Notes from a lecture delivered in Salamanca around 1970.
I am going to speak about the problem of atheism as it appears in twentieth-century philosophy, especially in what is called existential philosophy, and more concretely in existentialism, but trying to make reference to the whole way in which this theme has been posed in the thought of recent decades.
During the nineteenth century one could define the situation of the problem of God as a traditional oblivion. By this I mean that the central current of nineteenth-century European thought did not include the problem of God, at least not as a living and fully current problem, but rather dealt with it only either through thinkers who represented an old tradition —for example, a Scholastic tradition, in the broadest sense of the word— or through certain marginal thinkers —for example, the Italian ontologists, Rosmini and Gioberti, or Fr. Gratry, or even Brentano—, thinkers who today strike us as interesting, but who during the nineteenth century were of little importance and drew general attention only very slightly.
It seems interesting to me to keep this in mind: that what in philosophy, and in general in the history of culture, strikes us as important today has not always seemed so in its own day, but quite the contrary; and it is incredible to what extent one must sometimes strive to find, in their own period, references to thinkers who today seem to us of the utmost interest. Consider the case of Kierkegaard, or that of Dilthey, of whom scarcely a few vague words were spoken, words that would not even lead one to suspect the interest of their intellectual work.
Well then, toward the end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth, there begins, in an especially intense way, a return to posing the problem of God, and precisely in this city of Salamanca. I need not say that I am referring to don Miguel de Unamuno, who possessed a boundless intellectual courage and dared to pose the problem of God and to make this problem the center of his meditation, at a time when both this problem and that of death and immortality had been relegated to the outskirts of philosophy, and when daring to raise such questions rather discredited a thinker.
But besides this, in Unamuno’s work there is something that interests us especially. It is that God appears in Unamuno primarily as the sustainer of personal immortality: God is the guarantor of man’s hope in an afterlife. This means that God does not appear as the foundation or key of the universe. This God occupies no important place in Unamuno’s ontology —supposing that Unamuno had an ontology, which is saying a great deal— but rather God appears as a reality destined to sustain the personal character of man and to guarantee his hope in immortality. That is, He is a strictly personal God, one who appears with a personal function, not with a primarily cosmic function, for example.
This is something new with respect to everything that had been done in European thought prior to the First World War and even between the two wars. The appearances of the theme of God before recent decades were very limited. For example, in Husserl’s phenomenology God has a limited, remote place: there are a few marginal references, for instance in the Ideen, and God appears as a “limit concept.” In Scheler, despite the Catholic period of his thought, represented by the book On the Eternal in Man (Vom Ewigen im Menschen), and despite his interest in religious themes, philosophy appears excessively oriented toward values, and the theme of God is studied within a constellation defined by the idea of value and, ultimately, with a relatively secondary role within his thought. As for that of Jaspers, the idea of the enveloping or the encompassing (das Umgreifende) appears forcefully, which raises a problem of transcendence but which likewise is not strictly a thematic treatment of the problem of God. In Heidegger the theme is so evaded that it is frequent —as frequent as it is irresponsible— to speak of Heidegger’s atheism. In my judgment this is pure frivolity, but it is true that there is no direct and thoroughgoing treatment of the problem of God in Heidegger’s work, at least in his work to date, even though possibilities for such a treatment in the future remain open. Gabriel Marcel holds a theistic position, especially after his conversion, but, for many reasons, in him too no formal treatment of this theme has appeared.
In any case, and despite these restrictions, and leaving aside the much more important precedent of Unamuno, with whom I have dealt at length on other occasions, the theme of God has acquired a new quality and intensity in the various philosophies defined by the fact that the word “existence” appears in some way in their designation, and among which we can fundamentally distinguish three groups:
Existential Philosophy and Existentialism
In the first place, existential philosophy, the fitting name for Heidegger’s philosophy, whose theme is the meaning of being in general, since this problem of being is posed within that entity which we ourselves are, and which Heidegger calls Dasein (“to exist”); for this reason that problem requires, for its elucidation, a prior existential analytic of Dasein or “existing,” and is therefore a condition for the posing of the problem of being, for that forgotten question about the meaning of being. For this reason Heidegger’s philosophy can be called existential philosophy, not because its theme is existence, but because the analysis of Dasein is a prior condition for posing the question of being.
In the second place we would have the philosophy of existence, which, in a relatively vague sense, could be applied to the thought of Jaspers —an essential part of which is the Existenzerhellung, or elucidation of human existence— or to that of Gabriel Marcel in France.
And, finally, the term existentialism —the one that has enjoyed the greatest popular fame and that, in a certain sense, has most captured the imagination of the men of recent decades— would have to be reserved for the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre and his followers.
As is well known, the definition of existentialism would be extremely vague. Sartre himself has said on occasion that by existentialism he understands that philosophy according to which existence in man precedes essence. This formula would be the most extreme abbreviation of what Sartre understands by existentialism, and we may take it provisionally in order to distinguish existentialism from other philosophical tendencies that have some proximity or analogy with it.
For a moment, especially after the Second World War, it seemed that these philosophical movements were philosophy itself. Despite the intrinsically unsatisfactory character of the doctrinal body of these intellectual constructions, when they are considered closely and in detail, we cannot overlook the enormous interest, the profound attention with which all these forms of thought —and perhaps very particularly the one called existentialism— were followed, first by Europeans and afterward also by Americans and by the whole world, at the end of the war and for some fifteen years or so.
The fact that this is now already in decline, that the popularity and interest of these philosophies are beginning to wane, should not conceal from us the profound attraction they have exerted upon the man of our time. And this, in any case, must be explained, and is in itself of the greatest interest.
