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

by Watson, Peter

  Santayana had, on the other hand, what he called a “comic vision” of life (“comic,” not “cosmic”), which “celebrates the passing joys and victories in the world,” and a notion he called “radical comedy,” which involves “an admission that, in no small part, what links people is the powerlessness and mortality that they share; it is an acceptance of things that resist or defeat self-assertion”; or, put another way, radical comedy occurs when “everybody acknowledges himself beaten and deceived, yet is happier for the unexpected posture of affairs.” Philosophical meditation and culture, he said, are ways of letting people momentarily break out “of the shabbiest surroundings in[to] laughter, understanding and small surrenders of folly to reason.” Santayana made the claim that, “disregarding the quest for eternal life and transcendent infinitude altogether, both public and private well-being hang on a gracious ‘love of life in the consciousness of our impotence.’”31

  A life worth living, he believed, required “unworldiness”: that is to say, in his context, a life away from the workaday world. This is why we need what he called “a holiday life,” a time and place to get away from the workaday world and play. “Spirit,” for him, is the cultural location for solitary, personal revitalization, a cultural space for the sense of beauty to resolve moral cramps. Santayana thought that the new emphasis on self-realization and technical rationality was “failing to give sufficient weight to spiritual and moral life.” There was no space for “spontaneous affirmation” or for appreciating what is “lovely and lovable.” Well-being—which is the aim of life—occurs in “reflective episodes of consummate joy that give point to things,” and giving point to things enables people to “feel triumphant rather than defeated or brutalized or unreal.”32

  And this is what cultural space is, said Santayana, this is what spirituality is: a playful holiday in which people can depart from the workaday worlds of, say, policy formulation, in order to engage in reflective, imaginative activities that stretch them and discipline them to celebrate and live triumphantly, at least for a time, with finitude. The appreciation of beauty belongs to our holiday life, “when we are redeemed for the moment.”33 Beauty—natural beauty or created beauty—is divine in his vocabulary, not in any supernatural sense but simply because of the feelings it engenders in us. Art shows that we can experience varieties of “finite perfection” without encountering a deity, audiences are made happier by empathizing with characters in unhappy situations, artists render suffering sufferable, tragic characters delight people by letting them identify with images of perfection they approach but miss; imperfection has value as “incipient perfection.”

  Imagination, said Santayana, allows us to realize possibilities not available to experience, and in this the momentum of our imagination will carry us beyond ourselves. There is no absolute reality or supreme good, “intermittence is intrinsic to life” and so is partiality and finitude, but art allows us to imagine excellence, shows us forms of the “whole,” and apposite endings. Spiritual redemption, in his world, depends on the “suspension of self-assertion.” “There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval by discerning and manifesting the good without attempting to retain it.”34

  Human self-assertion, he goes on, is indispensable but always falls short. Our salvation is to love life in the consciousness of impotence. We need faith in our intelligence to imagine a future which is a projection of the desirable in the present and to realize that that is our salvation. Aesthetic experience discloses a kind of order “that lets people unify many discrete moments in a harmonious way and carries with it an emotion of perfection, satisfaction or happiness.” Cultural activities and institutions make life significant not because they give direct contact with “something” above, below or besides culture, but because of the imaginative order they envisage.35

  Beauty, joy, comedy, play, mirth, humor, laughter—these are what we should aim for, not everlasting bliss. This is what he means by “comic faith,” something less grand and more reasonable than infinite or permanent happiness and blessed immortality. If we can combine this with making a difference—an improvement—to the worlds of our fellow humans, this is the only immortality available. In doing so, we shall not have overcome death, but we shall have overcome death’s sting.36

  Santayana lived on the edge of poetry and it showed, gloriously, in the style of his prose. He is, perhaps, the most understated philosopher of the twentieth century, and a wonderful companion in a world without God, the culmination of the pragmatic approach.

  * * *

  I. The Gifford Lectures are one of the most distinguished lecture series in the world. They are the legacy of the Scottish judge Adam Gifford, who died in 1887, and are intended to encourage a perpetual lively debate on science and “all questions about man’s conception of God or the Infinite.” The legacy provides for annual lectures to be held at one of Scotland’s four historic universities—Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St. Andrews—and since their inception in 1888 more than two hundred books have resulted, by some of the most distinguished names in theology, philosophy and the sciences. Eight Nobel laureates are among the names, which include William James, J. G. Frazer, Dean Inge, Arthur Eddington, Alfred North Whitehead, John Dewey, Albert Schweitzer, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Niels Bohr, Arnold Toynbee, Paul Tillich, Rudolf Bultmann, Werner Heisenberg, Raymond Aron, Hannah Arendt, Alfred Ayer, Iris Murdoch, Freeman Dyson, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Mary Midgley, George Steiner, Hilary Putnam, Martha Nussbaum and Roger Scruton. In his book on the Giffords, Larry Witham describes them as a “window on a century in which natural science encountered biblical religion with full force.”6 During that century, he says, the Giffords witnessed four stages: the clash of the great philosophical systems with scientific materialism; the advent of the material sciences—anthropology, psychology, physics, sociology and historical criticism—and their impact on religion; the great rebellion against science and reason in the West—the idea of God as “wholly other”; and, with the days of one dominant belief system (at least in the West) now over, the resurrection of the rational search for God. Many of the above names and themes will recur in these pages.

