Nigel Rodgers & Mel Thompson

How well do you know your philosophers? Which philosopher, for example, set up ménages à trois with his bisexual lover’s partners? Which seemed to prefer poodles to humans? Which lashed out physically at his students so violently that one of them collapsed? Which joined the Nazi party in spite of having a Jewish mentor and a Jewish lover?

Irrelevant questions for those interested in philosophy? Not necessarily: the behaviour of philosophers is seldom unrelated to their ideas, and their work may well be influenced by their own personal and emotional needs.

It is sometimes assumed that the life of reason will lead to a reasonable life. Socrates claimed that the unexamined life is not worth living, and tried to persuade his fellow Athenians to examine their lives and so change them. Plato expected the philosopher-ruler to concern himself with matters social and political, even though his mind might be on higher things, aware of the unreality of the shadows that most take for reality. Indeed, he argues in The Republic that only philosophers are fit to rule, since they alone are fully rational, capable of perceiving the good and controlling their baser passions. Stoics expect life to be lived in accordance with universal reason, and Epicureans may have made happiness the great motivator, but their idea of happiness entailed a life of simplicity. So we might expect philosophers to live well, in the broadest sense of that word.

This is not to say that philosophers are immune from the desires of the flesh. Among the ancients, Diogenes deliberately offends by masturbating in public places and even Plato acknowledges Socrates’ interest in contemplating the beauty of young men. Mediaeval misdemeanours include the extra-curricular interest that Abélard took in his young student Héloise, even if his resulting castration serves as a warning to libidinous teachers. In the modern period we know rather more about the lives and lusts of great thinkers. They are worth exploring, not just for tabloid entertainment, but because they raise questions about the role of rationality in human behaviour.

Artists, musicians, novelists or poets can behave outrageously badly and still be accepted as great exemplars of their art. Indeed, bad behaviour may enhance their reputations and give them a certain glamour. From philosophers, however, we expect nobler, wiser behaviour. Philosophers may not claim to lead lives of impeccable virtue, and their individual foibles do not automatically invalidate their arguments, but it is only fair to ask to what extent the lives of those committed to reason are shaped by that same faculty. Let us consider the behaviour of just a few philosophers of the modern period, with an eye to whether it has influenced, or been influenced by, their thought.

Take Rousseau. He argued that human nature is naturally good, and that wrong-doing is the result of the corrupting influence of society. This has had an overwhelming impact on attitudes to children’s education and upbringing, as well as on wider ideas of individual responsibility. Every teacher exhorted to let children express themselves freely, rather than feed them existing knowledge, is experiencing the impact of Rousseau’s thought. Similarly, every criminal who pleads that he is the victim of society, rather than responsible for his own crime, echoes Rousseau’s own views that an individual is inherently virtuous and that it is only wrong environments that lead to wrong-doing. But how do such ideas square with Rousseau’s own life? There is no need to dig for the dirt, for he left much of it exposed in his Confessions, a self-justifying and self-pitying literary masterpiece. For someone who outspokenly rejected the inequality of his age, Rousseau proved adept at living off the rich and powerful, and repeatedly bit the aristocratic, often female, hands that fed and pampered him. Worse, the philosopher who preached the vital importance of good parenting callously abandoned all five of his own children to an orphanage rather than be troubled to care for them himself. Even by 18 th century standards, this was heartless behaviour. In his personal life, Rousseau wished to present himself as a wronged innocent corrupted by those around him – exactly fitting his philosophy – whereas in reality he was a self-obsessed exploiter. Was his philosophy influenced by his need to excuse his own bad behaviour? If so, should we beware of it?

One philosopher who might be expected to have behaved badly was not really up to it. Nietzsche, self-anointed prophet of Dionysus, god of drama, intoxication and ecstasy, was himself oddly unadventurous. Indeed, he was such a recluse that it is remarkable he managed to contract syphilis at all. Yet his writing can inspire the most libidinous and aggressive thoughts, and Zarathustra contains philosophy’s perhaps most sexist lines “Are you visiting women? Do not forget the whip!” His one significant affair – with Lou Salomé in 1882 – got no further than a kiss, and she kept the whip hand, literally. A notorious photograph shows Lou brandishing a whip over Nietzsche and Paul Rée, the other man in their short-lived ménage-à-trois. It was Lou who ditched Nietzsche – he was never to be an bermensch himself. But his philosophy preaches just the opposite: the necessity of the masterful and dangerous. The weak should not impede the rise of the powerful. The elite, the bermensch, alone give meaning and value to the world. Though he was brilliantly perceptive as a psychologist – his language was to be grossly misused by the Nazis, for Nietzsche himself was certainly no anti-semite or nationalist – his vision is all the more dangerous for being so seductive. If Nietzsche had taken up the whip, or been sexually voracious, would he have written in quite the same vein?

