As I was reading, my gaze wandered from the page of text and out through the upstairs window, where on a clear day I can watch the Atlantic sweeping in towards the beaches of County Donegal. That day, grey mist and drizzle blurred the horizon line, the sky and the sea lost in vaporous obscurity: not unusual for Ireland in July. My attention briefly returns to my book until my phone alerts me that a text has arrived. It is from my friend who, like me likes to read. We often talk books together.
I ask him what he is reading. Roger Mais, John Updike, and the early novels of Jean Rhys, he replies. I say that I like the early novels of Jean Rhys, the way in which she captures the powerlessness of young women and the presumptuousness of the English middle classes. I report that I am reading an essay by Max Horkheimer, since we share an admiration for critical theory of the Frankfurt variety. I also mention the steady rain. Then I speculate: since Rhys and Horkheimer were likely contemporaries, what might they have said to each other if they had met and conversed? A council/counsel of sadness, he replies.
Later, having finished reading the essay, I wondered again, what might Jean and Max have talked about if they had met. They were, as I had suspected, almost exact contemporaries. Horkheimer was born in 1895, and he lived most of his life in Germany except for a period of exile in the United States before and during the war. He died in 1973. Rhys was born in 1890, in the Caribbean, but moved to England as a teenager, where she lived for most of her life, although she travelled in Europe in the 1920s. She died in 1979. If they had met in a Berlin café in 1930, I imagine they might have shared frustrations and wells of unhappiness, for the world was not kind to either of them in early life. Perhaps, however, they might have shared the consolation of having achieved a modicum of recognition in later life, if they had met in that same café in 1970.
It was a pleasing game – an experiment in counter-factual history – so I determined to play it some more. Who else – among famous thinker and writers – might have met and what might they have said to each other?
My second imagined colloquy took place in 1880, over luncheon at a liberal member’s club in central London. It is, I recognise, a rather conventional pairing, but I would have enjoyed a convivial debate between Charles Darwin (1809-82) and Karl Marx (1818-83). Darwin is famous for his writings on evolution: the slow, steady process of change that takes place in the natural world, through which certain characteristics prove advantageous to groups of plants or animals, making them better adapted – “fitter” – at least temporarily, to their environment. Although Darwin’s work is now almost universally accepted as the best form of explanation of natural evolution, at that time his work was still hotly contested. Marx is famous for his writings on revolution: the urgent, violent moment of change whereby one form of social and economic organisation is overthrown and replaced by another, unleashing a stream of political activity that enables the new dominant class to embed its position of power. Marx’s work has never been universally accepted and remains hotly contested.
What might the English gentleman and independent scholar and the German émigré and hack-writer have said to each other? We know that Karl admired Charles’s book, The Origin of Species, although it is doubtful that Charles admired Das Kapital. (There is a story here, for those who care …). Nonetheless, they were both men who spent their lives trying to understand how systems change, why they sometimes fail to change, and what the mechanisms of change might be. In retrospect, Charles was the more successful in this endeavour, but then he was mostly making inferences from a close study of what had happened in the natural world over many millennia, whereas Karl was trying to forecast what would soon happen based on his analysis of the often unreliable evidence of the current state of the social world. Today, we still find it harder to predict our socio-economic future than to explain the course of natural history.
They both have admirable beards, but temperamentally I imagine them as opposites: Charles is calm, measured, cautious and polite; Karl is agitated, prone to exaggeration, confident and rude. In character, I think I am more like Karl but wish I were more like Charles. I show this text in draft to a friend, who tells me I am wrong: you are more like Charles, but you want to be like Karl. It turns out that my attempt at self-revelation is an exercise in self-deception. As consolation, she tells me that my beard is to be preferred to late nineteenth century styles.
Now, imagine the canteen at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, in 1928. Two female students are chatting over a frugal lunch. They have both impressed their mostly male teachers and fellow students by their sharp minds, their passion for philosophy, and their determination to change the world. They will both, in due course, adopt radical – and radically different – stances in their personal and public lives, and they will both become internationally influential intellectuals. They are both called Simone.
They will not meet in later life to reflect on their differences, because Simone Weil (1909-43) died young, her poor health the consequence of years of self-chosen hardship, in solidarity with the working poor of France and Germany. Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86), by contrast, lived long enough to write about the problem of aging. According to the philosopher Jane Duran, they each use “the categories of existence, nihilation, and void to make statements about the importance of these concepts for our lives and for human life in general” (Ratio XIII, 2000). However, their shared starting point – the void of meaning at the heart of modern life – provoked dissimilar journeys. De Beauvoir, the existentialist, argued that the void necessitates an ethics of ambiguity, as we each define the ends of our own lives; Weil, the eschatologist, argued that the void makes possible our acceptance by God, through an act of grace.
There is a sense in which these two women recapitulate a debate that has been central to French intellectual life since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Montaigne took the indeterminacy of religious truth to be a reason for scepticism, toleration and the value of the study of humankind, whereas Pascal took the indeterminacy of religious truth to be a signal of the feebleness of human reason and the necessity of faith. One relied on self-examination and doubt, the other on a wager about God. For de Beauvoir, our bad faith is revealed when we try to disguise to ourselves the reality of the void, whereas for Weil, our bad faith is revealed when we fill the void with our own mental activities. Their shared commitment to the absurdity of the human condition is what draws them apart.
In my youth, my sympathies were mostly with Weil: her radical politics of identification, her championing of the poorest in society, her activism in support of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, her mysticism and spirituality. Today, I am drawn more to the café society of the post-war Parisian existentialists, struggling with the metaphysical legacies of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, seeking to find a new basis for ethical reasoning. If the two Simones had met for a frugal lunch in 1980, what might they have said to each other? It would have been a fascinating conversation to eavesdrop.
I thought about some other characters who might plausibly have shared a drink or two, and what might have transpired between them. As an expert on the absurdities of life, Samuel Beckett (1906-89) would be an interesting interlocutor. Although he dressed like a character from a Beckett play, Harpo Marx (1888-1964) always seemed far too cheerful to be much bothered by the void of meaning in modern life. A meeting between Samuel and Harpo – however improbably – would have been a delight to observe.