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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Tragedy Without God

http://sulekha.com/chpost.asp?for...ilosophy&show=0&cid=73258

One reader asks:

How does a non-believer come to terms with tragedy? Say, an untimely
death of a dear one? Or being struck by a series of ill-fortune which
in his/her opinion is totally undeserved? A religious person could
probably blame it on fate or destiny. And console oneself saying that
it is all God's will and there is nothing that he/she could do as a
mortal. And maybe even turn to God for solace and consolation.
What about a non-believer? How do you come to terms with the finality
of an event like death ? Whom does he/she turn to?

======================

http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol5/camus.html

Early in his essay, "The Myth of Sysiphus", Camus states that when
comforting illusions are stripped away, life can be seen to be
completely devoid of meaning. He asks whether that realization
necessarily means that life is not worth living. The entire essay is
an attempt to answer that question.

In developing the model on which his answer would be based, Camus
argues that man desperately demands meaning and clarity of the world
around him but finds himself confronting a universe that is
irrational and meaningless. In the face of this negation of basic
demands of the human spirit, the stance to assume, according to
Camus, is one of defiance and revolt, even though the effort expended
in that hopeless struggle is like that of Sisyphus rolling his rock
up the mountainside. Despite that hopelessness, Camus argues that it
is this very defiance and revolt in the face of a world without
meaning that enable man to live life as fully and passionately as
possible. Camus states: "It was formerly a matter of knowing whether
life had to have a meaning in order to be lived. It now appears to
the contrary that it can be lived all the more fully if it has no
meaning."

In this way, Camus maintains that what could easily be mistaken for
grounds for suicide—a realization that life has no meaning—is in fact
a basis for living life to the fullest. That, in a nutshell, is the
point of the essay.

On several occasions in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Camus makes it clear
that he is arguing against what he sees as the existential position,
which he characterizes as nothing less than "philosophical suicide"
(Ibid., 119). He states, for example:

"Restricting my discussion to existential philosophies, I see that
every one of them, without exception, proposes evasion. By way of a
unique kind of reasoning, they start out from the absurd and move
across the ruins of reason, in a universe that is closed and limited
to the human; [there] they deify what crushes them and find a reason
for pinning their hopes on what impoverishes them."

==================================

employees.csbsju.edu/dbeach/phil180/sartre.pdf

For Jean-Paul Sartre Existentialism Is a Humanism

This philosophic movement, like most others, was characterized by
radical disagreements among its members, and it was diverse enough,
to includeboth atheists and theists.

Its most famous members, however, were those who saw it as a central
part of their mission to respond to the loss of faith to determine
how one should live in the vacuum created by the death of God.

In this respect, Sartre `s philosophy is representative but also
somewhat paradoxical. Though he begins by depicting existentialism as
a response to the death of God, he announces in his conclusion that
whether God exists is not the issue. Similarly, he speaks of
anguish, forlornness, and despair as the consequences of atheism, but
ends by describing existentialism as an optimistic doctrine.

1. What is the meaning of the term "existentialism"?

2. What is the existentialist view of freedom?

There are two kinds of existentialist; first, those who are
Christian, among whom I would include Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel,
both Catholic; and on the other hand the atheistic existentialists,
among whom I class Heidegger, Sartre and the French existentialists.