The nearest most philosophers get to bermensch status is to charm by means of intellect. Bertrand Russell certainly did just that. His most notable lover, the flamboyant aristocrat Lady Ottoline Morrell, noted in her diary in September 1909, “I don’t think I have ever met anyone more attractive, but very alarming, so quick and clear-sighted and supremely intellectual.” Finding himself alone with her in her London house two years later, Russell describes the way in which his restraint gave way “like the bursting of a dam” and he found himself “overwhelmingly and passionately in love”. His libido continued unabated into old age, for it seems likely that the white-haired, pipe-smoking, octogenarian epitome of the philosopher-sage still managed to seduce his own daughter-in-law. In spite of creating emotional and domestic chaos, including three acrimonious divorces, Russell was happy to write on almost any topic, including family life and sex education. Even his political views could be erratic. He is famous for leading the campaigns against nuclear weapons, and earlier as a conscientious objector in the First World War; it is less well known that he urged pre-emptive nuclear war against Soviet Russia in the 1940s.

Russell’s sexual exploits, however, cannot compete with those of Sartre. Sartre’s relationship with his long-term partner, Simone de Beauvoir, was an open one in which each felt free to take lovers. At times, this led to complications, for de Beauvoir was bisexual, and was not above sharing some of her friends with Sartre. Most intense was the relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz, an 18-year-old student. It did not work out, because Sartre fell passionately in love with Olga, and found it difficult to maintain the primacy of his relationship with de Beauvoir, who later used the affair as the basis for her novel She Came to Stay. Even after the ménage ended, Olga remained within their circle of friends, and the episode did not prevent Sartre from adding Olga’s young sister Wanda to his harem, nor from trying another ménage a trois, this time with Bianca Lamblin, who ended up feeling deceived and victimised by both Sartre and de Beauvoir. In the Spring of 1939, when he took her to a hotel room for sex, she recalls – in her book A Disgraceful Affair – that he said to her (in “an amused, smug manner”) “The chambermaid will really be surprised, because I already took a girl’s virginity yesterday.” In the year before the outbreak of the Second World War, Sartre seems to have managed several lovers simultaneously. Annie Cohen-Solal’s biography delights in recording that Wanda, Lucile, Martine and “Louise Vedrine” (a pseudonym for Bianca Lamblin) all came to share Sartre’s nights in Montparnasse. This might be of entertainment value only, were it not for Sartre’s admission that his neurosis, fear of incest, and inability to give himself completely to a woman had influenced his philosophy. Indeed, looking at his description of the feminine as “slimy” and “leechlike” in Being and Nothingness, one senses that his existentialism reflected his own sexuality, where the self-affirmation of the male is countered by the smothering danger of the female. This sheds new light on his whole philosophy.

Another philosopher who makes no secret of the influence of his own personal agenda on his writing is Michel Foucault. Towards the end of his life, he joyfully discovered the bathhouses of San Francisco, where “orgy rooms” offered multiple sexual contacts between strangers. He was astounded to find a culture devoted to casual sex and drugs. Describing the experience he had while high on LSD overlooking Death Valley, California, he commented “The only thing I can compare this experience to in my life is sex with a stranger.” This from a professor of the Collège de France! His writings reflected his particular interests. The opening of his Discipline and Punish (1975) lingers on the details of torture in the mid 18 th century. To the innocent philosophical student, all the violent detail might seem superflous to his argument. To those who shared Foucault’s interests, however, it would have been highly arousing! In his final year, he took a particular interest in the writings of the Cynics, who delighted in flouting convention and living dangerously. Like them, he consciously chose to live dangerously and to endanger others, practising unprotected sex in the bathhouses, in spite of warnings about the danger and the possibility that he was already infected. He had always been fascinated by death, drawn to it almost, even when – high on drugs – he was knocked over and almost killed while crossing the street outside his flat in Paris. When he died of AIDS, he was at the height of his intellectual powers, and his body of work, although unusual in philosophical terms with its blending of disciplines (a word he would have cherished), is testimony to a man who led many lives, as a disciplined academic of the first order and as a political activist, alongside his alternative life cruising the clubs.

The saddest case of a philosopher behaving badly may be Martin Heidegger who, as rector of Marburg University in 1933, become a notorious propagandist for the Nazi regime. He did so in spite of the fact that his mentor, Husserl, was Jewish, and he had been having an affair with a Jewish student, Hannah Arendt. Sadly, long after the fall of the Third Reich, Heidegger could not bring himself actually to repudiate his support for National Socialism. If anything, he felt let down by Hitler, who had failed to live up to his expectations. Heidegger was a remarkable thinker by any standards. But his argument that we are thrown into particular situations and are required to respond to them with authentic commitment, encourages a self-affirming drive, without giving direction. Harnessed to German nationalism and the rise of Hitler, he felt that authenticity for the German people was to be seen in National Socialism, and let his philosophy endorse the most brutishly unphilosophical of regimes.

The bad behaviour of philosophers does not invalidate their work, but sets it within a human context. It illustrates the way in which even the greatest thinkers find their lives governed by forces that are far from intellectual.

Philosophers Behaving Badly by Nigel Rodgers and Mel Thompson is published by Peter Owen.

Nigel Rodgers is a historian and biographer of Churchill and Hitler (Hodder). Mel Thompson (www.mel-thompson.co.uk) is author of over 25 books on philosophy, religion and ethics.

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