The ‘Problems’ of Man in History
I would say that these systems of thought have given solutions —perhaps false ones, but solutions in any case— to the real problems of our time. I mean that a doctrine may be true or false, but in any case one must first raise the question of whether it is an answer to our problems or to others. Let us not forget that a problem is not simply something I do not know, an ignorance. If I am asked how many hairs the many listeners now hearing me have upon their heads, I would not be able to say. Is this a problem? No. And what is lacking for it to be a problem? That I should have to know it. Fortunately, I have no need whatever to know how many hairs my listeners have; and this means that it is not a problem. But if I did have to know it —if, for example, someone were to offer me a great prize of several million should the number of hairs be even, and threaten me with a violent death should that number be odd— then it would become for me a true problem. For something to be a problem, two things are required: first, that I do not know it; and second, that I have to know it.
Man has a problematic horizon that changes from time to time. And most problems cease to be problems not because they are solved but because they are dissolved. The history of philosophy, the whole of intellectual history, is the history of a succession of solutions, but primarily it is the history of a succession of problems. And these problems follow one another historically; they shift, they dissolve, and give way to others.
In the face of many intellectual doctrines we may perhaps say that they are true, or that they possibly are, but that they are not solutions to our problems, but to others —to those of the thirteenth century, or the seventeenth, or the nineteenth. What anguishes or disquiets us is not what anguished the men of a century ago, of eight centuries ago, or of twenty; and their solutions, whatever they may be, even if they are logically correct and objectively true by reason of their content, are of no use to us because they are not solutions to our problem.
Well then, existentialism in the broad sense is a repertoire of solutions to our grave problems, and this is why existentialism has interested us and continues
to interest us. That it should satisfy us? Ah, that is another matter. That it should be sufficient, that it should be an adequate answer? That is another story. Even whether our problems today are exactly those that in 1945 brought existentialism to success —about that, too, there would be doubt. But if we take a relatively long span, if we speak of the man of our time, understanding by that the last two or three decades, there is no doubt that the response of existentialism, true or not, bore upon that which we needed to know.
The point of departure of all these philosophical systems is human life, whether one calls it Dasein, “existence,” “subjectivity,” or, more profoundly and correctly, “human life.” This life has been interpreted from various points of view, some broader, others more partial. Some amounted to a forced interpretation; others project it onto a single plane and reduce it to a two-dimensional reality instead of letting it be what it fully and roundly is. In any case, since our life is the point of departure, in what it has of personal human life, all these philosophies have centered on the notion of freedom; on man’s condition of making or choosing himself in one way or another; on the solitude in which the life of each of us takes place; on the themes of responsibility, helplessness, pain, anguish, nausea… that which has been called the “existential moods.” They undoubtedly are such, but it is nowhere established that these are the only ones, or the most interesting, or that others just as important, just as existential, and perhaps more radical, have not been left in the inkwell.
Atheism
And now we find that in this procession of doctrines —which I shall not examine, because it would take us very far afield and lead us away from our theme— there has appeared, as a tendency of special prominence and extreme insistence, what we may call atheism. There are a certain number of thinkers who call themselves existentialists, and other contemporary thinkers who, for one reason or another —and it is interesting that the reasons vary greatly— take up a position that may be called, in general terms, atheism.
Atheism, in turn, is likewise not rigorously univocal, for under this word different interpretations may be understood; it is not always a matter of the same thing. For now, I wish to seek out the justifications that atheism may have within these lines of thought. If one wishes to understand a philosophy, one must try to place oneself within it, in such a way that, in expounding it, it should seem to us justified. It is not necessary —and it would be a profound error— to try to show the deficiency or falsity of a doctrine without first trying to understand it. One must make the attempt to justify it, to present it from within, not in order afterward to step outside it and refute it —an unpleasant word if ever there was one— but rather in order to remain within it and, in trying to take it seriously and think it through to the end, to see whether it actually leads us somewhere or whether we run up against some difficulty that compels us to go further.
The Concept of “Meaning” and the Concept of “the Absurd”
The thought of our time, and not only philosophical thought, has been preoccupied with a concept that has undergone an extraordinary development in the twentieth century: the concept of meaning. Let us not forget that Heidegger, in Sein und Zeit, precisely when he poses his original and fundamental question, says that it is “the question that inquires into the meaning of being.” That is, it is not a matter of asking about being, but about the meaning of being. This word “meaning” appears also in Anglo-Saxon thought, English and American (meaning); it appears with equal prominence in thinkers who are not strictly philosophers, such as Camus. It is, then, a matter of asking about the meaning of reality, and especially of human life.
And the concept of meaning appears set over against the concept of the absurd. The absurd appears constantly as something that lies in wait for contemporary thought, that profoundly disquiets it and against which it must mobilize. Recall once more the case of Camus himself and the importance the theme of the absurd has in him. It is a matter of seeing to what extent human life has meaning or not, is absurd or not; and it is precisely in this foreshortening that the problem of God, and consequently that of atheism, is posed.
God as an Obstacle
Curiously, atheism appears at times as proof or ground that the world has no meaning; or else as that conclusion to which we find ourselves compelled, given that reality is absurd; but there is a third possibility, intricately bound up with the other two, and it is the one that exerts the greatest attraction upon the men of today, according to which precisely in order to defend a certain meaning of life we would find ourselves obliged to set God aside and, therefore, to end up in an atheistic position.
They are three distinct motivations, and strictly speaking they are not philosophical theses or arguments, but rather something prior: three general presuppositions of interpretation which, by different paths, lead to three distinct variants of atheism. In many currents of the atheism of our time, and especially in existentialism, God appears literally as an obstacle. How can this be? God stands in the way of a certain conception of human life and of reality. Although it is never formulated in the terms I am about to state, the substratum of this whole series of philosophical arguments of our time would be this: “If God exists, things cannot be thus,” understanding by “thus” a determinate intellectual conception that one holds and in which one is installed. In view of this, it is concluded that God does not exist.
