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

  Sartre could have become a late joiner of this gang too. Had he gone to Freiburg, he might have taken up hiking and skiing, and become a lean mountain man instead of the ‘real little Buddha’ which he said he became during his year of Berlin beer and dumplings. Instead, he stayed in the capital’s French Institute reading the phenomenologists’ books, Husserl’s above all, and learning the difficult German terms as he went. He spent the year formulating his ideas ‘at Husserl’s expense’, as he later put it, but never met the master in person. Husserl probably never heard a word about him. Perhaps that was for the best, as he probably would have been unimpressed by the unfamiliar brew the young French existentialist would make of his ideas.

  If we could do as disciples like Levinas did, and sign up for Husserl’s classes in Freiburg back in the late 1910s and the 1920s, we might at first be disappointed. He neither looked nor sounded like a guru, or even the founder of a great philosophical movement. He was quiet, with round wire glasses and a delicate look. In youth, he had soft, curly blond hair, which soon receded to leave a bald-domed head over a moustache and neat beard. When he spoke, he accompanied his words with meticulous hand gestures: one person who attended a Husserl lecture said it reminded him of a ‘watchmaker gone mad’. Another witness, the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, noticed ‘the fingers of the right hand circling the flat palm of the left hand in a slow, turning movement’, as Husserl outlined each point — as if he were turning the idea round on his palm to look at it from different angles. In a very short surviving film clip of him as an elderly man in 1936, walking in a garden with his daughter, one can see him bobbing his hand up and down as he talks. Husserl himself was aware of his tendency to repetitive compulsions: he used to tell people that, as a boy, he was given a pocketknife as a present and was delighted, but sharpened it so obsessively that he wore the blade away entirely and was left with nothing but a handle. ‘I wonder whether my philosophy is not unlike this knife’, he mused.

  (Illustrations Credit 2.1)

  It was by no means clear, in his boyhood, that his talents would lie in philosophy at all. Born on 8 April 1859 in the Moravian town of Prostějov (or Prossnitz, to a German-speaker such as himself; it is now in the Czech Republic), Husserl came from a Jewish family but converted to Lutheranism as a young man. His school career was undistinguished. One former schoolmate told a biographer that the young Husserl was ‘in the habit of falling fast asleep during the lesson, and it was necessary for one of us to push him to wake him up. When the teacher called on him he would stand up sleepily, yawn and gape. Once he yawned so hard that his lower jaw remained stuck.’ But this only happened when Husserl was not interested in the subject. He was more alert in his favourite class of the time, mathematics, and went on to study this at the University of Leipzig. But a fellow Moravian student there, Tomáš Masaryk (later the president of Czechoslovakia) persuaded Husserl to accompany him to the University of Vienna to take classes with a charismatic philosophy teacher named Franz Clemens Brentano. He spent two years in Vienna from 1884, and was so won over by Brentano that he resolved to devote his life to philosophy. From then on, there was no more sleeping on the job.

  Brentano was the sort of teacher who could work such miracles. A former priest trained in Aristotelian philosophy, he had resigned from the priesthood and lost an earlier teaching job after questioning the Church’s new doctrine of papal infallibility, which he considered indefensible. The unemployed Brentano spent a year travelling around Europe learning about other ideas, including those from the new field of experimental psychology, and decided that traditional philosophy needed reinvigorating from such sources. He then began teaching again in the more open-minded University of Vienna. There, he encouraged his students to break with tradition, criticise the great philosophers of the past, and think for themselves, while also taking care to be methodical. This was the combination that galvanized Husserl. Armed with Brentano’s innovations, he embarked on his own philosophical work.

  A long, difficult period ensued, in which Husserl slowly built his career as a Privatdozent or unpaid university tutor, surviving on freelance fees — the usual route into German academic life. He soon had a family to support, marrying Malvine Steinschneider, another Jewish convert to Protestantism from his home town, and starting a family of three children. He meanwhile found time to publish increasingly innovative works of philosophy, notably Logical Investigations in 1900/1901 and Ideas in 1913. They made his name: he got a paid job in Göttingen and then, at last, took up the chair of philosophy in Freiburg, which would remain his home.

