The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  Despite his literary talent, Saint-Exupéry had no special fondness for men of letters. Like Malraux, he believed in action. “The role of spectator has always been my bugbear. What am I if I do not take part? If I am to be, I must take part.” Because the universe is not rational, he said, “it reveals itself to action and not to thought.” He believed that “man has no ‘interior’ considered either as a depository of ‘innate’ truths, as a receptacle for facts acquired by perception and reason or as a set of clearly defined characteristics.” He agreed with Malraux, and as he showed via his character Robineau in Vol de nuit, that “neither action nor individual happiness allow of being shared.” For him, throughout history there have been two means of responding to the “spiritual dry-rot” of bourgeois society—love and religion. But both responses are alien. “To love, to love and nothing else—what a dead end!”13

  Contemporary religion, Saint-Exupéry claimed, is unsure of itself, of the message it brings, or the light it offers, and so is unbelief, too. “[Jacques] Bernis [a character in The Aviator] enters a church to listen to a sermon which seems to him a cry that has long since ceased to expect an answer.” To expect an answer to a question is the wrong way to look at the world. Life is not what we possess, he is saying, but what we win, and he means this literally. In Pilote de guerre (Flight to Arras) he says: “Anguish is due to the loss of a real identity, and it is only through action that identity may be regained.” And he admits this is based on his own experience. In the lull before his sortie to Arras, he felt he was awaiting an “unknown self” which he sensed was “coming towards him from outside, like a phantom.” By the time his mission was completed, his “unknown self” was no longer unknown, he had discovered a little more of who he was through his deeds. “Humanism,” he liked to say, “has taken too little notice of deeds.” Being cultured is not to be achieved by contemplation, but by being enriched by action, doing. “There is no existence that is not contact with things.”14

  And “life,” moreover, is not just one thing. We are constantly redefining what it is by our actions. Saint-Exupéry’s ideal—his model—was not that of a great writer or philosopher, but that of Hochedé, an ordinary man, a fellow pilot during the war. Hochedé had no real inner life, Saint-Exupéry tells us, he was “pure existence” in that his acts and his identity were one. He writes about having experienced this himself just once, briefly, when he was over Arras: there, in the thick of enemy fire “[y]ou are lodged in your act. . . . Your act is you. . . . You no longer find anything else in you.” This for him was sheer being, completeness, transcendence, a concept that is quite new to our civilization, according to Everett Knight. “Hochedé . . . would not know how to throw any light upon himself. But he is constructed, he is complete. . . . We usually think of an ‘accomplished’ man as one who has somehow found time to bring to perfection both his mental and physical activities, who is both philosopher and peasant, or statesman and soldier. Hochedé, however, has no ‘inner’ life, yet he lacks for nothing; for what really exists, exists in things exterior to us and comprehensible in themselves.”15

  As Malraux said—and Saint-Exupéry would have agreed—the universe holds no secrets from us, it conceals nothing, there is no mystery to be “rescued” by thought. This is why we gain fulfillment by doing rather than by thinking.

  But Saint-Exupéry took this further, arguing that, because there are no absolutes, we must replace the idea of duty toward by responsibility for. This is not just splitting hairs. Duty implies teleological ends, obligations laid down by others—by ancestors or by God, for example—and therefore negates freedom. Responsibility, on the other hand, implies freedom—we choose who and what we wish to be responsible for. This is what Saint-Exupéry learned in the course of his mission to Arras, the consequences of which he develops in the final pages of Pilote de guerre. “The fraternity which made his flight group a single organism must be extended to ever larger groups. The fraternity that men once enjoyed in God, they would now have to reconstitute in man himself; the fraternity of action must replace that of common origin; sacrifice must replace possession.”

  This is the philosophy that his book Citadelle addresses. The mind is not a “container,” a receptacle of fact and memories, but an act; the world is not rational but inexhaustible, making acquisition pointless, another red herring. Citadelle shows “the fallacies inherent in ‘the great longing to possess,’ whether it be goods for the body or principles for the mind. Life is ‘movement towards’ and not material possession. Happiness is the ‘warmth of acts’; a civilization rests upon what it exacts from its people, not what it furnishes them; life is a permanent creation.”16

  Saint-Exupéry, like Kojève and Koyré before him in the 1930s, was much influenced by the advances in physical science between the wars. “Anyone who proposes to comprehend life by trying to penetrate beyond what is immediately given, is in somewhat the predicament of the physicist who studies phenomena so minute that any attempt to observe them causes a change in their comportment. . . . No useful purpose is served by making of life an object of study, for there is nothing ‘behind’ or ‘beyond’ it. . . . The attempt to ‘possess’ life in the capsule form of principles assimilable to the intelligence must therefore be as unsuccessful as that of the petit bourgeois to possess it in the form of the goods it offers. . . . Life is not a sphinx’s question with our salvation hanging in the balance. . . . Language does not resolve the ambiguity of life, it is part of it.” One of the characters in Citadelle is content that God should remain inaccessible, for otherwise “I have finished my becoming. . . . Men cease to become when they find a solution.”17