  3

  The Voluptuousness of Objects

  P

  ragmatism, the subject of the previous chapter, was for the most part an American school of thought. This chapter concerns European thinkers who would not call themselves pragmatists; nevertheless, as will become clear, there is more than a passing similarity in their ideas. The names to conjure up here are Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valéry, Paul Cézanne, André Gide and, above all, Edmund Husserl.

  Husserl is someone who has not been too kindly treated by history. Partly this has to do with the fact that the brand of philosophy he conceived was given a daunting name, “phenomenology”—one of those big words, as James Joyce was to say, that “make us afraid.” In fact, the underlying premise of phenomenology is very straightforward; it is also extremely important, being yet another school of thought that was and is as much anti-science as it was and is anti-religion.

  One of its founding elements was summed up by Paul Valéry (1871–1945), the French polymath—poet, essayist, philosopher—who wrote of the late nineteenth century, “We felt the possibility of a new religion, with poetic emotion as its essential quality.” In fact, Husserl went rather further than this.

  METAPHYSICS OF THE CONCRETE

  Born Jewish in Moravia but baptized as a Lutheran in Catholic Austria, Husserl—bearded, bespectacled, with a high forehead—may be seen as an outsider twice over. He was a mathematician before he was a philosopher, studying the former subject under Karl Weierstrass in Berlin and the latter under Franz Brentano in Vienna.

  Husserl argued that experience is the only form of knowledge and that there are at least two kinds of existence. Ordinary objects exist, out there in the real world, and concepts exist in our consciousness. But consciousnes
s is not a kind of matter, he said: it is what he called an “intention,” not the normal use of that word, but a “turning toward” the world, a way to meet the world, experience it. Consciousness is not merely an awareness of the world, but also an awareness of that awareness. From this, he said—as the pragmatists said—we cannot go “behind” consciousness to a more “inside” view of life or reality. “The world is not what I think but what I live.”

  He also argued that the perception of reality takes place “entirely without the aid of reason,” and that what we think of as primary and secondary qualities of objects are no such thing: objects are their appearance and not an aggregate of qualities assembled by the mind. For example, yellowness in a lemon is not a secondary quality, a sort of add-on that the mind attributes to “lemonness”—it is the lemon. There is no “distance” between consciousness and the table it perceives. We do not have to work out that it is a table by calculating its secondary qualities—the number of legs, the shape of its top, the wood or metal it is made of—we know immediately what it is.1

  Phenomenologists maintain that we need no instruments to understand the world about us: things are what they appear to be, nothing more. Consciousness is not a calculating machine or a camera; it is, in fact, the only absolute, for consciousness is always consciousness of something; we cannot just be jealous, we must be jealous of someone. There is nothing in consciousness.2 Another example: we are related to the objects around us by their relationship to us. The only way to “understand” utensils is to use them. Pure contemplation or reflection cannot do this for us; a scientist, by analyzing the wood and metal of a hammer, for instance, could never arrive at an “understanding” of it.

  The importance of this approach to life was first stressed by Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), who thought that the world had become “enslaved” by concepts. It was reinforced by Charles Baudelaire’s famous line “Je sais l’art d’évoquer les minutes heureuses.”3 In a world no longer illumined by God or reason, Husserl wanted a new metaphysic of the concrete, and this is where phenomenology was so influential. By this account, all attempts to reduce the infinite variety of the world (the universe, experience) to concepts, to ideas, to essences, whether those concepts are religious or scientific—whether they are the “soul,” or “nature,” or “particles” or the “afterlife”—diminish the actual variety of reality which is part, and maybe the biggest part, or even the whole, of its meaning.

  For Rimbaud, Valéry, Gide and others, the real is infinite and so methods of dividing it into comprehensible portions must also be infinite. “Since matter in its totality is beyond our comprehension, then no method, including that of science, can be the ‘good’ one; no method can ever answer our questions once and for all.” For Valéry, as for others, consciousness was “the ‘flaw’ in the fullness of being” but it was a flaw in which he rejoiced. “Certain men, with a certain delicacy of feeling, take a voluptuous pleasure in the individuality of objects. They show a delighted preference for that quality in a thing of being unique—a quality all things possess.”4

  There were two immediate implications of this approach, though there were longer-term influences as well, which we shall come to in due course. One was that the phenomenological view underpinned the artistic approach to life, rather than the scientific or the religious. The second was to emphasize that life is made up of myriad different observations and experiences, epiphanies and insights, and that these accumulate over a lifetime; that fullness, wholeness, is not to be achieved suddenly through some “transcendent” episode of a religious or therapeutic kind, but is more akin to hard work or education.