Everyone remembers the famous phrase: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.” Here we are dealing with the opposite, with the rigorous inversion of that point of view, which is that of deism. If God did not exist —it was thought in the eighteenth century— it would be necessary to invent Him; we need God in order to understand reality and, probably, in order to live rationally. Rationalism is fundamentally theistic, or at least deistic. It is interesting that, at a time when Voltaire was in full disrepute among religious thinkers, above all Catholics, Fr. Gratry very shrewdly announced a century ago that he regarded Voltaire as a good spirit, a good friend; precisely because of his rationalism, Voltaire’s thought is positive, and what disquieted Gratry from the Catholic point of view was not Voltaire but Hegel. Voltaire, with all his anticlericalism and his superficial anti-Christianity, was a sure ally, because his rationalism issued in a deism that might very well be converted into a rigorous theism.
Now, by contrast, it would be a matter of the reverse. Instead of saying: “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him,” one will say: “If God did exist, it would be necessary to eliminate Him or to forget Him.” Why? Because He disrupts the picture for us, because He does not allow us to install ourselves in a certain form of thought in which we place ourselves so as to interpret reality in a way that interests us and that seems to us, for certain reasons, right. If this strikes you as a somewhat rash and arbitrary construction, wait a few minutes for the texts in which Sartre literally says this.
Jean Paul Sartre
I shall not attempt to expound Sartre’s thought, rich and complex, extremely acute and variable, and having undergone a long evolution. I shall simply try to specify the core of the general interpretation of reality, and especially of human reality, in Sartre’s thought. His original thesis is that in man existence precedes essence. Man is nothing; he is what he decides, what he chooses; he has no essence, he has no nature. Everything in human reality is choix, choice.
And when man chooses, he does so on behalf of the whole of humanity. Sartre says that if I am a worker and enroll in a Catholic union and not in a Communist one, for example, I do not make a choice for myself alone, but I choose on behalf of man; and I, in enrolling in a Catholic union, am recommending resignation and thereby saying that paradise is not on earth and that man must resign himself and trust in the other life. If I marry a woman, even though the motives be love, passion, or desire, I am committing humanity to a path that is concretely monogamous marriage.
Naturally, when Sartre poses the problem as a priority of existence over essence, when he says that first I exist and afterward I choose what my essence is to be, he ultimately accepts the scheme of traditional ontology. Only he accepts it against the grain, he inverts it; but it is clear that at no moment does he make an attempt to go beyond it, to pose the theme of reality in different terms. He accepts the “essence–existence” scheme, just as he does the idea of “in-itself” or “for-itself” or “being” or “nothingness.” Ultimately, he moves within the categories of traditional ontology —of Scholasticism first, of phenomenology afterward— though with the appropriate inversions.
God as “causa sui”
The fundamental reason for which Sartre is going to reject the existence of God is that God is causa sui, and this notion of causa sui seems to him contradictory. Of course, one might ask: if the notion of causa sui is contradictory, must one not seek a higher notion of God? It would seem that this would be something prior to decreeing that God cannot exist. For, moreover, no one has taken this concept of causa sui seriously. It is an expression that has certainly been used, but in a scarcely formal way, and no one has said, literally and formally, that God is causa sui.
For Sartre, the whole of life fundamentally constitutes something that always fails. Man is, for Sartre, a passion to found being and to constitute the “in-itself.” Now then, this cannot be done. The idea of God as causa sui is contradictory, and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion: l’homme est une passion inutile.
With these theses one arrives at an atheistic position, but one is left somewhat surprised and asks oneself whether there is not something more, whether there is not something behind all this that is so simple, for the justification of atheism seems strangely simple and gratuitous. It would perhaps be well to take a step back and briefly review these theses of Sartre, in order to see to what extent they are, or can be, formulated with complete seriousness.
When it is said that man has no essence or nature, and that everything in man is choice or choix, one evidently must distinguish. If it is said that man has no nature in the sense in which things do, this seems to me enormously true, and, moreover, nothing new. Long before Sartre, Ortega had said it. In 1935, in History as a System, he had said: “Man has no nature; what he has is history.” Moreover, and around the same time, he had said elsewhere: “Man’s being is at once natural and extra-natural, a kind of ontological centaur.” And he had added: “Human reality has an inexorable structure, no more and no less than cosmic matter.” All of them theses that it is well to bring together in order to understand the concrete meaning of the first. When Ortega said “man has no nature,” he meant by this that man has no nature in the sense in which things do; if he has a nature, it consists precisely in not having one in that sense; or, in other words, man is not a thing.
Existentialist thought renews this evident truth that man, definitively, is not a thing. As soon as I try to identify the reality of man with that of any thing whatever, I find that it is not so, that man is not a material or biological thing, that I am not my body or my psyche —I am no thing. But existentialist thought tends to take a further step and, in view of the fact that I am no thing, to conclude that I am nothing. We might put it in English by saying that from the evidence that I am no thing it leaps to the thesis —anything but evident— that I am nothing. Now then, if it is true that man is not any thing, it is false that man is “nothing,” above all if we replace, as we must, the word “nothing” by its personal equivalent, “no one.”
Note that many languages know more than philosophers and scientists do. And the proof is that if someone knocks at the door with his knuckles, none of us will ask: “What is it?” but rather we will all ask: “Who is it?” —whereas philosophy and science have spent twenty-five centuries asking: “What is man?”; and since the question is already erroneous, the answer will be so too. I do not say that man is not also a “what”; in some measure and secondarily he is a “what,” but he is so because he is a “who.” Man is primarily a “who,” a “someone,” and for that reason he is or has “something,” and one may ask “what” about it. But that “what” is founded upon a prior and much more radical “who.”
The question, then, would be: Who is man? or, still more rigorously: Who am I? To which we naturally could not answer anything that is a thing, but rather something that points to a someone or, in other words, to what we call a person. Yes, we call it a person, but in general we take this name in vain. Even the famous definition of Boethius —by no means contemptible, moreover— of the person as rationalis naturae individua substantia, “an individual substance of a rational nature,” calmly takes for granted that the person is a thing. A very particular thing, a thing or substance that is of a rational nature; but this definition disquiets me, because it has left out what is radical and decisive in the person: that it is not a thing. And as soon as I say that a person is an individual thing of a rational nature, I have renounced grasping what I was trying to define. And let it not be said that I have done violence to the translation and said “thing” instead of saying “substance,” which is what Boethius says, for substance is understood primarily of things, and the model that serves Aristotle in elaborating his theory of substance is natural things.
