At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails With Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

by Sarah Bakewell

  Before coming to Sartre, the student had thought of seeking advice from the established moral authorities. He considered going to a priest — but priests were sometimes collaborators themselves, and anyway he knew that Christian ethics could only tell him to love his neighbour and do good to others, without specifying which other — mother or France. Next, he thought of turning to the philosophers he had studied at school, supposedly founts of wisdom. But the philosophers were too abstract: he felt they had nothing to say to him in his situation. Then, he tried to listen to his inner voice: perhaps, deep in his heart, he would find the answer. But no: in his soul, the student heard only a clamour of voices saying different things (perhaps things like: I must stay, I must go, I must do the brave thing, I must be a good son, I want action, but I’m scared, I don’t want to die, I have to get away. I will be a better man than Papa! Do I truly love my country? Am I faking it?). Amid this cacophony, he could not even trust himself. As a last resort, the young man turned to his former teacher Sartre, knowing that from him at least he would not get a conventional answer.

  Sure enough, Sartre listened to his problem and said simply, ‘You are free, therefore choose — that is to say, invent.’ No signs are vouchsafed in this world, he said. None of the old authorities can relieve you of the burden of freedom. You can weigh up moral or practical considerations as carefully as you like, but ultimately you must take the plunge and do something, and it’s up to you what that something is.

  Sartre doesn’t tell us whether the student felt this was helpful, nor what he decided to do in the end. We don’t know whether he existed, or was an amalgam of several young friends or even a complete invention. But the point Sartre wanted his audience to get was that each of them was as free as the student, even if their predicaments were less dramatic. You might think you are guided by moral laws, he was saying to them, or that you act in certain ways because of your psychological make-up or past experiences, or because of what is happening around you. These factors can play a role, but the whole mixture merely adds up to the ‘situation’ out of which you must act. Even if the situation is unbearable — perhaps you are facing execution, or sitting in a Gestapo prison, or about to fall off a cliff — you are still free to decide what to make of it in mind and deed. Starting from where you are now, you choose. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be.

  If this sounds difficult and unnerving, it’s because it is. Sartre does not deny that the need to keep making decisions brings constant anxiety. He heightens this anxiety by pointing out that what you do really matters. You should make your choices as though you were choosing on behalf of the whole of humanity, taking the entire burden of responsibility for how the human race behaves. If you avoid this responsibility by fooling yourself that you are the victim of circumstance or of someone else’s bad advice, you are failing to meet the demands of human life and choosing a fake existence, cut off from your own ‘authenticity’.

  Along with the terrifying side of this comes a great promise: Sartre’s existentialism implies that it is possible to be authentic and free, as long as you keep up the effort. It is exhilarating to exactly the same degree that it’s frightening, and for the same reasons. As Sartre summed it up in an interview shortly after the lecture:

  There is no traced-out path to lead man to his salvation; he must constantly invent his own path. But, to invent it, he is free, responsible, without excuse, and every hope lies within him.

  It’s a bracing thought, and was an attractive one in 1945, when established social and political institutions had been undermined by the war. In France and elsewhere, many had good reason to forget the recent past and its moral compromises and horrors, in order to focus on new beginnings. But there were deeper reasons to seek renewal. Sartre’s audience heard his message at a time when much of Europe lay in ruins, news of Nazi death camps had emerged, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed by atom bombs. The war had made people realise that they and their fellow humans were capable of departing entirely from civilised norms; no wonder the idea of a fixed human nature seemed questionable. Whatever new world was going to arise out of the old one, it would probably need to be built without reliable guidance from sources of authority such as politicians, religious leaders, and even philosophers — the old kind of philosophers, that is, in their remote and abstract worlds. But here was a new kind of philosopher, ready to wade in and perfectly suited to the task.

  Sartre’s big question in the mid-1940s was: given that we are free, how can we use our freedom well in such challenging times? In his essay ‘The End of the War’, written just after Hiroshima and published in October 1945 — the same month as the lecture — he extorted his readers to decide what kind of world they wanted, and make it happen. From now on, he wrote, we must always take into account our knowledge that we can destroy ourselves at will, with all our history and perhaps life on earth itself. Nothing stops us but our own free choosing. If we want to survive, we have to decide to live. Thus, he offered a philosophy designed for a species that had just scared the hell out of itself, but that finally felt ready to grow up and take responsibility.

  The institutions whose authority Sartre challenged in his writings and talks responded aggressively. The Catholic Church put Sartre’s entire works on its Index of Prohibited Books in 1948, from his great philosophical tome Being and Nothingness to his novels, plays and essays. They feared, rightly, that his talk of freedom might make people doubt their faith. Simone de Beauvoir’s even more provocative feminist treatise The Second Sex was also added to the list. One would expect political conservatives to dislike existentialism; more surprisingly, Marxists hated it too. Sartre is now often remembered as an apologist for Communist regimes, yet for a long time he was vilified by the party. After all, if people insisted on thinking of themselves as free individuals, how could there ever be a properly organised revolution? Marxists thought humanity was destined to move through determined stages towards socialist paradise; this left little room for the idea that each of us is personally responsible for what we do. From different ideological starting points, opponents of existentialism almost all agreed that it was, as an article in Les nouvelles littéraires phrased it, a ‘sickening mixture of philosophic pretentiousness, equivocal dreams, physiological technicalities, morbid tastes and hesitant eroticism … an introspective embryo that one would take distinct pleasure in crushing’.

