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I always thought the real intellectual differences related to Marxism were between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, the former having introduced Sartre to Marxism and later publicly breaking with him for his "ultra-bolshevism." Camus and Sartre seemed to have more personal differences, viz., Sartre generally being an asshole. Among other things, he considered Camus a notch beneath him intellectually, and Ive always personally believed that a big reason Sartre turned down the Nobel prize was because Camus already had one.
Ive always struggled to understand Sartre's popularity even among other philosophers I respect.
> Ive always struggled to understand Sartre's popularity even among other philosophers I respect.
I agree completely.
It is completely rankling when considering how he is compared to Simone de Beauvoir. Her "Second Sex" is considered a feminist work—and for good reason—but it surpasses any of what Sarte wrote as a philosophical work. While he did build on the backs of others, his ideas remain small compared to his contemporaries.
>I always thought the real intellectual differences related to Marxism were between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, the former having introduced Sartre to Marxism and later publicly breaking with him for his "ultra-bolshevism."
Merleau-Ponty was definitely more connected to actual lived reality than Sartre was. When Marxist theory produced a horror, not paradise, he actually sort of admitted it was happening.
WW2: Heidegger is the premier, German philosopher. And he's a Nazi. So the question is: what does it mean for the projector of philosophy that the leading light is also a fascist? Enter Satre who "rejects" Heigger but "keeps" with Hegel.
Being and Nothingness, as far as I understand, was a response in part to Heidegger's Being and Time.
My philosophy may be rusty, but to answer the question you asked, I think history is the reason why others held him in regard.
I recall reading a criticism of Sartre essentially to the effect of "he elevated anxieties of the early 20th century to eternal truths." It's an insightful observation that does double labor, serving both as grounds for serious concern about Sartre's work and as an explanation for much of its popularity.
>Sartre remained unpredictable, however, and was engaged in a long, bizarre dalliance with hardline Maoism when he died in 1980.
Bizarre in what way exactly? At the time (late-60s to late-70s) in France maoism was as popular between students and scholars as Marvel movies are in the US today...
It's worth noting Sartre spent 9 months as a POW, that influenced his outlook on freedom a fair bit.
what are the public academic debates that we are having today? creationism vs evolution? populism vs neo-liberalism?
I hate to reminisce but having two existentialist philosophers debating about socialism vs communism makes me jelly.
You have to remember that these were two French intellectuals, debating in a country, culture, and time period where Socialism vs Communism was very much a live issue.
That's not really true in the United States today, where even Socialism is generally held in contempt, and Communism is considered to be a demonstratably failed ideology which doesn't even deserve to be taken seriously.
On top of this, intellectualism itself is viewed with great suspicion by many Americans, who much prefer to hear celebrity gossip, or watch sports and reality shows. As a result, the "public" intellectual debates of the era are dumbed down and infotainmentized by a media mostly concerned with ratings and pandering to the lowest common denominator.
There still are plenty of debates in academia in the United States today, but they're not very public, and mostly take place in academic journals which most of the public would rather die before reading.
I've heard that France is still a culture that greatly respects their intellectuals, so I would expect they still have many public intellectual debates these days. Maybe someone who keeps current with them could comment.
I agree with everything you said. But I'd suggest that not only are the debates in academia alive, they're actually too vigorous and too radical.
I think one of the contributors to the current political situation is the increasing influence of academia on politics and the law. Instead of having a few big ideas that we wrestle with, every politician and lawyer is a little Leninist bent on burning everything down in favor of their ever-changing pet political philosophies. And the notion of moderation has somehow become radicalized, I think; a dirty word for some people and a rallying cry for others.
The vigorous creativity of scholarship provides an endless supply of fodder in terms of new ideas, new reasoning, new justifications, and most recently new "facts". If we were a nation of philosophers it'd be some kind of paradise. But we're not, and it's ripping apart our core social institutions.
I'm not dissing the scholarship, or trying to suggest it's all bunk. I mean, even bunk can be valuable by challenging assumptions or by making conspicuous assumptions itself. But too much of that debate is bleeding out into the culture. A whole new layer of public policy institutions and media outlets feeds off and disseminates the half-baked ideas. There's never any time or energy to winnow the chaff. And so it's effectively poisoning the social and political culture.
I don't think it is as fragmented as you explain it to be. There has been a broad agreement that the principles of the New Deal work; they have worked before and they would work now. However, there has been a deliberate effort by (a few) of the ultra-rich to subvert New Deal policies and this has been done through the creation and continued funding of institutions dedicated to what Krugman calls "movement conservatism". I would suggest 2 books: "Dark Money" and "Conscience of a Liberal" to get a better idea of the world that we operate in right now.
