The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (36 page)

But there was this similarity, arguably more profound than the differences: “David Herbert Lawrence spent much of his creative energies contriving a second faith, something to succeed what he considered false Christian philosophy and its successor, the sterile rationalism of science.” In
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
(1923),
The Plumed Serpent
(1926),
The Man Who Died
(1929) and
Fantasia of the Unconscious
(1930), Lawrence explored the post-Christian psychological world. He had several starting points. He had a mystical bent in which the oneness of all creation is the “fundamental prehension,” but he inveighed against all abstractions, including psychological ones. “The original sin against life is abstract thought.”
17

Lawrence believed, as Nietzsche believed before him, that life is erratic and irrational, and that we have a tendency to over-rationalize it. (Lawrence spent time in Germany, had a German wife, and was much influenced by German ideas, not only Nietzsche’s.) But he also thought that life is fundamentally erotic. Freud was condemned in Lawrence’s mind because psychoanalysis “is out, under therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.” And he staked his case on a revival of “the erotic mode as a therapeutic release from inwardness.”
18

Lawrence equated mysticism with the unconscious—mystical knowledge, for him, is essentially unconscious self-knowledge, and is therefore non-rational. Science, in eschewing contact with the irrational, was for Lawrence distancing itself from “life.” He thought the Christian God had died in 1914 and he disliked the religious conventions of the day, which were equally cold and automatic, and as distant from our experience as
the Aztec gods he explored in
The Plumed Serpent.
He found humanism sentimental, he objected to science’s way of assigning man a “more modest” place in the scheme of things, and he saw the West’s “binge of inwardness” likewise as a diminishing of who we are. Our aim should be to lead an “impassioned and yet social life.” He objected to science’s “machine metaphors” of the human passions, which, he said, emptied passion of its social content.

The erotic aspect of life being so important to Lawrence, he was convinced that the relationship between men and women lay at the base of a happy and fulfilled life—at one stage he imagined an assembly of men and women who would form the “nucleus of a new belief,” an “organic” society which would “permit” communal passion.
19
The “irrational power of love” was for him the antithesis of the coldly rational scientific world, and the freer expression of man’s erotic behavior was an expression of the divine.

The Plumed Serpent
is a novel of pagan religiosity, its plot focusing on the conversion of a Western woman to a primitive Aztec cult. Lawrence invokes the ritual of sun dancing as a reflection of divine concern with the human being. The protagonist, Kate, is cultured, informed and educated and, moreover, not in thrall to any Western ideology. Moved by where she is, she accepts her religious duty, with its sexual implications, and consents willingly to marry the high priest of the cult. Lawrence’s point is that she chooses to participate in a “passional community,” not simply remaining an observer, an outsider, as her European background would normally lead her to do. “An embarrassment even to ardent exegetes of Lawrence,
The Plumed Serpent
runs together just these motifs—the sexual, the instinctual unconscious, and the religious—which in the European culture have strenuously been kept apart,” says Philip Rieff in his book
The Triumph of the Therapeutic
.
20

In
The Man Who Died
, Lawrence contemplates the ending of the Christian passion, portraying Jesus as admitting the error of becoming Christ. Jesus is never named in the story, though he is clearly identified. We meet him as a confused and frightened man who expects to be rescued by his heavenly father before the time appointed for his crucifixion, and who therefore feels betrayed. He is also anxious that if the Romans find out
that he has survived “they will come for him and finish him off again.” He is now a far from spiritual figure—only too human; he travels to Egypt, where he seduces one of the goddess Isis’s temple priestesses. When the Romans do catch up with him he escapes by boat, leaving a slave to be mistaken for him.

Baldly stated, the plot was probably at the time offensive to a great many people, as Lawrence intended. (Alternatively, it is another “embarrassment.”) Upon his resurrection, Jesus realizes he cannot regain his moral edge; and he rediscovers what for Lawrence was his true divinity—his “amatory humanity”—in a directly sexual way, via a blond votary in the cult of another god. For Lawrence, this is a form of resurrection—Jesus, as a man now, has recovered his identity. Here one thinks of Joyce’s assertion that the most difficult thing a man can do is live with a woman, which the biblical Jesus never did. Salvation, Lawrence’s Jesus realizes, lies only in the intimate, private life—and that is his only lesson for others. Lawrence wrote to Bertrand Russell, the supreme intellectual of his day: “For heaven’s sake, don’t think—be a baby, and not a savant anymore. Don’t
do
anything anymore—but for heaven’s sake begin to
be
—start at the very beginning and be a perfect baby: in the name of courage.” To Lawrence, thinking—the intellect—is not a virtue. We should stop thinking always of ourselves first; restraint and prudence are less needed than fortitude and justice.

