Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part II: Sartre

Having surveyed the wreckage of modern Western civilization from the lofty vantage point of Nietzsche’s Superman, let’s now descend to the lowest depths of existential angst with Jean-Paul Sartre.  So pour some whiskey, put on a jazz LP, and light the cigarette of the hipster girl dressed in black reading Camus at the barstool next to you.  Let’s get Absurd.

Our theme in this series is how starkly the gravitas of many “Old Atheist” writers contrasts with the glib banality of the New Atheism.  Consider the ritual appeal to Hume in critiquing First Cause arguments for the existence of God.  There are insuperable problems with Humean views about causality, as I have argued in many places (e.g. here).  But put that aside for now.  The New Atheist forgets all about such views almost as soon as he has deployed them.  They amount to little more than a debating tactic or talking point, intended merely to stymie an opponent and block an unwelcome conclusion.  The New Atheist has no interest in thinking through their wider implications or ultimate defensibility.  But suppose someone seriously believed with Hume that causes and effects are all “loose and separate,” so that any effect or none might with equal likelihood follow upon any cause, and so that a thing or event might, as likely as not, pop into existence with no cause or explanation whatsoever?

Sartre imagines just this in his novel Nausea, and nausea is what he thinks such a person would experience, as surely as if he’d been riding an especially violent rollercoaster.  For reality is on the Humean empiricist view something of a rollercoaster, with unpredictable turns and drops awaiting us, in principle, at every moment.  Sartre has his protagonist say:

I went to the window and glanced out… I murmured: Anything can happen, anything…

Frightened, I looked at these unstable beings which, in an hour, in a minute, were perhaps going to crumble: yes, I was there, living in the midst of these books full of knowledge describing the immutable forms of the animal species, explaining that the right quantity of energy is kept integral in the universe; I was there, standing in front of a window whose panes had a definite refraction index.  But what feeble barriers!   I suppose it is out of laziness that the world is the same day after day.  Today it seemed to want to change.   And then, anything, anything could happen…

Sometimes, my heart pounding, I made a sudden right-about-turn: what was happening behind my back?   Maybe it would start behind me and when I would turn around, suddenly, it would be too late… I looked at them as much as I could, pavements, houses, gaslights; my eyes went rapidly from one to the other, to catch them unawares, stop them in the midst of their metamorphosis… Doors of houses frightened me especially.  I was afraid they would open of themselves. (pp. 77-78)

(Bas van Fraassen quotes some of these lines in his essay “The world of empiricism,” to give a sense of the flavor the world must have on a consistent empiricism.) 

But it is not in the external, material world that Sartre locates the most disorienting aspect of atheism.  That is to be found instead in the inner world of the conscious, acting subject.  In Being and Nothingness, Sartre famously draws a distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself.  By being-in-itself Sartre has in mind a mere thing or object, a physical phenomenon as it exists objectively or independently of human consciousness.  Being-in-itself exhibits “facticity” insofar as it is simply given or fixed.  As opposed to what?  As opposed to being-for-itself, which is the human agent, conceived of as consciousness projecting forward toward an unrealized possibility.  Being-for-itself exhibits “transcendence” insofar as it is not fixed or given in the way that a mere thing or object is, but is rather dynamic and constantly making itself.  It might therefore be said to amount, in a sense, to a kind of “nothingness” rather than a being.

Well, what does all that mean?  And what does it have to do with atheism?  Let’s slow down a bit and work through Sartre’s position carefully.  The first thing to note is that action is for Sartre always intentional or directed towards an end, and seeks to remedy some objective lack, something missing, some non-being.  For example, you order French fries because you want them but don’t have them.  Your action aims or is directed at the state of affairs of eating French fries, a state of affairs which, before the action takes place, does not exist.  Now, for this reason, Sartre thinks that no factual state can suffice to generate an action, since an action is always projected toward something non-existent.  Again, before you carry out the action of ordering the fries, the state of affairs of your eating French fries does not exist, is not among the facts that make up the world.  And yet that non-existent state of affairs is in some sense the cause of your action.

Defenders of free will are in Sartre’s view therefore mistaken in trying to uphold their position by looking for examples of actions without a cause, since acts are intentional or directed toward an end, and this non-existent end is itself a kind of cause.  But by the same token, Sartre thinks that critics of the idea of free will are wrong to deny its existence on the grounds that our actions are caused, because these critics have too narrow a conception of cause.  They look for all causes in the realm of factual states, and ignore the crucial role of non-existent states of affairs like that of your eating the French fries.  In effect, they fallaciously try to reduce being-for-itself (which cannot be understood except in terms of directedness toward what is as yet non-existent) to being-in-itself (which is entirely intelligible in terms of existent facts).  Yet even the attempt at such a reduction itself undermines the reduction, since before one undertakes the action of interpreting being-for-itself as a kind of being-in-itself, that interpretation does not itself yet exist and thus is not within the realm of the factual or the in-itself.

