Self Encounter; 2; The Far Side of Dispair

[music playing] [music playing] [music playing] [music playing] [music playing] [Dr. Hazel Barnes]: Toward the end of the 19th

century Friedrich Nietzsche declared, "God is dead." And he spoke the words in exaltation. But Dostoyevsky said, that if God does not exist, then everything is allowed. And here we see the under edge of tragedy and despair. For if everything is allowed, then can there be any right and wrong? If everything is allowed, how can man choose? How can man know how to live? Both Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky have profoundly influenced 20th century existentialism, so much so that it would be hardly an exaggeration to say that for the whole of the humanistic movement, there is simply an exploration of the consequences of this idea of the missing God. Jean-Paul Sartre, in a play which is called, "The Devil and the Good Lord", has presented a scene, which interestingly enough, combines

both the exaltation and the despair. Here toward the end of the play two strangely disturbed characters meet to settle a wager. The priest, Heinrich, has been haunted by the guilty memory that he has betrayed his own city and yet it is he who comes as victor in the settling of the bet. For the military leader Goetz, had bet that he could, for a year's time, do nothing but serve God and achieve only good. But he failed, for somehow or other history and the world distorted his acts, so the good result only in men suffering. As the scene progresses, their takes place a curious reversal. [Goetz]: Lord if you refused to grant us the means of doing good, why have you filled us with this goading desire for it? If you will not grant that I should

become good, and why have you remove for me the wish to be evil? ?inaudible?. There's no way out of this. [Heinrich]: Why, do you pretend to be speaking to him? You know quite well that he won't answer. [Goetz]: Why the silence? He who manifested himself to the acts of the profit, why should he not manifest himself to me? [Heinrich]: Because you are unimportant. Talk to the weak or ?moderized? yourself. Kiss the lips of a harlot or a leper. Die of fasting or die of excesses. God couldn't care less. [Goetz]: Than who is important? [Heinrich]: No one. Man is nothing. Don't pretend to be so surprised, you've always known it. You've cheated. You raised your voice to cover the silence of God. And those orders you pretend to receive from him, it is you who send them to yourself. [Goetz]: Myself? Yes. Yes indeed. You yourself. I alone. [Heinrich]: Yes, you. I said, you. [Goetz, laughing]: I, alone father.

You're right. I alone. I supplicated. I demanded some sign. I sent messages up to heaven. No answer. Heaven ignored my very name. Each minute I asked myself what I could be in God's eyes. And now I know the answer. God does not know me. You see that emptiness up there over our heads, that is God. You see that hole in the ground, that is God too. The silence is God. The absence is God. God is the loneliness of men. There was never anyone there but me. It is I who invented good. It is I who invented evil. It is I who accuse myself today and I am the only one who can absolve myself. I, man. If god exists

man is nothing. If man exist I- where were you going? [Heinrich]: I'm going away from you? I want nothing more to do with you. [Goetz]: Great father ,I'm going to make you laugh. [Heinrich]: Be quite! [Goetz]: But you don't know yet what I am going to tell you. [Heinrich]: It's not true. I- I know nothing and I don't want to know anything. [Goetz]: Heinrich, I'm going to let you in on a colassal joke, God doesn't exist. He doesn't exist. Know joy. Tears of joy. Hallelujah! Fool don't fight me. I'm bringing us deliverance. No more heaven. No more hell. Nothing but the earth. [Heinrich]: Nothing? Damn me a hundred times, a thousand times as long as he exists. Yet men have called us traitor and bastard and they have condemned us. If God does not exist, then there is no longer any way of escaping men. God this man has blasphemed. I believe in you. I believe. Our father which are in heaven, I prefer to be judged by an infinite being not by my equals. To whom i'm

speaking you just said he was death. [Goetz]: No way now of escaping man. Farewell to monsters. Farewell to saints. Farewell pride. There's nothing left but man. [Barnes]: In Goetz we can see Nietzche's exaltation. For him the thought that there is no God comes as a relief. Almost a salvation. It delivers him from the crushing burden of trying to serve a remote being who's will he can never fully understand. And it sets him free to love mankind and to serve man in the way that he himself thinks is best. If God exists, man is nothing. But if God does not exist then man is free to choose what he wants to make himself.

