Gospel & Universe 🎲 Almost Existential

Doctors of Revolt

Adam and Evil - Sartre: Existence Precedes Essence - Camus' Revolt

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Adam and Evil

Table 1

Having thus

fully decorticated The Word

there was little left to say on the

slippery subject of Eternal Truth

which started to look like a casket

or thin oval theatre in Padua, Italy

 where stems popped from sockets

and the clear skin was drawn back

with a swift, meticulous precision

beneath the necromantic gazes

of the heretic priests

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Body 1

There, in the northern cities of Italy

far enough from the chimes of old Saint Peter's

Mondino de Luzzi and the other heretics of science

conducted their examinations on the squat human body

which lay naked, without so much as an apple leaf

in the wooden chambers of the Renaissance 

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Body 2 

*        *

*

*

The game of sex

and knowledge was afoot:

the head was exposed to the air

as flesh turned inside out

and now knew itself

and its vesicles

and its muscles

that thrust up

in an endless

base raw drive

of fornication

and deviation

and replication

of its seedling nature amid the grass

of the wide world and its forbidden knowledge 

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Table 2 

The Index of Forbidden Books was itself forbidden in the ghastly bright theatres

of Bologna and Padua; lit on its own pyre, on its own funeral altar

on which, to his great distress, Pope Prohibitus the Sixth

saw the Snake

with venomous fang

who once bit the ankle

of each clay-footed priest

the ancient enemy

with carbunckles for eyes

now circling on the table

and worming his way up each vein

kidney, liver, philosophy, and part

toward the pulsing red cylinders

 of Darwin, Crick, Einstein, and Sartre

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Sartre: Existence Precedes Essence

Since the Renaissance, and especially since Darwin and the 19th Century, many religious people felt they had to take the scientific arguments seriously. Many felt they had to relinquish their faith and find whatever meaning they could in a Godless world. Others tried to keep both worlds by accepting the relativity and chaos around them, but in the face of it all making a leap toward faith. This is often referred to as a leap of faith, although it's really the self that leaps — from relative chaos to absolute order; from the many overwhelming truths uncovered by empiricism to the one sheltering Truth offered by religion. 

Prominent in this shift is the notion that existence precedes essence, that our physical bodies come before our spiritual selves. This was formulated by Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) in his 1946 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism:

Qu'est-ce que signifie ici que l'existence précède l'essence? Cela signifie que l'homme existe d'abord, se rencontre, surgit dans le monde, et qu'il se définit après. 

What does it mean here that existence precedes essence? This means that man exists to begin with, that he then encounters himself, that he moves into the world, and that he defines himself afterwards. (trans. RYC)

Existentialists believe that physical existence is all we’ve got, both on the small scale (the body) and on the large scale (the body politic and the universe). They believe there’s no essence guiding us — neither a personal spiritual essence (a soul), nor a cosmic omnipotent essence (a God). Despite the alienation, angst, and anomie (modernism's triple A) that this rudderless state of things induces, existentialists believe that we're still free to choose our own paths, to create our our meaning. While this freedom may be daunting — Sartre says that we're condemned to freedom (Being and Nothingness, 1943) — it's still better than being one of God's chosen or elect, who is described by Sartre as a man pinned against the wall by the finger of God (Le Diable et le Bon Dieu / The Devil and the Good Lord, 1951).

In his 1943 play Les Mouches (The Flies), Sartre writes that the painful secret of the Gods and kings is that men are free; / Le secret douloureux des Dieux et des rois: c'est que les hommes sont libres. This freedom comes at a high price, however, in terms of feeling that one's life is intrinsically meaningful. For Sartre, it simply isn't.

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Camus' Revolt

To a man without blinders, there's no finer sight than an intelligence grappling with a reality that transcends it.    — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942

While Sartre's thinking seems to have pushed him onto a difficult path — one that led to angst, despair, and extreme politics — the other great French existentialist, Albert Camus (1913-1960) trod a more middle ground. Sartre's logic led him to utopian politics of an authoritarian type, which makes sense in a way: if you can't change the absurd condition of the human self, and if you can't change the absurd contract between the self that yearns for meaning and the world that gives none, you can at least try to change the world in which you live.

The falling out between Sartre and Camus reflects their different views on how to proceed in an absurd universe: Sartre continued to support Stalin's radical attempt to change the world, whereas Camus rejected Stalin's authoritarian program in which the ends were allowed to justify the means. Camus argues that

democracy is, after all, the person who admits that his adversary might be right. He therefore lets his adversary express himself, and thinks about the arguments he's made. When parties or men are so sure they're right that they violently shut the mouths of their adversaries, democracy's over.  (Camus à "Combat," Albert Camus, Gallimard 2002, p. 665 — trans. RYC).

Camus' revolt against the absurdity of life is, to my mind at any rate, more subtle than that of Sartre. For while both existentialist realize, like Gilgamesh four thousand years before them, that one legitimate response to an uncaring, absurd universe is to engage with it anyway — in Camus terms, to grapple with the reality that transcends you — Camus doesn't prescribe a particular way that one must grapple. While both authors argue for justice and equality, Camus doesn't prescribe drastic manipulation as a means, nor does he imagine a particular goal that society must advance toward. His grappling is more liberal and democratic, which precludes supporting authoritarian versions of the perfect state. 

In his essay, "Existentialisme Entre Nature et Culture: Camus Contre Sartre," Pierre Zima argues that while Sartre saw the cultural or intellectual domination of nature as a necessary response to alienation, absurdity, and chaos, Camus saw nature as a consolation or solution to these things. Zima writes:

Camus defends nature and human nature (human life) against the grand philosophic and political projects which tend to sacrifice the individual to the historical. At the same time, he defends philosophic, political and literary revolt against the type of revolution that invariably finishes by re-establishing the repressive system it pretended to abolish. (trans. RYC)

Zima suggests that Camus' revolt is in a sense more radical, since it doesn't prescribe any sort of pattern or program that might counteract the absurdity that comes from desiring meaning in a universe that doesn't supply it. Zima finishes his essay with a quote from The Rebel (L'Homme Révolté, 1951) in which he aligns Camus' thinking with Nietzsche and the Greeks rather than with Marx and Christianity: "For Marx, nature is what one subjugates to obey history; for Nietzsche, it's what one obeys to subjugate history. It's the difference between the Christian and the Greek." (trans. RYC)

Camus's revolt against the absurdity of our brief and limited existence is also more positive and empowering than that of Sartre. Here's a famous passage from The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), in which Camus likens our struggle to find meaning to the struggles of the Greek king who was condemned by Zeus to push a boulder again and again up a hill:

This universe, now without Master didn't seem to [Sisyphus] sterile or futile. Each grain of the rock, each mineral splendour of that mountain of night, to him alone formed the world. Even the struggle itself toward the summits were sufficient to fill the human heart. It's necessary to imagine that Sisyphus is happy.  (trans. RYC)

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Next: In the Shadow of Borges

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