  We must somehow put back together the “broken world” into which we are born, always remembering that there are no “eternal principles” on which we can base our work. Throughout Citadelle there are references to the “cathedral,” the “Empire,” the “domain,” which, in addition to the sum of their parts, contain something that Saint-Exupéry calls “the divine knot” or “the meaning of things,” an intangible entity which transforms otherwise everyday things or words. He likens poetry, and the ordinary words of which it is composed, to a cathedral and the commonplace stones of which it is built. And he approaches poetry and cathedrals as the phenomenologists do, not as examples of some theory or other, but as events, the magnificent result of acts, efforts intended “to inspire and not to persuade.”

  LIFE WITHOUT ALIBIS

  As Walter Kaufmann has said, Sartre’s writings bear the stamp of his experience from the outset. He was very much affected by the events of the 1930s—the mass unemployment and the Depression, the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, the purges and terror in Stalin’s Russia—and in the Second World War as a soldier he fought against Hitler. He was captured, returned to Paris and became a member of the Resistance.

  These events shaped his thinking, but he was criticized by several of his fellow countrymen who said that his philosophy was secondhand, a pale imitation of Martin Heidegger’s. Though it is true that Heidegger’s views preceded and overlapped with Sartre’s, it is also true that for many, Sartre was by far the clearer exponent of existentialism, not just in his essays but also in his novels and plays, which attracted a far greater audience than Heidegger’s dense—indeed, often impenetrable—prose. Far more than Heidegger, Sartre came up within the excellent tradition that recognizes certain writers as straddling philosophy and literature—Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau.18

  That clarity of Sartre’s began with his saying that a man is not a homosexual, or a waiter or a coward in the same way that he is six feet tall or blond. “The crux of the matter is suggested by such words as possibility, choice and decision. If I am six feet tall, that is that. It is a fact no less than that the table is, say, two feet high. Being a waiter or a coward, however, is different: it depends on ever new decisions.” In his essay “Portrait of the Anti-Semite,” he again shows that a man is not an anti-Semite in the way th
at he is blond: he chooses to be an anti-Semite “because he is afraid of freedom, openness and change and longs to be as solid as a thing. He wants an identity, he wants to be something in the manner in which a table is something, or a rock.”19 This has strong echoes of Gide (see chapter 3).

  Sartre’s choice of illustrative examples in his work is instructive, showing how the war affected his thinking: his choice of cowardice, for instance, or the example he gives in his lecture entitled “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” referred to earlier. Here, he considers the young Frenchman who, at a certain point in the war, cannot decide whether to stay at home in occupied France and become a collaborator, looking after his ailing mother who badly needs him, or leave for Britain and join the Free French, who will one day—he hopes, he assumes—help in the liberation of his country. The young man had sought Sartre’s advice, and although Sartre does not actually say what advice he gave, he rehearses the arguments for both sides in such a way that we pretty much understand what it was.

  In that lecture he begins with the main doctrine of existentialism, encapsulated in the phrase we have already met: “existence precedes essence.” For Sartre, at bottom there always remains “a possibility of choice,” and this is crucial. When we see a paper knife, he said, we know that it had a maker and that the artisan who made it had an idea of a paper knife before he set out to create it. “One cannot suppose that a man would create a paper knife without knowing what it was for.” On this basis, God—for believers—is a kind of “supern[atur]al artisan”; when God creates, “he knows precisely what he is creating.”20 Even after the death of God, in the philosophic atheism of the eighteenth century, Sartre goes on, the notion of God is suppressed, but not that of “human nature”—human nature as something fixed, universal, found in every man. It was this conception of a fixed human nature, he says, agreeing here with the proto-existentialists, that led to fascism. Like Gide, like Malraux, like Saint-Exupéry, he rejected this idea.

  If God does not exist, “it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end.” And there is one place, at least, where it leads: “It is nowhere written that ‘the good’ exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plain where there are only men. . . . For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s actions by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism—man is free, man is freedom.”

  In the case of the boy torn between staying with his mother and risking the tag of “collaborator,” and leaving for Britain to join the Free French, Sartre had two things to say. He allied with the pragmatists in arguing that the boy would not stay with his mother because of some “mother love” deep within him, but that he would show his “mother love” by staying: he had a choice, and by exercising that choice he behaved his values—“feeling is formed by the deeds that one does . . . I can neither seek within myself for an authentic impulse to action, nor can I expect, from some ethic, formulae that will enable me to act . . . if you seek counsel—from a priest, for example—you have selected the priest; and at bottom you already knew, more or less, what he would advise. . . . You are free, therefore choose—that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do [italics added].”21 The young man’s values did not effectively exist until he acted.

