Back in 2018, Liam Fox, Tory MP and Brexiter, penned a paean to British self-confidence. “Everywhere I go across the world,” he wrote, “everyone I meet tells me that they believe in Britain. They want to buy British products, use British services, learn English. They trust our laws and our financial services, they admire our Armed Forces and they envy our universities.”

But, alas, there’s a problem–we Brits just don’t understand how great we are: the world, Fox informed us, needs a confident Britain (he didn’t explain why), and Britain can and should be confident.

If only Dr Fox had had access to a time-machine. He would have felt right at home in the Britain of the roaring twenties–an era when national self-confidence wasn’t merely a political aspiration, but an article of faith manifest in the nooks and crannies of public and private life.

As documented with delicious irony in the 1931 book, The English: Are They Human?, written by G. J. Reiner, a Dutch visitor to our island paradise, the closing years of the 1920s witnessed a Britain that had mastered the art of self-congratulation.

This was Britain at its territorial zenith, when the empire covered a quarter of the world's land surface—and seemingly every British newspaper covered a quarter of its pages with assertions of national preeminence. The England of 1929 didn't merely believe it was on balance the best—it believed it was superior in absolutely everything, right down to its dustcarts and station posters (though the posters were pretty cool).

So, with the help of Professor Renier, our estimable guide to a forgotten and now foreign land, let’s take a look at the myriad ways that the English were in that benighted age simply the best.

Let’s start with our capital city, London–definitely the best in the world, especially in June, according to the Daily Express (12 June, 1929):

No town on the face of the earth is more brilliant than London in June, no city more satisfying or more faithful to its tradition. And yesterday London, under its flaming sun, was magnificently in June.

Also the healthiest city in the world, according to the Star (3 July, 1929), largely to be accounted for by the “uniformly good sanitation and water supply”.

Happily, England’s countryside by no means pales in comparison. On 10 June, 1929, the Daily Express waxed lyrical about the “ineffaceable” beauty of England, when the rain has “cleaned and sweetened” the whole countryside:

[T]here is not a landscape in the world we could exchange for England’s. Bring back to memory the choicest foreign scenes, and a carpet of bluebells under the soft green of an English copse will outmatch them all.

So we’ve dealt with town and country, next the people. Also, clearly top notch. Evidence to that effect could be found in American immigration policy, which had been amended to allow in twice as many of the British, celebrated in the Sunday Express with the headline “America Picks the Best” (July 7, 1929).

It goes without saying, obviously, that English women are preeminent–the best dancers in the world (Guardian, 27 June, 1929), more developed than other women (Daily Express, 10 June, 1929), and the “greatest wonder of the world” (Sunday Express, 19 June, 1929).

If the film director, R. E. Jeffrey, writing in the Evening Standard (29 June, 1929), is to be believed, then probably the British accent has something to do with the esteem in which we are held, since it “contains the quality which makes it better than any other voice in the world for reproduction”.

Okay, we’ve established that England has the best cities, countryside, people, women and voices, so what’s next? Zoos. According to the Nation (4 May, 1929), Britain has the best:

The Zoo… it is, I do not doubt, the best, the most humanely conducted, the most scientifically valuable, the most admirable in every respect of all Zoos.

To zoos, we can add an airline–“The record of Imperial Airways for safety and regularity is the best in the world” (Star, 18 June, 1929)–the “gayest underground stations in Europe” (Guardian, 20 October, 1929) and, according to the Sunday Express (20 October, 1929), the “most famous piece of statuary in the world–the elaborate and imposing fountain which was surmounted by the statue of Eros, in Piccadilly Circus” (eat your heart out, Rome!).

At this point, it will come as no surprise to hear that the institutions of the British state are also unsurpassed. Take our judicial system, for example–obviously, “the finest in the world” (The Times, 27 March, 1929), with the “best judges and the most sensible juries in the world” (Daily News, 28 June, 1929). Similarly, our Civil Service–”for efficiency and incorruptibility it has no equal in the world” (Daily Herald, 24 March, 1930).

Consider the humble British Post Office (happily, in the days before unruly IT systems and wrongly incarcerated subpostmasters):

It has a dignity all its own, and includes in that tradition some of the best characteristics of the British race. The regularity, steadiness, and perseverance with which the many phases of its work are pursued have a striking resemblance to the Army and Navy which have carried British influence to remote corners of the earth. (Supervising, 1 February, 1930).

The natural question to ask of all this preeminence is from where does it originate? Possibly from the British hearth, since there is “nothing in the world to match the English home” (Evening Standard, 30 December, 1927), a happenstance that might also explain why “Englishmen make the best butlers, footmen and grooms in the world” (Evening Standard, 2 April, 1930).

Oddly, there is no claim for English superiority in matters culinary, a troubling oversight, it will be admitted, but happily it is accepted that “the best waiters in the world are the fully qualified English ones” (Evening Standard, 22 February, 1929) Also, the produce of English farms and gardens “is the best of its kind in the world” (Daily Mail, 26 October, 1929), which is a consolation.

At this point, it does rather feel it would be quicker to list the things that the English are not the best at–rather as when the hero of Three Men in a Boat informs his doctor that the only malady from which he does not suffer is housemaid’s knee.

But let’s end with a couple of the more audacious examples of English self-confidence.

The weather–with the best will in the world, it’s hard to think that the British weather is unsurpassed in all the world, on the grounds that it is…not. But that is to underestimate the confidence of an Englishman drunk on the glories of Empire and Morris dancing. Hence the Sunday Express on July 14, 1929:

Let us cure ourselves of the habit of pretending that the English climate is the worst in the world. In fact, it is the best in the world.

You might suspect that the Express has lost its mind, but eight months later, it doubled down, claiming that England is “the only country in the world where men and women can be out of doors on every day of the year”, an utterly bonkers assertion (why not Belgium or France, for example?), but one which does demonstrate admirable self-belief.

Finally, despite everybody and everything in England being the best, the English remain self-effacing and modest, as recognised by the Guardian, whose London correspondent wrote that we are “the most self-deprecating people on earth” (Guardian, 16 January, 1930). This puts Liam Fox in something of a bind—how do you restore confidence to a nation that historically has always been convinced of its own superiority while maintaining its preeminence in the realm of modesty? It seems, alas, that you can’t have your humble pie (no doubt, the best humble pie) and also eat it.

With thanks to G. J. Reiner.

If you had to name the most influential British philosophers of the 20th Century, the chances are that C. E. M. Joad would not appear on your list. In fact, unless you’re a philosophy enthusiast, it’s quite likely you’ve never heard of the fellow. This is not surprising. Joad enjoys no lasting intellectual legacy: his books are seldom read, he contributed no great original ideas, and he was regarded by his colleagues with, at best, polite indifference and, at worst, outright contempt. Bertrand Russell dismissed him as a plagiarist (and, apocryphally, refused to review his books on the grounds that “modesty forbids”), while academic philosophers found his habit of calling himself “Professor Joad” particularly irksome, given that no university had ever granted him such a title.

And yet, for a time, Joad was probably the most famous philosopher in Britain. During the 1940s, he became a household name thanks to the Brains Trust, a hugely popular BBC discussion programme where he, alongside Julian Huxley and Commander Campbell, would hold forth on all manner of topics with an air of great authority. His trademark phrase—“It depends what you mean by…”—became a national catchphrase, introducing the British public to the idea that before answering a question, one should first clarify its terms. It was, in its way, a valuable public service, even if it tended to give the (probably) misleading impression that philosophers do little more than quibble over definitions.

Joad also wrote a weekly column for a British national newspaper, the Sunday Dispatch, in which he opined on the issues of the day, such as the death of Tony the Performing Horse, what to think about in the dentist chair, beards, school uniforms, pornography and what he thought about as he crashed his car into a ditch. It was mainly fairly inoffensive fluff, but occasionally he dealt sensibly with an issue of importance. Here, for example, he argues in favour of euthanasia (Sunday Dispatch, March 22, 1942, p. 3):

I have never been able to see why a man should not be allowed to do what he likes with his own life. After all, we never asked for life. We were pitchforked into it without so much as “by your leave,” and we are, therefore, so far as I can see, under no obligation to make the best of a bargain that we never contracted.

[...]

Here, for example, is a man suffering from incurable cancer. Racked by perpetual pain, he longs to die. Yet, as the law stands, no doctor can confer upon him one of the greatest gifts of science–the boon of an easy death.

It must be said, though, he does rather go off the rails in his final paragraph:

Our community is fighting for its life. We don’t want to carry more passengers than we can help and take the time of able-bodied people to look after them.

Joad’s column ran from January 1942 until his death in April 1953. In fact, the Sunday Dispatch reported that he completed his final column only an hour or two before he died, at that point writing from his bed, which had been moved into his book-lined study. However, by this time, Joad’s reputation lay in tatters, wrecked by a scandal of his own making that made headlines around the world.

The source of the trouble can perhaps be traced to a passage that appeared in The Testament of Joad, a book he wrote in the mid-1930s. Here’s what it said (page 54):

When I am in my vagrant mood, society…appears to me as something to be preyed upon–I think of it as a great cow, whose udders are for the privy squeezing of the supple fingers of the vagrant… For example, as a vagrant I cheat the railway company whenever I can, returning on the next day with a cheap day return ticket or alleging, when I arrive ticketless at my destination, that I entered the train at a station nearer to it than was in fact the case.

It turned out that Joad wasn’t just spinning a line–on one occasion, at least, he really did set out to cheat the railway company.

The story of his train shenanigans broke in the press on the evening of April 12, 1948. Here’s how the Daily Telegraph (page 5) reported on it the next morning.

Dr. Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad, of East Heath Road, Hampstead, was fined 40s and ordered to pay 25gns costs by Mr. H. H. Maddocks at Tower Bridge police court yesterday for travelling on the railway without having paid his fare between Waterloo and Salisbury, and with intent to avoid payment.

[...]

Mr. R. E. Seaton, prosecuting, said the offence was “a common ticket fraud.” Dr. Joad and his secretary joined the Exeter train at Waterloo on Jan. 5 and booked two places for dinner. After the train had passed Salisbury he was asked for his ticket. He said he boarded the train at Salisbury and he paid 24s for the fare from there to Exeter.

When challenged later by the collector, who pointed out that he had booked two dinners on boarding the train at Waterloo, Dr. Joad repeated that he had got on at Salisbury.

In all, he denied four times that he had travelled from Waterloo, but at Exeter admitted he had made a mistake and tendered the full fare from London. This was not accepted, and next day he forwarded the money.

Joad, via his solicitor, tried to pass off the incident as a giant misunderstanding, though it’s hard to credit that during the course of his journey he managed to forget where exactly he initially boarded his train.

Sixteen days later his solicitors wrote about the “extremely unfortunate incident” and referred to the repercussions which any prosecution “would have on a person of the standing of our client who is, of course, the internationally known lecturer and author.”

The solicitors explained that it was the custom for his secretary to obtain the tickets, but on this occasion Dr. Joad told her no ticket would be necessary for him to Salisbury as he had a return half to that point. After paying the excess to Exeter he discovered to his dismay that he could not find the return half which he had believed was in his possession. (Daily Telegraph, page 5)

Mr Maddocks, the presiding magistrate, clearly wasn’t buying that excuse, stating that there was no doubt about Dr. Joad’s guilt, and that the fine should be the maximum available for the offence, 40 shillings.

The fallout was brutal and quick. Within a week, the BBC had thrown him out on his ear, announcing that he would not be taking part in the final Brains Trust broadcast for which he had been contracted, and giving no indication that he would ever appear again. Joad seems to have known that this marked the end of his television career, commenting to the press that he didn’t know whether he’d broadcast again. It also marked the end of his hopes of attaining a peerage, which were well-founded until his fall from grace.

On April 25, 1948, less than two weeks after his conviction, Joad used his Sunday Dispatch (page 3) column to comment on his downfall. It makes for a poignant read:

You board a train at Waterloo for Exeter, thinking yourself to have the return half of a ticket to take you as far as Salisbury. You are sitting in the restaurant car having had dinner and, somewhere after Salisbury, the ticket-collector comes for your ticket. You ask to pay from Salisbury and do.

You then feel in your pocket for your ticket from Waterloo to Salisbury and find to your dismay that you haven’t got it. The ticket-collector comes again. “I am told,” he says in effect, “that you got in at Waterloo,” and because you are you and are famous and it is still the dining-car everybody is looking at you, you shrink from the publicity of a fuss and a public explanation and recantation and say: “Oh no, I did get in at Salisbury”–and then, out of pride and folly and because everybody is still listening to you, you go on saying it, lying in fact like a trooper, and also like a fool, since you have omitted to remember that you are famous and that, of course, the attendants noticed you when you took a dining-car ticket and tried to book a seat at Waterloo.

And then, when the thing comes to court and you propose to plead guilty, since you did, after all, make a false statement–make it, in fact, a number of times–instead of being treated like dozens of others and dismissed with a £2 fine and no mention in the papers, you find eminent, eloquent, and forcible counsel engaged to prosecute you, court full of newspapermen, and then in the evening and again the next day all the headlines blazing out at you, blazing out not once but twice, and then, when the B.B.C. dispenses with you, blazing out yet a third time, and you feel as if you were standing in the pillory with no clothes on and that everybody knows about you, recognises you, and is looking at you.

Obviously, that can’t have been much fun, but our sympathy should be at least somewhat tempered by the fact that his account of what happened that day just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Why was he carrying around the return half of a train ticket in his pocket? Why didn’t he check if it was there before he boarded the train or at the very least before he encountered the ticket-collector? Why didn’t he explain to the ticket-collector that while he had boarded at Waterloo, he already had a ticket that covered his journey to Salisbury? Why didn’t he immediately alert the ticket-collector when he discovered he didn’t actually have a ticket for the first part of the journey?

Even if we think there is a plausible explanation for these omissions, we still have the difficulty that Joad was caught and prosecuted for doing the thing that he explicitly stated he liked to do in a book he wrote some ten years earlier. Therefore, the question is which is more likely: that he didn’t actually do the thing that he had previously stated he was in the habit of doing, and it was a mere coincidence predicated upon an unfortunate confluence of circumstances that led to him being prosecuted for it, and pleading guilty to the charge; or that he actually was in the habit of fare dodging, as he previously claimed, and in the end he got caught.

If you were a British communist in late summer 1939, you might think that getting straight on the correct attitude towards Nazi aggression would not be too taxing. After all, this is Hitler, we’re talking about, and you’re knowledgeable and committed. You read the Daily Worker, you hear impassioned speeches on the importance of fighting fascism, even while opposing Chamberlain and the Men of Munich, and you take seriously Harry Pollitt’s warning that the “appetite of the fascist tiger grows with every fresh kill”.

Joseph Stalin, however, was about to introduce a generous dose of cognitive dissonance into your life. With the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939, communists across the world were instructed to abandon their anti-fascist rhetoric and instead focus on opposing the imperialists in their own countries. The fight against Nazism, once a moral imperative, was now secondary to the shifting demands of Soviet foreign policy.

The resulting ideological about turn was stark, as evidenced by the political somersault performed by the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, in the space of just a few weeks. Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, with Britain declaring war on Germany two days later. On 4 September, the Daily Worker offered its full-throated support for the war.

The war is here. It is a war that CAN and MUST be won. And the people of Britain can win it. Fascism and its friends everywhere have brought this war upon us. Till now Hitler has had an easy time of it. His friends in other countries—and above all in Britain—have “opened the door” for him. Now it is the business of the enemies of Fascism to take a grip of things in Britain and fight this war to a victory over Fascism on every front.

[...]

For we are down to brass tacks. Hitler is making war upon us. You hear the sirens wailing their warning of fascist attack. There is not a minute to be lost. WE have got to get on here and now with the job of winning this war for the people against Fascism. (Daily Worker, Sept 4, 1939, p. 4)

Shortly afterwards, the CPGB published a pamphlet written by Harry Pollitt that made the party’s line on the war absolutely clear:

To stand aside from this conflict, to contribute only revolutionary-sounding phrases while the fascist beasts ride roughshod over Europe, would be a betrayal of everything our forebears have fought to achieve in the course of long years of struggle against capitalism. (How to Win the War, p. 4).

Three weeks later, the party's line on the war was still crystal clear—only now, it was the exact opposite. The war was no longer about resisting the fascist tiger, but rather was to be seen as a conflict between imperial powers for the control of territory. There was no relevant distinction between fascist and democratic states, meaning that it was the duty of communist parties to focus on bringing down their own governments—even if this meant military defeat. Indeed, the suggestion coming from Moscow was that it would not be entirely regrettable if Germany were to emerge victorious in the war against Britain.

This new line was communicated to rank-and-file communists in Britain via a new CPGB “manifesto” published in the Daily Worker on October 7 (p. 2). The excerpts that follow will give you a sense of it:

• The continuance of this war is not in the interests of the people of Britain, France or Germany. End this war before it has brought death and destruction upon millions and millions of people, before the flower of our youth is slaughtered.

• The truth about this war must be told. The war is not a war for democracy against Fascism. It is not a war for the liberties of small nations. It is not a war for the defence of peace against aggression.

• The British and French ruling class are seeking to use the anti-Fascist sentiments of the people for their own imperialist aims.

• The struggle of the British people against the Chamberlains and Churchills is the best help to the struggle of the Germans against Hitler.

• Only the Socialist State, the Soviet Union, in this war crisis has taken action on behalf of the people and of peace.

• The Soviet Union is leading the fight for peace.

Yes, you’ve got that right, the Soviet Union, the same Soviet Union that only a few weeks previously signed a secret deal with Nazi Germany to carve up Eastern Europe, the same Soviet Union that marched uninvited into Poland, is now the great hope for world peace.

If you can get past the stupidity on display here, there is an interesting story to be told about how the CPGB got itself into this mess. The trouble really started with the news that Dave Springhall, the party’s representative in Moscow, was on his way back to the UK with instructions from the Comintern for a new line on the war.

This did not initially go down well with the bulk of the CPGB leadership. At a Central Committee meeting on 24 September, held before Springhall returned to provide details of the new line, Harry Pollitt, the party’s General Secretary, argued strongly against a change of direction, insisting that fascism represented an existential threat to the British working-class.

I know what I want, but I am paralysed. I feel like a caged lion, waiting for Springhall to come back. We are all like a lot of rabbits in front of a snake, wondering whether we are on the right or wrong line. My own point is that we are on the right line. (Cited in About Turn, Eds. Francis King & George Matthews, pp. 24-5)

Unfortunately, one of the rabbits was not convinced the snake’s arrival was entirely a bad thing. Rajani Palme Dutt, in many ways the archvillain of this story, saw an opportunity to flaunt his Stalinist credentials. He hedged: the CPGB definitely wasn't just going to be told what to do, of course not, but…well, the situation was different now, Stalin had put Hitler back in his box, there was obvious wrongdoing on both sides, and in an imperialist war, only a people's government could defend the working-class against fascism—and anyway, no need to jump the gun, best to wait until the details of the new line had been fleshed out. (See About Turn, p. 25)

Only William Rust, among the CPGB leadership, sympathised with Dutt’s wait-and-see approach. Almost all the others were not for turning. Maurice Cornforth, a Cambridge-educated philosopher, and at the time the CPGB’s Eastern Counties district organiser, was particularly scathing, arguing in favour of the military defeat of Germany, and asking what was the point of the Central Committee if its role were merely to rubber stamp decisions handed down from Moscow.

A week later, things looked very different. Springhall had arrived back in London on the evening of the 24th of September. The next morning he provided the Central Committee with details of the new line, which turned out to be every bit as unhinged as Pollitt had feared.