>"A whole new layer of public policy institutions and media outlets feeds off and disseminates the half-baked ideas. There's never any time or energy to winnow the chaff. And so it's effectively poisoning the social and political culture."
Can you name one cultural meme that's emerged from academia in the last 10 years? I certainly can't. I simply don't think academic debates have that great a cultural impact in our modern society, regardless of this increased vigor you're referring to.
On the other hand, I can think of recent cultural memes that have emerged from the political sphere, pushed by a diverse range of people (from corporate interests to grass roots activists). Very few politically active people seem to be waiting around for answers from academia, they've got their own agendas to push.
Cultural memes aren't really the measure of progress, or worth, of academia. And "academia" itself is a pretty broad term: are you referring to Philosophy, or the Social Sciences or what?
At the core of earnest arguments behind climate change denialism are legitimate studies and critiques of not only climate science, but of modern modeling and statistical analysis techniques. A core underlying meme would be "lies, damn lies, and statistics". And more technical one would be "overfitting".
Those critiques are necessary and valid and healthy, but only in the realm of professional discourse. As they leaked out they lost all context and contingency and infused our culture with an unhealthy distrust and skepticism of the legitimacy of scientific claims and techniques.
The concept of regulatory capture has been co-opted by conservatives as an excuse to oppose any sort of government regulation, even though the theory of regulatory capture doesn't make specific claims about the benefit or value or appropriateness of regulation. That concept is not as widely known popularly but still very widely abused far outside the academic realm. It's increasingly being adopted by liberals to unfairly criticize sensible cooperation between regulatory agencies and private business.
The Laffer Curve is similar that way, except that absurdly Arthur Laffer was the first person to claim (and continues to claim) the concept proves things it doesn't.
On the liberal side we can look at trigger warnings and micro-aggressions. The original academic debates that coined those terms were, IMO, quite legitimate and important. In 2017 is it really controversial to think that we might want to give some thought to people suffering from PTSD, such as when discussing rape in the presence of possibly unknown rape victims still feeling victimized. And the concept of micro-aggression is genius. It finally gave us a concrete, if limited, framework for discussing and addressing many of the subtle ways that our inherent cultural biases prejudice and harm people. But both ideas were co-opted and prematurely expanded and radically applied by an overly eager student movement.
There are countless others, too. They abound everywhere. Every editorial article floweths over with inappropriate citations to complex academic theories. It's like the popular psychology fad of the 1950s ballooned to encompass every field, and we all have the fever. We're all pseudo-scientists, now, credentialed to apply scientific theory, and defend ourselves with scientific theory, however we see fit. It's not new. Social darwinism is a classic example of the abuse of science by both scientists and laymen. It just seems more common and more pervasive.
Maybe I'm mistaken in thinking that the pace of radicalism was slower earlier last century and in times prior. Part of the reason I think that is because college attendance rates are way up, which I think implies that a large portion of society has been exposed to more radical and more highly technical ideas. And like the advent of cheap sugar, we've developed a taste for new, sweet ideas that's messing with our political chemistry. But maybe that's also a poor assumption, not to mention a poor analogy.
It is quite illuminating to see the exchange for instance between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky to get a sense of the difference of tone and focus between european and american intellectuals.
What difference in tone and focus are you referring to? Noam Chomsky seems like a much more 'European-style' (academic?) intellectual then the pop/celeb 'intellectuals' popular in America such as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, etc.
>On top of this, intellectualism itself is viewed with great suspicion by many Americans, who much prefer to hear celebrity gossip, or watch sports and reality shows. As a result, the "public" intellectual debates of the era are dumbed down and infotainmentized by a media mostly concerned with ratings and pandering to the lowest common denominator.
What a brave new world we live in...
It's not really new...Richard Hofstadter won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for Anti-intellectualism in American Life wherein he argued that it was fundamentally embedded into the American character due to the democratization of education and our evangelical Protestant heritage.
I believe it's vim vs. emacs :P
I think Camus knew that there were things that he didn't know about political economy while Sartre was more certain that the vast oversimplification of reality that is marxist economics could somehow be hammered somehow into the mold of reality. The problem of economic calculation is deceptively easy to hand-wave away.
The problem with the communists wasn't the "oversimplification of marxist economics", after all capitalist policies are based on similar oversimplifications. It was the power struggles, and the controlling party elites.
Other than human nature, it had everything going for it.
The subtler arguments against socialism are not amenable to sound bites. The one that was initially penned in the 1920s and has stood the test of time the best is "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth"[1]. This kicked off the Socialist calculation debate[2] which was on-going during the 20th century. It was largely settled in favor of the anti-central planners with the collapse of communism and Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in China.
[1]https://mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-com...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_calculation_debate
It really all comes down to pricing theory, right? Marxism says that labor has intrinsic economic value. That's fundamental to Marxist communist thought, from economics to social theory to theories of history.
