ABSTRACT
To whom life is an experience to be carried as far as possible. Georges Bataille
Some avowedly atheistic philosophers cannot leave God alone. Sartre fits into this category. To be sure, he confessed in his autobiography, The Words, that his atheism was a ‘cruel and long-range affair’, and he reported he finally ‘collared the Holy Ghost in the cellar and threw him out’1 – a remark that lends Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ pronouncement a particularly graphic twist. But, in fact, religious concepts and analogies continued to punctuate Sartre’s writings to the very end. Indeed, his final interview with Benny Lévy scandalized Simone de Beauvoir in part because of its being ‘soft’ on religious themes and theses.2 Bertrand Russell appears to have been another such philosopher. He felt obliged to explain his atheism more than once, as if the questioner were none other than himself.3