The war wasn’t in any sense a just war, it was “an out-and-out imperialist war, a war which the working class in no countries can give any support to”. Poland was a semi-fascist, imperialist country (despite the absence of colonies), and it would be seen as “not a terrific misfortune” if it were to disappear from the map. There was no essential difference between fascist states and democratic countries, and as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, there was little to choose between Hitler and Chamberlain. There was no consideration given to the question of what system of government might be brought to Britain were it to lose the war. (See About Turn, pp. 53-61)

Pollitt knew he couldn’t sell this volte-face to the wider party membership, but the principle of democratic centralism meant the CPGB was bound to adopt the new line. Consequently, he handed over his general secretary’s responsibilities to a new secretariat made up of Dutt, Rust and Springhall.

At a fractious Central Committee Meeting held on October 2-3, Dutt demanded absolute fealty to the new line. It wasn’t enough simply to vote for it, communists had a duty to accept the line, to understand it and to apply it.

We want no half-hearted supporters, no vacillators, no faint-hearts. Every responsible position in the Party must be occupied by a determined fighter for the line. Right through the Party and through every organisation of the Party. We are going into a fight. We cannot go into it with the burden of a wrong line—in this first few weeks that is already a heavy burden for us, with the confusion, the weakness, the half-hearted kind of sentiments we have had to have the past week. (About Turn, p. 85)

He went on to remind the Central Committee that party members don’t have the luxury of anything as bourgeois as their own private thoughts:

Comrades, a Communist has no private opinions. That is, he has no sanctum of private opinions that he is going to hold apart from the collective thinking and the collective decisions of our movement. (About Turn, p. 285)

Nothing worrying about that sentiment, nothing at all.

If you read the transcript of the October 2-3 meeting, it is clear that the tone of Dutt’s address upset a lot of people. However, only three Central Committee members dissented from its substance.

William Gallacher, the party’s only sitting MP, was furious, vowing never to work with any of the interim secretariat again:

I have never in all my experience of this Central Committee, listened to a more unscrupulous and opportunist speech than has been made by Comrade Dutt, and I have never had in all my experience in the Party such evidence of mean despicable disloyalty to comrades as has been evidenced by these three. (About Turn, pp. 100-01)

J. R. Campbell, in effect, asked the obvious question—what the hell did they think was going to happen if Germany did in fact win the war?

I want to insist that it is not only French and British imperialism which is menaced by this situation, but the French and British peoples which are menaced by this situation. I cannot accept the thesis that the difference between fascism and democracy has lost its former significance. I think the difference between fascism and democracy retains its significance to the full, when armed fascism is in the field and is pushing forward relentlessly to acquire new territory and destroy democracy. Fascism today is facing the British and French peoples with nothing more or less than the complete destruction of their democratic institutions.

This is not a matter of rectifying a frontier. Not a matter of stealing a different colony here and there. Not a matter of reducing the power of the British Navy, but a matter of smashing the British and French peoples so that they cannot rise again, and smashing their democratic institutions in the process. And in that circumstance, when fascism is threatening our people in such a way, we cannot have a line in which we proclaim that we are prepared to retreat before extraordinary fascist aggression. That it is a matter of no consideration for us to defend ourselves against extraordinary fascist aggression until in some way or other… we have got a revolutionary workers government in this country. (About Turn, pp. 107-08)

Harry Pollitt, remarking that he didn’t envy “comrades who can so lightly in the space of a week, and sometimes in the space of a day, go from one political conviction to another”, echoed Campbell in questioning the wisdom of revolutionary defeatism in the context of an emboldened Nazi Germany, adding that what he really wanted to do was “smash the fascist bastards once and for all.” (See About Turn, pp. 201-03)

But that was it, that was the extent of the opposition to the new line. Other members of the Central Committee might have had doubts about specific elements of the new policy, but they quickly fell into line. The political somersaults on display over the two days of the meeting made the Central Committee look like a clown circus. Take Maurice Cornforth, for example, the philosopher-revolutionary, who had previously been scathing in his rejection of the changed line. In just a week, he somehow transformed himself into a walking, talking cautionary tale for those people who suppose that a philosophical education might inoculate a person against ideological capture. That’s not an exaggeration:

Perhaps it sounds rather silly in some ways to have oneself in the position where when the Soviet Union does something one is willing constantly at first, while thinking it over, to follow what the Soviet Union is doing, but I must say that I personally have got that sort of faith in the Soviet Union, to be willing to do that, because I believe that if one loses anything of that faith in the Soviet Union one is done for as a Communist and Socialist. …[T]he fact of the matter is that a socialist state, I believe, in that position, can do no wrong, and is doing no wrong, and this is what we have to stick to, so these are the reasons why personally I commenced to turn political somersaults, because that is what it means. (About Turn, pp. 130-31)

Well, he was certainly right about one thing—it does sound rather silly. Actually, it sounds absolutely bonkers.

Unsurprisingly, Cornforth was far from being the only Central Committee member willing to prostrate himself before the mighty Soviet Union. Bill Cowe, for example, quite openly admitted that he had often blindly followed the line taken by the Communist International (Comintern), the “unrivalled political authority and guide for the Communist Parties of the world and Communist Party members”. He did allow himself the possibility that on this occasion the International had got it wrong, but luckily it turned out in the end that he had got it wrong. (See About Turn, p. 275)

Peter Kerrigan reported a similar struggle, with a similarly happy outcome. What helped him get to the right view? Yes, you’ve guessed it, the Soviet Union:

…I have always justified the Soviet Union in every action that the Soviet Union has taken. That does not mean to say that I have expected all the changes that have taken place or anticipated them. As a matter of fact I was flabbergasted, quite frankly, when the Soviet Union marched into Poland. (About Turn, p. 244)

Alas, Kerrigan was not able to put his flabbergastedness to good use:

I must accept the thesis because I am convinced that the Soviet Union under no circumstances will ever do anything that is against the interests not only of the Soviet people but of the people of the whole world, and that is the test… (About Turn, p. 255)

By this point, I’m sure you’ve guessed how this is going to turn out. The Central Committee voted 21 to 3 for the new line—only Pollitt, Campbell and Gallacher voted against. It had taken just one week for the CPGB to reverse its previous stance.

You might be tempted to think that Pollitt, Campbell and Gallacher came out of all this looking pretty good. Well, not so much, actually. Shortly afterwards, at a closed session, Pollitt persuaded the Central Committee to switch Gallacher’s vote to the majority line, on the grounds that he had been led astray by his personal antipathy towards Dutt at the previous meeting, and was actually in favour of the new thesis.

By late-November, both Pollitt and Campbell had, in typical Soviet style, recanted their opposition to the new policy. They owned up to helping the enemies of the working-class by persisting with a wrong position, pleading guilty to “an impermissible infraction” of party discipline.

However, if it was Dutt’s hope that the Communist Party would colonise the minds of its supporters, he perhaps didn’t quite get his way. On 30 April 1956, Pollitt told ITV that “In 1939, I thought it an anti-fascist war. I thought it then and I think it now”. (See About Turn, p. 35, footnote 61)

He was in weighty company: heaping irony upon irony, in February 1946, Stalin made the same claim:

[A]s distinct from the first world war, the second world war from the very outset assumed the nature of an anti-fascist war, a war of liberation, one of the tasks of which was to re-establish democratic liberties. (Cited in About Turn, p. 33)

Oh, what a tangled web they wove.

Further Reading

About Turn (Francis King & George Matthews (eds.), Lawrence and Wishart, 1990) contains verbatim transcripts of the Central Committee meetings of the CPGB between 25 September and 3 October, 1939.

This was written in the early noughties, before the emergence of social media. It all seems rather innocent now, but I think parts of it still have merit.

Many of the philosophers who have written on the internet have argued that online relationships are in various ways diminished compared to everyday, embodied kinds. For example, Hubert Dreyfus in his On The Internet argues that “our sense of the reality of things and people and our ability to interact effectively with them depend on the way our body works silently in the background. Its ability to get a grip on things provides our sense of the reality of what we are doing and what we are ready to do…All this our body does so effortlessly, pervasively, and successfully that it is hardly noticed. That is why it is so easy to think that in cyberspace we could get along without it, and why it would, in fact, be impossible to do so.”

It is easy to understand why philosophers make these kinds of arguments. Many important facets of our personal relationships seem to require face-to-face contact. Dreyfus, for example, argues that trust in another person is in part based on the experience that they do not take advantage of our vulnerability when given the opportunity to so in a face-to-face situation. Even if one does not accept this, it does seem to be true that we can have a certain kind of confidence in people we meet in person that is not available in online relationships. Particularly, the opportunity for gross deception is minimised in a face-to-face situation. Gordon Graham, and countless others, have pointed out that it is very easy to deceive people on the internet by inventing wholly imaginary personas—something that it is much more difficult to achieve in the non-virtual world.

It is for these, and similar, kinds of reasons, then, that there is the belief that internet relationships are the poor relations of “real”, embodied relationships. However, one must be a bit careful before jumping too readily to this conclusion.

One reason is that non-virtual relationships are subject to kinds of distortion which are largely absent from internet relationships. Physical attractiveness, for example, is an important factor influencing the judgements we make about people. Specifically, we tend to make unwarranted inferences about people on the basis of our perception of their looks. For instance, as a result of what psychologists call a “positive halo effect”, attractive people are considered more intelligent, more moral, better adjusted, nicer, more sexually responsive, and more competent than their less attractive fellows. Of course, it isn’t only attractiveness that influences the judgements we make about people. We also take our cues from, among other things, age, sex, racial characteristics, style of dress, accent and social class.

The reason these kinds of cues often result in distorted judgements about people is because of our use of “implicit personality theories” that are rooted in stereotypes. In other words, we tend to take our cue from these readily identifiable characteristics to place people into categories, and then we assume that they share the other attributes that we think are typical of the category.

The philosopher Miranda Fricker has pointed to an interesting fictional example of this kind of process. In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, set in Alabama in the 1930s, there is a trial of a black man. The all-white jury genuinely do not believe his testimony, even though it is clear he is telling the truth. The important point being that in that culture, at that time, being black was a marker indicating—quite falsely—a lack of credibility. Not surprisingly, it is easy to find real-life examples of stereotyping. For instance, Rodney Karr found that gay males were rated more shallow, yielding, tense and passive than males labelled as heterosexual.

The significant point about internet relationships is that the characteristics we rely on to make judgements about people in the non-virtual world are largely invisible in the virtual world. The irony here is that it is precisely that facet of internet communication that makes gross deception possible—the absence of a face-to-face relationship—that undermines our tendency to stereotype. It would be possible to overstate the significance of this fact. Even in relationships conducted entirely via the medium of the written word, we still make judgements about people which go beyond the evidence. However, it is likely that we do so largely on the basis of the actual content of our communication with a person, which, arguably at least, is more likely to be indicative of those aspects of a person’s character that they themselves consider to be salient.

The corollary of this point is that in our internet relationships we have greater control over what aspects of our character we present to other people than we do in our everyday relationships. Of course, this is why people worry about deception on the internet. And it is a real concern—the individual who adopts a false persona in order to procure a sexual encounter with a vulnerable person behaves badly. But it is only part of the story. If by controlling what aspects our character we present to people online we are able to avoid the more pernicious effects of our tendency to make judgements on the basis of unwarranted stereotypes, then it is possible we will develop online relationships that are, at least in some ways, less distorted and more real than most of our everyday, embodied relationships.

I interviewed Roger Scruton around the turn of the millennium for The Philosophers’ Magazine. This is the interview.

Roger Scruton admits to being what many people would call an elitist. He thinks that some tastes are better than others. Specifically, he has a preference for high culture over popular culture and believes that this preference can be rationally grounded. Of course, probably everybody agrees that art, literature and music—the things that make up both high and popular culture—have value. Their centrality in human life, and the pleasure that they bring, make denying this proposition almost an absurdity. However, the idea that some art has more value than other art is contentious. It isn't immediately clear what could ground such a difference. In his writings, Scruton suggests that part of the story is that high art functions to transform lives, ridding them of their arbitrariness and contingency.

So how does this happen?

"I take it that there is a real question about what constitutes the value of high art," he responds. "It requires a lot of thinking and discipline to appreciate and to understand. We are living in a period when many people don't see the point of making the effort required for understanding difficult works of art, so unless you can say something about what you gain from them, the whole enterprise is jeopardised.

"Now, human ambitions are necessarily compromised. Our lives cannot be so constructed that they move of their own accord to a satisfying conclusion. They cannot be constructed so that each part casts light on another part and seems fully satisfied by that other part. Our goals are frustrated. Our lives fall to pieces. Nothing seems to come to fruition. And this is all inevitable because of the empirical circumstances in which we live.

"Nevertheless, it is part of being human that our ambitions and loves are framed according to our ideals: not just things that we want, but things that it would be right to want, and that would fulfil us were we to obtain them. The ideal is not attainable in reality, but we imagine what it would be like to attain it, when we see it fully realised in the imaginative work of art. This applies even when the realisation involves the destruction of a character, as in tragedy. Tragedy vindicates the ideal, by showing people how to be greater, more interesting, more worthy of praise, than the forces that destroy them. Contemplating tragedy, our lives are illuminated by the meaning that we see."

So, for Scruton, high art is a moral phenomenon through and through. I ask him whether it is his view that the ethical life can only be sustained and renewed through art and the work of the imagination.

"I don't want to say that it is only through art or the imagination that you can live an ethical life," he replies. "The best art is devoted to the task of making the ethical life worthwhile, and showing that all the costs involved in it are fully compensated. That is something that you find in Shakespeare's great tragedies. Although there is a huge cost in thinking in terms of right and wrong, duty and virtue, and living in this way—living in the eyes of judgement—there is also the greatest of benefits. Judgement raises us to the level where fulfilment is possible. So art and imagination offer us light in the darkness. But this doesn't mean that people who have no feeling for art cannot live decent lives. On the contrary, of course they can."

It is also true that art can be involved in people living very unethical lives. The example of Hitler and his love of Wagner springs to mind.

"People always give this example," says Scruton. "You cannot say that works of art will always have a good effect on people, even if their moral content is of the highest order. What effect they have depends upon the kind of person we're talking about. An evil person will gain sustenance from a great work of art. But I think it is nonsense to suppose that this necessarily tells you anything about the work of art itself. Anything that had an effect on Hitler was going to have a bad effect, just as any water poured into a poisoned drain will come out poisoned."

The problem with this reply is just that there are people who don't agree. They think that there is something about Wagner's art which explains why it was so attractive to Hitler. So I ask whether there is any way of settling this dispute?

"Well, the specific case about Wagner is still very much alive. But consider that Goebbels was very much moved by Mozart. Stalin had pretty developed musical tastes. Mao Tse-tung was moved by classical Chinese poetry, some of which contains what people claim are perfect statements of the old Confucian ethic. Yet all of those people went on to commit terrible crimes. I think you have to recognise that our appreciation and understanding of works of art is in the first instance isolated from life—that's the whole point of aesthetic experience, that it enables us to contemplate life from a position of solemn detachment. Works of art are not there to influence or guide our actions. They are there to be contemplated, but from the act of contemplation we gain a sense of what is meaningful. And this feeds our moral sense.

"The fact that there are bad people moved by works of art doesn't taint those works of art. You have to think of all the good people moved by them too. And maybe the only good thing about these bad people is that they were moved by those great works of art."

According to Scruton, part of the distinction between high and popular culture has to do with the way that some art objects genuinely engage the imagination as opposed to being merely objects of fantasy. I ask him what's involved in this distinction.

"Fantasy objects are substitutes," he replies. "They are a way of titillating real emotions and giving substitute satisfaction. The imaginative act, in contrast, is an endeavour to create a possible world, an imaginative world, where the emotions are also imaginary. So the artist is not offering a substitute satisfaction for a real emotion - art is not like pornography, for example. Rather, the artist is making someone imagine both the object and the emotion directed towards it. The artist explores an imagined world as a free being with all moral commitments engaged. That tells us the difference between, for example, the erotic and the pornographic."

It is not at all clear, however, that it is easy to draw these kinds of distinctions. For example, thinking about the difference between erotic art and pornography , it seems possible that the same object might produce different reactions in different people. So, for some people, an art object might result in an imaginative act and for other people it might be purely an object of fantasy.

"This is difficult," admits Scruton. "You have to think in terms of the language of literary critics. Leavis talks about works of art that invite a certain response. We know what that means, although it is difficult to specify it precisely. We know this because we know it in life. We know that there are people who invite a sentimental response to themselves, and others who remain distant, as if there is something still to be got from them. In the same way, we recognise this in art. Kitsch is a form of cheap invitation, and pornography is an invitation to fantasy sex. The erotic, in contrast, puts the sexual object at a distance—so that it becomes an object of contemplation. And the passion that erotic art arouses is an imaginative passion, not a real one. You can see this, for example, in Titian's nudes, which are very good examples of erotic art. A Titian Venus is not masturbation material at all. The whole image is veiled by contemplation and idealised. It is not a woman for the taking, but rather a woman who is thinking of her own lover. To grasp the atmosphere of the picture, you have to set it at a distance from yourself."

Scruton draws a similar distinction between real feelings and sentimental feelings. I ask him how this cashes out in terms of an understanding of high and popular culture.

"These are very difficult philosophical questions," he replies. "Sentimentality is one of those things which is very hard to define. I take the line that the crucial feature of a sentimental emotion is that while it might appear that its intent is to exit outwards towards an object, it is in fact only a pretence that the object is the real focus of its concern. Its real focus is the subject. So the thought is not 'how sad' of that object, but rather 'how refined and touching of me to be feeling "how sad" of that object'."

For Scruton, then, it seems that notions of sentimentality and fantasy are central in drawing the distinction between high and popular culture.

"Well, I wouldn't want to argue that all popular culture is kitsch," he cautions. "But there is truth in what people like Adorno say, that there are different levels in which we respond to art, and some responses are much easier to achieve than others. They are easier to achieve because they involve either a kind of emotional laziness or engagement with self-satisfied feelings.

"Now, there are different reasons why something might be easy to engage with. But one reason is that it is simply eliciting a stock response. The response is automatic, involving no reflection on the object. In such cases sentimentality is always in the wings. If you are just giving vent to a stock response, the thing which is most important to you is not the object, it is yourself."

Arguably, the difficulty with this kind of argument is that it is highly value-laden. Surely, it is possible just to reply, well, the whole point of art is to produce a sentimental response?

"That's one come-back," agrees Scruton, "just to say, well what's wrong with sentimentality? I feel that one of the great achievements of English literary criticism since Coleridge is that it has not only tried to answer that question, but has actually given an account of what is wrong with sentimentality.

"Essentially, sentimentality puts a veil between you and the world. It makes your own feelings more important than their object, and thereby neutralises the feelings. You are not really responding to the world as it is, hence there is an epistemological defect in sentimentality. Leavis brings this out very brilliantly in his analysis of the Hardy and Tennyson poems in 'Reality and Sincerity'. He succeeds in showing just how concrete the vision of the world is in Hardy, and how he is interrogating objects and using them to interrogate himself. Each detail is raising an evaluative question, not only about the thing itself, but also about the quality of the emotion directed towards it. Whereas in Tennyson, there is an easy flow of emotion, which washes over things so that you hardly see them. There is no self-interrogation, and no interrogation of the object. The level of awareness is diminished."

There's an interesting question about what's at stake here. The talk has been about the different levels at which one can respond to art. As someone who prefers popular culture to high culture, despite having had fairly extensive exposure to the latter, I wonder whether any moral, and perhaps behavioural consequences, follow as a result of a preference for sentimentality and fantasy.

