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While reading Ron Aronson’s illuminating guide to the secular life, it struck me that, given the context, an exploration of the topic of Sartre and atheism was very much in order. For my sources I have relied firstly on Daniel Giovannangeli’s article “Athéisme” in the Dictionnaire Sartre. It lists about a dozen works. However, at the same time, I have kept in mind what Sartre said in 1943 in his analysis of Bataille’s L’Expérience intérieure, namely, that even if for Sartre, Bataille and many others “God is dead ... men have nevertheless not become atheists.”i And he adds portentously: “This silence of the transcendent conjoined with modern man’s permanent need for religion is today’s—as well as yesterday’s—greatest preoccupation” ( Sit. I, 1947, 142). Finally, this is also why I have made use of the illuminating comments made by Michel Contat and John Ireland in the Pléiade edition of Sartre’s plays entitled Théâtre complet (Tc, xiv; 1584). I will juxtapose their comments, whenever the need arises, with Sartre’s own remarks about atheism. Regarding the latter, Sartre was not loath to admit how long and hard he struggled to free himself from Christianity. He emphasized this in 1964 while concluding his conference on Kierkegaard entitled “The Singular Universal”: “becoming an atheist is a long and difficult undertaking. It requires an absolute relationship with two infinites: man and the universe” (Sit. IX, 189). Here he echoes Pascal’s remarks about man’s place in the universe: “After all, what is man in nature? Nothing compared to infinity, everything compared to nothingness, [man finds] himself in the middle between nothingness and everything” (Pensées, 45). Hence it is not surprising that, as John Ireland points out (Tc, 1583), Sartre had long projected to write an

Sartre and Atheism: An Introduction to the Round-Table Discussion of Ronald Aronson’s Living Without God