The Pillars of Unbelief -- Sartre
PETER KREEFT
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Just as we have pillars of Christian faith, the saints, so are there
individuals who have become pillars of unbelief. Peter Kreeft
discusses six modern thinkers who've had an enormous impact on our
everyday life. They have also done great harm to the Christian mind.
The articles in this series constitute background to help us
understand the main personalities, and those ideas they advocated,
which have led us to the secular society.
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Jean-Paul Sartre
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Jean-Paul Sartre may be the most famous atheist of the 20th century.
As such, he qualifies for anyone's short list of "pillars of
unbelief."
Yet he may have done more to drive fence-sitters toward the faith than
most Christian apologists. For Sartre has made atheism such a
demanding, almost unendurable, experience that few can bear it.
Comfortable atheists who read him become uncomfortable atheists, and
uncomfortable atheism is a giant step closer to God. In his own words,
"Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the
consequences of a coherent atheistic position." For this we should be
grateful to him.
He called his philosophy "existentialism" because of the thesis that
"existence precedes essence." What this means concretely is that "man
is nothing else than what he makes of himself." Since there is no God
to design man, man has no blueprint, no essence. His essence or nature
comes not from God as Creator but from his own free choice.
There's profound insight here, though it is immediately subverted. The
insight is the fact that man by his free choices determines who he
will be. God indeed creates what all men are. But the individual
fashions his own unique individuality. God makes our what but we make
our who. God gives us the dignity of being present at our own
creation, or co-creation; He associates us with Himself in the task of
co-creating our selves. He creates only the objective raw material,
through heredity and environment. I shape it into the final form of
myself through my free choices.
Unfortunately, Sartre contends that this disproves God, for if there
were a God, man would be reduced to a mere artifact of God, and thus
would not be free. He constantly argues that human freedom and dignity
require atheism. His attitude is like that of a cowboy in a Western,
saying to God as to an enemy cowboy: "This town ain't big enough for
both you and me. One of us has to leave."
Thus Sartre's legitimate concern with human freedom and his insight
into how it makes persons fundamentally different from mere things
lead him to atheism because (1) he confuses freedom with independence,
and because (2) the only God he can conceive of is one who would take
away human freedom rather than creating and maintaining it -- a sort
of cosmic fascist. Furthermore, (3) Sartre makes the adolescent
mistake of equating freedom with rebellion. He says freedom is only
"the freedom to say no."
But this is not the only freedom. There's also the freedom to say yes.
Sartre thinks we compromise our freedom when we say yes, when we
choose to affirm the values we've been taught by our parents, our
society, or our Church. So what Sartre means by freedom is very close
to what the beatniks of the `50s and the hippies of the `60s called
"doing your own thing," and what the Me generation of the `70s called
"looking out for No. 1."
Another concept Sartre takes seriously but misuses is the idea of
responsibility. He thinks that belief in God would necessarily
compromise human responsibility, for we would then blame God rather
than ourselves for what we are. But that's simply not so. My heavenly
Father, like my earthly father, is not responsible for my choices or
the character I shape by means of those choices; I am. And the fact of
my responsibility no more disproves the existence of my heavenly
Father than it disproves the existence of my earthly father.
Sartre has a keen awareness of evil and human perversity. He says, "We
have learned to take Evil seriously...Evil is not an
appearance...Knowing its causes does not dispel it. Evil cannot be
redeemed."
Yet he also says that since there is no God and since we therefore
create our own values and laws, there really is no evil: "To choose to
be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we
choose, because we can never choose evil." So Sartre gives both too
much reality to evil ("Evil cannot be redeemed") and too little ("We
can never choose evil").
Sartre's atheism does not merely say that God doesn't exist, but that
God is impossible. He at least pays some homage to the biblical notion
of God as "I Am by calling it the most self-contradictory idea ever
imagined, "the impossible synthesis" of being-for-itself (subjective
personality, the "I") with being-in-itself (objective eternal
perfection, the "Am").
God means the perfect person, and this is for Sartre a contradiction
of terms. Perfect things or ideas, like Justice or Truth, are
possible; and imperfect persons, like Zeus or Apollo, are possible.
But the perfect person is impossible. Zeus is possible but not real.
God is unique among gods: not only unreal but impossible.
Since God is impossible and since God is love, love is impossible. The
most shocking thing in Sartre is probably his denial of the
possibility of genuine, altruistic love. In place of God, most
atheists substitute human love as the thing they believe in. But
Sartre argues that this is impossible. Why?
Because if there is no God, each individual is God. But there can be
only one God, one absolute. Thus, all interpersonal relationships are
fundamentally relationships of rivalry. Here, Sartre echoes
Machiavelli. Each of us necessarily plays God to others; each of us,
as the author of the play of his own life, necessarily reduces others
to characters in his drama.
There is a little word which ordinary people think denotes something
real and which lovers think denotes something magical. Sartre thinks
it denotes something impossible and illusory. It is the word "we."
There can be no "we-subject," no community, no self-forgetful love if
each of us is always trying to be God, the one single unique
I-subject.
Sartre's most famous play, "No Exit," puts three dead people in a room
and watches them make hell for each other simply by playing God to
each other -- not in the sense of exerting external power over each
other but simply by knowing each other as objects. The shocking lesson
of the play is that "hell is other people."
It takes a profound mind to say something as profoundly false as that.
In truth, hell is precisely the absence of other people, human and
divine. Hell is total loneliness. Heaven is other people, because
heaven is where God is, and God is Trinity. God is love, God is "other
persons."
Sartre's tough-minded honesty makes him almost attractive, despite his
repellant conclusions like the meaninglessness of life, the
arbitrariness of values and the impossibility of love. But his
honesty, however deep it may have lodged in his character, was made
trivial and meaningless because of this denial of God and thus of
objective Truth. If there is no divine mind, there is no truth except
the truth each of us makes of himself. So if there's nothing for me to
be honest about except me, what meaning does honesty have?
Yet we cannot help rendering a mixed verdict on Sartre, and being
gratified by his very repulsiveness -- for it flows from his
consistency. He shows us the true face of atheism: absurdity (that's
the abstract word), and nausea (that's the concrete image he uses, and
the title of his first and greatest novel).
"Nausea" is the story of a man who, after arduous searching, finds the
terrible truth that life has no meaning, that it's simply nauseating
excess, like vomit or excrement. (Sartre deliberately tends toward
obscene images because he feels life itself is obscene.)
We cannot help agreeing with William Barrett when he says that "to
those who are ready to use this [nausea] as an excuse for tossing out
the whole Sartrian philosophy, we may point out that it is better to
encounter one's existence in disgust than never to encounter it at
all."
In other words, Sartre's importance is like that of Ecclesiastes: He
asks the greatest of all questions, courageously and unswervingly, and
we can admire him for that. Unfortunately, he also gives the worst
possible answer to it, as Ecclesiastes did: "Vanity of vanity, all is
vanity."
We can only pity him for that, and with him the many other atheists
who are clear-headed enough to see as he did that "without God all
things are permissible" -- but nothing has meaning.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Kreeft, Peter. "The Pillars of Unbelief -- Sartre" The National
Catholic Register, (January - February 1988).
To subscribe to The National Catholic Register call 1-800-421-3230.
THE AUTHOR
Peter Kreeft has written extensively (over 25 books) in the areas of
Christian apologetics. He teaches at Boston College in Boston
Massachusetts. Peter Kreeft is on the Advisory Board of the Catholic
Educator's Resource Center.
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/civilization/cc0013.html
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