"I think there certainly are," responds Scruton. "This is a delicate question, because it depends upon how important artistic and cultural matters are in the life of a person. The artistic choices people make don't reveal that much if art isn't particularly important in their life. But when art becomes integrated into your life, then it does become a sign of what sort of person you are. It also becomes a means of communicating with others, which is a very important role that art plays in our culture at least. We use our artistic tastes in order to clarify our feelings about other things, not only to ourselves, but to each other. That's one of the reasons that we are 'suitors for agreement', as Kant says in the Critique of Judgement. The aesthetic judgement is never just 'I like that, you don't'; there is always an attempt to use the aesthetic object to cast light on your own way of life.

"Thus I would find it extremely difficult to live with somebody whose main interest was pop music. Not only because I cannot stand the sound of it, but because it would mean that communication would be curtailed, and a source of judgement would be neutralised.

"On the other hand," continues Scruton, "I can see that this is too simple a view. There's a part of me that likes pop music too. I can read about pop music enthusiasts and get a sense of how it might be thrilling to be even the most abject kind of MTV addict. Take Salman Rushdie's novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. It is about two Indian pop idols, and it conveys some of the sense—though I think a completely delusive sense— of pop as a spiritual crystallisation of modernity. I can see how someone can get to the point of liking pop music for this reason, believing it to be a vivid symbol of modern life, and a means to engage in that life."

I want to push Scruton on these points. I ask him whether he would be willing to say that his experience of the world, and perhaps his moral sense, are richer because of his involvement in high culture than a person's can be through their interest in popular culture? And will other people be able to recognise this? Are there implications for one's relationships, for example?

"The position I would like to defend is one that some people would call elitist, though I don't regard that as a term of abuse," replies Scruton. "I think you can be an elitist without being a snob. You can think that some tastes are better than others, not just because they are more satisfying, but because they engage in a more creative and fulfilling way with the human soul, without condemning people who don't have those tastes. That is the position that I would like to take, because I know what the love of serious music has given to me—not just enjoyment at the sound of it, but an insight into what matters.

"I was thinking about this, this morning. As I woke up, I had the thought that the twentieth century had been full of the most wonderful farewells, and I thought of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, Stauss's Four Last Songs, Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus, and James Joyce's Ulysses. Those are all incredible farewells, and I thought how wonderful it is to have known these things, and to see how to be reconciled not only to your own death, but also to the death of a civilisation. I woke with a sense of gratitude that this had been given to me through art. I don't think it could have been given to me in any other way."

This is a curious story from the tail end of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister of the United Kingdom. The context is the death of A. J. Ayer in June 1989, and the flurry of newspaper tributes that appeared in the immediate aftermath. Not the sort of thing likely to cause a kerfuffle, you might think, except an obituary written by Richard Wollheim for The Independent newspaper signed off with the following paragraph:

In the days when British life was still permeable to wide-ranging, free-floating argument, which endured until the late 1970s, Ayer made himself heard on a number of social issues. He was thought of, sometimes dismissively, as a voice of the liberal establishment. But on no issue was it a voice that could be disregarded. It based itself on fundamental principles and it exemplified an honesty of argument that is now in very short supply in the public domain. (The Independent, June 29, 1989, p. 1)

If you know anything about 1980s Britain, you’ll straightaway recognise this as a fairly typical dig at the politics of Thatcherism. If you’re a Tory MP, your best bet is just to ignore this sort of thing—after all, how many among the voting public actually care what a moral philosopher working in California thinks about—well, anything, really? But apparently Robert Jackson, Minister for Higher Education, just couldn’t quite help himself. He shot back as follows:

I guess it was only to be expected that one of Sir A J Ayer's academic obituarists should remark, as does Professor Richard Wollheim, upon the contrast between today's supposed intellectual ice-age and "the days when British life was still permeable to wide-ranging, free-floating argument, which endured until the late 1970s".

Equally, it is to be expected that those of this opinion will overlook the irony of such a contrast when it refers to a philosopher whose main work enormously narrowed the range of philosophical inquiry, and who taught, in Richard Wollheim's own words, that "all other thinking... religion, ethics, metaphysics... is literally meaningless... nonsense."

Wollheim's contrast between today's intellectual climate and that of Ayer's heyday is not, as he thinks, one between breadth, pluralism and openness on the one hand, and narrowness and dishonesty of argument on the other. His is the voice, rather, of a dethroned hegemony—dethroned largely because of the poverty and superficiality of its thinking.

This little missive did not go down well with the great and the good of British philosophy. Not in the least bit. Luckily for Jackson, it would be another 20 years before the invention of social media, so his savaging occurred in slow motion via the letters pages of The Independent.

G. R. Grice was the first in on the act, drawing a large lesson from the fact Jackson had used the word “taught” in his letter:

Of course, the other possibility here is that Jackson used the word “taught” because that's a perfectly normal shorthand to describe the act of arguing for a position. But that doesn’t seem to have occurred to Grice.

Simon Blackburn, for his part, upped the ante by asking whether Robert Jackson’s intervention marked a new low point in public life. (Probably a bit of a stretch, given Oswald Mosley, John Profumo, Jeremy Thorpe, the assassination of a prime minister, Richard III…).

Ronald Dworkin’s intervention was much more sober, and included an entirely proper analysis of the importance of being wrong in an interesting way.

Obviously, Mr Jackson felt obliged to respond to the brickbats aimed in his direction, making the entirely correct point that the Academy isn’t quite so open to heterodox viewpoints as his critics seemed to think.

Next up was T. E. Wilkerson, complaining that Ayer’s ideas had been tossed away like an unfashionable hat, while at the same time rather confirming Jackson’s point about “established orthodoxies”, by making a sweeping claim about what everybody knew to their cost about the Conservative government.

Team Jackson, however, was not for turning. Julian Brazier, MP, leapt onto the battlefield brandishing the traditional cudgels of Conservative thought: faith, morality and common sense.

The final substantive philosophical contribution was, surprisingly enough, measured in tone. Timothy Sprigge argued that it just isn’t true that Ayer considered moral philosophy and moral judgement to be meaningless:

In terms of the letters pages of The Independent, that was it. But the whole affair rumbled on for a bit.

Notably, Peregrine Worsthorne, writing in the Spectator, castigated Jackson’s critics for their “woefully misplaced” outrage. He insisted that the Ayer he knew would have had no time for such sentimentality. Moreover, he claimed that Ayer himself was insensitive in precisely the same way critics alleged of Jackson.

Shortly after learning that his beloved wife Vanessa was dying of cancer he wrote asking me—a friend of Vanessa’s—to put him up again for the Garrick Club…on the grounds that he would soon be in need again of somewhere to dine in convivial company. I can think of quite a few people unselfless enough to be thinking of themselves in this way at such a time; but absolutely nobody other than Freddie would have been so insensitive as to try to translate such private thoughts into action. (Spectator, 15 July, 1989)

A week later, a letter from Jackson appeared in the Spectator, offering an important—and, I think, plausible (the subtext running through this entire brouhaha is outrage at the cuts to university funding for the humanities enacted by the Tories through the 1980s)—corrective:

…Perhaps I could correct Perry–and others–on a point of fact. My letter to the Independent was not, as he seems to think, an early shot in the debate about the value of Ayer’s work. It was, in fact, a criticism of a quite gratuitous piece of political banner-waving in the final paragraph of Professor Wollheim’s front page obituary of Ayer in that newspaper. (Spectator, 22 July, 1989)

That should have been the end of the matter, but actually our tale has a postscript. In December 1989, the London Evening Standard ran the following story.

Peter Strawson’s claim that Jackson’s letter was “atrocious” and that Lady Ayer’s remarks were “perfectly just and perfectly reasonable” does rather lead one to wonder what he must have made of Roger Scruton’s article about Freddie Ayer, published in the Sunday Telegraph on July 2nd, less than a week after Ayer’s death, in which Scruton had this to say about Ayer:

…Ayer was the very opposite of a philosopher. He was a hater of wisdom, a man devoted to destroying the conceptions in which the wisdom of humanity reposes, and replacing them with a disenchanted language of fact. And his morality, which he presented as a shocking defiance of established views, was a mere hotch-potch of unsupported platitudes.

Probably he didn’t like it.

In the immediate post-WW2 period, Bertrand Russell got it into his head that it might be a good idea to drop a nuclear bomb on non-nuclear Russia. Usually, he couched his idea in conditional terms (if Russia doesn’t do some x, then…), and often suggested that the USSR could be cowed merely by the threat of nuclear armageddon, but there is no doubt he envisaged circumstances in which it would be right to annihilate Russian citizens via the mechanism of an asymmetrical nuclear strike.

The standard form of Russell’s argument was utilitarian: If the USSR were allowed to develop its own nuclear bomb, the chances of a global nuclear conflagration would increase massively. A way to mitigate against this would be to bring all atomic energy under international control. In a situation where only one country has the nuclear bomb (i.e., the United States), it would be possible to win a war against any adversary that refused to play ball. Therefore:

If the whole world outside of Russia were to insist upon international control of atomic energy to the point of going to war on this issue, it is highly probable that the Soviet government would give way on this issue. If it did not, then if the issue were forced in the next year or two, only one side would have atomic bombs, and the war might be so short as not to involve utter ruin. (“International Government”, New Commonwealth, 9)

So it's a utilitarian argument: If Russia gets the nuclear bomb, then all hell will break loose. It’s better for the West to use their current nuclear superiority to bully Russia into submission while it still can. Yes, it might end in war, in which case Moscow and other Russian cities would be destroyed by nuclear strikes, but even this worst case scenario is better than the inevitable global armageddon that would occur if Russia were allowed to continue on its current path to nuclear parity.

It’s a bad argument on multiple levels, but we’ll leave our analysis of it for another day. Instead, let’s focus on a version of the argument he outlined at a talk at the Westminster School in London, where he gets perilously close to arguing for an immediate preventive war against the USSR.

His talk itself was relatively uncontentious, recommending that the Western Alliance strengthen morally and physically as much as possible in order to make it clear to the Soviets that they couldn’t win a war. Russell also talked up the benefits of a world government backed by armed power, suggesting that it could be forced upon reluctant nations until such time as “the world has been educated into unified sanity.”

So far, so good—a bit batty, but nothing to suggest preemptive nuclear strikes. The problem came in a Q&A session, when he outlined the ways the West might deal with an unrepentant expansionist Russia:

As he saw it there were three alternatives if the present aggressive Russian policy was persisted in: (a) War with Russia before she has the atomic bombs, ending fairly swiftly and inevitably in a Western victory; (b) war with Russia after she has the atomic bombs, ending again in Western victory, but after frightful carnage, destruction and suffering; (c) submission.... This third alternative seemed to him so utterly unthinkable that it could be dismissed; and as between the other two the choice to him, at least, seemed clear. (“Atomic Energy and the Problems of Europe”, Nineteenth Century and After, vol. 145. p. 43)

His preference for the first alternative was taken by many people present as indicative of his support for an immediate preventive war against the Soviet Union. Hence, the next day, the Observer ran the following report from the Associated Press:

Lord Russell told 400 London students and schoolteachers, at a New Commonwealth Schools Conference, at Westminster School yesterday: “Either we must have war against Russia before she has the atom bomb or we will have to lie down and let them govern us.

Like all dictators, Stalin and other Soviet leaders are living in a fool’s paradise. They don’t realise the strength of our resources and that the United States, Britain, and the commonwealth, and other Western Powers, would win any war now. (November 21, 1948, p. 1)

The Daily Worker was even more direct, titling its report, “Earl Russell calls for atom war”, and declaring his sabre rattling “monstrous” in an editorial (November 22, 1948, p. 3).

Russell was not in the least bit amused by what he took to be the inaccuracy of the reporting, denying in a press release that he had urged immediate war with Russia. He claimed that what he had in fact said was that it should be made clear to the Soviets that Western powers would be prepared to use force if necessary.

It has become obvious that the Communists, like the Nazis, can be halted in their attempts to dominate Europe and Asia only by determined and combined resistance by every means in the democracies’ power–not excluding military means, if Russia refuses all compromise. (The Observer, November 28, 1948, p. 3)

The trouble is Russell is dishonest on this issue (see Ronald Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell, Chapter 19, for further details), so we can’t take his denial at face value. In a letter to the New York Nation, he claims he was stitched up by a communist journalist:

The story that I supported a preventive war against Russia is a Communist invention. I once spoke at a meeting at which only one reporter was present and he was a Communist, though reporting for orthodox newspapers. He seized on his opportunity, and in spite of my utmost efforts I have never been able to undo the harm. (Nation, October 1953)

The trouble with this explanation is that other people at the Westminster meeting, who were decidedly not communists, also heard him advocating for a preventive war—or at least thought they did. One of them was Nigel Lawson, former British Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had this to say about Russell’s denials:

I happened to be present at the occasion in 1948 on which Russell made his surprising plea; and his habitual clarity of expression was such that there was no possible room whatever for doubt about his meaning…His thesis, I remember, went roughly as follows: (i) the history of man is one of a seemingly endless succession of wars, but (ii) the number of wars steadily diminishes, as the number of countries, empires or blocs in the world diminishes, since after each war the victor absorbs the vanquished. Hence (iii) war will come to an end only when there is but a single bloc or power-centre left. At the present time (this had, in 1948, a superficial plausibility) we are down to two players, East and West, so (iv) there is only one more war to come. But (v) Russia will soon get the atom bomb, too, which means that the war to end wars would then become the greatest disaster the world has known. Hence (vi) we must go for a merciful quick kill now, while we have the bomb and Russia hasn't. (Spectator, 13 February 1970)

Of course, this is just one person’s recollection, so perhaps not reliable, especially given the passage of time. However, a couple of weeks later, the Spectator published a letter from the then Executive Secretary of The David Davies Memorial Institute of International Studies that confirmed Lawson’s account:

I have just seen Nigel Lawson’s article on Bertrand Russell in the Spectator of last week in which he made the point that Russell made a speech in 1948 in Westminster School Hall where he advocated a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Russia before she got the atomic bomb.

I organised the said meeting and Mr Lawson’s recollection is entirely correct. In fact we had the greatest difficulty in explaining away the more obvious implication to the press, more especially as the then Emeritus Dean of Gloucester had taken the chair for Lord Russell! (Spectator, 27 February 1970)

Thirty years later, Lawson told the same story in a letter to The Economist, in response to the claim that Nicholas Griffin, the editor of The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, had scotched the notion that Russell had advocated for a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union:

I was in the audience at the public meeting at which Russell advocated precisely this, and it made a big impression on me at the time… Needless to say, Russell advocated a pre-emptive nuclear strike on purely humanitarian grounds. In a nutshell, he pointed out that at the time the Soviet Union did not yet possess a nuclear capability but that it would very soon do so, after which all history made it clear that sooner or later there would be a nuclear war between the two superpowers that would be infinitely more devastating than either of the two world wars through which he had lived. The only sure way of preventing this Armageddon, he concluded with remorseless if unpalatable logic, was for America to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union before it acquired the bomb: after that it would be too late. (The Economist, 4 August 2001, p. 16)

Griffin leapt to the defence of Russell in the next issue of The Economist, arguing that Russell wasn’t suggesting immediate nuclear war, but rather stating the least catastrophic outcome if it turned out not to be possible to deter Russia from its aggressive expansionism. (The Economist, 11 August 2001, p. 14)

Lawson wasn’t buying this defence:

Nicholas Griffin now concedes that, at his 1948 meeting at Westminster School, Bertrand Russell advocated an early pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union, before the Russians acquired their own atomic bomb. But he adds that Russell made it clear that this drastic action should take place “if the present aggressive Russian policy was persisted in.” Mr Griffin insists, however, that Russell “obviously hoped” that this policy would not be persisted in. What in fact was “obvious”—and one of Russell's chief characteristics was his clarity—was that he expected that it would be, and was clear that we could not simply wait and see, as this would give the Russians time to acquire their own atomic bomb.

I was there when Russell spoke: Mr Griffin was not. (The Economist, 18 August 2001, p. 14)

Unsurprisingly, Griffin did not accept he had conceded the point.

I certainly do not concede that Bertrand Russell advocated “an early pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union”, as Lord Lawson claims (Letters, August 18th). What he advocated was a continuation of the West's policy of containment from a position of strength…

Lord Lawson may have been present when Russell spoke but I have a verbatim transcript of what he said. (The Economist, 25 August 2001, p. 18)

Likely the transcript to which Griffin referred is the article published in Nineteenth Century and After titled “Atomic Energy and the Problems of Europe”, which Russell explicitly states is a verbatim transcript of the address that he gave at Westminster School.

However, contra Griffin, he does not say that the portion of the article that deals with the Q&A session is a verbatim transcript. Almost certainly it is not–it’s too short (if it’s verbatim, the Q&A lasted five minutes, max) and the tone is all wrong (too structured, too formal, and so on)—which means it cannot be relied upon as evidence of what Russell actually said during this part of the event. This is a problem since it was during the Q&A session that Russell got himself into trouble.

Nevertheless, a close reading of even this presumably heavily edited section supports Lawson’s version of events, not Griffin’s. Here’s why. The third question of the Q&A is as follows:

Had not Lord Russell a more encouraging message to give to young people? Two succeeding generations had been decimated by war. Was all that he could offer to a third generation yet another devastating war? It seemed a most hopeless and gloomy prospect to be offered by so brilliant and distinguished a speaker. It was a deplorable picture for young people to have to contemplate. (Nineteenth Century and After, vol. 145. p. 43)

This question makes sense if Russell had talked up the inevitability of war–it makes much less sense if he had suggested the serious possibility that the Soviets might be deterred by the policy of “containment from a position of strength”. Particularly, the suggestion that all that he could offer to a third generation was the prospect of another devastating war supports Lawson’s recollection, not Griffin’s version of what was said.

It’s also instructive that Russell did not immediately say in his response that there was still reason for hope. Rather, he accepted that the immediate picture was gloomy, but said none of it was his fault, and he couldn’t really do much about it.

So what should we make of all this? The first thing to say is that we’re not going to get certainty here. Not least there is always the possibility that further evidence exists in the Russell archive that substantiates Griffin’s version of events, thereby vindicating Russell. However, as it stands, it seems likely, on the balance of probabilities, that in the Q&A section, at least, Russell did advocate for a preemptive nuclear strike against the USSR, or at least came as near to that position as you can get, without actually saying, do it, do it now.

This is a blast from the past. I wrote this 20 years ago now, in response to the idea that atheists/secularists should start calling themselves “Brights”.

When Tony Blair first became leader of the Labour Party in 1994, the Sun newspaper, a British tabloid, took to calling him ‘Bambi’, presumably in the hope that the nickname would become established in the public consciousness. It did not, of course, for it lacked any kind of resonance with what people could believe about Blair. He wasn’t a child, his leadership was anything but childlike, and he lacked the requisite number of legs to be a baby deer. Not discouraged, the Sun was at it again in 2001, this time when Iain Duncan Smith became leader of the Conservative Party. In what was probably a desperate attempt to establish his man of the people credentials, it started to call him ‘Smithy’. A quite absurd conceit, given his double-barrelled name and former career as an army officer. Needless to say, this nickname didn’t catch on either, and now, almost universally in the UK media, Duncan Smith is known as IDS.

None of this is surprising. If your aim is to coin, ex nihilo, a name or epithet which quickly gains widespread public acceptance, the chances of success are not great. Even the media, with its ability to address massive audiences, fails as often as it succeeds. Thus, for every ‘Slick Willy’, you’ll find that there is a ‘Bambi’, for every ‘loony left’ a ‘Doris Karloff’.

This is a comforting thought for a secularist at the present time. For a rather unfortunate meme has lately infected the minds of some leading exponents of a naturalistic worldview. It is a meme that says it would be a good idea if people without belief in things supernatural started to call themselves ‘brights’.

