Albert Camus vs Jean-Paul Sartre on Time
Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre on time, side by side — 4 passages against 5, and what the disagreement is actually about.
Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre both have a great deal to say about time — 4 passages and 5 respectively in thinkr's library — and they do not say the same thing. Setting them side by side is more useful than reading either alone, because the disagreement shows you what each position is actually giving up.
Albert Camus on time
French-Algerian novelist and philosopher of the absurd. The Myth of Sisyphus asks how to live well in a universe without inherent meaning.
“It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.”
“To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”
“Those who need myths are indeed poor. Here the gods serve as beds or resting places as the day races across the sky.”
“What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.”
Jean-Paul Sartre on time
French existentialist novelist and philosopher. Held that existence precedes essence — we are condemned to be free, and to bear the weight of our choices.
“To choose this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.”
“If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.”
“I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.”
“I wanted for the moments in my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. It would be just as well to try to catch time by the tail.”
“Her face seems ravaged by both lightning and hail. But on yours there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.”
Where they part
France/Algeria, 1913–1960 and France, 1905–1980 are not the same world, and the difference is not only historical. Albert Camus treats time as something to be it takes time to live. Like… — a matter of practice. Jean-Paul Sartre approaches it from another side entirely. Neither is refuting the other; they are answering slightly different questions, and noticing which question you are actually asking is most of the work.