  “THINGNESS”

  Everett Knight draws our attention to the work of Cézanne, who, he says, brought about a new era in art, an art which sought in a number of ways to see objects, as he put it, “in their full, non-human independence.” Cézanne, in Knight’s view (and others’), sought to show that perception is not guided by the intelligence “but warped by it. . . . This is the insight upon which the vision of Cézanne is based. His whole endeavor is to capture objects before his intelligence has organized them into something quite different from what they really are.” He went on: “As Valéry discovered, the sea is upright, rather than flat as the intelligence would have it. Cézanne draws dishes with several contours, because that is how they actually are before the intervention of the mind.”5 Another good example of this phenomenon is the difference between photography and the human eye. It is not uncommon, for instance, for us to experience a hill in the distance as high, as high as we know from experience that it is. In a photograph, however, the hill appears as insignificant.

  I. A. Richards, the Cambridge-based philosopher and literary critic, thought that art—poetry in particular, in his case—is “capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos.” Others who shared this attitude, after Cézanne, were the Cubists, who had a clear vision and were trying to show that the world of things is “incommensurate with anything human.”6 This led them to a major advance in the arts: the objects they created were not to be regarded as representations, as the traditional understanding had it, but as objects in their own right—their newness, their novelty, was part of their point, part of their meaning. Sheer newness, shockability, “thingness,” doesn’t sound like much of an alternative to “salvation,” but it proved immensely popular in the twentieth century.

  Husserl was also of the same mold as the American pragmatists in that he formed the view that there is no such thing as an unchanging human nature. Since he believed that a person is nothing more than the events of his or her life, it followed that he or she has no “definition.” This view is profound, and in several ways. It underlines that not only are the objects of the world each unique, but we are too. Each of us has an individual perspective on the world and it can in no way be surmounted.7 So, the only way we can ever come to terms with the world is to abandon any notion that there is, somewhere, an absolute principle (God, for example) and an absolute human nature (God-given) which can be brought together to realize one “truth.” This view is no less profound in carrying the further implication that science, for all its undeniable successes, is, no less than religion, only one way of understanding the world and not necessarily the one that suits us (some of us) best.

  What Valéry and Husserl were both trying to urge on us is a denial of the view that the particular is somehow less consequential than the general. “In giving our attention to the particular, we fear the risk of fixing ourselves upon an exception to the rule; art by its nature is existential; it is concerned with particulars, while rationalism is interested only in their relationships.” Husserl, in the words of Sartre, “has given back to us the world of artists and the prophets.” However we approach life, however we deal with it, life will always keep changing and remain beyond the reach of total understanding. We can never formulate an “exhaustive” explanation in such a way that our quest or our responsibility is “at an end.”

  ASSENT TO THE WORLD

  Roughly contemporary with Valéry and Cézanne was the philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson was born in Paris of Polish-Jewish descent in 1859, where his father was a musician. His early years were spent in London, but after the family moved back to France his first interest was mathematics; then he entered the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied philosophy. Bergson was influenced by the British biologist/philosopher Herbert Spencer; in London in 1908 he met William James, who helped popularize his ideas in America, while T. E. Hulme did the same in Britain.

  Bergson shared many of the ideas of James and the other pragmatists, though in the end he went in a different direction. Like the pragmatists and the phenomenologists, he believed that life consisted of a flux of immediate experience, that “reality is given immediately to the mind” but that “life overflows the intelligence” so that “reality can be recognized but not known completely.” Like the pragmatists and phenomenologists,
he thought that reason and logic distorted experience by analyzing it into separate elements.8 For Bergson, reality cannot be represented in the abstract, as science or religion attempt to do, without being distorted, “because it is always changing.” The world is a plurality, he insisted, implying there is no such thing as an absolute truth; reality always “escapes” a system, and “there is no bridge from the finite to the infinite.”

  So far, this could all be Dewey, William James or even Husserl talking. Where Bergson parted company with them, however, was in going further into the workings of the mind. The Victorian era had been obsessed with the so-called scientific idea of the world—or even of the universe—as a machine. Bergson’s answer was that this was so because it is the way the mind works, the way logic works. Logic is in effect limited—the world, he said, has not been built up in the way that we appreciate it scientifically; science is simply the way we have learned to take the world apart, and the apparent scientific unity we (think we) see around us is due to the fact that “man is a solitary sorting machine.”9

  He went on to make two proposals, which he saw as advances, and that concern us here. One was his notion of intuition. Around the central intellect, he said, is a “fringe” of intuition. The intuition acquires forms of knowledge that are “unseizable” by the intellect; intuition is a form of knowing without analysis, or even being able to state what we know. (Bertrand Russell dismissed this as “mystical.”) The intuition immerses itself in the flux of life and apprehends experience “without crystallization.” Bergson thought that there were, in effect, two selves—the logical self and the intuitional self. The poet was the classic example of the intuitional self and metaphor the classic form of intuitional knowledge, a metaphor being “a new name for a feature of reality for which we previously had no name.”10 The artist, to be an artist, must be “free of prose”; poetry is above all the “grammar of assent” to the world. Others have seen Bergson’s concept of intuition as overlapping with Freud’s ideas about the unconscious, which we will consider shortly.I