[lit-ideas] Mailer on Sartre (was: Faith)
- From: Paul Stone <pas@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 20 May 2005 22:29:16 -0400
On Sartre's God Problem
Norman Mailer
This year marks the centenary of the birth of Jean-Paul Sartre, the great
philosopher of existentialism and a definitive model of the intellectual
engagé. The Paris-based daily Libération asked a group of writers to
comment on the philosopher's legacy. Norman Mailer was among the
contributors. His remarks are reprinted below. --Adam Shatz
I would say that Sartre, despite his incontestable strengths of mind,
talent and character, is still the man who derailed existentialism, sent it
right off the track. In part, this may have been because he gave too wide a
berth to Heidegger's thought. Heidegger spent his working life laboring
mightily in the crack of philosophy's buttocks, right there in the cleft
between Being and Becoming. I would go so far as to suggest Heidegger was
searching for a viable connection between the human and the divine that
would not inflame too irreparably the reigning post-Hitler German mandarins
who were in no rush to forgive his past and would hardly encourage his
tropism toward the nonrational.
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.
Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom
that may also be on the way. Those are the poles of our existence--as they
have been from the first instant of the Big Bang. Something immense may now
be stirring, but to meet it we will do better to expect that life will not
provide the answers we need so much as it will offer the privilege of
improving our questions. It is not moral absolutism but theological
relativism we would do well to explore if our real need is for a God with
whom we can engage our lives.
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