The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (44 page)

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.
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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.”
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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
.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.

Despite his literary talent, Saint-Exupéry had no special fondness for
men of letters. Like Malraux, he believed in action. “The role of spectator has always been my bugbear. What am I if I do not take part? If I am to be, I must take part.” Because the universe is not rational, he said, “it reveals itself to action and not to thought.” He believed that “man has no ‘interior’ considered either as a depository of ‘innate’ truths, as a receptacle for facts acquired by perception and reason or as a set of clearly defined characteristics.” He agreed with Malraux, and as he showed via his character Robineau in
Vol de nuit
, that “neither action nor individual happiness allow of being shared.” For him, throughout history there have been two means of responding to the “spiritual dry-rot” of bourgeois society—love and religion. But both responses are alien. “To love, to love and nothing else—what a dead end!”
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Contemporary religion, Saint-Exupéry claimed, is unsure of itself, of the message it brings, or the light it offers, and so is unbelief, too. “[Jacques] Bernis [a character in
The Aviator
] enters a church to listen to a sermon which seems to him a cry that has long since ceased to expect an answer.” To expect an answer to a question is the wrong way to look at the world. Life is not what we possess, he is saying, but what we
win
, and he means this literally. In
Pilote de guerre
(
Flight to Arras
) he says: “Anguish is due to the loss of a real identity, and it is only through action that identity may be regained.” And he admits this is based on his own experience. In the lull before his sortie to Arras, he felt he was awaiting an “unknown self” which he sensed was “coming towards him from outside, like a phantom.” By the time his mission was completed, his “unknown self” was no longer unknown, he had discovered a little more of who he was through his deeds. “Humanism,” he liked to say, “has taken too little notice of deeds.” Being cultured is not to be achieved by contemplation, but by being enriched by action, doing. “There is no existence that is not contact with things.”
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And “life,” moreover, is not just one thing. We are constantly
redefining
what it is by our actions. Saint-Exupéry’s ideal—his model—was not that of a great writer or philosopher, but that of Hochedé, an ordinary man, a fellow pilot during the war. Hochedé had no real inner life, Saint-Exupéry tells us, he was “pure existence” in that his acts and his identity were one. He writes about having experienced this himself just once, briefly, when
he was over Arras: there, in the thick of enemy fire “[y]ou are lodged in your act. . . . Your act is you. . . . You no longer find anything else in you.” This for him was sheer being, completeness, transcendence, a concept that is quite new to our civilization, according to Everett Knight. “Hochedé . . . would not know how to throw any light upon himself. But he is constructed, he is complete. . . . We usually think of an ‘accomplished’ man as one who has somehow found time to bring to perfection both his mental and physical activities, who is both philosopher and peasant, or statesman and soldier. Hochedé, however, has no ‘inner’ life, yet he lacks for nothing; for what really exists, exists in things exterior to us and comprehensible in themselves.”
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As Malraux said—and Saint-Exupéry would have agreed—the universe holds no secrets from us, it conceals nothing, there is no mystery to be “rescued” by thought. This is why we gain fulfillment by doing rather than by thinking.

But Saint-Exupéry took this further, arguing that, because there are no absolutes, we must replace the idea of
duty toward
by
responsibility for
. This is not just splitting hairs. Duty implies teleological ends, obligations laid down by others—by ancestors or by God, for example—and therefore negates freedom. Responsibility, on the other hand, implies freedom—we
choose
who and what we wish to be responsible for. This is what Saint-Exupéry learned in the course of his mission to Arras, the consequences of which he develops in the final pages of
Pilote de guerre
. “The fraternity which made his flight group a single organism must be extended to ever larger groups. The fraternity that men once enjoyed in God, they would now have to reconstitute in man himself; the fraternity of action must replace that of common origin; sacrifice must replace possession.”

This is the philosophy that his book
Citadelle
addresses. The mind is not a “container,” a receptacle of fact and memories, but
an act
; the world is not rational but inexhaustible, making acquisition pointless, another red herring.
Citadelle
shows “the fallacies inherent in ‘the great longing to possess,’ whether it be goods for the body or principles for the mind. Life is ‘movement towards’ and not material possession. Happiness is the ‘warmth of acts’; a civilization rests upon what it exacts from its people,
not what it furnishes them; life is a permanent creation.”
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