Liberal economic theory says that there's no such thing as intrinsic economic value. See Diamond Fallacy. Optimal price signaling through a free market would be a necessary corollary. (And I think the Halting Problem could be used to prove that.)
Neither seem right to me, but Marxism definitely seems far more wrong. Nonetheless, concepts like dignity and justice wouldn't exist if labor and other activities didn't have some kind of intrinsic value, however indefinite or indeterminable. The vast majority of people in capitalist societies, especially those in ultra capitalist societies, and particularly Americans, believe in an intrinsic worth to labor. And human concepts such as dignity, justice, and "the value of human life" exist precisely to define what we perceive as intrinsic value. And perhaps that's what democracy is about--a hack bolted onto free market capitalism to aggregate (in a very poor manner) our normative assessments of different kinds of intrinsic values, and to pay those costs more optimally than capitalism alone could manage.
It is remarkable how little attention this gets.
Marxism has nice slogans, but very little attention is given to the details of what is the value of good quality paper clips or whatever.
The assumption of perfect knowledge and that wise central planners can beat bottom up and local knowledge is wrong. It's interesting what a common assumption it is too. Even though government and large organisation inefficiency is often remarked about.
If capitalism (and more merely wanting to make a profit when you can) was so great fit for human nature, one has to wonder why people were forced out of their villages, beaten, trained, enslaved in colonies, and policed, to adopt it in any large numbers. Compared to these processes, Stalin was a small-time crook.
Humans have lived and thrived without capitalist economies and with other priorities (from moral to religious and to civic duty) presiding over markets and profit for millennia.
The mere presence of commerce is not the same as capitalism (whose start is estimated at the 15th or 16th century, and it's total, often cancerous, spread over traditional communities in the 20th century).
It's a crude fit for human nature, yup; now I beg you suggest a better one. The medieval church was a pretty crude fit too, coping with unconscious motivation fairly well, encouraging innovation not so well. I think we can and will do better one day, but the socialism we have now is far too naive. I think kindness, responsibility and shrewdness about human nature might be put together in one system, but such a working system isn't clear to me, and we aren't doing much to think one up.
re "The subtler arguments against socialism are not amenable to sound bites." History is unsubtle - especially where communism is concerned. Many arguments can be put forward to discredit it, but none are really neede. There's another couple soundbites (more accurately, aphorisms) for you.
The (lack of recognition of the) unconscious mind cripples socialism. Interestingly, Christianity and Buddhism both sneak it in, in one roundabout way or another; the next social movement needs to start right there, with the unconscious mind - tackling the conundrum of our deeper motivations including sexual selection. That might be possible. Sexual selection (often aided by our unconscious) overpowers every version of socialism so far. We need a version that can cope with that extreme pressure on human action.
Oh, not this again. Moderation improves only wrong ideas. Yes, experiments with social order are costly, but it absolutely doesn't mean that "even the most venerable and worthy ideas need to be balanced against one another".
Freedom is an awful word (to use in rigorous discourse) because it simultaneously means two very different, if not in some way opposite things. Freedom can be used in the sense of having many options to execute your will, or it can be used in the sense of having nothing to lose by executing your will[0].
[0] - http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/kriskristofferson/meandbobbym...
That's easily remedied by defining what's meant by freedom, which was a major part of the existentialist project.
So Camus against violence and Sartre for.
Makes sense; the philosopher or revolutionary most in favour of violence comes from the middle or upper classes, not the lower.
Rereading my comment I see it can be interpreted different ways.
So to clarify I was thinking of middle-class advocates of radical left wing causes - such as Che Guevera.
Those guys were writers, not philosophers in the first place.
Unlimited, pure freedom does not exist and hence the absolute Free Will. It is an empty concept. Freedom is bound by the mind, the mind is bound by biology. Biology is bound by physics and other constraints of the environment. The Universe of Ideas is mere a hallucination. Suicide as an ultimate act of freedom, which is the canonical illustration - the only freedom man have. Not much freedom, after all.
> Those guys were writers, not philosophers in the first place.
It's interesting that you begin with a comment like this to seemingly dismiss Satre and Camus as not being real philosophers, and then you proceed to put forward your own terribly unfounded philosophy with no supporting argument.
Show me a flaw in my logic before judging my style.
Speculations is not a substitute for philosophy. Philosophy, originally, was the quest for "reality as it is", which eventually destroyed religious dogmas and was a precursor for specialized sciences.
Arguably, with Hegel, at least in the West, the term philosophy lost any meaning and became mere abstract fancy speculations, similar to theology and mysticism.