  Such attacks only enhanced existentialism’s appeal for the young and rebellious, who took it on as a way of life and a trendy label. From the mid-1940s, ‘existentialist’ was used as shorthand for anyone who practised free love and stayed up late dancing to jazz music. As the actor and nightclubber Anne-Marie Cazalis remarked in her memoirs, ‘If you were twenty, in 1945, after four years of Occupation, freedom also meant the freedom to go to bed at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning.’ It meant offending your elders and defying the order of things. It could also mean mingling promiscuously with different races and classes. The philosopher Gabriel Marcel heard a lady on a train saying, ‘Sir, what a horror, existentialism! I have a friend whose son is an existentialist; he lives in a kitchen with a Negro woman!’

  The existentialist subculture that rose up in the 1940s found its home in the environs of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church on the Left Bank of Paris — an area that still milks the association for all it is worth. Sartre and Beauvoir spent many years living in cheap Saint-Germain hotels and writing all day in cafés, mainly because these were warmer places to go than the unheated hotel rooms. They favoured the Flore, the Deux Magots and the Bar Napoléon, all clustered around the corner of the boulevard Saint-Germain and the rue Bonaparte. The Flore was the best, for its proprietor sometimes let them work in a private room upstairs when nosy journalists or passers-by became too intrusive. Yet they also loved the lively tables downstairs, at least in the early days: Sartre enjoyed working in public spaces amid noise and bustle. He and Beauvoir held court with friends, colleagues, artists, writers, students and love
rs, all talking at once and all bound by ribbons of cigarette or pipe smoke.

  After the cafés, there were subterranean jazz dives to go to: in the Lorientais, Claude Luter’s band played blues, jazz and ragtime, while the star of the club Tabou was the trumpeter and novelist Boris Vian. You could undulate to a jazz band’s jagged parps and bleats, or debate authenticity in a dark corner while listening to the smoky voice of Cazalis’ friend and fellow muse, Juliette Gréco, who became a famous chanteuse after her arrival in Paris in 1946. She, Cazalis and Michelle Vian (Boris’ wife) would watch new arrivals at the Lorientais and Tabou, and refuse entry to anyone who did not look suitable — although, according to Michelle Vian, they would admit anyone ‘so long as they were interesting — that is, if they had a book under their arm’. Among the regulars were many of the people who had written these books, notably Raymond Queneau and his friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who both discovered the nightclub world through Cazalis and Gréco.

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  Gréco started a fashion for long, straight, existentialist hair — the ‘drowning victim’ look, as one journalist wrote — and for looking chic in thick sweaters and men’s jackets with the sleeves rolled up. She said she first grew her hair long to keep warm in the war years; Beauvoir said the same thing about her own habit of wearing a turban. Existentialists wore cast-off shirts and raincoats; some of them sported what sounds like a proto-punk style. One youth went around with ‘a completely shredded and tattered shirt on his back’, according to a journalist’s report. They eventually adopted the most iconic existentialist garment of all: the black woollen turtleneck.

  In this rebellious world, just as with the Parisian bohemians and Dadaists in earlier generations, everything that was dangerous and provocative was good, and everything that was nice or bourgeois was bad. Beauvoir delighted in telling a story about her friend, the destitute alcoholic German artist known as Wols (from Alfredo Otto Wolfgang Schulze, his real name), who hung around the area living on handouts and scraps. One day, he was drinking with Beauvoir on the terrace of a bar when a wealthy-looking gentleman stopped to speak to him. After the man had gone, Wols turned to Beauvoir in embarrassment, and said, ‘I’m sorry; that fellow is my brother: a banker!’ It amused her to hear him apologise exactly as a banker might on being seen speaking to a tramp. Such topsy-turvydom may seem less odd today, following decades of such countercultural inversions, but at the time it still had the power to shock some — and to delight others.

  Journalists, who thrived on salacious tales of the existentialist milieu, took a special interest in the love lives of Beauvoir and Sartre. The pair were known to have an open relationship, in which each was the primary long-term partner for the other but remained free to have other lovers. Both exercised this freedom with gusto. Beauvoir had significant relationships later in life, including with the American writer Nelson Algren and with Claude Lanzmann, the French film-maker who later made the nine-hour Holocaust documentary Shoah. As a woman, Beauvoir was judged more severely for her behaviour, but the press also mocked Sartre for his serial seductions. One story in Samedi-soir in 1945 claimed that he tempted women up to his bedroom by offering them a sniff of his Camembert cheese. (Well, good cheese was hard to get in 1945.)

