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Interview

Sarah Bakewell

Sarah Bakewell, popular author of engaging books about exciting ideas, chats with Tim Madigan about Iris Murdoch, Montaigne, the meaning of hope, humanism, fallibility, and her own life, among other topics.

Sarah Bakewell is a British author. Her best-selling works include the National Book Critics Circle Award Winner How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Chatto and Windus, 2010), At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (Other Press, 2016), and Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope (Penguin Press, 2023). She is the recipient of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Nonfiction, for work that “unknots complex philosophical thought with verve and wit; her eye for detail and her animated conversation bring readers to inhabit the lives of great philosophers.”

How did you become interested in philosophy?

Photo © Pietro Ficai Veltroni

It started when I was a teenager, reading people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus – all the usual existentialist types. I decided to study philosophy at the University of Essex, but not initially. I went to study literature, but we also did a module on philosophy. There was this wonderful interdisciplinary program in the first year. I discovered philosophy through that as a minor, then changed it to my major. I did start work on a PhD on Heidegger, as I was excited when I first read him, especially by his idea of ‘Being’. I suppose that, to a young person, his later philosophy, which is bizarre and kind of mystical, was incredibly exciting. Then, just as suddenly, I fell out of love with it. Because of that I decided to change paths altogether, and I didn’t continue with the PhD. I ended up working in other fields for quite a long time, specializing in rare books. I became a curator at the Wellcome Library in London. And then I wrote historical biographies, and weirdly, philosophy started to find its way back in. The next thing I knew I was writing this mixture of biography and philosophy, which, I must say, I find much more congenial to my temperament than pure philosophy, if there is such a thing.

You do seem to have an affinity for philosophers who are also literary figures, such as Montaigne, de Beauvoir, Camus, and Sartre.

Oh, definitely. It’s very arguable with somebody like Montaigne whether you should call him a philosopher or an essayist, or a sort of all-purpose writer. I’m inclined to think it doesn’t have to be either/or. The same is true of Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre. I think I’m drawn to them because literature was my first love and is still very central to me. I don’t see it as any kind of handmaiden to philosophy – or the other way around, either. But it’s also because by its nature literature tends to be about specific people’s experiences – about the human being in a particular time and place, a person to whom things happen, which is more like life as we experience it. We’re not some sort of ‘pure consciousness’. As Heidegger said, we are ‘thrown’ into history. Events and quirks of personality and accidental encounters with others are the stuff of literature. So I think it makes for quite a happy combination with philosophy.

Did you have an interest in Iris Murdoch?

Very much so. She had this great phrase, ‘inhabited philosophy’. It’s not that philosophy has to be something that you live out in your life in a pure way so much as just having a philosophy that is absolutely tied up with the stuff of life – a philosophy that you live. That’s a much more interesting concept than just the idea that life and philosophy have some sort of parallel tracks.

Recently there’s been several books published about British philosophy Post-World War 2, often with an emphasis on female philosophers at Oxford and Cambridge, and Iris Murdoch plays a very large role in these.

Yes, that’s true. Two books about that group of women philosophers – Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch – just happened to come out at the same time recently, which is something that often happens in the publishing world, and is pretty much dreaded by most authors.

One book that I absolutely enjoyed which came out last year was David Edmonds’ biography of Derek Parfit. That’s a wonderful example of biography and philosophy being interwoven. Parfit was such an extraordinary personality, a puzzling person in many ways. I like reading these things; it’s all part of a general interest in people. But when you’re writing about a philosopher or a novelist, you’re writing about someone who also reflects on their own life. The extreme case of that is Montaigne, because there’s nothing you could say about him that he hasn’t already said about himself. There’s a wealth of reflection on his own life and experiences. It’s great to write about someone who’s already written about themselves.

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

What is it about Montaigne that brought you back into writing about philosophy?

I was interested in him as a writer in a general way, probably more than as a philosopher, initially. Then he led me to thinking about the influence of Epicurean, Stoic, and Skeptical philosophers – the three Hellenistic sets of philosophers who interested him. It’s a philosophy that’s very borderline with literary reflection.

My book on Montaigne did well, and ended up leading me back, in my next book, to the philosophers I’d first gotten interested in when I was a teenager. So I next wrote about the existentialists. There was a connection, because Montaigne opened up the idea in me that you can write about a lived, inhabited philosophy of existence.

In terms of writing about Montaigne, that was just a pure labor of love, really. I discovered his writing quite by accident. I was about to go on a long journey from Budapest to Amsterdam, and was looking for something to read on the train. There was a very limited selection in a small secondhand bookshop near the train station in Budapest. I looked at the few books that they had that were not in Hungarian, and one of them was a translation of Montaigne’s selected essays.

