Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beau­voir were twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry philosophy’s pow­er cou­ple, in a time and place when pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als were true celebri­ties. In the mid-six­ties, they were not only fas­ci­nat­ing writ­ers in their own right, but also activists engaged in inter­na­tion­al strug­gle against what they defined as the glob­al­ly inju­ri­ous forces of cap­i­tal­ist impe­ri­al­ism and patri­ar­chal oppres­sion. In 1967, Sartre, along with Bertrand Rus­sell and a hand­ful of oth­er influ­en­tial thinkers, con­vened what became known as the “Rus­sell Tri­bunal,” a pri­vate body inves­ti­gat­ing war crimes in Viet­nam. De Beau­voir mean­while had pub­lished a suite of mem­oirs and prize-win­ning nov­els, and her ground­break­ing fem­i­nist study The Sec­ond Sex had been in pub­li­ca­tion a full twen­ty years.

In the inter­views above with Sartre and de Beau­voir, the “free and inti­mate cou­ple,” a mod­el of exis­ten­tial­ist free love, receives rev­er­en­tial treat­ment from the CBC. The jour­nal­ists describe Sartre as “the most famous and con­tro­ver­sial writer of his time…. An ally of stu­dents and inter­na­tion­al rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies [and] a very pub­lic fig­ure.” Sartre’s Paris apart­ment, an “aus­tere room,” rep­re­sents “a kind of uni­ver­sal con­science.” There are long, lin­ger­ing shots of the writer at work, pre­sum­ably on his Flaubert study, ten years in the mak­ing at this point. Sartre becomes pas­sion­ate when the inter­view­ers ask him about the dan­gers of the Viet­nam War. He responds:

There is noth­ing glo­ri­ous about a super­pow­er attack­ing a small nation which can­not fight on even terms, and yet resists fierce­ly, refus­ing to yield…. My per­spec­tive is sociopo­lit­i­cal as well as moral. The Viet­nam war is the very sym­bol of impe­ri­al­ism, the fruit of today’s monop­o­lis­tic cap­i­tal­ism.

For Sartre, phi­los­o­phy and pol­i­tics are insep­a­ra­ble. “The war in Viet­nam,” he says, ”dis­putes my work, and my work dis­putes the war.”

When the scene shifts to the sep­a­rate home of de Beau­voir, nick­named “Cas­tor” (the beaver), the cam­era lingers over her col­lec­tion of knick-knacks. Her home is “like a muse­um of her own life… filled with rem­i­nis­cences of Cuba, Africa, Japan, Spain, Chi­na, Mex­i­co.” She dis­cuss­es her time spent with Fidel Cas­tro at his coun­try home (“He fish­es with his gun, shoot­ing at trout”), and talks about her mem­oirs. “I am attached to my past,” she says, “but I don’t shun the present and future. Arti­facts and sou­venirs are meant to pre­serve the present. To buy a sou­venir is there­fore an invest­ment in the future.”

Sartre and de Beauvoir’s rela­tion­ship is sto­ried and com­plex. In his lengthy 2005 expose for The New York­er, Louis Menand describes it thus:

Their liai­son was part of the mys­tique of exis­ten­tial­ism, and it was exten­sive­ly doc­u­ment­ed and cool­ly defend­ed in Beauvoir’s four vol­umes of mem­oirs, all of them extreme­ly pop­u­lar in France…. Beau­voir and Sartre had no inter­est in var­nish­ing the facts out of respect for bour­geois notions of decen­cy. Dis­re­spect for bour­geois notions of decen­cy was pre­cise­ly the point.

Their sex­u­al rebel­lion seems nov­el for the times, but the way they con­strued their open rela­tion­ship also relied on Roman­tic clichés and the medieval for­mu­la of court­ly love. As Sartre would say of their roman­tic “pact”: “What we have is an essen­tial love; but it is a good idea for us also to expe­ri­ence con­tin­gent love affairs.” His Aris­totelian argu­ment, Menand writes, “worked as well on her as a dia­mond ring.” The couple’s egal­i­tar­i­an sex­u­al pol­i­tics often seem at odds with their prac­tice, in Menard’s esti­ma­tion, in which Sartre seemed to gain the upper hand and both wield­ed pow­er over their con­quests.

While spec­u­la­tions on their arrange­ment may seem pruri­ent, the two doc­u­ment­ed their own dal­liances obses­sive­ly in their work—both fic­tion­al and non—referring to their entourage of admir­ers and lovers as “the fam­i­ly.” They adopt­ed young women, fre­quent­ly stu­dents, as pro­tégées, and seduced both women and men in what their for­mer lover Bian­ca Bienen­feld, in her mem­oir A Dis­grace­ful Affair, would call “act­ing out a com­mon­place ver­sion of ‘Dan­ger­ous Liaisons.’”