The whole thing started with two people from Sacramento, California, Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell. Though atheists, they did not want to be referred to as being ‘godless’, so they came up with the word ‘bright’ to better describe their naturalistic worldview. Their hope is that other nonbelievers will also use the word, and that it will become an umbrella term for the whole range of naturalistic philosophies (i.e., atheist, agnostic, humanist, etc.). They have setup a website, The Brights Net, to this end, and have attracted several high-profile supporters, including Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, both of whom have written articles advocating for the idea.

It is easy enough to understand the attraction of this idea. The naturalistic philosophies of the non-religious do not play the same kind of high-profile role in political and civic life as do the supernaturalist ideas of their religious counterparts. This is the case particularly in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, where, for example, assorted bishops get to sit on various ethics committees simply because they are bishops. Given this situation, any intervention that promises to raise the profile of naturalistic thinking is bound to be attractive—at first sight. The trouble is that it doesn’t take too many more sights of the brights idea to realise that it is badly flawed.

First, ‘bright’ is just the wrong word. How it was chosen in the first place isn’t quite clear. It seems to have had something to do with the fact that it is a ‘positive’ and ‘memorable’ word; and also that it is sufficiently puzzling or enigmatic when used as a noun – ‘I am a bright’ –that it invites the response, ‘What’s a bright?’, thereby allowing a person to talk about their naturalistic worldview. But there are major problems with the word.

The first is that its enigmatic quality is indicative of a fundamental arbitrariness in its relationship to the phenomenon that it names. It’s the let’s call Tony Blair ‘Bambi’ problem. Dawkins imagines that a bright might have a conversation which goes like this:

“What on earth is a bright”? And then you’re away. “A bright is a person whose world view is free of supernatural and mystical elements….”

“You mean a bright is an atheist?”

“Well, some brights are happy to call themselves atheists. Some brights call themselves agnostics. Some call themselves humanists, some freethinkers. But all brights have a world view that is free of supernaturalism and mysticism.”

(Richard Dawkins, ‘The future looks bright’, The Guardian, June 21^st 2003)

All very nice, except that the conversation is far more likely to go something like this:

‘What on earth is a bright?’

‘A bright is a person whose world view is free of supernatural and mystical elements.’

‘Right. So why the word “bright” then?’

‘Err. Well it’s a positive word. And memorable.’

‘So is the word “truffle”, but you wouldn’t call yourself a truffle. So why “bright”?’

‘Well, it’s what this couple from Sacramento came up with… and it is a very cheerful word!’

The arbitrariness of the choice of the word ‘bright’, though undermining its potential as a meme, would not matter so much were it not for the fact that one of the established uses of the word is as an adjective meaning ‘clever’ or ‘intelligent’. The problem here is that in the absence of an obvious reason to explain how it is that the word ‘bright’ designates a person who espouses a naturalist worldview, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that what is being suggested is that it is more intelligent to embrace naturalism than it is to embrace supernaturalism.

It must be said that the supporters of the brights idea are quite clear that the word should not be taken to be an adjective in this way. However, this does not make the problem go away. It should be obvious why it does not. For starters, there is the trivial point that you cannot strip a word of its associations simply by denying that you intend them. [1] Nor can you do so by using the word in a slightly strange way (i.e., as a noun). If someone announces that they’re a bright, then likely it will occur to their audience that what they actually mean is that they are bright. The fact that they will also be unable to explain why the word ‘bright’ is appropriate as a label for someone with a naturalistic worldview will do nothing to allay this suspicion.

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There is also a slightly more complex point to be made here. To be an atheist in the United States – and also in some ways in the United Kingdom - is to set oneself against the dominant culture. There is, therefore, a tendency to associate atheism with a certain kind of intellectual independence. This is reflected in the names of the groups with which many atheists associate (e.g., freethinkers; skeptics; etc). And it also underpins the anti-intellectual sentiment of much of the religious sermonising characteristic of Christian fundamentalism. The problem with the word ‘bright’ is that it is too easily seen as confirming this link between atheism and intellectuality. Or to put this more precisely, if people with no belief in god begin to self-identify as brights, they run the risk of apparently confirming what many religious people already suspect about them, that they consider themselves to be better or more intelligent than people who believe in a god.

Does this matter? Yes it does, if one is interested in convincing people of the merits of a naturalistic worldview. To start with, there is the obvious point that people are more likely to be receptive to new ideas if they feel that they are being treated with respect. But perhaps more worryingly, a movement which self-identifies as a movement of brights makes itself a hostage to rhetorical fortune. It is extremely easy—and, it must be said, very tempting—to parody the whole idea of a brights movement. And, of course, this is exactly what the enemies of a naturalistic worldview will do should the idea take off. The brights movement will find itself transmogrified into a ‘We’re smarter than you’ movement. And, at that point, protesting that the word was chosen simply because it is ‘warm’ and ‘cheerful’ will just result in more parody and more laughter.

‘Bright’, then, is the wrong choice of word to designate a person with a naturalistic worldview and as an umbrella term for a movement. But substituting a different word won’t make the brights idea a good one because it is muddle-headed for other reasons. Perhaps the most interesting of these has to do with what appears to be an unspoken assumption about people with a naturalistic worldview.

The assumption seems to be that the rejection of supernaturalism is enough to qualify someone as a person without religion. This claim is only unproblematic if one defines religion as involving supernatural beliefs. However, there is at least an argument that the sphere of the religious can be extended to include aspects of the secular world. It is an argument inspired by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. He claimed that the realm of the sacred is distinguished by the separateness of its objects from those of the world of the profane, and by the system of interdictions that prevents them from being denied. [2] If one accepts this conception, then there are secular phenomena that qualify as sacred. So Durkheim talks of ‘common beliefs of every sort connected to objects that are secular in appearance, such as the flag, one’s country, some forms of political organisation, certain heroes or historical events’, which are ‘indistinguishable from beliefs that are properly religious’; and he notes that ‘Public opinion does not willingly allow one to contest the moral superiority of democracy, the reality of progress, [or] the idea of equality, just as the Christian does not allow his fundamental dogmas to be questioned.’

It is easy to understand what Durkheim is getting at. It is only necessary to attend a meeting organised by a group like the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain to become very quickly aware that people can hold secular beliefs to be every bit as inviolable as religious beliefs often are for the religious. Of course, this point is already well understood. For example, in a review of Steven Rose et al’s Not in Our Genes, Richard Dawkins, commenting on their arguments against ‘genetic determinism’, has this to say: ‘The myth of the "inevitability" of genetic effects has nothing whatever to do with sociobiology, and has everything to do with Rose et al’s paranoiac and demonological theology of science. [my italics]’ (Richard Dawkins, New Scientist 24 January 1985).

What this means for the brights idea is that the criterion of a naturalistic worldview is no guarantee that people will be free of the kind of thinking which is quite reasonably described as ‘religious’. Or to put this another way, it is no guarantee that people will not be committed to beliefs, or sets of beliefs, which are beyond rational scrutiny in the same way as are many of the beliefs which are associated with theism. Possibly the supporters of the brights movement will not deny this, but rather claim that it does not matter too much, that their expectation has never been that they will create a movement of absolutely rigorous thinkers, each one holding up their beliefs to the light of reason. Fair enough. Except for two further points.

First, there is just a suggestion in some of the writings of the supporters of the brights idea that they see themselves as the true inheritors of the Enlightenment tradition. Well, it just isn’t this clear-cut. First off, the belief in a deity, in and of itself, does not rule out an attitude towards this world which is entirely consistent with the Enlightenment emphasis on reason and the progress of human knowledge. But perhaps more significantly, many people who qualify as brights would have a decidedly ambivalent attitude towards the products of the Enlightenment. Just consider, for example, that many Marxists would agree with Rose et al that ‘science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology.’ (Not in Our Genes). And that from amongst the whole caboodle of postmodern thinkers, at least some will be prepared to commit to agnosticism, and will no doubt claim something like ‘that progress in social thought is not possible without a thorough critique of the Enlightenment, whether for its justification of the domination of nature, or its authoritative support for belief systems like scientific racism or sexism, or for the monocultural legacy of its assumptions about rationality.’ (Andrew Ross, The Sokal Hoax).

Which thoughts lead on to the second point about the kind of movement the brights idea is likely to foster. It is certainly going to contain some odd bedfellows. Scientific atheists and Marxist atheists will be united in thinking that there is definitely no god, but they’ll fight like cats and dogs over the fate of the bourgeoisie. The agnostics will irritate both groups by sitting on the fence, whilst freethinkers drive themselves crazy trying to find a viewpoint unique to themselves. The skeptics will watch the whole thing from afar with slightly cynical smiles while debunking their four millionth crop circle, and the postmodernists will talk past themselves, as per usual. As for the rest of the world? They won’t see past the name, and the result will be parody and scorn. Therefore, one can only hope that the ‘bright’ meme fails on its evolutionary journey.

Footnotes

[1] The observant reader will notice that there is an echo here of the criticism that some people have made of the language of Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. For the record, I think the criticism is misplaced in the case of The Selfish Gene.

[2] There’s obviously a lot more to Durkheim’s argument than this mere bald assertion. See his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life; and also, for a summary of the argument I’m making here, J. C. Alexander’s The Antinomies of Classical Thought: Marx and Durkheim (Routledge, 1982), pp. 242 -250.

The UK’s Sexual Offences Act (2003) states that consent for a sexual encounter exists if a person agrees by choice to engage in sexual activity and has the freedom and capacity to make that choice. A person who is “extremely intoxicated” lacks that capacity, which means they are the victim of rape if a (male) person nevertheless has sex with them.

However, although a person cannot consent if they are extremely intoxicated, it does not necessarily follow, even in those cases where there is no previously established consent—as, for example, might exist between a married couple—that sex under the influence of alcohol cannot be consensual. Let’s consider the following scenario.

Dido and Aeneas hook up at a nightclub, and then travel back to her place, where they get cosy together on the couch. Aeneas is hoping for a night of passion, but is rather disconcerted when Dido explains the circumstances under which this might occur:

Look, Aeneas, I want to want to have sex with you, but I never actually want sex unless I’m drunk. It’s the only way I can relax, and if I can’t relax, then I can’t get aroused, which means I won’t enjoy it. But hey, I’ll start drinking now, and hopefully there will come a point where I’ll be relaxed enough to allow us to go ahead. But you must realize that I’m not consenting right now to have sex with you later. I’m simply telling you that I’m choosing to drink now in the hope that I will come to want sex later on, and I’m letting you know that my intoxicated consent—if I come to give it—will be genuine consent.

Dido starts drinking, and eventually tells Aeneas that she wants to have sex with him. Aeneas, though, is worried, because although Dido is cogent enough, and appears to know her own mind (which means there is no legal impediment here—she’s clearly not “extremely intoxicated”), there is no doubt she’s more than a little drunk. Normally, he would decline to have sex under such circumstances, but he wonders whether it makes a difference that she has deliberately ingested alcohol to get in the mood for sex. In other words, should he take Dido’s consent to be valid even though she is intoxicated?

Although this is by no means an easy question to answer, some light can be shed upon it by noting first the obvious point that it is because intoxication results in cognitive and behavioural changes that issues of consent arise. Even at relatively low levels, alcohol affects, amongst other things, personality, mood and the ability to make decisions, with the consequence, of course, that it also affects behaviour. This raises the possibility that drunken consent, even if it meets the legal bar for consent (as in our scenario), is compromised to the extent that it does not reflect the intoxicated person’s established, and relatively stable—i.e., sober—interests, desires and beliefs. (If you’re not sure why this is the case, ask yourself whether you’d trust the drunken version of yourself to make a decision about whether or not to participate in some relatively dangerous activity that you would normally avoid.)

In this regard, the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, has illuminating things to say about morality. According to Kant, it is morally wrong to treat another person solely as a means to an end—so, for example, it would be wrong to punish an innocent person just because the consequence might be a drop in the overall crime rate. If we have sex with a person in the full knowledge that they are acting out of character, especially if we have reason to believe that once sober they would regard their own drunken behaviour as violative in terms of their core beliefs and values (or perhaps even in terms of their sense of self), then it looks like what we’re doing is taking advantage of an aberrant situation for the sole purpose of our own sexual gratification, without paying due regard to the established interests, desires and beliefs of our sexual partner. If this is the case, then, in Kantian terms, at least, what we are doing is wrong.

So what does this line of thought tell us about the case of Dido and Aeneas? In one way, it should make us feel better about the prospect of their sexual encounter. Although it is true that Dido would not have consented to sex without alcohol in her system, her intoxicated consent seems to be consistent with her established interests, desires and beliefs. As she put it, she wants to want sex, and she would be offended if anybody suggested she was being taken advantage of just because it so happens she only ever wants sex while drunk. Dido’s intoxication is simply the way she gets to the point where she desires sex. Therefore, at least arguably, Aeneas would not be taking advantage of her if he went ahead with the sexual encounter.

However, there is a layer of complexity here that should make us feel a little nervous about the prospect of their sexual congress. Aeneas has what might be called an epistemic problem. He doesn’t know Dido well enough to be able to make a confident judgement about whether or not her intoxicated consent reflects her established interests, desires and beliefs. So a cautionary principle should hold sway. If you can’t be sure that you won’t merely be taking advantage of a person in a vulnerable moment if you have sex with them, then you shouldn’t have sex with them. Aeneas can’t be sure, so what he ought to say to Dido is that he needs to get to know her better before they enjoy each other in a more fleshy way.

If you want to explore these issues in more detail, check out an interactive activity I built a long time ago that deals with these themes.

Bertrand Russell tends to get short shrift around here, but there is something to be said for a balanced perspective, so let’s tell the story of how he managed to escape a sinking plane, which surely must show him in a good light. Except, now I've researched the story, I’m not sure it does show him in a good light. There’s just something a bit off about the way he talks about the incident in his autobiography. His tone, given the circumstances, is a tad too jolly. It could be a British stiff upper lip thing, I suppose, or maybe I’m just being overly precious, and there’s no problem. Let’s see what you think.

The incident itself was serious. On October 2nd, 1948, Russell was on board a flying boat on a journey from Oslo to Trondheim, when it was caught in a crosswind on landing, and crashed into a bay. Nineteen people were killed; Russell, seated in the smoking section near an exit, survived by swimming towards rescue boats.

This is how Russell described his rescue to a Sunday Dispatch reporter on the day after the disaster:

Like the others, I found myself in the water as the plane sank. And, like them, I had to swim until a number of boats put out and picked us up. I don’t suppose I was swimming for more than about a minute. For one who has been swimming regularly for about 70 years, it wasn’t much. I have not been injured at all. I thought for a while as I stood on the pier wrapped in blankets that I might be in for a cold. I was to have given a series of lectures to the Students’ Union tonight, and would have been quite fit and ready to do so. (Sunday Dispatch, October 3rd, 1948, p. 1)

Russell provides some additional details about the incident in his autobiography. I’ll quote at length because I want to make a point about it at the end.

When our plane touched down on the water it became obvious that something was amiss, but none of us in the plane knew what it was. We sat in the plane while it slowly sank. Small boats assembled round it and presently we were told to jump into the sea and swim to a boat – which all the people in my part of the plane did. We later learned that all the nineteen passengers in the non-smoking compartment had been killed. When the plane had hit the water a hole had been made in the plane and the water had rushed in. I had told a friend at Oslo who was finding me a place that he must find me a place where I could smoke, remarking jocularly, ‘If I cannot smoke, I shall die’. Unexpectedly, this turned out to be true. [...]

We were rowed to shore to a place some miles from Trondheim and thence I was taken in a car to my hotel. Everybody showed me the utmost kindness and put me to bed while my clothes dried. A group of students even dried my matches one by one. They asked if I wanted anything and I replied, ‘Yes, a strong dose of brandy and a large cup of coffee’. The doctor, who arrived soon after, said that this was quite the right reply…

I was astonished by the commotion caused by my part in this adventure. Every phase of it was exaggerated. I had swum about one hundred yards, but I could not persuade people that I had not swum miles. True, I had swum in my great-coat and lost my hat and thrown my attaché case into the sea. The latter was restored to me in the course of the afternoon – and is still in use – and the contents were dried out. When I returned to London the officials all smiled when they saw the marks of sea water on my passport. It had been in my attaché case, and I was glad to recover it. (Autobiography, Chapter 14: Return to England)

The point I want to make is that there is not a single expression of regret or sympathy for the 19 people who lost their lives. That’s odd, isn’t it? The only time he mentions the deaths of 19 people who were sitting only a compartment away is in the context of a jokey anecdote about how smoking saved his life (which he later repeated in a television interview).

The tone he takes suggests he considered the whole incident an entertaining adventure. His seeming complete emotional detachment from the deaths of his fellow passengers, the lack of any expression of regret or sympathy, the jaunty tone, the absence of even a smidgeon of survivor’s guilt, is suggestive of psychological oddness (even allowing for generational differences, and so on).

Maybe I’m reading this wrong, but I don’t think so. You’re in a plane crash, people die, surely you say just something to indicate that it was actually a tragedy? Not convinced? Well, I missed out this bit from Russell’s autobiography:

My lecture was cancelled as the man who had been intended to be the Chairman had been drowned. Students took me to a place in the nearby mountains where they had an establishment. In going and coming, they walked me about in the rain and I remarked that Trondheim was as wet out of the water as in it, a remark which seemed to please them. (Autobiography, Chapter 14: Return to England)

What do you think now?

As is well known, Arthur Schopenhauer once got himself into a spot of bother with a seamstress. Here’s how Bryan Magee describes what happened:

In the lodgings where Schopenhauer was staying in Berlin in 1821 the servant women working in the house were in the habit of congregating in the semi-private little hallway outside his rooms and holding conversations there… One day he asked a group of three chattering women to remove themselves. Two did, but the third refused. He became threatening. She obstinately refused to budge. He started pushing her, and a tussle ensued which ended with his throwing her down the stairs. She took him to court. He fought the case, and kept it going for nearly five years. In the end he was ordered to compensate her for her injuries by paying her 60 thalers a year for the rest of her life. (The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, pp. 12-13)

This story is mostly right, except Schopenhauer did not throw the woman–Caroline Marquet, a seamstress–down the stairs. This is a myth, but an oft repeated myth. Bertrand Russell, for example, makes exactly the same claim in A History of Western Philosophy, and in Schopenhauer: The Human Character, John Atwell lists the seamstress incident, including the fabrication that Marquet was pushed down the stairs, among the things that students most often think they know about Schopenhauer’s life.

So the interesting question is how did this myth get started? Let’s see if we can find out.

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The definitive early biography of Schopenhauer is Wilhelm Gwinner’s Arthur Schopenhauer: From Personal Acquaintance, published in 1862, only two years after the philosopher’s death. Unsurprisingly, given the author’s personal connection with Schopenhauer, the work is somewhat adulatory in tone, as is evidenced by the way it treats the Marquet incident.

In 1821…an acquaintance of his landlady had the habit of receiving coffee visits in his anteroom. He once roughly threw this person out of the door, whereupon she fell on her right arm and claimed to have become unable to work. It came to a lawsuit, which ended unfavourably for him as he had to support the old woman for life. Unfortunately, she possessed a tough constitution: even the Angel of Death of cholera wrestled with her in vain, and he bore the burden for over twenty years, until he could finally write on her death notice: “obit anus abit onus!” (pp. 62-63)

The less said about the last part, particularly the idea that it was “unfortunate” that Marquet survived cholera, the better, but the account of the incident itself is accurate (insofar as it goes)–and you’ll note that there is no mention of stairs. So far, so good.

