I will confess a bias towards what I'm choosing to call the the\"old\" atheists (Sartre and Nietzsche) rather than the new; I thinkthat what Nietzsche and Sartre had to say about the implications ofatheism is more interesting than all of Dawkins, Hitchens, andHarris put together. I have put a lot of effort into trying toexplain the Sartre excerpt. This is because Sartre attempts tocriticize the relevance of religion, whereas the New Atheistwriters (see Hitchens) tend to focus on the truth of religion. Ifsomething is irrelevant, it no longer matters whether it is true,allowing Sartre's perspective to circumvent the endless debates onwhether or not this or that miracle happened, or whether to trustthe feeling one might have when one prays.
Nietzsche is, significantly, who Sartre is responding to in hisexcerpt. There is no assigned reading for Nietzsche in this class;for our purposes, his thoughts on ethics can be summarized thus:all morality consists of different fictions, not unlike novels,that different groups make up from scratch. The primary genres ofmorality are 'master morality' and 'slave morality.' Nothingactually is right or wrong, just as nothing actually is beauitfulor ugly, true or false. This is why Nietzsche's philosophy issometimes called 'nihilism.' Nietzsche responded to the challengefrom religion in the following way: you're right, he said. There isno morality without God. However, there also is no God. Theresimply is no morality, and almost no-one can handle the truth ofthat, which is why most of us turn to God. Hargrave, Lewis, andmany others claim that lack of religion leads to nihilism.Ironically, religious thinkers tend to love teaching Nietzsche.
Sartre's objections to religion are obvious; it is important tonote that Sartre did NOT believe that he could prove that God didnot exist, but rather that if He did exist, God, gods, or anythingelse supernatural is simply irrelevant to our moral situation, ourmoral plight.
Sartre's objection to other atheists is more subtle. Sartre'smission in his 1946 speech is predominately to, as the titleimplies, defend the idea that existentialism is a form of humanism,that it is not nihilism. Another way of putting this is that Sartrewas trying to argue that there was at least one form of atheism(existentialist) that was NOT nihilistic. All of which begs severalquestions, but let's start with: what's nihilism?
A humanist is someone who believes that a, \"man is the measureof all things,\" and takes joy in this, feels like the potential ofthe human being to create art, ideas, community, values, etc. isbeautiful, is sublime, and can give life true meaning. At the heartof Sartre argument is a very simple, very idealistic claim: that ifwe only made all decisions in total freedom, if we only thoughts ofthese decisions in terms of complete responsibility, then the worldwould be a much better place. There is a right and wrongway of making decisions, but no absolutely right or wrongdecision.
What do you think of Sartre's foundational premise thatexistence precedes essence, that there is no human nature? Are weblank slates, or is this idea a bit dated??
