THE MISERY OF FEUERBACH, NIETZSCHE AND SARTRE LOVES COMPANY
by Gary L. Morella

or Jean-Paul Sartre in "Existentialism and Humanism," there is no eternal truth because there is no divine mind to think it. It was Sartre who provided a basis for the non-Naturalism of moral judgments, a deep reason why "Is can never ground an Ought." An atheist like himself, Sartre observed, has to be thorough-going. If God is dead and out of the picture, with Him must go everything that assumes His existence. Sartre felt that those who thought God could be excised and the world and society would still look basically the same are simply foolish.

The theist or believer holds that human beings are creatures of God. One could consider creation analogous to the human artisan who fashions something for a purpose, a useful or good purpose else quality control dictates that it be discarded. The artisan's work is what it is because of this purpose that is the work's nature and, as such, a means for evaluation of the work. If man is an artifact of God's, man has a nature that provides a measure of his action. Acts that thwart his nature, i.e., acts that are unnatural, are bad, those that fulfill its potential are good. There is this criteria of good and bad action antecedent to a person doing anything at all. He will be good if he fulfills the purpose his Maker has embedded in him, and bad if he does not.

In a Godless world there are no natures because there is no divine artisan. Consequently, there are no guidelines one must consult before acting. One is free to do whatever he wants. His is a total freedom which is not a freedom measured by what he is or what he is designed for. This is Sartre's warped view of the world. One's initial glee that with the dropping of all constraints life is a "bowl of cherries" is dispelled by Sartre's gloomy description of what absolute freedom is like. There are no excuses as there is nothing to diminish our responsibility for what we do. This becomes a freedom too far which man is condemned to. Anything is permitted if God doesn't exist. Many have taken the Sartrean or Nietzschean route looking at the implications of man not having a nature or a destiny or any basis at all in the way things are for appraising them one way or another. This nihilistic mentality takes the form of modernist slogans such as "there is no such thing as right or wrong," "don't impose your morality on me," "I'm OK, you're OK," "reproductive rights," "get out of my bedroom," and one of my personal favorites, "get your rosaries off of my ovaries." This madness has resulted in a juridical devolution that allowed a so-called "c"atholic, and I use the term loosely, Supreme Court justice to declare that each of us has the right to define the universe as he wishes, to determine the point and purpose of our reproductive system, to approve or disapprove of abortion. In short, anything goes. The Supreme Court de facto by this decision has made universal emotivism the law of the land leaving unanswered the question of how long can any society endure or stave off anarchy on such a basis.

How does all this translate to the essence, existence questions? From Sartre's standpoint, for the theist, essence precedes existence as theists see God as a creator and His creation as possessing the nature God gave them, a nature which provides a gauge of the possessor in terms of seeking the good. Contrast this with the atheist who eliminates the Creator resulting in no essence thereby providing no antecedent guide for action. The statement cannot be made that one ought to do something which is a function of a human nature which can be appealed to for judgment reinforcement. Absent a nature, what we are is defined by the acts we perform - existence preceding essence.

Jacques Maritain in "Existence and the Existent" countered Sartre with another look at Thomas Aquinas. Maritain described two fundamentally different ways of interpreting the word existentialism. One being to affirm the primacy of existence, but as implying and preserving essences or natures, and as manifesting the supreme victory of the intellect and of intelligibility which is what he considered authentic existentialism. The other being to affirm the primacy of existence, but as destroying or abolishing essences or natures, and as manifesting the supreme defeat of the intellect and of intelligibility. He called this "apocryphal existentialism," the current kind as practiced by Sartre and company, an existentialism which no longer signifies anything at all. He reasoned that, if you abolish essence, or that which esse posits, by that very act you abolish existence or esse. These two notions he held are correlative and inseparable defining an existentialism that is self-destroying.

