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

by Watson, Peter

  The French were naturally relieved to see the back of the Germans, and Paris in particular was inundated with sophisticated Anglophone visitors who had been starved of Parisian culture for too long. Jean Cocteau held court at the Hôtel Saint-Yves on the rue Jacob, where he was famous for his monologues (“the spoken word was his language and he used it with the virtuosity of an acrobat”). Picasso and Dora Maar could be found on the rue des Grands Augustins at Le Catalan, virtually an extension of his studio. Jean-Paul Sartre and his companion Simone de Beauvoir wrote for six hours a day at the Café Flore, or the Deux Magots, though Brasserie Lipp on Boulevard St.-Germain was out of favor for a time because its Alsatian dishes had proved popular with German officers.

  The autumn of 1945 saw what Anthony Beevor and Artemis Cooper called “the great existentialist boom,” though it was in truth a time of general cultural innovation. An astonishing number of newspapers and literary magazines were launched (despite the paper shortage being so acute that Le Monde was reduced from a broadsheet to tabloid size, becoming known as “Le Demi-Monde”). Theatres proliferated, as did jazz and cabaret: Juliette Gréco and Marlene Dietrich had stayed at the Ritz—“Ritzkrieg,” it came to be called—in between entertaining the troops at the front. And there was a vogue for American novels, now that they could be freely obtained. All this was happening in an atmosphere of such penury that people took to using 1920s-style cigarette holders, so they could smoke their Gauloises and Gitanes down to the very end. (When she was introduced to Sartre by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Juliette Gréco was amused to see that he left his silver cigarette case with the management at the Flore as a deposit against settling his bill.)2

  Sartre was to be a central figure in the “existentialist boom,” which began—in the popular mind at least—with a lecture he gave at the Club Maintenant in Paris in the autumn of 1945. It came to be regarded as a seminal event, one of the best accounts being that by the French writer and journalist Michel Tournier in his autobiography: “On October 28, 1945, Sartre called us together. It was a mob scene. An enormous crowd pressed against the walls of the tiny hall. The exits were blocked by those who had not managed to gain entry to the sanctuary, and women who fainted had to be piled on a convenient grand piano. The wildly acclaimed lecturer was lifted bodily over the crowd and on to the podium. Such popularity should have alerted us. Already the suspect tag ‘existentialism’ had been attached to the new system. Having tumbled into the darkened nightclubs of Paris, the new star attracted a grotesque fauna of singers, jazz musicians, soldiers of the Resistance, drunkards, and Stalinists. So what was existentialism? We were soon to find out. Sartre’s message could be stated in six words: existentialism is a form of humanism. . . . We were floored. Our master had gone and fished up that worn-out old duffer Humanism, still stinking with sweat and ‘inner life,’ from the trash heap where we had left him, and now he trotted him out along with the absurd idea of existentialism as if he had invented both. And everyone applauded.”3

  How very French: an enjoyable account that also manages to be a stylish put-down. But Tournier’s observations were true enough in that, although for many people Sartre’s lecture had kick-started a new philosophy—and a new way to attempt to live without God—in practice the ideas he made use of had been germinating in France and Germany all through the 1930s and even during the war, with the not necessarily paradoxical result that several leading Resistance figures continued to read and follow the teachings of the German philosopher, and notorious Nazi sympathizer, Martin Heidegger.

