AutoBioPhilosophy: An intimate story of what it means to be human

But had I done so, there might never have been any Anna, the daughter who began life in the womb as Sweet Pea. Not to mention my second daughter, Ruby, and my third daughter, Greta. They arrived in 1991 and 2006 respectively, as if fulfilling a prophecy.

The dream revealed nothing, however, about that fifteen-year gap, nor the fact that the daughters would have different mothers. In this respect, the dream was a riddle, not unlike the witches’ prophecy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

In Act One, the witches tell Macbeth that he will never be killed by a man ‘of woman born’. From this information, Macbeth quite reasonably infers that he is invulnerable to murder. In Act Five, Macbeth is stabbed by Macduff. It turns out that as a baby Macduff was delivered by Caesarian section. He was never ‘born’ in the technical sense. The prophecy was playing with Macbeth’s assumptions, just as my dream had tricked me into assuming that all three daughters would share the same mother.

The importance of doing nothing

Trying to stand in for my father spoke to an urge on my part that was immature. Or premature, rather. Because I couldn’t bear to spectate on his life, I was trying to hasten his death. Doing so would turn me prematurely into a father in my own right. As a precocious essay at adulthood, that fitted with acts of far lesser import, such as the calling of my parents by their first names, which was supposed to prove how grown-up I was. It fitted with starting to shave before I really needed to, as I had done at fifteen. It fitted with lying about my age to my first girlfriend, Emma. I told her I was doing my A levels like an eighteen-year-old, when at sixteen I was only doing my Os. In all cases, I was jumping the gun. Maybe it was a response to having an older sister, showing that I wasn’t lagging behind. Whatever the cause, the natural – and unhurried – process of maturation caused me stress. I was forever trying to catalyse it.

Knowing when to act is at least as important as knowing what to do. Ripeness is all. And sometimes the best course is to do nothing. Broadly speaking, that is the Taoist approach. It’s not about inertia, however. The advantage of minimising our own activity is that it maximises the effect of powers larger than we are. We get out of our own way. That allows us to be carried instead by a knowing tide. We recognise that there are wider forces ready to disport themselves, forces such as that species imperative. If being human means standing in the flow of life, then perhaps we should allow that flow to happen, and accept that life is stronger than any of us. Let us stop trying too hard.

Because we in the West live in a culture that believes in making rather than letting things happen, that approach might be unpalatable.

We favour action, looking down on inaction with disdain. Yet it was exactly at the point where I was no longer calling the shots that I was rewarded with a daughter.

When I decided to drop out of Oxford, I believed I was taking my life into my own hands. I was exhibiting, even flaunting, my agency. As I’ve said, there was a powerful enough default option, in the form of carrying on with my degree. Interrupting that momentum took effort. But as the thunderbolt of Simone’s pregnancy proves, I could direct events only so much. My interruption was interrupted. The result, however, was a daughter whom I love. That raises the question of what other powers were at large, powers operating a level deeper even than the species. Might there be a fifth layer to our triangle, a wider base?

That I was prematurely made a father might have been chance. Except that ‘chance’ is such a non-answer. Given that Anna’s appearance in the world was so positive, was there a benign will that made it happen? In pop terms, was this ‘the universe’ doing me a favour? The practical benefit of Simone’s pregnancy was that it made me realise I should go back to Oxford and finish my degree. It forced me to sober up. If I was to be a father, I should give us as a family the best foundation. An Oxford degree, which luckily enough I was two-thirds of the way to completing, was exactly that. At the very least, I would be pulled out of the hole I had dug. Whether it was chance or the machinations of a spirit, some goodness was abroad, some benefit being dispensed like overnight dew.

Again, it’s hard to know. Powers such as chance or ‘the universe’ are inscrutable. That is partly what it means to be human. We never know for sure the balance of our own agency versus all the other forces operating upon us. The lesson that I draw from Simone falling pregnant is that sometimes it is better to take one’s own hands off the steering wheel. Trust that you’ll be delivered safely to the right destination, even though that destination might not be the one that you punched into the SatNav.

