Existentialism is a Disappointment

 

 

I. 

 

We all know Heidegger's magnificent response to Sartre's post-War declaration that l'existentialisme est un humanisme; let's just say he wasn't impressed [a]. But rather less well known is the effect it had on a generation of young French intellectuals who had previously adored the author of L'Être et le néant (1943). 

 

This generation includes Michel Tournier, whose recollection of this time is worth sharing at length as it perfectly illustrates the intense punk rock seriousness with which philosophy was then taken and how sexy and scandalous Sartre's phenomenological ontology appeared to be - before he sold out to humanism ...

 

 

II.  

 

"In the darkest days of the War, some of us, depressed by the oppressive restrictions, formed a small group united by a common idea of philosophy - a narrow, even fanatical idea that might well have gone in hand with tumbrils and the guillotine. I was foolishly about to write that Deleuze had been the 'soul' of this group when suddenly I had a vivid image of the brickbats and howls with which that hated word would have been greeted by the adolescents we were then. [...] In any case, Deleuze did set the tone of the group, and it was he who sustained our ardour." [b]

 

"One day in the autumn of 1943 a meteor of a book fell on to our desks: Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. After a moment's stupor there was a long mulling over [...] the book exuded irresistible power; it was full of exquisite subtleties, encyclopedic, proudly technical, with an intuition of diamondlike simplicity running through it from start to finish. Already the clamour of the anti-philosophical rabble could be heard rising in opposition in the press. [...] We were exultant. Like Socrates's disciples in fourth-century Athens or Hegel's students at Jena in 1805, we had the extraordinary good fortune of seeing a philosophy born before our very eyes." [131]  

 

"On October 28, 1945, Sartre called us together. It was a mob scene. An enormous crowd pressed against the walls of the tiny venue. The exits were blocked by those who had not managed to gain entry [...] and women who fainted had to be piled on a convenient grand piano. The wildly acclaimed lecturer was lifted bodily over the crowd and on to the podium. Such popularity should have alerted us. Already the suspect tag 'existentialism' had been attached to the new system. [...] So what was existentialism? We were soon to find out. Sartre's message could be stated in six words: existentialism is a form of humanism. [...] We were devastated. Our master had retrieved that exhausted old figure of Man, still stinking with sweat and 'inner life', from the rubbish heap where we had left him [...] And everyone applauded." [132]

 

"That night we gathered in a café to mourn our loss. One of us thought he had found the key to what went wrong in a novel that Sartre had published in 1938 called Nausea. [...] Suddenly it was all too clear [...] Sartre had [... become] the Autodidact. Around the table we were unanimous in our forecasts of disaster [...] And the future seemed to bear us out [...]" [132-33]

 

It should be noted that, looking back over thirty years later, Tournier is prepared to admit that the reaction experienced by himself and his philosophical comrades was probably a bit harsh:

 

"This reaction to Sartre should be taken for what it was: a liquidation of the father by overgrown adolescents afflicted with the awareness that they owed him everything. With hindsight I can see all the juvenile excess in our condemnation." [133]

 

However, Tournier then importantly qualifies this:

 

"Yet I cannot help thinking that it contained a grain of truth. Sartre seems always to have suffered from an excess of moral scruple. Acute fear [...] undeniably diminished his powers and his creative potential. I am convinced that one cannot live a full and healthy life without a minimum of indifference to the woes of others. [...] Sartre's misfortune was that [...] he was a Marxist who was never able to give up the secret ambition of becoming a saint." [133]

 

And with that Tournier sticks the boot into Sartre in an even more brutal manner than Heidegger ... 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] For those who don't know ... L'existentialisme est un humanisme (1946) is a text by Jean-Paul Sartre, based on a lecture of the same title given in Paris on 29 October 1945. 

      Invited by Jean Beaufret in November 1946 to comment on Sartre's work and the development of existentialism in France, Martin Heidegger composed a response known in English as the Letter on Humanism (revised for publication in 1947). In this text, Heidegger distanced himself from Sartre and dismissed his thought as merely a reversed form of metaphysics which is oblivious to the truth of Being. 

