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After years of atheism and complicity with Soviet crimes, Sartre scandalized<\/strong> even Simone de Beauvoir. Here is the story of the little-known conversion<\/strong> of Jean-Paul Sartre<\/mark><\/strong>.<\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jean-Paul Sartre<\/mark><\/strong> was one of the last major secular intellectuals.<\/p>\n After him (with the exception of Bobbio and Cioran), only figures of little substance<\/strong> and much superficiality (often vulgar), such as Singer, Onfray, A.C. Grayling, and Richard Dawkins, emerged. They are hardly comparable to the depth of thought of the French philosopher.<\/p>\n Sartre was the one who perhaps most of all sought to discern the foundations of a secular morality<\/strong>, one without God.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n His atheism realistically led to anguish<\/strong> and insecurity because, as Sartre said, human reason is essentially theological<\/strong>, meaning it operates as though the human horizon were the divine horizon.<\/p>\n Here is what he said in 1946<\/strong> in an interview with Elio Vittorini<\/strong>:<\/p>\n \u201cAtheism is the belief that man is a creator, and that he is abandoned, alone, in the world. Atheism is therefore not a cheerful optimism, but, in its deepest sense, despair<\/strong>.\u201d<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n L’\u00catre et le N\u00e9ant<\/i> (1943) is Sartre\u2019s manifesto of philosophical atheism, but he himself would write four years later in “Cahiers pour une morale”<\/i> that it remains an act of faith<\/strong>: \u201cThe decisive absence of faith is an unshakable faith.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n It was precisely during this period<\/strong>, in the early ’50s, when the Cold War was at its peak, that Jean-Paul Sartre realized he was “living a neurosis”: despite his philosophy of action, until then he had been just a bourgeois writer, like Flaubert.<\/p>\n His interest in Marxism<\/strong> was reignited, aligning himself with the Communist Party.<\/p>\n Yet, as explained<\/a><\/em><\/strong> by American philosopher Jim Holt<\/strong>, during those years the crimes of Stalin<\/strong> were becoming blatantly documented, to the point that other intellectuals were abandoning the party. Holt writes: \u201cThe former philosopher of freedom turned into the totalitarian Sartre.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n Even Raymond Rosenthal<\/strong> referred<\/a><\/em><\/strong> to him as \u201ca staunch Stalinist.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n Here begins the shameful past<\/strong> of the greatest proponent and theorist of secular morality.<\/p>\n The break with Albert Camus<\/strong> happened precisely because the latter chose to denounce totalitarianism, while Sartre remained silent<\/strong> on the Soviet gulags (“It was not our duty to write about the Soviet labor camps”<\/i>, he later justified). He excused Stalin\u2019s purges<\/strong> and those of Mao<\/strong>, and described defectors like Victor Kravchenko<\/strong>, who first exposed the horrors of Stalinism from within, as a CIA creation<\/strong>.<\/p>\n And it didn\u2019t stop there. In opposition to the Vietnam War, Sartre even urged the Soviet Union<\/strong> to fight the Americans, even at the risk of nuclear war, and in defending Algerian independence, in the preface to a book by Franz Fanon (“The Wretched of the Earth”<\/i>) he wrote that for an African \u201cshooting at a European is like killing two birds with one stone, destroying both the oppressor and the man who oppresses at the same time.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n In 1977, when three men were arrested for pedophilia, Sartre<\/strong> (along with Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and many others) signed<\/a><\/em> a petition calling for the sexual liberalization<\/strong> of adolescents.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n Yet, even for the greatest secular figure of the 20th century, God<\/strong> remained a constant interest<\/strong> throughout his life, as a horizon, as a transcendental illusion, as an unconscious but inescapable mistake.<\/p>\n Sartre did not hesitate to declare the persistence<\/strong> of the remnants of that faith in God, which had been the central target of his intellectual program.<\/p>\n In particular, something changed<\/strong> drastically in the last years of his life.<\/p>\n In 1980<\/strong>, just months before his death, at the peak of his intellectual powers (though not his physical strength), in an interview with his former Maoist friend Pierre Victor<\/strong> (aka Benny Levy<\/strong>), Jean-Paul Sartre<\/strong> revealed his conversion<\/strong> through a scandalous statement<\/strong>, for many a retraction of his entire philosophical work (he himself confirmed<\/a><\/em> the authenticity of the interviews with Levy):<\/p>\n
\nSartre\u2019s Realist Atheism<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
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Sartre’s Complicity with Soviet Crimes<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
Sartre’s Conversion that Shocked de Beauvoir<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n
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