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Old 09-30-2007, 09:40 PM   #30
Archaea
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If you haven't read Camus and Sartres in a long time, you owe it to yourself to do so.

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This sense of estrangement from others is found in another classic of Existentialism, the novel The Stranger (1942), by Camus. Like many of Camus' stories, this one is set in Algeria. It is about a fellow whose mother dies but who can't stand sitting up at her wake. He leaves, and offends the community by his evident disrespect. Later, he kills a local Arab. This is not something that the French colonial judicial system would ordinarily take very seriously, but local French opinion is so unsympathetic with our "stranger," just because he left his mother's wake, that he is condemned for the killing of the Arab. The absurdity of all this is the point of the story. An Existentialist is always a stranger to others and is certainly going to have no patience with conventions like wakes for the dead or, for that matter, laws about murder.
The isolation produced by Existentialist value decisions also explains why few Existentialists are self-identified as such. Calling someone an "Existentialist" imposes an essence on them, telling them what they are. This violates their absolute autonomy and freedom and makes it sound like they actually have something important in common with some other people, other Existentialists. This is intolerable.
Sartre himself felt the moral loss involved in all this. Traditional ideas about moral responsibility disappeared when there was nothing meaningful to be responsible about. Sartre consequently tried to compensate for this by introducing a new, strengthened sense of responsibility. His view was that one is "responsible" for all the consequences of one's action, whether it is possible to know about them or not. He illustrated this in a short story about the Spanish Civil War. A young Republican partisan is captured by the Fascists. He is told that he will be executed unless he betrays some other Republicans who are considered more important. Not knowing, in fact, where they are, he makes up a story that they are hiding in a cemetery on the edge of town. He is then put in a cell. Later, the Fascists return and release him. What happened? Well, it turned out, just by chance, that the Republicans he pretended to betray actually were hiding in the cemetery, and were captured. So it's his fault.
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