(III:1) 'Abortive Gods'

As Kierkegaard had been considerably influenced by Hegel in spite of his polemic against him, so also Sartre. The following will only be apreciated when it is realised that Sartre transferred the role of the Hegelian 'Absolute' to the concrete individual. In other words, since in his atheistic philosophy he had no room for God, he conferred both divine dignity and function upon man. And as the Hegelian God was consciousness that 'posited' its world, so the Sartrean 'god' is consciousness which 'posits' its world. But, whereas the Hegelian God succeeds in his task, viz., to become what he is (that is, in his consciousness), the Sartrean 'god' is doomed to failure. He always is what he is not and he is not what he is. In fact, he is no full-grown god, but only a 'Dieu manque'. That is, a would-be God, or to do more justice to Sartre's sex-ridden language: an 'abortive god'. This leads us right into Sartre's ontology, for this 'abortive god', as concrete individual consciousness, is one essential part of the ontological structure of Being. Being, so Sartre tells us, is either consciousness (être-pour-soi) or object (être-en-soi). To the latter applies the principle of identity. It is what it is. That is, its existence exhausts its essence. The same can, however, not be said of consciousness. Whenever an individual makes himself the object of his own consciousness, he will be barred from ever becoming the object of his own reflection in such a manner that the principle of identity would apply to him. In other words, the object of consciousness will always remain distinct from the consciousness itself. This analysis of consciousness is certainly questionable and seems to be easily refuted by an appeal to experience. But the explanation for Sartre's contention is that to him consciousness is, in fact, self-consciousness. Consciousness so defined is always consciousness of the object and consciousness of self at once. For instance, if I see a flower, I am, according to Sartre, conscious of the flower and at the same time conscious of my consciousness of the flower. This certainly applies in some cases, but when the same is claimed for all cases of consciousness, then it becomes a false generalisation, and yet for Sartre, this view of consciousness is fundamental, and without it his argument falls to the ground. In short, the pour-soi and the en-soi are for ever doomed to fall apart, and yet at the same time their existence is inseparably linked to each other in that the individual consciousness continues positing the objects of its consciousness. It 'has to be' (as Sartre informs us) what it is not and it is not what it is. It is under a necessity continually to produce this 'endless stalemate'. This necessity, Sartre calls in his typical perverted manner the individual's freedom. In fact, this freedom is what you would expect of an 'abortive god'. "For Sartre, freedom is, like consciousness, a defect, a deprivation."³ Sartre says in one place ⁴ that freedom is my choice to be God: 'I choose to possess the world'. But we have seen what this 'divinity' amounts to. And so it does not come as a great surprise to us when we learn that freedom manifests itself in 'dread' of 'anguish'. 'Dread', in Sartre's terminology, is not identical with fear. I am afraid of things, but I dread a nothing or 'the' nothing. 'The' Nothing is one of Sartre's philsophical atrocities and it is, together with Being, part of the ontological structure of existence. In other words, to Sartre it is not merely a quality of judgment, but part of the structure of the real. It owes its origin to the pour-soi or consciousness, and it becomes the subject of dread in so far as it separates consciousness from the object of consciousness. That is, anguish is given with the irrevocable fact that the pour-soi is what it is not and that it is not what it is.