I
picked up Jean Paul Sartre's novel the Age of Reason the other day.
It reminded me of reading it long ago; in the 1970s. Upon reflection
I realized that the title does have several possible meanings neither
exclusive or exhaustive of the other values. One that hadn't read
the book might think it to be an existentialist or coming of age
novel. it is neither .
Set
in pre-war France it covers Sartre's personal experience of being
mobilized into the Army and eventually captured by the Germans and
repatriated to Paris. The French underground didn't want the
philosopher in its movement because he was thought too talkative.
That was lucky since he wrote 'Being and Nothingness' during the war.
That probably wasn't the reason the Germans let him go (being to
chatty since they had a way of persuading people to hush) -he may not
have seemed much of a military threat and hoped Vichy France would
expand to renormalize French society in the Nazi mold.
The
experiences of the Second World War stimulated Sartre to write three
'freedom' novels about it. A philosopher named Matthew, a brother and
a girlfriend provide elements of his experience with a transcendental
gestalt that extrapolated along a time continuum I suppose might be
regard as existentialist. The novel plainly is a thinly veiled prose
fiction account of Sartre's own experience. As a thinking fellow he
also wrote about France social transformation into a state of war
from civilian to military to civilian.
The
age of reason in French history was a significant enlightenment era
social development where people like Descartes-hugely influential on
Sartre's work, the encyclopedists, Diderot, Condorcet, Immanuel Kant
and other made critical thought and technical philosophical method of
self-examination and first principles primary tools of intellectual
investigation into the meaning of life and social existence. One sees
that effort in each of Sartre's major works; 'Being and Nothingness'
and the Critique of Dialectical Reason'. Yet in naming his major
fiction work The Age of Reason at the start of the Second
World War era I wonder if Sartre was not being a little sarcastic;
the result of the historical age of reason was evolution to mass
mobilization and death.
One
must stretch the age of reason out 300 years or so from its
beginning to end if one were to credit Sartre with that reasoning for
naming the book. Initially one might think it a coming of age
novel-as if becoming old enough to go to war at 17 or 18 is reaches
an age of adult reason. With social accountability one should want to
war upon one's neighbor nation, or upon polar bear in the Arctic or
perhaps take over the Ukraine from historical Russia before taking
Russia from Russia along with the Arctic and the Arctic ocean
seafloor.
Whatever
Sartre meant in his novel's title, the book is a window into 1939-40
France. It is strange to just pick up the book after so many years
and find it there unchanged.
Once
while walking along the road in Valdez Alaska a Euro-style yellow
taxi stopped. A window rolled down and a fellow that looked like
Sartre asked me for directions to the ferry terminal. I said I didn't
know, and the taxi drove off. That reminded me of a time at Fort
Bliss walking in a dust storm when three soldiers asked me for
directions to some place and I was at a loss to tell them.
Sometimes
one just doesn't know what it is that other people are looking for,
and might wonder if the information they needed-the alphanumeric
data, would really be so fulfilling if they got it. One wonders if
temporal beings seeking temporal things think enough of eternal
things, of the Lord Jesus? One needs temporal things yet the mind is
different than the things it usually seeks. Reason brings one to
wonder of God and how he created the temporal even through a cascade
of waves and particles, or disturbed the waters of a unified field
with a word.
And
that reminds me a little of holographic theories of the Universe, and
of another topic too that goes on a little farther.
The
topic originates with Paul the Apostle in his letter to Titus. He
writes in Chapter 1 verse 2; "In hope of eternal life, which
God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began;". One
views pre-destination in that verse, and one wonders how eternity was
promised to temporal beings from the eternal God.
Reason
informs us that a promotion to eternal life would be inevitable for
beings made by the eternal God. Eternity with God for those that love
God, and eternity in hell for those that don't. There are more
questions to be asked, and ideas that are too vast and that use more
of human brain capacity than it would be easy to sustain perhaps.
That is something of a paradox itself; how can ideas about vast
subjects such as eternity and its relationship to the temporal
passage of thought be ephemeral and disappear an instant after they
arise?
It
seems in a way as if eternity must be all around the temporal
universe waiting like a greater than four-dimensional flood to surge
over and engulf it wiping it away like a dream upon awakening. The
temporal mind and temporal being could be like a hologram sandwiched
into an instant of an expanded universe that necessarily entails time
and motion of space to be in an other than eternal form. One imagines
black holes, a singularity, inflatons, membranes and dimensions in
various potential forms of minimalism and extension creating
appearances of time, space and being for sentient life immersed
within. Still, the eternal now seems ready to rip one out of the
temporal in any instant as if the entire experience were illusory-and
it is of course not. Yet the temporal is contingent being from which
one may see eternity just dimly as if viewing it through a shaded
glass darkly, with less resolution than if looking through a dark
polarizing filter at the sun.
One
must wonder of the loss of the age of reason, or of its
transformation into a constellation of pride things, collectives,
corporations, poisoned planet, social injustice, over-consumed
resources and thoughtless politicians working classical corruptions
and anachronistic divisions to crash populations again in primal
historical recursion in order to concentrate wealth and engender
environmental sustainability for the rich with relief from the
existence of the poor.
One
may look back at the end of the age of reason and consider what
followed it-the age of mechanical man with the masses in revolt, as
Ortega y Gasset wrote, to seek an existentialist utopia in a modern
secular world ruled by the rich without requisite reason, where one
need be only a same-cloned cell in the machine? Or is it an
existentialist detachment from social responsibility or right
historical and political management while the masses believe in
quantum uncertainty as a political fact too wherein they may jostle
as quantum contained immorally by the strong force of the ultra-rich.