  This way of thinking began, as perhaps it was bound to, with the successive disasters and catastrophes of the First World War, the terror and purges in Stalin’s Russia, the stock market crash and the ensuing Depression, the Spanish Civil War and its horrors, such as the bombing of Guernica. Against this background such figures as Alexandre Kojève, Alexandre Koyré and Georges Bataille, following Heidegger, found traditional atheism—replacing God with man, history, nations and states—a “sinister impoverishment.” They were also at pains to point out that their ideas were an “anti-humanism.” Humanism, they went so far as to say, had led to fascism. What they meant by this was that humanism, even atheistic humanism, carried with it the idea that man was an end, a fixed end, a form of unchanging perfection already created. For them, this manifestly wasn’t true—man is still in the process of being formed, and it was the very idea that we understand what man is that had led to the catastrophes, as the dictators and other politicians tried to force man into a set mold. “Neither Marxists nor Capitalists nor humanists . . . can fully explain mankind, they are incomplete (and possibly erroneous) ways to understand ourselves.”4

  Kojève et al. were much influenced by science, especially by what was then recent science, advances in physics, mathematics and anthropology in particular. Science in general they thought had impoverished us because “completeness” is inherent in scientific and mathematical thought; this was not only itself a limiting factor and/or metaphor, but also where the idea of “perfection” had come from in the first place. But the findings of physics and mathematics—in particular, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—had shown that we are not separate from nature, that the very measurement of the “outside” world is affected by our presence; and in any case, as Kurt Gödel had shown, there are logical limits to what we can know. Moreover, there is no such thing as Nature with a capital N, there is no fixed nature because science is always advancing our grasp of what nature consists of.

  The discoveries of anthropology had shown, furthermore, that there are very great differences between peoples, not least in their understanding of God. Therefore, there is no such thing as being in the abstract; to be exists only at a specific time and a specific location, we can understand ourselves only via the immediacy of the concrete, meaning there is no “pure,” privileged perspective on life, we cannot avoid having a central standpoint. This was all derived, ultimately, from Heidegger, Husserl and the phenomenologists.

  THE BATTLE OVER TRANSCENDENCE

  And what follows from this, they deduced, is that we can have no access to transcendence. We cannot step back from the world, as Heidegger said, with Kojève and the others following; there is no “nature” prior to its interaction with man, man cannot be “outside” the world in some way, meaning that transcendence is simply not possible, not available. There is no teleology, no direction to the world. One aim of life is to surpass oneself; but even here no generalizations are possible because no generally agreed direction can exist, even in principle, since man cannot transcend his subjectivity.

  All we can hope for, as Emmanuel Lévinas put it in a useful neologism, is “excendence,” a striving to escape from our condition. But even this is at least partially doomed; Lévinas also espoused the concept of “subjective insufficiency”—meaning is not controlled by man, by the subject, and so, as Valéry said, we are condemned to live within limits and with disappointment.5

  All this amounted to a re-proportioning of man, and here violence played a crucial role. Before the disasters of the twentieth century, violence had been regarded as what the historian Stefanos Geroulanos of New York University has called, in a nice phrase, “the left-over darkness” of the Enlightenment, occurring in places “where the light of reason had not yet reached.” But violence—the violence of the Gulag and the Holocaust death camps, for example—was no longer just that. Violence, by this account, was inescapable in modern society, because reason isn’t something that exists prior to man, but has to be constructed. We are, in effect, “emptied out,” there is no stability in human nature, there are no absolutes, no idealized understanding of humanity. We must seek what satisfaction we can here on earth, within the state and with all the shortcomings that carries with it, implying that our existence is invariably and always one of struggle and, if we are not to descend into further catastrophe, constant criticism.6

  And it was this set of ideas, sometimes called proto-existen
tialism, that concerned the Resistance during the war. In addition to Sartre, other figures active here included Jean Beaufret, Gaston Fessard and Joseph Rovan. Beaufret first encountered the ideas of Heidegger while in the Resistance network Pericles in the mountains around Lyon, when he was given a copy of Being and Time by Rovan, who had translated part of the book into French. (Rovan was an important résistant himself, a talented forger of identity papers.) Beaufret published his own writings on Heidegger in Confluences and Fontaine, both of which, like Sartre’s Les Temps modernes, were journals inspired by the Resistance. So integral was his “resistantialism” to his reading of Heidegger that, on the very day the Allies launched the Normandy invasion, June 6, 1944, Beaufret claimed that “he reproached himself for rejoicing more for realizing some of what Heidegger was all about than about being told about the invasion itself.” Again, how very French. Fessard, Jesuit theologian and philosopher, taught Heidegger throughout the occupation. As Geroulanos sums up: “Not only did these figures relegitimate the study of Heidegger’s thought during and after the occupation, they also helped make Heidegger . . . a cornerstone of Résistance morality.”7

  We can now see the significance of Michel Tournier’s comments in regard to Sartre’s lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism” of October 28, 1945. In France at least, humanism had lost its lustre.

