The Role of Art in the Philosophy Camus and Sartre

Abstract

The presented article will depict the problem of art. In existential philosophy. Concentrating on philosophy of Sartre and Camus, one can recognize the role the existentialists attribute to art. Both Nausea by Sartre and L’homme revolte by Camus contain premises for the thought, that man can reach a specific kind of “salvation” or in other words, find oneself through art. This act is always accompanied by creation, struggle with reality of both the creator and the spectator. The art however, as the only domain of human activity, which cannot be achieved in any other way in his existence. The meaning or understanding—open for new interpretations and possible to be temporarily achieved are offered by art itself. The existentialists, developing the problem of existence of human being point out to its ambiguous condition, stretched between authenticity and inauthenticity, becoming oneself and failure of such project. The art, as Sartre emphasizes, can be also divided to authentic and inauthentic, the first one opening before the man the possibility of richer being, allowing to realize, what authenticity and the road to understanding it is.