  Husserl arrived in Freiburg in the middle of the First World War, in 1916, and it was a terrible year for his family. All three of the nowadult Husserl children joined the war effort: the daughter, Elli, worked in a field hospital, while the two sons fought on the front line. The elder, Gerhart, was severely wounded but survived. The younger son, Wolfgang, was killed at Verdun on 8 March 1916, aged twenty. Husserl, who was prone to episodes of depresson, fell into one of his worst periods of despair.

  Usually he got himself out of depression by furious work, sometimes writing major treatises in just a few weeks. This time it was harder. Yet he had a lot to distract him in Freiburg. Besides writing and teaching, he now managed an entourage of disciples who formed a sort of Husserlian laboratory. One pictures an array of white-coated phenomenologists tinkering at benches, but mostly their labours took the form of writing, teaching, and pursuing individual research projects. They edited a yearbook in which they published phenomenological texts, and taught basic university classes — ‘phenomenological kindergarten’, as one of the key assistants, Edith Stein, called it. Stein was struck by the extreme devotion Husserl expected from her and other colleagues. She was exaggerating only slightly when she joked to a friend, ‘I am to stay with him until I marry; then I may only accept a man who will also become his assistant, and the same holds for the children.’

  Husserl had to be possessive about his best followers, for only a few — Stein among them — mastered the art of reading his manuscripts. He used his own adaptation of a popular form of shorthand, the Gabelsberger system, and filled thousands of pages with this idiosyncratic script in a minuscule frenzy. Despite his precision of manner, he was not orderly about his writing. He would leave old projects discarded like shavings while he set off on new ones, which in turn he did not finish. His assistants worked to transcribe his drafts and tease out his arguments, but, each time they returned a document to him to revise, he would rewrite it as a new work. He always wanted to take his thought to some more puzzling and difficult place: somewhere not yet explored. His student (and later translator) Dorion Cairns recalled Husserl saying that his aim was always to work in whatever topic seemed the ‘most distressing and uncertain’ to him at any time — the ones that filled him with most anxiety and self-doubt.

  Husserl’s philosophy became an exhausting but exciting discipline in which concentration and effort must constantly be renewed. To practise it, he wrote, ‘a new way of looking at things is necessary’ — a way that brings us back again and again to our project, so as ‘to see what stands before our eyes, to distinguish, to describe’. This was Husserl’s natural style of working. It was also a perfect definition of phenomenology.

  So what exactly is phenomenology? It is essentially a method rather than a set of theories, and — at the risk of wildly oversimplifying — its basic approach can be conveyed through a two-word command: DESCRIBE PHENOMENA.

  The first part of this is straightforward: a phenomenologist’s job is to describe. This is the activity that Husserl kept reminding his students to do. It meant stripping away distractions, habits, clichés of thought, presumptions and received ideas, in order to return our attention to what he called the ‘things themselves’. We must fix our beady gaze on them and capture them exactly as they appear, rather than as we think they are supposed to be.

  The things that we describe so carefully are called phenomena — the second eleme
nt in the definition. The word phenomenon has a special meaning to phenomenologists: it denotes any ordinary thing or object or event as it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality.

  As an example, take a cup of coffee. (Husserl liked coffee: long before Aron talked about the phenomenology of apricot cocktails, Husserl told students in his seminars, ‘Give me my coffee so that I can make phenomenology out of it.’)

  What, then, is a cup of coffee? I might define it in terms of its chemistry and the botany of the coffee plant, and add a summary of how its beans are grown and exported, how they are ground, how hot water is pressed through the powder and then poured into a shaped receptacle to be presented to a member of the human species who orally ingests it. I could analyse the effect of caffeine on the body, or discuss the international coffee trade. I could fill an encyclopaedia with these facts, and I would still get no closer to saying what this particular cup of coffee in front of me is. On the other hand, if I went the other way and conjured up a set of purely personal, sentimental associations — as Marcel Proust does when he dunks his madeleine in his tea and goes on to write seven volumes about it — that would not allow me to understand this cup of coffee as an immediately given phenomenon either.