In the eighteenth century, the atheism of the philosophes discarded
the idea of God, but not so much for the notion that essence precedes
existence. To a certain extent, this idea is found everywhere; we
find it in Diderot, in Voltaire, and even in Kant. Man has a human
nature; this human nature, which is the concept of the human, is
found in all men, which means that each man is a particular example
of a universal concept, man. In Kant, the result of this universality
is that the wild-man, the natural man, as well as the bourgeois, are
circumscribed by the same definition and havethe same basic
qualities. Thus, here too the essence of man precedesthe historical
existence that we find in nature.Atheistic existentialism, which I
represent, is more coherent. It states that if God does not exist,
there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a
being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and that
this being is man, or, as Heidegger says, human reality. What is
meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that,
first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only
afterwards, defines himself If man, as the existentialist conceives
him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only
afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he
will be. Thus, there is no human nature,since there is no God to
conceive it. Not only is man what heconceives himself to be, but he
is also only what he wills himself tobe after this thrust toward
existence.Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is
the first principle of existentialism. It is also what is called
subjectivity,the name we are Labeled with when charges arc brought
against us. But what do we mean by this, if not that man has a
greater dignity than a stone or table? For we mean that man first
exists, that is, that man first of all is the being who hurls himself
toward a future and who is conscious of imagining himself as being in
the future. Man is at the start a plan which is aware of itself,
rather than a patch of moss, a piece of garbage, or a cauliflower;
nothing exists prior to this plan; there is nothing in heaven; man
will be what he will have planned to be. Not what he will want to be.
Because by the word "will" we generally mean a conscious decision,
which is subsequentto what we have already made of ourselves. I may
want to belongto a political party, write a book, get married; but
all that is only amanifestation of an earlier, more spontaneous
choice that is called "will." But if existence really does precede
essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, existentialism's
first move is to make everyman aware of what he is and to make the
full responsibility of his existence rest on him. And when we say
that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is
responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for
all men. The word subjectivism has two meanings, and our
opponentsplay on the two. Subjectivism means on the one hand, that an
individual chooses and makes himself, and, on the other, that it is
impossible for man to transcend human subjectivity. The second of
these is the essential meaning of existentialism. When we say that
man chooses his own self, we mean that every one of us doeslikewise;
but we also mean by that that in making this choice he also chooses
all men. In fact, in creating the man that we want to be, there is
not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create
an image of man as we think he ought to be. To choose to be this or
that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we
choose,because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good,
and nothing can be good for us without being good for all. If, on the
other hand, existence precedes essence, and if we grant that we exist
and fashion our image at one and the same time, the image is valid
for everybody and for our whole age. Thus, our responsibility is much
greater than we might have supposed,because it involves all mankind,
if I am a working man and choose to join a Christian trade-union
rather than be a communist, and if by being a member I want to show
that the best thing for man is resignation, that the kingdom of man
is not of this world, I am not only involving my own case I want to
be resigned for everyone. As a result, my action has involved all
humanity. To take a more individual matter, if I want to marry, to
have children; even if this marriage depends solely on my own
circumstances or passion or wish, I am involving all humanity in
monogamy and not merelymyself. Therefore, I am responsible for myself
and for everyone else.I am creating a certain image of man of my own
choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man. This helps us understand
what the actual content is of such rather grandiloquent words as
anguish, forlornness, despair. As you will see, it's all quite
simple. First, what is meant by anguish? The existentialists say at
once that man is anguish. What this means is this: the man who
involves himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he
chooses to be, but also a lawmaker who is, at the same time, choosing
all mankind as well as himself, can not help escape the feeling of
his total and deep responsibility. Of course, there are many people
who for Sartre are not anxious; but we claim that they are hiding
their anxiety, thatthey are fleeing from it. Certainly, many people
believe that whenthey do something, they themselves are the only ones
involved, andwhen someone says to them, "What if everyone acted that
way?"they shrug their shoulders and answer, "Everyone doesn't act
thatway." But really, one should always ask himself, "What
wouldhappen if everybody looked at things that way?" There is
noescaping this disturbing thought except by a kind of double-
dealing.A man who lies and makes excuses for himself by
saying "noteverybody does that," is someone with an uneasy
conscience,because the act of lying implies that a universal value is
conferredupon the lie.. . .When we speak of forlornness, a term
Heidegger was fond of,we mean only that God does not exist and that
we have to face allthe consequences of this. The existentialist is
strongly opposed to acertain kind of secular ethics which would like
to abolish God withthe least possible expense. About 1880, some
French teachers tried to set up a secular ethics which went something
like this: God is a useless and costly hypothesis; we are discarding
it; but, meanwhile,in order for there to be an ethics, a society, a
civilization, it isessential that certain values be taken seriously
and that they beconsidered as having an a priori existence. It must
be obligatory, apriori, to be honest, not to lie, not to beat your
wife, to have children,etc., etc. So we're going to try a little
device which will make itpossible to show that values exist all the
same, inscribed in a heavenof ideas, though otherwise God does not
exist. In other words—and this, I believe, is the tendency of
everything called reformism in France—nothing will be changed if God
does not exist. We shall findourselves with the same norms of
honesty, progress, and humanism,and we shall have made of God an
outdated hypothesis which will peacefully die off by itself.The
existentialist, on the contrary, thinks it very distressing thatGod
does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in aheaven
of ideas disappeared along with Him; there can no longerbe an a
priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to
think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be
honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is we are on a plane
where there are only men.

