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

  Kierkegaard was well placed to understand the awkwardness and difficulty of human existence. Everything about him was irregular, including his gait, as he had a twisted spine for which his enemies cruelly mocked him. Tormented by religious questions, and feeling himself set apart from the rest of humanity, he led a solitary life much of the time. At intervals, though, he would go out to take ‘people baths’ around the streets of Copenhagen, buttonholing acquaintances and dragging them with him for long philosophical walks. His companions would struggle to keep up as he strode and ranted and waved his cane. One friend, Hans Brøchner, recalled how, when on a walk with Kierkegaard, ‘one was always being pushed, by turns, either in towards the houses and the cellar stairwells, or out towards the gutters’. Every so often, one had to move to his other side to regain space. Kierkegaard considered it a matter of principle to throw people off their stride. He wrote that he would love to sit someone on a horse and startle it into a gallop, or perhaps give a man in a hurry a lame horse, or even hitch his carriage to two horses who went at different speeds — anything to goad the person into seeing what he meant by the ‘passion’ of existence. Kierkegaard was a born goader. He picked quarrels with his contemporaries, broke off personal relationships, and generally made difficulties out of everything. He wrote: ‘Abstraction is disinterested, but for one who exists his existing is the supreme interest.’

  He applied the same argumentative attitude to the personnel of philosophical history. He disagreed, for example, with René Descartes, who had founded modern philosophy by stating Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. For Kierkegaard, Descartes had things back to front. In his own view, human existence comes first: it is the starting point for everything we do, not the result of a logical deduction. My existence is active: I live it and choose it, and this precedes any statement I can make about myself. Moreover, my existence is mine: it is personal. Descartes’ ‘I’ is generic: it could apply to anyone, but Kierkegaard’s ‘I’ is the ‘I’ of an argumentative, anguished misfit.

  He also took issue with G. W. F. Hegel, whose philosophy showed the world evolving dialectically through a succession of ‘forms of consciousness’, each stage superseding the one before until they all rise up sublimely into ‘Absolute Spirit’. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit leads us to a climax as grand as that of the biblical Book of Revelation, but instead of ending with everyone divided between heaven and hell, it subsumes us all into cosmic consciousness. Kierkegaard countered Hegel with typically awkward questions: what if I don’t choose to be part of this ‘Absolute Spirit’? What if I refuse to be absorbed, and insist on just being me?

  Sartre read Kierkegaard, and was fascinated by his contrarian spirit and by his rebellion against the grand philosophical systems of the past. He also borrowed Kierkegaard’s specific use of the word ‘existence’ to denote the human way of being, in which we mould ourselves by making ‘either/or’ choices at every step. Sartre agreed with him that this constant choosing brings a pervasive anxiety, not unlike the vertigo that comes from looking over a cliff. It is not the fear of falling so much as the fear that you can’t trust yourself not to throw yourself off. Your head spins; you want to cling to something, to tie yourself down — but you can’t secure yourself so easily against the dangers that come with being free. ‘Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’, wrote Kierkegaard. Our whole lives are lived on the edge of that precipice, in his view and also in Sartre’s.

  There were other aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought that Sartre would never accept, however. Kierkegaard thought that the answer to ‘anguish’ was to take a leap of faith into the arms of God, whether or not you could feel sure that He was there. This was a plunge into the ‘Absurd’ — into what cannot be rationally proved or justified. Sartre did not care for this. He had lost his own religious beliefs early in life: apparently it happened when he was about eleven years old and standing at a bus stop. He just knew, suddenly, that God did not exist. The faith never came back, so he remained a stalwart atheist for the rest of his life. The same was true of Beauvoir, who rejected her conventional religious upbringing. Other thinkers followed Kierkegaard’s theological existentialism in various ways, but Sartre and Beauvoir were repelled by it.

