2 - Sovereign Decisionism and the Imago Dei

Summary

The Failed Atheism of Jean-Paul Sartre

In the year following Sartre's death, Simone de Beauvoir published in Adieux a series of interviews she conducted with the philosopher in August and September of 1974. Toward the end of the final interview, Sartre says that his career as a professional educator helped him produce the publications through which he had hoped to achieve immortality—a kind of “quasi-survival” he imagined in the form of his literary reputation. De Beauvoir uses this opportunity to shift the conversation from the figurative immortality Sartre hoped to achieve in his writings to the topics of religious belief, the immortality of the soul, and Sartre's own impending death. “[T]here is still one question that I should like to ask you,” she says. “Has the idea of the survival of the soul, of a spiritual principle in us, a survival such as the Christians think of, for example—has that ever crossed your mind?” Sartre replies to de Beauvoir that he expects there will be “nothing after death,” but—intriguingly, and in spite of his atheism—he also admits that he has retained something akin to religious belief, a commitment to moral absolutes that, in Sartre's opinion, can only exist in a universe created and governed by a divine being. “In the moral field,” he states, “I’ve retained one single thing to do with the existence of God, and that is Good and Evil as absolutes. The usual consequence of atheism is the suppression of Good and Evil. It's a certain relativism.” In a divinely governed universe, it would appear that moral absolutes are built into the metaphysical nature of being, not simply as axiological beliefs imposed on creation from above, but as an essential part of material reality itself. Arguably, this is why there are no moral absolutes in a world without God. The material nature of reality depends on a divine creator whose absence results—according to Sartre—in a morally neutral universe.