what are the differences between Camus and Sartre in existential thinking?

Question

Freedom? Revolt??
Sartre doesnt' believe in human nature,,what about Camus? He never says he doesn't,, so do they agree with each other?

Answer 1

Now that's a really interesting question - and a mighty big one.
But I'm glad I took the time to research it. I learned a lot, and now I know some of the reasons (besides my feelings) why I've always preferred Camus to Sartre.

1.So Gore went to Cannes and read existentialist philosophers, Sartre and Camus – but whoa up there a minute. Sartre and Camus are often mentioned in the same breath, being as they were friends and occasional antagonists, but the fact is that Camus was not an existentialist. Camus was not even a member of the existentialist extended family (which includes Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard).

2.Camus went on to praise Sartre's descriptions of absurdity, the sense of anguish that arises as the ordinary structures imposed on existence collapse in Antoine Roquentin's life, and his resulting nausea. Sartre's deft handling of this strange and banal subject moves with a "vigor and certainty" reminiscent of Kafka. But—and here Sartre differs from Kafka—"some indefinable obstacle prevents the reader from participating and holds him back when he is on the very threshold of consent." By this, Camus meant not only the imbalance between ideas and images but also Sartre's negativity. Sartre dwells on the repugnant features of humankind "instead of basing his reasons for despair on certain of man's signs of greatness." And the reviewer was also bothered by the "comic" inadequacy of Roquentin's final attempt to find hope in art, considering how "trivial" art is when compared with some of life's redeeming moments.
Camus briefly dismissed existentialists such as Jaspers, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard en route to insisting that nothing could overcome life's absurdity. Sartre, on the other hand, had spent years working through the phenomenology of Heidegger and Husserl until he synthesized them in Being and Nothingness into a work that sought to penetrate the very nature of being. Starting with Cartesian individual consciousness, Sartre carefully described basic structures of existence, fundamental human projects, and characteristic patterns of behavior such as bad faith. By the end of the book he was poised to follow his philosophy's implications, as he did over the next several years, into virtually every aspect of existence—from daily life and politics to ethics, artistic creation, and the nature of knowledge. In The Myth of Sisyphus, on the other hand, starting from the premise that "the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions," Camus stayed on the terrain of experience and its frustrations rather than pursuing "the learned and classical dialectic." Thus both The Myth of Sisyphus and Being and Nothingness began with the absurd and exuded the same zeitgeist; yet they were vastly different.
In addition to their mutual praise and sense of discovery, these texts suggest many differences between Sartre and Camus. Sartre had a more negative and Camus a more positive view of both nature and human reality. Merely to open The Stranger alongside Nausea is to be struck by the contrast between Meursault/Camus's dazzling physicality and Roquentin/Sartre's famous disgust for the physical. Camus reveled in the sensuous world of North Africa, as in Nuptials, and his reader can hardly ignore its intensity and its pleasures. Sartre's writing never embraced the physical world or the body in the direct, unquestioning, and often joyous way so natural to Camus. Indeed, one of the most striking contrasts in modern fiction, as Camus himself knew, is that between the gray, ugly Bouville—"Mudville"—of Nausea and The Stranger's bright, shimmering port city, its beach, and its surrounding countryside, Le Havre and Algiers.
Although both wrote important works of philosophy and fiction and successfully tackled a number of other genres, by temperament the one was primarily a philosopher, absorbed with theories and general ideas, the other primarily a novelist, most comfortably capturing concrete situations—Camus's distinction between "intelligence" and the "instinctive element." The brilliant young philosopher took absurdity as his starting point and slowly, in the five years between Nausea and Being and Nothingness, explored how human activity constitutes a meaningful world from brute, meaningless existence. The philosophizing novelist built an entire worldview on the sense that absurdity is an unsurpassable given of human experience.

3.Basically the feud between Sartre and Camus was about each individual's relation to resistance and violence, history and action. Sartre and Camus argued over some of the following issues -- political commitment, the nature of history, the relation of the "writer" to the struggles of the oppressed, the nature of violence and terrorism, the role of the individual, etc. All of this was in the context of the growing anti-colonial movements, especially movements against French Imperialism in Africa and Indochina and the postwar influence of Stalinism over the European working class and these same anti-colonialist movements. Sartre's emphasis was on opposing oppression in France and opposing French imperialism. Camus' emphasis was on opposing the tyranny of Stalinism and similar totalitarian tyrannies and would not support an anti-imperialist movement that would simply lead to another form of oppression. For Sartre, Camus' moral position provided backhanded political support for imperial oppression. For Camus, Sartre's political position provided moral cover for Stalinist domination. From this distance we can see that they were both correct and both fundamentally confused.

