Reason has a price.

Aggressive secularism has long seemed like the last gasp of an increasingly anaemic liberalism. All of the prominent so-called 'New Atheists' - Ditchkins, Harris, and co. - stand as exemplars of the virtues of liberal democratic capitalism. Faith is the enemy of progress because it has the terrible tendency to reach beyond the liberal framework of individual rights and liberties. As right as Nick Clegg may have been to call for the disestablishment of the Church of England the fact that it was Clegg calling for it proves it is not a radical demand. I find myself sympathising with the conservative tobacco salesman Roger Scruton as he took aim Dawkins with his musket and fired this noteworthy potshot:

Richard Dawkins and his followers have recycled the theory of evolution not as a biological theory but as a theory of everything – of what the human being is, what human communities are, what our problems are and how they’re not really our problems, but the problems of our genes: we’re simply answers that our genes have come up with, and it’s rather awful to be the answer to someone else’s question, especially when that thing is not a person at all. Nevertheless people swallow that.

Not long after that I was amused to find, in The Spectator of all places, a piece on the "cult" of Richard Dawkins. He's still busy since retiring years ago. For just £85 a month you can be apart of the 'Reason Circle' and get discounts on Dawkins merchandise. If you should want the chance to see Richard Dawkins speak at an event then you have to pay £210 a month. Only £100,000 to have a meal with him and gain entrance to the 'Evolution Circle'. That's not where it ends. You could make a donation of £500,000 to have dinner with the man - just the once - and become a member of 'The Magic of Reality Circle'.

The New School for the Humanities comes to mind. It was set up by another 'militant' atheist AC Grayling and it charges tuition fees of £18,000 a year. Is this more obscene than the Dawkins cult? It's a close call. And it was a long time ago that Marx wrote "Now atheism itself is a minor sin as compared with the criticism of existing property relations."

Socialism as a secular faith.

In God is not Great Christopher Hitchens writes “When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered.” He goes onto note that there is no supernatural or absolutist element in dialectical materialism, but it did have a ‘messianic’ aspect in its faith in the coming revolution. There are also martyrs and saints in the figures of Che Guevara and Vladimir Lenin. With Stalinism there was the papacy complete with heresy hunts, miracles and inquisitions. He draws parallels between the leftist reverence for Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg and the elevation of particular figures in Christianity to the status of sainthood. No doubt Karl Marx is the founding Jewish prophet of this faith, while Luxemburg is a mixture of Cassandra and Jeremiah in Hitch’s mind.It has been acknowledged by Hitch’s former IS comrade Terry Eagleton that Karl Marx may have been an atheist there are Judaic themes in secular form to be found in his thinking.

This includes notions of justice, emancipation, the reign of peace and plenty, the day of reckoning, history as a narrative of liberation, the redemption not just of the individual but of a whole dispossessed people. You could draw a parallel between Marx’s avoidance of sketching out utopia of the future and the Jewish aversion to any speculation of the World to Come. Hitchens favours this side of the bearded dialectician because this is where we find the hostility to fetishism, idols and illusions. Again, all of this could be seen as Judaic. Yet it is the case that the tenets of dialectical materialism do not consistent of any set of claims about the cosmos. So the religious may subscribe to Marxist materialism, the curious blend of German philosophy, French politics and English economics. In fact Karl Marx once told his wife Jenny that if she wants to “satisfy” her metaphysical needs she’d do better to seek out the Jewish prophets than to attend the Secular Society. Perhaps if Marx is the founding prophet then Leninism serves as a Pauline ‘betrayal’ necessary for the establishment of a universal church.

Today it is no coincidence that the liberals have become increasingly obsessed with secularisation while the radicals have taken up theology as a pursuit. It’s nothing new. Nietzsche’s enmity for socialism came down to his view of the project as a radicalised kind of Christianity. There is an element of truth in this charge:just as the Christians live for the otherworldly the socialists seek to build, out of this world, the other world. It is no wonder then that the New Atheists fall back on liberal shibboleths as a presupposed Gnosticism – especially the notion of history as progress, to which any obstacle must be circumvented. It might be because liberalism really believes in nothing except that the individual should be free to believe that the last obstacle is totalitarian belief itself. The first step towards totalitarianism, in the liberal mind, is any attempt to reach beyond the confines of capitalist society. So for many it would seem the only political project, of any worth, is the fight to rid the world of faith.

