In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  JOHN COTTINGHAM: The difference is that, when you get on to Nietzsche and Sartre, you have got Descartes but without God. You have got the whole thing depending on just the individual thinker, meditating and wondering what’s going on. Whereas with Descartes, you have got this radical subjective reflection, but against the background of a firm traditional belief in the infinite source of his being, God. The moderns are very different, although they see Descartes as their ancestor.

  In fairness to Descartes, he added, as the programme came to a close, Melvyn and his guests had been discussing very transparent thoughts or conscious acts, like ‘cogito ergo sum’. That was not all that mattered to Descartes. In his later work, he acknowledged that there was much besides, notably passions and emotions, love, hate, fear and so on, which were much more complicated and for which there was no such immediate, transparent awareness of all the implications of what was going on inside.

  SUSAN JAMES: The ‘cogito’ continues to be at the root of contemporary work on the nature of self-consciousness, and Descartes has recently become much more a figure studied for his work on the passions and these more obscure relationships between mind and body.

  SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

  ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.’ So wrote Simone de Beauvoir in her best-known and most influential work, The Second Sex, her exploration of what it means to be a woman in a world defined by men. Published in 1949, it was an immediate success with the thousands of women who bought it, if much less so with some of the male critics. Beauvoir was born in France, in 1908, to a high bourgeois family, though her father lost his fortune when she was a girl. Some commentators say that was her good fortune as, with no dowry, she pursued her education to get work. In a key exam to allow her to teach philosophy, she came second only to Jean-Paul Sartre, who was re-taking it. They became lovers and, for the rest of their lives together, intellectual sparring partners. Sartre concentrated on existentialist philosophy, Beauvoir explored that and existential ethics, plus she wrote novels, of which the most successful was The Mandarins, and, increasingly in the decades leading up to her death in 1986, wrote about the situation of women in the world.

  With Melvyn to discuss Simone de Beauvoir were: Christina Howells, professor of French and fellow of Wadham College, Oxford; Margaret Atack, professor of French at the University of Leeds; and Ursula Tidd, professor of modern French literature and thought at the University of Manchester.

  Simone de Beauvoir had a bourgeois background, Christina Howells began, in a conventional family, with a younger sister of whom she was extremely fond, Poupette, while her mother was apparently a religious woman. Beauvoir was sent to a Catholic school and, while she was there, she discovered that she was an atheist. She excelled at school and studied literature and mathematics in particular, moving into philosophy when she went to the Sorbonne and, in Paris, somehow followed classes at the École Normale, which was for men only. Students at the École Normale were prepared for the agrégation, the very competitive exam after which the entrants could be allowed to teach in a school or, if they pursued it further, a university.

  CHRISTINA HOWELLS: She didn’t go to the two or three years of preparation for getting into the École Normale, she wasn’t allowed to go there officially. And she had a really stupendous academic record. She came second to Sartre when she took the agrégation.

  MELVYN BRAGG: This is in the whole country?

  CHRISTINA HOWELLS: That’s right. She was twenty-one, he was twenty-four, and he had sat it before.

  Melvyn observed that Sartre was fascinated by Beauvoir, this young, brilliant woman, and she was slightly in awe of him, and they got cracking, then and there.

  CHRISTINA HOWELLS: It seems that he was fascinated by her. He was a very ugly man and she was lovely, so it is not surprising, and they were both so intelligent. I know she always claimed that Sartre was superior, but I think that was very modest of her, bizarrely modest given what she has done later.

  MELVYN BRAGG: But she made (retrospectively, I think, but still) the statement: ‘I knew that my life would be bound to his life, for the rest of my life.’

  CHRISTINA HOWELLS: Yes, she did; it is hard to know, isn’t it? Because we probably all feel a bit like that.

  It was an open relationship, Margaret Atack continued, and they never set up home together, which was very unconventional for its time and for her background. He was as dazzled by her intellect as he was by her looks and it was a meeting of minds.

  MARGARET ATACK: A very loving and affectionate and intimate relationship. She certainly wasn’t interested in becoming a creator of philosophical systems in the way that he was. She was always within philosophy but she said, ‘I don’t have to invent a philosophical system to feel myself Sartre’s equal, or independent.’

  Melvyn pictured these two people of supreme intelligence meeting each other, sitting in Les Deux Magots or Café Flore along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, talking philosophy all the time, along with gossip about their entourage.

  MARGARET ATACK: She was working within the importance of his apprehension of being in the world, of the existentialist framework, of freedom of choice, of commitment, and all their works were jointly (almost) edited. She used to send him her manuscripts; he used to send her his. Her elaboration of the nature of self and other, interaction with other people, they were both very involved in that.

  Beauvoir saw herself primarily as a writer and began her novels when France was occupied, first She Came to Stay and then The Blood of Others. She Came to Stay (1943) was Beauvoir’s first published novel and, Ursula Tidd said, it is a novel that explores one of the grand themes of Beauvoir’s intellectual life, the whole theme of the ‘other’, looking at what happens when we realise that there are other people in the world, and how we respond to other people in the world.

