The man who said no
O'Brien, Dennis
THE FIRST SERIOUS ATHEIST OF THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION The man who said no DENNIS O'BRIEN THE HISTORY of great men seems to require periods: Picasso's blue period, his rose period. German...
...He was for and against the Communists...
...This does not mean that I discover his absence in some particular spot in the establishment...
...When asked what held the vast bulk of his work together: plays, novels, short stories, literary criticism, biography, political commentary, Sartre unhesitatingly answered that it was his philosophical approach...
...The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven...
...Resistance was his natural way of life: Never were we more free than under the Germans . . . The often frightful circumstances of our struggle enabled us finally to live undisguised and fully revealed, that awful unbearable situation which we call the human condition...
...his absence congeals the cafe in its evanescence...
...Trapped in his own doubt, assured only of himself as negator, Descartes finally concludes that the world which is given to him is underwritten by a trustworthy God who would not be likely to fill his head with garbage...
...Thomas was overawed by the priority of existence over essence, at the too-muchness of divine existence...
...Jean-Paul as the Divine Son...
...When Descartes took us to the limit of denial, he carefully cautioned the reader to withdraw into solitude as he had been able to do in the long Germanic night...
...There is human faith, hope and love but they work their way only as long as the individual maintains them in continuous creation...
...Sartre's life was littered with ideological ruptures with the likes of Albeit Camus, Raymond Aron, Arthur Koestler, Merleau-Ponty...
...Sartre kept embracing and attacking Communism wherever, in some particular historical configuration, moments of human community were achieved or denied...
...The Christian deity lacks Plato's value blueprints, the Forms...
...I go to a cafe to meet a friend and I scrutinize the place only to discover that he is not there...
...Sartre is equally overwhelmed in the most famous passage in his immense oeuvre: And then all at once it was as clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself...
...Sartre is rigorous enough to see that these strategies are failures...
...Something elseNature, Humanity, Love—would serve the traditional function of the Supreme Being...
...In a superbly observed passage he discusses how a situation can be determined by an absence...
...I have written, I have lived, I have nothing to regret...
...it makes itself ground for a determined figure...
...When I enter the cafe in search of Pierre, there is found the synthetic organization of all objects in the cafe as the ground on which Pierre is about to appear . . . But now Pierre is not here...
...Slavery was a wicked institution as was its nasty descendant, Jim Crow...
...I think, therefore I am," said Descartes, and Sartre openly approved of the dictum not only metaphysically but, evidently, in everyday life...
...Sartre was a kind of Communist...
...I believe that Sartre, like the others, has absolutely no political philosophy at all...
...Sartre was fundamentally, uncompromisingly, and incessantly a philosopher, and that is the source of his great "No...
...How did Descartes get out of his self-imposed freedom...
...What good is such a radical freedom...
...I have seen people, some good, some wicked...
...without God the world suffers a fundamental vanishing of value...
...The fictive creation which one throws over a life of chance is only words, however, it takes a true Word to compose not only autobiography but life itself...
...I am the giver and the gift.'' Sartre said that his life had been destroyed when he could no longer be a writer...
...No good at all...
...Nor is the Cartesian allusion a minor note since in many ways Sartre's philosophy is Descartes for the streets...
...if I decide not to marry, I lose my options...
...If you existed, you had to exist to excess, to the point of moldiness, bloatedness, obscenity . . . (Nausea) The too-muchness which Sartre's hero finds obscene, is the Christian's holy—the glory of God so much spoken of in liturgical texts...
...broken ideological connections, his capacity for deep and lasting friendship is attested to by many—not the least, of whom being Simone de Beauvoir, "Beaver'' as he nicknamed her, with whom he lived from their student days until his death...
...Despite the trail of DENNIS O'BRIEN, author of Hegel on Reason and History (University of Chicago Press), is the president of Bucknell University...
...Thomas less God in Christ...
...It is neant, "naughting," denying which reveals the core of humanity...
...Still, Marcel was correct that even in wicked institutions human beings love and trust one another Conversely, no institution from the family to the church guarantees human community...
...An unfortunate happening...
...In Sartre it is only slightly different...
...What they all have is a philosophy of human community which is something very different...
