Abstract

Described in the blurb as "the first systematic account of Sartre’s phenomenology of religion," King’s work also locates Sartre’s observations in the tradition of religious mysticism which Sartre is said to have studied in the early ‘30s. In fact, one of King’s most telling criticisms throughout the exposition is that Sartre was not faithful enough to the phenomena of mysticism, sacrificing phenomenology to his ontological commitments whenever the two seemed to conflict. The opening chapter sets the theme by treating the "theological complex" ascribed to each man in virtue of his futile passion to be the conscious foundation of his own being, that is, to be in-itself-for-itself or God. This complex, developed by the child’s likening of its parents to divinities beneath whose gaze it secures an object-like being, generates what King in his final chapter terms the bourgeois "ideal of being," viz., the flight from subjectivity and freedom to absolute objectivity. He distinguishes this ideal from the artist’s ideal of nothingness and the worker’s ideal of doing. What has this to do with the sacred? Basically, these ideals mark the termini a quo and ad quem of Sartre’s evolving notion of God, perhaps the major claim of King’s study.