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

  In the interim, I had been transformed yet again by my student experience. I managed to spend my days and evenings more or less as the existentialists had in their cafés: reading, writing, drinking, falling in and out of love, making friends, and talking about ideas. I loved everything about it, and thought life would always be one big existentialist café.

  On the other hand, I also became aware that the existentialists were already considered out of fashion. By the 1980s, they had given way to new generations of structuralists, post-structuralists, deconstructionists and postmodernists. These kinds of philosopher seemed to treat philosophy as a game. They juggled signs, symbols and meanings; they pulled out odd words from each other’s texts to make the whole edifice collapse. They searched for ever more refined and unlikely wisps of signification in the writers of the past.

  Although each of these movements disagreed with each other, most were united in considering existentialism and phenomenology the quintessence of what they were not. The dizziness of freedom and the anguish of existence were embarrassments. Biography was out, because life itself was out. Experience was out; in a particularly dismissive mood, the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had written that a philosophy based on personal experience was ‘shop-girl metaphysics’. The goal of the human sciences was ‘to dissolve man’, he said, and apparently the goal of philosophy was the same. These thinkers could be stimulating, but they also turned philosophy back into an abstract landscape, stripped of the active, impassioned beings who occupied it in the existentialist era.

  For decades after my second dropping-out I dipped into philosophy books occasionally, but lost the knack of reading them with the deep attention they needed. My old favourites remained on the far reaches of my bookcase, making it look like a spice shelf in a demiurge’s kitchen: Being and Nothingness, Being and Time, Of Time and Being, Totality and Infinity. But they rarely shifted their dust — until, a few years ago, I picked up a collection of essays by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, looking for one I vaguely remembered about the Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne, whom I was researching at the time.

  Merleau-Ponty was a friend of Sartre and Beauvoir (until they fell out), and a phenomenologist who specialised in questions of the body and perception. He was also a brilliant essayist. I became diverted from Montaigne into the volume’s other essays, and then to Merleau-Ponty’s main work The Phenomenology of Perception. I was amazed afresh at how adventurous and rich his thinking was. No wonder I used to love this sort of thing! From Merleau-Ponty, I went on to revisit Simone de Beauvoir — whose autobiography I’d discovered during a long student summer selling ice creams on a grey, dismal English beach. I now read the whole thing again. Then came Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre. Eventually I returned to the monumental Heidegger.

  As I went on, I got the eerie feeling of blending again with my twenty-year-old self, especially as my copies of the books were filled with that self’s weirdly emphatic juvenile marginalia.

  (Illustrations Credit 1.5)

  Yet my present-day self also watched over my responses, making critical or sardonic remarks from the sidelines. The two of me alternated as I read, sometimes quarrelling, sometimes being pleasantly surprised by each other, sometimes finding each other ridiculous.

  I realised that, while I had changed in those twenty-five or so years, the world had changed too. Some of those fashionable movements that knocked existentialism out of the way have aged badly themselves, going into a decline of their own. The concerns of the twenty-first century are no longer the same as those of the late twentieth century: perhaps we are inclined to look for something different in philosophy these days.

  If this is so, then there is a certain refreshment of perspective to be had from revisiting the existentialists, with their boldness and energy. They did not sit around playing with their signifiers. They asked big questions about what it means to live an authentic, fully human life, thrown into a world with many other humans also trying to live. They tackled questions about nuclear war, about how we occupy the environment, about violence, and about the difficulty of managing international relations in dangerous times. Many of them longed to change the world, and wondered what sacrifices we might or might not make for such an aim. Atheist existentialists asked how we can live meaningfully in the absence of God. They all wrote about anxiety and the experience of being overwhelmed by choice — a feeling that has become ever more intense in the relatively prosperous parts of the twenty-first-century world, even while real-world choices have shut down alarmingly for some of us. They worried about suffering, inequality and exploitation, and wondered whether anything could be done about these evils. As part of all these questions, they asked what individuals could do, and what they themselves had to offer.

  They also asked what a human being is, given the last century’s increasingly sophisticated understanding of brain physiology and body chemistry. If we are in thrall to our neurons and hormones, how can we still believe we are free? What distinguishes humans from other animals? Is it only a difference of degree, or are we truly set apart in some way? How should we think of ourselves?

  Above all, they asked about freedom, which several of them considered the topic underlying all others, and which they interpreted both personally and politically. In the years following existentialism’s decline, this topic went out of focus in parts of the world, perhaps because the great liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s achieved so much in civil rights, decolonisation, women’s equality and gay rights. It seemed as though these campaigns had got what they wanted, and that no point remained in talking about liberation politics. In a television interview in 1999, the French scholar Michel Contat looked back on the Sartre of the 1960s as someone who had given him and his generation ‘a sense of freedom that directed our lives’, but he immediately added that it was a topic few took much interest in any more.

