The Age of Reason

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.