Modern Mind

but people had seen the danger, and it was partly as a result of this tussle that the ‘C’ in BBC was changed in 1927 from Company to Corporation, protected by royal charter. The General Strike was therefore a watershed for the BBC in the realm of politics. Before the strike, politics (and other ‘controversial’ subjects) were avoided entirely, but the strike changed all that, and in 1929
The Week in Parliament
was launched. Three years later, the corporation began its own news-gathering organisation. 55
    The historian J. H. Plumb has said that one of the great unsung achievements of the twentieth century has been the education of vast numbers of people. Government-funded schools and universities led the way here, but the various forms of new media, many of which started in the 1920s, have also played their part. The term
middlebrow
may be intended as an insult by some, but for millions, like the readers of
Time
or those listening in to the BBC, it was more a question of wising up than dumbing down.
    * The history of Harlem was not fully recovered until the 1980s, by such scholars as David Levering Lewis and George Hutchinson. My account is based chiefly on their work.

PART THREE
SARTRE TO THE SEA OF TRANQUILITY

The New Human Condition and The Great Society
     

23
PARIS IN THE YEAR ZERO
     
    In October 1945, following his first visit to the United States, which had impressed him, at least temporarily, with its vitality and abundance, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre returned to a very different Paris. After the years of war and occupation, the city was wrecked, emotionally more so than physically (because the Germans had spared it), and the contrast with America was stark. Sartre’s first task on his return was to deliver a lecture at the university entitled ‘Existentialism is a Humanism.’ To his consternation, so many people turned up for the lecture that all the seats were occupied, and he himself couldn’t get in. The lecture started an hour late. Once begun, ‘he spoke for two hours without stopping, without notes, and without taking his hands out of his pockets,’ and the occasion became famous. 1 It became famous not only for the virtuosity of its delivery but because it was the first public admission by Sartre of a change in his philosophy. Much influenced by what had happened in Vichy France and the ultimate victory of the Allies, Sartre’s existentialism, which before the war had been an essentially pessimistic doctrine, now became an idea ‘based on optimism and action.’ 2 Sartre’s new ideas, he said, would be ‘the new creed’ for ‘the Europeans of 1945.’ Sartre was one of the most influential thinkers in the immediate postwar world, and his new attitude, as Arthur Herman makes plain in his study of cultural pessimism, was directly related to his experiences in the war. ‘The war really divided my life in two,’ Sartre said. Speaking of his time in the Resistance, he described how he had lost his sense of isolation: ‘I suddenly understood that I was a social being … I became aware of the weight of the world and my ties with all the others and their ties with me.’ 3
    Born in Poitiers in 1905, Sartre grew up in comfortable surroundings with sophisticated and enlightened parents who exposed their son to the best in art, literature, and music (his grandfather was Albert Schweitzer’s uncle). 4 He attended the Lycée Henri IV, one of the most fashionable schools in Paris, and then went on to the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Initially he intended to become a poet, Baudelaire being a particular hero of his, but he soon came under the influence of Marcel Proust and, most important, of Henri Bergson. ‘In Bergson,’ he said, ‘I immediately found a description of my own psychic life.’ It was as if ‘the truth had come down from heaven.’ 5 Other influences were EdmundHusserl and Martin Heidegger, Sartre’s attention being drawn to the Germans in the early 1930s by Raymond Aron, a fellow pupil at the same
lycée.
Aron was at the time more knowledgeable than Sartre, having just returned from studying with Husserl in Berlin. It was Husserl’s theory that much of the formal structure of traditional philosophy is nonsense, that true knowledge comes from ‘our immediate intuition of things as they are’, and that truth can best be grasped in ‘boundary situations’ – sudden, extreme moments, as when someone steps off the pavement in front of an oncoming car.