  They found a philosophy more to their taste in the other great nineteenth-century existentialist precursor, Friedrich Nietzsche. Born in Röcken in Prussia in 1844, Nietzsche set out on his brilliant career in philology, but turned to writing idiosyncratic philosophical treatises and collections of aphorisms. He directed these against the pious dogmas of Christianity and of traditional philosophy alike: for him, both were self-serving veils drawn over the harsher realities of life. What was needed, he felt, was not high moral or theological ideals, but a deeply critical form of cultural history or ‘genealogy’ that would uncover the reasons why we humans are as we are, and how we came to be that way. For him, all philosophy could even be redefined as a form of psychology, or history. He believed that every great philosopher actually wrote ‘a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir’ rather than conducting an impersonal search for knowledge. Studying our own moral genealogy cannot help us to escape or transcend ourselves. But it can enable us to see our illusions more clearly and lead a more vital, assertive existence.

  There is no God in this picture, because the human beings who invented God have also killed Him. It is now up to us alone. The way to live is to throw ourselves, not into faith, but into our own lives, conducting them in affirmation of every moment, exactly as it is, without wishing that anything was different, and without harbouring peevish resentment against others or against our fate.

  Nietzsche was unable to put his ideas into much effect in his own life, not because he lacked the courage, but because his body betrayed him. In his forties, he fell victim to a disease, possibly syphilis or a brain tumour, which destroyed his faculties. After a distraught episode on the streets of Turin in January 1889, during which (the story goes) he weepingly threw his arms around the neck of an abused horse, he fell into irreversible dementia and spent the rest of his life an invalid. He died in 1900, having no idea of the impact his vision of human existence would one day have on the existentialists and others. Probably it would not have surprised him: while his own time failed to understand, he always felt his day would come.

  Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were the heralds of modern existentialism. They pioneered a mood of rebellion and dissatisfaction, created a new definition of existence as choice, action and self-assertion, and made a study of the anguish and difficulty of life. They also worked in the conviction that philosophy was not just a profession. It was life itself — the life of an individual.

  Having absorbed these older influences, the modern existentialists went on to inspire their own and later generations in a similar way, with their message of individualism and nonconformity. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, existentialism offered people reasons to reject convention and change their lives.

  The most transformative existentialist work of all was Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering feminist study, The Second Sex, published in 1949. An analysis of women’s experience and life choices, as well as of the whole history of patriarchal society, it encouraged women to raise their consciousness, question received ideas and routines, and seize control of their existence. Many who read it may not have realised they were reading an existentialist work (partly because the English-language translation obscured much of its philosophical meaning), but that was what it was — and when women changed their lives after reading it, they did so in existentialist ways, seeking freedom and a heightened individuality and ‘authenticity’.

  The book was considered shocking at the time, not least because it included a chapter on lesbianism — although few yet knew that Beauvoir herself had had sexual relationships with both sexes. Sartre too supported gay rights, although he always insisted that sexuality was a matter of choice, which put him at odds with the views of many gay people who felt that they were simply born t
hat way. In any case, existentialist philosophy offered gay people encouragement to live in the way that felt right, rather than trying to fit in with others’ ideas of how they should be.

  For those oppressed on grounds of race or class, or for those fighting against colonialism, existentialism offered a change of perspective — literally, as Sartre proposed that all situations be judged according to how they appeared in the eyes of those most oppressed, or those whose suffering was greatest. Martin Luther King Jr. was among the civil rights pioneers who took an interest. While working on his philosophy of non-violent resistance, he read Sartre, Heidegger and the German-American existentialist theologian Paul Tillich.

  No one could argue that existentialism was responsible for every social change in the mid-twentieth century. But, with its insistence on freedom and authenticity, it gave impetus to radicals and protesters. And when the waves of change rose and broke into the students’ and workers’ uprisings of 1968, in Paris and elsewhere, many of the slogans painted on city walls echoed existentialist themes:

  – It is forbidden to forbid.

  – Neither god nor master.

  – A man is not ‘intelligent’; he is free or he is not.

  – Be realistic: demand the impossible.