And there is still something more: by virtue of a curious inconsistency in the Aristotelian theory of substance, one that affects it at its very root —while Aristotle says that the true substances are the natural ones —water, iron, a tree, an animal—, when he wishes to explain the ontological scheme of substance, when he wishes really to explain that very substance, he always resorts to the examples of the statue and the bed, which are not natural and, according to Aristotle himself, are not true substances. That is to say, Aristotelian ontology is good for explaining those substances that are not substances. And the true substances, such as living beings, and primarily man —not to mention God— are very poorly explained by the Aristotelian theory as it stands in his Metaphysics. There is here a series of problems into which I shall not now enter.
The notions of traditional ontology, Scholastic or phenomenological, are not sufficient. On the other hand, when Sartre says that man chooses himself, that man is nothing until he chooses himself, one would have to say that, to begin with, he is man. That is, if I find myself obliged to choose, to decide my being and construct my essence, it turns out that I do so under a forced constraint, like a poet who is handed an imposed rhyme. For if I decide right now to choose myself as a crocodile, it turns out that I do not succeed; and if I choose myself as an oak or as a block of granite, my decision is in vain. I can choose my essence, and I must realize it within a determinate area, which is precisely that which we call “man.”
So that I have to decide and choose who I am going to be: this one whom we call Julián Marías, who is being made little by little and in a sorry way. But what I cannot decide is what, what kind of thing I am going to be. I have not decided my “what,” not even to the extent that human reality is a “what,” because I cannot choose myself as black or as yellow or as a woman; because I find that, whether I will it or not, I am a man and white.
We see, then, that it turns out to be somewhat excessive to say that human reality is choice. There are two radical ingredients of human life that are not objects of choice. The first is circumstance; the second is vocation. I have not chosen to be a man, or a Spaniard, or to be born in the twentieth century, nor my family, nor my country; I have not chosen this body and this soul that I have; none of this have I chosen: I have simply found myself with it. Nor do I choose my vocation. Antonio Machado says: “No one chooses his love.” A vocation is a voice that calls me, that summons me. Where, then, is the choice? I have to choose whether I follow my vocation or not, whether I am faithful or unfaithful to it; I do not choose the vocation itself, and precisely for that reason it is my vocation, my destiny. I feel myself called to be someone, and I freely choose to be faithful or unfaithful to that vocation, just as I choose what I am going to do with the gifts that are given to me, with my body and my soul and my world. Human choice is constitutive; man is an entity that chooses for as long as he lives; but he does not choose everything.
On the other hand, existential philosophy, beginning with Heidegger himself, is pervaded by the presupposition of “mortalism.” The first example is the idea of Sein zum Tode, although it is excessive to translate it as “being-for-death,” and I believe it is better to translate it as “being-at-death.” In any case, Heidegger insists too much on mortality. The fact that life ends in death and that death is certain does not mean that one lives for death, nor that death is definitive, nor the last word. Human life is a possibility open to immortality or to annihilation. Recall what Plato said: “Beautiful is the risk of being immortal.” The onus probandi belongs as much to the one who affirms the one thing as to the one who affirms the other. And this for an elementary reason: that although it may be thought that from my bodily death my personal death follows, numerically they are distinct. For I am not my body, even though I am corporeal, and from the destruction of my somatic organism the destruction of my personality may perhaps follow —perhaps I shall not be able to go on living because of the destruction of my organism, but this would have to be proved. My death is not the death of my body, and consequently the question of whether personal death necessarily follows from bodily death is an open question that would have to be justified: the onus probandi, I repeat, belongs as much to the one who affirms immortality as to the one who affirms annihilation.
But existential philosophy, and still more existentialism, has taken mortalism as a presupposition —the annihilation of man and, therefore, the reduction of man to his earthly life. What happens then? Man appears as a reality that chooses itself, that has neither nature nor essence, that is entirely an object of choice, and that is annihilated upon dying and therefore has no life other than the temporal and earthly one. And this is where a philosophical interpretation of atheism arises.
Sartre presents what he literally calls a technical vision of the world, when he tries to think about God and says that God would make man in the same way that someone manufactures a paper-knife. How is a paper-knife manufactured? First I have the idea of the paper-knife, I set out to make it, and, conforming to certain norms that make something be a paper-knife, I manufacture it. Well then, God is interpreted, says Sartre, as a superior artificer and stands in relation to man as the artisan stands in relation to the paper-knife: God makes man on the basis of His idea of him. So that man has no nature because there is no God who can conceive it. But the immediate consequence —though apparently not for Sartre— is that, if there is no God, He cannot conceive any nature and, therefore, there is no nature; whereby man loses his ontological privilege of being the entity without a nature, we are left with the general abolition of nature, and man is reintegrated into the universe of “non-natural” things. This is what Sartre calls “coherent atheism.” That it is atheism I do not doubt, but that it is coherent seems to me an exaggeration.
And there is something still more interesting. It is that when Sartre says that the existentialists are not atheists in the sense that they exhaust themselves in proving that God does not exist —because if He did exist it would make no difference, since even a valid proof of the existence of God would change nothing— then we do not understand. And I believe that the most important thing one can do when one does not understand something is to start from there, to make a virtue of necessity. When something is not understood and, instead of taking it for granted, one pauses for a moment and seriously acknowledges that one does not understand it, one immediately begins to understand: I have verified this a thousand times.
