What makes or does not make philosophical sense depends on your philosophy and worldview. To Camus, it makes philosophical sense to detach oneself from the absurdity of the universe, rather than allow oneself to be dragged down by it, by means of a humanistic morality with human values at its heart. Camus, at first an existentialist philosopher and writer, later rejected Sartre’s existentialist philosophy in favor of positive human values.
This. Camus couldn’t handle how absolutely bleak Sartre’s world was.
Sartre’s perspective I thought was actually beautifully illustrated in the highly underrated movie GalaxyQuest. The movie is about a group of actors from a sci-fi tv series(like Star Trek) who end up in space with a group of aliens who think that the actors are actually the crew that they portrayed on tv, and that the television shows were actually “historical documents”. The aliens have based their entire society around this stupid tv series from the 90s, including their ships and how they operate. Anyway, Sigourney Weaver (who is hilarious in the movie) plays the token attractive female on the show. Her ONLY job on the ship is to interface with the ship’s computer by asking it questions. So whenever someone asks a question, she simply repeats it, saying “Computer, how much fuel do we have left?”
Then, when the computer answers, she turns to the crew and repeats exactly what the computer just said.
Well, when they are taken into space by the aliens to help save their planet, the ship is designed to only respond to her voice, so the actress must take on her role from the television series. So she is continuously repeating the questions from the crew to the computer, and then repeating the answers back to the crew. It is, in a word, ABSURD. One of the crew members (Camus in this analogy) realizes this and says, “You know, this is really getting annoying”, to which Weaver (Sartre, here) hilariously replies, “Look, I have ONE job on this lousy ship. It’s STUPID, but I’m gonna do it, okay?”
Weaver realizes the absurdity of her existence, but she continues on the same path anyway. It’s totally pointless, but if she doesn’t do her job, what WILL she do? Sartre just keeps going, knowing that nothing really matters. Camus can’t stand this. He would go crazy, and rightfully so. Camus found Sartre’s philosophy to be intolerable because it just accepts that life is totally pointless.
Camus’ theory doesn’t really require a leap of faith because it doesn’t rely on any outside agent. It relies solely on the individual, which is how it differs from religion. Camus relies on himself alone to attempt to establish meaning for his existence, whereas with religion, we rely on an unprovable God who may or may not exist to somehow imbue us with meaning.
For Camus, both Sartre and Religious individuals are taking the lazy way out. Sartre because he realizes life has no meaning and so denies the need for any real sort of morality or attempt at making sense of it all, and the religious because they just assume their life has meaning because they are created by God and that automatically gives life meaning. Both philosophies require no effort to give meaning to life, because it either has meaning or it doesn’t, period.
Camus doesn’t believe in God, but he can’t cope with a meaningless world, so he decides that the meaning of life is to try to give meaning to a meaningless life. It’s not really a leap of faith, because life is meaningless and he knows this, but the REVOLT is not.
The REVOLT is the meaning. Men are slaves to the meaninglessness of life. We can never escape that meaninglessness no matter how hard we try. BUT, we CAN resist it. We have 3 choices: live as a slave (Sartre), kill ourselves, or die in revolt. Camus saw dying in revolt as the only moral option, as well as the only one that makes life tolerable.
To understand Camus’ position ask yourself this question: would I rather be in prison for my entire life, from birth to death and accept it, or would I rather spend all of my time planning and trying to escape even though I know logically that the prison is inescapable?
For Sartre, the answer is just accept it and move on, but for many real-life prisoners, the only thing that makes prison tolerable is patiently and meticulously planning their escape, even if that escape is pretty much impossible.