  As Sartre remarked, the demonstrators on the 1968 barricades demanded nothing and everything — that is to say, they demanded freedom.

  By 1968, most of the torn-shirted, kohl-eyed night-owls of the late 1940s had settled down to quiet homes and jobs, but not Sartre or Beauvoir. They marched in the front line, joined the Paris barricades, and addressed factory workers and students on picket lines, even though they sometimes found themselves perplexed by the new generation’s way of doing things. On 20 May 1968, Sartre spoke to a gathering of about 7,000 students who had occupied the Sorbonne’s magnificent auditorium. Of all the eager intellectuals who had wanted to get involved, Sartre was the one chosen to be wired up to a microphone and led before the melee to speak — as always, so diminutive that he was hard to spot, but in no doubt about his qualification for the role. He appeared first at a window to address students in the courtyard outside, like the Pope on the Vatican balcony, before being led into the packed auditorium. The students had piled themselves everywhere inside, climbing over the statues — ‘there were students sitting in the arms of Descartes and others on Richelieu’s shoulders’, wrote Beauvoir. Loudspeakers mounted on the columns in the hallways transmitted the speeches outside. A TV camera appeared, but the students shouted for it to be taken away. Sartre had to bellow to be heard even through the microphone, but the crowd slowly calmed down to listen to the grand old existentialist. Afterwards, they kept him busy with questions about socialism and about postcolonial liberation movements. Beauvoir worried that he’d never get out of the hall again. When he did, it was to find a jealous group of writers waiting in the wings, annoyed that he’d been the only ‘star’ (as Marguerite Duras allegedly grumbled) whom the students wanted to hear.

  Sartre was then just short of his sixty-third birthday. His listeners were young enough to be his grandchildren. Few would have remembered the end of the war, let alone those early years of the 1930s when he had begun thinking about freedom and existence. They would have seen Sartre more as a national treasure than as truly one of themselves. Yet they owed even more to him than they could have realised, in a way that went beyond political activism. He formed a link between them and his own generation of dissatisfied students in the late 1920s, bored with their studies and longing for ‘destructive’ new ideas. Further back, he connected them to the whole line of philosophical rebels: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and the rest.

  Sartre was the bridge to all the traditions that he plundered, modernised, personalised and reinvented. Yet he insisted all his life that what mattered was not the past at all: it was the future. One must keep moving, creating what will be: acting in the world and making a difference to it. His dedication to the future remained unchanged even as, entering his seventies, he began to weaken, to lose what remained of his vision, and to become hard of hearing and confused in his mind — and eventually to succumb to the weight of years after all.

  Twelve years after the Sorbonne occupation, the biggest crowd of all assembled for Sartre’s final celebrity appearance: his funeral, on 19 April 1980. It was not a state ceremony, as his refusal of Establishment pomp was honoured to the end. But it was certainly a massive public occasion.

  Excerpts from the television coverage are still viewable online: you can watch as the hospital doors open and a small truck slowly emerges, piled high with a mountain of floral sprays that teeter and wave like soft coral as the vehicle creeps into the mass of people. Helpers walk in front to clear the way. Behind the truck comes the hearse, inside which you see the coffin, and Simone de Beauvoir with other chief mourners. The camera focuses on a single rose which someone has tucked into the hearse’s door handle. Then it picks out a corner of the black cloth draped over the coffin inside, decorated with a single letter ‘S’. The hushed commentator tells us that some 50,000 people are attending; about 30,000 of these line the three kilometres or so of streets between here and the Montparnasse cemetery, while another 20,000 wait at the cemetery itself. Just like the 1968 students, some people inside the cemetery have climbed onto the laps or heads of memorial figures. Minor mishaps have occurred; one man reportedly fell into the open grave and had to be hauled out.

  The vehicles arrive and halt; we see bearers extract the coffin and convey it to the graveside, struggling to push through while maintaining their dignified demeanour. One bearer removes his hat, then realises the others have not, and replaces it: a tiny awkward moment. At the graveside, they lower the coffin in, and the mourners are handed forward. Someone passes a chair for Simone de Beauvoir to sit on. She looks dazed and exhausted, a headscarf tied over her hair; she has been dosing herself with sedatives. She drops a single flower into the grave, and many more flowers are thrown in on top of it.

