David Edmonds: This is Philosophy Bites with me, David Edmonds.

Nigel Warburton: And me, Nigel Warburton.

David Edmonds:Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybites.com. Jean Paul Sartre, the twentieth century French novelist and philosopher, was one of the founders of existentialism. He rejected God and the Nobel Prize for literature.

Host 1: He opposed the Vietnam War and French involvement in Algeria. He embraced Marxist ideas, but later changed his mind. Perhaps his longest commitment was to his lifelong companion, Simone de Beauvoir. His relationship to her is usually described as unconventional. Mary Warnock is a philosopher who now sits in the House of Lords.

Host 1: She’s also the author of a book on Sartre.

Nigel Warburton: Mary Warnock, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Mary Warnock: Well, it’s a great pleasure to be here. I’m longing to know what you’re going to ask me.

Nigel Warburton: Well, the topic I want to focus on is Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialism. Obviously, Sartre is one of the best known philosophers of the twentieth century, not least because of his novels and plays, but he’s also the quintessential existentialist. I wanted to start by just asking you what you understand by existentialism.

Mary Warnock: Well, I understand why existentialism was sort of totally forgotten little sub branch of philosophy that I think nobody thinks about at all anymore. It was very much an outcome of the war, the Second World War, and the immediate aftermath of that, and largely in Paris, I think. I mean, it was very interesting as a phenomenon, but I think it’s gone away.

Nigel Warburton: Sartre described existentialism as the idea that for human beings, existence precedes essence.

Mary Warnock: Whatever that means. You need to unpick what he meant by that. And I rather think he meant that there’s no given human nature, but we all make our own lives by the choices that we make. And I think that’s what he meant by this obscure remark. But that was a very important thought because he argued that everything is a matter of choice, And that if you say that you’re bound to do this or have to do that, whether you mean you are morally bound to do it or whether you mean your childhood influences determine you to do that, whichever you mean, you’re wrong because actually you could do otherwise.

Nigel Warburton: And he used a famous example of a student who allegedly really came to see him in wartime with this dilemma. Should he stay at home with his mother or should he join the Free French and fight the Nazis?

Mary Warnock: Yes. That was a wonderfully vivid example of that being a genuine choice for the student. And nobody could make it for him. I mean, the great thing that Sartre brought, certainly brought to British philosophy when eventually, as it were, he crossed the Channel, was that he was brilliant at producing real examples. That was something that the English school at that time, the English school of philosophy, was very bad at doing.

Mary Warnock: I mean, starting from the nineteen thirties, really, there was a now very obscure philosopher called Pritchard, who wrote about moral philosophy, but whose examples were all absolutely preposterously unrealistic and uninteresting. And Sartre was like a breath of fresh air. And in his big book, Being and Nothingness, he had examples of what he referred to as bad faith, where a waiter, for example, pretended that he had to get up at five o’clock in the morning, he had to attend to his Gospel, and actually he’d created a situation in which these duties having to do this, must do that he’d actually created them. But once he’d created them, of course, as Sartre said, they sprang up like partridges all around his feet. He had duties all over the place.

Mary Warnock: But then you suddenly recognise when you read it that there were lots of people who were in bad faith in that way, who wouldn’t think beyond the fact that they got to get up in the morning and catch the eight thirty or whatever it was, and their life was dominated by these false necessities.

Nigel Warburton: This notion of bad faith is obviously central for Sartre in Being and Nothingness. I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about what it is.

Mary Warnock: Bad faith is pretending to yourself something which if you thought for five minutes you would realise was not true. It’s acting or overacting a part. And his waiter, who pretended that he was really bound by duty, was acting the part and overacting the part of a conscientious waiter. I remember when I read this I suddenly recognised all kinds of people who I knew who seemed to me to be playing the part of an Oxford philosopher, or playing the part of a committed mother of five, or whatnot. And you took on this persona and you pursued it and you were an actress actually and I find this fascinating.

Nigel Warburton: So what is actually wrong with being in bad faith? We’re pretending to ourselves. Maybe that’s just a condition of interacting socially that we have to tell ourselves stories like this.

Mary Warnock: I think that it is true we have to tell ourselves stories, and we do have to have a narrative of our own life. But I think bad faith probably is objectionable only if it’s carried too far, to the extent that you may suspect yourself or even other people, I mean more other people, of being actually insincere, having no real self, just being hollow, playing one part after another. And so it was wonderful to have all that blown away and to be told that you could do anything you like.