What seems to me unintelligible is the following: First, we have exhausted ourselves to show that God is contradictory because He is causa sui —despite the fact that no one says that God is causa sui. Second, in view of the fact that there is no God, there can be no nature of man —although it then turns out that if there is no God, by the same reasoning there would be no nature of any kind. And finally it turns out that even if God existed it would make no difference; and even if there were a valid proof of His existence, nothing would change. I confess I do not understand it: it is perfectly clear that it is not clear. And so there is no alternative but to go around it.
Now then, this is not possible. Sartre says: “There is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it.” But then I would venture to ask: if there is no God, then how is there a nature of the cauliflower, of the oak, of the crocodile? Sartre does not deny that there is a nature of things. Man is a privileged and unique entity that has no nature; but if the reason why man has no nature is that there is no God to conceive it, then there is no God to conceive any kind of nature; Sartre’s argument proves too much, for it would prove not merely that there is no human nature, but that there is no nature whatever, and then I repeat once again: what is the privilege and the differential character of man?
In spite of this, Sartre says —and I quote literally once more—: “Existentialism is nothing other than the effort to draw all the consequences from a coherent atheist position.” Existentialism is not so much an atheism in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrating that God does not exist. It declares, rather: “Even if God existed, this would change nothing; that is our point of view. It is not that we believe God exists, but we think that the problem is not that of His existence; what is needed is that man should find himself again and persuade himself that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God.”
It turns out, then, that there is no God because God is contradictory; but He is contradictory because we have defined Him as causa sui. Then —it will be said— let us define Him better. Since we are not bound in indissoluble marriage to the definition of God as causa sui, let us divorce ourselves from it. For what reason are we going to identify God with that obscure notion of causa sui, given that it is invalid? Might it not be precisely that we choose it because it is invalid?
On the other hand, once it has been proved that there is no God because, being causa sui, He is contradictory, we find ourselves without human nature and without the nature of the cauliflower…
Recall what I have called, following an image of Ortega, the “method of Jericho.” Joshua took Jericho by circling the city and sounding the trumpets. Philosophy has no method other than that of the circlings of Jericho. Let us try to make at least half a turn.
It turns out, then:
First, if the reason why there is no God is that the notion of causa sui is contradictory, the advisable thing will be to seek another, more adequate notion of God, instead of declaring God nonexistent for the sake of not letting go of that notion, about which we could not care less.
Second, might it not be that if man has no nature, it is for some reason distinct from and more intrinsic than that of God’s not existing? Can we not seek in man himself something that explains why he has no nature —if in fact he has none— instead of inferring it in an extrinsic and automatic way simply from the fact that there is no God and He cannot conceive it? Why should we think reality from the point of view of the technical vision of the world? Why should we assimilate the reality of man and his essence to the reality of the paper-knife and its own? Is this not an excess of reification? And what if it turned out that man is not a paper-knife, that he in no way resembles a paper-knife?
Finally, what does Sartre mean when he says that, in the last analysis, it would not matter at all whether there were a God, that everything would be the same, and that even if it were demonstrated by a valid proof that God exists, nothing would happen? But if we demonstrate by a valid proof that God exists, then God exists; then He can conceive the essence of man; then man can have essence and nature; then the whole Sartrean evidence about the non-natural character of man, about the precedence of existence over essence, about choice or choix, collapses.
As we can see, if we take this “coherent atheism” a bit seriously, we find that, on reaching the end, we cannot remain within it. It is atheism itself that expels us from itself. We are not trying to show that Sartre is wrong, but that we cannot install ourselves in his position. I am trying to take it seriously, but it will not let me, it does not permit me, it expels me. I cannot remain within it because it is not coherent, because if one thing is true, the other is not.
The Atheism of the Analytic Philosophy of Language
There is another form of atheism that is not the existentialist one. It is that which is found in another type of philosophy founded on linguistic analysis and epistemology, defined by an extreme positivism and reduced, especially in England, almost entirely to the analysis of language. These philosophies are not atheistic in the sense that they say that God does not exist. They say something prior and perhaps more serious: they say that the proposition “God exists” has no meaning. That is, that to speak of God is to say nothing. One cannot even say that He does not exist; for to say that God exists or that He does not exist are two opposed theses, but ones that resemble each other in that neither of them has meaning —and here “meaning” appears once again. For God is not an object of experience, and neither the thesis that God exists nor the thesis that He does not exist is scientifically verifiable; and only what is empirically verifiable has “meaning.”
This is a position in a certain sense more serious, because it takes the ground out from under our feet. And this is the form of atheism today, since existentialism is somewhat in decline. What is on the rise, the true philosophical “new wave,” is this one. Since the matter is serious, it is well to examine it.
I would ask two things.
First: the thesis that only what is empirically verifiable has meaning —is it itself empirically verifiable? For it occurs to me to ask the philosopher who subscribes to that thesis: How do you know this? Ah, he knows it through sources that, strictly speaking, are not valid for him. There is a step, or a leap, to another genus. The philosopher who denies meaning to every statement that is not empirically verifiable is himself making a statement that is not empirically verifiable.
If a philosopher were to limit himself to enunciating only empirically verifiable theses, we would be delighted with him, and there would be nothing to object to. But if he dares to take a further step and say that only those theses have meaning, I ask myself how he knows it. And then it would turn out that we can have respect for the practice of the one who eliminates from his philosophy every reference to the problem of God, but I would not feel equally respectful toward the one who, in the name of empirical verifiability, forbids it to me. If it is in the name of other things, and with good reasons, that is fine; but if it is in the name of that criterion, I do not accept it, because his principle is not empirically verifiable.
In the second place, what sense does the limitation of problematicity make, starting from a certain idea of knowledge? I mean, how can it be accepted that the sphere of the problematic should be limited on the basis of a prior conception of what knowledge is? The effective and a posteriori impotence of thought is something we frequently run up against: I try to know something and do not succeed, I fail repeatedly; I shall conclude that it is not possible, at least up to now, to know it. What is unacceptable is the prior decree of unknowability. To say that of something one can neither speak nor know anything does not satisfy me. One must reply: “Seeing it is enough; let us go and see it.” All skepticism seems fine to me, provided it is justified and a posteriori, provided it is arrived at after having made the attempt, and not before.
