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

  Just try it: if you attempt to sit for two minutes and think about nothing, you will probably get an inkling of why intentionality is so fundamental to human existence. The mind races around like a foraging squirrel in a park, grabbing in turn at a flashing phone screen, a distant mark on the wall, a clink of cups, a cloud that resembles a whale, a memory of something a friend said yesterday, a twinge in a knee, a pressing deadline, a vague expectation of nice weather later, a tick of the clock. Some Eastern meditation techniques aim to still this scurrying creature, but the extreme difficulty of this shows how unnatural it is to be mentally inert. Left to itself, the mind reaches out in all directions as long as it is awake — and even carries on doing it in the dreaming phase of its sleep.

  Understood in this way, the mind hardly is anything at all: it is its aboutness. This makes the human mind (and possibly some animal minds) different from any other naturally occurring entity. Nothing else can be as thoroughly about or of things as the mind is: even a book only reveals what it’s ‘about’ to someone who picks it up and peruses it, and is otherwise merely a storage device. But a mind that is experiencing nothing, imagining nothing, or speculating about nothing can hardly be said to be a mind at all.

  Husserl saw in the idea of intentionality a way to sidestep two great unsolved puzzles of philosophical history: the question of what objects ‘really’ are, and the question of what the mind ‘really’ is. By doing the epoché and bracketing out all consideration of reality from both topics, one is freed to concentrate on the relationship in the middle. One can apply one’s descriptive energies to the endless dance of intentionality that takes place in our lives: the whirl of our minds as they seize their intended phenomena one after the other and whisk them around the floor, never stopping as long as the music of life plays.

  Three simple ideas — description, phenomenon, intentionality — provided enough inspiration to keep roomfuls of Husserlian assistants busy in Freiburg for decades. With all of human existence awaiting their attention, how could they ever run out of things to do?

  Husserlian phenomenology never had the mass influence of Sartrean existentialism, at least not directly — but it was his groundwork that freed Sartre and other existentialists to write so adventurously about everything from café waiters to trees to breasts. Reading his Husserl books in Berlin in 1933, Sartre developed his own bold interpretation of it, putting special emphasis on intentionality and the way it throws the mind out into the world and its things. For Sartre, this gives the mind an immense freedom. If we are nothing but what we think about, then no predefined ‘inner nature’ can hold us back. We are protean. He gave this idea a Sartrean makeover in a short essay which he began writing in Berlin, but published only in 1939: ‘A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Intentionality’.

  The philosophers of the past, he wrote, had been stuck in a ‘digestive’ model of consciousness: they thought that to perceive something was to draw it into our own substance, as a spider coats an insect in its own spittle to semi-dissolve it. Instead, with Husserl’s intentionality, to be conscious of something is to burst out —

  to wrest oneself from moist, gastric intimacy and fly out over there, beyond oneself, to what is not oneself. To fly over there, to the tree, and yet outside the tree, because it eludes and repels me and I can no more lose myself in it than it can dissolve itself into me: outside it, outside myself … And, in this same process, consciousness is purified and becomes clear as a great gust of wind. There is nothing in it any more, except an impulse to flee itself, a sliding outside itself. If, impossibly, you were to ‘enter’ a consciousness, you would be picked up by a whirlwind and thrown back outside to where the tree is and all the dust, for consciousness has no ‘inside’. It is merely the exterior of itself and it is this absolute flight, this refusal to be substance, that constitute it as a consciousness. Imagine now a linked series of bursts that wrest us from ourselves, that do not even leave an ‘ourself’ the time to form behind them, but rather hurl us out beyond them into the dry dust of the world, on to the rough earth, among things. Imagine we are thrown out in this way, abandoned by our very natures in an indifferent, hostile, resistant world. If you do so, you will have grasped the profound meaning of the discovery Husserl expresses in this famous phrase: ‘All consciousness is consciousness of something.’

  For Sartre, if we try to shut ourselves up inside our own minds, ‘in a nice warm room with the shutters closed’, we cease to exist. We have no cosy home: being out on the dusty road is the very definition of what we are.

  Sartre’s gift for shocking metaphor makes his ‘Intentionality’ essay the most readable introduction to phenomenology ever written, and one of the shortest. It is certainly a better read than anything Husserl wrote. Yet Sartre was by then already aware that Husserl had later moved away from this outward-bound interpretation of intentionality. He had come to look at it a different way, as an operation that pulled everything back into the mind after all.

  Husserl had long ago considered the possibility that the whole intentional dance could just as easily be understood as occurring inside a person’s inner realm. Since the epoché suspended questions about whether things were real, nothing stood in the way of this interpretation. Real, not real; inside, outside; what difference did it make? Reflecting on this, Husserl began turning his phenomenology into a branch of ‘idealism’ — the philosophical tradition which denied external reality and defined everything as a kind of private hallucination.

