What are we?

Detail from Paul Gauguin’s Life:
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

What are we?
On Paul Gauguin, authenticity and the midlife crisis: how the philosopher Bernard Williams dramatised moral luc

‘If there’s one theme in all my work it’s about authenticity and self-expression,’ said the philosopher Bernard Williams in an interview in 2002. Authenticity was already an influential cultural ideal during Williams’s lifetime ( he was born in 1929 and died in 2003 ) but it has become only more so since. What is more familiar and compelling than the injunction to be true to oneself, to keep it real? Williams explored the force and appeal of this ideal, and his work still helps us makes sense of it. But, as he was also keenly aware, being true to yourself can be dangerous.

In his essay ‘Moral Luck’ (1976), Williams discusses Paul Gauguin’s decision to leave Paris in order to move to Tahiti where he hoped he could become a great painter. Gauguin left behind – basically rejected and abandoned – his wife and children. This was on the face of it a very selfish thing to do, and you might think that Gauguin’s action was morally indefensible. Williams, however, thinks that Gauguin’s eventual success as a painter constitutes a form of moral terpitude - 'moral luck,' in that his artistic achievement justifies what he did. It provides a justification that not everyone will accept,  nor agree to diagree with but one that can make sense only to Gauguin himself, and perhaps to others. ‘Look,’ we can imagine Gauguin saying to himself, ‘I was right … I knew I had it in me.’

Williams imagines Gauguin to be conflicted. He also freely admits, however, that his ‘Gauguin’ is not necessarily true in all details to the historical French artist. Williams introduces Gauguin and his life as a useful prop a metaphor if you will, in a thought experiment designed to explore the role that authenticity, achievement and luck play in justification. Williams also just assumes, for the purposes of argument, that Gauguin did in fact succeed, which is to say that Gauguin did create valuable art, and that this art was a great expression of his gifts as a painter and person.

The story of moral harm in pursuit of art, with the overall endeavour somehow justified by the art, is a familiar one both in fact and fiction. The fiction tends to be written by men, and their protagonists tend to be men. Life imitates art and vice versa, and in reality those who justify their selfishness (and worse) in the name of art tend to be men too. Williams, however, does not discuss in any detail the harm caused by Gauguin: nor does he discuss the way in which many of Gauguin’s Polynesian victims were used as subjects (and objects) in his most famous paintings. This is something I will return to in what follows.

Williams’s Gauguin is introduced to dramatise a momentous decision, whether to stay or go, where the choice is constructed in such a way that leaving means to abandon one’s family, and staying means to abandon one’s art. Williams describes two distinct ways in which you can imagine Gauguin’s decision to leave ending in failure. One way is if something goes wrong that is external or extrinsic to Gauguin’s artistic ability: his ship sinks, say, or he eats some bad shrimp and dies on the way. If Gauguin had died en route to Tahiti as a result of shipwreck or food poisoning, he would not necessarily have been mistaken in his ambition to be a great artist: he’d just have been unlucky. But you can also imagine a scenario where Gauguin arrived safely in Tahiti only to find that he had painter’s block, and couldn’t produce a thing, or that what he created on the canvas was uninspired and useless. Gauguin’s decision to leave France, in this scenario, would have been deeply and intrinsically mistaken. He staked everything on following his inner voice, and obstacles did not get in the way: he did.

Why did Gauguin risk everything? Williams invites us to see Gauguin’s meaning in life as deeply intertwined with his artistic ambition. His art is, to use Williams’s term for such meaning-giving enterprises, his ground project. Lots of goals and desires are mundane: if it’s raining, for example, then I might want to put up an umbrella; and if I don’t like rain on my head, then I have a reason to put it up. Yet, even though I’m English, I don’t think that putting up umbrellas gives me a reason to stay alive. This is what a ground project does, according to Williams: it gives a reason, not just given that you are alive, but a reason to be alive in the first place.

Williams does not mention Gauguin’s wife and children but many readers at this point might immediately think: what about them? Or as Mette, Gauguin’s wife, might have asked: what about me? More pointedly: aren’t I and the children part of the meaning of your life? Williams imagines Gauguin’s situation as one in which pursuing what he thinks his life is most deeply about – the meaning of his life – must take him away from his family. And this framing assumption can be questioned. Indeed, the American moral philosopher Susan Wolf (a Williams admirer, and one of his most gifted interpreters) has wondered why Gauguin’s ‘ability to express himself as a painter requires Gauguin to leave France for Tahiti, abandoning his wife and children in the process’, and suggests that this construction of the choice should arouse suspicions of ‘inauthenticity or self-indulgence or both’.

We can certainly see how, for Williams, the question of authenticity was central to Gauguin’s situation. The desires and goals at the heart of what Williams calls a ground project form a fundamental part of one’s identity, and in that sense being true to one’s deepest desires is being true to who one is most deeply. That is to say, being true to one’s deepest desires is being authentic. We see here the enormously influential cultural ideal mentioned at the outset: the purpose of life is to be authentic, where that means finding out who you are and living accordingly. Gauguin, in other words, was a cultural prototype for a conception of life’s meaning that today has widespread appeal around the world. Gauguin’s desire to produce great art is his ground project, and it forms his sense of himself as an artist above all else (above, among other things, being a parent). Seen in this light, his decision to leave for Tahiti is an attempt to live the most authentic life possible, the life truest to himself.