But for the priest Heinrich, the thought of God's absence brings only terror and despair. So long as God existed for Heinrich, then, although he might fear God's condemnation, he could at the same time hope for God's pardon. He could feel that if he admitted his guilt and repented, then God might see fit to pronounce him finally not guilty. But without God, Heinrich is at the mercy of men. So long as he exists or is remembered, he will be guilty in the eyes of humanity. For Sartre, Goetz's is attitude is ultimately the right one. And yet in Sartre work, as in the work of other existentialist writers, we generally see the negative side, the forelornness of man without God. Sartre has declared that he is the first

person who has ever explored to the full the consequences of man's life without God. If God does not exist, then says Sartre, man has nowhere to turn. It is, one might say, using perhaps another strange analogy, just as if we would try to judge a Ford car without any Mr. Ford. So long as there is a Mr. Ford or one of his agents, then we have a model, we have a blueprint and we can say that the car which is coming there off the assembly line is a perfect Ford or an imperfect Ford. The right number of ?rattles?, not enough ?rattles?. But, without a plan one cannot judge a car. Without God, there is no plan for mankind and there is no final point of reference by which man can judge his values,

or right or wrong, or declare that he has lived up to his possibilities or not lived up to his possibilities. Sartre feels that most men simply cannot face the burden of this self creative life and so, they try to live as if there were a God. But this for Sartre is an evasion. Furthermore, it is not the right kind of sacrifice. Man denies himself so that God may exist. But there is no God and man is a useless passion. One might well wonder why since Sartre realizes how desperately man needs God, why he will not go the one step further and say that God is there. Perhaps the very desperation of man's need is one reason for Sartre's suspicion. He feels the concept, concept smacks too much of self-

fulfillment in the sense of wish fulfillment. But Sartre and other existentialists have, in any case, no intention of trying to prove that God does not exist. One cannot prove a negative. And we probably all realize that basically each of us finds on non-rational grounds that the hypothesis of God is satisfactory and meaningful or not. And then afterwards, we each want, hunt round for reasons or for proof to uphold the position we have already chosen. On the other hand, one will find in existentialist work one very specific objection to the traditional concept of God and this is an objection based upon the injustice of the universe. Why, asked these writers, if God is all powerful, does man have to suffer?

If God is merciful, then how can he sentence man, any man at all to eternal damnation? In a later scene in Sartre's "The Devil and the Good Lord", we see Sartre raising this kind of criticism, of the concept of God in the light of the injustice of the world. Here a group of women have gathered in a cathedral. They are in mourning bewailing the deaths of Catherine, Goetz's mistress, who died when Goetz's cast her off, cast her off in the name of righteousness. [Woman 1]: Is she dead? [Woman 2]: Yes. [Woman 1]: May God receive her soul. [Hilda]: God? He'll refuse it. [Woman 3]: Hilda and how can you say that? [Woman 4]: She saw the flames of hell before she died. Suddenly she sat up crying that she saw them and then she died. [Woman 5]: Let's us pray my friends. Pray for the forgiveness of this poor dead girl who saw the flames

of hell and is endanger of damnation. [Woman 6]: Employ thy pardon. [Woman 7]: What has thou to forgive us? Thou art the one who should ask our forgiveness. I do know what thou hast in store for me and I did not even know that girl. But if thou dost condemn her then I shall refuse to enter heaven. Dost thou think a thousand years of paradise would make me forget the terror in her eyes. I have only scorn for thy elect. Idiots who have their hearts to rejoice while they're damned soul's writhing in hell and poor people on earth. I know thou hast the power to let me die without confession and suddenly summon me before thy bar of judgment. But we shall then see who will judge the other.

[Barnes]: Hilda's attitude reminds me of that William James, who once asked how many people would be willing to accept an eternity of bliss if they knew that their everlasting happiness was being paid for by the never ending torture of one dammed soul. And a very few of us would be willing to accept heavenly rapture on these terms. Then we can easily understand Sartre's criticism of men who are willing to accept an image of a creating God less merciful than men themselves. Albert Camus has voiced this same type of criticism in his novel, "The Plague". There the priest, Padalu, confesses that he is not able to understand how there can be any justification so that even eternal paradise could cancel out the sufferings here on earth of one innocent child. Now many people might say