  URSULA TIDD: One of Beauvoir’s philosophical concepts is the notion of the existential situation. Other people are part of our existential situation. Beauvoir, in this novel, is exploring what it is to begin to take into account the presence of the other, and she explores it through a triadic relationship, loosely based on the relationship that she was having with Olga Kosakiewicz, a triadic relationship they had in the 1930s.

  One can read that as a novel of personal relationships, but it is really about the terror of the other. The Blood of Others (1945) was very much a product of Beauvoir’s wartime experience and she was again exploring the presence of the other, but in the context of situated action. One of the main characters is Jean Blomart, a resistance leader, and much of the action takes place in the context of the Second World War.

  URSULA TIDD: One of the main decisions that opens the novel is Jean Blomart trying to decide whether or not to sanction actions of sabotage against the Nazis in occupied Paris. It is a novel about the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of action. The epigraph to the novel is taken from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and it sums the novel up: ‘Each of us is responsible to everyone, and for everything.’ Which is, of course, a terribly tall order.

  Beauvoir brought out The Ethics of Ambiguity just two years after that novel. Ambiguity was a very strange word in this context, Christina Howells thought. It was more about the ethics of complexity or the ethics of existentialism. The problem for an existentialist, trying to compose an ethics, is that, for existentialism, there are no pre-given values.

  Simone de Beauvoir with Jean-Paul Sartre

  CHRISTINA HOWELLS: You make yourself, but you also make your ethics. In common sense, we might think that we know, roughly, what’s good and what’s bad: we mustn’t steal, we mustn’t hit people, we mustn’t kill people. If you are a more rigorous philosopher, say a Kantian philosopher, then there are also categorical imperatives, things that definitely are always wrong, such as lying or killing. For the existentialist, it is situational: what are the consequences of this behaviour?

  The means could contaminate the ends. For example, what should someone in the resistance do in a wa
rtime situation where killing one of the occupiers could lead to fatal reprisals?

  Existentialism is about choosing, Ursula Tidd continued, where you are free to make your choices, but that choice is constrained by the consequences, which are the kind of person you become, and the kind of world that you create through your behaviour.

  MARGARET ATACK: The choices are eloquent of your values. You are always on this treadmill, you can never stop. The ambiguity is also that, yes, you go for action, but you can never go with a quiet conscience. You can never think, ‘Well, that’s it, I have ticked it, and I have done it,’ because you can never have clean hands.

  In The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir’s best-known book, one of the big ideas is that gender is constructed, by which Beauvoir meant something specific.

  MARGARET ATACK: [With] existentialism, we have no human nature, we are free, we are totally not determined. There is a philosophical rejection from the outset that there might be an éternel féminin, as the French call it (you know, ‘just like a woman’). We do not have gendered natures in the sense we don’t have any kind of nature.

  There are the givens of one’s situation, but what matters is what you do with the cards that life has dealt you.

  URSULA TIDD: Beauvoir is encouraging women in The Second Sex to throw themselves into the world and to seize their lives and to make their essence. When she is talking about becoming a woman and not being born a woman, her point really is an anti-naturalist one: that there is no inherent nature that decrees that men are like this and women are like that.

  Patriarchal ideology has certain (what Beauvoir would call) myths about women; there are also myths about men, but here Beauvoir was interested in writing about women. For example, there is the myth that motherhood is a natural situation that all women are destined to fulfil.

  URSULA TIDD: Beauvoir argues controversially that there is no maternal instinct, and that the experience of real mothers is terribly variable. In the same way, one could argue that the experience of paternity is terribly variable as well. In the second volume, which is subtitled Lived Experience, Beauvoir is at pains to show the micropolitics of gender relations and the ways in which girls and women learn very quickly, both at conscious and at unconscious levels, how to become women who conform to patriarchal ideology.

  Women become the second sex, relative to the masculine, yet women do have choices, and it is up to women to seize those choices. Women respond to that situation in various ways, Beauvoir argued, and sometimes women are complicit with patriarchal ideology.

  The Second Sex had a mixed reception. It was very popular, but, at the same time, was seen as rather rude.

  CHRISTINA HOWELLS: Mauriac was very indignant and said that he didn’t wish to know about the workings of the author’s vagina, which caused quite a scandalous reaction. Beauvoir is quite explicit about bodily functions. She talks about menstruation, for example, and abortion. She says that women smell and women get constipated, all to do with menstruation. At the time, it was really rather revolutionary to be talking about it at all.

  Beauvoir also talked about women without really talking about femininity, which some feminists found difficult to deal with.

  Before the war, it is unlikely that Beauvoir would have said she was a feminist. She, like Sartre, was not very interested in politics and they were much more interested in themselves.

  MARGARET ATACK: After the transition they went through in the war, she became much more interested in the rootedness of experience, and the rootedness of women’s experience, and the disparagement and the oppression and the inequality and the systematic denigration of the female in this gender relationship between the sexes. That’s hugely feminist. I find her works are never hostile to women, but that’s not widely shared in some circles.

  Around the time of the May 1968 protests, young Marxist feminists such as Christine Delphy approached Beauvoir as they wanted her support in the second wave of feminist activity in France. Beauvoir was very humble towards them, for an intellectual.