Simplification: The Root of These Forms of Atheism
I find the root of all these forms of atheism in a will to simplify the situation. I mean, the elimination of part of the data of a problem, so that it may be held to and made to fit a mental scheme we have at our disposal. This seems to me interesting, because it corresponds to a peculiar configuration of the contemporary mind.
Consider other fields where that attitude is seen more clearly; for example, a political position. Someone wants the unification of Europe or the raising of the standard of living of the masses. There may be someone who wants these things purely and simply, but that is not frequent. Almost always one wants the unity of Europe provided that it be of a certain kind —for example, socialist; or fascist, as the late Mr. Hitler wanted a united Europe, but one founded on the primacy of the Aryan race; another unity did not interest him. Some want the masses to be raised up, but in accordance with certain principles; if they hold others, it is of no interest. That is to say, first a scheme is established and reality is compelled to submit to it; and if reality will not submit, then everything left over is eliminated. This reminds me of the story of the man who left a clock to be repaired; the following week, the clockmaker returned it to him, saying: “Here is your clock, and these two pieces that were left over.” I am not prepared to believe that there are pieces of reality left over.
On the other hand, if philosophy decides to turn its back on a problem, the problem does not thereby cease to be there. What happens is that philosophy loses its fundamental condition: radicality. It is not that philosophy “ought” to be radical, but that it consists in being so, in going to the roots, and without this its philosophical character disappears: this is the price that the simplification of reality costs.
But I promised to make one more turn around Sartre. Might not what he says have some good sense to it? Might it not have some justification? He is without doubt a man of acute talent, and when someone who possesses it says something that strikes us as erroneous and false, one must make the attempt to take another turn, lest it turn out that what he says does have some sense.
We have all read Camus’s novels. Camus was a great writer and an admirable figure in many respects; personally, I like his novels better than his essays. But throughout his work, Camus was permeated by the conviction that reality is absurd. L’étranger, which is an admirable tale, goes about showing the conduct of a man who does a series of things that are, indeed, absurd. But Camus has taken the precaution of performing a small operation in narrating the life of Meursault: namely, that of excising the motives, as he might have excised his tonsils. Naturally, once the motives have been excised, his conduct is absurd. But at the same time it is impossible. I mean that Meursault could not have done what he did if he had had present to him nothing more than what Camus tells us. Meursault had motives, a why and a wherefore, for everything he did. Camus, with the most skillful art of the storyteller, anesthetizes Meursault, excises his tonsils —that is, his motives— and goes on; neither Meursault nor the reader notices —the reader too has been anesthetized by Camus’s art— and we read L’étranger with keen pleasure. But when I reread it, I notice that it is full of little gaps, precisely those left by the motives when they were excised.
And Sartre? Sartre is a phenomenologist. He depends enormously —as everyone has said— on Heidegger, and often anyone would say —except him— that he depends on Ortega; but he depends still more on Husserl. And since he is an excellent phenomenologist, in narrating he sees that there is no human action without motivation. That is why the acts of his characters always have meaning, are not absurd; we understand quite well why they do each thing they do. What lacks meaning, what is absurd, is the whole. Each action has meaning, but life as a whole does not; while preserving the meaning of each act, meaning is taken away from life.
This characteristic of Sartre’s fiction proceeds from the radical deficiency of his philosophy. If we take seriously what human life is, we see that an act cannot be justified except from a project, and this in turn exists only as a function of a total and vaguer project that envelops my entire life. And I can only do something by giving an account of what I do; and it turns out that only life itself gives an account, as instrumentum reddendi rationem, as vital reason.
And this is what Sartre radically fails to recognize.
On the other hand, what does “absurd” mean? The absurd is that which has no meaning, that which has no “good sense”; but this means that the absurd depends on meaning, that it moves, as Hegel would say, in the “element” of meaning. Just as when we say that something is false, we are moving in the element of truth. Meaning is prior to the absurd. Human life is already meaning, it is the element of meaning. And within it, within that radical and original meaning, we say that there are things that have meaning and others that do not, because they are absurd. The absurd is derivative, like a cyst or an infarct within that great order of meaning.
And finally, what is it that Sartre wants to justify when he says what seems to be his supreme incoherence —that there is no God and that everything in man depends on there being none, but that, in the last analysis, if there were one it would make no difference? Well, he probably means —and this indeed makes sense— that even if God exists, man is free and has to make himself, not as a “what,” but indeed as a “who,” and at every instant he has to invent his life and be responsible for it; and the fact that God exists does not affect this condition of man.
But this means, in the end, that the atheism of existentialism is entirely unnecessary. And that what is true in its interpretation of human life —and there is much that is true— is perfectly independent of whether or not God exists. Or rather, taking things seriously and viewing the totality of life from its global project, the contrary would probably turn out to be the case: namely, that in order for human life to be able to be what it phenomenologically is, in order for it to be what it shows itself to be, it is necessary that God exist.
I want to end with a quotation from old Unamuno, from the old honorary Salamancan, when he said that the only question —Unamuno was given to exaggeration: let us not say “the only” one— is to know whether I must die utterly or not. “And if I do not die, what will become of me? And if I die, then nothing has any meaning.” Unamuno said that then nothing has any meaning. That is to say, if I die utterly, it is not that the whole of life has no meaning, but that this act I am performing at this moment has no importance whatever, because one day it will cease to have any, and therefore it is a question of waiting. For something to have importance, it must have it always; otherwise, strictly speaking, it no longer has it.
Colloquy
Question:
I should like to put three questions to you:
a) Can man free himself or not from what is called the determinism of temperament?
b) Is the existentialist entitled to say that he is not satisfied with the notion of God as causa sui because it seems to him contradictory?
c) In what sense is Sartre right or not when he says that in performing an act I thereby commit the whole of humanity?