In this sense the New Atheists are post-political in their anti-theism. It is apt then that Christopher Hitchens took on this projectafter he lost his ‘faith’ in socialism. Despite Hitch’s tirades against God, conveniently framed to provide a defence of the ‘War on Terror’, he admitted that if he could he would not rid the world of religious conviction. Apparently there is no third camp between Athens and Jerusalem, rationality in one corner and religiosity in another. Yet in his newfound ‘free-thinking’ Hitchens severed any responsible commitments he had before to take on the convictions needed to support the invasion of Iraq.The liberal tradition (which certainly includes the New Atheists) does not have the monopoly over democracy, civil liberties, human rights and notions of equality. The same goes for its claim to science, reason and unbelief. The Marxist project was originally pitched as scientific in its critique of capitalism, which went as far as to take the church as a superstructural institution that serves to legitimatise the economic system.

There is no contradiction here. The New Atheists may adhere to a strenuous conception of secularity, but it was the Catholic tradition which spawned secularism as an irreligious realm where there is space for religious conviction, influence and practice. John Gray traces absolutism and atheism to the advent of monotheism, in its fundamental claim to universal truth. Unbelief is just an extension of the Abrahamic passion for truth.Gray stresses that “Only with Christianity did the belief take root that one way of life could be lived by everyone.” Before monotheism it was taken for granted that the rejection of one god merely meant the embrace of another god and another cult. It was the first time that there was strictly one way to live and believe, which had to be taken above all others. He claims that “If the world had remained polytheist, it could not have produced communism or ‘global democratic capitalism’.”For polytheism is too ‘delicate’ for modern thinking Gray concludes “If we live in a world without gods, we have Christianity to thank for it.”

Power, Faith & Unbelief.

"Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race." – Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal agreed with George Bernard Shaw that the subjects which interest civilised men can be narrowed down to politics and religion. Not just in Creation but in his 'inventions' Kalki and Messiah. The religious instinct in man fascinated Vidal, especially as he saw the late 20th Century as a period of the deterioration of the traditional religions. Meanwhile he had preempted the rise of the death cult in America in his 1954 novel Messiah. In the bourgeois fetish for the cultures of the past Vidal found great hopes for our civilisation in the Stoics of Rome and the Confucians of China. The great mistake of humanity, in his view, was monotheism in its claim to universal truth and he held Christianity in particular disdain. In his novel Julian the focus is the Roman Emperor Julian who sets out to undo the union of Christian dogma and state-power in order to revert back to the plurality of Paganism. This exemplifies the liberal side of Gore Vidal, his loyalty to secular humanism.

It is typical of Gore Vidal in his 'reflections' to blend history, religion and politics in fiction for the reason that the court historians are so awful that the novel is now the only medium that can redeem history. In Creation the protagonist is a member of the Zoroastrian faith, perhaps the earliest monotheism, and witnesses the murder of Zoroaster. Cyrus is on the side of monotheism in the book, as well as the established powers in Persia and holds the masses in contempt. This is in contrast to Vidal's own political views, which could be taken as a hybrid leftism. In the book the political leaders of the time, particularly Thucydides and Pericles, are juxtaposed against one another as conservatives and democrats. The chaos of China is presented as a land which may conceive of the totalitarian impulse, while at the same time Confucian politics are received in a very positive light. Cyrus Spitama identifies himself with the conservatism of Thucydides as well as of Confucian hierarchical order and practical moral values.

