Freedom in Absolute and Relative Terms

When we ask ourselves what is the nature of freedom, we are effectively asking ourselves what is our relationship to the world. To ask what it means to be free is to ask to what extent we are bound to the world, to what extent we are limited by the world as we encounter it. The three philosophers (or philosophical writers) who are under consideration here - Sartre, Gide, Camus - all argue this point, although in different ways, or rather with different emphases. This paper, focusing on three works of fiction Of the three, examine their understanding of personal freedom and the way in which our own beliefs about the degree of freedom that we have affect the way in which we interpret the reality of the world. While all three of these writers are fundamentally concerned with the nature of freedom, they vary substantially in the reasons that they assign to the necessity to fight for freedom. For Sartre freedom is everything - the limits of our potential as humans and the greatest responsibility that we carry as a species. For Gide and Camus, freedom is not so much the essential, a priori condition of humanity. Rather, they saw the virtue of freedom, and the importance of fighting for freedom, as an essential way to free themselves of the falsity of the world, a way in which they could find their own natures.

Before looking at these three texts in greater depth, we will first examine more generally how each of these writers conceived the n

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is certainly not an "outsider," neither consciously choosing to remain outside society nor being rejected by it. On the contrary, Meursault is the perfect model of a young lower-middle-class pied-noir, with an ordinary desk job, and with the ordinary insider's simple taste for watching a banal film, having a drink at the local bar, going to the beach, lying in the sun. He is very much inside the French Algerian colonial scene, living the most ordinary of lives, not at all a social reject an in no way a rebel... at least not yet (Korkos 43). The central incident of The Stranger - the murder that is so very different from the murder of Amedee in Les Caves du Vatican was based on a real event in which a friend of Camus had an argument with a group of Arabs that led to knives and guns being drawn but only rather minimal injuries. Camus himself was involved in the argument, but not the fight; but it made a lifelong impression on him as he tried to understand how it could come about that individuals were so little engaged in the reality of the world, so little determined to experience what the world had to offer, that they should come to care so little about violence or pain or even life (Korkos 51). Freedom, Reality and Madnes

Category: Literature - F