you got to wonder, why have there been so many gruesome wars and revolutions all throughout the 20th century? We never saw a mass hysteria in the vein of a Hitler or a Stalin before the 20th century. What happened? What changed about the world?

Well, Camus thought this is yet another side effect of people realizing that we live in a universe where a god doesn’t have a plan for you and there’s not some guy that’s going to come back wearing flip flops that’s going to deliver you from all the evils of the world. He says, we’re starving for a Messiah, but we don’t have one. And, when we realize we don’t have one, we create one. We elect this person who says they got all the answers for us, a powerful person that’s going to deliver us to a better world. We put every ounce of enthusiasm we have behind them. We make 40-foot-high likenesses of them. We faint when they walk by us and touch our hand like they hit us with some sort of Buzz Lightyear attack. We do all of this, to Camus, because we’re trying to fill a void. We’re trying to replace that Messiah that we don’t actually have.

So, obviously, Camus and Sartre differ on their views about what constitutes a just revolution. And, when Camus sees the style of revolution playing out that was going on at the time, he writes, in my opinion, his greatest work, but it fell under heavy criticism during his time. It was called The Rebel. Camus’s goal in writing The Rebel was to completely rework and change the average person’s perspective on what a revolution should look like. His thinking was, in this new world that we’re living in where there’s no objective morality that we can appeal to, can’t we all just accept a few things? Can’t we all just realize -- look, we’re hurling through the void on this massive spaceship together. We’re condemned. Can’t we all just come to some kind of minimum level of dignity and respect that every person deserves no matter the political strife that’s going on? One of his main goals when he was writing it is to find a specific level of dignity, a rule where we can say, “This far, and no farther.”

So, Camus releases this book, obviously against communism, obviously against the way that the current revolution’s going. And remember, Sartre would see this book as a direct affront to him and the cause he’s living and dying for every day. Remember, anything that hurts the Soviets is directly helping the enemy. So, Sartre doesn’t respond right away. He doesn’t give the stinging critique that people are expecting.

Eventually, after a long time, he tells one of his younger contemporaries named Francis Jenson to critique Camus’s work, which was probably intentionally done as an insult. I mean, like, if you’re anything, if you’re a competitive Monopoly player and some guy challenges you to a game of Monopoly, and you say, “You know what? Why don’t you play my little brother first? How about that? Yeah. That’s how much disdain I have for you and your Go-passing, $200-collecting abilities. I bet you use the iron as your little guy that walks around the board, don’t you? The iron, that’s the worst one. Disgusting.”

Well, to put it briefly so we can get to the real drama here, Sartre’s “little brother” critiques some stuff. He says that Camus doesn’t understand Hegel and Marx properly. He says that Marxism didn’t lead to Stalinism, Stalin led to Stalinism. Camus writes back to him, insulted, and says, look, obviously you aren’t interested in actually understanding what I wrote. You’re just interested in strawmen and ad hominin attacks. So he pressed him further on the concept of history and said more generally that he’s tired of “seeing seasoned militants who had given their all to the struggles of their age lectured and censored by armchair philosophers whose hands are clean.”

Now, just looking back on it, it kind of seems like Camus won that particular game of Monopoly because this is when big daddy Sartre decided he was going to throw his hat into the ring, alright? Just to give you an idea of the tone of Sartre’s response to Camus, his first line that he writes is this: “Albert, our friendship was not an easy one, but I shall miss it.” He says things all throughout his response like, “What if your book simply shows your philosophical incompetence? And if your reasoning is inaccurate and if your thoughts are vague and banal?”

He even spends nearly an entire page lecturing Camus like he’s a philosophy professor on how Hegel and Marx viewed the concept of history. He was going to educate him. He says that Camus’s sitting there morally judging history as though he’s some sort of outsider, up on an ivory tower, interpreting it. When, in reality, he says, you’re just as much a part of history as everyone else. You’re creating it too. And when you ask a question like “What if you’re wrong about the end point of history that we’re all heading to?” the point isn’t to know what the end of history is, the point is to create one. He even -- he even accuses Camus of abandoning his existentialist principles. He says, “Where is Meursault, Camus? Where is Sisyphus? Where today are those Trotskyites who preached permanent revolution? Without a doubt, assassinated or exiled.”

Now, Camus wrote a long, detailed response to Sartre, but he actually never sent it. At a certain point he just didn’t see what good could come of it. I mean, Sartre obviously severely misunderstood Camus’s work if he thought that he was an existentialist. I mean, Camus may have asked some existentialist questions throughout his work, but he never espoused the idea that existence preceded essence. He even said explicitly during his life, “I am not an existentialist.”

This is a place where a lot of people get confused, I think. There’s a big difference between an existentialist and an existential philosopher. Existentialism is the specific term coined by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to describe the particular way of thinking that they laid out. But all the other thinkers that asked existential questions -- you know, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky -- these would more commonly today be known as existentialist philosophers, not existentialists.

Now, the echoes of this debate between Sartre and Camus still ring out to this day. This very question -- this question is a question that pervades our geo-policy. It’s a question where the United States seems at times to be divided down the middle 50/50 on it. What violence, what murder is justifiable in the name of bringing about a better world in the future? What about the Iraq war? Sure, when we initially went in there in 2003 it was all about weapons of mass destruction, right? We were told it was reasonable to suspect that they had them and that the last thing we can ever let happen is to let the wrong people get their hands on these things.

Then time passed. Years passed. Didn’t find anything. And the justification for staying there started to become about spreading democracy. It became about, look, these people were under the rule of Saddam Hussein, ruthless dictator, slaughtering his own people, pouring gas down someone’s throat and throwing a match inside. These people were suffering, and there was nothing they could do about it. Don’t they deserve to be free like we are? Aren’t all men born free? Shouldn’t we invade and help set up a democracy in that region so that, then, when all the other countries surrounding it see how great it is to be us, democracy will spread like a virus?

The bigger question is, when we have an ideology that we think is vastly superior to somebody else’s, when we see people suffering against their will, do we have an obligation to step in and spread our superior idea around, even if it means the blood of innocent people? I mean, what are you, against freedom? What are you, against American values? How could you say no to that? On the other hand, who are we to say what’s superior? Can we? Can we know for certain whether that future world where democracy works and is loved by all the citizens, can we know whether that’s actually going to come to fruition? What if something worse than the current situation comes to fruition? I mean, after all, millions of people were suffering.

Is temporary war just a necessary phase for us to pass through before bringing about a better world? Or is it never okay to kill someone as a means to a political end? And, if we did do that, are we just committing philosophical suicide?

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.