In Creation Gore Vidal takes us on a tour of the ancient world, from Persia to Cathay and back, with Cyrus Spitama as our guide. Spitama is embedded in the ruling class of the Persian Empire, whilst also being descendent of Zoroaster and a follower of the Wise Lord consequently. Many of the major philosophical and religious ideas of the time are explored in the book, in Ancient Greece Cyrus encounters many philosophers and delivers his tale to his nephew Democritus. It was appropriate given the affinity Vidal had with the atomist principles espoused by Lucretius and Democritus. The vision was of a cosmos as a kind of soup of atoms bumping up against one another. The book culminates in the exposition of the atomist philosophy by Democritus. In another sense the relationship between Cyrus Spitama and Democritus mirrors the relationship between Gore Vidal and his grandfather Thomas Gore. Specifically the passing of the elder's wisdom to the young man.

The focus on the Persian Empire rails against the Western vanity, the tendency to see itself as a great fusion of Hellenism and Judeo-Christian values. Creation begins with Cyrus leaving the Odeon as Herodotus goes over his own version of history. The portrayal of Ancient Greece is just as one of many great powers rather than the centre of the world. The warring forces of China in the days of Confucius as well as the rival kingdoms of India feature prominently. The relativity of Greek glory to the lessons of the Buddha and Confucius, Mahavira and Lao Tzu. It's more than a novel, it is a work of comparative religion and philosophy crafted to persuade the reader not to be so arrogant in his modern assumptions. This is not to say that Vidal isn't writing from a position beyond commitment. Vidal was a lifelong atheist and opponent of monotheism. If anything he wants to enlighten us of the possibilities beyond the desert God of Abraham. The novel was timed well with the rise of Reaganism and the emergence of the Christian Right.


For Gore Vidal the threat of the Christian Right is equivalent to the threat of Le Pen in France, in other words it is fascistic and anti-democratic in nature. The accumulation of obscene piles of wealth in a few private hands matches the concentration of power in American society. This creates a systemic need to block democracy at every turn. Vidal would remind us that the political system in the United States is not at all democratic. First of all, there is only one political party with two right-wings - the Democrats and the Republicans - which is the party of property. Chomsky has spoken in these terms too, except he called it the business party. There is a structural need within capitalism which can be differentiated in terms of a base and a superstructure. The economic base depends upon the ideological superstructure for its legitimacy. The relation of the base to the superstructure is not just dependency, there is a tension between the pluralism and relativism of the market against the sociality of institutions and tradition.


The management of this tension can found in the revival of political religion in the new world. The Christian Right was born out of the attempts made throughout the 70s by conservatives to regroup after the losses in the last decade. The Nixon administration left America disillusioned with politics, only for great hopes to arise with the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. The failures of the Carter administration to achieve significant change cleared the way for Reagan in 1980. Nowadays it is almost compulsory for American Presidents to be Christian: No unbelievers allowed! But it wasn't always this way. Crucially it was Carter who had made religion an issue in his openness about the faith to which he subscribed. This could be taken as a long-time result of the Christian revival of the 1950s. Really it was the 1960s which convinced many Christians that the shared fabric of society - its traditions, institutions and moral values - was about to be destroyed in its entirety. This is less a story of a Christian Right than the story of the New Right.

The debacles of the early 60s such as the Cuban crisis and the assassination of JFK the Establishment was shaken to its foundations. Everywhere there seemed to be collapse as the issues of civil rights, racism and imperialism became the moral battleground in the American body politic. The obvious opponent for Gore Vidal was William F Buckley, l'enfant terrible of American conservatism, and they would cross swords repeatedly in debates at party conventions in the late 60s. Around this time Paul Weyrich infiltrated the student Left and was astonished by the level of planning and tactics that he witnessed. He realised that the conservatives were wrong in their assumption that the people would support them because they were right about the issues. In actuality what was needed was a movement capable of rolling back the achievements of the Left. It would be a counter to the counter-culture. The key was the mobilisation of the religious, who were largely apolitical.

