At Vassar he [Camus] gave a lecture on “The Crisis of Mankind” and was dazzled by the spectacle of “an army of long-legged young starlets, lazing on the lawn.” But he was preoccupied by what he thought of as the “American tragedy.” The tragedy of the students was that they lacked a sense of the tragic. For Sartre the tragic was the mechanization and objectification of the human. For Camus, the tragic was something more elusive: whatever it was, it was missing in America.
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Tags: America, Camus, de Beauvoir, existentialism, France, liberty, Other Folks Blogs, pragmatism, Sartre, Situatedness

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