Michael led a very active love life in the 1940s and 1950s (and even later), having affairs, usually overlapping, with—only among others, note— Iris Murdoch (twice), Jenifer (Mrs. H.L.A.) Hart, Mary Walsh (with whom he had an illegitimate son, Sebastian, before deserting them both), Barbara Hoyle (wife of the cosmologist Fred Hoyle), his son Simon’s girlfriend Bobbie Kirk, and Rosemary Wormald, wife of the Peterhouse historian Brian Wormald … Almost unbelievably, Michael seems seldom to have been sleeping with fewer than three women at once.
Robert Grant in A Companion to Michael Oakeshott, Paul Franco and Leslie Marsh (eds) 2012, 31-2
There was, however, one curious, obscure survivor of this tragic family, the product of Marx’s most bizarre act of personal exploitation… This was Helen Demuth, known in the family as ‘Lenchen’…. She remained in the Marx family until her death in 1890. Eleanor called her ‘the most tender of beings to others, while throughout her life a stoic to herself’. She was a ferociously hard worker, not only cooking and scrubbing but managing the family budget, which Jenny was incapable of handling, Marx never paid her a penny. In 1849-50, during the darkest period of the family’s existence, Lenchen became Marx’s mistress and conceived a child.
Intellectuals, Paul Johnson 1988, 111-2
Michael Oakeshott was a top shagger and conservative sex-addict; Marx was a layabout buffoon and socialist slave-impregnator. What am I supposed to do with this? On the one hand, immaculate works of the Western canon, on the other, sordid, dripping accounts of villainy. In case you couldn’t tell, I have become completely obsessed with degenerate philosophers. In particular, political and moral philosophers who really ought to know better.
I first encountered this strange topic in Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine. In one of the many, extraordinary footnotes, Baker gives the following accounts of Spinoza and Hobbes:
The philosopher [Spinoza] liked to entertain himself by dropping flies into spider’s webs, enjoying the resultant battle so much that sometimes he occasionally burst out laughing. (History of European Morals, vol. 1, page 289).
Hobbes too, we learn in a penguin selection of John Aubrey’s Lives page 228, liked during college (“rook racked” Oxford) to get up early in the morning and trap jackdaws with sticky string, using cheese as bait, hauling them in fluttering and wrapped in the feather-destroying snare, apparently for fun. Jesus H. Christ! (The Mezzanine, 1988 pg. 121)
His diagnosis is unassailable: “As our knowledge of these philosophers is brought within the domestic and anecdotal embrace, we can’t help having our estimation of them somewhat diminished by these cruel, small pursuits.” In a similar vein, Baker describes Wittgenstein’s obsession with Cowboy films, which he watched daily for hours at a time: “Can you take seriously a person’s theory of language when you know that he was delighted by the woodenness and tedium of cowboy movies? Once in a while, fine – but every day?” Alas, Baker is correct: whilst knowledge of this sort tends to diminish our respect for the Greats, the reader irresistibly thirsts for the personal and perfidious.
An even richer trove of philosopher skulduggery can be found in Johnson’s Intellectuals. Tolstoy frequented brothels and fathered a son on his married serf Aksinya (whom he refused to acknowledge). Believing in total “openness,” Tolstoy made his eighteen-year-old fiancée Sonya read his uncensored diaries before their marriage — pages cataloguing his sex with prostitutes, gypsies, peasant girls, and even her mother’s friends, plus unpaid gambling debts and the fact that he had not warned past sexual partners about his venereal disease. Tolstoy later skipped his brother’s funeral to go to a party, and, on his deathbed, assigned all his copyrights away from his family.
Bertrand Russell, Johnson tells us, was an aficionado of nuclear war in the 1940s, arguing America should use its stockpile to threaten and, if necessary, destroy the USSR. Earlier, in 1914, he seduced a young American woman called Helen Dudley, whom he brought over to England to intermittently sleep with. After breaking her heart, Russell left Helen when she fell ill, became paralysed, and went insane. Russell summarises this in his autobiography:
I had relations with her from time to time’, the war ‘killed my passion for her and I broke her heart’… ‘she fell a victim to a rare disease, which first paralysed her, and then made her insane.’
The end. So much for the Atheist’s creed: “we believe in immortality through good deeds.” Johnson’s book goes on, detailing Russell’s tax evasions, affairs, betrayals, sordid servant-bonking, as well as the perfidy of other progressives like Sartre, Wilson, and Rousseau. If you spend too much time dwelling in these lives, you enter a topsy-turvy world where socialists carelessly impregnate their married servants and humanist educationalists abandon their children:
The first [of Rousseau’s children] was born to Thérèse [his mistress] in the winter of 1746-47. We do not know its sex. It was never named. With (he says) ‘the greatest difficulty in the world’, he persuaded Thérèse that the baby must be abandoned ‘to save her honour’. She ‘obeyed with a sigh’. He placed a cypher-card in the infant’s clothing and told the midwife to drop off the bundle at the Hôpital des Enfants-trouvés. Four other babies he had by Thérèse were disposed of in exactly the same manner, except that he did not trouble to insert a cypher-card after the first. None had names. It is unlikely that any of them survived long. (Johnson, 29-30)
There is a strong hint of character assassination in these stories, and it is no coincidence the conservative Paul Johnson takes aim at primarily liberal targets. He has been criticised for his polemic tone and selective choice of material. Nonetheless, you cannot help but feel the force of his blows. The same unease arises from collective degeneracy. What do we make of studies which show ethicists are no more moral than other academics?