As Adam Curtis notes "The fundamentalists were driven by pietism - the belief that a true Christian should not only devote their life to god, but also turn their back on the secular political world. They should live the good life through their own actions - and forget about politics." The New Left had actually laid the groundwork for the entrance of right-wing Christians into the political realm. The issues of gay rights, abortion and sexual discrimination mobilised the Christian Right because the liberalisation on these social issues threatened the way that they led their private lives. Then Jimmy Carter abolished the charity status of the religious schools. For many it was the last straw, enough was enough. Paul Weyrich reached out to Jerry Falwell, the product of this backroom deal was the Moral Majority. Falwell pulled some strings in order to pull together numerous right-wing preachers in America. The aim was now not just to convert, but to register the converted as Republican voters in what would later be known as the culture wars.

The network of preachers were soon spreading anti-Carter propaganda and then an obvious alternative revealed himself to the newly political Christians. It was Ronald Reagan, the old hero of libertarians, who had been trashed by Gore Vidal in a debate with Buckley. Vidal had condemned Reagan in 1967 as an aging actor with little knowledge of the world outside the United States. This is on top of viciously draconian policies were hardly friendly to blacks and the poor. Before a crowd of Christians, at a mass rally, Reagan said that if he were stranded on a desert island he would only want the Bible to read. The election could've been won without the Christian vote. It was about a movement that could be used to influence and shape the political discourse. The right-wing hegemony turned the debate towards social and cultural issues on which the liberal Left had to be marginalised. Meanwhile the Right could implement an economic agenda as the leading political issues were moral.

Only a God can save us.

 

For Heidegger the gods will save us once we welcome them back into our world, when we've gotten past this technological stance which stifles us. You could take this as an expressed acceptance of the futility of all struggle. There can be no way out of the hegemony, all we can do is wait for an outburst of ‘divine violence’. Thus ‘only a God can save us.’ Žižek sees this as one of many reactions by the Left to the hegemony of global capitalism and its indestructibility. The capitalist system can't help but tend towards moral relativism and secular pluralism, but this goes further as value is just commodity and purchase the system is totally atheistic and nihilistic. In these terms capitalism is insufficient for Being, it has no real space for it other than as a thing to be commodified and exchanged at a price. All the while capitalism denies our essence and fails to even understand itself. It has to hide behind words like ‘free-enterprise’ and ‘democracy’ for fear of being recognised for what it is.

It was Rosa Luxemburg who predicted that the capitalist system would collapse once expansion and growth ad infinitum had become an impossibility. The only possible limit to the infinite growth paradigm could come in its most thorough dominance in the world. If the world went capitalist then the parasite would soon have to face the real possibility of its own demise. With this in sight, it would take a global push to tip the system over. Today we find, as Bauman put it, capitalism has learned to create “host organisms” and onwards the parasite strives. This is nothing unusual, Karl Marx never foresaw the possibility of the capitalist system buying-off socialism with social democratic reformism. For Heidegger the answer to the technological nightmare, which engulfs us, was to be found in neither capitalism nor socialism. Notoriously Heidegger joined the Nazi Party after Hitler was rushed into power in 1933 and went on to betray his former mentor Edmund Husserl.

In his day Martin Heidegger drew a distinction between National Socialism as it existed at the time as opposed to the idealised vision which had not been realised. Heidegger may have been indulging in the far-right equivalent of ultra-leftist position which retains a certain distance from power and real decisions in its criticism of the established order. The farthest Heidegger went, in later life, to renounce National Socialism was to point to its “failure” to emerge as a genuine Third Position to American capitalism and Russian communism. In an interview for Der Spiegel, Heidegger makes it clear that he regards each of these systems as determined by ‘planetary technology’. The implication being that there has not yet been a thorough attempt to provide an answer to the nihilism of modern man as technological, value-creating and subjectivist. After all Fascism was something of a last-ditch attempt on the part of capitalism to purge itself of immense contradictions.