      Those who wish to read a transcript of Sartre's lecture for themselves can do so by clicking here. Heidegger's response is also available as a pdf online or can be found in his Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 2010). My reading of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism can be found here.

 

[b] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 128. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the post. 

      Note that I have very slightly modified the translation by Goldhammer in places. The original French text was published as Le Vent Paraclet (Gallimard, 1977) and readers who (rightly) worry about issues of translation are free to consult this if they wish.       

 

On Initiating Youth into the Democracy of Touch

Some youths playing football as imagined by D. H. Lawrence 

in a water colour entitled Spring (1929)

 

 

When D. H. Lawrence writes of the inspiration of touch, he is clearly thinking of how desire invests the lives of adult men and women, involving as it does, amongst other things, "the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love" [1].

 

Nevertheless, this former school teacher was vitally interested in the education of the young and would doubtless have wanted to see children and adolescents initiated (or groomed) into his phallic-utopian new order, so that from an early age they too might learn to substantiate the mystery of touch and form a direct relationship with all things. 

 

The fact that children and adolescents are often denied intimacy with one another is something that also concerned the French author Michel Tournier. Like Lawrence, he argued that youngsters should be allowed (and, indeed, encouraged to experience) physical contact with the bodies of others and that our primary human need is for touch. 

 

Before eyebrows could be raised, however, and accusations begin to fly, Tournier quickly added:

 

"When I speak of physical contact, I mean of course something far more vast and more primitive than erotic games and sexual relations, which are merely a special case." [2]

 

Tournier was also keen to counter those who think that by giving children toys or pet animals to play with we can conveniently sublimate their desire for the forming of close physical and emotional bonds:

 

"Everyone likes to say that young children like to play with dolls and teddy bears, and sometimes they are permitted to play with small animals. It is also commonly said, however, that dogs like bones. The truth is that dogs gnaw on bones when they have nothing else, but you can take my word for it, they would prefer a good cut of steak or a nice veal cutlet. As for children, it is quite simply a dreadful thing that we toss them dolls and animals in order to assuage their need for a warm, living body. Of course sailors on long voyages sometimes avail themselves of inflatable rubber females, and lonely shepherds in the mountains have been known to mount a lamb or goat. But children are neither sailors nor shepherds and do not lack for human company. Their distress is the invention of a fiercely anti-physical society, of a mutilating, castrating culture, and there is no question that many character disorders, violent outbursts, and cases of juvenile drug addiction are consequences of the physical desert into which the child and adolescent are customarily banished in our society." [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Version 2 of Lady Chatterley's Lover, in The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 323. 

 

[2] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Albert Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 15.

[3] Ibid., pp. 16-17. 

 

 

Michel Tournier on Education 2: Erotic Religiosity

It is not enough to love the young; 

they must know that they are loved - St. Don Bosco

 

 

I. 

 

I closed part one of this post [click here] mourning the fact that only rarely in an age of remote learning do teachers and their students form those close bonds that were common when education was about initiation in the old aristocratic sense of the term (i.e. becoming a good human being and member of society), rather than instruction in the modern bourgeois sense (i.e., becoming someone with the skills and knowledge valued by employers).

 

Perhaps, I tentatively suggested, we need to radically rethink the question of education and reintroduce an element of erotic religiosity back into the classroom; whether this be modelled on classical Greek lines, Loyola's order of Jesuits, or even upon Lawrentian lines in terms of the democracy of touch, is something that would obviously have to be discussed carefully and at length [a].

 

 

II.

 

The French writer Michel Tournier seems to favour the Catholic model, if only because this is the one with which he is most familiar. 

 

In his autobiography [b], he tells us that the two schools that occupy a special place in his memory among the dozen or so he attended in the course of a "chaotic scholastic career" [47], were both religious institutions; Saint Erembert's in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Saint Francis's School in Alençon. Each were far more successful than their secular counterparts "in preserving the initiatory aspects of education" [47].

