Humanism: Reading Sarah Bakewell

What is a humanist? Sarah Bakewell’s introduction to her new book on this subject begins with this definition: A humanist is a person whose concern is “the human dimension of life … whereas scientists study the physical world, and theologians the divine one, humanities-humanists study the human world of art, history, and culture. Non-religious humanists make their moral choices based on human well-being, not divine instruction. Religious humanists focus on human well-being, too, but within the context of a faith. Philosophical and other kinds of humanists constantly measure their ideas against the experience of real living people.” (Humanly Possible, pp. 3-4)

In her introduction, Bakewell summarizes the long history of humanists: 

“Through the centuries, humanists have been scholarly exiles or wanderers, living on their wits and words. In the early modern era, several fell foul of the Inquisition or other sleuths of heresy. Others sought safety by concealing what they really thought, sometimes so effectively that we still haven’t a clue. Well into the nineteenth century, non-religious humanists (often called ‘freethinkers’) could be reviled, banned, imprisoned, and deprived of rights. In the twentieth century they were forbidden to speak openly, told they had no hope of running for public office; they were persecuted, prosecuted, and imprisoned. In the twenty-first century so far, humanists still suffer all these things.” (p. 7)

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, which I have just begun reading, looks to be a fascinating book with interesting implications for the political events of the moment. More distantly, the development of humanist thought in Renaissance Italy has fascinated me for a long time, and I’m enjoying Bakewell’s account of the writers and philosophers of that era. 

The review of this book in The Guardian published last week suggests the way the term “humanist” has emerged, particularly how the usage of the term humanism is more recent than the way of thinking that’s at the center of the book:

“To date the rise of ‘humanism’ to the early Renaissance is, strictly speaking, anachronistic; there was no such term until the 19th century. But Humanly Possible traces a lineage, less of theories than of kindred spirits, over seven centuries in Europe. This runs from medieval umanisti (students of humanity), who remained Christian even while resurrecting ‘the flowering, perfumed, fruitful works of the pagan world spring’ (as John of Salisbury called them), to today’s (more secular) self-declared humanists.”

Who is Sarah Bakewell?

Here is Sarah Bakewell’s picture, drawn by Brad Craft, as posted on her web page:

From  https://sarahbakewell.com/about/ 

A few things she says about herself:

“After fitful attendance at various schools, I studied philosophy at the University of Essex. I became enthralled by the work of Martin Heidegger and embarked on a PhD, but some impulse led me to give this up and move to London, where I found work in a tea-bag factory.  My job was to catch boxes of tea-bags spat at me by a machine, flip them on their sides, and push them in groups of six to the next person on the line. It was only for the first two hours that the machine spat faster than I could flip, but those two hours were a formative influence.

“After this, I worked for several years in bookshops: Hatchards in Piccadilly, and Collet’s International in Charing Cross Road (the latter now long gone, alas).  I did a postgraduate degree in Artificial Intelligence, then landed a job at the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine.  I spent ten fascinating years there as a cataloguer and curator of early printed books….

“Since 2002, my main job has been writing, although I also worked part-time for the National Trust from 2008-2010, cataloguing book collections in historic properties around England.  I taught Creative Writing at London’s City University and Oxford’s Kellogg College for some years.

“Otherwise I live mostly in London, and enjoy the usual glamorous writer’s life: putting a comma in, taking it out, putting it back in again, and eventually deleting the whole sentence.”

I may write more about Bakewell’s new book as I continue reading it. I’ve very much enjoyed two of her other books on the topics of the Existentialists and the philosopher Montaigne. She’s becoming a favorite author of mine.

Simone de Beauvoir and the Issue of Abortion

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), famous as a novelist and a philosopher, was a leader in the mid-20th century struggle for women's rights. Her book The Second Sex "can be considered the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement." (Sarah Bakewell, At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, p. 210) According to the Guardian: "Her life has inspired generations of women seeking independence, and this was largely attributed to her unconventional relationship with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, which seemed like a love that didn’t come at the cost of her freedom or professional success." (source) 

The philosophical couple -- Sartre and de Beauvoir -- lived in hotels but not together, wrote much of their famous work in Paris cafés, and agreed on freedom from ordinary commitment to one another. Their life seems like a very romantic and ideal Paris existence, and is probably more familiar to most women today than the technical details of their philosophic publications or the feminist writings of de Beauvoir. 