In Living in the End Times Žižek writes about the poetico-military complex with regard to Radovan Karadžić in Bosnia and the anti-Tutsi writer Hassan Ngeze in Rwanda. These were sincere and terrible poets, not simply corrupt politicos, who held up material to be manipulated as part of the riling up of jingoist sentiments. It this which was so instrumental in Yugloslavia as nationalism first began to appear on the scene in the 70s and 80s. Karadžić as a kind of parallax, homicidal poet from one angle and spiritual healer from another. Dragan Dabić provides the ideological key to Karadžić. Žižek reminds us of Lacan's thesis "truth has the structure of a fiction". The talk of setting free the individual's cosmic energies that link us all to the cosmos leads us to the Pagan conception of life as cosmic and its sanctity - which means that the blood of innocents will soon be flowing in the streets.

To convey the way Karadžić saw Bosnian Muslims, Žižek refers us to a favourite Chinese proverb of Karadžić's "He who cannot agree with his enemies is controlled by them." But this does not adequately capture the postmodern brand of nationalism to which Karadžić subscribed. And so he goes onto include a telling excerpt from a poem Karadžić wrote called 'For Izet Sarajlić'. It features the line "People nothing is forbidden in my faith" and this is the permissive spirit of postmodern nationalism, which seeks to liberate us from political correctness and multiculturalism. In this post-political era, there is no other way to mobilise the masses for a public cause and the only dominate calls are for us to enjoy ourselves. The majority of us are 'moral' in that we cannot slaughter each other out of disgust at such conduct and so a 'sacred' Cause is necessary to render killing acceptable to us.

It is in such poetry and violence that we regress from the Christian love of the neighbour to the Pagan past of putting our tribe before all the others. It may be presented as a defence of Christian values, but it is the greatest threat to the Judeo-Christian legacy in Europe. As Žižek notes it goes against the universalism of the Holy Spirit, to which we each have immediate access to as individuals irrespective of their place in the social order. Who else may we add to this catalogue? There is, of course, the Austrian writer Peter Handke, who gave a speech at the funeral of Slobodan Milošević. We might even include DH Lawrence, as he was on the radical Right and moved from Christian theology to Pagan mysticism. Then there's Eduardo Limonov who founded a neo-fascist movement in post-Communist Russia. In the bombardment of Sarajevo, Eduardo Limonov visited with Karadžić and was filmed taking a turn firing into the streets below them with a rifle.

The poet Eduard Limonov had returned to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union having spent almost 20 years in exile in America. Limonov was appalled to witness the reign of Boris Yeltsin as the Kremlin sought to impose Western-style capitalism with "shock therapy" as the means to this end. This would be a disaster as Limonov was convinced American capitalism was no different than Soviet totalitarianism, it was just more sophisticated in its oppression. He decided to take drastic action and founded a political party to recapture the original aims of the Bolshevik Revolution and integrate it within a modern nationalism. It would be the National Bolshevik Party that is now the embodiment of the resurgent nationalism which have sought to put a stop to the Russian process of 'modernisation' since the 1990s. The drink-sodden Yeltsin and the gang of free-marketeers around him practically destroyed Russia only to give way to Putin in the end.

Then there is Heidegger who had planned to lecture on Nietzsche and Hölderlin in 1944-45 but the trajectory of the war demolished these plans. Before that he had lectured on Hölderlin already at the beginning of the Nazi era when he himself was a member of the Party. The hymns selected were Germania and The Rhine, note the obvious nationalist connotations. For Heidegger the dilemma of Western existence had manifested itself in Germany, the land of the middle. He saw the question of Being and the matter of German identity as entwined. The Germans are the most metaphysical people in these terms and if Europe isn't going to go down the path of annihilation then this decision can only come through the development of new, spiritual forces from the centre. Nietzsche had diagnosed the condition, Hölderlin had the cure for it. The way to open the question of Being and the new and deeper way of being German. This is could very well have been the way Heidegger had wanted to be the philosopher of the Third Reich.

What undermines this neat pattern is that National Socialism may have found Pagan blood myths useful at times Hitler did condemn Pagan cults in 1938. This is because Fascism has few consistent and universal characteristics other than a reactive spirit and a pathological Judeophobia. More generally, this may just be the instances of that Fascist tendency to aestheticise politics. We shouldn't forget that our concerts are modeled on Nazi rallies. This tendency remains alive and well in the National Bolshevik Party that Limonov has led for the last 20 years in Russia. Many of its members came out of the Russian avant-garde music scene which had resisted communism as it scoffed at the West. Originally the avant-garde was on the side of the revolutionaries in 1917 until it was suppressed at the appearance on the scene of socialist realism under Stalin. It only resurfaced in the 1960s during the Khrushchev thawing period, then it became an expression of resistance under Brezhnev and when the Wall fell the artists prescribed Nazism as a positive vision.