 

Tournier explains what it was about Catholicism that particularly appealed to his youthful self and how this inclined him in later years towards the study of philosophy:

 

"The Catholic religion, with its rituals, holy days, theology, and mythology, served as a marvelous emotional counterweight to mathematics and the natural sciences, a counterweight without which the child or adolescent is afflicted by a sense of dryness and aridity. In any case, I cannot separate my memory of the theology [...] from the sumptuousness of ritual. Dunce that I was, I found in religious history and catechism an anticipation of what I later discovered in metaphysics: concrete speculation inextricably intertwined with powerful and brilliant imagery. For metaphysics is nothing other than the rigour of mathematics wedded to the richness of poetry." [47]   

Not that Tournier was smitten with other aspects of Catholicism: "I had little use for the bludgeon of dogma or for the zombie-like obedience and faith of the humble." [47] This is probably why he became a novelist and not a priest. He appreciated the fact that the Church initiated the child into a world that was both spiritual and sensual; a world that granted access to all - not just members of the nobility - to poetry, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Alas, the institutionalised clergy also has another face, hideous, hypocritical, and hateful ...

"Having lost its temporal power, the Church signed on as handmaiden to the most constricted, conservative element of the bourgeoisie, whose interests and ideas it ardently adopted as its own. It continued to draw its teachings from the Gospel, but from the words of the Pharisees rather than those of Jesus. In other words, it began to preach respect for social hierarchies, money, and power as well as hatred of sexuality." [48-49] 

For Tournier, it's simple: in teaching a false morality (conservative and anti-erotic), the Church cannot possibly initiate the young into the good life. In a manner similar to D. H. Lawrence, he dreams of a Jesus fully resurrected in the flesh:

 

"Fear of the flesh has made the crucifix - a corpse nailed to two pieces of wood - the centre of Catholic worship in preference to all other Christian symbols [...] The Church has resolutely set its face against the dogma of resurrection in the flesh and attempts to ignore the fact that whenever Jesus encountered sexuality - even in the antisocial forms of prostitution and adultery - he defended it against the wrath of the Pharisees. [...] Prudes are ugly and impute their own ugliness to love, but when they spit on it, they spit on themselves. Loved and celebrated in those we love, the flesh is as radiant as that of Jesus on Mount Tabor." [49-50] [c]

 

Tournier continues:

 

"Sumptuous, subtle, and erotic - such is the initiatory Church of which I dream when I think back on how my childhood might have been. I thank my stars that the Church that actually raised me only partially betrayed that ideal." [50]

 

Sadly, those days are now remote - Tournier was born almost a hundred years ago (in 1924) - and secular education has pretty much triumphed:

 

"The revolution begun by the men of the Enlightenment is now complete. Emotional bonds, personal and possibly erotic relationships, pose no further danger of polluting the aseptic atmosphere of the classroom. Education, cleansed of every last vestige of initiation, has been reduced to nothing more than a dispenser of useful and saleable knowledge. Already computers are taking the place of teachers [...]" [50]     

But still the heart beats and the flesh quivers ... And tomorrow is another day ...

 

Notes

 

[a] I am aware of the danger that initiation can collapse into indoctrination and that models of pedagogy that flirt with ideals of pederasty can often serve as an apologetics for the sexual abuse of minors. In replacing modern teachers with tutors and mentors who care about more than exam results, we don't want to end up appointing orgres to the classroom (or even dangerous women like Miss Brodie). 

      On the other hand, if you banish the warm and magical aspect of education entirely from the official curriculum and prohibit all forms of amorous relations in the classroom, then you can be certain they will develop elsewhere and often in guises you wouldn't anticipate.    

         

[b] Michel Tournier, The Wind Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989). All page references given in the post refer to this work. 

 

[c] As Deleuze notes: "A certain number of 'visionaries' have opposed Christ as an amorous person to Christianity as a mortuary enterprise." See 'Nietzsche and St. Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos', in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Verso, 1998), p. 37.  

Michel Tournier on Education 1: Initiation contra Instruction

Ivor Fox: The Initiation (c. 1950) 

Oil on board 

 

 

I've asked it before and I'll ask it again: What is education all about? 

 

I don't think government ministers or even those working in the teaching profession can answer this question with any real confidence. Thus it is that we have to turn to our philosophers and writers to find an answer ...

 

D. H. Lawrence, for example, made a bold attempt to address this question in a long essay entitled 'Education of the People' (1920); an important text that I have discussed elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark [a]. 

