Beware Of Children Bearing Gifts
By DONALD DeMARCO
Some time ago, when I was convalescing, my Number One Son and his wife brought me three gifts. The flowers were beautiful, the food was nourishing and the book they selected was indigestible. They could not be faulted for thinking that I would welcome Jean-Paul Sartre’s ponderous Being and Nothingness. It is his principal philosophical work and a staple for students of modern philosophy. I was sorry to inform them that I had a copy of that formidable tome since graduate school.
All was not lost. We gave the copy to my daughter, who was also visiting me. She enjoys reading works for which she has no personal affinity.
Inevitably, the name Jean-Paul Sartre provoked a discussion. “There is no such thing as a human nature,” he wrote. It is a statement that lies at the core of his thinking. On what basis could he make such a wild and provocative statement? “There is no God,” he declared. Therefore, there is no being who could confer a nature — such as a human nature — on we beings that we have referred to these many millennia as having a human nature.
If there is no God, then there is no human nature. Therefore, “existence precedes essence.” We exist , but are devoid of an essence or nature. As a consequence, we are freedom — “absolute freedom,” in his words. And this is the appeal of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy. We are free to do or to be anything there are no moral rules. Such an unbound notion of freedom was most appealing to people, especially to the young, who felt restricted by law, conventions, traditions, and moral regulations.
Sartre is famous for his trenchant phrase. In addition to the two mentioned above, we can add the celebration phrase from his play, No Exit — “Hell is other people.” Sartre envisioned others as warring against our freedom. Each individual looked upon the other as an object to be exploited. “No Exit” means that we cannot free ourselves from the cannibalistic attitudes of others.
Sartre’s most dedicated opponent was his contemporary Gabriel Marcel. The two philosophers were as far apart from each other as Christ is from Satan. Marcel, a Catholic convert, looked upon human beings in terms of their having “creative fidelity.” For Marcel, to love authentically (or existentially) as opposed to just functioning, one must be creative and therefore faithful to that creative impulse that springs from his nature.
“A really alive person,” he writes, “is not someone who has a taste for life, but somebody who spreads that taste, showering it, as it were, around him, and a person who is really alive in this way has, quite apart from a tangible achievement, something essentially creative about him.
Marcel was truly a Renaissance man. He was a philosopher, playwright, critic, editor, and a gifted pianist. If a single word captured his spirit, it is the word “artist.” But he extended this word to everyone. We are all artists in the sense that we have this creative capacity to present ourselves in the world to others as unique artistic expressions. We are able to touch the subjectivity of others as a musician or a painter can touch others.
Two words in Marcel’s vocabulary are important in clarifying his notion of creative fidelity. One is the word “presence.” We pass people on the street and are not “present” to them. But it is possible for us to “participate” in their life — subject to subject. We can be, to employ Marcel’s second word, “available” to them. We have familiar expressions for Marcel’s notion of availability such as “I am at your service,” and “I am here for you.”
We must ask, however, which of these two philosophies can we live by? Marcel’s philosophy abounds with hope. It affirms the nature of the human being as loving, caring, and creatively disposed to each other’s needs. Sartre’s philosophy is Godless, human-less, anti-social, and devoid of hope. Can one truly, realistically, live by such a dreary outlook?
Pierre Victor spent a great deal of time with the dying Sartre and interviewed him at his bedside. According to Victor, Sartre had a drastic change in his view of God. As Victor reported, Sartre’s near-death profession was the antithesis of what he maintained throughout his 74 years of life:
“I do not feel that I am the product of chance; a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creative hand refers to God.”
Sartre’s longtime partner, Simone de Beauvoir, was infuriated when she was apprised of these words and dismissed them as the “senile act of a turncoat.” Yet, I believe that these words spoken by Sartre on his deathbed were far closer to reality than the philosophy inscribed in his book, Being and Nothingness.
- + + (Dr. Donald DeMarco is professor emeritus, St. Jerome’s University, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College. He is a regular columnist for St. Austin Review and is the author of 41 books. He is a former corresponding member of the Pontifical Academy of Life. Some of his recent books, The 12 Supporting Pillars of the Culture of Life and Why They Are Crumbling, Glimmers of Hope in a Darkening World, and Restoring Philosophy and Returning to Common Sense, are posted on amazon.com. His two latest books are Let Us Not Despair and The Road to a Better World. He and his wife, Mary, have 5 children and 13 grandchildren.)