  Instead, this cup of coffee is a rich aroma, at once earthy and perfumed; it is the lazy movement of a curlicue of steam rising from its surface. As I lift it to my lips, it is a placidly shifting liquid and a weight in my hand inside its thick-rimmed cup. It is an approaching warmth, then an intense dark flavour on my tongue, starting with a slightly austere jolt and then relaxing into a comforting warmth, which spreads from the cup into my body, bringing the promise of lasting alertness and refreshment. The promise, the anticipated sensations, the smell, the colour and the flavour are all part of the coffee as phenomenon. They all emerge by being experienced.

  If I treated all these as purely ‘subjective’ elements to be stripped away in order to be ‘objective’ about my coffee, I would find there was nothing left of my cup of coffee as a phenomenon — that is, as it appears in the experience of me, the coffee-drinker. This experiential cup of coffee is the one I can speak about with certainty, while everything else to do with the bean-growing and the chemistry is hearsay. It may all be interesting hearsay, but it’s irrelevant to a phenomenologist.

  Husserl therefore says that, to phenomenologically describe a cup of coffee, I should set aside both the abstract suppositions and any intrusive emotional associations. Then I can concentrate on the dark, fragrant, rich phenomenon in front of me now. This ‘setting aside’ or ‘bracketing out’ of speculative add-ons Husserl called epoché — a term borrowed from the ancient Sceptics, who used it to mean a general suspension of judgement about the world. Husserl sometimes referred to it as a phenomenological ‘reduction’ instead: the process of boiling away extra theorising about what coffee ‘really’ is, so that we are left only with the intense and immediate flavour — the phenomenon.

  The result is a great liberation. Phenomenology frees me to talk about my experienced coffee as a serious topic of investigation. It likewise frees me to talk about many areas that come into their own only when discussed phenomenologically. An obvious example, close to the coffee case, is expert wine tasting — a phenomenological practice if ever there was one, and one in which the ability both to discern and to describe experiential qualities are equally important.

  There are many such topics. If I want to tell you about a heartrending piece of music, phenomenology enables me to describe it as a moving piece of music, rather than as a set of string vibrations and mathematical note relationships on which I have pinned a personal emotion. Melancholy music is melancholy; a sweet air is a sweet air; these descriptions are fundamental to what music is. Indeed, we do talk about music phenomenologically all the time. Even if I describe a sequence of notes as going ‘up’ or ‘down’, this has less to do with what the sound waves are doing (which is becoming more or less frequent, and longer or shorter) than with how the music plays out in my mind. I hear the notes climbing up an invisible ladder. I almost physically rise in my chair as I listen to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’; my very soul takes flight. That’s not just me: it is what the music is.

  Phenomenology is useful for talking about religious or mystical experiences: we can describe them as they feel from the inside without having to prove that they represent the world accurately. For similar reasons, phenomenology helps physicians. It makes it possible to consider medical symptoms as they are experienced by the patient rather than exclusively as physical processes. A patient can describe a diffuse or stabbing pain, or a sensation of heaviness or sluggishness, or the vague unease in a disturbed stomach. Amputees often suffer from ‘phantom’ sensations in the area of the lost limb; phenomenology allows these sensations to be analysed. The neurologist Oliver Sacks discussed such experiences in his 1984 book A Leg to Stand On, about his recovery from a severe leg injury. Long after the physical damage had healed, his leg felt separate from him, like a wax model: he could move it, but it did not feel like his from within. After much physiotherapy it returned to normal, but, had he not been able to convince his doctors that the feeling was phenomenologically important and that it belonged to the condition rather than being some personal oddity, he might not have received that therapy and might never have regained full control of his leg.

