The Pillars of Unbelief—Sartre by Peter Kreeft 30/9/19 4(26

The Pillars of Unbelief—Sartre

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Just as we have pillars of

Christian faith, the saints, so Source: Jan-Feb 1988
National Catholic Register
are there individuals who
have become pillars of
unbelief. Peter Kreeft discusses six modern thinkers with an
enormous impact on everyday life, and with great harm to the
Christian mind:

Machiavelli - inventor of "the new morality"

Kant - subjectivizer of Truth
Nietzsche - self-proclaimed "Anti-Christ"
Freud - founder of the "sexual revolution"
Marx - false Moses for the masses, and
Sartre - apostle of absurdity.

Jean-Paul Sartre may be the most famous atheist of the 20th century.
As such, he qualifies for anyone's short list of "pillars of unbelief."

Yet he may have done more to drive fence-sitters toward the faith
than most Christian apologists. For Sartre has made atheism such a
demanding, almost unendurable, experience that few can bear it.

Comfortable atheists who read him become uncomfortable atheists,

and uncomfortable atheism is a giant step closer to God. In his own

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words, "Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all

the consequences of a coherent atheistic position." For this we
should be grateful to him.

He called his philosophy "existentialism" because of the thesis that

"existence precedes essence." What this means concretely is that
"man is nothing else than what he makes of himself." Since there is
no God to design man, man has no blueprint, no essence. His
essence or nature comes not from God as Creator but from his own
free choice.

There's profound insight here, though it is immediately subverted.

The insight is the fact that man by his free choices determines who
he will be. God indeed creates what all men are. But the individual
fashions his own unique individuality. God makes our what but we
make our who. God gives us the dignity of being present at our own
creation, or co-creation; He associates us with Himself in the task of
co-creating our selves. He creates only the objective raw material,
through heredity and environment. I shape it into the final form of
myself through my free choices.

Unfortunately, Sartre contends that this disproves God, for if there

were a God, man would be reduced to a mere artifact of God, and
thus would not be free. He constantly argues that human freedom
and dignity require atheism. His attitude is like that of a cowboy in a
Western, saying to God as to an enemy cowboy: "This town ain't big
enough for both you and me. One of us has to leave."

Thus Sartre's legitimate concern with human freedom and his

insight into how it makes persons fundamentally different from
mere things lead him to atheism because (1) he confuses freedom

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with independence, and because (2) the only God he can conceive of
is one who would take away human freedom rather than creating
and maintaining it—a sort of cosmic fascist. Furthermore, (3) Sartre
makes the adolescent mistake of equating freedom with rebellion.
He says freedom is only "the freedom to say no."

But this is not the only freedom. There's also the freedom to say yes.
Sartre thinks we compromise our freedom when we say yes, when
we choose to affirm the values we've been taught by our parents, our
society, or our Church. So what Sartre means by freedom is very
close to what the beatniks of the `50s and the hippies of the `60s
called "doing your own thing," and what the Me generation of the
`70s called "looking out for No. 1."

Another concept Sartre takes seriously but misuses is the idea of

responsibility. He thinks that belief in God would necessarily
compromise human responsibility, for we would then blame God
rather than ourselves for what we are. But that's simply not so. My
heavenly Father, like my earthly father, is not responsible for my
choices or the character I shape by means of those choices; I am.
And the fact of my responsibility no more disproves the existence of
my heavenly Father than it disproves the existence of my earthly
father.

Sartre has a keen awareness of evil and human perversity. He says,

"We have learned to take Evil seriously...Evil is not an
appearance...Knowing its causes does not dispel it. Evil cannot be
redeemed."

Yet he also says that since there is no God and since we therefore
create our own values and laws, there really is no evil: "To choose to

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be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we

choose, because we can never choose evil." So Sartre gives both too
much reality to evil ("Evil cannot be redeemed") and too little ("We
can never choose evil").

Sartre's atheism does not merely say that God doesn't exist, but that
God is impossible. He at least pays some homage to the biblical
notion of God as "I Am" by calling it the most self-contradictory
idea ever imagined, "the impossible synthesis" of being-for-itself
(subjective personality, the "I") with being-in-itself (objective
eternal perfection, the "Am").

God means the perfect person, and this is for Sartre a contradiction
of terms. Perfect things or ideas, like Justice or Truth, are possible;
and imperfect persons, like Zeus or Apollo, are possible. But the
perfect person is impossible. Zeus is possible but not real. God is
unique among gods: not only unreal but impossible.

Since God is impossible and since God is love, love is impossible.

The most shocking thing in Sartre is probably his denial of the
possibility of genuine, altruistic love. In place of God, most atheists
substitute human love as the thing they believe in. But Sartre argues
that this is impossible. Why?

Because if there is no God, each individual is God. But there can be

only one God, one absolute. Thus, all interpersonal relationships are
fundamentally relationships of rivalry. Here, Sartre echoes
Machiavelli. Each of us necessarily plays God to others; each of us,
as the author of the play of his own life, necessarily reduces others
to characters in his drama.

There is a little word which ordinary people think denotes

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something real and which lovers think denotes something magical.

Sartre thinks it denotes something impossible and illusory. It is the
word "we." There can be no "we-subject," no community, no self-
forgetful love if each of us is always trying to be God, the one single
unique I-subject.

Sartre's most famous play, "No Exit," puts three dead people in a
room and watches them make hell for each other simply by playing
God to each other—not in the sense of exerting external power over
each other but simply by knowing each other as objects. The
shocking lesson of the play is that "hell is other people."

It takes a profound mind to say something as profoundly false as

that. In truth, hell is precisely the absence of other people, human
and divine. Hell is total loneliness. Heaven is other people, because
heaven is where God is, and God is Trinity. God is love, God is
"other persons."

Sartre's tough-minded honesty makes him almost attractive, despite

his repellant conclusions like the meaninglessness of life, the
arbitrariness of values and the impossibility of love. But his honesty,
however deep it may have lodged in his character, was made trivial
and meaningless because of this denial of God and thus of objective
Truth. If there is no divine mind, there is no truth except the truth
each of us makes of himself. So if there's nothing for me to be
honest about except me, what meaning does honesty have?

Yet we cannot help rendering a mixed verdict on Sartre, and being

gratified by his very repulsiveness—for it flows from his
consistency. He shows us the true face of atheism: absurdity (that's
the abstract word), and nausea (that's the concrete image he uses,

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and the title of his first and greatest novel).

"Nausea" is the story of a man who, after arduous searching, finds

the terrible truth that life has no meaning, that it's simply nauseating
excess, like vomit or excrement. (Sartre deliberately tends toward
obscene images because he feels life itself is obscene.)

We cannot help agreeing with William Barrett when he says that "to
those who are ready to use this [nausea] as an excuse for tossing out
the whole Sartrian philosophy, we may point out that it is better to
encounter one's existence in disgust than never to encounter it at
all."

In other words, Sartre's importance is like that of Ecclesiastes: He

asks the greatest of all questions, courageously and unswervingly,
and we can admire him for that. Unfortunately, he also gives the
worst possible answer to it, as Ecclesiastes did: "Vanity of vanity, all
is vanity."

We can only pity him for that, and with him the many other atheists
who are clear-headed enough to see as he did that "without God all
things are permissible"—but nothing has meaning.

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