Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [66]
Such faith, not fed by an intimate knowledge of the texts, is fragile; and my father, as soon as he got rich, as soon as he found himself out of his class, it disappeared in the blink of an eye. When I think about it, I never saw him show any real, genuine interest in it. When I think about it, I never saw him take a real, a genuine interest in any political issue. This is slightly frightening, because it means that with me, we are dealing with second-generation absolute atheists—not simply religious atheists but political atheists. When you get to this point, atheism is not joyous or heroic or liberating; there is nothing anticlerical about it, nor is there anything militant either. It is something cold, something desperate, lived like a pure incapacity; a white, impenetrable space where one advances only with difficulty, a permanent winter.
And the feeling, exhausting in the long run, that one is a vague organic hodgepodge whose controls are gradually failing.
No Dionysian laugh to enliven things; these days, Nietzsche’s philosophy seems to me like futile provocation, a joke in bad taste.
Nothing, therefore, would give me greater pleasure than to venture into this “region of the soul” where positivism, you may think, is bound to be out of its depth. The fact remains that the Judaism without God you outline still seems rather mysterious to me. Nor am I convinced that it is likely to elicit much sympathy from Chief Rabbi Sitruk, but I’ll let you worry about that.
The first thing would be to give up the idea of linking Man to the Universe. Man would go on being this fragile, medium-size object somewhere between quarks and spiral nebulae.
Such a philosophy (let’s call it that, if you prefer the term to religion) would merely connect men to one another, afford them common values. In terms of ambition, this is limited but I grant that at least it would be a start.
In passing, I have to say that your position is the exact antithesis of a rapidly expanding spiritual movement (the only expanding spiritual movement in Europe these days) based on ecological fundamentalism mixed in some cases with left-wing alter-globalization [the global justice movement] and in others with half-witted New Age cults. This movement does attempt to connect Man to the Universe, to give him a place in the “balance of nature” (and in particular to keep him in that place); but it also has very little to say about anything that might connect men to each other. Deep down, it’s a sort of neopantheism. It’s comforting to know that the Jews will be there to oppose it.
At heart, you’re not all that far removed from positivism.
At least from the positivism of Auguste Comte (who is, after all, the founder of the movement). But when he tried to found his “religion of humanity,” there was an immediate schism and he lost half of his disciples—including all those who had any intellectual weight in France at the time. I think he managed to marry two or three working-class couples (in spite of his attempts to gain the sympathies of Napoléon III and later Tsar Alexander I, the working classes remained his target market); the “religion of humanity” had some fleeting success in Brazil. And then, sometime around 1900, it all fell apart.
Saint-Simon, Pierre Leroux, in fact a whole host of social reformers in nineteenth-century France, had also envisaged founding a religion without God; they had even less success.
And yet Auguste Comte had a number of fine ideas. I remember a conversation I had once with Philippe Sollers (it’s been a while since we mentioned him; we’ve missed him) in which we agreed on the fact that prayer could have immediate psychological benefits, independent of the existence of the addressee. I didn’t tell Philippe at the time, because I didn’t want to traumatize him, but that it’s a typically Comteian idea. I even find it surprising to find Comte, who could have had no knowledge of Eastern meditation techniques, talking about posture and breathing control. A truly original mind who drew much from his