perhaps rightly, that this type of criticism has meaning only for a fundamentalist even an old fashioned view of religion. In his play, The Fly, play The Flies, Sartre has given a broader challenge to the religious concept. Here he brings to our attention the question as to whether or not we may accept any idea of a harmonious, rational universe sustained by an intelligent guiding supreme being or spirit. The Flies is the most interesting thing. Sartre is retelling here the old Greek story of the unhappy house of Agamemnon. Clytemnestra and her lover killed Clytemnestra's husband and then later Orestes came, the son, to avenge the crime. He killed his mother and her lover, but very reluctantly, only because the gods had commanded it. And

finally it is the gods who ultimately justify him. As Sartre tells the story everything is different. Orestes kills because he thinks that he must do so in order to punish the evildoers. And ultimately he does not receive justification from the gods. Instead he challenges and defies them. The most amazing scene in this play is probably the one where Zeus holds out for Orestes an overwhelming view of the whole universe lying there before him. The scene has always reminded me of the one in the Old Testament where God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind. But they're differences, too. And important differences. In the Old Testament, God appeared because Job seeking an answer to the problem of evil had cried out to him and asked for him to come and explain. In Sartre's play, Zeus appears voluntarily. Orestes does not really want him and Orestes

is given this vision because Zeus hopes by means of it, to lure him, to win him back so that by viewing the wonders of the universe Orestes may arrive at what Zeus would consider a natural piety and reverence. [Zeus]: Orestes, I created you as I created all thing. ?A sea?. See the stars moving in the firmament never swerving, never clashing. It is I who have fixed their causes according to the laws of justice. It is my work that living things increase and multiply, each according to his kind. It is my work that the tide's innumerable tons creep in to lap the sand and then withdraw at the appointed hour. I make the plants grow and my breath fans 'round the world the yellow clouds of pollen. You were a knot in your own home intruder. You are like a sliver in the flesh or a poacher in his lordship's forest. For the world is good. I created it in accordance with my will and I am goodness. The good

is everywhere. But you, Orestes, has done evil. And that of which you are so proud, the evil which you have claimed to invented what is it but a reflection in a mocking mirror?A phantom thing that will have no being but for goodness. No return to yourself, Orestes, return to your saner self. The universe refutes you. You are but a might in the scheme of things. Return to nature and nature's thankless sun, or else you must beware as the sea is, shrink back at your approach, springs dry up as you pass by, rocks and stones roll out of your path and the earth itself crumble under your feet. [Orestes]: Let it crumble. The whole universe is not enough to prove me wrong. You are the king of gods, king of stone and stars, king of the waves of the sea, but you are not the king of man. [Barnes]: Job saw man's littleness and bowed down in faith. But Orestes asserts himself as man.

If we want to know the meaning of this assertion, we must realize what Zeus means. For Sartre, I don't think Zeus stands for God himself, but rather for any idea that man may have had of God. Particularly, a belief in any principle whatsoever which is rational, which sustains the universe in an all encompassing order and which gives man his natural, his right place and purpose. As Orestes rejects Zeus's vision, he is admitting that the order of the universe, its principal of harmony, are not in the universe itself, but are there because man has put them there. He has so organized the world that he finds them there. In one way we may say that this is the most thorough going atheism that the world has ever known. And yet, the strange thing is that if we hunt for

parallel positions to Sartre's view we will find them not as much in the works of the humanistic philosophers, who for the most part have relied very much on scientific reasoning and on this principle of order which, Orestes is rejecting. But we do find a parallel in the work of religious existentialists and the work of people like Kierkegaard, for instance. Now this is not to say that atheism and a belief in God can't ever be one and the same thing. They are natural opposites, of course. And yet, if one looks at the mood, the attitude toward living which is involved, then I think that the parallel between Sartre and Kierkegaard is much closer than that of either one of them as compared with the outlook of the ordinary man on the street, whether that man is one who goes to church or not. They are two ways in particular in which I think Sartre and Kierkegaard are alike in this connection.