Ethicists expressed somewhat more stringent normative attitudes on some issues, such as vegetarianism and charitable donation. However, on no issue did ethicists show significantly better behavior than the two comparison groups. (The Self-Reported Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors, Eric Schwitzgebel)
Even if metrics like “staying in touch with one’s mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, charitable giving, and responsiveness to student emails” are not constitutive of morality, doubts and mistrust worm their way in. What was the point of studying ethics if you behave no differently or, in some cases, worse than the non-ethicist?
With respect to their treatment of library books, then, it does not appear that the people reading philosophical ethics behave any better than those reading other sorts of philosophy; indeed, the opposite seems to be the case. [Do Ethicists Steal More Books?]
I remember the same curious sense of moral confusion when reading about H.G. Wells’s life. In A Modern Utopia (1905), Wells presents himself as a member of the spiritually elite ‘Samurai’ ruling class, superior in character, virtue, honour, intelligence, and integrity. All very compelling stuff; several London social clubs even started ‘Samurai societies.’ Nonetheless, Wells’s own personal life consisted of an endless string of extramarital affairs with younger women (including, fantastically, with the American birth control activist Margaret Sanger). As he noted himself:
I have pleased myself tremendously through romantic deeds… every iota of sexual impulse in me… has fully expressed itself. Let me admit it, I am immoral and have preyed on admirers.
You begin to wonder: if this man is to be a Samurai, do I want to be a part of his Utopia? (In any event, A Modern Utopia accidentally falsifies itself via the significantly more compelling and travelling-companion character (‘the botanist’), whom Wells consistently condescends and insults. When told most animals will be destroyed to prevent the spread of diseases, “The botanist shakes his head… and says quietly, ‘I do not like your Utopia, if there are to be no dogs.’”)
Or take the inverse case: Nietzsche, who recommends the big-souled man, was by all accounts a diminutive figure, polite, gentle, kind to children and the elderly, prone to excessive masturbation, and in love with a string of women he could never have. By his own warped standards, Nietzsche was hardly a “blonde beast”:
In assessing Nietzsche’s condition, I have long been reminded of identical or very similar experiences with young men of great intellectual ability. Seeing them laid low by similar symptoms, I discovered all too certainly that these were the effects of masturbation. Ever since I observed Nietzsche closely, guided by such experiences, all his traits of temperament and characteristic habits have transformed my fear into a conviction. (Wagner to Dr. Otto Eiser, late October 1877)
To conclude my list of degenerate philosophers, I will examine some counterexamples: philosophers who embody, in their day to day lives, an expansive moral greatness. Frank Ramsey, for example, shows how all the virtues could be conjoined in a man:
There was something a bit abnormal about Frank. He was so huge in body and in mind, so much bigger and better… that I suspected that… his cells might have double the number of chromosomes… While still an undergraduate Frank had attacked Keynes on… probability and had shaken him to the core. But this precocious intelligence was combined with a childlike innocence…
The result was very curious. When I brought to his notice some ordinary tale of petty self-seeking, self-deception or malice, Frank was at first astounded. Such things did not seem possible to him up there in the heights. Then he would realise the full implications and humour of folly and silliness, and the self-defeating nature of selfishness and spitefulness, and God-like, his great innocent face would become wreathed in smiles and then he would chuckle. And his chuckle was the chuckling of a god. (Source)
Or, in a passage describing a similar saturnian, child-like capaciousness, the description of Abraham Lincoln in his first meeting the German-American politician Carl Schurz:
He talked in so simple and familiar a strain, and his manner and homely phrase were so absolutely free from any semblance of self-consciousness or pretension to superiority, that I soon felt as if I had known him all my life and we had long been close friends. He interspersed our conversation with all sorts of quaint stories, each of which had a witty point applicable to the subject in hand, and not seldom concluding an argument in such a manner that nothing more was to be said.
He seemed to enjoy his own jests in a childlike way, for his unusually sad-looking eyes would kindle with a merry twinkle, and he himself led in the laughter; and his laugh was so genuine, hearty, and contagious that nobody could fail to join in. (source)
Do these accounts make the writing of these men more compelling? It is hard to say, but the sense of integration between thought and life is undeniably compelling. Reconciling a philosopher’s personal life with their intellectual work is difficult, and may be as much a matter of the reader’s personality as the thinker’s. At least personally, I am repelled by the writer whose behaviour radically undercuts their prescriptions.
Your moral philosophy should be in some kind of feedback circuit with your behaviour. I worry the wicked man who proposes sweet sounding moral words, reproduces a system for his own needs, whether consciously or otherwise. To believe this is no small thing, for it implies you cannot separate the thinker from their thoughts. It twangs a much longer, deeper intellectual string, subject of long interminable debates, best left for another day. For now, I remain unsettled and disturbed when I see socialists enslave, spiritualists debauch, and conservatives philander.