Bad Existentialists

I don't care much for French philosophers of the modern variety, and I have never read Sartre or De Beauvoir, but I knew a little of their "open" relationship and the suspicion that, despite all the philosophical window dressing, De Beauvoir was a smart woman who didn't recognize she was still a victim of sexist adventurism on Sartre's part.

This week, a book review in the New Yorker has a good long discussion about their relationship. (New Yorker book reviews, I am finding, can be very good reading.)

The article reminded me of Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals", a very readable and amusing biographical examination of the contrast between the public pronouncements of various "intellectuals" and their private lives. I can't find my copy right now, but I don't think Sartre got a chapter. I remember Marx did, and it was very enlightening.

Anyway, the book review points out that Sartre was not exactly the best physical specimen:

".. she fell in love with Sartre, once she got over the physical impression he made. Sartre was about five feet tall, and he had lost almost all the sight in his right eye when he was three; he dressed in oversized clothes, with no sense of fashion; his skin and teeth suggested an indifference to hygiene. He had the kind of aggressive male ugliness that can be charismatic, and he wisely refrained from disguising it. He simply ignored his body."

I wonder how often he bathed..

De Beauvoir explained their pact to each have affairs, but always tell the other about it, as follows:

"One single aim fired us, the urge to embrace all experience, and to bear witness concerning it. At times this meant that we had to follow diverse paths—though without concealing even the least of our discoveries from one another. When we were together we bent our wills so firmly to the requirements of this common task that even at the moment of parting we still thought as one. That which bound us freed us; and in this freedom we found ourselves bound as closely as possible. "

Yadda yadda.

So off they went, having an extraordinary number of affairs, it seems, and even though she denied it to interviewers while alive, it turns out from her posthumously published letters that De Beauvoir jumped into bed with many women too. It also turns out, by the sounds of it, that they were both unpleasant people:

"The most appalling discovery, for many readers, was what '“telling each other everything'” really meant. The correspondence was filled with catty and disparaging remarks about the people Beauvoir and Sartre were either sleeping with or trying to sleep with, even though, when they were with those people, they radiated interest and affection. Sartre, in particular, was always speaking to women of his love and devotion, his inability to live without them—every banality of popular romance. Words constituted his principal means of seduction: his physical approaches were on the order of groping in restaurants and grabbing kisses in taxis. With the publication of '“Letters to Sartre,'” it was clear that, privately, he and Beauvoir held most of the people in their lives in varying degrees of contempt. They enjoyed, especially, recounting to each other the lies they were telling."

Reminds me of a certain ex politician of current note, too.

People become (quite rightly) upset when clergy or other prominent Christians are revealed to be hypocritical in their personal lives, especially in the field of sexual activity. Books like "Intellectuals", and this story of a couple of pop philosophers of the 20th century, serve to remind us that purely secular figures, many of whom claim to be modern rebels against the strictures of religious conservatism, also often turn out to be extremely hypocritical in private, and to deserve no great respect.

There's lots more in the review, go read it quickly while it is still up on the site.