The existentialism of Sartre in which the primacy of existence is asserted is paid for by the abolition of intelligible nature or essence - "the" characteristic of the atheistic existentialism of today. This finite chaotic existence of subjects devoid of essence, the atheistic option, is foisted on mankind resulting in a radically irrational world making a succession of absolute and irrevocable choices which involves it irretrievably in a morass of ever-new situations which are unresolvable. The supreme irony is that the atheists demand absolute choices as a function of moral relativism, not of universal, absolute, immutable laws predicated on the natural good. Consider the following scenario.

Atheists have no problems with the notion that there are no absolute truths, i.e., everything is relative, because absolute truths have a religious connotation which they would be very uncomfortable with.

Imagine someone arguing that human dignity is not absolute, but merely relative. There are two replies to such relativism, one theoretical and the other practical. First, a relativist actually makes an absolute claim in stating that "everything is relative."

Not only do relativists theoretically contradict themselves with their own first premise, they contradict themselves in practice. As Peter Kreeft notes, "The relativist lets the cat out of the bag when you practice what he preaches, when you act toward him as if his own philosophy of relativism were true. He may preach relativism, but he expects you to practice absolutism." (Ref the "absolute" rights to desecrate the Mother of God such as happened at Penn State a few years ago.) Kreeft gives the example of telling his relativist students that all women in the class will flunk. Given their relativist premises, the students have no argument to make against so blatantly unfair a practice. Who are they, after all, to IMPOSE THEIR BELIEFS ON HIM?

Now apply this reasoning to the dignity of all human life. Many today wish to apply relativism to the value of human life, arguing that manhood is not absolutely, but only relatively, applicable to all human beings. But the lines drawn in such application, based on convenience, are completely arbitrary. If someone tells you that life is complex and demands such arbitrariness, you could ask him, "so does that mean that you wouldn't mind if a thief, faced with the 'complexity' of his own existence, decides to draw some arbitrary lines and steal your wallet?"

No one in his right mind stands for the relativistic view of human dignity when it comes to his or her own human dignity. Each of us - even the hardened secularist who preaches relativism - instinctively recognizes that our dignity as persons implies certain moral absolutes of behavior. These moral absolutes are a function of the Natural Law, without which anarchy exists.

I repeat a question which is never answered. What keeps said atheistic, relativistic society from deciding that a certain group is undesirable and thus can be eliminated for the good of the whole? It's happening in Holland with Euthanasia which started out as physician assisted suicide, evolved to voluntary euthanasia, and now is pure and simply involuntary euthanasia. Are people worthless because they are old? Tell that to Pablo Casals who was a virtuoso cellist at 90. It's happening to millions of babies in the womb - the holocaust of our time with the blessings of an activist judiciary who usurp the legislative branch of government by making laws instead of interpreting them contrary to the tenets of a Constitution which, if it means anything, must remain static to give any kind of meaning to "separation of powers."

Just who would you appeal to in a Godless society when the knock arrives at your door and you're told, it's time for you to meet the great nothing? Surely, even atheists would hold that you have some rights? But what happens when those rights are perceived to be yours alone and the appeal for your life is taken as FORCING YOUR BELIEFS DOWN SOMEONE ELSE'S THROAT. What do you do in such a situation?

The bias of contemporary existentialism is to manage at all costs to make atheism livable no matter how ridiculous the consequences. The question of what if by chance that could not be managed does not even arise. It is deliberately squashed and forbidden for very good reasons - a little thought easily proves its illogic. The straw that breaks the camel's back is that Sartre declares himself firmly optimistic, leaving the tragic sense to Christians. There is nothing equal to the stature of a Nietzsche and his disciples whose most original and highly appreciated contribution of their existentialism to our age, per Maritain, is the renunciation of any measure of grandeur.