  Sartre, though, had not lost his. This was due to his ability to express his philosophy not just in academic journals, the normal outlet for philosophical writings. His talents ranged much more widely—to novels and plays, and to the popular Temps modernes. The journal’s title was partly inspired by Chaplin’s film Modern Times, but its editorial committee, led by Sartre, was impressive enough in itself to attract attention. It included Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty as philosophy editor, Michel Leiris and Raymond Queneau for poetry and literature, as well as Raymond Aron and Jean Paulhan. André Malraux was invited to take part, but declined. Other existential ventures of the time included plays such as Jean Giraudoux’s Sodome et Gomorrhe, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone and Camus’s Caligula.

  The “existentialist boom” in Paris did not last long. By the end of 1949, the heyday of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was over. “In Paris, perhaps one needs a war to launch a quartier,” quipped the poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert. But existentialism’s legacy was more enduring.8

  INTENSITY AS MEANING

  Though he shared many of their ideas, André Malraux did not really belong in this intellectual circuit comprising men like Kojève and Koyré, spiritual heirs of Heidegger. He was much more a man of action, traveling to Cambodia and China in his twenties. While in Cambodia he had been arrested for removing some antiquities; his sentence was later revoked but that didn’t stop him being critical of the French colonial authorities. In 1930, his father, a banker, committed suicide after the stock market crash. In the mid-1930s, Malraux fought in the Spanish Civil War; during the Second World War, he was captured in 1940, escaped and joined the Resistance, being later decorated by both the French and British governments. He also found time to write; his 1933 book La Condition humaine won the Prix Goncourt.

  His background was important for his philosophy, which, despite reflecting a lifestyle different from those of the other Paris intellectuals of the 1930s and during the Resistance, nonetheless formed part of the canon of existentialism. He accepted that we can have no preconceived idea of man, that “existence precedes essence”—the founding mantra of existentialism—and that therefore there is no “model existence” we can aspire to. Instead, he said, we must aspire to two things: that our lives “leave a scar on the face of the earth”; and that our actions be conducted with other men—“common action is a common bond.” Life is not sacred, he argued, it is not a possession, but “an instrument of value only to the extent that it is utilized.”9 Malraux thought that the obsession with an “inner world, the inner life,” was a red herring. He had discovered a different mentality in China, so different, in fact, that he wondered whether it is even possible to speak of the “human mind” in the abstract. “The Chinaman, for example, does not conceive of himself as an individual, the notion of ‘personality’ is foreign to him. The Chinese feel themselves far less distinct from others and from things than does the Westerner.” To an extent he shared that view.

  If there is no direction to life, Malraux decided, then its only meaning “must lie in its intensity.” “I can no longer conceive of man apart from his intensity,” he said. And intensity is determined by action, from which it follows that the only plan the world will ever have for us is the one “we temporarily force upon it.” He could not just accept that our condition is absurd, as Gide and Valéry did, but argued that we must revolt against that idea—nothing must be accepted without a fight, the “constant criticism” of the proto-existentialists. This also meant refusing to accept all forms of order, such as one’s position in society; and the apparent order in personality—never accept that you are one type of person or another, everything is always changing. He agreed with Gide that there is nothing beyond the immediate, no understanding apart from experience; that what is not available to sensation does not exist and that therefore nothing can be known beyond action.10 This is what his novel La Condition humaine is about.