  What led Husserl to do this in the 1910s and 1920s was his longing for certainty. One might not be sure of much in the world, but one could be sure about what was going on in one’s own head. In a series of lectures in Paris in February 1929, attended by many young French philosophers (though Sartre and Beauvoir missed it), Husserl laid out this idealist interpretation and pointed out how close it brought him to the philosophy of René Descartes, who had said ‘I think, therefore I am’ — an introspective starting point if ever there was one. Anyone who wants to be a philosopher, said Husserl, must at least once try to do as Descartes did: ‘withdraw into himself’ and start everything from scratch, on a certain foundation. He concluded his lectures by quoting St. Augustine:

  Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself.

  Truth dwells in the inner man.

  Husserl would later undergo another shift, turning again towards an outside arena shared with other people in a rich mixture of bodily and social experience. In his last years, he would say less about Descartes’ and Augustine’s inwardness, and more about the ‘world’ in which experience occurs. For now, however, he was almost entirely looking within. Perhaps the crises of the war years had intensified his desire for a private, untouchable zone, although the first stirrings did predate his son’s death in 1916, and the last would continue for a long time after it. Debate continues to this day about how significant Husserl’s changes of direction were, and how far his idealist turn went.

  Husserl certainly turned idealist enough during his long reign in Freiburg to alienate a few key disciples. Among those to complain about it early on was Edith Stein, shortly after she finished her PhD thesis on the phenomenology of empathy — a subject that led her to look for connections and bonds between people in a shared exterior environment, not a withdrawn and solitary one. Early in 1917, she and Husserl had a long debate on the subject, with her sitting in the ‘dear old leather sofa’ where his favourites usually sat in his office. They argued for two hours without reaching agreement, and shortly afterwards Stein resigned as his assistant and left Freiburg.

  She had other reasons for going: she wanted more time for her own work, which Husserl’s demands made difficult. Unfortunately, she struggled to find another post. First she was blocked from one formal position at the University of Göttingen because she was a woman. Then, when another came up in Hamburg, she did not even apply because she felt sure that her Jewish origin would be a problem: the department already had two Jewish philosophers and t
hat appeared to be the limit. She returned to her home town, Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland), and worked on her thesis there. She also converted to Christianity, after reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Ávila, and in 1922 become a Carmelite nun — a dramatic transformation. The Order gave her special dispensation to continue her studies and to send out for philosophy books.

  Meanwhile, in Freiburg, her departure left a gap in Husserl’s gang. In 1918 — still long before Sartre had heard of any of them or thought of going to Germany — that gap was filled by another impressive young phenomenologist. His name was Martin Heidegger, and he would prove far more trouble to the master than even the forthright and rebellious Edith Stein had been.

  If Sartre had gone to Freiburg in 1933 and met both Husserl and Heidegger, his thinking might have got off to a different start indeed.

  3

  THE MAGICIAN FROM MESSKIRCH

  In which Martin Heidegger appears, and we become perplexed about Being.

  Martin Heidegger’s challenge to Husserl came in the opening lines of a book, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), which he published in Husserl’s own phenomenological Yearbook series in 1927. The first page contained an innocuous-seeming quotation from Plato’s dialogue The Sophist:

  For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being’. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.

  Of all the perplexing things about ‘being’, Heidegger goes on, the most perplexing of all is that people fail to be sufficiently perplexed about it. I say ‘the sky is blue’ or ‘I am happy’, as if the little word in the middle were of no interest. But when I stop to think about it, I realise that it brings up a fundamental and mysterious question. What can it mean to say that anything is? Most philosophers had neglected the question; one of the few to raise it was Gottfried von Leibniz, who in 1714 put it this way: why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? For Heidegger, this ‘why’ is not the sort of question that seeks an answer from physics or cosmology. No account of the Big Bang or divine Creation could satisfy it. The point of asking the question is mainly to boggle the mind. If you had to sum up Heidegger’s opening sally in Being and Time in one word, that word might be ‘wow!’ It was this that led the critic George Steiner to call Heidegger ‘the great master of astonishment’ — the person who ‘put a radiant obstacle in the path of the obvious’.

  As a fresh starting point for philosophy, this ‘wow!’ is itself a kind of a Big Bang. It’s also a big snub for Husserl. We are meant to understand that he and his followers are foremost among the people who fail to be astonished at being, because they have retreated into their navel-gazing inwardness. They have forgotten the brute reality on which all of us ought to be constantly stubbing our toes. Heidegger’s book politely praises Husserl’s phenomenological methods, and acknowledges him with a dedication ‘in friendship and admiration’. But he also clearly implies that Husserl and his crew have lost themselves in their own heads, which is the very place of uncertainty and isolation from which intentionality had been supposed to rescue them. Wake up, phenomenologists! Remember being — out there, in here, under you, above you, pressing in upon you. Remember the things themselves, and remember your own being!

  Oddly, Heidegger was first inspired to set off down this route by reading Franz Brentano — not Brentano’s paragraph on intentionality, but his doctoral thesis, which concerned different meanings of the word ‘being’ in the works of Aristotle. The philosopher who led Heidegger to notice being was the same who led Husserl to intentionality, and thus to the inward turn.