...I think that a reasonable case can be made that Sartre is the first serious atheist of the Christian tradition...
...On November 10, 1619 Descartes, bedded down in Germany for the winter from military campaign activities, decided to spend the night sorting out what he could know and what he could doubt...
...Sartre criticized the French professors of the 1880s who thought that they could dispose of God as a useless hypothesis and yet retain "morality, society and a law-abiding world...
...Existentialists—they all refuse the title, but it remains—have been everywhere on the political spectrum...
...For Sartre, human reality is divine reality without the ontological goods...
...Human reality is pure only as absolute freedom but that is also absolute negation, withdrawal, alienation from the given world...
...Sartrean denial is not a mere thought experiment to see if we can arrive at a fulcrum truth, it is a way of being in the world...
...But, alas, there is no God...
...A Christian novelist like Mauriac may tell a story like The Vipers' Tangle in which the presence of divine grace discovers love in the heart of a disintegrated human relation...
...In Sartre's case, however, fragments at the surface reflect the deepest structure of his thought...
...It is typical of existentialists to perceive the human communion of a situation and ignore the institution...
...How does Sartre get out of inner negation onto the top of a barrel in front of the Renault works in 1970...
...Radical doubt needs radical solutions...
...Marcel was a monarchist of sorts...
...Nevertheless that is their deepest longing, their fundamental life project...
...Descartes managed to say "no" to the whole normal fabric of life...
...This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous lumps, in disorder—naked with a frightful obscene nakedness...
...Human beings are in a dilemma of a God to whom all things are possible—as long as He creates nothing...
...Sartre wants his denials in full daylight...
...The most interesting way to read the book is to think of Jean-Paul as Jesus Christ...
...The lived world is not a dream, it is a kind of fiction, it is our continuous creation in the manner of a God who also creates out of nothing...
...Jean Baptiste had refused me the pleasure of making his acquaintance...
...Commonweal: 404...
...The Words is a book irt which the narrative is wholly transferred from chance to choice in the manner of tales of divine providence...
...All things gently, tenderly were letting themselves exist like weary women giving way to laughter...
...Sartre was a man who found "No" an ever-recurring act of liberation...
...Descartes proved no faint-hearted doubter and ended the long night wondering not only about easy things like the shape of sticks in water, but whether he had a body or whether all the thoughts in his head were merely the manipulations of some evil, superior demon...
...Simone de Beauvoir first heard of Sartre from Maheu...
...German school children divide Goethe's life by his mistresses...
...There can be no reliance on the theological virtues of faith, hope and love which validate and sustain those human gestures...
...Olivier Todd called him a "nomad Utopian" who wished to be as free to change his habitation as his point of view...
...To Sartre, the human task is to be a writer, the novelist of a life written out in actual deeds...
...Sartre who was raised a Catholic in an indifferently religious household, claimed that he lost his belief in God at age twelve while waiting for two girls at a bus stop in La Rochelle...
...Something works below and beyond the human will to destruction...
...Everything happens as if the world, man and man-in-the world succeeded only in realizing a missing God...
...How DOES the absence of God from the world affect my life...
...Reading the chronology of Jean-Paul Sartre in the French press after his death in April, it seemed that he would be characterized not by liaisons but by breaks with former comrades...
...I cannot believe it will be regarded as his greatest contribution...
...Radical negation becomes the basis of freedom...
...For those who find the persistence of philosophical puzzles some proof that there may be something in the subject after all, it is surprising to note that Sartre moves not a step beyond Descartes...
...He concludes, as long as I doubt, I know that I am something and not nothing...
...Heidegger endorsed either the Nazi party or the Trappists at his infamous Inaugural lecture at Fribourg...
...But how can one be in the world and yet see the core of human reality as saying "No...
...No wonder Underground or a German barracks room at night look like the only preserves for pure freedom...
...Petersburg cellar for spite seems a better figure for "the man who says no...
...Everything happens as if human freedom and nature were presented in a state of disintegration to an ideal synthesis...
...Just as Descartes discovered, without God the negator can newer validate the world—it may be all a dream or my personal fiction...
...He is really remarkable!' This, of course, intrigued me no end...
...Sartre's late "political" work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, which attempts to wed Marxism to existentialism, is a tortured text with fascinating insights on the way in which human beings gather...