I was fascinated to come across somebody so real. He gives such an impression of being a human being, complete with all the inconsistencies, oddities, opinions, and prejudices we all have, but he reflects on his own failings all the time. It’s a rich experience to come across even a selection of his essays. But it was a long time after that that I started writing about him. By then I’d gotten a more complete edition of his Essays (1580) [in which Montaigne first popularised the essay form, Ed]. This remained a favorite book for many years, before I eventually thought I’d like to write about him.

Was the title How to Live or A Life of Montaigne your title, or did the publisher come up with it?

It was mine, but it should have a question mark after ‘How to Live’. The question ‘How should I live?’ was prominent in the Early Modern period. There were a number of writers interested in it, and they picked it up from classical sources.

While not quite grammatical in English, the question ‘How to live?’ is asked in the book’s twenty chapters. So the structure of the book is that there’s this one question, and twenty chapters that are all attempts at an answer. And, of course, ‘attempt’ is what the word essai means in French. That’s how Montaigne came up with the term – from the idea of trying things out, tasting them, giving them a kind of test drive, as we might say. I wanted to capture something of that in the structure of the book: to say here are various approaches to how you might live. I was putting the elements of his life into this structure of possible attempts at an answer to the question, but with an account of his life at the core of it. This made it fun to write, as it gave me a different angle than a straight biography.

A theme that runs throughout your books is the desire to live authentically. One thing I noticed when I was teaching an Introduction to Philosophy course, is that up until roughly the Nineteenth Century and even beyond, almost all the philosophers covered in the course had either been jailed, executed, or threatened with death and exile because the beliefs that they were expressing were so controversial.

This still does happen around the world today, and nobody’s entirely safe from it. Even now there’s a great deal of controversy over freedom of thought in universities. When I was writing the book about existentialism I was interested in some of the stories that had come out of Czechoslovakia, as it then was known, during the Cold War period, from philosophers who had been influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, applying their thinking about oppression and freedom, and how a coercive society works. There was Jan Patočka, who was persecuted by the Communist regime, and became ill and died prematurely because of it. Vaclav Havel, who studied with Patočka, also wrote essays about oppression and freedom, and what it means to philosophize in a regime of that sort.

Yes, you pursue this topic in your most recent work, Humanly Possible, too. I think we often admire the people you write about because they spoke their mind, or wrote views that were at the time against the grain. Putting them in the context in which they lived helps us to better understand why they wrote what they did. For instance, Montaigne, as you point out, had to be quite cautious in regards to what he wrote.

Exactly. This leaves us, all these years later, wondering, ‘Well, what did he really think, and what did he really mean? And how much of it is just being careful, versus how much of it is genuinely what he thought?’ We simply don’t know. For instance, did he accept the right of the Catholic Church to tell people what to think? That seems odd given his temperament and attitude, but he may very well have done so. What to me seems the key point in understanding him is that he just wasn’t all that interested in questions about God or the afterlife. There’s a lot in him that rather implies that he didn’t think there was much of an afterlife to expect, but he doesn’t say that there isn’t one. He simply doesn’t seem to take it into account much. I think that his interest was very much focused on how to be a human being in this world. He was steeped in classical readings from pre-Christian times, and took on the ancient philosophers’ view that the important thing is to live well, to be a good human being, to be a thoughtful human being, and to deal well with other people. He seemed not to be influenced by expectations of an afterlife.

That’s pertinent to most of the people you write about in Humanly Possible.

A lot of them had that tendency. Many earlier ‘humanists’ wouldn’t have necessarily thought to question any of the otherworldly beliefs, but they come across as not being very interested in them, just because there’s so much else that’s interesting about our relationships with each other in the here and now. This very much applies to somebody like Petrarch [1304-74], who I more or less take as my starting point for the history of humanism. There’s no reason at all to think that he doubted the existence of God, or that he didn’t go along with the Church’s orthodoxy. But when you read his letters to his friends, he’s completely fascinated by how to be a good human being and how to live well in the world. It’s a matter of focus; and it’s that interest in human relationships, life, and culture, that makes him a humanist.

You also talk about the importance of hope in Humanly Possible. ‘Hope’ often has religious connotations, particularly hope for an afterlife. What would you say the humanist concept of hope is?

The humanist concept of hope is focused on this world. Moreover, hope, as most humanists would use that term, means that if we want things to be better, we have to do it ourselves. It’s up to us. And we have an ability to think about the future, to plan it to some extent; to collaborate, communicate, cooperate, and to take political steps that might improve things. And we’re completely interwoven and dependent with the rest of life on Earth, so we have a certain degree of responsibility for how things go on the planet, as well as with ourselves and our own lives.