Author Hazel Row­ley, who also wrote on Franklin and Eleanor Roo­sevelt, doc­u­ment­ed their 51-year part­ner­ship in her book Tete-a-Tete, a biog­ra­phy writ­ten in coop­er­a­tion with de Beauvoir’s adopt­ed daugh­ter (and pos­si­ble lover) Sylvie Le Bon de Beau­voir and con­test­ed by Sartre’s adoptee, Arlette Elka­im-Sartre. Like all rad­i­cal fig­ures, Sartre and de Beau­voir need to be accept­ed as warts-and-all human beings. Their influ­en­tial work is not negat­ed by their con­tra­dic­to­ry lives, but the per­son­al and polit­i­cal do make for a strange blend in the case of these intel­lec­tu­al rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Simone de Beau­voir Explains “Why I’m a Fem­i­nist” in a Rare TV Inter­view (1975)

Jean-Paul Sartre Breaks Down the Bad Faith of Intel­lec­tu­als

Lovers and Philoso­phers — Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beau­voir Togeth­er in 1967

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

“Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy,” or Wiphi, is an online project of “open access phi­los­o­phy” co-cre­at­ed by Yale and MIT that aims to make fun­da­men­tal philo­soph­i­cal con­cepts acces­si­ble by “mak­ing videos that are freely avail­able in a form that is enter­tain­ing” to peo­ple “with no back­ground in the sub­ject.” To accom­plish this goal, they have con­tract­ed with an impres­sive range of pro­fes­sors of phi­los­o­phy from pres­ti­gious uni­ver­si­ties across the coun­try. Wiphi is still very much a work-in-progress, but they cur­rent­ly fea­ture some inter­est­ing intro­duc­tions to clas­si­cal philo­soph­i­cal issues. Cur­rent­ly, the site divides into sev­er­al basic cat­e­gories like “Crit­i­cal Think­ing,” “Epis­te­mol­o­gy,” “Meta­physics,” “Ethics,” and “Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy.” Much of these are still unfin­ished, but the few videos on the site, such as those relat­ed to the prob­lem of free will and the exis­tence of God, pro­vide view­ers with much to chew on.

In the video above, MIT phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Richard Holton explains the basics of the prob­lem of free will. He divides this into two dis­tinct prob­lems: the meta­phys­i­cal and the epis­te­mo­log­i­cal. The first prob­lem states that if the laws of nature are deter­min­is­tic, every­thing that will hap­pen is fixed, and there is in fact no free choice (no mat­ter how we feel about it). Holton choos­es to focus on the sec­ond prob­lem, the prob­lem of fore­knowl­edge. Put sim­ply, if things are deter­mined, then if we know all of the con­di­tions of real­i­ty, and have ade­quate resources, we should be able to pre­dict every­thing that is going to hap­pen.

Holton leaves aside enor­mous­ly com­pli­cat­ed devel­op­ments in physics and opts to illus­trate the prob­lem with what he calls “a sim­ple device.” In his illus­tra­tion, one must pre­dict whether a light­bulb will turn on by turn­ing on anoth­er light­bulb, part of a sys­tem he calls a “frus­tra­tor.” In this sce­nario, even if we have all the knowl­edge and resources to make per­fect­ly accu­rate pre­dic­tions, the prob­lem of “frustrators”—or faulty observers and feed­back loops—complicates the sit­u­a­tion irrev­o­ca­bly

In the video above, Pro­fes­sor Tim­o­thy Yen­ter describes the Cos­mo­log­i­cal argu­ment for the exis­tence of God, clas­si­cal­ly attrib­uted to Aris­to­tle, elab­o­rat­ed by Islam­ic philoso­phers and Thomas Aquinas, and tak­en up in the Enlight­en­ment by Leib­niz as the prin­ci­ple of suf­fi­cient rea­son. One of that argument’s premis­es, that the cos­mos (every­thing that exists) must have a cause, assumes that the causal cir­cum­stances we observe with­in the sys­tem, the uni­verse as a whole, must also apply out­side of it. Pro­fes­sor Yen­ter describes this above in terms of the “fal­la­cy of com­po­si­tion,” which occurs when one assumes that the whole has the same prop­er­ties as its parts. (Such as argu­ing that since all of your body’s atoms are invis­i­ble to the naked eye, your whole body is invis­i­ble. Try head­ing to work naked tomor­row to test this out.)

