R. What a pile-up of words that do not bring any distinct idea to mind. All my reflections bring me back to the clear idea that I am only a human being and that any idea of the superhuman means nothing to me; that it is not even an idea. I can thus answer you that I do not understand you. But now let me ask you what patîma or other nonsense syllables might mean.
Q. Let us see where you want to lead me. All right, patîma is only a word.
R. This is the reproach I made to you when I asked what is God. It is only a word unless you explain it to yourself.
Q. But your word signifies nothing, whereas the name God doubtlessly signifies something because I deny his existence.
R. It will mean as much or as little as you wish. Can a word contain anything other than the ideas that you can put there? And can you put there anything other than human ideas? I can also mark with the label patîma a completely different range of ideas, or what I will name, following your example, ideas that are unknown; that is, I cover over as you did, an empty space...physical syllables that strike my ear without imprinting anything on, or recalling anything to, my brain.
Q then says that intellection counts more than desire here, without adding to the observation, but R continues on the drawbacks of any God discussion:
R. If what you understand is a reality, then why do you deny it? If it is nothing, then you have made a great discovery. You declare to me that by the word God, you do not mean anything real; I believe that. It is as if you said to me, “Nothing is nothing.”
Q. Well, we will soon not even be able to discuss this together. From your side of things, tell me what your thought is on God.
R. I would like to, even without hope of giving you satisfaction. I have, like many others and for a long time, talked nonsense about these matters and beaten about in empty space. The research was in vain. So I have come back to man as the central goal of philosophy, as the source from which every human activity proceeds.25
So, there is no concept of God that works. “God” is a nonsense syllable, and the search for ultimate meaning in human reality must start elsewhere.
The essence of the human being is found, however, in his or her needs, which are at the center of all human faculties. Sieyès concludes the section on “the needs of man” with this admonition: “Everything is there. Every search, every movement that does not go toward this goal is a false step, a loss of human strength. The need for subsistence, the need for protection against changes in the atmosphere, the need for social exchange, the needs arising from curiosity, the imagination, and hope. Man is, therefore, a being with needs. Around him nature has placed an infinity of concentric circles that are so many depositories open to his needs, open to the progressive development of his faculties and whatever is useful for life.”26 Here, then, hope expressed as God is the ultimate need of humans. If you stay with science and the material reality, thinking that you can go from the known to the unknown, you will never come to God as reality/idea.27 You cannot simply study the evidence: you have to pose questions and then arrive at some kind of state where curiosity rests; that is, you have to traverse those concentric circles of reality. The need to live, the need to ask, the need to know, is a drive that takes a person beyond any concept of truth: “It is not in the order of truths, but in the order of needs that I have placed myself....The order of truths must remain outside of every idea of God, it is true, but its necessity is visible to the human being in the order of his needs.”28
Our needs are useful, in that they lead us to the “beyond”: “Can we get something out of it for our own needs? Certainly if I am only speaking of the closest beyonds and not of the farthest, the response is indubitable.”29 Sieyès uses strange terminology whereby he assures us that the discussion does not shoot for the ineffable infinite. The “beyond” is outside human measure, but it can serve as some kind of goal: “Let us not dream of discovering the beyond, or discovering if there is a question of a true beyond, that which I can call God or what is better designated by the name of ultramètre, beyond human measure....Can the ultramètre be useful to our needs? I would like to respond with clarifications that will give you all my thoughts on the topic”30 Does an attempt to look beyond this world serve any useful religious purpose? “No,” answers Sieyès, “if religion kills the energy that has its own animation; yes, if it has added to and continues to add to this [energy].” Priests regularly kill the energy when they say such things as “your sufferings are the will of God.”31
God is attained through intuition and feeling, not through reasoning: “Everything that is not in the order of our needs we can reject, I see; but God felt and not conceptualized seems to be part of this order [of needs].” God is not a “rational truth,” which does not mean that he is in opposition to truth.32 There are parallels to other disciplines here. You can say that “God is heterogeneous to the order of truths,” but you can say the same thing about geometry relative to sentiment, about color or hardness relative to abstract geometric shapes: “Everyone carves out this notion in his own way; it [the notion] is relative to what each person can best believe.” God is “beyond all senses [hypo-sens],” beyond all goodness, beauty, virtue, knowledge, justice, and power.33 And yet in the end, God is a reality: “God is incomprehensible and unknowable, agreed. Thus he is a reality grasped by the sentiments.”34
In sum, God is at the heart of human action, human exchange, human goodness, at the heart of the action of the religious “fiber.” The God that is experienced, or felt, here does not interfere, however, with the progress of reason. He is the reality of goodness in moral activity. With Sieyès, the Frenchman, we see a teaching that presages German liberal religion and philosophy from Schleiermacher to Fichte.35 But for Sieyès it was a dead end, probably because with his lexical acumen there were too many elements within measuring distance and not ultramètre, especially politics and economics, that won his attention.
Political Commitment
Less than ten years later, in Qu’est-ce que c’est le tiers état? Sieyès promoted the political rehabilitation of the social majority, in effect, the entire population, apart from the clergy and nobles.36 Looking forward to the revival of the old parliamentary legislature, which had not assembled since 1614, Sieyès hammers away at the obvious: the legislature is divided into three Estates or houses, two of them (clergy and nobles) representing only a tiny portion of the total French population. The Third Estate, which ideally should be representing the commoners, would have at best a third of the political clout on the national scene. And Sieyès found that this derisory one-third of the legislative force was yet further limited by unfair voting practices.
Why did Sieyès want so much to rehabilitate the majority? Probably because he identified with the majority in its suppressed state, and avenging them certainly had to do, in part, with avenging himself. In his personal life, he had used the church as a stand-in for the broader society, and now, trying to make his mark in that broader society, he was working for all his compatriots. Sieyès placed the word nation in high relief in this (and other) writings, defining it in this text as “a body of associates living under common laws and represented by the same legislative assembly.”37 “What does a nation require to survive and prosper,” he asks, and he proceeds to enumerate the principal private activities that “support society.”38 Public services are the army, the law, the church, and the bureaucracy, and even there, with aristocrats and clergy so often in charge, it is the common people who do all the work. “What, then, is the Third Estate? All; but an ‘all’ that is fettered and oppressed,” because “the privileged have succeeded in usurping all well-paid and honorific posts.”39 There follows a tirade against the aristocracy which, “from infirmity, incapacity, incurable idleness, or a collapse of morality, performs no functions at all in society.”40 Aristocrats are a burden for the nation without being part of it. They hold themselves exempt from any common obligations and they have political rights distinct from all the other members of the population.
In