  Heidegger discovered Brentano’s thesis when he was eighteen, living in his home town of Messkirch, not far from Freiburg but in the Upper Danube region of Swabia. It is a quiet Catholic town, dominated by a wildly over-the-top baroque church in the local style. Its interior, a riot of white-and-gold excess, with saints and angels and flying cherubs by the cloud, comes as a cheering surprise after the stern exterior and the solemn, dark forests around the town.

  Martin, born on 26 September 1889, was the eldest child, with a younger sister, Marie, and a brother, Fritz. Their father, Friedrich, was the sexton of the church, and the family lived just opposite it: their steep-roofed house, the plain central one in a group of three, is still there. Martin and Fritz helped out with church duties from an early age, picking flowers for decoration and climbing the tower steps to ring its seven bells in the mornings. Each Christmas they began extra early. After drinking milky coffee and eating cakes beside the Christmas tree at home, they would cross the little square to the church before 4 a.m. and began the Schrecke-läuten (fright-ringing) that woke all the townspeople. At Easter they stilled the bells and instead turned a handle to make small hammers hit wood, producing a rattling, pocking sound.

  (Illustrations Credit 3.1)

  The sound of hammers striking wood or metal resonated through Martin’s world, as his father was also the town’s master cooper, making barrels and other ware. (A quick online search reminds us that coopers used to make ‘casks, barrels, buckets, tubs, butter churns, hogsheads, firkins, tierces, rundlets, puncheons, pipes, tuns, butts, pins and breakers’ — a beautiful list of objects that now sounds like a half-remembered dream.) The boys would go out in the nearby forest after woodcutters had passed by, collecting pieces which their father could use. Heidegger later wrote to his fiancée describing his memories of the cooper’s workshop, and also of his grandfather, a shoemaker, who would sit on his three-legged stool hammering nails into soles, by the light of a glass globe. All this is worth dwelling on because, for Heidegger even more than for most writers, these childhood images remained important to him all his life; he never abandoned his allegiance to the world they evoked.

  (Illustrations Credit 3.2)

  When the ‘helpful son’ jobs were done, Martin would run out past the church and through the park of the equally grandiose Messkirch castle into the forest, and sit with his homework on a roughhewn bench at the side of a path in the deep woods. The bench and path helped him to think through any tangled text he was studying; later, whenever he was bogged down in a tough philosophical task, he would think back to the bench in the woods, and see his way out. His thoughts were always filled with images of dark trees, and dappled forest light filtering through the leaves to the open paths and clearings. He gave his books titles like Holzwege (Forest paths) and Wegmarken (Trailmarks). Their pages resound with the ringing of hammers and the serene tolling of village bells, with rustic crafts and the heft and feel of manual labour.

  Even in his most rarefied later writing — or especially there — Heidegger liked to think of himself as a humble Swabian peasant, whittling and chopping at his work. But he was never exactly a man of the people. From boyhood, there was something set apart about him. He was shy, tiny, black-eyed, with a pinched little mouth, and all his life he had difficulty meeting people’s eyes. Yet he had a mysterious power over others. In an interview for a BBC TV programme in 1999, Hans-Georg Gadamer recalled asking an old man in Messkirch if he had known Martin Heidegger as a boy. The man replied:

  ‘Martin? Yes, certainly I remember him.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Tscha [Well],’ answered the man, ‘What can I say? He was the smallest, he was the weakest, he was the most unruly, he was the most useless. But he was in command of all of us.’

  As he grew up, Heidegger attended seminary schools, then went to Freiburg where he studied divinity. But meanwhile, his encounter with Brentano’s thesis led him to immerse himself in Aristotle, and to feel drawn towards philosophical rather than theological inquiry. He picked up the Freiburg university library’s copy of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, borrowed it, and kept it in his room for two years. He was fascinated to see that Husserl’s philosophy took no account of God. (Husserl, although a Christian, kept his faith separate from his work.) Heidegger studied Husserl’s method of proceeding by close description and attention to phenom
ena.

  He then followed Husserl in switching to philosophy, and building his career by scraping a living as an unsalaried Privatdozent for years. Also like Husserl, he acquired a family to support: he married Elfride Petri in March 1917, and they had two sons, Jörg and Hermann. Elfride was a Protestant, so they covered all bases by having a registry office wedding followed by two religious ones, Protestant and Catholic — after which they both broke with their churches completely. Heidegger officially ceased to consider himself a believer, although signs of a yearning for sacred things are not hard to find in his work. Their marriage lasted, despite episodes of infidelity on both sides. Many years later, Hermann Heidegger revealed a secret he had heard from his mother long before: his real father was not Martin Heidegger, but a doctor with whom she had had an affair.

  (Illustrations Credit 3.3)

  During Heidegger’s early years studying and teaching in Freiburg, Husserl was not yet based there; as soon as he arrived in 1916, Heidegger set out to court him. At first, Husserl responded in a vague and formal way. Then, as would happen to many others, he became enthralled by the strange young man. By the end of the war, Husserl was as keen as Heidegger was to symphilosopheín — philosophise together, in the Greek word their circle liked to use.