From Existentialism to Metaphysics

It was also Mr. Stevenson who organised the school exchange with Le Havre. I soon realised that the spoken French I had acquired in school was not the French spoken by the French. On our meeting, my host asked ‘Ca va?’. I had no idea what she meant, having only been taught ‘Comment-vous portez vous?’. She rolled her eyes. Le Havre is the model for Sartre’s 1938 novel, La nausée, but WW2 bombing had obliterated the look and feel of Antoine Roquentin’s Bouville.

I continued reading Existentialist literature through the1970s: Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Kafka. In the Penguin classics translations, I read all they had of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Herman Hesse. At school, my favourite book had been Camus’ La Peste but, afterwards it was War and Peace. Camus says somewhere in the Carnets that he wished he could integrate philosophy into the plot in the manner of Tolstoy, rather than overtly though conversations between characters. (He is thinking, perhaps, of Rieux and Tarrou in La Peste). I feel Camus could have been easier on himself. The huge third part of War and Peace is Tolstoy overtly informing the reader of his own Philosophy of History. Yet the murder in L’Etranger, the fléau in La Peste, and the suicide in La Chute, raise the questions How should I live? Should I live? What is the value of my life, or any life? in a plot driven way. Yet, Tolstoy is a brilliant stylist: with a stroke of the pen, he shows us even the character of the dog. Like Tolstoy, I personally am obsessed with the minutiae of the Napoleonic Wars, and interested in why and how anything happens in history. But these are quite specialised interests, not shared, even, by most historians. It therefore escapes me why War and Peace is loved by so many readers.

From 1973 to 1976 I studied History, with Archaeology and French, at the University of Lancaster in the North of England. There was, to say the least, a buzz about the place. Austin Woolrych was my tutor for the so called English Civil War, Harold Perkin for comparative industrial revolutions, Constantine somebody or other for comparative imperialism. Ninian Smart had recently set up the world-class Department of Religious Studies. Drs. T. W. Potter and David Shotter had devised a new course on the Archaeology of Roman Britain. I eagerly enrolled.

The French course was organised thematically: one week Surrealism, another Freedom, another Death, le nouveau roman, the resistance, and so on; reading the literature, watching the films, studying the history of the time, and paintings, music or scupture which bore on the topic.

It was one of the few truly interdisciplinary courses I have encountered. Most Joint Honours or Joint Schools degrees simply juxtapose subjects. Often this is right: one and the same question often cannot be coherently addressed by methods of, say, both physics and philosophy, or both mathematics and history. Much later, I was asked whether the Philosophy of History course should be compulsory in a History and Philosophy joint degree, and whether Philosophy of Mind should be compulsory in a Psychology and Philosophy joint degree. I answered in the negative. Suppose a student has two interests, but not much interest in the relation between those two interests. Bryan Magee interviewed Iris Murdoch on television. He introduced her, appropriately, as writing novels and teaching philosophy in St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Then he asked her what the interesting questions are about the relation between literature and philosophy. She said she did not think there were any. Bryan’s face dropped, no doubt realising he still had the best part of an hour of television to fill. But, there is no reason to think some of the Joint Schools undergraduates do not have a similar separation of interests as Iris Murdoch.

2. Nineteen-Sixty-Eight

Later on, Cartmel College at the University of Lancaster was sacked. I mean sacked in the quasi-Viking sense: fridges, cookers, and televisions gleefully thrown out of the upstairs windows to burst in the quad, fire hoses turned on in the corridors, so staircases became waterfalls, rooms ransacked, huge glass panes broken, etc. Who would do such a thing? The students of Cartmel College. Why? For the high level of mindless drunken entertainment. The sacking was not political (unless you think everything is political). In the 1960s and ‘70s students had a bad image with the public. But the anarchistic reality far exceeded even what was avidly reported in the tabloid press. You have to understand that the ‘60s did not last from 1960 to 1969. The ‘60s lasted from 1967 to 1976, or, perhaps until May 1979. Or perhaps, through their recuperation by Global Capitalist (Neo-)Liberalism, the ‘60s never stopped. Or perhaps the ‘60s lasted until the return of nationalistic conservative and socialist politics through Brexit and the Covid crisis. Either way, the ‘60s failed. Why was that?

The ‘60s was in fact two separate kinds of revolt: there was the quietist revolt of the hippies and like-minded people. They wished to have as little as possible to do with capitalist society and the state, and wished to live a communal and self-sufficient life, in the country, in teepees, and often travelling. They smoked marijuana, took LSD, and were non-violent. On the other hand, there was the political revolt of the anarchists and Marxists, and their fellow-travellers. They wished to overthrow capitalist society and its state, and hand power over to the people. They were not particularly interested in marijuana or LSD, and their methods were violent. These two groups were not made up of the same people, even though some members of the public dabbled lightly in both lifestyles.

The ‘60s failed not only because the two kinds of revolt diluted the rebellion. The two kinds of revolt placed mutually exclusive demands on the individual: Do I fight or drop out? Am I violent or pacifist? Do I argue or contemplate? Should I act, or just be? This bifurcation of the revolt allowed the recuperation of ‘60s rebellion by Global Capitalism.

SAIGON TODAY, LANCASTER TOMORROW!

3. The Basque Country

In 1976 I was in the Basque Country of Northern Spain teaching English in a language school in Eibar, in Guipuzcoa. Although or because Franco had died about a year earlier, there were demonstrations for Basque independence, shootings, and arrests more or less on a daily basis. Eibar was wildly exciting and deadly, terrifying but addictive. The political situation was far more complex and nuanced than I had assumed. There were seven kinds of ETA, and only one of them, ETA Militar, was armed. There were seven kinds of Spanish police force. Warned of the secret police (las secretas) more or less on arrival, I thought this was a joke. Quite soon I learned it was the opposite. There were disagreements between Basque separatists about what sort of society an independent Basque Country would be: Socialist? Anarchist? Anarcho-socialist? Russian style communist? Euro-communist? There were Basques who thought Fascism was right, and the only real difficulty about Franco’s extreme nationalism was that it had not been Basque.

A young communist, perhaps seventeen or eighteen, used to drink outside the bar amusing himself by placing his hand in the mouth of a large Alsatian, withdrawing it just as the animal’s jaws snapped shut. He was reading a book I knew, about the abortive Russian revolution of 1905. I also used to drink with two communist revolutionaries who had fought with Fremilo with Cuban backing, against the Portuguese army in Angola, one from Cape Verde, the other from Angola.

One day, the young communist came to the bar heavily bandaged. He had been beaten up. I asked who had done this. He said it was the Angolans. I was absolutely incredulous. I asked the elder of the two revolutionaries about this. He said that it was indeed so. Naturally, I asked what on earth possessed communists to beat up a fellow anti-fascist. He replied in a completely matter of fact way, that they did it for the money (el dinero). The politics of the Basque Country were, indeed, nuanced: off-duty Guardia Civil paying African communists to beat up Basque communists.

One evening, two English colleagues and I were drinking in a bar with a young Basque anarchist who began placing CNT stickers on the inside windows: Confederatión Nacional del Trabajo; the anarchist trade union. The bar began to empty, and the barman could be seen using the telephone attached to the corridor beyond the bar. It seems incredible to me now, but I could not tell how much danger there was in this situation. Anyway, the four of us at our table were the only ones left in the bar.

Two men came in, both with pistols drawn: one portly with a black beard, wearing a large cream Arran cardigan; the other taller and thinner with shoulder length blond hair wearing a denim jacket. I had no idea who they were. Secret police? ETA? Los Guerrillos del Christo Rey?