But there's much more to de Beauvoir's leadership of women in their struggle for autonomy and freedom. In particular, de Beauvoir wrote The Manifesto of 343 Women in 1971. The 343 signers, including the writer, all stated that they had had clandestine, illegal abortions. They asserted that they deserved complete control over their own bodies and over decisions on whether they should have children. Here are just a few words from the Manifesto:

Abortion

A word which seems to express and define the feminist fight once and for all. To be a feminist is to fight for free abortion on demand.

Abortion

It’s a women’s thing, like cooking, diapers, something dirty. The fight to obtain free abortion on demand feels somehow ridiculous or petty. It can’t shake the smell of hospitals or food, or of poo behind women’s backs. The complexity of the emotions linked to the fight for abortion precisely indicate our difficulty in being, the pain that we have in persuading ourselves that it is worth the trouble of fighting for ourselves. It goes without saying that we do not have the right to choose what we want to do with our bodies, as other human beings do. Our wombs, however, belong to us.

This is only an excerpt. For a long time, these words seemed to be just a historical detail -- nothing that concerns us any more. It's tragic that in America in 2022, this fight has to start all over again, with the coming of new laws prohibiting or regulating abortion, thanks to the reactionary Supreme Court. The Manifesto was particularly specific about regulations of abortion, as opposed to no restrictions.

From the Manifesto:

The most liberal of laws would still be regulating how our bodies can be used. And how our bodies should be used is not something which should be regulated. We do not want tolerance, scraps of what other humans are born with: the freedom to use their bodies as they wish. … we are opposed to all laws which claim to regulate any aspect of our bodies. We do not want a better law, we want it to be removed, pure and simple.

Between 1975, when the French law was changed, and February of 2022, abortion was legal in France until the 12th week of pregnancy, and covered under French national medical insurance. A revision this year extended the time frame until the 14th week, and also made medication abortions available via remote appointments rather than in person. Thus de Beauvoir's demand for no regulation has never been achieved in France. (This is a bit complicated -- see "France Expands Abortion Access in Two Key Moves" from Human Rights Watch for details.)

The words of de Beauvoir's Manifesto have just become more relevant in the USA than they have been for half a century.  Suddenly, moral questions also are being asked in what I see is a new way. In the current New Yorker, an article titled "Ethical Health Care After Roe: Can physicians meet their obligations to patients when abortion is criminalized?" reports on an interview with Louise Perkins King, a surgeon and bioethicist at Harvard, and the vice-chair of the ethics committee at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. This interview covers many of the issues of women's autonomy over their own bodies, returning to the issues that concerned de Beauvoir. The article documents some interesting conclusions about the Supreme Court decision, particularly: "we know from very clear statistics that many people will die because of this decision." 

I especially found the following statement by King to be enlightening in regard setting arbitrary time limits for the legality or illegality of abortion, an issue also of importance to the Manifesto. King stated:

..if I’m pregnant, at a certain point in time, depending on which legislation you’re looking at, you will be able to say to me, “You no longer have the right to manage the risks for your body, to manage the risks of passing a grown infant through the vaginal canal, the risks of tearing, prolapse, sexual dysfunction, hemorrhage, and death. You no longer get to control whether you’re going to take those risks or not.”

Obviously, if I’m sitting in front of somebody who is in the very early stages of pregnancy, this question is very simple for me. In the early stages of a pregnancy, if they don’t wish to take on those risks, a hundred per cent, they have an absolute right to bodily autonomy in those decisions. If we’re getting into later stages of pregnancy, it becomes quite complex, but really that’s almost a red herring, because it just doesn’t happen. Even with the incredible lack of access that we have in this country to sexual education and contraception, women are not presenting for elective termination in their third trimester. So that question doesn’t happen, and, because it doesn’t, as an ethicist, even though I find a lot of difficulty in that space, in my analysis, I don’t actually have to answer that question. It becomes a red herring, because it constantly does get brought up, even though it’s not really the true issue. It’s an interesting, difficult question to grapple with, but it just doesn’t happen.

When I think about de Beauvoir and her leadership of the struggle for women's rights, I think of Paris in an idealized time in the 1930s and 1950s. Or of Sartre and de Beauvoir's war experiences under the Nazi occupation of Paris. But now I also think about the way the advances in women's rights, that were associated with de Beauvoir's many works and actions, are once again being denied. I'm so sad! And angry!

Blog post © 2022 mae sander. Quotes as attributed.

Shared with Paris in July.

The Existentialist Café

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre at various cafés, especially in Paris. Lower left: also Claude Lantzmann.

American cover.

Coffee and cigarettes played a big role at the existentialist café. That is, the literal cafe where existentialists met, as depicted in the photos above, which I shamelessly culled from around the internet. I suspect that little is known about what they ate!