Dostoevsky said, If God didn'texist, everything would be possible.

That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything
is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn,
because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling
to. He can't start making excuses for himself.If existence really
does precede essence, there is no explainingthings away by reference
to a fixed and given human nature. In otherwords, there is no
determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On theother hand, if God
does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which
legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm ofvalues, we have no
excuse behind us, nor justification before us. Weare alone, with no
excuses.That is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is
condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not createhimself,
yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into theworld,
he is responsible for everything he does. The existentialistdoes not
believe in the power of passion. He will never agree that a sweeping
passion is a ravaging torrent which fatally leads a manto certain
acts and is therefore an excuse. He thinks that man is responsible
for his passion.. . .As for despair, the term has a very simple
meaning. It means that we shall confine ourselves to reckoning only
with what dependsupon our will, or on the ensemble of probabilities
which make our action possible.When we want something, we always have
to reckon withprobabilities. I may be counting on the arrival of a
friend. The friend is coming by rail or street-car; this supposes
that the train will arriveon schedule, or that the street—car will
not jump the track. I am left in the realm of possibility; but
possibilities are to be reckoned withonly to the point where my
action comports with the ensemble ofthese possibilities, and no
further. The moment the possibilities I amconsidering are not
rigorously involved by my action, I ought to disengage myself from
them, because no God, no scheme, can adapt the world and its
possibilities to my will. When Descartes said,"Conquer yourself
rather than the world," he meant essentially the same thing.

The doctrine I am presenting is the very opposite of quietism, since
it declares, "There is no reality except in action." Moreover, it
goes further, since it adds, "Man is nothing else than his plan; he
exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself, he is therefore
nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his
life."According to this, we can understand why our doctrine horrifies
certain people. Because often the only way they can bear their
wretchedness is to think, "Circumstances have been against me. What
I've been and done doesn't show my true worth. To be sure,I've had no
great love, no great friendship, but that's because I haven't met a
man or woman who was worthy. The books I've written haven't been very
good because I haven't had the proper leisure. I haven't had children
to devote myself to because I didn't find a man with whom I could
have spent my life. So there remains within me, unused and quite
viable, a host of propensities,inclinations, possibilities, that one
wouldn't guess from the mere series of things I've done."

Now, for the existentialist there is really no love other than one
which manifests itself in a person's being in love. There is no
genius other than one which is expressed in works of art; the genius
of Proust is the sum of Proust's works; the genius of Racine is his
series of tragedies. Outside of that, there is nothing. Why say that
Racine could have written another tragedy, when he didn't write it? A
man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of
that there is nothing. To be sure, this may seem a harsh thought to
someone whose life hasn't been a success. But, on the other hand, it
prompts people to understand that reality alone is what counts, that
dreams, expectations, and hopes warrant no more than to define a man
as a disappointed dream, as miscarried hopes, as vain expectations.
In other words, to define him negatively and not positively. However,
when we say, "You are nothing else than your life," that does not
imply that the artist will be judged solely on the basis of his works
of art; a thousand other things will contribute toward summing him
up. What we mean is that a man is nothing else than a series of
undertakings, that he is the sum, the organization, the ensemble of
the relationships which make up these undertakings.

Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the
consequences of a coherent atheistic position. It isn't trying to
plunge man into despair at all. But if one calls every attitude of
unbelief despair, like the Christians, then the word is not being
used in its original sense. Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it
wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares
that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. There you've
got our point of view. Not that we believe that God exists, but we
think that the problem of His existence is not the issue. In this
sense existentialismis optimistic, a doctrine of action, and it is
plain dishonesty for Christians to make no distinction between their
own despair and ours and then to call us despairing.

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