Nigel Warburton: But surely Sartre was wrong when he said that we’re completely free. We’re free to choose whatever we want. There are influences which are very strong, and maybe he even acknowledged that at times.

Mary Warnock: Well, I think he was wrong in two ways. I think first of all, was wrong to discount all the influence from one’s childhood or past, and equally, doubtless, from one’s genetic make up. But I think he was more importantly wrong, actually, in saying there’s no such thing as actual moral right and wrong. Only thinking makes it so. I think this relativism in moral philosophy was a rarely pernicious influence and is actually wrong.

Nigel Warburton: That’s really interesting because in existentialism and humanism, he did say that when you choose for yourself, you choose for everyone. So he had this universalizable aspect. Sartre was saying that when I make a choice, say I choose to marry, that’s not just an idiosyncratic personal thing. I’m saying that human beings in my epoch should marry, maybe have a certain kind of family relationship. I must be choosing the best choice, otherwise I’m being insincere in some way and so I’m acting as if everybody’s following me in what I do.

Mary Warnock: Of course one has to distinguish between choice and if you choose to have a boiled egg rather than a scrambled egg for lunch, that has no general implications for humanity as a whole. But if you make what may seem like a moral choice, that you’re going to keep your promise on this occasion, although it’s your own hindrance, then you are choosing for humanity as a whole. Now that is what he said in that essay, in that lecture, but he never said it either before or since. So I think it was probably produced out of some kind of pressure not to be so relativistic, egocentric in his view of morality, as he rarely was at that time inclined to be. But of course later on, in the second phase of his life, when he was struggling to reconcile Marxism with existentialism, then he had to be making choices for the whole of humanity.

Mary Warnock: And he changed gear completely in the middle of his career. And so his second enormous book really had well, very little relation to his original existentialist days.

Nigel Warburton: But in his later work Yes. Sartre, for me, became incomprehensible. A lot of his later work was written while he was taking speed. It seems to have had quite a bad effect on his writing, and I think he’d reached a stage where he perhaps wasn’t edited in the way he might have been as a younger philosopher. I wonder if he had any thoughts about the style in which he came to write.

Mary Warnock: It was appalling. It was absolutely ghastly. I mean, I didn’t like the style of Being and Nothingness, though I enjoyed the anecdotal part of it. And I enjoyed the sort of huge metaphysical structure that it was all built around. But it appalled me when I first read it.

Mary Warnock: But it was nothing, as you say, to the incomprehensible and rather shoddy way that the critique was written. But when that book came out, we hadn’t yet had the benefit of yet more incomprehensible and deliberately incomprehensible French philosophers like Derrida and so on, who rarely are unreadable and meant to be so.

Nigel Warburton: Meant to be so. Why would they want to be incompatible?

Mary Warnock: Because they wanted to be profound. And I think they were unduly influenced by Heidegger, who thought that philosophy had to have a whole special vocabulary and way of going about things that nobody could possibly understand. I think, rarely, from Hegel onwards, one branch of philosophy did delight in obscurity. And I think that is a totally mistaken view of what philosophy should be about.

Nigel Warburton: Going back to Sartre, what would you say is his enduring legacy for us? You began by saying that he’s more or less been forgotten.

Mary Warnock: He has been forgotten, and probably rightly so. But what he did, historically, I think, was to open our eyes to the fact that moral philosophy could be an exciting and totally relevant subject, involved not only in intellectual questions but in emotional questions as well. I admire him most for his having embraced the philosophy of Husserl and the German phenomenologists who thought you couldn’t separate the intellect from the emotions, and who preceded Wittgenstein in really breaking down the distinction between the inner and the outer. What’s going on in your head is not completely separate from what is going on in the outside world. And Sartre went, when he was very young, to Germany to discover what was going on with the phenomenologists.

Mary Warnock: And he introduced Husserl to France and he wrote a wonderful, terribly over excited article saying that now at last we are free from the ghosts in the machine, we’re free from Descartes. And he saw that, he understood that, and he emotionally adopted this huge step, I think, that the phenomenologist took.

Nigel Warburton: Mary Warnock, thank you very much.

Mary Warnock: Thank you.

David Edmonds: And you can hear more Philosophy Bites at www.philosophybites.com