In 1917 Rosa Luxemburg reflected that the time of pogroms against Russian Jewry has been brought to a close - principally by the October Revolution - before adding "I can sooner imagine - pogroms against Jews in Germany." At the time of Luxemburg's death, at the hands of the Freikorps, Heidegger was working under Husserl at Freiburg. By then the First World War had ended, with millions slaughtered and Germany left vanquished. Heidegger had served, albeit in a limited capacity, as a soldier and this he shared with the future Fuhrer along with the year of his birth. Luxemburg had been incarcerated for her firm opposition to the imperial bloodbath and amidst the confusion Rosa reached out to Benito Mussolini, who she assumed was still the socialist editor of Avanti! - little did she know that Mussolini had been kicked out of the Italian Socialist Party by then for his support of the war. This is where the defeats of the Left converge with the opening for Fascism.

It would be tempting to go off on a tangent about the relation between Heidegger’s philosophy and the politics in which he engaged personally, specifically National Socialism. That would be pushing things as Heidegger at most leaves the door open to fascism, there is nothing inherently fascist about his philosophy. As Robert Solomon notes, it might be more constructive to engage with the world as it is today. There is a sense in which everything is reduced to the same level in consumerism, as with technology and money, whereby human beings are cut-off from the world and each other. Ultimately, this leaves human beings diminished as technology and money reduce the world in its immediacy - a leveling effect which has become the primary source for alienation in the modern world. In a way Heidegger returned to the pessimism of Schopenhauer in his last days.

Heidegger's last writings are dominated by his own particular notion of releasement, which could be seen as a way of thinking and living that has turned away from willing. This comes across as Schopenhauerian, though it may have been the Taoist influences on Heidegger by that point. When it came to the return of the gods, Heidegger found Nietzsche's programme for overcoming nihilism unsatisfactory. Nietzsche wanted to place the Übermensch where God once stood as a central pillar of values. Once the old myths underpinning our superstructure begin to give way, we must find new ideals in order to advance beyond what humanity has been thus far. In this Heidegger sniffed out the Will to Power which has been responsible for the destruction of values in the first place. It was not new forms of domination that can save us, but rather a humbling to power as we await the return of the gods. Maybe what we need is a bit more Nietzsche than Heidegger in this regard.

G-d and Phenomenology.

Perhaps as a consequence of the close ties between phenomenology and existentialism in the 20^th Century so it may be associated with atheism. This association of existentialism with atheism is not unfounded as existentialists such as Albert Camus subscribed to the view of life as totally meaningless. And indeed Jean-Paul Sartre was a vehement atheist. The same may be said of Nietzsche though in many respects it may be argued he remained firmly within Lutheranism.[1] Then there is Kierkegaard, a man who may even be deemed a Christian fundamentalist by some. The most significant reaction to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology came from Martin Heidegger was a student of theology before he moved onto philosophy and developed hermeneutical phenomenology. But it was the reactions to Heidegger which took the most overt stances on the question of God. It may safely be said from the outset that there is no reason phenomenology can be strictly either theistic or atheistic.

The reactions to Heidegger took both theistic and atheistic forms. In Sartre’s reaction to Heidegger he presented an existential phenomenology which was atheistic as it acknowledged the human desire for God. Then Emmanuel Levinas introduced an ethical element into phenomenology which went further than a mere acknowledgement of the desire for God. If we take phenomenology as the study of appearances, as Heidegger did, then it may seem as though it begins at a secular point and doesn’t necessarily rule out the existence of God. As it would seem that the study of appearances could well be agnostic on the question of God, as it is beyond appearances, phenomenology may be better described as non-theistic rather than atheistic in this sense. We might be able to maintain this stance on Husserl and Heidegger, but it is disputable and even more so when we move to the later phenomenologists.