A pint of Guinness

Put another way, knowing can be the enemy of being. Although it is human to want to know, the fact that our knowledge has limits is what keeps us open to experiences we can’t fully understand. That is possibly the moral of the Garden of Eden. In warning Adam and Eve against eating from the tree, God is imparting general advice to us all: keep your knowledge in check, so that you can enjoy the benefit of forces beyond your ken, forces working for your good. Yes, that sounds paternalistic; but then we are talking about God.

The experience of Anna’s birth was one I will never fully know or understand, no matter how many the hindsight miles by which I overtake it. Too many thoughts, feelings and prior events had converged at that point for me to make sense of them. But that is exactly what allowed it to make such an impression. My reasoning couldn’t block out the experience. Some fragments: the grey light filtering in from the courtyard; Simone squeezing my hand to the point of crushing it; the crowning of the baby’s head as slick as an otter’s; the rapidity with which the body slithered out once the shoulders were through; the whole scrunched-up baby held aloft by the midwife, with the umbilicus attached, as though she were lifting an oversized telephone with its cable; the placing of this rubbery alien on Simone’s breast.

Later that day, my oldest friend from school, Charlie, came to visit. He was at the same stage as me, about to start his third year at university. He insisted that we wet the baby’s head. We went for a swift pint of Guinness at a nearby pub. It was there that he told me his girlfriend had fallen pregnant by accident, and that they were going to keep it.

Now the family is rejoined. In a

gold circlet they weep of old fears.

It is warm here, the sycamore

pales at last. His to keep. Amass.

J. H. Prynne

3 (#ulink_285d7e87-756c-527f-926f-721353ab3990)

The Keys to the Tower (#ulink_285d7e87-756c-527f-926f-721353ab3990)

If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.

Thomas Merton

Michaelmas Term 1987 began two weeks after Anna was born. By now, the three of us were ensconced in a breezeblock-lined, one-bedroom flat, in a university accommodation complex several leagues north of central Oxford, far up the Banbury Road. This was the very flat where, a fortnight previously, I had received that late-night phone call from Simone’s Aunt Lydia, urging me to make haste to London for the birth. Anna slept in the living room, snug in a Moses basket perched on my red futon, which was now doing respectable duty as a sofa.

It was the first term of my last year. With a new baby in the mix, I approached it like a job. Where my fellow students were getting up when they fancied, shaking off hangovers, smoking roll-ups, playing snooker in the common room, and putting off work until the essay deadline was upon them and they were forced to pull an all-nighter, I was a picture of orderliness. I arrived at the library when the doors opened, did my research, wrote my essays, reported for my tutorials, and in the afternoon relieved Simone of baby care. I cycled back not just with books in my basket but bumper packs of nappies dangling from the handlebars.

In the evenings we’d stay in, watching EastEnders on a portable black and white TV with a dodgy picture, while Anna fed or snoozed. When she was doing neither, and just crying, we would take turns swinging the Moses basket and humming lullabies until she dropped off. When even that didn’t work, we’d turn on the vacuum cleaner. No, not to suck the bawling infant out of our lives. It’s not unusual for babies to find ‘non-periodic’ noise soothing, and for Anna it did the trick.

That model of ‘lots of time, few responsibilities’, which was the model by which most arts students lived, was supposed to empower them. Free from the quotidian constraints that were to shackle them after college, they would not only satisfy their academic requirements, but would naturally read around their subject and generally improve their minds.

That was the theory. In practice, the absence of pressure caused a reduction in drive. They grew lazy. At least, that had been my experience before dropping out. Now that my third year had come around, the time available to me for studying, shortened by family commitments, meant that I had no choice but to be efficient. I would argue that the constraints actually improved the quality of my work, in that I saw my studying time as precious. I focused. No doubt there is a general rule in that: we work best under a certain amount of stress. A bell curve applies, as in the diagram opposite. Maybe all students should have a young family.

On purpose

The overarching question that guides this book is, ‘What does it mean to be human?’ While tracking a life, in this case mine, along a more or less straight line, each chapter offers a different tangent to that question. The tangent suggested in the last chapter was that of standing in the flow of life. As if planting one’s feet in a river, being human means feeling the past of the species surge up behind us, while sensing its urge to flow onwards. None of us is more than a boulder in the onward mission of the life force.

