On Sartre's God Problem (Norman Mailer | The Nation | 2005)

[struggle4progress]

This article appeared in the June 6, 2005 edition of The Nation ...

Sartre, however, was comfortable as an atheist even if he had no fundament on which to plant his philosophical feet. To hell with that, he didn't need it. He was ready to survive in mid-air. We are French, he was ready to say. We have minds, we can live with the absurd and ask for no reward. That is because we are noble enough to live with emptiness, and strong enough to choose a course which we are even ready to die for. And we will do this in whole defiance of the fact that, indeed, we have no footing. We do not look to a Hereafter.

It was an attitude; it was a proud stance; it was equal to living with one's mind in formless space, but it deprived existentialism of more interesting explorations. For atheism is a cropless undertaking when it comes to philosophy. (We need only think of Logical Positivism!) Atheism can contend with ethics (as Sartre did on occasion most brilliantly), but when it comes to metaphysics, atheism ends in a locked cell. It is, after all, near to impossible for a philosopher to explore how we are here without entertaining some notion of what the prior force might have been. Cosmic speculation is asphyxiated if existence came into being ex nihilo. In Sartre's case--worse. Existence came into being without a clue to suggest whether we are here for good purpose, or there is no reason whatsoever for us.

All the same, Sartre's philosophical talents were damnably virtuoso. He was able to function with precision in the upper echelons of every logical structure he set up. If only he had not been an existentialist! For an existentialist who does not believe in some kind of Other is equal to an engineer who designs an automobile that requires no driver and accepts no passengers. If existentialism is to flourish (that is, develop through a series of new philosophers building on earlier premises), it needs a God who is no more confident of the end than we are; a God who is an artist, not a law-giver; a God who suffers the uncertainties of existence; a God who lives without any of the pre-arranged guarantees that sit like an incubus upon formal theology with its flatulent, self-serving assumption of a Being who is All-Good and All-Powerful. What a gargantuan oxymoron--All-Good and All-Powerful. It is certain to maroon any and all formal theologians who would like to explain an earthquake. Before the wrath of a tsunami, they can only break wind. The notion of an existential God, a Creator who may have been doing His or Her artistic best, but could still have been remiss in designing the tectonic plates, is not within their scope.

Sartre was alien to the possibility that existentialism might thrive if it would just assume that indeed we do have a God who, no matter His or Her cosmic dimensions, (whether larger or smaller than we assume), embodies nonetheless some of our faults, our ambitions, our talents and our gloom. For the end is not written. If it is, there is no place for existentialism. Base our beliefs, however, on the fact of our existence, and it takes no great step for us to assume that we are not only individuals but may well be a vital part of a larger phenomenon that searches for some finer vision of life that could conceivably emerge from our present human condition. There is no reason, one can argue, why this assumption is not nearer to the real being of our lives than anything the oxymoronic theologians would offer us. It is certainly more reasonable than Sartre's ongoing assumption--despite his passionate desire for a better society--that we are here willy-nilly and must manage to do the best we can with endemic nothingness installed upon eternal floorlessness. Sartre was indeed a writer of major dimension, but he was also a philosophical executioner. He guillotined existentialism just when we needed most to hear its howl, its barbaric yawp that there is something in common between God and all of us. We, like God, are imperfect artists doing the best we can. We may succeed or fail--God as well as us. That is the implicit if undeveloped air of existentialism. We would do well to live again with the Greeks, live again with the expectation that the end remains open but human tragedy may well be our end ... http://www.thenation.com/article/sartres-god-problem

Set out to try to find some of Sartre's discussion of his atheism and encountered this

[Warren Stupidity]

1. It is a shame that the late Mailer in his dotage re-embraced religiosity.

[Jim__]

2. "... man is the being whose project is to be God."

Norman Mailer was a great writer. His ideas about God always seemed simplistic and, I don't think his ideas can really compete with Sartre's on this subject. I'm not claiming that Sartre was right, but rather that he had thought through the topic more thoroughly than Mailer (and most of the rest of us). My recollection, admittedly old and fading, is that Sartre's thoughts about God centered on two main points. First, that the concept of God was untenable. Second that man's freedom, again my recollection is that this was central to Sartre's philosophy, precluded a God.

A short excerpt from Sartre's Existentialism and Human Emotions addresses the issue a bit:

The Best Way to conceive of the fundamental project of human reality is to say
that man is the being whose project is to be God. Whatever may be the myths and
rites of the religion considered, God is first "sensible to the heart" of man as the
one who identifies and defines him in his ultimate and fundamental project. If
man possesses a pre-ontological comprehension of the being of God, it is not the
great wonders of nature nor the power of society which have conferred it upon
him. God, value and supreme end of transcendence, represents the permanent
limit in terms of which man makes known to himself what he is. To be man
means to reach toward being God. Or if you prefer, man fundamentally is the
desire to be God.

The rest of the text contains more on Sartre's thoughts about God.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Either Mailer was ignorant of biological history, or he really thought existence was all about him

"Base our beliefs, however, on the fact of our existence, and it takes no great step for us to assume that we are not only individuals but may well be a vital part of a larger phenomenon that searches for some finer vision of life that could conceivably emerge from our present human condition. There is no reason, one can argue, why this assumption is not nearer to the real being of our lives than anything the oxymoronic theologians would offer us. It is certainly more reasonable than Sartre's ongoing assumption--despite his passionate desire for a better society--that we are here willy-nilly and must manage to do the best we can with endemic nothingness installed upon eternal floorlessness. "

So, what did Mailer think was going on 50 million years ago? Were small mammals and birds "searching for some finer vision of life that could conceivably emerge from their condition"? Or were they just existing? Or did Mailer think that humans like himself were inevitable, and that the 'reason' for a few billion years of evolution on Earth was to produce the great Norman Mailer?

I think that Sartre's views hold up far better with the actual facts than those of either the theologians Mailer disparages, or Mailer's assumption that someone has produced the present human condition so that Mailer can muse on the reason for his own existence.