Lawrence’s two main criteria “for the living of life” were, first, “the need to unite with another in the alternately straining and easing relationship of love”; and second, the need for “passionate purpose,” quite separate from erotic engagement and its release, passionate purpose being about making “something new and better in the world.” “If passionate purposes are to be effective, they must be steady; and if they are steady, then they develop inevitably into ‘fixed ideals.’” At the same time, he did believe that each self has one purpose only, namely to come into “the fullness of its being,” in which he thought that the “fact of otherness,” as experienced in the “erotic crucible,” could fuse together—if only for brief (sacred) moments—to “proximate fulfillment.” The object of these experiences, Lawrence believed, was precisely what Freud meant by the “oceanic feeling”—at one point Lawrence talks about the “Oceanic God.” In
The
Plumed Serpent
, when Kate decides to dance with one of the Quetzalcoatl men, looking to the primitive as a source of spiritual renewal for Europe as well as for herself, she slips into a trance-like “second consciousness” and finds herself “caught up and identified in the slowly revolving ocean of nascent life” around her.
21

He thought that our aim should be “biological warmth,” in particular a biologically warm family; being a good parent was one way to preserve “the human being [parent and child] all his life fresh and alive, a true individual.” The sense of otherness, which we gain in the crucible of the erotic, we must transfer to our relationships with our children, not in the same erotic sense but in the sense of “warm otherness.” For Lawrence, love and otherness are the twin divinities: these are what we must show if we are to lead exemplary lives, always aware that this may reveal itself in “patches of compromise,” and that the desire for possession (of the loved other) is offset by the need to be free (of the other). (When he went to Mexico, he actually found the “radical alterity” of the locals “profoundly hostile.”)
22

In all this, for Lawrence, the means are more important than the ends, our actions are what count—ecstatic, erotic action, an echo of Nietzsche in
The Birth of Tragedy
. For Lawrence, passion is holy: “Screams of violence are more full of life than the hushed tones of tolerance.” (Owen, the American who travels with Kate in Mexico at the beginning of
The Plumed Serpent
, and refuses to leave the bullfight early because, he believes, “Life means seeing anything . . . on show,” is condemned as having “the insidious modern disease of tolerance.”) The core aspect of life is, after all, our encounter with instinct, and how we manage that encounter is all-important. God having died, we must learn to love ourselves as we “collide” with our instincts, which means that the decisive factor in humankind is the will, or desire—not intellect.
23

No less than Woolf or Joyce, Lawrence took risks with his writing—in style, in subject matter. But, like them, his aim was a larger, warmer life, living well among others close to him. Intimacy and accurate details are the key ingredients.

14

The Impossibility of Metaphysics, a Reverence for Metapsychology

T
oward the end of 1932, the British philosopher A. J. Ayer and his new wife, Renée, arrived in Vienna. He was there to work under Moritz Schlick, one of the leaders of the Vienna Circle, a group of radical philosopher-scientists, news of whose achievements was beginning to seep into the British and American consciousness.

The Vienna that Ayer found was not so different, in many respects, from the city it had been before the Great War. It was busy and crowded, with two million inhabitants, still a wonderful architectural showcase, still home to a vibrant café culture where, for the price of a cup of coffee, “one could spend a morning in an elegant salon reading newspapers in three or four languages.”
1
It was still famous for its music, its cheap dance halls and its anti-Semitism. Freud was still practicing there.

The Vienna Circle was elaborating a tradition begun by such figures as Ernst Mach, Bertrand Russell, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and espoused a philosophy known to themselves as
Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung
, “the world scientifically conceived.” Its main members were Herbert Feigl, Otto Neurath and Friedrich Waismann, Austrian and Jewish, together with Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap from Germany, and occasional members included Kurt Gödel and Karl Popper. Only two Anglo-Saxons were ever admitted, Ayer and the American Willard Van Orman Quine, who was in Vienna at the same time as his British colleague. Several of the group had trained as sci
entists or as mathematicians before turning to philosophy, and such training clearly shaped their views.

The Circle had been launched in 1929 when Carnap and Neurath published
Wissenshaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis
(The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle): its main planks were empiricism and its commitment to logical analysis, and its distinguishing both of these from the belief—common since Kant’s day, particularly among Hegelians—that there are certain metaphysical facts about the world (such as “the Absolute”) that we can know independently of experience.