Answer:
I shall try to answer the three questions, which have a certain connection among themselves. First: man is conditioned by an enormous quantity of factors. Man, of whom I have said that he is not a thing, is also a thing —that is, he is bound to a factual reality of the type of things, such as, concretely, his body or his psyche— and consequently he is subject to a whole series of conditionings or determinations: physical laws, the law of gravity, chemical, biological, psychic laws… Consequently, if I let myself drop from the top of a tower, I fall to the ground, and I fall with a velocity according to the formula ½gt², discounting the resistance of the air, which is a slight advantage; but I am subject to that conditioning. In the same way I am subject to the totality of biological, sociological, and other laws. Now then, I am none of that. I am “my life.” Therefore, in acting I must reckon with all this. For example, temperament is a portion of my circumstance, which I reckon with, just as I reckon with having legs of a certain length, a better or worse memory, a determinate socioeconomic condition, and so on. Consequently, they are conditionings from which I set out in order to make my life and to project my life. And I am free in the sense that temperament, or any other conditioning, does not determine me, but it does condition me; that is to say, the range of my possibilities is determined and configured by that set of determinations. So that if I have a certain temperament, I have to reckon with it, and that temperament orients me in one direction or makes a certain type of conduct difficult for me. But I naturally have the freedom to choose to abandon myself to my temperament or to combat it.
On the other hand, when you spoke of the question you were putting to me —whether it is legitimate to tell the existentialist not to be satisfied with that notion of God from which he has set out and which seems to him contradictory— the situation is the following: the existentialist chooses a notion of God as causa sui, which is a highly particular formulation, marginal within theological and philosophical thought, and which, I repeat, no one has ever taken very seriously, because ultimately, when it is said that God is causa sui, what is meant is that He has no cause external to Himself, and nothing more. It is a paradoxical and extreme formulation. The expression causa sui was used at some point to indicate that relatively negative character of God, that of having no cause. But, naturally, what the reality of God is can be interpreted in many ways, and in fact this is done. We can say of God that He is ens fundamentale, Deus absconditus; we can speak of the infinitude of God; we can prove God from many other angles, of which it would be necessary to see, in each case, to what extent they are sufficient, whether these notions are or are not contradictory, whether they can have confirmation of some kind, and so on. But that is a secondary question. What makes no sense is to take a notion of God, to which practically no one has recourse, solely because it is contradictory, in order to reject it by saying that it is contradictory.
The third question —in what sense Sartre is right or not when he says that in performing an act I therein implicate or commit the whole of humanity— I believe could indeed be maintained in some way. I am of the opinion that it would make some sense to say that when I perform an act I commit the whole of humanity. And besides, it is a very old thesis. Ultimately it is a Kantian thesis, for you will recall, for example, that Kant’s categorical imperative —“act in such a way that you can will that the maxim of your action, that is, the motives for which you have acted, should become a universal law of nature”— means that when I perform any action whatever, I am affirming certain norms with it. For example, if I lie, I intend that the one who hears me should believe me, because if he did not believe me I could not lie. Consequently, the one who lies is speaking, and the one who speaks affirms the general rule that when one speaks one tells the truth, because if I did not tell the truth, in principle no one would believe me, and therefore I could not lie. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to say that an act of mine commits or implicates the whole of humanity. But the one who has no right to say this is Sartre. If you say it or I say it, we may be right, but Sartre has no right to say it, because he has told us that there is no essence of man, that there is no human nature in any sense, that there is nothing but what I do. Then I ask: how does what I do implicate you? How does what I do signify a commitment of humanity, if this thing called humanity does not exist? If there is no essence of man, if there is no human nature, what sense does it make to speak of humanity? This would be my fundamental objection.
Question:
Well; but you, on the other hand, have affirmed —and this is precisely what I am referring to— that if I die definitively, then nothing has any meaning. In the face of this affirmation, I would ask you to demonstrate it to me in a general way, that is, over and above Sartre.
Answer:
When I quoted Unamuno and said that if I die definitively then nothing has any meaning, I meant the following: that for “something” to have meaning signifies that it interests me or matters to me in a total way. That “something” is truly important to me.
But then it would turn out that, if I were to die utterly and absolutely, there is a moment at which that would cease to matter to me, and consequently what that “something” possesses would be a provisional importance, subject to the annihilation of that importance by the annihilation of my life; and therefore nothing would any longer have true importance, since one day it would cease to have it. And nothing has true importance if it does not have importance always. And therefore the supposition of personal annihilation strips of ultimate importance any act or process of my life. That is what I meant. And this is intrinsically evident.
Question:
But I, insisting, go further, farther. A man will cease to be important to himself with his death. But he will continue to be important within the complex of humanity, and in this sense that act will continue to have an enduring importance.
Answer:
Pardon me, that act will be important to others until they die. And consequently that importance will likewise be a limited importance, neither permanent nor definitive. This is the question: individual death makes all importance —importance is the most important category of history— subject to lapsing as soon as the subject of that importance, which is man, lapses. And although after my death something may go on mattering to others, I apply to each of the others that same reasoning, and importance for them is lost as they die off. There is nothing that is ultimately important. Which is to say that if man is annihilated, things are of little importance.
Question:
You have tried to demonstrate the absurdity of Sartre’s philosophy. You have said that this philosophy responds to the problems of a particular moment and that it sets out from human life, like all the existentialists. From the logical point of view, the analysis you have made is perfect. Now then, if we regard Sartre’s philosophy as a reflection of reality, then we have that what is absurd is reality, that the European society of that time was absurd, and Sartre’s phrase that if God existed it would be the same —that is, that that absurd society would go on being absurd even if God existed. Consequently, Sartre’s philosophy has a meaning as a reflection of reality.
Answer:
I shall try to summarize your question. I have not said that Sartre’s philosophy is absurd. I have tried to demonstrate that it has certain intimate incoherences, that if we take some parts of his doctrine seriously, we cannot take others seriously. Moreover, I have made an effort to see the good sense that underlies them. Furthermore, you suppose that the society in which Sartre lives —the European society of our time— is absurd and has no meaning. Then his philosophy would have meaning by being a reflection of the absurd society in which he lives.