  The focus on action among the existentialists stemmed partly from the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his idea that consciousness is not a function just of the brain but of the entire body. Merleau-Ponty, who as a student attended lectures alongside Sartre, Beauvoir and Simone Weil, subsequently became a child psychologist and a phenomenologist, teaching at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France. He argued that the body sets limits to experience and that style in art, the physical movements that create distinctive styles, cannot be put into words, much as Wittgenstein had said (see chapter 15). Style, he maintained, is a fruit of the body as much as of the mind, and if we are to feel fulfilled we must satisfy the body as much as the mind. Acts do that; that is why they are fulfilling.

  LOVE AS REFUGE

  Returning for a moment to Malraux, his real dilemma was this: if our action—the decisions and the movements we make—is to remain “pure,” pristine, then how can we account for other people? Action and solitude go together: the immediate experience of action—its very intensity—distances us from others. And this gives rise to the statement “Love is not a solution to human solitude; it is a refuge from it.”11 This may be extended, to say that there are no solutions to the mysteries of life, only (temporary) refuges from the constant struggle. Indeed, Malraux goes so far as to suggest that intercourse with other people can never satisfactorily cure solitude—only feeling that we have a reason for being on earth can do that; but metaphysics and religion he dismisses as no more than irrelevant “half-way houses.” If we are to lead an intense life through action, solitude is the inevitable price we pay—this is one of our dilemmas. The other dilemma arises when we consider whether action should sacrifice its “purity” in an attempt to achieve something that is beyond the immediate. In living for others, however worthwhile that is from their point of view, we sacrifice intensity.

  Living as we do with these dilemmas, which constitute our “existential anguish,” means we are often ready to give up our individuality in order to conform to some model that we imagine will enable us to have “perfect communication” with our fellow men and women. But this is an illusion, Malraux says, and he repeats: “Love is not a solution to human solitude; it is a refuge from it.”

  It is a phrase worth repeating, because Malraux was convinced that communication between individuals, to the extent believed possible in the old days of religion and metaphysics, when people believed in “transcendence,” for example, is no longer in the cards. This is shown clearly, he said, in the phenomenon of modern art, which has a sacred quality, in that it is dedicated not to God but to itself. “[Modern] art is a ‘closed system,’ without indebtedness to the exterior world whose domination it is
the very meaning of art to contest. . . . Human freedom could hardly be carried further. But the liberation has been effected at the cost of introducing a new kind of separation between man and his world; not that of an attempt on the part of the mind to gain perspective on matter, but that of a withdrawal into a different world.”12

  In other words, the artist is constructing something that “resists” the outside world. He or she has shown us his or her product. We, as spectators, recognize what he or she is trying to do but we can never understand totally. Art before the death of God, a painting by Raphael, say, or Leonardo da Vinci, contained transcendental subjects to which there was a “common,” shared, reaction. But that was illusory too. That was our choice, and another dilemma: an illusory commonality, or our cold appreciation of what is not common.

  Malraux thought—and acted—according to his belief that the universe is not a riddle to which we must find the key, but that in fact the universe has nothing to conceal from us. We must explore it as intensely as we can, trying as best we can to both enjoy the experience and observe ourselves experiencing it. To a degree, inevitably, we will fail in this; but we must make the most of it all the same, for that is all there is. Since the universe has nothing to conceal from us, life is its own answer and we must ensure that we live it as intensely as we can. If we need a metaphor by which to live, we should be like modern artists, creating something which is its own justification and which others will understand only incompletely.

  INSPIRATION BEFORE PERSUASION

  Though he is best known for being a pioneer aviator and for his novella The Little Prince (translated into no fewer than 250 languages), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry won several literary prizes, in France and the United States, and fought as a member of the Free French Air Force in North Africa in the Second World War (despite being wildly overage). His books earned the distinction of being banned in both occupied France and free France (he was very suspicious of de Gaulle). He disappeared on a reconnaissance flight over the Mediterranean in July 1944.