...In contrast, Sartre's stories are almost universally about human relations in (he process of disintegration from earlier communion...
...The event may have been casual, the results were not...
...The absence of God haunts the human world...
...This is not the life which most of us sensesomething we fell into, something that has a lot of happenings...
...Political philosophy, in my view, is concerned with institutions...
...Theology not politics was Sartre's metier...
...As he himself noted, though atheism had been long proclaimed, no one seemed at all troubled by God's absence...
...I keep creating myself...
...Human being is nothing, a no-thing, a source of negation, of saying ' 'no'' in the midst of the fullness of being...
...Maheu always spoke admiringly of Sartre...
...in old age, blind and ill, his career as a writer destroyed by these infirmities, he was serene.' 'I have not been fooled by anything, I have not been deceived by anything...
...I am not referring to the elite among us who were active members of the Resistance Movement, but about all Frenchmen who at every hour day and night for four years said, 'no.' Sartre's choice of denial as a way of life did not stem from any personality quirk or a developed misanthropy...
...He could say "No" to the Nobel prize as he could say "No" to earthly possessions...
...the diversity of things was only a veneer...
...Dostoevsky's famous Underground Man who retreats to a St...
...You can't do anything with it since to do something is already to betray that freedom...
...Because Descartes seems a mere algebraist concerned with theory, many students fail to see that the course of those famous meditations is also—to adapt the title of Sartre's novelistic Commonweal: 402 trilogy—"a road to freedom...
...In conversation some twenty years ago, Marcel told me how much he had been impressed with the warm affective relations between blacks and whites in the South...
...Given the radical otherness of human reality—a "hole in being," like Descartes's doubter who always escapes getting stuck in the deterministic fullness of things—Sartre also finds in God the only way "out of the hole...
...She had the habit of accosting people to ask, '.'Have you read Poulou's latest book...
...It had given him a whole new evaluation of the racial issue in America...
...Sartre's philosophy is St...
...No one has been very attracted by his solution, but he insists that he needs a God to make the rescue...
...it carries the figure everywhere in front of it...
...Sartre's father died when he was an infant...
...In fact Pierrre is absent from the whole cafe...
...Descartes wants to assure himself that his thoughts are not the determined casual endproducts of an evil demon or a benign Mother Nature...
...Similarly the vanishing of God is not a piece left out in the corner of our world, it is an absence which haunts us everywhere...
...He chose to live in his latter years in simple surroundings on the tenth floor of an apartment across from the Gare Montparnasse...
...If Sartre is a nay sayer, he developed the tactic from Descartes...
...There is a deeper sense to that claim than the mere effect of blindness...
...Sartre was famous in the public eye for his various political stands...
...In an intellectual climate in which theism seems at best a charming anachronism or a logical muddle, Sartre's profound atheism reveals by contrast what Christian theism may be all about...
...Given his almost visceral loathing of the bourgeois and their way of life, who would have expected him to move in with his mother, on the death of her second husband...
...As a young student at the Sorbonne he was regarded as a considerable "womanizer...
...He never stops thinking,' he used to say to me, 'he thinks from morn till night...
...A traditional deity might carry off the trick of being wholly free and determinatively decisive, but humans aren't up to it...
...Rather than the son of a dead man, I was given to understand that I was the child of miracle...
...As every freshman philosophy student knows, he decided the only thing he could know was that he was a thinking thing, Cogito ergo sum...
...This could be said to characterize the curious, brittle life of French intellectuals who seem to prefer the proper nuance of theory to pragmatic alliance...
...Sartre's great philosophical work, Being and Nothing, is thoroughly Cartesian...
...Pierre absent haunts this cafe...
...he would deny his denials and shake hands again with Aron at a rally for the Vietnamese boat people in 1979...
...IT IS not CLEAR that philosophy in general has ever quite recovered from Descartes, and Sartre shares in the French obsession with this great national ancestor...
...Once there is a world with Jean-Paul Sartre, not all things are possible...
...If I decide to marry, I lose my options...
...Nowhere is this notion of life as a semi-divine fiction more strikingly evident than in 4 July 1980: 403 Sartre's brief autobiographical work, The Words...
Vol. 107 • July 1980 • No. 13