  The film footage shows only the first of two ceremonies. In a quieter event the following week, the coffin was dug up and the smaller coffin inside it removed so that Sartre could be cremated. His ashes went to their permanent spot, in the same cemetery but less accessible to a large procession. The funeral was for the public Sartre; the second burial was attended only by those close to him. The grave, with Beauvoir’s ashes interred next to him when she died six years later, is still there, kept well tidied and occasionally flowered.

  With these ceremonies, an era ended, and so did the personal story that wove Sartre and Beauvoir into the lives of so many other people. In the filmed crowd, you see a diversity of faces, old and young, black and white, male and female. They included students, writers, people who remembered his wartime Resistance activities, trade-union members whose strikes he had supported, and independence activists from Indochina, Algeria and elsewhere, honouring his contribution to their campaigns. For some, the funeral verged on being a protest march: Claude Lanzmann later described it as the last of the great 1968 demonstrations. But many attended only out of curiosity or a sense of occasion, or because Sartre had made some small difference in some aspect of their lives — or because the ending of such an outsized life simply demanded some gesture of participation.

  I have watched that brief film clip online a dozen or more times, peering into the low-definition images of the many faces, wondering what existentialism and Jean-Paul Sartre meant to each of them. I only really know what they meant to me. Sartre’s books changed my life too, albeit in an indirect and low-key way. I somehow failed to notice the news of his death and funeral in 1980, although I was already a suburban existentialist by then, aged seventeen.

  I had become fascinated by him a year earlier. On a whim, I spent some of my sixteenth-birthday money on his 1938 novel Nausea, mainly because I liked the Salvador Dalí image on the Penguin cover: a bile-green rock formation and a dripping watch. I also liked the cover blurb, which called Nausea ‘a novel of the alienation of personal
ity and the mystery of being’. I wasn’t sure what alienation meant, although I was a perfect example of it at the time. But I had no doubt that it would be my kind of book. It was indeed: when I started reading, I bonded at once with its gloomy outsider protagonist Antoine Roquentin, who spends his days drifting disconsolately around the provincial seaside town of ‘Bouville’ (modelled on Le Havre, where Sartre had been stuck as a teacher). Roquentin sits in cafés and listens to blues records instead of getting on with the biography he is supposed to be writing. He walks by the sea and throws pebbles into its grey, porridge-like depths. He goes to a park and stares at the gnarled exposed root of a chestnut tree, which looks to him like boiled leather and threatens to overwhelm him by the sheer opaque force of its being.

  (Illustrations Credit 1.4)

  I loved all this and was intrigued to learn that this story was Sartre’s way of communicating a philosophy called ‘existentialism’. But what was all this about ‘being’? I had never been overwhelmed by the being of a chestnut root, nor had I noticed that things had being. I tried going to the public gardens in my own provincial town of Reading and staring at one of the trees until my eyes blurred. It didn’t work; I thought I saw something move, but it was just the breeze in the leaves. Yet looking at something so closely did give me a kind of glow. From then on, I too neglected my studies in order to exist. I had already been inclined to absenteeism; now, under Sartre’s influence, I became a more dedicated truant than ever. Instead of going to school, I got myself an unofficial part-time job in a Caribbean emporium selling reggae records and decorative hash pipes. It provided a more interesting education than I had ever had in a classroom.

  Sartre had taught me to drop out, an underrated and sometimes useful response to the world. On the other hand, he also made me want to study philosophy. That meant passing exams, so I reluctantly applied myself to the syllabus at the last moment and squeaked through. I went to Essex University, where I did a philosophy degree and read more Sartre, as well as other thinkers. I fell under the spell of Heidegger and started a PhD on his work — but then dropped out again, in my second such disappearing act.