Camus, the Resistance philosopher of solidarity, discovered (or perhaps re-discovered) the problem of other minds in New York. Unlike Sartre, he had no difficulty with things, trees, the Empire State Building, the impersonal ocean. It was only on looking into the face of another human being that he fully experienced a sense of the tragic. While hell-is-other-people Sartre came to invoke a notion of the “group-in-fusion,†Camus — who had to keep explaining to the students that he was not and never had been an “existentialist†— increasingly redefined the “absurd†in terms of an inevitable failure of language to bridge the gap between individuals. And it was not just the problem of inadequate English in speaking to Americans. He had the same feeling in Quebec.
The clash between Sartre and Camus would come to be defined by their political divergence in the ’50s, crystallized by the publication of “The Rebel†by Camus. But already, in their different reactions to the United States — and particularly New York — we have the ingredients of a philosophical schism. Sartre, on his return to Europe, recalls above all America’s racism and practice of segregation, the inevitable counterpart to its drive to conformity. He writes a play, “The Respectful Prostitute,†that dramatizes the episode of the Scottsboro Boys in the ’30s. The split between contending forces — East and West, black and white, bourgeoisie and proletariat, humans and things — becomes the defining concern of his philosophy, summarized in the (admittedly rebarbative) phrase he comes up with in his “Critique of Dialectical Reason†to define boxing, but which also applies to his relationship with Camus: “a binary praxis of antagonistic reciprocity.†Existentialism in this form, inflected with Marxism, infiltrates the American intelligentsia, is absorbed into black power philosophy (“black existentialismâ€) and finds an echo in writers as disparate as Richard Wright and Norman Mailer.
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