The Circle saw itself as having two tasks. Negatively, as Ben Rogers put it in his biography of Ayer, its purpose was to “warn people off” metaphysics, and particularly to counter the German fascination with Romanticism and idealism. At the same time, its more positive aim was to clarify the logic of science and commonsense observation. For Schlick, Neurath, Carnap and the others, science—to encompass commonsense observation as well—is the only source of real knowledge; everything is built up from sense experience and so any proposition which does not relate back to sense experience cannot lay claim to being knowledge. In Carnap’s words: “All knowledge stems from one source of knowledge: experience—the unmediated content of experience such as red, hard, toothache and joy.” This can be traced back to Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
and its claim that an utterance is meaningful if, and only if, it expresses a proposition whose truth or falsehood can be verified by empirical observation or solely by reference to the meaning of the terms it contains. If a statement could not be tested empirically, then according to the Circle it was meaningless. (Karl Popper would subsequently replace the notion of verifiability with that of falsification.)

WHAT CAN AND CANNOT BE SAID

This had grave, even apocalyptic, consequences for metaphysics. “The Vienna Circle no longer attacked propositions about the soul, God, the Absolute, the after-life, historical destiny, national spirit, or transcendent values, as being false or unduly speculative. Instead it maintained that
insofar as they were unverifiable, they were literally meaningless.”
2
Anything that could not be tested was out of court. The Circle’s aim—as had been Wittgenstein’s in the
Tractatus
—was to purify language, to make clear what can and cannot be said.

In a letter to friends in Britain at the time, Ayer wrote that the ultimate term of abuse among the members of the Circle was “metaphysical.” Wittgenstein was treated, if not like a god (as that would have been metaphysical), “as a second Pythagoras.”
3
All his life Ayer retained the view that there is no “unknowable realm of hidden objects” or entities—such an idea was simply nonsensical, as it was to the members of the Circle. He started his famous book
Language, Truth and Logic
, which popularized the ideas of the Circle in the English-speaking world, in the summer of 1933, with the specific aim of “demonstrating the impossibility of metaphysics.”

He began by criticizing the metaphysical thesis that philosophy affords us knowledge of a reality transcending the world of science and common sense.
4
Nothing concerning the properties, or even the existence, of anything super-empirical can legitimately be inferred. The impossibility of a transcendent metaphysic is a matter of logic. It was at the time impossible to verify, practically, that there were mountains on the far side of the moon, but it was verifiable in principle. On the other hand, “the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress,” and is not verifiable even in principle. We cannot conceive of an observation that would verify this.
5
Most statements can never be more than highly probable—“arsenic is poisonous” or “all men are mortal” cannot be established with certainty in an infinite number of cases. By the same token, statements about the past can never be more than highly probable.

There is a difference between being false and being nonsensical, and we are often confused by language. For example, the statements “unicorns are fictitious” and “dogs are faithful” look similar, but fictitious objects like unicorns do not have some special form of existence, “so as to be real in some non-empirical sense.” Just because something can be the subject of a sentence does not mean that it exists.

Ayer argued that fundamental ethical concepts are unanalyzable because “there is no criterion by which one can test the validity of the judg
ments in which they occur.” The reason is that they are pseudo-concepts. In saying “You acted wrongly in stealing that money,” I am saying nothing more than “You stole that money.” No further statement is added other than moral disapproval. “It is as if I had said ‘You stole that money’ in a particular tone of voice. . . . Sentences which make moral judgments are pure expressions of feeling and do not come under the category of truth or falsehood.”
6

Moreover, “there cannot be such a thing as ethical science, if by ethical science one means the elaboration of a ‘true’ system of morals.” One of the chief causes of moral behavior, he says, is fear, both conscious and unconscious, of God’s displeasure, or fear of the enmity of society.
7
“This is why [morals] present themselves as ‘categorical’ commands. They are partly determined in turn by the society’s condition of its own happiness. This is why altruism is preferred everywhere to egotism.”

Regarding the possibility of religious knowledge, Ayer says: “If the conclusion that a god exists is to be demonstrably certain, then these premises must be certain. But we know that no empirical proposition can ever be anything more than probable. It is only a priori propositions that are logically certain. But we cannot judge the existence of a god from an a priori proposition. . . . It follows that there is no possibility of demonstrating the existence of a god.

“What is not so generally recognized is that there can be no way of proving that the existence of a god, such as the God of Christianity, is even probable. Yet this is also easily shown. For if the existence of such a god were probable, then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical hypothesis. . . . But in fact this is not possible. It is sometimes claimed that certain regularities in nature constitute sufficient evidence for the existence of a god. But if the sentence ‘God exists’ entails no more than that certain types of phenomena occur in certain sequences, then to assert the existence of a god will be equivalent to asserting that there is the requisite regularity in nature; and no religious man would admit that this was all he intended. He would say that in talking about God, he was talking about a transcendent being. . . . In that case ‘god’ is a metaphysical term. And if ‘god’ is a metaphysical term, it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that God exists is to make a metaphysical utterance that cannot
be either true or false. . . . This affects atheists and agnostics too. The atheist’s assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical.”