One is their emphasis on subjectivity. It is obvious that for the humanistic philosopher, at least as Sartre views him, then man must be shut up in his own subjectivity. He can't get outside. He can't find any non-personal, non-human point of view. But for Kierkegaard, too, this isolation within the individual is complete. This is illustrated particularly well in Kierkegaard's discussion of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. When Abraham was told as a result of God's will that he must sacrifice his son Isaac, he was in this kind of quandry. If the message is genuinely from God, then he must sacrifice Isaac and it is the right thing to do. But if the message is not from God, then he would be committing what would be the very worst

possible crime judged on the basis of Abraham's own view of human ethics. But how is Abraham to know whether the command is from God or not? If an angel speaks to him, how does Abraham know it's not an hallucination? And if God himself speaks, how is Abraham to know whether this is really God or whether, actually, the command is the projection of Abraham's own inward evil wishes? Nobody but Abraham can decide and Abraham cannot tell within his life whether he has done the right thing or not. The second way in which I think these two men are alike is in their emphasis on commitment. The either-or comes in here. Either there is a God and God and religion are the most important things, and man must do nothing but obey the religious command. Or there is no God and then man must take the total burden of responsibility for the

world and for himself upon his own shoulders, with no one to give him any sign. Both men are absolutely the opposite of what we might call the Easter Sunday Christian. The commitment is total. It is a passionate choice. But, here again, when man makes the leap in faith, he leaps without any knowledge that there's going to be anything but a chasm of nothingness on the other side. Or if he refuses to make the leap, then he must stay on this side without knowing whether he was right or not. Kierkegaard feels that only the irrational is commensurate with the grandeur of man's need. Sartre feels that for man to leap is a betrayal of the human condition. As Orestes rejects Zeus, he is admitting his estrangement from nature. He goes forth into loneliness and exile, but these open spaces are at least not a prison.

They are an open future. Orestes is moving on to freedom. But what is this freedom? Zeus tells him what it is in no uncertain terms. [Zeus]: Impudence. Spawn. So I am not your king. Who, then, made you? [Oretes]: You, but you blunder. You should not have made me free. [Zeus]: I made you free so that you might serve me. [Oretes]: Perhaps, but it has turned against its giver and neither you nor I can undue what has been done. [Zeus]: At last. So that is your excuse. [Orestes]: I am not excusing myself. [Zeus]: No. Well let me tell you it sounds much like an excuse. This freedom, who slave you claim to be. [Orestes]: Neither slave nor master. I am my freedom. No sooner had you created me that I ceased to be yours. [Zeus]: This language is ?overdue? and somewhat shocking. [Orestes]: To my ears, too. In fact, I hardly understand myself. Yesterday I had an excuse. You were my excuse for being alive, for you had put me in the world to fulfill your purpose. And the world was a ?old panda?, ?parading? to me about your goodness, day in and day out. Then you forsook me.

[Zeus]: I forsook you? How? [Orestes]: Yesterday I felt at one with nature, this nature of your making and suddenly out of the blue freedom crashed down and swept me off my feet. Nature sprang back. My youth flew with the wind and I knew myself alone, utterly alone in this well meaning little universe of yours. And nothing was left in heaven, no right or wrong, nor anyone to give me orders? [Zeus]: What of it? Am I to admire a scabby sheep that has to be kept apart? Your ?vaunted? freedom isolates you from the fold. It means exile. [Orestes]: Yes. Exile. [Zeus]: What do you propose to do? [Orestes]: The folk of Argos are my folk. I must open their eyes. [Zeus]: Poor people The gift you make to them will be a sad one of loneliness and shame. You will take from their eyes the veils I had laid on them and you will show them their lives as they

really are. Foolish and futile. A barren boon. [Orestes]: Why, since it is their luck, should I deny them the despair I have in me? [Zeus]: What will they do with it? [Orestes]: What they choose. They are free and human life begins on the far side of dispair. [Barnes]: If God does not exist, there is nothing left but men. But if God does exist is there anything better for man to do to serve him than to follow his own deepest spiritual aspirations and potentialities. For centuries man has looked outside into the universe for an answer, but the universe has returned to him only his own image. It is not easy for man to come back and look only within, but if he can find the courage to do so then perhaps on the far side of despair, a new life may begin.

[music playing] [music playing] [music playing] [music playing] [Announcer]: Scenes from "The Flies" were taken from the book "No Exit and The Flies" translated by Stewart Gilbert. "The Devil and the Good Lord" was translated by Kitty Black. Both books by Jean-Paul Sartre, published by Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated. [music playing] This is NET,

National Educational Television.