  URSULA TIDD: She could have played the grande dame, but she didn’t do that. She lent her support in a very discreet way, she financed political campaigns, she lent her support for the campaign for legalising abortion in France, which was passed in 1975. That was very much appreciated by young feminists, who needed that kind of support to get some of these campaigns off the ground.

  After The Second Sex, Beauvoir wrote The Mandarins (1954), which won the Prix Goncourt. There was a perfect storm around this novel, which gave it more momentum, as she was already notorious after The Second Sex. Existentialism had been flavour of the month, and Beauvoir and Sartre were intellectual celebrities. The novel took on the relationship between France and America, Margaret Atack said, with the increasing domination of America, and the relationship between the intellectual left and the Soviet Union. It had a group of intellectuals who were writers, who were grappling with the ambiguities of being committed, politically, in a world where it no longer seemed so black and white to them as it had been in the resistance. Readers liked to spot the people in Beauvoir’s circle, behind the story, something she reportedly hated.

  Christina Howells teaches it to students as a roman à clef, as readers can clearly see who is who in The Mandarins.

  CHRISTINA HOWELLS: There is Camus in it, there is Beauvoir in it, Sartre in it. Camus was very upset by it because the character Henri drives his wife insane in the book and, of course, Camus’ first wife sadly did go to a mental asylum. Henri is very promiscuous in the book; that’s also true of Camus.

  With Beauvoir, Ursula Tidd added, her own life was also the stuff of literature, so, in a sense, she lived to write and she wrote to live, and everything was witnessed in her writing.

  URSULA TIDD: [The Mandarins] is also about the politics of truth telling in the immediate Cold War period in France. One of the central ethical dilemmas in that novel is whether to expose the existence of the Soviet gulags to the French left, and that particular question is something that the character Henri Perron, who is this editor of [an] independent left-wing journal, has to agonise over.

  MELVYN BRAGG: What’s his agony? Letting down the communist side by telling the truth?

  URSULA TIDD: Exactly, exactly.

  It was also letting down the workers, Margaret Atack said, as the communists were the biggest party in the elections after the Second World War.

  Beauvoir went on to write her autobiography, which is perhaps no easier to categorise than her other works. The novels are philosophical, Christina Howells suggested, while the philosophy involves a lot of examples and the autobiography itself is a literary work, not simply a recounting.

  Since Beauvoir’s death, letters have been discovered between her and Sartre that have shown a more complex side to their characters. In the public discourse that was hostile to her, Beauvoir was very much treated as the little woman next to Sartre, until the letters appeared.

  MARGARET ATACK: Then one realises everything she had said about them exchanging views was perfectly true. They write to each other at great length about their relationships with other people, about the nights they pass with them. It is very intimate, and it is very detailed. And here was a level of shock – suddenly they became a centre of a web of intrigue.

  Sartre and Beauvoir shared young adult women between each other, it transpired, and readers were shocked by the way they wrote about the intimate details. Ursula Tidd thought Beauvoir recognised, at the end of her life, that they had made some serious mistakes in the relationships that they had had with the women they drew to them.

  In the studio afterwards, Christina Howells observed that, while The Second Sex was written over fifty years ago, it is still an eye-opener. Some of the topics in there are things that we still do not talk about. And Beauvoir’s argument was apparently persuasive; in late interviews, she actually made Sartre say that the feminist struggle was more important than the working-class struggle (although whether he really thought it was another
matter).

  ZENO’S PARADOXES

  The ancient Greek thinker Zeno of Elea flourished in the fifth century BC. His great innovation in philosophy was the paradox, a tool to highlight the unexpected consequences of common sense ideas, to question assumptions and to provoke new theories. For example, according to Zeno’s paradoxes, motion is not possible. An arrow in flight does not move. The fastest runner in Homer, Achilles, could never catch up with the tortoise in a race, if he gave it a head start. Philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have tried to refute his ideas, or explain them, with varying success. Innovations in mathematics with Newton and Leibniz went some way to demonstrate flaws in Zeno’s arguments, but the questions he raised 2,500 years ago about time and space are as relevant as ever and they have re-emerged in quantum physics.

  With Melvyn to discuss the paradoxes of Zeno were: Marcus du Sautoy, professor of mathematics and Simonyi professor for the public understanding of science at the University of Oxford; Barbara M. Sattler, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of St Andrews; and James Warren, professor of ancient philosophy at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

  In the arrow paradox, Zeno claims that, if someone shoots an arrow, it never moves but is always at rest.

  Zeno lived in the middle of the fifth century BC and came from Elea, a town on the west coast of southern Italy and, James Warren said, we know that he travelled a lot in Greece and wrote maybe just one work, which included these paradoxes, of which we know about seven or eight, some to do with motion, some to do with plurality.

  JAMES WARREN: One of the most important people in Zeno’s intellectual life was from the same city, a character called Parmenides. Parmenides wrote a very peculiar poem in hexameter verse, in the style of Homer, and he attempted to set out to prove that there was only one thing, and that it was changeless and motionless and perfect. Whatever else you think there is, if it is not this one thing, it isn’t actually there.