Thus the assertions of the theist cannot be valid, but they cannot be invalid either. As the theist says nothing about the world, he cannot be justly accused of saying anything false. “It is only when the theist claims that in asserting the existence of a transcendent god he is expressing a genuine proposition,” says Ayer, “that we are entitled to disagree with him.”

He goes on: “Regarding the attributes of God . . . We may have a word which is used as if it names this ‘person’ but unless the sentences in which it occurs express propositions which are empirically verifiable, it cannot be said to symbolize anything at all. And this is the case with regard to the word ‘god,’ in the usage in which it is intended to refer to a transcendent object. The mere existence of the noun is enough to foster an illusion that there is a real, or at any rate a possible entity corresponding to it. It is only when we inquire what God’s attributes are that we discover that ‘God’ in this usage, is not a genuine name. The same is true of soul and afterlife.
8
 . . . We are often told that the nature of God is a mystery which transcends human understanding. But to say this is to say that it is unintelligible. And what is unintelligible cannot significantly be described. We are told that God is an object of faith and not an object of reason. This may be nothing more than an admission that the existence of God must be taken on trust, since it cannot be proved. If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something that cannot be described, then he must admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it. . . . The argument from religious experience is fallacious. The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge, any more than our having moral experiences implies that there is any such thing as moral knowledge. The theist, like the moralist, may believe that his experiences are cognitive experiences but unless he can formulate his ‘knowledge’ in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure he is deceiving himself.”
9

The logical positivists—as the followers of the Vienna Circle in the Anglo-Saxon world came to be called—all seemed to think, as Freud appears to have thought (see p. 278), that simply by making their argu
ments available they would be accepted and eventually prevail. They saw no need to put anything “in the place” of God. The major change that they sought to bring about was for philosophy to become a “smaller” activity. Ayer argued that philosophy was nothing more than logical analysis, and in that case, he insisted, no sense could be made of a God who was held to have created the universe, on the grounds that no sense could be made of an entity existing outside space and time; and that “in being made to transcend time, it loses all possibility of being, even in principle, accessible to our experience.”

Ayer became more and more convinced that philosophy was incapable of offering an authoritative answer to the question “How should I live?” Put another way, he was saying that we can have knowledge of empirical truths and of the truisms of math and logic, “but not of values”—our morality is ultimately up to us. “The purpose of man’s existence is constituted by the ends to which he, consciously or unconsciously, devotes himself. . . . In the last resort, each individual has the responsibility of choice; and it is a responsibility that is not to be escaped.”
10

THE CRUELTIES OF CONSOLATION

It is one of the sharper ironies of modern intellectual history that at exactly the time the logical positivists were focusing on “the impossibility of metaphysics,” Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were introducing their own accounts as to how and why psychology “explained” God. Each of them claimed he was an empiricist, that his theories were based on close observations of experience. Nonetheless, several critics have described what they produced as “metapsychologies.” Each constructed a very radical synthesis, each very different from the other, coming to diametrically opposed conclusions.

Freud was raised in a thoroughly secular household, as a “Godless Jew” in the historian Peter Gay’s words, in Vienna in the last half of the nineteenth century when the city, as we have seen, was one of the jewels of Europe in terms of its sophisticated secular culture: theatre, opera, architecture, science, sports, cuisine, leisure—a world, in Frederic Mor
ton’s account, of “nervous splendor.” This may well have helped determine Freud’s approach: that once the psychological basis of religion had been explained, and its “errors” exploded, people would turn away, having no further need of religious psychological support. For Freud, as for the Vienna Circle, there was no “need” for an alternative to religion. It was a shortcoming, a false path in human history, and it was time to move on.

Freud’s first critiques of religion were, as we saw earlier, his 1907 paper “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” and
Totem and Taboo
(1914). There, he had noted that several times in the past—in pre-exile Israel, for example, or classical Greece—gods had died or been killed off without too much fuss being made and without too many untoward effects being felt. In this sense, the death of God was nothing new. But now, as the logical positivists were circling their wagons, he produced three more books on religion,
The Future of an Illusion
,
Civilization and Its Discontents
and
Moses and Monotheism
. That number is a measure of the importance he attached to attacking/explaining/explaining away belief in God.