  But Sartre also said that, when we act, when we choose, we must do so knowing that we are, and are not, alone. “In reality, things will be such as men have decided they shall be. . . . Man is nothing else than what he purposes, he exists only insofar as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions . . . there remains within me a wide range of abilities, inclinations and potentialities, unused but viable, which endow me with a worthiness that could never be inferred from the mere history of my actions. . . . But for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art . . . reality alone is reliable . . . the coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic.” There is a human universality, he goes on, “but it is not something given; it is being perpetually made”; and that is because we are all aware of purposes, that other people exist who may have identical, similar, or quite different purposes, and we are aware of them. Sartre called this “intersubjectivity,” and it affects our moral choices. These moral choices are comparable to the construction of works of art, in that works of art are the product of actions, and when we construct a work of art no one questions why we produced this work and not another. This is why existentialism is a humanism, he says: it allows that freedom is to be willed in community, it is to be achieved, acted upon. If my purposes are to be absolutely free, if my decisions, my choices, are to be absolutely my own, then it follows that everyone else must be free. Otherwise, freedom is a contradiction in terms.

  Therefore—and this goes back to the young man in occupied France—the decisions we take, while not forced in any way, must be made in the awareness of how society, community, would be if everyone made that same decision. If the young man acted his love for his mother, as he is free to do—if he chose to—what would be the consequences of that action if universally applied? Are we free to make these choices? Yes, but there will be consequences that we cannot necessarily foresee.

  Many people, then and now, have regarded existentialism as a tragic and pessimistic doctrine. The first charge is true, but not the second. “Life,” Sartre liked to say, “begins on the far side of despair. . . . Work out your own salvation with diligence,” “diligence” being the crucial word. Life is serious and our decisions matter, not always immediately, but eventually. “All man’s alibis are unacceptable; no gods are responsible for his condition; no original sin; no heredity and no environment; no race, no caste, no father, and no mother; no wrong-headed education, no governess, no teachers; not even an impulse or a disposition, a complex or a childhood trauma. Man is free; but his freedom does not look like the glorious liberty of the Enlightenment; it is no longer the gift of God. Once again, man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.”22

  Absurd and tragic as man’s situation is, that does not rule out integrity, nobility, valor or effort. These are the ways of defying the world, of being in it and knowing and relishing that we are in it. There are no alibis.

  SCORN, AND THE BREATHING SPACES IN LIFE

  The last word in this chapter returns us to Albert Camus, who in his book of reflections The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) considers the figure who Homer thought was the wisest and most prudent of mortals but who to others was no more than a highwayman and who, by various misfortunes, was condemned in perpetuity to push a huge stone to the top of a slope, at which point the stone rolled back down to the bottom, where Sisyphus had to start all over again.

  This is in itself a pretty obvious metaphor for the ordeals of life, but what interested Camus were the brief interludes when Sisyphus was free of his burden and what he thought about during the stone’s descent; how his life—the decisions he had made—had brought him to this point. Camus saw that the answer was scorn. That however bleak the fate, however eternal the burden, however dreadful the ordeal, there will always be breathing spaces; and that is what happiness is, this is what freedom is—essentially, a series of decisions and acts that lead to consequences. Not all the consequences will be good or fulfilling but we must scorn those that are not and dwell on those that are, creating for ourselves brief moments of respite.

  Live with the consequences of your deeds and enjoy the warmth they create. The only warmth in the cold, indifferent universe is that which we create ourselves. And that is what a work of art is, it is what a constructed life is, a fulfilled life, the warmth of acts.

  19

  War, the American Way and
the Decline of Original Sin

  T

  he wartime successes that had produced the atomic bomb, radar and penicillin promised much for peacetime, and engendered a sense of optimism that the applications of science would make possible improvements across a wide range of activities. The prestige of science rubbed off on the social sciences, psychology in particular, and on expertise generally, but change was happening anyway. It was Alan Petigny who identified the “permissive turn” in American society in the 1940s, which was essentially a challenge to traditional and religious views of the way life should be ordered.

  Although we shall be making the case for a “psychological turn” in America especially, in the wake of the war, it would be wrong to ignore earlier moves in that direction. Tufts Medical School had established the first American course on psychotherapy as early as 1909, the year that saw the foundation of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene. In 1908, the Episcopalian Emmanuel Movement, based on the Emmanuel Church in Boston, had founded a journal, Psychotherapy, which carried articles by theologians, neuroscientists, Freudians and philosophers. Some people were already talking of “self-realization” rather than “self-mastery.” In 1924, Atlantic Monthly identified what it called “a psychological revival,” listing a raft of books on psychology and sex life, psychology and business efficiency, psychology and the Christian religion, psychology and parenthood, psychology and preaching, even psychology and insurance and psychology and golf.1