What Sartre is doing here, I would suggest, is noting (in a somewhat idiosyncratic, obscure, and potentially misleading jargon) that action is irreducibly teleological or intelligible only in terms of the notion of final cause -- of which the intentionality or directedness of thought is a specific instance -- whereas those who deny free will typically want to analyze human action in exclusively efficient-causal, non-teleological, and non-intentional terms.  And the very attempt to eliminate teleology or intentionality from the story is self-defeating, since such an attempt qua action will itself aim at a certain outcome (and thus exhibit teleology) and will involve representing the world in a certain way (and thus involve intentionality).  Sartre, I would suggest, is essentially calling attention to the incoherence problem that is fatal to eliminative materialism and related doctrines.

But Sartre’s preferred mode of expression is much more melodramatic (and unfortunately, much less precise).  For example, he famously speaks of the “nothingness [which] lies coiled at the heart of being -- like a worm,” and which is the source of our freedom (Being and Nothingness, p. 56).  The idea is that we cannot avoid acting, but in acting are always projecting ourselves toward some end or outcome that does not yet exist and precisely for that reason cannot fix or determine what we do.  Even the attempt to interpret ourselves as cogs in a deterministic machine is itself an opting for but one possible interpretation among others, and thus is not forced upon us.  No sooner has one entertained that interpretation than it dawns upon him that he could in the very next moment instead reject it and adopt another.  It is as if we are, in acting, always trying vainly to plug a black hole which simply sucks up anything we throw into it and perpetually remains as open as it ever was.  This is precisely what our freedom consists in: the absence of anything in the realm of facticity, of being-in-itself, of the objective world beyond consciousness, which can possibly fix, determine, or settle how one shall act. 

As the harrowing talk of “nothingness” being “coiled… like a worm” implies, this freedom is not for Sartre a cause for relief or celebration.  Nor is his insistence on the reality of free will (contra Sam Harris and other New Atheists) a wish-fulfilling attempt to salvage some shred of human specialness in the face of atheism and the advance of science.  On the contrary, Sartre regards the denial of free will as itself an instance of “bad faith” or intellectual dishonesty.  For the denial of free will is simply incoherent, while the exercise of free will is -- when one truly understands what it entails -- frightening, and something we have an obvious motive for wanting to avoid.  There is absolutely nothing for which one is not ultimately in some sense responsible, in Sartre’s view.  If I say that my actions are all the result of heredity, bad upbringing, stress, or what have you, then it is nevertheless the case that I have opted for this interpretation, could have chosen another instead, and might yet choose another in the next moment.  It is in this sense that Sartre famously holds that one even chooses one’s own birth and the events that took place before one’s birth.  For one always opts for some interpretation of exactly how one’s birth and those other events led to one’s current circumstances, and could choose some alternative interpretation instead.  That is to say, what significance to give one’s birth and the other events that were outside one’s control is always up to one.  One is never able finally to say: “This is just the way these things have affected who I am and what I do, and that’s out of my hands.”

Given how deep our responsibility goes, and how vertiginous it is relentlessly to be faced with the need to choose, there is constant temptation to try to find some escape by locating something beyond consciousness that is the “true” source of one’s actions -- deterministic laws of physics, genes, familial and other social influences, the movement of history, or what have you.  But there is no escape, and the free-will-denying atheist is for Sartre no less engaged in self-deception than the religious fundamentalist.  Moreover, unlike the religious believer or the traditional metaphysician, the modern atheist has nothing to look to for guidance in how to choose -- no God, no Platonic realm of Forms, no Aristotelian natures of things. 

This is the force of Sartre’s famous slogan “existence precedes essence.”  For the theist and the traditional metaphysician, what a human being is is metaphysically prior to the fact that any particular human being exists.  There is a fact of the matter about what it is to be human, a nature or essence -- being a rational animal, say, or being made in God’s image -- that is independent of any actual human being’s existence and choices, and what is good or bad for a human being is to be defined in terms of these pre-existing facts about his nature.  But if one rejects all such theistic and metaphysical assumptions, and also follows out the implications of Sartre’s analysis of free will, then there is a sense in which this order of things is reversed.  That is to say, a human being’s existence is prior to his essence -- he must choose what he is to be, and this choice is never fixed once and for all but must be revisited constantly.  Nor, given the lack of any metaphysical grounding for such choices, do any of them have any ultimate rationale or justification.  An air of absurdity inevitably surrounds the human condition.  To look at the world this way just is to be a Sartrean existentialist. 

So, no Richard Dawkins-style happy talk for Sartre about enjoying one’s life in the absence of God.  “I am condemned to be free,” Sartre famously writes (p. 567, emphasis added), indeed “abandoned” to a harsh reality in which responsibility cannot be evaded (p. 569) -- cannot be passed on either to God or to the naturalistic forces the atheist would put in place of God.  “I am without excuse,” Sartre says, “for from the instant of my upsurge into being, I carry the weight of the world by myself alone without anything or any person being able to lighten it” (p. 710).  For Sartre, it is not the delusional optimism of the Atheist Bus Campaign but the ennui of the existentialist hero that is the mark of true authenticity. 

Though, famously, this ennui had for him its compensations.  Sartre’s Old Atheism is world-weariness, whiskey, a smoky bar, and a beautiful French woman lighting your cigarette while Miles Davis plays in the background.  The New Atheism, meanwhile, is goofy bus advertisements, pimply combox trolls live-blogging a Reason Rally, and Richard Carrier making a crude pass at you.  Why the hell would anyone ever want to be a New Atheist?