  In reality, Sartre did not need to dangle cheese to get women into his bed. One may marvel at this, looking at his photos, but his success came less from his appearance than from his air of intellectual energy and confidence. He talked enthrallingly about ideas, but he was fun too: he sang ‘Old Man River’ and other jazz hits in a fine voice, played piano, and did Donald Duck imitations. Raymond Aron wrote of Sartre in his schooldays that ‘his ugliness disappeared as soon as he began to speak, as soon as his intelligence erased the pimples and swellings of his face’. Another acquaintance, Violette Leduc, agreed that his face could never be ugly because it was illuminated by the brilliance of his mind, as well as having ‘the honesty of an erupting volcano’ and ‘the generosity of a newly ploughed field’. And when the sculptor Alberto Giacometti sketched Sartre, he exclaimed as he worked, ‘What density! What lines of force!’ Sartre’s was a questioning, philosophical face: everything in it sent you somewhere else, swirling from one asymmetrical feature to another. He could wear people out, but he wasn’t boring, and his clique of admirers grew and grew.

  For Sartre and Beauvoir, their open relationship was more than a personal arrangement; it was a philosophical choice. They wanted to live their theory of freedom. The bourgeois model of marriage had no appeal for them, with its strict gender roles, its hushed-up infidelities, and its dedication to the accumulation of property and children. They had no children, they owned little, and they never even lived together, although they put their relationship before all others and met almost every day to work side by side.

  They turned their philosophy into the stuff of real life in other ways too. Both believed in committing themselves to political activity, and put their time, energy and fame at the disposal of anyone whose cause they supported. Younger friends turned to them for help in starting their careers, and for financial support: Beauvoir and Sartre each maintained protégés. They poured out polemical articles and published them in the journal they established with friends in 1945, Les Temps modernes. In 1973, Sartre also co-founded the major left-wing newspaper Libération. This has undergone several transformations since, including moving towards a more moderate politics and nearly going bankrupt, but both publications are still going at the time I’m writing this.

  As their status grew and everything conspired to tempt them into the Establishment, Sartre and Beauvoir remained fierce in their insistence on remaining intellectual outsiders. Neither became academics in the conventional sense. They lived by schoolteaching or freelancing. Their friends did likewise: they were playwrights, publishers, reporters, editors or essayists, but only a handful were university insiders. When Sartre was offered the Légion d’honneur for his Resistance activities in 1945, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, he rejected them both, citing a writer’s need to stay independent of interests and influences. Beauvoir rejected the Légion d’honneur in 1982 for the same reason. In 1949, François Mauriac put Sartre forward for election to the Académie française, but Sartre refused it.

  ‘My life and my philosophy are one and the same’, he once wrote in his diary, and he stuck to this principle unflinchingly. This blending of life and philosophy also made him interested in other people’s lives. He became an innovative biographer, publishing around two million words of life-writing, including studies of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Genet and Flaubert as well as a memoir of his own childhood. Beauvoir too collected the minutiae of her own experience and that of friends, and shaped it all into four rich volumes of autobiography, supplemented by one memoir about her mother and another about her last years with Sartre.

  Sartre’s experiences and quirks found their way even into his most serious philosophical treatises. This could make for strange results, given that his personal take on life ranged from bad mescaline flashbacks and a series of embarrassing situations with lovers and friends to bizarre obsessions with trees, viscous liquids, octopuses and crustaceans. But it all made sense according to the principle first announced by Raymond Aron that day in the Bec-de-Gaz: you can make philosophy out of this cocktail. The topic of philosophy is whatever you experience, as you experience it.

  Such interweaving of ideas and life had a long pedigree, although the existentialists gave it a new twist. Stoic and Epicurean thinkers in the classical world had practised philosophy as a means of living well, rather than of seeking knowledge or wisdom for their own sake. By reflecting on life’s vagaries in philosophical ways, they believed they could become more resilient, more able to rise above circumstances, and better equipped to manage grief, fear, anger, disappointment or anxiety. In the tradition they passed on, philosophy is neither a pure intellectual pursuit nor a collection of cheap self-help tricks, but a discipline for flourishing and living a fully
human, responsible life.

  As the centuries went by, philosophy increasingly became a profession conducted in academies or universities, by scholars who sometimes prided themselves on their discipline’s exquisite uselessness. Yet the tradition of philosophy as a way of life continued in a sort of shadow-line alongside this, often conducted by mavericks who had slipped through the gaps in traditional universities. Two such misfits in the nineteenth century had a particularly strong influence on the later existentialists: Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Neither was an academic philosopher: Kierkegaard had no university career, and Nietzsche was a professor of Greek and Roman philology who had to retire because of ill health. Both were individualists, and both were contrarians by nature, dedicated to making people uncomfortable. Both must have been unbearable to spend more than a few hours with. Both sit outside the main story of modern existentialism, as precursors, but had a great impact on what developed later.

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  Søren Kierkegaard, born in Copenhagen in 1813, set the tone by using ‘existential’ in a new way to denote thought concerning the problems of human existence. He included it in the unwieldy title of a work of 1846: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments: a mimical-pathetical-dialectical compilation: an existential contribution. This eccentric title was typical of him: he liked to play games with his publications, and he had a good eye for the attention-grabbing phrase: his other works included From the Papers of One Still Living, Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, and The Sickness Unto Death.