021_Existentialism-Sartre.doc READINGS: EXISTENTIALISM (SARTRE) Thomas Mann,Doktor Faustus Primo Levi,The Drowned and the Saved Jean-Paul Sartre,Existentialism Simone de Beauvoir,The Second Sex Schoenberg,Survivor of Warsaw Selections from Thomas Mann,Doktor Faustus According to Schleppfuss all this -- evil, the Evil One himself -- was a necessary emanation and inevitable accompaniment of the Holy Existence of God, so that vice did not consist in itself but got its satisfaction from the defilement of virtue, without which it would have been rootless; in other words, it consisted in the enjoyment of freedom, the possibility of sinning, which was inherent in the act of creation itself.Herein was expressed a certain logical incompleteness of the All-powerfulness and All-goodness of God; for what He had not been able to do was to produce in the creature, in that which he had liberated out of Himself and which was now outside Him, the incapacity for sin.That would have meant denying to the created being the free will to turn away from God -- which would have been an incomplete creation, yes, positively not a creation at all, but a surrender on the part of God....Evil contributed to the wholeness of the universe, without it the universe would not have been complete; therefor God permitted it....St. Augustine, at least, had gone so far as to say that the function of the bad was to make the good stand out more strongly... We wrote that down in our notebooks, that we might go home more or less cheered.The real vindication of God, in view of the pains of creation, so we added to Schleppfuss’s dictation, consisted in His power to bring good out of evil…. We are lost.In other words, the war is lost; but that means more than a lost campaign, it means in very truth thatweare lost: our character, our cause, our hope, our history. It is all up with Germany, it will be all up with her.She is marked down for collapse, economic, political, moral, spiritual, in short all-embracing, unparalleled, final collapse. I suppose I have not wished for it, this that threatens, for it is madness and despair. I supposed I have not wished for it, because my pity is too deep, my grief and sympathy are with this unhappy nation, when I think of the exaltation and blind ardour of its uprising, the breaking-out, the breaking-up, the breaking-down; the purifying and fresh start, the national new birth of ten years ago, that seemingly religious intoxication -- which then betrayed itself to any intelligent person for what it was by its crudity, vulgarity, gangsterism, sadism, degradation, filthiness -- ah, how unmistakably it bore within itself the seeds of this whole war!My heart contracts painfully at the thought of that enormous investment of faith, zeal, lofty historic emotion; all this we made, all this is now puffed away in a bankruptcy without compare. No, surely I did not want it, and yet -- I have been driven to want it, I wish for it today and will welcome it, out of hatred for the outrageous contempt of reason, the vicious violation of the truth, the cheap, filthy
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