Sarah Bakewell's fascinating book, At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, stresses a more symbolic version of this café, which was open mainly in the middle years of the twentieth century. As in her earlier book about Michel de Montaigne, she combines personal details from the lives of philosophers with highly approachable explanations of their work.

Perhaps the most interesting discussion in At The Existentialist Café concerns the great importance of Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex, which she says "had an even greater impact in Britain and America than in France. It can be considered the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement." (p. 210)

"Ideas are interesting," Bakewell writes in her final summary, "but people are vastly more so. That is why, among all the existentialist works, the one I am least likely to tire of is Beauvoir’s autobiography, with its portrait of human complexity and of the world’s ever-changing substance." (pp. 326-327)

Bakewell begins with the phenomenologists, precursors of the existentialists, but her main focus is on the Parisians: Sartre, de Beauvoir, and their constantly changing circle of colleagues and friends, including the many rifts, breaks, fights, and disillusionments that occurred between the various participants.

The Nazi era before and during World War II was central to the honesty of the philosophers -- she covers Heidigger's Nazi commitment in detail, as well as the experiences and reactions of the Paris group to the defeat of France, the occupation, and the many deportations and persecutions. For example, in the wartime life of Simone de Beauvoir:

"One necessary adjustment was learning to put up with the idiotic and moralistic homilies emanating every day from the collaborationist government — reminders to respect God, to honour the principle of the family, to follow traditional virtues. It took her back to the ‘bourgeois’ talk she had so hated in her childhood, but this time backed by a threat of violence. Ah — but perhaps such talk was always backed by hidden threats of violence? She and Sartre later made this belief central to their politics: fine-sounding bourgeois values, for them, were never to be trusted or taken at face value." (pp. 140-141).

The Existentialist Café covers philosophers' lives and thoughts, and even covers parodies of their work that appeared when they were overwhelmingly popular.

"Sartre’s friend Boris Vian spoofed the craze in his 1947 novel L’écume des jours, translated as Froth on the Daydream or Mood Indigo. This surreal and playful romance includes, as a side character, a famous philosopher called Jean-Sol Partre. When Partre gives a lecture, he arrives on an elephant and mounts a throne, accompanied by his consort the Countess de Mauvoir." (pp. 165-166)

Or about the style of the existentialists, who gave the world the black turtleneck sweater as a statement of commitment or solidarity or something:

"To go with the jazz, blues and ragtime after the war, people sought out American clothes, readily available in flea markets; there was a particular craze for plaid shirts and jackets. If your twenty-first-century time machine could take you back to a Parisian jazz club immediately after the war, you would not find yourself in a sea of existentialist black; you would be more likely to think you’d walked into a lumberjacks’ hoedown. ... The sleek black turtleneck arrived afterwards — and when Americans in turn adopted that fashion, few realised they were returning a sartorial compliment." (pp. 167-168)

UK cover.

Bakewell offers a variety of both unexpected and expected insights and observations about the existentialists and their time and influence. A few more quotes that I found interesting --

"The word phenomenon has a special meaning to phenomenologists: it denotes any ordinary thing or object or event as it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality. ... Phenomenology gives a formal mode of access to human experience. It lets philosophers talk about life more or less as non-philosophers do, while still being able to tell themselves they are being methodical and rigorous." (p. 40-43)

"For Sartre, the awakened individual is ... a person who is engaged in doing something purposeful, in the full confidence that it means something. It is the person who is truly free." (p. 152)

"One sometimes has the feeling, reading Sartre, that he did indeed borrow from other people’s ideas and even steal them, but that everything becomes so mixed with his own strange personality and vision that what emerges is perfectly original." (p. 106) 

"In April 1933, all doubts about Heidegger were blown away when he accepted the post of rector of Freiburg University, a job that required him to enforce the new Nazi laws. It also required him to join the party. He did so, and then he delivered rousing pro-Nazi speeches to the students and faculty. He was reportedly seen attending the Freiburg book burning on 10 May, trooping through a drizzly evening by torchlight towards the bonfire in the square just outside the university library — almost on the steps of his own philosophy department." (pp. 79-80)  

"Heidegger set himself against the philosophy of humanism, and he himself was rarely humane in his behaviour. He set no store by the individuality and detail of anyone’s life, least of all his own."(p. 320). 

I especially enjoyed the wrap-up in At The Existentialist Café, where Bakewell describes how the existentialists' ideas of "rebellion and authenticity" reappeared in the student protests and general spirit of the 1960s and 1970s. (p. 292)

The book is wonderful to read, offering incredible clarity. As you read you feel enlightened. Could I summarize and explain what I read? I won't answer that question.