In this new chapter, I shall crop that trans-generational view down to an individual life span. How do we make our allotted time on earth meaningful? We do so, I believe, by identifying and pursuing a purpose. By ‘purpose’ I mean more than doing what we have to do to survive. One of the elements that makes us human is that we are capable of going beyond meeting our immediate needs for survival. Of course, we don’t always have the luxury of doing that. Sometimes survival is the best that we can hope for. Think of refugees or people living on the breadline. Once our basic needs have been met, however, we naturally want to optimise our lives, to make them go as well as possible.

That we can do in one of two ways. Either we try to make our lives more comfortable or we try to make them more meaningful. In reality, the choice isn’t black and white: we’ll make trade-offs between the two. To use an obvious example, we might take a job with a charity that doesn’t pay so well because we want to make a difference; but we stop short of giving away all our earnings in order to maintain a standard of living. Thus we strike the balance between meaning and comfort that feels right for us. Often we find that balance intuitively, without explicitly posing the question. It’s an intuition that we all possess, this knowing whether we are driven more by meaning or by comfort.

The lucky few manage to square the circle. A human rights lawyer will have meaningful work while enjoying a pretty decent lifestyle. A smaller minority still will pursue personal comfort with no regard for meaning at all. To use another obvious example: bankers. For such groups, there is perhaps a hidden cost to be paid, however. Not only can gaining money go together with losing meaning, but in the process the conscience may become restive. In the blinkered pursuit of wealth, the desires of the self eclipse the needs of the soul to such a degree that, in the darkness, doubts about one’s very goodness as a human being may arise. An excess of comfort can feel uncomfortable. The thicker the mattress, the greater the chance of a pea.

I was given my own sense of purpose through those twin occupations of studying for my finals and being a parent. They filled the crater that had opened up when I dropped out and went to live in France with no life-plan to speak of. As it turned out, my studies provided a purpose that would sustain me beyond the immediate challenge of preparing for my exams.

French intellectuals

I had gone up to read English at Oxford in October 1984. There had recently formed a group calling itself ‘Oxford English Limited’ (OEL). The name was a pun: OEL’s mission was to expose the limitations of the English Literature syllabus. Its high-minded members claimed that the study of English at Oxford had been reduced to whimsical musings about novels and the lives of their authors. Made up largely of Marxists, OEL insisted that literature be examined in its political context. Rather than extolling Pride and Prejudice for its marvellous characters and charming plot, we should be looking at the way in which class differences were reinforced by its author. Through this lens, which was the opposite of rose-tinted, it appeared that Jane Austen was doing little more than condoning the bourgeois way of life. She was thereby perpetuating capitalism rather than disrupting it – disruption being the Marxist protocol.

The early 1980s was the era of Margaret Thatcher. Discontent with her brand of Conservatism infected not just those on the far Left but also those of more moderate kidney. That Marxist approach to literature fitted with an anti-authoritarianism that was in the air. Yet to me it came as a jolt. At school I had been taught to judge literature purely on its aesthetic merits. Did the novel achieve a satisfying unity or did it feel fragmented? Were the characters ‘flat’ or ‘round’? How successfully did the language used by the author express his or her intentions? Here was a much more abrasive approach. According to OEL, a novel was less a work of art than a battleground upon which ideologies were fought out. Like many of my peers, I was forced to rethink my assumptions.

The OEL call to politicise the study of literature went together with a wider attempt by progressive dons in the English faculty to bring continental thinking to bear upon literary studies. Of especial interest were the ideas of Parisian intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida. Though the differences between these thinkers were as great as the similarities, their output was often taken en bloc. This block went by the moniker of ‘Post-Structuralism’. It combined a depth of analysis with a width of reference that made the Oxford way of doing things seem to me parochial and light-weight.

From that list of thinkers, it was the last, Jacques Derrida, to whom I felt the greatest draw. There was a book of Derrida’s called Writing and Difference – my paperback translation had an avocado green cover – over which I pored as if it were the oracle. I’m not sure that I understood a word to begin with. But that didn’t matter. I became mesmerised by the intricacy of the sentence structure, the elegance of the argumentation, the intensity of the analysis, the boldness of the conclusions.