The first significant English language biography of Schopenhauer, Arthur Schopenhauer: His Life and His Philosophy, authored by Helen Zimmern, appeared some fifteen years later in 1876. It was self-avowedly a modest endeavour, relying primarily upon Gwinner for its biographical material. Thus, its treatment of the Marquet incident echoes Gwinner’s:

He hated all disturbance, despised all gossip and needless chatter. With horror he discovered that an acquaintance of his landlady's was in the habit of holding coffee parties–peculiarly German feminine institutions, sacred to small-talk, backbiting, and all uncharitableness–in his anteroom, in the very precincts of the philosophic temple. In an excess of blind fury, he seized her roughly and threw her out of the door. She fell on her right arm, and was severely injured, so that she declared herself incapable of earning her livelihood. (pp. 141-42)

It’s the same story, obviously, though enlivened by the irony of an accusation of uncharitableness in the midst of a highly uncharitable description of German coffee parties. The important point is that there is still no mention of Marquet having been thrown down the stairs.

This is also true of William Wallace’s Life of Schopenhauer, first published in 1890, which also includes a few additional details about the incident, suggesting that he had consulted new sources, likely the submissions that were made to court. Here’s how he describes the events of August 12 1821:

He took her by the waist, hauled her out, throwing her things after her when she cried for them; and, when she, almost immediately, returned to fetch something she had still left, he again, but this time violently and using an offensive epithet, pushed her forth, so that she fell and made outcry enough to alarm the whole house. On the following day, the sempstress, Caroline Luise Marguet (sic), aged forty-seven, laid her complaint before the court, alleging, in addition to the above facts (which seem to have been practically admitted by Schopenhauer), that he had torn her cap, kicked and beaten her, and left on her person the marks of his violence. The offensive epithet alone he admitted to have been in fault: for the rest he held he had only defended his rights as a lodger. (p. 152)

This treatment of the incident, which includes most of the relevant details, is accurate, and, as we noted, there is no mention of stairs. However, by the 1890s, other accounts do mention Schopenhauer having thrown a woman down stairs in a fit of rage.

The earliest appearance of the “thrown down stairs” myth I've managed to locate is in an article by W. S. Lilly published in the May 1882 edition of The Nineteenth Century, an important UK literary journal. Here’s what he has to say:

In the pleasures of the senses he indulged freely. Wine, indeed, soon mounted to his head. He was obliged therefore to content himself with shallow potations. But he was a great eater, and, as Miss Zimmern euphemistically expresses it, “he was very susceptible to female charms,” with a preference, as that lady is obliging to note, for brown women. His landlady at Berlin, it may be assumed, either was not charming or was not brown, as he distinguished himself by kicking her downstairs with such violence as permanently to cripple her… (“The Goal of Modern Thought”, W. S. Lilly, The Nineteenth Century, p. 701)

He completely mangles the story, which is odd, because his main source seems to be Helen Zimmerm’s biography, which, as we have seen, gets the story right.

What happened next is significant. Within weeks, Lilly’s article was cited in The Saturday Review, an influential London weekly newspaper. The story stays mangled with the victim identified as Schopenhauer’s “unlucky landlady”:

…in a fit of anger, he kicked her downstairs and crippled her for life and was consequently sentenced by a court of law to maintain her; she revenged herself by living to old age, and he wrote on the certificate of her death, Obit anus, abit onus. (The Saturday Review, May 6, 1882)

By this point, the “thrown down stairs” myth has gained traction. W. S. Lilly repeats his original fabrication in a book length treatment of the conflict between religion and modernity (Ancient Religion and Modern Thought, 1884, p. 10). The Reverend Sterling Berry weaponises the fabrication in a work of Christian apologetics written in the last decade of the 19th century, dismissing Schopenhauer as:

A selfish cynic, who lived with no regard for the fulfilment of even the commonest duties; neglectful of his clever and charming mother; so devoid of humanity as to kick his landlady downstairs, thereby crippling her for life; his writings are at once the mirror of his own inner life and the fuel by which he fed the bitter spirit that possessed him. (The Problem of Human Suffering, p. 18)

So much for loving the sinner, and hating the sin. More to the point, it’s instructive that the language used here mirrors that used by Lilly: Schopenhauer kicked his landlady downstairs, thereby crippling her for life.

There’s also a passing reference to the incident in a book by George Herbert Perris on Tolstoy, published in 1898, which is worth noting because though it repeats the “thrown down stairs” fabrication, does at least get it right that the victim was a seamstress, not Schopenhauer’s landlady:

One wonders whether, and to what extent, his [Tolstoy’s] views of woman and sex-relations were affected by those of the philosopher who threw the seamstress downstairs. (Leo Tolstoy, The Grand Mujik, p. 65)

By the turn of the twentieth century the myth was well-established. It now crops up routinely as something that’s known anecdotally about Schopenhauer’s life. Here, for example, in The New Statesman in 1915:

The moral elevation and intellectual soundness of such passages may come as something of a surprise to those who associate Schopenhauer only or primarily with his cheaper, more violent essays, or with the anecdotes told of his life. Was it not he, for instance, who is recorded to have kicked his housekeeper downstairs (ex pede pessimism) and permanently injured her, so that he had to keep her for the rest of a tactlessly prolonged life… (November 6, 1915)

To which the appropriate response is–well yes, sort of, but you really shouldn’t believe everything you read.

It is perhaps worth concluding by noting Bertrand Russell’s version of the myth, which appeared in A History of Western Philosophy, written towards the end of the Second World War.

[Schopenhauer] habitually dined well, at a good restaurant; he had many trivial love-affairs, which were sensual but not passionate; he was exceedingly quarrelsome and unusually avaricious. On one occasion he was annoyed by an elderly seamstress who was talking to a friend outside the door of his apartment. He threw her downstairs, causing her permanent injury. She obtained a court order compelling him to pay her a certain sum (15 thalers) every quarter as long as she lived. When at last she died, after twenty years, he noted in his account-book: "Obit anus, abit onus." (p. 786)

It’s the same mix of fact and fiction. The seamstress wasn’t elderly, she was talking to two friends, not one friend, they were in the entrée to his apartment, not outside of it, and she wasn’t thrown downstairs. But she was hurt by Schopenhauer, and he was compelled to support her for the remainder of her life. The important point here, apart from the fact you shouldn’t trust Bertrand Russell’s popular writings, is that the runaway success of A History of Western Philosophy has inevitably solidified this myth in the public imagination.

In A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell states that Arthur Schopenhauer was once so annoyed by an elderly seamstress who was talking to a friend outside the door of his apartment, that “he threw her downstairs, causing her permanent injury.” (p. 786)

Bryan Magee repeats this story in his book on Schopenhauer’s philosophy:

One day he asked a group of three chattering women to remove themselves. Two did, but the third refused. He became threatening. She obstinately refused to budge. He started pushing her, and a tussle ensued which ended with his throwing her down the stairs. (The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, pp. 12-13)

Nothing surprising here, you might think, Schopenhauer was exactly the sort of disreputable fellow who would throw a defenceless woman down the stairs. Well maybe, but in fact he didn’t. In claiming otherwise, Russell and Magee played their part in disseminating and reinforcing a widely believed myth about Schopenhauer. Here’s what really happened between the philosopher and the seamstress.

On Sunday, August 12th, 1821, Schopenhauer returned to his apartment on Niederlagstrasse in Berlin to find its entrée inexplicably occupied by three chattering women. As per usual, he wasn’t in the best frame of mind, with professional and personal troubles weighing heavily. Moreover, just two weeks earlier he had complained to his landlady, widow Becker, about a previous intrusion, and she had promised it wouldn’t happen again. He was also expecting an imminent visit from Caroline Médon, a 19-year-old singer and actress with whom he had begun a relationship–the prospect of this being disrupted served only to increase his irritation.

Unable to contact his landlady, he confronted the three women himself, telling them they weren’t allowed to be in his space. Two of the three left, but the third woman, Caroline Louise Marquet, a 46-year-old seamstress who lived in a small chamber adjacent to Schopenhauer’s rooms, refused, telling Schopenhauer that she was “an honest person”. This did not go down well. Schopenhauer called her an “old wretch” and attempted to remove her physically.

Exactly what happened next is not definitively settled, with Schopenhauer and Marquet offering radically differing accounts.

Schopenhauer’s version–surprise, surprise–suggests restraint in the face of unreasonable intransigence. He tried to persuade her to leave, and it was only after she refused that he grabbed her around her torso and dragged her out of his entrée. He threw her belongings out after her, but she re-entered his apartment under the guise of looking for a missing trinket. Pushing and shoving ensued, and she fell, but he suggested she deliberately threw herself to the ground because she wasn’t getting her own way, and wanted to play the victim.

Marquet’s version paints a much more disturbing picture. She claims that Schopenhauer grabbed her by the neck and dragged her for about 9 feet to the entrée door, before slamming her against a hallway wall and holding her there for a moment. The second time he ejected her, he injured her abdomen and right-side by bending her backwards over a commode with such force she almost lost consciousness. She also alleges that he punched her, kicked her, bloodied her bonnet, and hurled derogatory epithets in her direction.

The day after the incident, Marquet filed a complaint against Schopenhauer, alleging assault. This was the start of a complex and lengthy legal process that ultimately went against Schopenhauer. The details of this process need not concern us here, suffice it to say that Marquet prevailed in both criminal and civil aspects (speaking loosely). On the criminal side of things, Schopenhauer was fined 20 thalers for causing minor injuries to his neighbour. The civil case for damages dragged on for nearly six years, before being settled in Marquet's favour in May 1827, with Schopenhauer compelled to pay most of the court costs, plus maintenance of 60 thalers a year until Marquet died or was able to resume her profession.

Schopenhauer’s biographers do not on the whole fill themselves with glory when discussing this incident. There’s often the suggestion lurking just below the surface that Marquet was on the make, exaggerating her injuries for financial gain. Most do not mention that Marquet’s account of the assault was at least partly corroborated by a witness–one of the other women present that evening. It is also worth noting that her injuries, as specified in her civil case against Schopenhauer, were significant, including right-side paralysis and urinary incontinence.

Frau Marquet died in1842, fifteen years after the final settlement. Schopenhauer’s reaction to her death was predictably graceless. Across her death certificate he scrawled, obit anus abit onus–the old woman has died, the burden has been lifted.

Further Reading

Schopenhauer: a biography, David E. Cartwright, CUP, 2010.

Die Schopenhauer-Marquet-Prozesse und das preußische Recht, Karlheinz Muscheler, Mohr Siebeck, 1996.

This is the final part of a three part series. First part is here. Second part, here.

Nathalie

Hazel Barnes raises the possibility that one reason for Beauvoir’s increasing disenchantment with Bianca Bienenfeld was the appearance of a new young woman on the scene. (Barnes, 1991, p. 22) The pattern will be familiar by now. Nathalie Sorokine, seventeen years old, a student of Russian descent, became infatuated with her glamorous philosophy teacher, and set out to cultivate a friendship with her. She’d “inadvertently” bump into Beauvoir on the Paris Métro, and then walk to the lycée with her, discussing philosophy. (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 347)

After Sorokine's success in her baccalaureate, Beauvoir supported her ambition to study at the Sorbonne by helping with tuition fees. As their relationship progressed, Beauvoir found herself increasingly drawn to the young Russian. By July 1939, their relationship had become physical, as indicated by a letter Beauvoir wrote to Sartre later that year:

Sorokine turned up and, as in the month of July, pulled me first onto the bed, then… into her arms and towards her mouth; finally, after about an hour, she even drew my hand to specific parts of her body. [October 11, 1939] (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 111)

Sorokine was sexually naive, and Beauvoir was reluctant to become involved in a full-blown physical affair, but not reluctant enough to keep Sorokine out of her bed. In fact, Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre towards the end of 1939 suggest a gradually deepening intimate relationship between Beauvoir and her young student.

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Unsurprisingly, some commentators have sought to downplay Beauvoir's active role in the relationship's development. Let’s take Kate Kirkpatrick’s account in her biography, Becoming Beauvoir, as illustrative of this tendency, and see if it stands up to scrutiny.

Kirkpatrick makes it seem almost as if Sorokine forced Beauvoir into a sexual relationship:

In December Beauvoir told Nathalie that it wouldn’t work for them to have a physical relationship. But then, on 14 December 1939, Sorokine tried to caress the clothed Beauvoir instead of working on Kant. That night she wrote to Sartre, ‘There is nothing to be done, she wants to sleep with me.’ She didn’t want to, she wrote in her diary, ‘but that’s what she really wanted – and the situation is disgusting and impossible’. (Kirkpatrick, 2019, p. 170)

Let’s look at what really happened.

The first point to make is that by December they were already in a physical relationship—if kisses, embraces, and hands being drawn to specific parts of Sorokine’s body, count as physical—and what Beauvoir actually reports saying to Sorokine is that the physical aspect wasn’t working out, so perhaps they’d better put a stop to it. Here’s the relevant passage in her December 14th letter to Sartre:

[S]he seized her notebook on Kant and said: ‘Let’s work, but let’s stay here.’ Then, five minutes later, she burst into tears: “We’re not working—I’ll never make any progress.’ I told her I wasn’t fooled. That it was these physical relations which made her edgy, and that in fact the whole thing was a mess and perhaps we’d better put an end to them. (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 211)

The statement that Sorokine tried to caress the clothed Beauvoir instead of working on Kant is similarly misleading. Here’s Beauvoir’s account of the incident:

We were supposed to work, but we began by tender embraces and when the hour to work came she still held me in her arms. Then, after five minutes, she said nervously: ‘I’d like us to either work or talk.’ I tried to stand up, but she clung to me and kissed me. It was more passionate than ever: she removed a pin from my blouse and a shoe from my foot, in a symbolic disrobing, and attempted clumsy caresses through my clothes. (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 211)

Technically, yes, Beauvoir was fully clothed, and Sorokine tried to caress her through clothing, but this wasn't some lecherous, unwelcome pawing, batted away by an outraged Beauvoir; it was in the context of kissing, tender embraces, and a symbolic disrobing. The word "attempted" surely references Sorokine's inexperience and hesitancy, rather than any rebuttal or rejection or failure to caress.

It is true that Beauvoir wrote in her diary that she didn’t want to sleep with Sorokine, but it’s not clear she meant that in a general sense, rather than just there and then. Here’s the relevant passage:

She threw herself into my arms saying… that she loved me in a physical way and that she did not want to feel ashamed about anything with me—I hesitated, I did not want to sleep with her, but that’s what she really wanted—and the situation is disgusting and impossible. (Beauvoir, 2009, p. 191)

The use of the past tense in the phrase, “I hesitated, I did not want to sleep with her”, at the very least leaves open the possibility that this lack of desire was only a temporary state, applying to that particular moment.

In fact, if one reads to the end of the letter Beauvoir sent Sartre on December 14th (the event we’re talking about actually occurred on December 13th, not the same day, as Kirkpatrick states), it’s pretty clear that by this point Beauvoir was enamoured with the young Russian, and more than happy to continue the relationship. In fact, she says as much herself:

I’ll have to sleep with her, there’s no help for it. I'm quite put out—and pretty well smitten—by this little personage. Well, so what? (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 212)

It’s no surprise then that about a month later, and not for the first time, she found herself in bed with Sorokine again. This time things went a lot further:

There were embraces—one-sided. Then she said we had to turn on the lights, so she could read me her diaries—and she read me some charming little passages on the education of her will. But we didn’t get far—having remained in bed and unclad and the embraces started up again, this time with reciprocity. It’s certainly not what it was with Kos. But I’ve a very keen taste for her body, and find these moments extremely pleasing. (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 255)

It’s absolutely clear that by this point Beauvoir was sexually involved with Sorokine, it’s not just kissing and cuddling. So how should we assess her actions in this case?

Well, assuming we take Beauvoir’s account, as related through her letters and diary, at face value, it is not obvious that she was perpetrating a horrible wrong in these interactions with Sorokine. There was certainly no coercion: Sorokine, by now eighteen years old, was clearly a willing participant in these exchanges. There was no significant deception: it's obvious from reading Beauvoir's letters that she was very taken with the young woman. There is no complicating Jean-Paul Sartre factor: he was absent from Paris at this time, and later on, Sorokine found it easy enough to dismiss his attentions. Sure, there is the modern worry about asymmetrical power, but it would be unreasonable to expect Beauvoir's attitudes towards consent to have been shaped by 21st-century moral imagination. In this case, unlike in the cases of Olga and Bienenfeld, Sorokine doesn't seem to have been sufficiently mesmerised by the milieu surrounding Beauvoir's celebrity such that one might reasonably expect Beauvoir to have considered that perhaps mesmerised snakes cannot consent properly (if, indeed, it is true that they cannot).

It is ironic, therefore, that it is in the case of Sorokine, rather than in either of the previous two cases, that Beauvoir got herself in trouble with the authorities.

The trouble started in December 1941, when Sorokine’s mother filed a complaint about Beauvoir with the Vichy ministry of education. Thanks to the work of Ingrid Galster we now know the details of this complaint. (Galster, 2001)

The origin of the complaint is a little murky, but it seems that a young man, a Monsieur Dupas, was, in one way or another, the catalyst. He had dated Sorokine for a year, and wanted to marry her, but Sorokine wasn’t interested, and decided to ditch him. According to Beauvoir, this angered Mme Sorokine, who considered Dupas to be an ideal suitor, so she asked Beauvoir to use her influence with her daughter to ensure the ill-suited couple stayed together. Beauvoir refused to get involved, and Mme Sorokine punished her for this refusal by reporting Beauvoir to the authorities for inciting a minor to debauchery.

Although Mme Sorokine’s complaint does not make explicit reference to Dupas, it seems very likely that the source of her information about Beauvoir’s relationship with her daughter was the jilted young man. The complaint alleges among other things that Beauvoir had, in effect, groomed her daughter for a sexual relationship, seduced her, and then behaved in such a way so as to ensure Sorokine’s material and psychological dependence. It also alleges that Beauvoir had hoped to procure a lover for Sartre by introducing him to Sorokine, and that these were events that had played out before with previous students, namely, Olga and Bienenfeld.

The authorities took these allegations seriously—rightly so, given the level of detail provided—and began an investigation, during which they interviewed Beauvoir, Sartre, Sorokine, Olga Kosakiewicz, Wanda Kosakiewicz (by this point, Sartre’s lover) and Jacques-Laurent Bost. Not a single person among Beauvoir’s immediate circle admitted that the allegations might be true. They all lied, to put it bluntly, presumably, given the apparent level of coordination, at the behest of Beauvoir and Sartre.

Sorokine stated that she was great friends with Beauvoir, but was “normal”, had never had sex with a woman, and the only reason Beauvoir spent a lot of time in her hotel room was because her own room was too cold. Yes, she had told her ex-boyfriend that she’d slept with Beauvoir, but only as a ruse to get him out of her life.

Sartre, for his part, confirmed that Beauvoir and Sorokine were friends, but denied that Beauvoir had ever had any sexual interest in women (a barefaced lie, obviously).

Olga Kosakiewicz confirmed that she had been a student of Beauvoir’s, with whom she continued to enjoy a warm friendship, but she denied that Beauvoir had ever shown any sexual interest in her. She was certainly not aware of any sexual contact between Beauvoir and Nathalie Sorokine. Similarly, Jacques-Laurent Bost denied that he had ever been Beauvoir’s lover—again, just a barefaced lie—and insisted that he knew nothing of any relations between Beauvoir and Sorokine.

Needless to say, Beauvoir also lied to the investigators, telling them that although Sorokine had developed heightened feelings for her teacher, she had never encouraged them, instead directing her towards “normal” sexual relations. She added that Mme Sorokine was obviously very angry about the situation with Monsieur Dupas, but as far as she was concerned she had done the right thing in advising Sorokine to break up with her now ex-boyfriend. She confirmed that she had been Sartre’s lover for six years, but outright lied when she said she had never been sexually intimate with Bost.

In the face of this pattern of denial and deception, it is not surprising that the inquiry found the accusation that Beauvoir had incited a minor to debauchery to have been not proven. Put simply, there wasn’t enough concrete evidence that Beauvoir had diverted Sorokine from a “normal” life, or that they were having sex with each other, for the inquiry to find in favour of the complainant.

However, this was not the end of the matter. At the beginning of April 1942, The Pétainist rector of the University of Paris, Gilbert Gidel, wrote to the Paris Academy recommending Beauvoir’s exclusion from the Academy’s roster of instructors. At a time when Vichy France was focused on rebuilding its “moral fabric”, he could not countenance the continued employment of a teacher who had lived as Sartre’s concubine for six years, who taught homosexual writers such as Proust and Gide, who resided in a hotel, and graded in Parisian cafés, and who was suspected of improper conduct with her female students. Just over a year later in June 1943, Beauvoir’s licence to teach was revoked, and although it was restored after liberation, she never taught again.

Conclusion

Simone de Beauvoir's complex and often problematic relationships with three of her young female students—Olga Kosakiewicz, Bianca Bienenfeld, and Nathalie Sorokine—reveal a stark contrast between her public reputation and private actions. In particular, her willingness to introduce these young women to Jean-Paul Sartre, in the full knowledge, surely, that he would attempt to seduce them, is deeply troubling. More broadly, the unequal power dynamics that characterised these relationships, together with her willingness to deceive lovers, friends and the authorities, often at the whim of a man she considered essential, represent a significant challenge to her standing as a feminist icon. Is there anything that can be said in her defence or is her legacy inevitably tarnished by the way she conducted her private affairs?

In an article written in the immediate aftermath of the publication of Beauvoir’s letters and wartime diary, Deirdre Bair, Beauvoir’s biographer, conceded that Beauvoir systematically ignored all the principles of equality that she had championed, but insisted we shouldn’t judge her too harshly for what were effectively private choices. She flagged up what she considered to be a double-standard in the way that men and women are treated:

We don't impose… [a] standard of perfection upon male writers; we don't discredit their work when we learn how reprehensible or disappointing their lives may have been. No one has suggested, for example, that we reject the existential philosophy of Sartre because of his notorious womanising or his self-serving behaviour during World War II, but they do seem to believe we should reject de Beauvoir's because she went along with it. (Bair, 1990, p. 32)

She has got a point, of course, and it bears fleshing out just a little. There is the danger that we’ll judge Beauvoir more harshly than we would a man given identical circumstances just because Beauvoir is a woman. To borrow some terminology from the sociology of crime, in the terms of patriarchal norms, Beauvoir is doubly deviant: she’s not only sleeping with her students, she’s a woman sleeping with her female students (so maybe, triply deviant), and women just shouldn’t do that sort of thing.

It’s worth emphasising, therefore, that Sartre is every bit as culpable as Beauvoir in these events. The focus here has been Beauvoir, but it could just have easily been Sartre, and all the problematic elements would have remained in place, even if they had differed in their specifics.

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But there is something not quite right with Bair’s defence of Beauvoir. Sartre’s reputation doesn’t rely upon the contribution he made to feminist theory. Yes, he’s sleazy, but he hasn’t made his name as an opponent of sleaziness. A more apt comparison would be discovering that Mahatma Gandhi regularly engaged in bar brawls. Such a revelation would undoubtedly tarnish his legacy as a pacifist icon.

Crucially, though, it wouldn’t touch the arguments Gandhi made for pacifism. Those remain in place, and stand or fall on their own terms, regardless of whether or not he was able to live up to them. The failure of a writer to match up to their own standards might lead us to question whether those standards are realistic, but the issue of empirical warrant will never be settled on the basis of the life of a single person.

The same principle applies to Simone de Beauvoir's legacy. Her personal life was undeniably flawed— perhaps irreparably damaging our view of her personal ethics—but the merit of her seminal work, The Second Sex, is orthogonal to the question of her individual failings. Its enduring value lies not in the perfection of its author, but in its message of female emancipation, the novelty of its arguments, and its lasting impact on feminist theory and women's lives globally. Beauvoir’s personal failings are a legitimate topic of conversation, especially given how she put her own life at the forefront of her literary output. Her failings undoubtedly complicate our view of her as an individual and diminish her standing as a feminist icon, but they do not undermine the significance of her ideas and intellectual contribution to the feminist cause.

References

Bair, D. (1990, November 18). Do as she said, not as she did. The New York Times Magazine, 32.

Barnes, H. E. (1991). Simone de Beauvoir's journal and letters: A poisoned gift? Simone de Beauvoir Studies, 8(1), 13-29. 10.1163/25897616-00801003

Blair, D. (1990). Simone de Beauvoir: A biography. Simon & Schuster.

Contat, M. (2006). Sartre and his other women. Journal of Romance Studies, 6(1-2), 115-124.

Beauvoir, S. (1965). The Prime of Life. Penguin Books.

Beauvoir, S. (1992). Letters to Sartre. Arcade Publishing.

Beauvoir, S. (2009). Wartime Diary. University of Illinois Press.

Beauvoir, S. (2011). The Second Sex. Vintage Books.

Francis, C., & Gontier, F. (1987). Simone de Beauvoir : a life, a love story. St. Martin's Press.

Galster, I. (2001). Beauvoir est exclue de l'université retour sur une affaire classée. Contemporary French Civilization, 25(1), 109-130.

Joseph, G. (1991). Une si douce Occupation: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1940-1944. A. Michel.

Kirkpatrick, K. (2019). Becoming Beauvoir: A Life. Bloomsbury Academic.

Klaw, B. (1999-2000). Simone de Beauvoir and the other woman: A philosophy of the jealous. Simone de Beauvoir Studies, 16(1), 20-32.

Lamblin, B. (1996). Disgraceful Affair. Northeastern University Press.

Lamblin, B. (1998-1999). A disgraceful triangle. Simone de Beauvoir Studies, 15(1), 145-155.

Rowley, H. (2007). Tete-a-Tete: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Vintage Books.

Sartre, J.-P. (1992). Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1926-1939 (S. d. Beauvoir, Ed.). Scribner's.

This is the second part of a three part series. Part 1 is here.

Bianca

Bianca Bienenfeld was sixteen, a pupil at Lycée Molière, when she first met Simone de Beauvoir, newly appointed to teach the baccalaureate philosophy class. Bienenfeld was mesmerised by her beautiful young teacher, so different from the “boring old man” teaching next door.

The whole package came as a revelation to me. She knew so much about subjects that were so rich and so new to us; her lectures were lively, clear, and well structured… she had everything stored in her mind, in perfect order. (Lamblin, 1996, p. 16)

In early spring 1938, Bienenfeld wrote a note to Beauvoir expressing her admiration. She received an immediate response inviting her to meet. Very soon, Bienenfeld was “floating on a cloud of happiness”, meeting her teacher almost every Sunday morning to stroll around Paris. Her attachment to Beauvoir grew over the next few months, and after she graduated, Beauvoir invited her on a short backpacking trip to Burgundy. Bienenfeld, writing as Bianca Lamblin, reports in her memoir that it was during this trip that she began a sexual relationship with Beauvoir (Lamblin, 1996, p. 31). She was seventeen years old.

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By the time 1938 drew to a close, Beauvoir and Bienenfeld were enmeshed in a full-blown love affair (complicated by the fact that Beauvoir was also smitten with Jacques-Laurent Bost, who was himself in a relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz). It was at this point that Sartre inserted himself into the proceedings (Bienenfeld has subsequently suggested that Beauvoir deliberately encouraged her affair with Sartre in order to exert some kind of control over his sexual liaisons). Beauvoir had suggested to Bienenfeld that she should join the essential two for a bit of skiing over the Christmas vacation. The trip went well, and Bienenfeld enjoyed New Year’s Eve with Beauvoir and Sartre, spending the night in their bathtub.

Bienenfeld reports in her memoir that this marked the beginning of Sartre’s romantic pursuit of her. During the winter and spring of 1939, they met in cafés and went out on their own together. She was attracted by his intelligence and charm, writing in her memoir that he was “the master of the language of love” (Lamblin, 1996, p. 39). Sartre soon declared his love, and, despite Bienenfeld’s ambivalence, talk quickly turned to the circumstances in which they would consummate their relationship.

The whole thing turned out to be a disaster. Sartre began the proceedings by announcing that he’d taken another girl’s virginity in the same hotel room the day before. He then undressed in front of Bienenfeld, and washed his feet in the bathroom sink. He refused to draw the curtains when asked, and then mocked Bienenfeld for her shyness. After this display of boorishness, it is entirely unsurprising that Bienenfeld was unable to go through with the act, though she does note in her memoir that he “achieved his goal” in the days that followed. (see Lamblin, 1996, pp. 42-3)

So where was Simone de Beauvoir in all this? In fact, this period marked the beginning of the souring of Beauvoir’s relationship with Bienenfeld. It seems absolutely clear that jealousy lay at the heart of this cooling off. The evidence is in the letters that Beauvoir wrote to Sartre during this period, which show Beauvoir making a concerted effort, disguised as adherence to their pact of total transparency, to undermine Bienenfeld. The four examples that follow are representative:

I don’t know why, I’m cold. Perhaps it’s the fact of having got on so well with Kos.—that always harms Bienenfeld. Perhaps, too, I was expecting something more solid, but find just a little girl, rather lost, too pathetic, and disordered in her thoughts. [September 21, 1939] (Beauvoir, 1992, pp. 73-4)

She practises mental and manual masturbation all day long, and I explained to her that the latter may be all very well, but the former’s disastrous. I worked away assiduously to persuade her as far as possible to accept a life without us, instead of rejecting it… If she comes back to Paris, it will be a real little cataclysm—a disaster for me. [November 10, 1939] (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 156)

I’m finding Bienenfeld indescribably burdensome, to the point where a shiver of annoyance sometimes escapes me, or there’s a nuance in my voice, which then require explanations and correctives. [November 11, 1939] (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 157)

We went upstairs, we went to bed, and she stripped naked saying: ‘I find it ridiculous, putting on a nightie just to take it off again.’ I can’t convey to you the reasonable, sedate quality which this little phrase, uttered in this way, imparted to our transports of passion. It reduced me to a state of bleak frigidity—and frigidity gave way to hatred. It was the first time I’d ever felt that: a real hatred of sleeping with a woman I don’t love. I articulated it to myself even as she was marvelling at the tender expression on my face. She’s all nervous explosions, and the more passion she puts into them the more nervous and clumsy her caresses become. And I was enduring that clumsiness of hers with malicious irony—it couldn’t have been more disagreeable. [December 22, 1939] (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 226)

It is these passages, and others like them, in Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre that provoked the most consternation among reviewers and commentators when the letters were published in the early-1990s. It is important to keep in mind the broader context here.

The age difference was large. Bianca Bienenfeld was only eighteen years old when these letters were written, Beauvoir was thirty-one, and Sartre was thirty-four, almost twice her age.

Moreover, Beauvoir was still sexually active with Bienenfeld at this point. Indeed, earlier in the November 10 letter, cited above, she had this to say:

We had a passionate night—the strength of that girl’s passion is incredible. Sensually I was more involved than usual, with the vague, lousy idea (I think) that I should at least ‘take advantage’ of her body. (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 155)

Needless to say, Bienenfeld had absolutely no idea that Beauvoir and Sartre were writing disparagingly about her in their personal correspondence. In fact, she was devastated when she found out fifty years later with the publication of Letters to Sartre. She had believed until then that Beauvoir had been a friend and ally, but this turned out not to be the case.

A number of defences have been offered for Beauvoir’s behaviour in these years. Let’s consider one of these in relation to Beauvoir’s treatment of Bienenfeld.

In his introduction to Letters to Sartre, Quintin Hoare makes this argument:

[I]t is precisely this blazing, disconcerting truthfulness that forms the bedrock of De Beauvoir’s lifelong passionate relationship with Sartre, giving it its radical edge… Love and ethics themselves were being redefined, not just mores. (Beauvoir, 1992, p. IX)

The first point to make here is the obvious one that there is nothing unusual, or radical, or noble, about a thirty-something man pursuing much younger women for sex. You can dress it up in philosophical finery, tell yourself that you’re forging a new kind of ethics, and it’ll still be the age old story of an older man hitting on women much younger than himself, and hoping he gets lucky.

But, even if this were not true, there is naivety in the suggestion that “truthfulness” is deployed in these exchanges to further the end of a radical ethics. A much more plausible account is that this is truth-telling as a romantic cudgel designed to bring down a love rival. Hazel Barnes, perhaps best known for translating Sartre’s magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, has noted that Beauvoir was a little reticent in providing details about her sexual encounters, arguing that this shows the letters weren’t intended to titillate (Barnes, it must be said, underestimates the ease with which some men can be titillated) (Barnes, 1991, p. 14). There is something to this point, which rather belies the injunction to “tell everything”, but, significantly, Beauvoir seems to have had no such qualms in providing exactly the right sort of detail about her relationship with Bienenfeld to damage her rival in the eyes of Sartre.

Beauvoir knew perfectly well that “telling the truth” could be deployed tactically in order to further some possibly disreputable goal. She made the point herself when discussing her pact with Sartre in The Prime of Life:

Frank speaking is not only, very often, a means of communication but of action too: it isn’t playing fair if, while pretending that no pressure is being brought to bear, you bludgeon someone with an indiscreet truth. (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 24)

Well quite.

There seems to be a suggestion lurking in Hoare’s apologetics that Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s commitment to radical transparency functions as a moral get out of jail free card. But, of course, it doesn’t. You don’t escape your obligations to other people just because you’ve got a special pact with your essential person. Probably it’s true that Bienenfeld must have known that she couldn’t expect normal levels of privacy from Beauvoir and Sartre, but she assuredly did not know that she was being disparaged in such offensively personal terms by somebody whom she loved, and whose good faith she was justified in assuming.

Some might think that Bienenfeld was expecting too much from Beauvoir and Sartre, that she must have known she’d always be merely an addition to an established dyad, contingent rather than essential. Certainly, Beauvoir became increasingly irritated that Bienenfeld expected to be treated as an equal in the relationship between the three of them. Hence in one of her letters to Sartre, she told him all about what she called “a big scene”.

We left the Dome, and she began to reproach me for not wanting to leave you to her for 6 days during your leave. Flushing with anger, I told her I couldn’t understand how she envisaged our relations; that she seemed to see the threesome as an exact tripartite division, which astonished me. [November 12, 1939] (Beauvoir, 1992, pp. 59-60)

The trouble is Bienenfeld was eighteen years old, and getting mixed messages from the two of them. In fact, the same letter that describes the fight over access to Sartre is an object lesson in how to muddy waters, with Beauvoir revealing that she had told Bienenfeld that:

1. They were a threesome, with Beauvoir and Sartre forming the base and Bienenfeld as the "projecting point."

2. Beauvoir loved Bienenfeld as much as Sartre, though she needed Sartre more.

3. Sartre loved both women equally.

There is also evidence in Sartre’s letters to Bienenfeld, published as Witness to My Life, that he was spinning the same line that she was more than merely contingent to them. The two excerpts below are typical of the flavour of his letters to her:

My love, I don’t quite know what to tell you about the Beaver’s [Beauvoir] departure. But there is one thing I do know well, in any case, that our future is your future; there is no difference—and that the Beaver lives in a world in which you are everywhere and always present. [July 1939] (Sartre, 1992, p. 190)

Now listen, I will come back to you. I’m in no danger, I’m the faithful type, and you’ll find me again when the time comes… Nothing can change us, my love, neither you, nor the Beaver, nor I. This is a wretched moment in our lives, but it isn’t the end of our lives. There will be a peace and an afterward. [September 2, 1939] (Sartre, 1992, p. 226)

Given this context, it is not surprising that Bienenfeld believed she was an integral part of a triad, not a contingent other to be discarded on a whim. Hence it was a profound shock to her when she received a “brutal letter” out of the blue from Sartre in February 1940 telling her that the relationship was over:

…it was totally unexpected; all the preceding letters had been warm, loving, romantic. Nothing that had occurred between us could have allowed me to predict such a sudden rupture. I was deeply bewildered, unable to understand… I wondered what to make of all the love letters I had received week after week, one of them just three days earlier, if love could dissolve in an instant like a bad dream. I understood that the feelings Sartre claimed to have had for me were nothing but empty words, a pathetic act. (Lamblin, 1996, pp. 66-7)

Not coincidentally, this rupture marked the beginning of the end of Bienenfeld’s relationship with Beauvoir. The final break occurred just over six months later after the pair took what turned out to be a farewell bike trip visiting churches and chateaux in the Morbihan. After their return to Paris, Beauvoir informed Bienenfeld that she would not be able to see her as often as before, and confessed that she was having an “idyll” with Jacques-Laurent Bost (known to them as “Little Bost”). Bienenfeld was distraught:

Suddenly I was suffocating, sinking… I felt abandoned, humiliated for the second time in a year, torn apart, deserted. The entire marvellous adventure, that attractive three-part structure, collapsed like a house of cards. (Lamblin, 1996, p. 89)

There is little to be said in defence of either Beauvoir or Sartre for their dealings with Bianca Bienenfeld. Perhaps charitably one could point out that Beauvoir did at times show a glimmer of insight into the terrible harm they had inflicted upon the young woman. In one letter, written in the immediate aftermath of Sartre’s brutal dismissal of Bienenfeld, she states quite explicitly that the amount of suffering they had caused was unacceptable (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 285). In another letter, written much later, after she’d reconnected with Bienenfeld at the end of WW2, she has this to say:

I’m upset about Bianca Bienenfeld… she’s suffering from an intense and dreadful attack of neurasthenia, and it’s our fault I think. It’s the very indirect, but profound, after-shock of the business between her and us. She’s the only person to whom we’ve really done harm, but we have harmed her… It’s important to see a lot of her, and I’m going to try because I’m filled with remorse. (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 390)

To which, the obvious thing to say is that remorse is the only appropriate response given the series of events we’ve outlined here.

However, there is a question mark about whether Beauvoir is a reliable narrator even when it comes to her own thoughts and emotions. The fact is that Beauvoir lied—a lot. In fact, she was an inveterate liar, especially if one includes lies of omission in the mix. The big lies we already know about. Beauvoir consistently failed to tell the truth about her sexuality, and her relationships with various young women, right until the end of her life. She also lied endlessly to her friends and lovers: she lied to Olga about her love affairs with Bienenfeld and Little Bost; she lied to Bienenfeld about Little Bost, and, perhaps more significantly, about the real nature of her feelings towards Bienenfeld (including, with malicious enjoyment, within the context of sexual intimacy); she lied to the parents of her young female companions; and, even at times, she lied to the authorities (as we’ll see tomorrow).

It is also trivially easy to identify, within the pages of her memoirs and letters, other less serious instances where she failed to tell the truth. For example, just in the time period we’ve been dealing with: she managed to obtain a doctor’s note under a false pretext to allow her to take two weeks off from teaching so she could visit Sartre in Berlin (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 185); she lied to a couple of soldiers, and also to their commanding officer, in an attempt to disguise the fact she was staying in a hotel room with Little Bost (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 299); she plotted to have secret meetings with Sartre so she could spend more time alone with him (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 289); she got herself into a muddle because she’d told friends she was visiting her sister, and then bumped into them, while out with a male friend (Beauvoir, 1965, pp. 160-61); and, during the occupation of Paris, she happily accepted a bicycle as a gift, knowing perfectly well that it had been stolen (Bair, 1990, p. 239).

The point here isn’t that Beauvoir was more untruthful than average, or even that the lies were not on occasion justified, but rather that to the extent that she practised “radical transparency”, it was of an extremely limited kind. She might have consistently told a version of the truth to Jean-Paul Sartre, but she certainly didn’t do so writ large. This fact is thrown into sharp relief in her dealings with the third student with whom she became romantically involved, Nathalie Sorokine.