  In all these cases, the Husserlian ‘bracketing out’ or epoché allows the phenomenologist to temporarily ignore the question ‘But is it real?’, in order to ask how a person experiences his or her world. Phenomenology gives a formal mode of access to human experience. It lets philosophers talk about life more or less as non-philosophers do, while still being able to tell themselves they are being methodical and rigorous.

  The point about rigour is crucial; it brings us back to the first half of the command to describe phenomena. A phenomenologist cannot get away with listening to a piece of music and saying, ‘How lovely!’ He or she must ask: is it plaintive? is it dignified? is it colossal and sublime? The point is to keep coming back to the ‘things themselves’ — phenomena stripped of their conceptual baggage — so as to bail out weak or extraneous material and get to the heart of the experience. One might never finish adequately describing a cup of coffee. Yet it is a liberating task: it gives us back the world we live in. It works most effectively on the things we may not usually think of as material for philosophy: a drink, a melancholy song, a drive, a sunset, an ill-at-ease mood, a box of photographs, a moment of boredom. It restores this personal world in its richness, arranged around our own perspective yet usually no more noticed than the air.

  There is another side effect: it ought in theory to free us from ideologies, political and otherwise. In forcing us to be loyal to experience, and to sidestep authorities who try to influence how we interpret that experience, phenomenology has the capacity to neutralise all the ‘isms’ around it, from scientism to religious fundamentalism to Marxism to fascism. All are to be set aside in the epoché — they have no business intruding on the things themselves. This gives phenomenology a surprisingly revolutionary edge, if done correctly.

  No wonder phenomenology could be exciting. It could also be perplexing, and often it was a bit of both. A mixture of excitement and puzzlement was evident in the response of one young German who discovered phenomenology in its early days: Karl Jaspers. In 1913, he was working as a researcher at the Heidelberg Clinic of Psychiatry, having chosen psychology over philosophy because he liked its concrete, applied approach. Philosophy seemed to him to have lost its way, whereas psychology produced definite results with its experimental methods. But then he found that psychology was too workmanlike: it lacked philosophy’s grand ambition. Jaspers was not satisfied by either. Then he heard about phenomenology, which offered the best from both: an applied method, combined with the soaring philosophical aim of understanding the whole of life and experience. He wrote a fan letter to Husserl, but in it admitted th
at he was not yet quite sure what phenomenology was. Husserl wrote back to him, ‘You are using the method perfectly. Just keep it up. You don’t need to know what it is; that’s indeed a difficult matter.’ In a letter to his parents, Jaspers speculated that Husserl did not know what phenomenology was either.

  Yet none of this uncertainty could dim the excitement. Like all philosophy, phenomenology made great demands on its practitioners. It required ‘a different thinking’, Jaspers wrote; ‘a thinking that, in knowing, reminds me, awakens me, brings me to myself, transforms me’. It could do all that, and also give results.

  Besides claiming to transform the way we think about reality, phenomenologists promised to change how we think about ourselves. They believed that we should not try to find out what the human mind is, as if it were some kind of substance. Instead, we should consider what it does, and how it grasps its experiences.

  Husserl had picked up this idea from his old teacher Franz Brentano, in Vienna days. In a fleeting paragraph of his book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano proposed that we approach the mind in terms of its ‘intentions’ — a misleading word, which sounds like it means deliberate purposes. Instead it meant a general reaching or stretching, from the Latin root in-tend, meaning to stretch towards or into something. For Brentano, this reaching towards objects is what our minds do all the time. Our thoughts are invariably of or about something, he wrote: in love, something is loved, in hatred, something is hated, in judgement, something is affirmed or denied. Even when I imagine an object that isn’t there, my mental structure is still one of ‘about-ness’ or ‘of-ness’. If I dream that a white rabbit runs past me checking its pocket watch, I am dreaming of my fantastical dream-rabbit. If I gaze up at the ceiling trying to make sense of the structure of consciousness, I am thinking about the structure of consciousness. Except in deepest sleep, my mind is always engaged in this aboutness: it has ‘intentionality’. Having taken the germ of this from Brentano, Husserl made it central to his whole philosophy.