This too was disruptive but in a way which, to my mind, was far more fundamental than that of the Marxists. Derrida was systematically deconstructing the cornerstones of Western philosophy, all the way from Plato through to his own contemporaries. Those cornerstones weren’t merely academic. They were the ideas on which Western society as a whole was built – ideas like democracy, truth, justice and freedom. Derrida was showing how many of these ideas just didn’t stand up under scrutiny, and that it was time to start again from scratch. To me, it was thrilling.

The very word ‘deconstruction’, which has since entered common parlance, comes to us from Derrida; although strictly speaking it originates with his precursor, Martin Heidegger. Derrida sought to distance himself from the term, however, on account of its negative connotations. In fact, his work had both a negative and a positive mode, both brake and accelerator. The brake involved taking a fine-toothed comb to the texts of leading thinkers in order to expose biases, point out contradictions, and highlight apparently marginal remarks that undermined the central thesis. The accelerator saw Derrida blending disciplines usually held apart, such as psychoanalysis and philosophy, in order to produce fresh insight. Ever inventive, he created a host of new concepts as well as reinventing the old. Even when debunking the arguments of another philosopher, he would generally do so in a highly respectful manner, helping the reader to understand that other philosopher’s reasoning. Through Derrida, one could learn about the entire history of ideas. One also saw how these ideas could be renewed.

Not everybody appreciated both sides. The innate conservatism of Oxford led many academics to denounce Derrida as an intellectual terrorist, bent on detonating the achievements of Western civilisation. They claimed that he was a nihilist. They said that the prolixity of his prose served to mask a lack of clear thinking. To quote a phrase of the times, they belittled his writings as ‘intellectual masturbation’.

Jacques Derrida was a divisive figure. In Oxford, the majority took against him, especially the philosophers, although he enjoyed support among a group of Literature dons and assorted mavericks. In many British universities he was reviled, but still there were pro-Derrida camps, especially at Sussex University, in Brighton, which after all was closer to France. At Cambridge – always more international in its tastes than Oxford – the controversy reached a head when a motion was submitted to award the contrarian an honorary doctorate. It threw the academy into turmoil, and the story made the nationals. After measured oration and bitter wrangling, the proposal squeaked through.

The purpose star

Like other Derrida fans, I felt that his detractors had jumped to their conclusions. When I probed as to which particular aspects of his thinking they eschewed, I would be met by generalisations. It turned out that they hadn’t read Derrida first hand, and were going on hearsay from their academic friends. It seemed that an uninformed view expressed by a trusted peer counted for more than unfiltered data from the primary source.

Perhaps that’s not surprising. One cannot form an opinion without excluding some of the facts. Moreover, one makes that exclusion for the sake of affirming identity. Opinions are first and foremost expressions of our belonging. The content comes a distant second. Whenever we opine on a given subject, our underlying motive is to indicate the tribe to which we belong, and affirm our membership of it. It’s one of the reasons why people so rarely change their minds. Changing your mind involves changing the group to which you feel you belong. That takes courage. Change more broadly follows the same rule: many people attest to wanting to change, but precious few are willing to disturb their identity.

I tired of defending Derrida. My leaning was towards the philosophy itself. Before long, it became my passion. I began collecting the master’s books, in English and in French, taking especial delight when I stumbled upon a bilingual edition. I ordered copies direct from Paris. To celebrate the end of my third year, I shelled out forty-seven pounds – a king’s ransom – for a hardback copy of Derrida’s signature work, called Glas.

But why did I latch on so? Why Derrida and not Marx? What’s happening when we make such attachments? For many if not all of us, there is a time in our lives, usually in our teens or twenties, when we hit upon the thing that is going to guide us in our work life. At that point – and it often is a point – we see the thing, like an apparition, to which we are going to pledge our time. It might be training as a doctor, setting up a business, working for a politician, joining the navy, making ceramics, coding software, looking after children. Sometimes we make a false start, studying as an accountant before becoming a teacher, or taking up nursing only to leave for the theatre. But nearly always there is a moment – or at least a period – when we identify our guiding purpose and attach to it. It is like noticing a star that you had never seen before and deciding to follow. I call it the ‘purpose star’.

Finding the purpose star seems to occur when three conditions are met: