Page 85 - Eclipse of God

58 Chapter 5

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(si j’ai supprimé Dieu le père),” Sartre says literally, “someone
is needed to invent values ( pour inventer les valeurs). . . . Life
has no meaning a priori . . . it is up to you to give it a mean-
ing, and value is nothing else than this meaning which you
choose.” That is almost exactly what Nietzsche said, and it has
not become any truer since then. One can believe in and accept
a meaning or value, one can set it as a guiding light over one’s
life if one has discovered it, not if one has invented it. It can
be for me an illuminating meaning, a direction- giving value
only if it has been revealed to me in my meeting with Being,
not if I have freely chosen it for myself from among the ex-
isting possibilities and perhaps have in addition decided with
some fellow- creatures: This shall be valid from now on. The
thesis reminds me of that curious concept of Georges Sorel,
the social myth, the classic example of which is the general
strike. This avowedly unrealizable myth shall show the workers
the direction in which they shall be active, but it can function
naturally only so long as they do not read Sorel and learn that
it is just a myth.
More important than these arguments of a remarkable psy-
chological observer and highly gifted literary man, for whom
genuine ontological considerations are always intermingled with
entirely different matters, is that argument which Heidegger,
who undoubtedly belongs to the historical rank of philoso-
phers in the proper sense of the term, brings forward concern-
ing the problem of religion in our time. These thoughts, it is
true, are first explicitly expressed in the writings of his second
period, from about 1943 on, but we already find indications of
them earlier.
Like Sartre, Heidegger also starts from Nietzsche’s saying
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“God is dead,” which he has interpreted at length. It is evi-
dent to him that Nietzsche wanted in this saying to dispense
with not only God but also the absolute in all its forms, there-