Question:
There may be no intellectual logical coherence, but there will be existential logical coherence.
Answer:
I do not believe there is coherence of any type. In the first place, I know of no logic that is not existential or vital. Logic is the logic of reason, and reason is fundamentally vital reason. A logic that is not vital is of no use to me, nor does it seem to me apposite. That present-day European society is absurd, meaningless —too broad a topic—, I would not venture to say. I believe that European society, like life itself, has a considerable number of meaningless elements, but that is not to say that present-day European society has no meaning; I believe rather that it does. I have told you, moreover, that meaninglessness and the absurd move within the element of meaning. I cannot say of something that it is absurd except within the general presupposition of meaning in which we move, and from which we find certain concrete lacks of meaning. And therefore to say of man in present-day Europe that he has no meaning seems to me unintelligible. It is not that it seems to me false. It is that I do not know what it means.
Question:
Sartre’s philosophy arises at the end of the World War as a reflection of that society, and so it is a matter of a coherent reflection of the reality in which it appears.
Answer:
This hypothesis that war has no meaning has two difficulties: first, war does have meaning, even if it is a painful, grievous, and frequently disastrous meaning; but it is a form of technical thought and of technical conduct that precisely moves in a fairly rigorous way within the element of meaning. And, on the other hand, I do not believe that Sartre’s thought, or that of any other philosophy, can be reduced to the interpretation of man in an exceptional situation, such as that of war. In any case, it claims to formulate an interpretation valid for man in general, in any situation, not only for war. It would cease to be valid when the war ended. That is to say, Sartre would have produced his work at a moment when it was ceasing to have meaning, which seems to me excessive to think.
Question:
I believe that the force of Sartre lies precisely in this: that essence, if there were a God, ought to precede existence; and since from the analysis of man we do not see that it precedes, we have to conclude that God does not exist.
Answer:
The meaning of the phrase that it would make no difference whether there were a God or not is right in that the conception of man as freedom, project, choice, and so on, insofar as it is true, is independent of whether or not God exists. In that it is right; that is precisely the good sense it has. But then it turns out that its thesis of atheism is oversimplified and, moreover, unnecessary.
Question:
Regarding logical empiricism, you said that “when empirical verifiability is taken as the criterion, and it is added that no statement that is not empirically verifiable has meaning, I ask whether this ‘statement’ is empirically verifiable.” Would you explain this reasoning more extensively?
Answer:
The logical empiricist can do two distinct things: one, to formulate empirically verifiable statements and try to compose a doctrine with them: this seems to me irreproachable, perfect.
The other; the logical empiricist says: “no statement that is not empirically verifiable has meaning.” And I then ask him: And how do you know this? This statement that he makes —is it empirically verifiable? For if it is not, then it has no meaning, and therefore the logical empiricist has no right to make it.
If a logical empiricist, considering that every statement about God is empirically unverifiable, abstains from it, that seems to me perfect. But if he formulates an atheist thesis on the ground that a statement about God is empirically unverifiable and therefore has no meaning, then I say: it is this statement that has no meaning.
Atheism, as an abstention from touching the theme of God, seems to me perfect. But the thesis that forbids posing the problem of God by virtue of a principle such as that every statement not empirically verifiable has no meaning is unjustified.
Question:
I believe that Sartre’s negation of God has a meaning within his thought, whereas you seem to have tried to demonstrate that this is not so.
Answer:
It seems to me that your question tends toward this: when Sartre says that there is no God for such and such reasons, but that in the last analysis it would make no difference, I believe that what he means —and this is what I have tried to justify as the good sense of his thought— is that the reality of man as he conceives it, independently of whether or not there is a God, is indeed independent of whether or not there is a God. That is to say, the existence of God is in no way an obstacle to our being able to think of man as a projective, free, imaginative entity that makes itself, and so on. And this is why I have said that Sartre’s atheism is, first, unjustified, because he has not justified it; and second, unnecessary, because one can maintain the existentialist interpretation of man without any need to be an atheist. And this is why it is at once unjustified and unnecessary.
Question:
In a certain way we all have the same idea of nature. This idea is applicable to all beings, men and things. How…?
Answer:
I do not believe that we all have the same idea of nature. I have a rather different idea from Sartre’s. I have tried to move within Sartre’s domain and have wished him to be right; I have tried to install myself in his thought and go on thinking in accordance with it, and I find that it does not let me be a “Sartrean.” Because when I am trying to be one in a certain direction, I run up against a wall, which is not a thesis of mine, but a thesis of his. And when Sartre speaks of nature, he is speaking of nature as that mode of being of things that have an essence prior to their existence. That is to say, for Sartre an artificial object, such as this pen, is made in view of an end. That is, the artificer who made this pen first thought of the pen, had the idea of the pen —something that serves to write on paper— and, in accordance with certain techniques, manufactured the pen. This is the model of the artificer’s production.
The cauliflower is a natural object, since there is an essence of the cauliflower that is prior to the existence of this concrete cauliflower hic et nunc. This is what Sartre understands by nature, and so he says that there is no nature of man because there is no God who can think it. But I say: if there is no God who can think the nature of man, neither can He think that of the cauliflower, and therefore this could be said of all nature in general and not only of man, and for that reason the ontologically privileged character of man would disappear. I believe, on the contrary, that he has an ontologically privileged character, essentially different from that of the cauliflower. But this is not due to there being no God, but to the fact that man is essentially distinct, for example, from the cauliflower, and to the fact that human reality is not made, but is making itself —in sum, to the fact that it is free. And to say that man has no conditionings is a sophism, because he does have them, and tremendous ones; rather, within the framework that these conditionings leave him, he has no alternative but to choose himself and make himself and be free of necessity.
Author: Julián Marías
Source: Encuentra.com