4. A central topic in recent scholarship is the bitter conflict that ended Sartre's friendship with Albert Camus during the 1950s. That dispute is often treated as an episode in the cold war: an inevitable clash resulting from Sartre's growing support for the Soviet Union and Camus's firm anti-Communism. That telling of the story can be found, for example, in a new book by David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War (Oxford University Press).

But their epochal debate is now being reframed. "Enough time has passed, the cold war has finally lifted enough, that people can step back and look at it with new emphases, and a new degree of balance," says Ronald Aronson, a professor of interdisciplinary studies at Wayne State University. His book Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It is due from the University of Chicago Press in January. Mr. Santoni, of Denison, also analyzes the debate at length in his book Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent, published earlier this year by Pennsylvania State University Press. A forthcoming collection of primary documents, Sartre and Camus: A Historic Confrontation (Humanity Books), edited and translated by David A. Sprintzen and Adrian van den Hoven, will add more grist to a busily grinding academic mill.

The two men had formed a formidable intellectual alliance during the mid-1940s. While Sartre was the more sophisticated in matters of technical philosophical argument, Camus had a gift for translating existentialism into eloquent journalistic commentary in the pages of Combat, the newspaper he edited as an underground journal during the Nazi occupation, which became one of the most influential periodicals in the country after the war. Camus's sustained involvement with the Resistance intrigued Sartre, whose participation had been marginal.

As Mr. Aronson's dual biography shows, there were temperamental and ideological differences between Sartre and Camus even when they were friends. But they wrote for one another's journals and cooperated in trying to establish a new left-wing political party.

When that effort collapsed in the late 1940s, Sartre, who had long been denounced by the Communist Party, nevertheless began to treat it as the one force in French society struggling for radical change. In 1951, by contrast, Camus published The Rebel -- an existentialist critique of any ideology that could be used to justify murder, with the communist movement being very much the focus of his concern. A review in Les Temps Modernes by a young Sartrean intellectual treated Camus's efforts at historical and philosophical analysis with heavy sarcasm.

The ensuing political flame-war was severe. Camus accused Sartre of making an opportunistic alliance with a movement that violated in practice any conception of human dignity. Sartre, in a blistering rebuke, accused Camus of carrying "a portable pedestal," from which he handed down lofty moral judgments on the struggle for social justice.

The division only deepened a few years later, when Sartre embraced the cause of the Algerian independence movement. Camus, who grew up in Algeria as part of the community of French settlers, had long denounced the brutality and racism spawned by French colonization. But as the conflict escalated -- with the French Army practicing torture, and the Algerian movement committing acts of terrorism against the settlers -- Camus refused to endorse the call for independence. Sartre, by contrast, treated the violence of the Algerian rebels not only as a necessary means to achieve independence but as a way to overthrow the humiliating effects of colonial rule. Their "revolutionary violence" was a way to reclaim humanity from the "systematic violence" built into the familiar order of colonial domination.

The original debate may have passed into history, but the core question of whether terrorism can ever be justified is urgently contemporary. "Sartreans are among the only groups of intellectuals today able to look strongly and clearly at the issue of systemic violence," says Mr. Aronson, "because their man is the one who really 'got' it. But then again, they're also prone to justifying any and all responses against it, just as Sartre himself did." The discussion might have seemed rather abstract, but now it feels rather less so. For a non-Sartrean, it can be a puzzling experience to hear young scholars quote the philosopher on "regenerative" violence without ever quite saying whether or not Al Qaeda is engaged in it.

In the closing pages of his book, Mr. Aronson tries to imagine a new sort of thinker who can synthesize Sartre's insights and Camus's moral critique. "Such an intellectual," he writes, "would illuminate today's systemic violence while accepting the challenge of raising an effective struggle against it without creating new evils."

Answer 2

user-friendly... God exists, Santa does not. anybody is conscious of we made up Santa - the provides in our stockings come from our parents, and as quickly as you're sufficiently previous to be a determine your self you will comprehend which you ought to do the artwork and you will't enable 'Santa' fill your infant's stocking with imaginary provides. God, on the different hand, is as authentic as you or me and in all possibility 'realer'. he's actual good and has shown himself many cases - this is basically that distinctive human beings do no longer settle for the info because of the fact they do no longer opt to have self assurance he's authentic as this could recommend making variations of their sinful lives and giving themselves to somebody else.