Posts tagged Sartre
‘The language of poetry rises from the ruins.’ - pierrot le fou. (1965)
Which I like to think is a reference to french existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre,
“The language of poetry rises up on the ruins of prose.”
- Jean Paul Sartre, 1948.
Existentialism and Religion.
Probably the most well-known intellectual atheists of the 20th century were Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. However Camus privately and Sartre publicly converted vaguely to monotheism, Catholic and Jewish respectively.
A look at the rationale behind their conversions constitutes the best case for the existence of God. We may call this the existentialist argument for God. It’s also touched by Pascal, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, Lewis, Wittgenstein, and the film (I haven’t read the book) Life of Pi.
First, ground rules:
- God’s existence or non-existence cannot be objectively demonstrated through empirical evidence or deductive argument. Why?
- Because the question of God, by most definitions, concerns basic presuppositions about reality itself. Contra “new atheism” the question is not scientific. It is pre-scientific, pre-theoretic, as Karl Popper eloquently stated. Consider:
- You can demonstrate the proposition “a tree exists” by showing a tree to me. You and I share (in language and practice if not in conscious theory) basic presuppositions like the physical world exists, other minds exist, and one can satisfactorily demonstrate to other people that a tree-size physical object exists by showing it to them.
- But you cannot objectively demonstrate basic presuppositions themselves. We have no common ground here, no criteria for satisfactory objective demonstration in language and practice..
So how could we move forward? Is the question itself pointless, leaving us only the agnostic or the arbitrary? Not necessarily. (Not if you care about the question anyway.)
Wittgenstein in Culture and Value (1984) offers the imagery of iron. Physical sciences, deduction, and so forth are cold. You need cold to set the molecular bonds and use the tool. But first you need heat. As heat forges iron, so intuition and reflection and personal experience mould our understanding of the scaffolding of reality. These are other, more fundamental, more necessary means of knowing than objective empiricism. These are the kind of methods you must use if you are to investigate the question of God.
Which basic presupposition—atheism or theism—makes more sense of your experience of the universe? There is no objectively right or wrong answer here.
The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
As for me, I don’t see myself as so much dust that has appeared in the world but as a being that was expected, prefigured, called forth. In short, as a being that could, it seems, come only from a creator; and this idea of a hand that that created me refers me back to God.
Does the possibility and actuality of a physical universe ordered by natural laws make more sense to you under the lights of atheistic or theistic presuppositions? Does the possibility and actuality of meaning or purpose in human experience line up better with one or the other? Paraphrasing Life of Pi, “given you can’t objectively determine which story is true and given the immediate result is the same, which is the better story: the one with the cannibalism or the one with the tiger?”
For me, the most interesting observation is that in fact humans have this wide sense of purposeful personhood which may make more sense under the theistic premise of a transcendently purposeful personhood in God.
I don’t know whether I’m convinced. I remain agnostic for the time being. The iron’s still hot.
This morning over breakfast S. asked me why I looked so glum.
“Because,” I said, “everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident.”
“Jesus,” S. said. “Aren’t you ever off the clock?”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/shouts/2012/10/le-blog-de-jean-paul-sartre.html#ixzz29lassq8w
Excerpts of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness with a backwards map of the world at night burned into it - Luke Nedza
Sartre and the Anguish of Freedom →
In the series of extracts from my almost-finished book on the history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 15, which looks at existentialism, and primarily the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. This extract is from the section that explores Sartre’s concept of freedom and his relationship to Marxism.
Imagine, Kierkegaard wrote in his pseudonymously published The Concept of Anxiety, a man standing at the edge of a cliff. When he glances over the edge, he is overcome with dread, not just because he is filled with fear at the thought of falling, but also because he is seized by a terrifying impulse deliberately to leap. ‘He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy’, Kierkegaard gnomically observed. That dizziness ‘is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss.’ For if ‘he had not looked down’, he would not have felt that dread. What grips that man, Kierkegaard suggests, is dread of the possibilities open to him; what he experiences ‘is the dizziness of freedom’.
Sartre, too, sees what he calls ‘anguish’ as the condition of human freedom. Since nothing can determine our choice of life for us, neither can anything explain or justify what we are. There is no inherent meaning in the universe. Only we can create meaning. Albert Camus, the French-Algerian novelist and fellow existentialist, called this sense of groundlessness the ‘absurdity’ of life. There is, Camus observes in The Myth of Sisyphus, a chasm between ‘the human need [for meaning] and the unreasonable silence of the world’. Religion is a means of bridging that chasm, but a dishonest one. ‘I don’t know if the world has any meaning that transcends it’, he writes. ‘But I know that I do not know this meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.’ Camus does not know that God does not exist. But he is determined to believe it, because that is the only way to make sense of being human. The only way to find meaning, the only way to bridge the chasm between the cold, silent world and the human need for moral warmth, is to create our own meaning, our own values. Sartre similarly sees the world as absurd in the sense that there is no meaning to be found beyond the meaning that humans create. The price of making meaning is anguish.
The recognition that humans have to bear responsibility for our lives and the values we create is the source of anguish. A wholly authentic or truly human life, Sartre suggests, is only possible for those who recognize the inescapability of freedom and its responsibility and are happy to live with anguish. But humankind, Sartre agrees with TS Eliot, mostly ‘cannot bear too much reality’. They fear, they dread, they feel enchained by, the responsibility of freedom.
Humans try to avoid the anguish that comes with looking over the cliff edge by hiding the truth from themselves, by pretending that there is no cliff, that something or someone has erased that edge. There are, Sartre suggests, many ways in which people do this. The most important, and the idea for which Sartre is probably most celebrated, is that of ‘bad faith’. People often try to evade the terrifying realities of the human condition by ordering their lives according to some preordained social role, in essence by turning themselves into objects, in an effort to deny the burden of subjectivity.
(Source: sunrec)
A production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Le Mouches, c. 1945
Simone de Beauvoir et Jean-Paul Sartre. Paris, 1959. Photo: Georges Pierre.
(À gauche, Évelyne Rey, actrice, soeur de Claude Lanzmann, qui avait une relation amoureuse avec Sartre).
(Source: beauvoiriana)
“For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad of tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves…. I would like to hold them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stopping one, there would only remain in my hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions.”
Tete-a-Tete, by Hazel Rowley, is an account of the complicated relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The book chronicles their lives together and apart, and shows how they influenced each others’ work. It is hands-down one of the best books I have ever read, and I recommend it to anyone interested in Sartre or Beauvoir, existentialism, or who is just looking for a good read.
Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre in a plane to Brazil, 1960. (Hazel Rowley Archives)
jean-paul sartre as portrayed by reginald gray.
Jean-Paul Sartre Summary →
A highly summarised but nonetheless interesting introduction to Existential principles of Jean-Paul Sartre.