Fortunately, there is Eastern philosophy too and the branch which is called philosophy of science. Camus and Sartre have nothing to contribute here.
dylanfw showed you a flaw in your facts. Sartre and Camus were in fact philosophers by any reasonable definition of the word.
Or rather, dylanfw claimed a flaw in your "facts". But your claim - that they were not philosophers - was just a claim, with no supporting reason given. It can be dismissed just as easily (and with more justice).
And, dylanfw said "... with no supporting argument". He/she can'd dismiss your logic because there is no logic - just some dogmatic claims, with no support whatsoever.
> Arguably, with Hegel, at least in the west, the term philosophy lost any meaning and became mere abstract speculations, similar to theology.
With Hegel, philosophy became irrational. For a good explanation, see "Escape From Reason" by Francis Schaeffer.
> Fortunately, there is Eastern philosophy too.
You think that Eastern philosophy isn't abstract speculation, similar to theology? Why?
> philosophy became irrational
This is contradiction.
> Eastern philosophy isn't abstract speculation, similar to theology? Why?
Due to its goal and its method. The goal was to find the ultimate reality, as they call it. The method was of removing nonsense, not pilling up more abstract concepts. A recursive process of reaching the ultimate base case, if you wish.
The culmination is, arguably, the Upanishads and to some extent Advaita Vedanta and the Buddhist philosophy of mind. For its time it was remarkable achievements and for the most parts in its fundamental principles it still does not have a contradiction with the principles confirmed by the findings of the classic sciences.
Philosophy didn't become irrational on its own. It took Karl Marx's work to thoroughly debunked it as such (e.g. Manuscripts of 1844). At least the action and moral parts. The knowledge aspect remained open to speculation and reflection (i.e. epistemology).
What they have in common is the successful negation of Marx's work by placing philosophy on life-support, which it still is today, and by acting as if either the marxist critique never happened, or, it is equivalent to leninist/stalinist ideology.
There cannot be a "flaw" in a sequence of statements which do not form a silogism. There is no flaw in your logic because there is no logic.
What qualifies one to count as a philosopher in your opinion? I don't know about Camus, but I'm pretty sure Sartre has produced at least as much purely philosophical works as works of literature and is universally considered one of the most important philosophers of 20th century.
The nonexistence of absolute free will does not make it a useless concept just like the nonexistence of "absolute" solid bodies doesn't make "solid body" a useless concept.
>Those guys were writers, not philosophers in the first place.
Philosophy is generally defined as explicit thought about the most fundamental issues. That is what the two of them did, so they were by definition philosophers.
I think what you are meaning to argue is that they were poor philosophers.
Camus said the only freedom is suicide. (The Myth of Sisyphus)
I agree with the others. The way I like to put it is that the only true freedom is in the _choice_ of suicide. The corollary is that to find any meaning in life you have to first come to terms with that grim reality. If and how you come to terms with that reality shapes the meaning of your life.
You can, of course, choose suicide. But then it's lights-out and so there's not much to discuss in that case. I don't think either Sartre or Camus saw suicide as cowardly, but maybe I'm wrong about that. As far as I see it, perceiving suicide as cowardly is sort of at odds with existentialist claim. If suicide is cowardly then suicide isn't much of a choice at all and then there really isn't any freedom at all.
(Of course, being animals with an intrinsic evolutionary predisposition to avoid death, suicide isn't much of a choice at all. Unless you're mentally ill, it's _really_ difficult to convince yourself to die. The lack of freedom in this world is actually much more grim than even existentialists wish to admit. But I'm happy to adopt the existentialist conceit as I think existentialism says something profound and profoundly concise about how to find meaning in life.)
>"If suicide is cowardly then suicide isn't much of a choice at all and then there really isn't any freedom at all."
A cowardly choice is still a choice, it's still a possibility. Freedom is freedom to choose, it imposes no limits on what motivates you.
Aside from this, cowardly doesn't seem to fit suicide, if we're going for negative connotations then self-absorbed seems more appropriate IMO.
>"The lack of freedom in this world is actually much more grim than even existentialists wish to admit."
What do you mean by this? What freedom do you feel you lack?
I think you are mistaken. At least from my reading of The Stranger I remember Camus stating suicide is a cowardly act. Wikipedia[1] states Camus viewed suicide as a rejection of freedom. Also the myth of sisyphus doesn't have much to do with suicide does it? I may be mistaken. I thought it was more of an analogy to the condition of man, not so much a suggestion to commit suicide to avoid it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_suicide#Absurdis...
Having just read Myth of Sisyphus, the first 3rd is essentially dedicated to the idea of suicide and how to process that choice in the face of "meaning".
He said suicide is the most interesting and pressing philosophical question. The ultimate act of rebellion he seems to advise is to live free in the face of and with the full consciousness of the absurdity of this existence, like pushing a rock up a hill over and over again.