I know this all sounds a bit of a dream now, when things seem to be going so badly. Well, if we want things to be better, it’s up to us. Nobody’s going to step in from on high and save us – contrary to one of Heidegger’s last comments, that ‘Only a god can save us now’. Heidegger always denied that he was writing about God when he wrote about ‘Being’, or even this ‘god’, but I think it’s his coming out of the theistic closet, as it were; his still having a mystical sense of some sort of a higher power. Whereas the humanist tradition, in all its various forms, doesn’t even think about eternal salvation. It’s more like, how should we behave responsibly and productively to solve the problems that are in front of us?

Throughout Humanly Possible you stress the concept of fallibility – the acceptance that humans are imperfect, and we’re not going to create utopias.

The desire to create a utopia, I think, is one of the most dangerous ideas we’ve had collectively, especially if it relies on changing human nature in some fundamental way. This connects to the idea of ‘engineers of human souls’ – a phrase used by Stalin, whereby, in order to bring about the perfect Communist state, writers, artists, scientists, and technicians will have to engineer human nature.

The idea of fundamentally changing human nature is a rather religious concept. It implies that there’s something fundamentally wrong with human nature and there’s a solution that will change it for the better. The humanist starting-point, on the other hand, is to have a reasonably realistic assessment of what kind of beings we are and what we can or can’t do. It does not say that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us – either via the concept of evil or original sin – or that we’ve fallen from grace. The humanist instead says, look, we have these helpful qualities, and we have these dangerous tendencies; indeed, we have all sorts of mixtures of qualities – let’s just try and act in such a way that the more constructive and helpful qualities can flourish and the dangerous tendencies can be contained.

I wonder in that regard if there’s a kind of a dialectic between At the Existentialist Café and Humanly Possible, because at least some of the existentialists seemed to be dealing with despair, angst, and the sense of staring into the abyss, whereas the humanists you write about seem to express a more pragmatic and hopeful perspective.

The classic case of an early kind of existentialist who stared into the abyss was Kierkegaard. For him, if there was going to be any salvation, it would come from something beyond the human, something divine. But Sartre didn’t believe in any divine being; he said that he lost his faith while standing at a bus stop when he was a teenager. Maybe the bus was really late! But he didn’t have this supernatural hope.

What are the consequences, then, for how we live as human beings without such a hope? For some thinkers we have a ‘God-shaped hole’. How do we fill it? If there’s no God, then there’s no divine order, and so no blueprint laid down for us on how to be a human being, and therefore it’s up to us to figure out how we do it. So with the existentialists we have the sense of an active choice all the time: freedom, but within a situation. Sartre and other existentialists emphasize that it’s all about what we make of our choices: what kind of beings do we want to make ourselves into by our choices? There’s a tremendous spectrum among existentialists regarding how religious or nonreligious we should be, but ‘responsibility’ is the key word for all of them – taking responsibility for our choices. And the nuclear age brought that very much into focus. If we want to survive, we have to choose to survive.

There’s also a huge historical backdrop amongst different humanist traditions emphasizing responsibility. Humanists today point out that, even if we did only care about human beings, we can’t survive without the rest of our ecosystem, so on those grounds alone selfish humanism would be untenable. Since the Nineteenth Century, humanism has been dominated by the view that we’re an evolved species. We’re absolutely a part of the entire world. But we also have language. We have various degrees of a sense of morality and politics, and an ability to think and reflect and work together. We have what we can call the cultural realm. Humanists take that realm seriously.

One of the central crises right now is the growth of Artificial Intelligence. You did a postgraduate degree in this topic, so you were ahead of your time.

Well I was very interested in it when I was a student, but now I’m way behind. I graduated in 1989. Just to put it in context, one of the main puzzles being discussed then was how to write a program that could map the optimal route for getting from point A to point B. That’s what Google Maps now does all the time, a billion times a day.

My interest in the topic really came from an interest in the philosophy of mind. It was a time when there was a lot of overlap between philosophy and artificial intelligence research. What’s happened since is that, with the huge increase in computing power and interconnectivity, quite a lot of the things that we now think of as AI are really just a reliance on processing absolutely massive data sources. This produces impressive effects – but the vision of what human-like cognition might be which dominated early work in AI seems to have become less relevant. At the moment, at least, that seems to be where AI is at. It’s facing diminishing returns if it just keeps on working from these massive data sets without doing anything new. But we really don’t know where it’s going to lead us.

It was an interesting time to be working in AI, but then I never got a job in the field. I decided to do something completely different.

You’re getting a sense of what my youth was like. I was just sort of all over the place, really, but I was having a great time. And you never quite know which things you do are going to end up becoming a spark that you want to take further.

What are your current projects?

I’m having a bit of a break, although I’m sure that something is sparking somewhere. But I must say I’m enjoying just taking a bit of time to see where it leads me. The humanist book took me six years to write. It was very all-consuming. I loved doing it, but I also feel like I need to do a reset.

• Tim Madigan is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at St John Fisher University, in Rochester NY.