The final part of this three part series is here.

References

Bair, D. (1990, November 18). Do as she said, not as she did. The New York Times Magazine, 32.

Barnes, H. E. (1991). Simone de Beauvoir's journal and letters: A poisoned gift? Simone de Beauvoir Studies, 8(1), 13-29. 10.1163/25897616-00801003

Blair, D. (1990). Simone de Beauvoir: A biography. Simon & Schuster.

Contat, M. (2006). Sartre and his other women. Journal of Romance Studies, 6(1-2), 115-124.

de Beauvoir, S. (1965). The Prime of Life. Penguin Books.

de Beauvoir, S. (1992). Letters to Sartre. Arcade Publishing.

de Beauvoir, S. (2009). Wartime Diary. University of Illinois Press.

de Beauvoir, S. (2011). The Second Sex. Vintage Books.

Francis, C., & Gontier, F. (1987). Simone de Beauvoir : a life, a love story. St. Martin's Press.

Galster, I. (2001). Beauvoir est exclue de l'université retour sur une affaire classée. Contemporary French Civilization, 25(1), 109-130.

Joseph, G. (1991). Une si douce Occupation: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1940-1944. A. Michel.

Kirkpatrick, K. (2019). Becoming Beauvoir: A Life. Bloomsbury Academic.

Klaw, B. (1999-2000). Simone de Beauvoir and the other woman: A philosophy of the jealous. Simone de Beauvoir Studies, 16(1), 20-32.

Lamblin, B. (1996). Disgraceful Affair. Northeastern University Press.

Lamblin, B. (1998-1999). A disgraceful triangle. Simone de Beauvoir Studies, 15(1), 145-155.

Rowley, H. (2007). Tete-a-Tete: The Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Vintage Books.

Sartre, J.-P. (1992). Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1926-1939 (S. d. Beauvoir, Ed.). Scribner's.

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Early in January 1940, Simone de Beauvoir wrote a letter to Jean-Paul Sartre that mentioned a sexual encounter she had had the previous day. She told Sartre she had not enjoyed the experience:

Yesterday at 11 we went home to Bienenfeld’s place. Embraces. If I’m to tell you everything, in addition to the rufous odour of her body she had a pungent fecal odour which made things pretty unpleasant. So far as friendship with her goes, no problem—but our physical relations couldn’t be more distasteful to me. (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 252)

If you are discomforted by this passage, you’re not alone. It appears in correspondence that formed part of a collection of letters from Beauvoir to Sartre first published, along with her wartime journal, in 1990. The revelations contained within sent shockwaves through the worlds of Beauvoir scholarship and academic feminism. Her letters and journal showed Beauvoir in thrall to Sartre, whom she revered as a genius, consistently prioritising his needs and wants above her own. Her biographer, Deirdre Bair, had this to say about the revelations:

I can understand the feeling of betrayal, the pain…women felt when they learned how de Beauvoir, throughout the more than 50 years they were together, put all her needs, goals and desires second to Sartre's every impulse, how she evaded hard truths about herself like her bisexuality or the sad realities of much of her daily life, continually running errands for Sartre. (Bair, 1990, p. 32)

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the disclosures was the sexual affairs Beauvoir had with three young women, all at one time her students, and the possibility that at least part of her motive in cultivating these liaisons was to enable Sartre to pursue his own affairs with the same women. To put it crudely, there is the suspicion that Beauvoir was pimping for Jean-Paul Sartre. (This claim has been made by Bianca Lamblin, Nelson Algren and Mme Nathalie Sorokine.)

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The Pact

To understand what’s going on here, you’ve got to know about the pact the two philosophers established in 1929, largely at Sartre’s behest, that provided the ground rules that underpinned their relationship for more than forty years. We know about this pact, because Beauvoir talked about it—a lot.

It had two main features. The first was a distinction between essential and contingent loves. Here’s how Beauvoir describes this aspect:

[Sartre] explained the matter to me in his favourite terminology. “What we have”, he said, “is an essential love; but it is a good idea for us also to experience contingent love affairs.” We were two of a kind, and our relationship would endure as long as we did: but it could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches to be had from encounters with different people. (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 22)

Happily, though, while Sartre sounds like every man trying to sell the advantages of polyamory to a reluctant partner, this isn’t what is going on here (supposedly):

We would never become strangers to one another, and neither would appeal for the other's help in vain; nothing would prevail against this alliance of ours… I did feel a flicker of fear, though I regarded it as mere weakness and made myself subdue it. (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 23)

The second part of the pact had to do with honesty and transparency. Never lie and tell each other everything:

I was used to some reserve, and at first this rule of ours embarrassed me. But I soon came to realise its advantages. I no longer needed to worry about myself: all my actions were subjected to a kindly enough scrutiny, but with far greater impartiality than I could have achieved myself. (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 23)

So what to make of all this? In intellectual and leftist circles, Beauvoir’s and Sartre's relationship was for a long time seen as a model of freedom and authenticity. Certainly, their rejection of the values of traditional marriage was unusual and radical at the time. However, it was not a relationship of equal partners—in the words of Michel Contat, Sartre was the prince royal, Beauvoir was merely his consort. (Contat, 2006, p. 117)

Sartre was the first of the two of them to make use of the sexual freedom that was on offer. Quelle surprise. Although his attempt to seduce the bored wife of a colleague was apparently not wildly successful, it did set the tone for the remainder of their relationship. This dynamic would soon evolve into a more complex web of liaisons, with Beauvoir herself taking an active role. The most notable of these entanglements involved three of Beauvoir's former students—Olga Kosakiewicz, Bianca Bienenfeld and Nathalie Sorokine. These relationships would not only test the integrity of their “eternal alliance”, but also come to raise troubling questions about power, consent and exploitation.

Olga

Olga Kosakiewicz, a seventeen-year-old White Russian émigrée, developed a schoolgirl crush on her teacher after Beauvoir praised her work in class. Olga pursued a friendship with Beauvoir, which began in earnest when Beauvoir suggested meeting outside of class. In Beauvoir’s eyes, Olga was “still a child” (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 224), but despite the nine years between them their friendship blossomed, with Olga’s feelings quickly reaching “a burning intensity” (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 217). Beauvoir’s feelings were also strong, and it wasn’t too long before Beauvoir introduced Olga to Sartre, a fateful decision that had predictable consequences.

At first, the three of them got along well together, but, as time went on, Sartre became infatuated with the young Russian girl:

My passion for her burned my humdrum impurities like the flame of a bunsen burner. I became scrawny like a cuckoo; farewell my creature comforts. (Francis & Gontier, 1987, p. 147)

This made for a very complex situation. Beauvoir and Sartre began to see themselves as part of a trio. They arranged their time equitably so they all got one-on-one time with each other, and also scheduled “plenary sessions” where they would be together as a three. However, the “splendid edifice” they had built didn’t really make anybody happy. Beauvoir was uneasy from the start, primarily because she could never love Olga in the way she loved Sartre or the way that Sartre loved Olga.

Sartre, for his part, became irrationally consumed with jealousy. He began to scrutinise Olga’s behaviour for signs that he had fallen out of favour, and would enlist Beauvoir in forensic analyses of Olga’s every word and gesture. Obviously, this didn’t best please Beauvoir, who came to the realisation that Olga inspired feelings in Sartre that she was incapable of inspiring. This was a significant blow to Beauvoir’s emotional equilibrium, producing an agony that “went far beyond mere jealousy” and leading her to ask whether the whole of her happiness rested on a “gigantic lie” (Beauvoir, 1965, p. 261).

Olga, of course, was in an impossible position. She was fond of Sartre, thought he had something of the mediaeval knight about him, but didn’t want to pursue a physical relationship, which provoked frustration and jealousy in him. At the same time, she worried that if she provoked a confrontation with Sartre, it might jeopardise Beauvoir’s feelings for her. Plus, she was financially dependent on them both, so couldn’t just up and leave. Thus, in Beauvoir’s words, the three of them found themselves being led a merry dance by this “quietly infernal machine” they had set in motion.

But this is rather disingenuous. The responsibility for the mess lies squarely with Beauvoir and Sartre, not with Olga. She was a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl with a crush. They were much older, glamorous, already well-known, and well-connected socially. What did they expect to happen if they brought Olga into their relationship? Also, the power dynamic was inequitable, as Beauvior knew perfectly well:

Though we valued her youth more highly than our own experience, her role was, nevertheless, that of a child—a child up against an adult couple united by unfailing emotional bonds. However devotedly we consulted her interests, it was we who controlled the destiny of the trio. We had not established any real equality in our relationship with her, but had rather annexed her to ourselves. (Bair, 1990, p. 194)

Olga also understood, or came to understand, how the relationship was founded on unequal power, stating later in an interview that the contingent loves were like mesmerised snakes: “We did what they wanted because no matter what, we were so thrilled by their attention, so privileged to have it (Bair, 1990, p. 200).”

There is one further dimension to the relationship that is morally relevant here. In her 1990 biography, Deirdre Bair mentions the close physical friendship between Beauvoir and Olga, but notes that both women insisted that it was never sexual. However, the publication of Beauvoir’s letters and diary in the same year, provided a strong indication that this simply isn’t true. For example, in one journal entry, Beauvoir compares the sexual performance of women unfavourably with that of men, and lists Olga among her disappointments (Beauvoir, 2009, p. 200); in a letter to Sartre, she relates telling Nathalie Sorokine (more of whom later) that she had previously had sexual relations with Olga (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 212); and in another letter, she states that having sex with Sorokine was not like it was with Olga (Beauvoir, 1992, p. 255).

By today’s standards, the ethics of this situation appear suspect. There is nothing in the letters or diary to suggest that either Beauvoir or Sartre paid any regard to the modern worry—justified or not—that the freedom to consent is undermined in situations of gross power imbalance. Nor is there anything to suggest that Beauvoir was troubled by the fact that the recent origins of what we now know was sometimes a sexual relationship lay in the classroom.

However, something does need to be said here in defence of Beauvoir. There were genuine affectional ties between Beauvoir and Olga that survived the breakdown of their ill-fated experiment in polyamory, and their friendship continued well into the 1970s. During the years of WW2, in particular, they were very close, and, according to Beauvoir, came to depend upon each other in many different ways (see Bair, 1990, p. 231). Thus, although Sartre's two-year obsession with Olga undoubtedly caused Olga distress, as corroborated by a contemporaneous observer (see Bair, 1990, p. 194), the long-term impact of these early experiences remains ambiguous. Olga’s enduring friendship with Beauvoir suggests that, at least in the medium term, the consequences of this tumultuous period were not uniformly bad.

However, not all of Beauvoir's student entanglements ended quite so propitiously. The case of Bianca Bienenfeld, the second of the three students with whom Simone de Beauvoir became involved, presents a far more troubling narrative.

Part 2 is here.

References

Blair, D. (1990). Simone de Beauvoir: A biography. Simon & Schuster.

Contat, M. (2006). Sartre and his other women. Journal of Romance Studies, 6(1-2), 115-124.

Beauvoir, S. (1965). The Prime of Life. Penguin Books.

Beauvoir, S. (1992). Letters to Sartre. Arcade Publishing.

Beauvoir, S. (2009). Wartime Diary. University of Illinois Press.

Beauvoir, S. (2011). The Second Sex. Vintage Books.

Francis, C., & Gontier, F. (1987). Simone de Beauvoir : a life, a love story. St. Martin's Press.

On October 29th 1772, after spending the evening drinking wine and writing letters, Wilhelm Jerusalem, still only in his twenties, put a gun to his own head and pulled the trigger. He was not killed instantly, but was able to drag himself across the floor of his study before collapsing unconscious next to a window, where he was found the following morning by a servant.

He survived only a few more hours, and was buried later that day. Jerusalem was driven to suicide by his love for Elizabeth Herd, a married woman. She had rejected his advances and asked her husband to ensure that he did not trouble her again. An ugly confrontation followed, which left Jerusalem a broken man. An acquaintance later wrote of his death that it "was loneliness…that ate away his heart".

These events would not warrant even a footnote in the annals of doomed love were it not for the fact that the acquaintance was Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who at this time was also suffering the pangs of unrequited love.

He had met and fallen in love with Charlotte Buff in the early summer of that same year, while living in the small German town of Wetzlar. "Lotte" was nineteen years old, attractive, funny and vivacious, but already engaged to another man, Christian Kestner. Goethe befriended them both, and spent what he later described as an idyllic summer in their company. However, when he eventually declared his feelings to Lotte, she made it clear that there could never be anything more than friendship between them.

Goethe responded to this setback by leaving unannounced for Koblenz, writing to Lotte: "I am alone now, and may shed my tears. I leave you both to your happiness, and will not be gone from your hearts".

In fact, he was hardly gone at all, maintaining a correspondence with them both over the next few months. In this way, he came to learn of the suicide of Jerusalem, whom he had met occasionally during his summer in Wetzlar, and was immediately struck by the similarity of their two situations. He returned briefly to the town, and with the help of Kestner was able to piece together the circumstances that led to Jerusalem's death.

We know all this because Goethe drew upon his love for Lotte, and the suicide of Jerusalem, as the inspiration for The Sorrows of Young Werther, literature's exemplary treatment of the pain and perils of doomed love.

Partly autobiographical, partly biographical, the novel tells the story of Werther's descent into despair, and his eventual suicide, as he realises that there is no escape from the torment engendered by his one-sided passion for a sweet-natured, but unattainable, young woman. In the first half of the book, Werther is Goethe, in the second half, he is Jerusalem, and the young woman, of course, is Lotte.

The novel was an instant success, establishing Goethe's international reputation. The fact that its origins lay in real-life events quickly became the catalyst for the emergence of a Werther cult. The young men of Germany began to imitate Werther's style of dress: blue frockcoat, yellow waistcoat and breeches. There were plays, poems and paintings inspired by the romantic hero, and even pilgrimages to the grave of Wilhelm Jerusalem, where flowers were left and speeches given.

It is also said that the novel inspired an epidemic of copycat suicides amongst the lovelorn youth of Europe, and while there isn't a lot of evidence to support this contention, it is certainly true that worries about this darker aspect of Werther fever led to the book being banned in Denmark, Italy and parts of Germany.

A. J. Ayer popping up in the sports pages of the Sun newspaper more than thirty years after his death is not something that many people would have predicted. At least, not before the publication of Ben Rogers’s biography of Ayer – A. J. Ayer: A Life – in 1999, which contained a story that for a while dominated the publicity for the book. The story’s cast of characters is a headline writer’s dream: Freddie Ayer, Mike Tyson and Naomi Campbell. Its setting is a party thrown by clothes designer Fernando Sanchez in his Manhattan apartment. Here’s how Rogers tells the story:

Ayer was… chatting to a group of young models and designers, when a woman rushed in saying that a friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. Ayer went to investigate and found Mike Tyson forcing himself on a young south London model called Naomi Campbell, then just beginning her career. Ayer warned Tyson to desist. Tyson: “Do you know who the fuck I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.” Ayer stood his ground:”And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field; I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.” Ayer and Tyson began to talk. Naomi Campbell slipped out. (A. J. Ayer: A Life, p. 344)

According to Rogers, this incident was widely reported at the time, so let’s see what we can find out about the genesis of the story.

The first mention I’ve been able to track down is a short Associated Press piece that appeared in a number of North American newspapers (e.g., The Philadelphia Enquirer) in December 1987. It’s the same setting, the same cast of characters, but there’s a different outcome and no confrontation between Tyson and Ayer. The bones of the report are that despite the presence of high profile guests at the party, including Ayer, nobody could stop Tyson from hassling Naomi Campbell. On being told that Campbell was just a baby, Tyson replied, “I’m a baby too.”

The next time the story pops up, in the London Evening Standard on February 1st 1988 (p. 13), it has morphed into something much more familiar to us. The reporter is John Heilpern, and we can conjecture that Freddie Ayer was the likely source of the story, as we know the two men were in contact at the right time–Heilpern mentions attending what is almost certainly the 1987-89 Broadway revival of Cole Porter's Anything Goes with Ayer.

This is how Heilpern tells the story:

Visiting Manhattan, and game for anything, he practically risked his life by being brazen enough to confront the world heavyweight champion at a party given by Fernando Sanchez, the chic underwear designer. He’d gone to the party with young relatives, but thinking Mike Tyson was coming on too strong with a beautiful model, he decided to rescue her.

“Leave this to me!”... “But Freddie, he’s the world heavyweight champion”... “I know that!”

“Look here,” he announced boldly to a stunned Mike Tyson. “We are both supreme in our field. I suggest we talk about this like rational men.”

Most of the familiar ingredients are now in place, although we’ve lost Naomi Campbell. This might explain why a year later in a story published in the Telegraph, written by John Doughty shortly after Ayer’s death, Campbell has been replaced by Robin Givens (Tyson’s one-time wife). Doughty explicitly states that Freddie Ayer is his source, though enough of the details of the story are wrong (as far as we know) to suggest that someone somewhere has got their wires crossed.

In Doughty’s version it’s not a party, but rather drinks with friends in a New York hotel. Ayer heard cries from another suite in the hotel, and went to see what was afoot.

He was surprised to see “Iron” Mike Tyson manhandling a certain Miss Robin Givens… Freddie strode up to Tyson and tapped him on the back of a small part of his 19 and a half inch neck. When Tyson swivelled round to confront his tiny adversary, Freddie asked him to leave the lady alone, and added for good measure that while Mr Tyson was undoubtedly the heavyweight champion of the world, he, Freddie Ayer, was one of its intellectual champions. Startled, Tyson dropped Miss Givens, who scuttled off. (June 30, 1989, p. 21)

At this point, it is right to say something about the tone of these reports. Phrases such as “slunk off” and “scuttled off” are belittling when used to describe a woman’s escape from aggressive, unwanted sexual attention. There might be humour in the idea of Freddie Ayer taking on Mike Tyson in unarmed combat, but there is nothing at all funny about the situation that sparked his intervention (assuming it has been accurately described).

Let’s get back to our genealogical enquiry. The story next appears a couple of years later, again in the Evening Standard (January 29, 1992, p. 11), this time told by Nigella Lawson, no less (this isn’t quite as bonkers as it sounds–Lawson is the daughter of Ayer’s third wife). Again, it differs in the details from previous accounts–not least, Robin Givens is now absent, even if Naomi Campbell hasn’t yet returned.

Many years ago, when Tyson was still invincible, he was at a party in New York also attended by my late stepfather, A. J. Ayer. Freddie Ayer was at the time over 70 and had the build one might expect of a philosopher who had once entertained a modest ambition to be a soft-shoe shuffler.

At one point he saw Tyson on the other side of the room giving more attention to a woman than she was apparently willing to receive, and, ever pleased to come to a lady’s assistance, he walked over to them.

“I say,” said Freddie, “I don’t actually think she wants you to talk to her any more”.

Lawson provides no further details except for the fact that Tyson immediately desisted from “his attempts to impress himself on the woman”.

Before circling back to Ben Rogers’s account, it’s worth looking at a report of the incident that appeared in The Independent on September 19, 1993 (p. 20). This account, written by Charles Nevin, is noteworthy partly because it marks the return of Naomi Campbell, but also because it provides just a hint of independent corroboration of the events described.

The incident itself is by now familiar (though again, there is the same variation in the details). But Charles Nevin, for the first time, as far as I can tell, asks the crucial question: Is it true? He seems to think that it is:

Dee Wells, Ayer’s second and fourth wife, confirms it, but seems to remember that the Ayer response was the more simple and dignified “I am a philosopher”. The problem, says Ms Wells, is that only minutes later Campbell was back with Tyson: “So much for logic,” is her conclusion.

It’s difficult to know what to make of all this–there’s so much variation in the story and so little in the way of firsthand corroboration.

Ben Rogers’s source for the story is Gully Wells, Freddie Ayer’s stepdaughter (the daughter of Dee Wells, above). But it isn’t clear from his account whether Gully was actually at the infamous party. So, in and of itself, that doesn’t get us much further–if Ayer were the source of the story, then it is to be expected that Gully would echo his account.

Luckily for us, we don’t have to leave it there, because Gully has written a memoir, The House in France, published in 2011, in which she tells us exactly what happened that night. The relevant context is that Ayer and Fernando Sanchez had first met the week before at a party given by Sarah Giles, a friend of Gully’s, and Sanchez had invited them all to his party.

Gully Wells describes the event as it unfolded (The House in France, p. 88):

Freddie was just about to get up and pile lots more smoked salmon on to his plate, when Sarah came rushing over to our table. “The most terrible thing is going on upstairs. This poor girl is pinned up against the wall and the man won’t let her go.”

Who better than a seventy-seven-year-old philosopher to take on an overenthusiastic suitor? Perhaps he could try engaging him in a discussion of ethics.

The scene was just as Sarah had described it. Naomi was squealing, the man had her rammed against the wall, and, distracted by the effort of trying to shove his tongue down her throat, he didn’t notice when Freddie tapped him on the shoulder. So Freddie tapped him a bit harder; the man swung round, adjusting his fly, and glared at the old geezer. “And who the fuck are you?”

“I happen to be rather a famous philosopher. My name is Professor Sir Alfred Ayer. And who are you, if I may ask?”

“I’m Mike Tyson—the heavyweight champion of the world.”

“Well in that case, my dear boy, we are both supreme in our field.”

Which settled everything.

Whether Naomi really needed rescuing, I’m not so sure. All I do know is that Freddie was thrilled with his heroic feat that there was no dragging him away from the party.

So there we have it. Not everything about this account rings entirely true, and its treatment is bizarrely minimising of the incident itself, but it’s certainly the best we’ve got. As implausible as it seems, it really does appear that A. J. Ayer intervened in the hope of preventing Mike Tyson from assaulting Naomi Campbell, a young model about to embark on a stellar career.

Not all philosophers, it must be acknowledged, are literary powerhouses—masters of the beautiful turn of phrase. Here’s Martin Heidegger, for example, waxing lyrical about the ontic and ontological:

Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. But in that case, this is a constitutive state of Dasein's Being, and this implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship towards that Being—a relationship which itself is one of Being. And this means further that there is some way in which Dasein understands itself in its Being, and that to some degree it does so explicitly. It is peculiar to this entity that with and through its Being, this Being is disclosed to it. Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein's Being. Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological. (Being and Time, p. 32)

Clearly, this sort of thing will rob more sober readers of their will to live. Imagine, therefore, what it would be like if you were dating Heidegger, and the great philosopher, in between penning paeans to the Fatherland and rehearsing the Horst-Wessel-Lied, decided to write a love letter to you. The chances are that it would contain passages such as this one:

We change ourselves into that which we love, and yet remain ourselves. Then we would like to thank the beloved, but find nothing that would do it adequately. We can only be thankful to ourselves. Love transforms gratitude into faithfulness to ourselves and into an unconditional faith in the Other. Thus love steadily expands its most intimate secret. Closeness here is existence in the greatest distance from the other—the distance that allows nothing to dissolve—but rather presents the “thou” in the transparent, but “incomprehensible” revelation of the “just there.” That the presence of the other breaks into our own life—this is what no feeling can fully encompass. (Great Philosophers Who Failed At Love, Andrew Shaffer, loc 852)

To which Hannah Arendt, the recipient of the letter, must surely have been tempted to reply, "What in God’s name are you banging on about?".

Still, as a heartfelt expression of love, it perhaps beats this passage penned by William Gladstone, which, rather extraordinarily, formed part of a marriage proposal:

I seek much in a wife in gifts better than those of our human pride, and am also sensible that she can find little in me: sensible that, were you to treat this note as the offspring of utter presumption, I must not be surprised: sensible that the lot I invite you to share, even if it be not attended, as I trust it is not, with peculiar disadvantages of an outward kind, is one, I do not say unequal to your deserts, for that were saying little, but liable at best to changes and perplexities and pains which, for myself, I contemplate without apprehension, but to which it is perhaps selfishness in the main, with the sense of inward dependence counteracting an opposite sense of my too real unworthiness, which would make me contribute to expose another — and that other! (Disraeli, Douglas Hurd, loc 2441)

Amazingly enough, Gladstone's proposal, which in context was actually rather sweet, met with success, and his marriage to Catherine Glynne endured for 59 years until his death in 1898.

There are, of course, people who write a fine love letter, some of them even philosophers. Take Jean Paul Sartre, for example–iffy philosopher, jolly good letter writer. Here are three extracts from letters written to Simone de Beauvoir in the summer of 1939 (from Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir):

This is just a brief note to tell you that I love you with all my might and that you’re my little sweet. I received your good letter, and I’m sad to be away from you, my flower. I’m a bit less gloomy today because I’m working, and also we’ve gotten out some. Yesterday afternoon we took an excursion to Auxerre, about which there is nothing to say, except that it filled the day.

[..]

Farewell, my darling Beaver, my little flower. I think so intently about you, every day, nothing but you, and I would so like to be near you.

I love you so, my darling Beaver, I long to see you again, and have some fun with you. You don’t seem at all abstract to me. I feel you very close and think with joy I’ll see you soon. But it is pure time that separates me from you, time swallowed like individual spoonfuls of cod liver oil, with the feeling that everything will be disgorged all at once.

Do write to me, and often. Your letters are my only pleasure. I love you so.

My darling Beaver

I received your two delightful letters, which I read without skipping a single one of the descriptions… and I was very moved by your small compliments. Dear God, how nice you are, my Beaver. You fill me with regrets and longings, and yesterday I was completely morose not to be with you. Who wanted this? you will ask. I did, probably, but without you it’s like Paradise Lost. I love you.

This is much more like it, though the sentiments contained are somewhat diminished by the knowledge that Sartre was at this time writing exactly the same kind of stuff to another woman, Bianca Bienenfeld.

My dear little flame

I was so counting on a letter from you this morning… I am sure you must have written to me, I have such confidence in you. I simply imagine the letter must be lost or they couldn’t find it at the post office. But I’m left with a feeling of great emptiness, because ever since my last glimpse of your little hand waving at the window of the bus, I’ve had nothing more from you–only memories. I love you passionately.

I am sad not to have gotten the letter. I would so like to know about your return, how they treated you, whether you had much trouble: I love you so much… My love, what a long time it is till September 25th. But you know, I haven’t yet lost your face; on the contrary, it is clear as day, and I feel a little pang each time I see it again, beautiful little eyes, dear little mouth. I love you passionately.

Still, this is definitely a step up from Heidegger’s efforts. In fact, in her memoir, A Disgraceful Affair, Bienenfeld wrote that Sartre was “the master of the language of love”.

Unfortunately, his mastery didn’t extend to the domain of physical relations. His efforts to entice Bienenfeld into his bed for the first time were disgraceful.

Sartre began pursuing Bienefeld in the spring of 1939, soon declaring his love for her. Despite Bienenfeld’s ambivalence, talk between them quickly turned to the circumstances in which they would consummate their relationship. On the agreed occasion, Sartre began proceedings by announcing that he’d taken another girl’s virginity in the same hotel room the day before. He then undressed in front of Bienenfeld, and washed his feet in the bathroom sink. He refused to draw the curtains when asked, and then mocked Bienenfeld for her shyness. After this display of boorishness, it is entirely unsurprising that Bienenfeld was unable to go through with the act, though she does note in her memoir that he “achieved his goal” in the days that followed. (see A Disgraceful Affair, Bianca Lamblin, pp. 42-3)

It is relevant here that Bienenfeld was just 18 years old when all this happened—Sartre was 34, almost twice her age. It is also relevant that she was a student of Simone de Beauvoir, with whom she was also having an affair.

St. Thomas Aquinas, perhaps best known for troubling to come up with five different proofs of God's existence, had a lot to live up to even before he was born. He wasn’t yet a twinkle in anybody’s eye when a prophetic monk turned up at the family castle announcing to his mother that she was pregnant and that her yet to be born son was destined for greatness. Not just any kind of greatness, mind you, but a divine greatness as a Dominican friar “of such sanctity of life and splendour of knowledge that the like will not be found in all the world in his age.” (LTA, p. 28)

His mother, clearly a woman not easily impressed, replied only that she was not worthy of such a son, but if that was God’s will, then so be it.

Thomas, born in 1225, enjoyed a childhood not untypical for a boy born into Italian nobility in the High Middle Ages. When he was five years old, he was packed off to the prestigious Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino, presumably in the hope that he would eventually come to serve the Church in a manner that would bring honour to his family.

Trouble is, you can’t buck a hagiographic prophecy, meaning that Thomas inevitably rejected the reasonable life of a Benedictine monk, choosing instead to join the Dominican order. This was not good news for his family. The upmarket Benedictines were thoroughly respectable types, bringing honour and prestige to a family, and providing the aspiring devotee with stability and a comfortable monastic existence. The Dominicans, in comparison, were disreputable–a mendicant or begging order, embracing radical poverty and an itinerant, ascetic lifestyle. Not the sort of thing with which any noble family wanted to be associated.

There is some suggestion that Thomas’s mother was reconciled to her son’s new career path, but, according to his biographer, William of Tocco, this all changed when Thomas pulled a disappearing act. Infuriated that she hadn’t been able to contact him, Thomas’s mother instructed her other sons to kidnap him.

William of Tocco tells us what happened next:

[I]t happened that they found their brother resting next to a spring of water with four friars of the Order. At once, they rushed upon him like foes rather than brothers, yet they did not prevail to strip him of the Dominican habit, to which he clung manfully. Anxious that their youthful brother might suffer some injury from the altercation, these men finally dismissed the other friars and sent their brother, arrayed as he was, to their mother under close guard. (LTA, p. 41)

Thomas ended up confined at his mother’s pleasure in the family castle at Roccasecca. His brothers set about disabusing him of his Dominican tendencies. But Thomas was resolute, spending his time studying the Bible, writing logical treatises, converting his sister, and clinging on to his preacher’s habit in the face of attempts to remove it. Frustrated at Thomas’s intransigence, the brothers hit upon a cunning plan to lure him away from the path of righteousness–the sort of plan that “seldom failed to bring down citadels, to grind boulders to dust, and to uproot the cedars of Lebanon by its tempest.” (LTA, p. 47)

They brought him a woman, “the loveliest girl that they could find, adorned with the seductive arts of a courtesan, so that she might lure him into sin by her looks, caresses, teasing gestures, and any other wiles that she could summon.” (LTA, p. 47)

But Thomas wasn’t for turning. Though a stimulus arose in his flesh, Thomas drank deep from the reservoirs of his own righteousness to resist the temptations of earthly pleasure. Sparing not a moment to consider how the young woman might have found herself in this situation, he seized a hot poker from the fire, with which he chased the chastened girl from his chamber.

Exhausted by his own piety, he scrawled the holy Cross upon the wall of his chamber, offered up a prayer for virginity, and fell into a deep sleep, during which he dreamt of girdles.

William of Tocco, ever reliable, gives us the lowdown:

And behold, two angels were sent to him from Heaven, assuring him that the Lord had heard the prayer of him who had attained victory in so bitter a conflict. Then, binding him tightly round by the loins, they said: “Behold, we gird you on behalf of Almighty God, as you have requested, with the girdle of chastity, which can never be loosened henceforth by any attack. That which human virtue cannot obtain is now granted to you by the munificent gift of divine Grace. (LTA, p. 48)

In the face of angels and girdles, Thomas's family finally realised that he was a lost cause, and he was allowed to escape, trotting off to Napes, Rome, Paris and, finally, Cologne, where he took up a professorial position and was ordained to the priesthood.

References

The Life of St. Thomas Aquinas (D. M. Foley, Trans.). (2023). Angelus Press. (LTA)

The philosopher Bryan Magee rose to prominence in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s primarily through the mechanism of chatting with other philosophers about philosophy on radio and television. Conversations with Philosophers was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in the early 1970s; Men of Ideas was broadcast on BBC Television in 1978; and a final set of conversations, Great Philosophers, also a BBC Television production, was broadcast in 1987.

These broadcasts, along with decades moving in elite philosophical circles, had put Magee at the very heart of British academic philosophy. Therefore, he was ideally placed, especially given his personal friendships with many of the era’s leading thinkers, to write what promised to be the definitive philosophical memoir of the late twentieth century. However, when Confessions of a Philosopher appeared in 1997, it quickly became notable for reasons beyond its philosophical content.

The source of the trouble was a section that Magee wrote about his friendship with Bertrand Russell, and, in particular, the part that deals with the final decade of Russell’s life, when the grandee of British philosophy came under the influence of Ralph Schoenman, a young American political agitator. Magee was not Schoenman’s biggest fan:

[He] was an appallingly sinister figure, like an evil dwarf out of Wagner's Ring, and his motivations were unquestionably calculated and manipulative. [Magee, 1997, p. 211]

It’s not entirely clear how Magee could be so certain about Schoenman’s motivations given that he only ever spoke to him on the phone, but, regardless, the story he relates about Russell and Schoenman bears retelling.

In effect, it is Magee’s claim that Schoenman exercised what would now be called coercive control over Bertrand Russell in the last years of Russell’s life. He describes how his “easy and pleasurable contact with Russell”, which had included regular correspondence and conversations, was abruptly terminated. Schoenman, having installed himself in Russell’s home as his private secretary, intercepted all phone calls, demanding to know the purpose of each call, before invariably declaring Russell to be too busy to talk. If Magee wrote to Russell, then the reply would come from Schoenman. According to Magee, the situation became "Kafkaesque," with Schoenman effectively blocking all communication channels. Magee claims that he wasn’t alone in being stonewalled in this way, with similar stories circulating among Russell’s friends.

On its face, this story has a certain plausibility, but Magee is careless in the telling of it. In particular, if the details of the story are true, then Magee cannot know what he claims to know: specifically, that Bertrand Russell had no idea what was going on—that he hadn’t seen Magee’s letters or been told about the phone calls. Put simply, to know all this, Magee would have had to have had the sort of contact with Russell he claims not to have had.

Magee makes a further claim, also careless and almost certainly just false:

Meanwhile public declarations began to appear over Russell's signature that he could not possibly have written (if only because of their inadequate literacy) and which did not represent his views. [Magee, 1997, p. 211]

It is certainly true that Russell signed public declarations that he did not write. He said as much himself in his autobiography. However, he categorically denied that he hadn’t read these declarations and that they did not represent his views:

Another charge… is that I myself compose neither speeches nor articles nor statements put out over my name. It is a curious thing that the public utterances of almost all Government officials and important business executives are known to be composed by secretaries or colleagues, and yet this is held unobjectionable. Why should it be considered heinous in an ordinary layman? In point of fact, what goes out over my name is usually composed by me. When it is not, it still presents my opinion and thought. I sign nothing–letters or more formal documents–that I have not discussed, read and approved. [Russell, 2009, loc: 14445]

This idea that Russell wasn’t responsible for the juvenalia that came out of his mouth in the 1960s is further undermined by the fact that a lot of it literally came out of his mouth. For example, here he is engaging in a bit of moral philosophy at a CND meeting in Birmingham in April 1961:

We used to think that Hitler was wicked when he wanted to kill all the Jews, but Kennedy and Macmillan and others both in the East and in the West pursue policies which will probably lead to killing not only all the Jews but all the rest of us too. They are much more wicked than Hitler [...] We cannot obey these murderers. They are wicked and abominable. They are the wickedest people that ever lived in the history of man. [Russell, 2009, loc: 14024]

So let’s get this straight, Jack Kennedy and Harold Macmillan are the wickedest people ever to have lived, wickeder than Hitler, Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria, Julius Streicher, Genghis Khan, and so on. It is ludicrous, of course, but there’s no doubt that Russell, not Schoenman, said it, even if its being said at all was a reflection of Schoenman’s influence upon Russell at this time.

Bernard Levin, in an article published in the New York Times Magazine in 1967, offered a much more realistic assessment of the dynamic that existed between Russell and Schoenman:

It is clear that Schoenman exercises enormous influence on Russell. The 94-year-old philosopher trusts his young helper absolutely (one attempt by a former friend and associate of Russell's to tell him that his concurrence in Schoenman's views and activities was doing his reputation harm ended with the friend being permanently barred), and Schoenman's hand can be easily discerned in some of the statements Russell puts out.

Yet even this will not do as a complete explanation of Russell's present confusion. For even if Schoenman prepares singlehanded all the documents, all the statements, all the protests, it is beyond dispute that Russell agrees to them. Schoenman may be Mephistopheles, but he is not Svengali; he may have persuaded Russell to believe in, and propagate, the most curious rubbish, but the fact remains that Russell does believe it, and is not just a mindless puppet, good for nothing but holding the pen. Russell must be held responsible for his words and his deeds. [Levin, New York Times Magazine, February 19, 1967]

This is precisely the sort of analysis that Magee fails to provide in his memoir, perhaps out of an understandable desire to wash away the sins of his friend. However, he really should have tried a bit harder to get things right and to avoid defaming a living person. This is how he concluded his chapter on Bertrand Russell:

Schoenman was an appallingly sinister figure, like an evil dwarf out of Wagner's Ring, and his motivations were unquestionably calculated and manipulative… Many thought he was motivated by what later came to be called loony-left views plus an unbalanced hatred of his own country, the United States. [...] But at least as many people suspected that Schoenman had been planted on Russell by the CIA with the mission of discrediting him internationally as the world's most prominent spokesman for unilateral nuclear disarmament–and certainly this was what occurred as a direct result of Schoenman's handling of him. If I had to bet on one of these alternatives I would opt for the latter… [Magee, 1997, pp. 211-12]

Unsurprisingly, Schoenman, very much alive, and living in the United States, was not best pleased when he found out about all this.

He said I was like an evil dwarf out of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle”. At 5-11, I’m probably the largest dwarf on record. The passages were clearly intended to reinvent and incite prejudice and to create a climate of distrust of me and my relationship with Russell. This was a full-board attempt at character assassination… [Magee] made no effort to contact me before, during or after the publication of the book. [The Guardian, November 11, 1999]

The result was a libel action, which Magee comprehensively lost - in fact, he offered no defence at all. The case was settled in November 1999, at the cost of a full retraction, an estimated £100,000 in damages, and an undertaking to pulp existing copies of his memoir.

The statement read in court by Schoenman’s lawyer, Liz Hartley, was damning. On the accusation that Schoenman was a CIA plant, she had this to say:

The Defendants accept that this allegation was entirely without foundation, is absolutely untrue and should never have been published, since neither the author nor the publishers ever had any evidence, nor are they aware of any evidence, that supports such a serious allegation. The allegation could not have been more damaging to the Claimant's reputation and standing with colleagues and has caused the Claimant considerable distress.

On the claim that Schoenman had run interference to prevent Magee from contacting Russell, she reported that Magee now said that he “misinterpreted his own experiences at that time” and he withdrew the allegation without reservation.

She summed up as follows:

The Defendants accept their serious error in publishing these libels and recognise the considerable damage they have done to the Claimant. The Defendants are here today by their Solicitor to withdraw all of these allegations and to apologise publicly to the Claimant. The Defendants have recalled for destruction unsold copies of both the hardback and paperback editions of the book and have given their undertaking not to distribute or otherwise publish or cause to be published any future editions containing the passages objected to by the Claimant. They have also agreed to pay to the Claimant a very substantial sum by way of damages and to pay his legal costs.

What a fiasco.

References

Magee, Confessions of a Philosophy, Random House, 1997.

Russell, Autobiography, Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2009.