Jonathan and Amanda Witt at Wittingshire picked up the ball and ran with it, sending the query out via email to various people. Today, Amanda wrote back. I've corrected an obvious typo, but otherwise this is as sent to me:
Now, this makes more sense to me than what I ran into the other day. It looks as though the 'quote' I ran across does come from a conversation with Satre (taped, no less), but is so severely pruned that it is misleading.Kathryn--
Another reply came in, and it's quite interesting--but it's long, so I'll just send it like this and let you decide whether to cram it into your comments section or excerpt it or whatever. It's from William F. Lawhead, a philosophy prof at Ole Miss.
--Amanda
Lawhead wrote:
I don't put much stock in accounts of death bed conversions of famous atheists. There are such stories about Voltaire and Darwin. But the evidence is pretty clear that these are manufactured. However, there is no telling what Sartre said on his deathbed. He was a pitiful, sick man who urinated on himself and was a drug addict and an alcoholic. However, the quote you mention has some basis in fact. The following is from the article "Sartre's Last Years" by Simone de Beauvoir. It was published in Harper's, Feb.1984, pp. 30-39. It was taken from the book Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre by de Beauvoir, trans. Patrick O'Brian and, at the time, due to come out with Pantheon Books. I'm looking at the article right now, so it is not hearsay. However, I have not seen the book. I would trust any account that comes from de Beauvoir, as she knew him best. She would have been reluctant to quote something like this that contradicted his life long teachings. The following is from a conversation with Sartre that Simone taped in the summer and fall of 1974. (That would be 6 years before his death--not quite on his deathbed, unless he repeated similar remarks later.)Quote -----
Sartre: Even if one does not believe in God, there are elements of the idea of God that remain in us and that cause us to see the world with some divine aspects.
S.d.B.: What for example?
Sartre: That varies according to the person.
S.d.B.: But for you?
Sartre: As for me, I don't see myself as so much dust that has appeared in the world but as a being that was expected, prefigured, called forth. In short, as a being that could, it seems, come only from a creator; and this idea of a creating hand that created me refers me back to God. Naturally this is not a clear, exact idea that I set in motion every time I think of myself. It contradicts many of my other ideas; but it is there, floating vaguely. And when I think of myself I often think rather in this way, for want of being able to think otherwise.
End quote---
Nevertheless, immediately after this he goes on to reiterate his lack of belief in God and the freedom that this brings. He then says "I don't need God in order to love my neighbor. It's a direct relation between man and man; I don't have to pass by the infinite at all. And then my acts have made up a life, my life, which is going to end, which is almost over, and which I judge without too many errors. This life owes nothing to God; it was what I wanted it to be and to some extent what I made it without meaning to. And when now I reflect upon it, it satisfies me; and I do not need to pass by God for that."
What I make of this is that Sartre is saying, consistent with his life's philosophy, that the idea of God is like a hangover that is hard to shake. It is analogous to the experience of distinctly remembering you turned off the stove, but turning the car around to go back and check anyway, because you can't get over the nagging doubt that you didn't. So, it is clear that this quote in 1974 did not come out of a conversion experience, and I am skeptical that there was one in 1980. As I said, Sartre was hardly lucid in his last years. Still, his rambling, musing about the feeling of being created is
remarkable.
My thanks to the Witts and to William F. Lawhead.
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