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

  This word ‘ambiguity’ comes up again and again in describing Heidegger, and it applies not just to his character or actions, but to his philosophy. Ever since 1945, philosophers and historians have tried to work out whether Heidegger’s thought is entirely invalidated by his Nazism, or whether it can be judged in isolation from his personal and political flaws. Some people have proposed trying to rescue certain aspects while discarding others, burying the dangerous bits like so much radioactive waste while holding up the occasional fragment deemed worthwhile. But this seems unsatisfying: Heidegger’s philosophy forms a dense, complicated whole in which every aspect depends on every other. If you try to remove everything unpleasant from Being and Time, the structure collapses.

  Moreover, almost every important thought in Heidegger holds some ambiguity within itself. The most dangerous ideas can also be the ones with most to offer — as in the passages calling us to authenticity and answerability. Most puzzling of all are the sections where he wrote about Mitsein, or being with others: he was the first philosopher to make this experience so central in a philosophical work. He wrote beautifully about ‘solicitude’ for others: about the moments when we ‘leap in’ for another person, out of concern and fellow feeling. Yet none of this enabled Heidegger to show any fellow feeling at all for those suffering or persecuted in Nazi Germany. He could write about Mitsein and solicitude, but he could not apply it to history, or to the predicaments of those around him, including those to whom he seemed close.

  He certainly seemed to have no idea what he was putting his friends through. Many who knew him, especially Husserl, Jaspers and Arendt, were confused by Heidegger’s ambiguity, and wounded by his actions and attitudes. They could not bring themselves to forget him, so they agonised over him. Their effort to figure him out gave them a glimpse into a void. It wasn’t that Heidegger had a bad character, Hannah Arendt wrote to Jaspers in 1949; it was that he had no character. Sartre said a very similar thing in an essay of 1944, speaking of Heidegger’s Nazism: ‘Heidegger has no character; there’s the truth of the matter.’ It is as if there was something about everyday human life that the great philosopher of everydayness did not get.

  Brooding up at the hut in Todtnauberg, Heidegger struggled on with his writing and thinking through the 1930s. In 1935, he wrote miserably of ‘the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free’. But this was ambiguous too: did he mean that the Nazis were responsible for this, or that the general darkening and massification of humanity had made Nazism necessary?

  He may have felt some confusion himself during these years; he certainly had difficulty expressing his thoughts. In July 1935, he wrote to Jaspers saying that all he had been able to manage lately in his work was a ‘thin stammering’. But he had been working on translations, and with the letter he enclosed some lines from Sophocles’ Antigone, the chorus’ ‘Ode on Man’ section. (He would also have this translation printed privately later, as a birthday gift to his wife in 1943.) It begins, in the published English translation of Heidegger’s German:

  The manifold uncanny holds sway

  And nothing uncannier than man.

  Heidegger’s thought itself was now becoming more and more ‘uncanny’. In his snowy forest, he began a long, slow reorientation which has become known as the ‘turn’ (die Kehre), although it can be pinned down to no single event. It was a process leading Heidegger towards a more earthy, more receptive, more poetical way of thinking, and away from talk of resoluteness and decisiveness.

  His poeticising and communing with the forest also led to new decisions of his own, however. Around the time he was considering whether to continue the rectorship, he was also offered a university post in Berlin — an option which must have complicated the Freiburg decision. But he rejected the offer. He gave his reasons in a radio address, published in the Nazi-approved publication Der Alemanne on 7 March 1934.

  The address did not openly deal with politics at all, though its implications were political. He said that he would not move to Berlin because it would take him away from his Black Forest environment — from ‘the slow and deliberate growth of the fir-trees, the brilliant, simple splendour of the meadows in bloom, the rush of the mountain brook in the long autumn night, the stern simplicity of the flatlands covered with snow’. When a blizzard blows around the cabin on a deep winter’s night, he wrote, ‘that is the perfect time for philosophy’. And:

  When the young farm boy drags his heavy sled up the slope and guides it, piled high with beech logs, down the dangerous descent to his house, when the herdsman, lost in thought and slow of step, drives his cattle up the slope, when the farmer in his shed gets the countless shingles ready for his roof, my work is of the same sort.

