Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre and "Ordinary Values"

The difference between [Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus] seems to me wonderfully revealed in a little incident related by the Dominican priest Father Bruckberger, who was active in the French resistance and was close to both at the time. Bruckberger used to run into Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir at the cafe, the two of them huddled over books and notes and discussing points of philosophy. They struck him, he remarks, like two permanent graduate students (and perhaps we may add, Sartre remained something of that to the end). They were joined one day by Camus [...] Sartre was then in the process of completing his big book Being and Nothingness, and he was in the misdst of expounding to his hearers the view of absolute liberty which he develops in that tome. This liberty is a possibility we carry around within us like a terrorist's bomb, which at any moment we could detonate in any direction. "Nothing prevents us ..." -- this is Sartre's recurring phrase to indicate that at any moment we can step off in a new direction out of the rut that we have hitherto traveled in life. At that moment a German officer in full regalia walked past on the sidewalk, and Camus, who had been listening in silence, remarked: "Even granted that liberty, there are some things we wouldn't do. For example, you wouldn't denounce me to the Germans even though you had the pure possibility of doing so." The remark, Bruckberger tells us, seemed to disturb Sartere, as if he had never thought of the question so concretely and personally before, and he was at a loss for a reply.

This little episode seems to me to sum up the two men, Sartre the rampant ideologue, and Camus the advocate of what he came to call "ordinary values" -- those elementary feelings of common decency without which the human race would not survive. There was a quality about Camus which made him something different as an intellectual, a quality indeed that most intellectuals lack: he was a man of the people who remained in touch with our common humanity.

-- William Barrett, The Truants pp. 118-119.