Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology ISSN: 0007-1773 (Print) 2332-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp20 Atheism and Alienation, A Study of the Philosophical Sources of Contemporary Atheism, by Patrick Masterson David A. Pailin To cite this article: David A. Pailin (1972) Atheism and Alienation, A Study of the Philosophical Sources of Contemporary Atheism, by Patrick Masterson, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 3:1, 84-85, DOI: 10.1080/00071773.1972.11006233 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.1972.11006233 Published online: 21 Oct 2014. Submit your article to this journal View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rbsp20 Download by: [University of Sussex Library] Date: 12 November 2017, At: 18:56 Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 18:56 12 November 2017 substance of a human life which the patient's conscience demands should not be wasted. but which the bearer of this life must try to make an authentic life. E. K. Ledermann London The Leaves of Spring: A Study in the Dialectics of Madness, by A. Esterson. Tavistock, London. 1970. xxxv+278. This valuable book is a study in greater depth of one of the case-histories discussed in the work in which the author collaborated with R. D. Laing. The Families of Schizophrenics. The essence of the theory of Laing and Esterson about the nature of schizophrenia is that the odd behaviour of schizophrenics is to be understood as that of people acting for reasons, and not as the effect of mere chemical processes in the brain such as have never, after all. been proved to exist. I am not sure that much more light is thrown on the case of Sarah Danzig herself than was by the comparatively brief discussion in the earlier book. though the analogies which Esterson shows between the fate of schizophrenics and that of religious victims is both fascinating and instructive (p. 178). There is certainly a quality of black farce about the manner in which we are told that Sarah was judged to be insane - one might be reading one of the more macabre passages in one of the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. Sarah told the psychiatrists that she spent. as she did. a lot of time studying the Torah: which she explained was the Jewish Law. They took this to be evidence of a delusion that she was studying law. One can only agree here with Esterson's stigmatization of the interview as a "degradation ceremony" whereby the patient was "formally and solemnly invalidated as mentally ill" (pp. 71-2). For all the manifest stupidity and insensitivity of the patient's family as Esterson describes it. I cannot help feeling that the scales are sometimes unfairly loaded against them. This is understandhie, of course. in relation to common psychiatric practice. which is apt to load the scales against the patient. But it is only common sense for parents to say, as Sarah's did. that a girl who marries in the teeth of her family's opposition may be making 84 trouble for her own future if the marriage should go wrong. This is really an inadequate pretext for Esterson's charge that the family evidently completely misunderstood the nature of human relationships (p. 29). Often. too. the author uses jargon from Sartre and from Freud which seems to me to obscure rather than clarify the points he is trying to make. Yet in general this is an impressive and fascinating book. Hugo Meynell University of Leeds Atheism and Alienation, A Study of the Philosophical Sources of Contemporary Atheism, by Patrick Masterson, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, and Macmillan. London, 1971, 188pp., 0 One of the intellectual curiosities of the 1960s was the strident announcement by some radical theologians-in various and conflicting sensesthat 'God is dead'. Though the slogan was not new - Nietzsche, Hegel and Richter had already given the 'news'-what perhaps was new was the recognition by these inhabitants of 'God's own country' that their culture was no longer fundamentally theistic. At the same time, the widespread residual religiousness of Americans was shown by the fact that it was still interesting enough there to speak of 'God'-even if it was of his 'death'-for the death-of-God-debate to enter the pages of Playboy. On the other side of the Atlantic the question of God was too dead to raise any similar public interest in his obituary- writers. It is, indeed, a moot point whether contemporary European culture should be described as 'atheistic' when it regards the question of God as so dead and irrelevant to contemporary life that it is not concerned positively to attack belief in him. There is as little interest in denying the existence of God as in denying the divine right of kings. 'God' is neither a live option nor an interesting question. Patrick Masterson has now produced a short, interesting. introductory survey of major elements in the philosophical background to this contemorary Western culture. His A theism and A /ienation maintains that the basic philosophical reason for the abandonment of God as the integrating foundation of life and thought. lies in modern philosophy's interest in man as a knowing and moral being. First. starting with Descartes, it is Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 18:56 12 November 2017 concerned with the nature, conditions and limits of knowledge as knowledge available to man. This epistemological concern apparently confirms in practice the claims of Ockham, three centuries before Descartes, and of Barth, three centuries after Descartes. that where man's thought starts with man and his world, it will never find God. What man can justifiably claim to know that he knows does not include the God of theistic belief. Secondly. there is man's understanding of himself as a free and morally responsible being. This status increasingly has seemed incompatible with belief in the God of traditional Western theism. Belief in God has come to be seen at best as irrelevant and at worst as a way in which man rejects the truth about his existence. Instead of integrating life and thought, it reflects a fundamental 'alienation' in human self-understanding. After considering the significance of Descartes' philosophical method, Dr. Masterson passes over Locke and Hume to trace the development of Western atheism and of the view that theism is a basic expression of alienation in the works of Kant. Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, 'Positivistic Naturalism' (including Comte, Wittgenstein and Flew) and in atheistic existentialism (particularly in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty). In the concluding chapter he suggests that contemporary atheism overcomes the theistic expression of man's alienation at the cost of leaving man without hope. Escape from despair to a viable faith in the ultimate moral and personal meaning of life may not be possible without some kind of revived belief in God. According to Dr. Masterson, probably only such an affirmation of God could make adequate sense of man's existential commitment 'to an affirmation of the ultimately personal and moral characterisation of reality' and, far from producing a state of alienation, would 'promote a more expansive liberation of the creative possibilities of human subjectivity than is available within the context of a denial of any such transcendent personal perfection' (pp.l66, 172). Although in such a survey Dr. Masterson's comments on individual philosophers have to be fairly brief. they are clear and useful. His understanding of them generally follows accepted interpretations. I wonder, however, if the interpretations do not too readily rule out the possibility that religious belief in God is significant as a matter of belief for Kant and the possihility that Nietz~ch~"s protest is against a theologically and religiously false theism and not against theism as such. The discussion of Hegel's early work may, though, be too ready to interpret his use of the word 'God' as having a theological and religious reference. An explicit consideration of the meaning of the key-term 'alienation' would also have been helpful. Dr. Masterson emphasises that what he offers in his last chapter are only tentative suggestions about what 'will be taken up in a separate study' (p.l59). This study might usefully consider three inter-related problems which the present work hardly touches. First there is the question of how far it is not the reality of the God of religious faith but the concept of God which has been developed in traditional Western theology (in terms of actus purus, ens realissimum, etc.) and which is questionably relevant to actual faith. that has produced the judgment that belief in God is incompatible with the affirmation of the significance of human life. Secondly, does the dipolar panentheistic concept of God developed by process theologians such as Charles Hartshorne provide, as they claim, a way of understanding God that is both adequate to his deity and establishes the positive significance of human life? Inclined as I am in favour of Hartshorne's concept of God, I think it at least deserves consideration, especially since theologians like Schubert Ogden have used it to meet the challenge of atheism and alienation faced by Dr. Masterson. Ogden's study of Sartre in his Reality of God is particularly relevant to Dr. Masterson's thesis. Some of Dr. Masterson's comments suggest that the traditional theistic position is the only possible one and that he does not recognise that difficulties with this position have led to much contemporary atheism. Finally there is the need to consider whether what makes sense of our existential commitment to life can be asserted as more than a presupposition of our fundamental wish to live in hope. These comments, though, are posed not so much as criticisms of Dr. Masterson's useful introduction but as suggestions about what one reader would like to see him include in his promised further work. David A. Pailin University of Manchester 8S
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