 

More recently, the French author Michel Tournier had a crack in his intellectual autobiography, Le Vent Paraclet (1977), arguing that education can be thought either in terms of initiation or instruction:

"Education in the broad sense of the word prepares a child to enter society and to occupy his place in it. In all times and places it appears to come in two forms, one moral, emotional, indeed magical, the other purely intellectual and rational. The first is called initiation, the second instruction. [...]

      Of course these two components of education assume many guises, and their importance varies. My view is quite simply that, historically, the relative importance of initiation has been diminishing compared with that of instruction and that for some time now this has passed the point of being harmful." [b]

 

Beginning in the eighteenth century, says Tournier, there was a bourgeois-Romantic attack launched upon the classical, aristocratic model of education "dispensed primarily by the Jesuit schools" [44]. Such a model was said to lack relevance in the age of commerce, industry, science and technology. What's the point of a man knowing about Ancient Athens and Rome, if he is incapable of earning his living in the modern world?    

"Behind these indictments (echoes of which can still be heard today in strictures against the teaching of Latin and Greek) lies a lack of understanding that comes close to bad faith. The critics pretend that the Jesuits' instruction was intended to equip the child with the knowledge needed to become a merchant, manufacturer, sailor, or government official. Had that been its purpose, it would have indeed fallen far short of its goal! But to begin with, the Jesuits were educating young aristocrats, who did not need to become scholars in order to succeed. High birth was enough. But they were also supposed to be human beings, and the education they were offered was supposed to help them toward that end. Here we touch on the crux of the misunderstanding that arose in this period between the 'ancients' and the 'moderns'. For the aristocrat, the child was not a full-fledged human being. He was a little animal, dirty, vicious, and stupid, on the whole rather contemptible. Education was supposed to make him presentable. The Jesuits were concerned not with enriching the child's mind and preparing him for a career but with shaping his moral being. Toward that end they caused him to live in a wholly unreal world in which people spoke only Latin [...] In other words, initiation was much more important than instruction in this version of education. But the moderns had no notion what this initiation was all about, and they actively opposed it. For them, the child was not wicked but simply uninformed. His mind was a blank page upon which knowledge had to be inscribed. Whereas the only ambition of earlier educators was to conduct the child from an animal state to a human one, the moderns wished to enrich his mind with science and technology, tools with which to make his fortune ..." [45-46]  

I don't know if this is true or not, but I find this passage fascinating. As I do the one which follows: 

"This crisis, which began in the eighteenth century, appears to have been a turning point in the history of education, as moral initiation gradually lost out to practical instruction. Since that time, the initiatory function of education has steadily diminished, and we are now witnessing the elimination of the few vestiges that remain. First to go was corporal punishment, which established a sadomasochistic bond between teachers and pupils, followed by religious instruction and confession, which established a similar bond at a spiritual level. More recently, Greek, Latin, philosophy, and literature have been stricken from the curriculum as obviously superfluous nonsense. All traces of humanity must be eliminated from the classroom so that the 'heartless teacher' [...] can inoculate his students exclusively with knowledge deemed to be of practical use." [46-47]

This final line is particularly resonant in an age in which schools are repeatedly (and now almost routinely) closed on the pretext of a virus presently doing the rounds, and more and more teaching is done remotely via a screen - or online, as we like to say. 

 

"Only rarely and with a feeling of illicitness" [47], says Tournier, do students and teachers now form close relations and, in some cases, life-long bonds of friendship. 

 

Perhaps, therefore, we need to radically rethink the question of education and - dare one say it - introduce an erotico-religious (or initiatory) element back into the classroom ... An idea I will develop in part two of this post: click here.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Education of the People', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambrdge University Press, 1988), pp.85-166. 

      

Recent posts on Torpedo the Ark that discuss this essay include 'Back to School in the Age of Coronavirus' and 'Education, Education, Education à la D. H. Lawrence'.

 

[2] Michel Tournier, Le Vent Paraclet, (Éditions Gallimard, 1977). I am quoting here, obviously, from the English edition, translated as The Wind Spirit by Arthur Goldhammer, (Collins, 1989), p. 43. Following page references to this text will be given directly in the post.