  But that was sixteen years ago, at the time I’m writing, and since then freedom has come into the spotlight again. We find ourselves surveilled and managed to an extraordinary degree, farmed for our personal data, fed consumer goods but discouraged from speaking our minds or doing anything too disruptive in the world, and regularly reminded that racial, sexual, religious and ideological conflict are not closed cases at all. Perhaps we are ready to talk about freedom again — and talking about it politically also means talking about it in our personal lives.

  This is why, when reading Sartre on freedom, Beauvoir on the subtle mechanisms of oppression, Kierkegaard on anxiety, Camus on rebellion, Heidegger on technology, or Merleau-Ponty on cognitive science, one sometimes feels one is reading the latest news. Their philosophies remain of interest, not because they are right or wrong, but because they concern life, and because they take on the two biggest human questions: what are we? and what should we do?

  In asking these two questions, most (not all) of the existentialists drew on their own life experience. But this experience was itself structured around philosophy. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty summed up this relationship, ‘Life becomes ideas and the ideas return to life.’ This connection became especially apparent when they talked ideas through with one another, which they did all the time. As Merleau-Ponty also wrote:

  A discussion is not an exchange or a confrontation of ideas, as if each formed his own, showed them to the others, looked at theirs, and returned to correct them with his own … Whether he speaks up or hardly whispers, each one speaks with all that he is, with his ‘ideas’, but also with his obsessions, his secret history.

  Philosophical conversations between thinkers who had invested so much of themselves in their work often became emotional, and sometimes downright argumentative. Their intellectual battles form a long chain of belligerence that connects the existentialist story end to end. In Germany, Martin Heidegger turned against his former mentor Edmund Husserl, but later Heidegger’s friends and colleagues turned their backs on him. In France, Gabriel Marcel attacked Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre fell o
ut with Albert Camus, Camus fell out with Merleau-Ponty, Merleau-Ponty fell out with Sartre, and the Hungarian intellectual Arthur Koestler fell out with everyone and punched Camus in the street. When the philosophical giants of each nation, Sartre and Heidegger, finally met in 1953, it went badly and they spoke mockingly of each other ever after.

  Other relationships were extraordinarily close, however. The most intimate was that between Sartre and Beauvoir, who read each other’s work and discussed their ideas almost every day. Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty had also been friends since their teenage years, and Sartre and Beauvoir were charmed by Camus when they first met him.

  When these friendships soured, it was generally because of ideas — most often political ideas. The existentialists lived in times of extreme ideology and extreme suffering, and they became engaged with events in the world whether they wanted to or not — and usually they did. The story of existentialism is therefore a political and a historical one: to some extent, it is the story of a whole European century. Phenomenology was first developed in the years before and during the First World War. Then Heidegger’s philosophy emerged from the troubled situation of Germany between the wars. When Sartre went to Berlin in 1933, he saw Nazi marches and banners everywhere, and the mood of unease found its way into his work. His existentialism, and Beauvoir’s, came of age during the Second World War, with the French experience of defeat and occupation, then went on to fill its sails with wild expectations for the post-1945 world. Existentialist ideas flowed into the widening stream of 1950s anti-conformism, and then into the full-blown idealism of the late 1960s. Through it all, the existentialists changed their thinking as the world changed; their constant shifts of direction kept them interesting, if not consistent — and not always on the right side, to say the least.

  In short, the existentialists inhabited their historical and personal world, as they inhabited their ideas. This notion of ‘inhabited philosophy’ is one I’ve borrowed from the English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who wrote the first full-length book on Sartre and was an early adopter of existentialism (though she later moved away from it). She observed that we need not expect moral philosophers to ‘live by’ their ideas in a simplistic way, as if they were following a set of rules. But we can expect them to show how their ideas are lived in. We should be able to look in through the windows of a philosophy, as it were, and see how people occupy it, how they move about and how they conduct themselves.

  Inspired both by Merleau-Ponty’s mottos about lived ideas and by Iris Murdoch’s ‘inhabited philosophy’, and triggered by my own eerie feelings on retracing my steps, I want to explore the story of existentialism and phenomenology in a way that combines the philosophical and the biographical. This is a mixture many of them were drawn to (although one repudiated it: Heidegger), and this too has fed my desire to try the same. I think philosophy becomes more interesting when it is cast into the form of a life. Likewise, I think personal experience is more interesting when thought about philosophically.

  This will be a twentieth-century story, which is why there is very little more on the proto-existentialists Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. I’m also brief on theological existentialists and existentialist psychotherapists: they are fascinating but really need separate books to do them justice. On the other hand, people such as Iris Murdoch, the English ‘new existentialist’ Colin Wilson, the pugnacious Norman Mailer with his ‘Existentialist Party’, and the existentialist-influenced novelist Richard Wright have all found their way in, for various reasons. Some people are only here because they had an interesting role to play in the lives of the others: people like the ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the daring rescuer of manuscripts Herman Leo Van Breda, and the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka, who defied his country’s regime and died for it.