  When the offer first came through, said Heidegger, he sought advice from his Todtnauberg neighbour, a seventy-five-year-old farmer since identified as Johann Brender. Brender thought for a moment — one of those long, thoughtful moments that wise country people supposedly go in for. Then he replied, not with words but with a quiet shake of the head. And that was all it took. There would be no Berlin for Heidegger; no cosmopolitan urban life; no more flirting with the ‘intoxication of power’. It was back to the south-west German forest, to the tall trees, to the wood-chopping, and to the rustic benches at the side of the pathways, where his thinking worked best — that is, where ‘all things become solitary and slow’.

  (Illustrations Credit 4.2)

  These were the scenes — which just happened to correspond to Nazi rural kitsch of the worst sort — which would guide the rest of Heidegger’s philosophising.

  Karl and Gertrud Jaspers were also wrestling with their own decision, and continued to do so through the 1930s: should they leave Germany? The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 severely restricted their lives: they stripped Jews of their citizenship and banned mixed marriages, although those already existing, like theirs, were officially tolerated for the moment. The following year, Jaspers lost his university position because of his marriage. Yet they still could not bring themselves to leave. Instead, they kept their heads down and lived cautiously, very much as Jaspers had learned always to breathe and move cautiously, for fear of damaging his vital organs.

  Hannah Arendt, instead, left early on: she had the benefit of a powerful warning. Just after the Nazi takeover, in spring 1933, she had been arrested while researching materials on anti-Semitism for the German Zionist Organisation at Berlin’s Prussian State Library. Her apartment was searched; both she and her mother were locked up briefly, then released. They fled, without stopping to arrange travel documents. They crossed to Czechoslovakia (then still safe) by a method that sounds almost too fabulous to be true: a sympathetic German family on the border had a house with its front door in Germany and its back door in Czechoslovakia. The family would invite people for dinner, then let them leave through the back door at night. From Prague, Arendt and her mother went on to Geneva, then to Paris, and finally to New York, where Arendt settled. She told a television interviewer later that everyone had known from the start how dangerous Nazi Germany was, but knowing it in theory was one thing, while acting on it and turning it into ‘personal destiny’ was very different. They survived.

  (Illustrations Credit 4.3)

  Heidegger’s former sparring partner at Davos, Ernst Cassirer, did not wait for a warning. Living in Hamburg, where he had taught since 1919, he saw how things were going as soon as the laws of April 1933 came in and left promptly with his family in May. He spent two years at Oxford University, then six years at Göteborg in Sweden; when it looked as though Sweden would fall under German control, he moved on to the United States, where he taught at Yale and then Columbia. He survived until just before the end of the war: on 13 April 1945, in New York, he died of a heart attack while out for a walk.

  Emmanuel Levinas had left for France well before the Nazis came to power. He taught at the Sorbon
ne, became naturalised as a Frenchman in 1931, and signed up to fight when the war began.

  The Husserls’ children, Elli and Gerhart, emigrated to the United States. Edmund Husserl himself was offered a post at the University of Southern California in November 1933; he could have become a Californian. I find it strangely easy to imagine him there, as neat as ever in his suit, strolling with a cane beneath the palm trees and clear white sun — just as many other intellectual European émigrés did. But he was not prepared to leave the country that was his home. Malvine Husserl stuck by him, equally defiant.

  Husserl continued his work in his own extensive private library. The student whose safety Heidegger jeopardised, Max Müller, was often sent on errands to his house by Heidegger, usually to keep Husserl up to date on who was doing what in the philosophy faculty and which dissertations were being written. Apparently Heidegger did not want Husserl to be entirely isolated, yet he never went to visit him personally. Müller was pleased to have this excuse to see the great phenomenologist. From what he saw, he concluded that Husserl was indeed rather cut off, mainly because he took little interest in outside affairs. ‘He was a strongly monological type and, as he had entirely concentrated on his philosophical problems, he did not actually experience the time that had begun in 1933 as “hard”, unlike his wife.’

  Husserl was paying more attention to the world than was apparent, however. In August 1934, he applied to go to Prague for the Eighth International Congress of Philosophy, dedicated to the theme ‘the mission of philosophy in our time’. He was denied a travel permit, so he sent a letter to be read out at the congress instead. It was a short but stirring document, in which Husserl warned that a crisis was threatening the European tradition of reason and philosophical inquiry. He called on scholars in every field to take up their responsibility — their ‘answerability to themselves’, or Selbstverantwortung — to counter this crisis, and especially to establish international networks that would bring thinkers together across borders.

