system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
why are camus and satre associated w/ each other?

i’ve never understood this? camus has said he “is not an existentialist” and describes existentialism as “philosophical suicide”; why are they paired and often mentioned in the same sentence?

edit: i’ve found this quote from camus:

“Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked. We have even thought of publishing a short statement in which the undersigned declare that they have nothing in common with each other and refuse to be held responsible for the debts they might respectively incur. It’s a joke actually. Sartre and I published our books without exception before we had ever met. When we did get to know each other, it was to realize how much we differed. Sartre is an existentialist, and the only book of ideas that I have published, The Myth of Sisyphus, was directed against the so-called existentialist philosophers.”
gpt
They wrote at the same time, at the same place, and about the same basic problem of existence - i.e. the ungrounded and meaningless nature from which human experience springs and, as an upshot, the primacy of human experience in making sense of more or less everything.

Also, they both did so through popular fiction and both wrote in the popular press - even in the same forums, like *Combat*, and about the same topics, like socialism, war, revolution, and violence.

It’s no big surprise that people both then and now see them as pretty similar - especially when you put them in a broad context were they’re so remarkable dissimilar to other “big names.”