Intelligibles are objects of thought. The metaphysician knows that his task is to search for the ultimate foundation of the intelligibility of things as of every other quality or perfection of being. He finds it in pure Act, and understands that in the final analysis there exists no human nature if the divine Intellect did not perceive its own Essence, and in that Essence the eternal idea of man, not an abstract and universal idea as our ideas are, but a creative idea. Maritain says "that a philosopher is not a philosopher if he is not a metaphysician." This would seem only logical since philosophy is a search for the truth and if the search leads to a capitalized version of Truth, i.e., Perfect Truth, what better vehicle for bridging to the supernatural, to theology, than metaphysics. To constrain a philosophy to the natural realm when it leads elsewhere is bad science by any definition. You don't say to the mathematician, "sorry, you cannot extend Newtonian mechanics to N or curved space because we won't let you." That would be an absurdity which is the correct descriptor for Sartrean existentialism.

Maritain goes on to describe the original error that underlies all the modern existentialist philosophies. "Ignorant of or neglecting the warning of the old scholastic wisdom, that 'the act of existing cannot be the object of a perfect abstraction,' these philosophies presuppose that existence can be isolated. They contend that existence alone is the nourishing soil of philosophy. They treat of existence without treating of being. They call themselves philosophies of existence instead of calling themselves philosophies of being." This reduces to the realization that the concept of existence cannot be detached from the concept of essence. These are inseparable in that they make up the same concept, albeit varied, of being which precedes the judgment of existence in the order of material or subject causality, with the judgment of existence preceding the idea of being in the order of formal causality.

Metaphysics uses the concept of existence to know a reality which is not an essence, but is the very act of existing. Existence cannot be detached from essence as it is always the existence of something, of a capacity to exist. It is the primary source of intelligibility for Maritain, but not being an essence or an intelligible, this source has to be super-intelligible. Maritain asks "why should it be astonishing that at the summit of all beings, at the point where everything is carried to pure transcendent act, the intelligibility of essence should fuse in on absolute identity with the super-intelligibility of existence, in the incomprehensible unity of Him Who is?"

Maritain describes Thomism as an "existentialist intellectualism" which, coupled with Thomas's insistence on the primacy of the speculative, illustrates the essential difference which sets this philosophy apart from contemporary existentialism that is false because it denies speculation in favor of action and confuses knowledge with power.

Thomas teaches that in every authentically moral act, man, in order to apply the law, must grasp the universal in his own singular existence where he is alone face to face with God. The contemporary atheistic existentialists, on the other hand, reject the ethical universal along with all essence. They repudiate it, moreover, dismiss it out of hand and believe that if there were a system of moral rules, those rules would automatically apply to particular cases making a mockery of all morality. What the liberal ideologues have done is to suppress generality and universal law with the end result that liberty, their battlecry, is suppressed. This in turn suppresses reason. I'm reminded of an old game show of the 50s-60s called "Truth or Consequences." The title is apropos today. We don't want the truth; the consequences are Planned Parenthood vs. Casey where freedom for the autonomous unencumbered self is confused with license as every man becomes his own god, creating his own universe. The fact that said universes invariably collide was totally ignored by the majority of our illustrious Supreme Court justices.

Feuerbach declared that God was the creation and the alienation of man; Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. They were the theologians of our contemporary atheistic philosophies. Evidently, it never occurred to them why would someone invent an immutable, omnipotent, omniscient, all-merciful, all-just because mercy without justice has no meaning, eternal God when the inventors would bear equal responsibility for obeying Same and suffer the same consequences for disobedience. No one would invent a God like that; you would invent a "feel-good" god to make you comfortable with your vices - a god in a constant state of evolution as a function of man's increased technical prowess. This god exists today where faith is watered down so as not to offend the sensibilities of modern man whose self esteem must survive at all costs. The question must be asked, "why were Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Sartre and their disciples so bitter?" The answer is simple. If man is not known to God, if he only has the experience of his personal existence and his subjectivity, then he also has the experience of his desperate solitude. He longs for death and beyond with total annihilation the only thing left for him. Everything linked to the combat for the salvation of self resembling a posture of faith has disappeared. The soul has been evacuated. With it went the sense of sin and the dignity of the existent with the grandeur of its liberty. "The nothingness in the existent has been replaced by the nothingness of the existence," per Maritain. In short, misery loves company with this sorry trio having many companions today.