Conservative philosopher
Roger Scruton
does a retrospective on Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frenchman who tried to
find a meaning for life after God is Dead. It’s a problem.
For the religious world-view, self-consciousness is a
source of joy, proof of our apartness from nature, of our special
relation to God and of our ultimate redemption, as we leap from the
world into the arms of our creator. For Sartre, self-consciousness
is a kind of all-dominating nothingness, a source of anxiety:
proof of our apartness, certainly, but also of our loneliness,
which is a loneliness without redemption, since all the doors
on our inner walls have been painted
there by ourselves and none of them will open.
Since Sartre, of course, the entire French elite and latterly their epigones in the American
academy have lived by banging into the doors on their inner walls. That
is fine. Let them wreck their lives if they want to.
The trouble
is that Sartre ended up wrecking France.
The French have not recovered from Sartre and perhaps
never will. For they have had to live with an intellectual
establishment that has consistently repudiated the two things that
hold the country together: Christianity and the idea of France.
The anti-bourgeois posture of the left-bank intellectual has entered
the political process, and given rise to an elite for whom nothing
is certain save the repudiation of the national idea.
Read the whole thing.
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