This brings us to the prob­lem of infi­nite regress. In the sec­ond part of his intro­duc­tion to the Cos­mo­log­i­cal Argument—in which he dis­cuss­es the so-called Modal Argument—Professor Yen­ter explains the key prin­ci­ple of Ex nihi­lo nihil fit, or “out of noth­ing, noth­ing comes.” This seems like a bedrock meta­phys­i­cal prin­ci­ple, such that few ques­tion it, and it intro­duces a key dis­tinc­tion between nec­es­sary things—which must exist—and con­tin­gent things, which could be oth­er­wise. The most impor­tant premise in the Modal Argu­ment is that every con­tin­gent thing must be caused by some­thing else. If all caus­es are con­tin­gent (which they seem to us to be) they must pro­ceed from a nec­es­sary, self-exis­tent thing. Whether that thing has all or any of the prop­er­ties clas­si­cal­ly ascribed to the the­is­tic God is anoth­er ques­tion all togeth­er, but Aquinas and the clas­si­cal Islam­ic philoso­phers cer­tain­ly thought so.

While there may be no philo­soph­i­cal nut­crack­er large enough to crack these prob­lems, they remain per­pet­u­al­ly inter­est­ing for many philoso­phers and sci­en­tists, and under­stand­ing the basic issues at stake is fun­da­men­tal to any study of phi­los­o­phy. In that sense, Wiphi pro­vides a nec­es­sary ser­vice to those just begin­ning to wade out into the sea of The Big Ques­tions.

 Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

Lawrence Krauss Explains How You Get ‘A Uni­verse From Noth­ing’

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Lec­tures Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

“To those human beings who are of any con­cern to me, I wish suf­fer­ing, des­o­la­tion, sick­ness, ill treat­ment, indig­ni­ties, pro­found self-con­tempt, the tor­ture of self-mis­trust, and the wretched­ness of the van­quished.” Thus wrote for­bid­ding­ly mus­ta­chioed Ger­man philoso­pher Friedrich Niet­zsche, artic­u­lat­ing his coun­ter­in­tu­itive view of suf­fer­ing as some­thing desir­able. But sure­ly the Niet­zschean way could nev­er lead to an enjoy­able life? On the con­trary, explains the tele­vi­sion series Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness. “Friedrich Niet­zsche believed that all vari­eties of suf­fer­ing and fail­ure were to be wel­comed by any­one seek­ing hap­pi­ness. We should regard them as tough chal­lenges to be over­come in the same way as a climber might tack­le a moun­tain.” Thus speaks the show’s host, pop­u­lar­iz­er of philoso­phers from Socrates to Seneca, Epi­cu­rus to Schopen­hauer, Alain de Bot­ton.

Niet­zsche per­haps put more com­pelling­ly than any writer before or since the notion of “no pain, no gain.” De Bot­ton, a phi­los­o­phy enthu­si­ast eager to look for the­o­ry in prac­tice, vis­its a ded­i­cat­ed, sac­ri­fice-mak­ing dancer from the Eng­lish Nation­al Bal­let, the com­bi­na­tion of whose acquired phys­i­cal grace and painful his­to­ry of toe­nail bruis­es make the argu­ment in a vis­cer­al way.

He then chats with a drinks dis­trib­u­tor fresh off the fail­ure of his first busi­ness ven­ture and already work­ing hard on his sec­ond. Accord­ing to our host, Niet­zsche “did­n’t think that hav­ing failed was, in itself, enough. All lives have fail­ures in them. What makes some lives ful­filled as well is the man­ner in which fail­ure has been met.” Or, in the sim­pler words of the dis­trib­u­tor him­self, “How would you be able to judge your suc­cess if you haven’t failed?”

Although this broad­cast works as an intro­duc­tion, we don’t rec­om­mend you lim­it your learn­ing about a philoso­pher with a volu­mi­nous body of writ­ten work to videos alone. In our col­lec­tion of free eBooks, you can down­load eight of Niet­zsche’s vol­umes in a vari­ety of for­mats: Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, Homer and Clas­si­cal Philol­o­gy, Human, All Too Human, The Anti Christ, The Case Against Wag­n­er, The Gay Sci­ence, and Thus Spake Zarathus­tra.

You can watch more episodes in Alain de Bot­ton’s series, A Guide to Hap­pi­ness here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

Sartre, Hei­deg­ger, Niet­zsche: Three Philoso­phers in Three Hours

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.