The explicitly atheist phenomenology can be found in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, where God is a contradiction as God would have to exist at the modes of in-itself and for-itself. Being-in-itself is the mode of being held by inanimate objects, whereas being-for-itself is integral to human freedom – a human being is not a human being in the sense that a stone is a stone.[2] The for-itself arises once in-itself has been negated by it, then it rushes into the future as the human subject strives towards authenticity. In this process then the for-itself becomes what it isn’t – being-in-itself – and negates what it was. This is the exact condition of human freedom from which the desire for God emerges. There is a hypothetical being-in-itself-for-itself and that is God, it implies a coincidence of the self with the self and absence of the negation that it takes to form the self. But it is the instability of the subject, which Sartre described, that opens up a temptation to ‘flee from being’ and into bad faith. This is where the desire for God comes from and it is followed by the futile attempts to reach out to this impossible mode of being.

Of course, it may be said, it is the framework in which Sartre works that has closed off any space for God from the outset. So it is the framework which is to be questioned here. But not to revert to a non-existent ‘neutral’ space from which we can see whether there is or isn’t a God. Rather we should look assess the problems with Sartre’s framework and then look at a rival framework. The problem might be down to some of the vestments of Cartesianism that Sartre brings to the table. The conception of freedom that Sartre develops is predicated on a notion of consciousness as nothingness.[3] Because freedom is consciousness it is detached from the causal forces of the external world. There is literally nothing which traps the self ‘inside’ consciousness because there is nothing there. It boils down to a modified version of the mind-body distinction that Descartes drew. It’s precisely this aspect of the Cartesian tradition that Heidegger wanted to throw out completely.

It is this levelled plain of radically free individuals, with the subject as an unstable moral agent – lacking any objective moral values – whose relations with others is typified by feelings such as shame. Sartre was preoccupied with the ‘look’ which separates the subject off from the world and turns them into a thing. The Other raises the instability of our already fragile consciousness.[4] The existence of the Other is not problematic, though the Other is a potential threat to the freedom of the subject.[5] The subject exists as in-itself and for-itself but does not exist in isolation, to the contrary the subject must coexist with others and so the subject is not just for-itself it is being-for-others. The Other reduces the for-itself subject to a thing-like in-itself existence, the subject is deprived of its autonomy and freedom. The relationship with the Other is inevitably prone to conflict, the subject can only dominate or be dominated. As Garcin says famously at the end of Sartre’s No Exit “There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is – other people.”[6]

The important thing to remember about Sartre is that he was writing in reaction to Heidegger, who had thoroughly rejected the Cartesian tradition. To do this Heidegger had questioned the basic claim that the knowledge we have of ourselves differs from the knowledge we have of others at a fundamental level. Heidegger used the word Dasein to signify not just the subject, but the temporal unfolding of existence – we might think of it as experience. In this way we are embodied experiencers of a world that we are thoroughly wrapped up in and share with others who compose the They.[7] The mind-body distinction is something to be thrown aside, along with the notion that there is an external world from which we can retreat. Heidegger had conceived of being-in-the-world to signify the human existence as bound up with reality, both as constitutive and constituted by it. For Heideggerians then Sartre fails insofar as he doesn’t totally reject Cartesianism, even if it only survives in modified form.

This is where Emmanuel Levinas enters the picture with a take on the Other which is in opposition to the position that Sartre had carved out. Levinas shared Heidegger’s worries about the implications of a selfhood which is cut-off from the world in its autonomy. And at the same time Levinas was concerned about the absence of an ethics in Heidegger’s project. For Levinas the Other is not a threat to one’s freedom, that we can only dominate or be dominated by. Rather the face-to-face encounter with the Other is positive as it challenges the self-assurance and self-containment of the subject. It inaugurates the possibility of an ethical code.[8] The naked face of the Other appeals to the subject in a way that cannot be ignored or forgotten. It is an appeal for the subject to go towards, to welcome and to take responsibility for the Other. The identity of the subject is dependent on the Otherness that is always and already present before the subject is constituted, it is founded by the ethical demand to take responsibility for the Other. This is where a space for God is prised open.