  The two gigantic figures in the story are inevitably Heidegger and Sartre — but those who know their Being and Time or Being and Nothingness may be surprised to find these masterworks chopped in shards and mixed up like chocolate chips in a cookie, rather than being dealt with by the whole bar, as it were. And they may not be the thinkers who, in the end, have the most to say.

  These philosophers, together with Simone de Beauvoir, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others, seem to me to have participated in a multilingual, multisided conversation that ran from one end of the last century to the other. Many of them never met. Still, I like to imagine them in a big, busy café of the mind, probably a Parisian one, full of life and movement, noisy with talk and thought, and definitely an inhabited café.

  When you peer in through the windows, the first figures you see are the familiar ones, arguing as they puff their pipes and lean towards each other, emphasising their points. You hear clinking glasses and rattling cups; the waiters glide between the tables. In the largest group in front, a dumpy fellow and an elegant woman in a turban are drinking with their younger friends. Towards the back, others sit at quieter tables. A few people are on a dance floor; perhaps someone is writing in a private room upstairs. Voices are being raised in anger somewhere, but there is also a murmuring from lovers in the shadows.

  We can enter and take a seat: perhaps in the front, perhaps in an unobtrusive corner. There are so many conversations to overhear, one hardly knows which way to wag one’s ears.

  But first, before the waiter comes …

  What is existentialism anyway?

  Some books about existentialism never try to answer this question, as it is hard to define. The key thinkers disagreed so much that, whatever you say, you are bound to misrepresent or exclude someone. Moreover, it is unclear who was an existentialist and who was not. Sartre and Beauvoir were among the very few to accept the label, and even they were reluctant at first. Others refused it, often rightly. Some of the main thinkers in this book were phenomenologists but not existentialists at all (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), or existentialists but not phenomenologists (Kierkegaard); some were neither (Camus), and some used to be one or both but then changed their minds (Levinas).

  All the same, here is my attempt at a definition of what existentialists do. I put it here for reference, but by all means skip it and come back if the need or want arises.

  — Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete human existence.

  — They consider human existence different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am free —

  — and therefore I’m responsible for everything I do, a dizzying fact which causes

  — an anxiety inseparable from human existence itself.

  — On the other hand, I am only free within situations, which can include factors in my own biology and psychology as well as physical, historical and social variables of the world into which I have been thrown.

  — Despite the limitations, I always want more: I am passionately involved in personal projects of all kinds.

  — Human existence is thus ambiguous: at once boxed in by borders and yet transcendent and exhilarating.

  — An existentialist who is also phenomenological provides no easy rules for dealing with this condition, but instead concentrates on describing lived experience as it presents itself.

  — By describing experience well, he or she hopes to understand this existence and awaken us to ways of living more authentic lives.

  So now let us return to 1933, and to the moment when Sartre went to Germany to learn about those new philosophers who called on him to pay attention to the cocktail on the table, and to everything else in life — in short, to the things themselves.

  2

  TO THE THINGS THEMSELVES

  In which we meet the phenomenologists.

  Sartre’s search for phenomenology took him to Berlin, but he would have found the heartland of the phenomenologists in a smaller city closer to home: Freiburg-im-Breisgau, in the south-west corner of Germany just over the French borde
r.

  With the Rhine separating it from France on the west, and the sombre Black Forest sheltering it on the east, Freiburg was a university city of about 100,000 people, a population often boosted by hikers or skiers passing through on their way to their holidays in the mountains — a fashionable pursuit in the 1920s and 1930s. They livened up Freiburg’s streets with their hobnailed boots and tanned knees and brightly embroidered braces, as well as their walking sticks studded with metal discs showing which routes they had already conquered. Beside them and the students, more traditional Freiburg residents carried on their lives surrounded by elegant university buildings and a tall cathedral, its sandstone tower perforated like lace and glowing a rosy colour in the evening sun. Further out, suburbs climbed over surrounding hills, especially the northern enclave of Zähringen where many university professors had houses on the steep streets.

  It was a devoutly Catholic city and an intellectual one, with studious activity revolving around both its seminary and its university. The latter now featured an influential coterie in the philosophy department: the phenomenologists. Initially, this meant followers of Edmund Husserl, who took up Freiburg’s chair of philosophy in 1916. He brought disciples and students with him, and recruited more, so that Freiburg remained a centre for his work long after his formal retirement in 1928. It was dubbed the ‘City of Phenomenology’ by one student, Emmanuel Levinas, the brilliant young Jewish Lithuanian whose book Sartre would later buy in Paris. Levinas’ trajectory was typical of many phenomenology converts. He had been studying philosophy just over the French border in Strasbourg in 1928 when he saw someone in the town reading a Husserl book. Intrigued, he read it himself, and immediately arranged a transfer so he could study with Husserl in person. It changed his whole way of thinking. As he wrote, ‘For the young Germans I met in Freiburg, this new philosophy is more than a new theory; it is a new ideal of life, a new page of history, almost a new religion.’