Recall the words of Terry Eagleton that “To move from Husserl to Heidegger is to move from the terrain of pure intellect to a philosophy which meditates on what it feels like to be alive.”[9]  We might add that Levinas takes off from ‘what it feels like to be alive’ to the realm of the ethical. The encounter with the Other is a mere glimpse of the Infinite, or more bluntly God, from which the most we can receive is an imperative.[10] The only means of relation to God is through moral conduct and this is especially the case in regards to the Other. Levinas was one of a line of Jewish phenomenologists, which began with Husserl and included such unlikely bedfellows as Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. But Levinas may have been the first in this line to introduce a Judaic turn to phenomenology. The trace of the ever elusive Infinite which we detect in the face of the Other comes in the form of an obligation in the same way that all Moses received from God at Mount Sinai were the mitzvoth – the commandments.[11] The Infinite seems to hold no content for us, but what we can relate to and that is moral in character.

There is a moment in A Serious Man (2009) which holds some relevance as Rabbi Nachtner says “Hashem doesn’t owe us anything. The obligation runs the other way.” God has left us to our own devices, which is why we can and must do His work. We might even go to the end and conclude that God does not intervene because we are the intervention. For Sartre it is the Other which is presupposed, for Levinas it is the Infinite which is presupposed. But it is Levinas who grounds our moral obligations in theistic terms. In doing so, Levinas reformulated the Cartesian case for the existence of God by substituting the Infinite for the Other. And so we could charge him, as we would Sartre, with bringing back the old baggage as part of his bid to bring morality into phenomenology. Though it should be noted that Levinas called for a revision of intersubjectivity as developed in the Cartesian tradition and by Husserl. This means that the basic concept of the subject: a mind which grasps what it confronts in experience and turns it into its content. The troubling assumption being that everything is ‘given’ as representation, even though everything is ultimately other than the mind it can be possessed by the mind.[12]

There is a more direct way whereby the subject can stand in such relations, e.g. face-to-face with another person. For Levinas the relation to the Other is essential to what it means to be human, it is irreducible. It’s a negative theology of sorts as Levinas shirked from a theorisation of God. If you can theorise about him then he isn’t God, this view that we cannot theorise Him seems compatible with the Heideggerian view of phenomenology as a study of appearances. Deliberately Levinas avoided the game of providing an argument for the existence of God as that would be ‘bad theology’. So the idea of a practical atheism may have had its use in terms of coming to grips with what it means to be human. This differs with the early work of Heidegger which carries the panentheistic tones of Heidegger's Christian background. But it also differs sharply with Heidegger's later nostalgia for the Pagan plethora of Greek gods. By contrast Levinas refuses any compromise with polytheism and insists on a universalist approach tempered by particularism.

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[1] Jackson, R: Nietzsche the Key Ideas (Hachette UK, 2010) pg.118-124

[2] Macey, D: Dictionary of Critical Theory (Penguin Reference, 2001) pg.201-203

[3] Solomon, RC; Sartre’s Phenomenology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vGzpEqKK-Y

[4] Wartenberg, T; Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.60-69

[5] Macey, D; Dictionary of Critical Theory (Penguin Reference, 2001) pg.284-286

[6] Sartre, JP; No Exit (Samuel French, Inc. 1958) pg.46-47

[7] Wartenberg, T; Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.51-60

[8] Macey, D; Dictionary of Critical Theory (Penguin Reference, 2001) pg.284-286

[9] Eagleton, T; Literary Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1983 | Second Edition, 1983) pg.47-57

[10] Putnam, H; Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to life (Indiana University Press, 2008) pg.68-82

[11] Putnam, H; Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to life (Indiana University Press, 2008) pg.87-94

[12] Mautner, T; Dictionary of Philosophy (Penguin Reference, 2001) pg.348-349