  He repeated a similar message in person in a lecture to the Cultural Society in Vienna in May 1935, this time being allowed to travel. Scholars must unite, he said, to resist the current slide into dangerous, irrationalist mysticism. A ‘heroism of reason’ was Europe’s only hope. In November 1935, he applied again to travel to Prague, and permission was granted, so he delivered another lecture making similar arguments. Throughout that year, he had been working his ideas into a longer project. He finished the first two sections in January 1936, and published them as The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Since the anti-Jewish laws now forbade him to publish anything in Germany, the work appeared in Philosophia, an international yearbook based in Belgrade.

  In August 1937, Husserl had a fall, and did not make a good recovery. That winter, his health declined. He continued to work with collaborators and visitors on a third section of the Crisis, but he did not finish it. His mind failed him in his last few months; he spoke little, but occasionally said things like ‘I’ve made many mistakes, but it can still all turn out well,’ or ‘I’m swimming in the River of Lethe and have no thoughts.’ Then, with a flash of his old ambition, he said, ‘Philosophy has to be built up all over again from the beginning.’ He died on 27 April 1938, aged seventy-nine. The nursing sister who attended him said afterwards, to Malvine, ‘He died like a holy man.’

  Edmund Husserl was cremated, because Malvine feared that a gravestone in a cemetery might be desecrated by vandals. She remained in their home for now, guarding her husband’s ashes, his magnificent library, and his archive of personal papers — all written in that distinctive shorthand script, and including his many unpublished and unfinished works, not least the last sections of the Crisis.

  Pleading illness, Heidegger did not attend the funeral.

  5

  TO CRUNCH FLOWERING ALMONDS

  In which Jean-Paul Sartre describes a tree, Simone de Beauvoir brings ideas to life, and we meet Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the bourgeoisie.

  In 1934, after his year of Husserl-reading in Berlin, Sartre returned to France filled with energy. He set to work devising his own spin on phenomenology, enlivening it with distinctively Sartrean takes on Kierkegaard and Hegel. He also drew on personal material: his childhood experiences, his youthful enthusiasms, and his wide range of interesting phobias and obsessions. Now that he was reunited with Simone de Beauvoir, he also involved her in his work, and she in turn brought her past and personality into her own writing and thinking. It became a complex blend.

  Sartre had to return to teaching, initially in Le Havre again. In his spare time he became a missionary for phenomenology, urging all his friends to study it — including those, like Merleau-Ponty, who had already done so. Beauvoir, who could read German well (apparently better than Sartre, although he had been speaking and reading it all year), spent much of 1934 immersed in phenomenological texts.

  Keen to get his ideas on paper, Sartre finished off the essay he had begun in Berlin, ‘A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Intentionality’ — the piece that so memorably explained intentionality as an exile from the cosy digestive chambers of the mind out into the dusty world of being. He also worked on a study of the phenomenology of the imagination, of which a shortened version was published in 1936 as L’imagination, and a reworked full version in 1940 as L’imaginaire or The Imaginary. Both works explored the phenomenological puzzle of how dreams, fantasies or hallucinations can be thought of in terms of the structure of intentionality, even when their objects are non-existent or absent in reality.

  To extend his research in these areas, Sartre decided he should experience some hallucinations of his own, so he asked the physician Daniel Lagache, an old school friend, to help him try the drug mescaline, which had first been synthesised in 1919. Intellectuals were falling over each other to get their hands on mescaline in the mid-century; the trend culminated in 1953 with The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley’s famous phenomenological study of what it felt like to view paintings and listen to music while tripping. An existentialist experimenter of the 1950s, the English writer Colin Wilson, described having an encounter with raw Being that was ‘like waking up on a train and finding a stranger with his face within an inch of your own’. Long before then, Sartre sought his own face-to-face with Being. Dr. Lagache injected him with the drug, then supervised the trip while Sartre, always the good phenomenologist, observed the experience from within and took notes.

  The results were dramatic. While Huxley’s drug adventure would be mystical and ecstatic, and one of Dr. Lagache’s assistants had enjoyed prancing through imaginary meadows with exotic dancers, Sartre’s brain threw up a hellish crew of snakes, fish, vultures, toads, beetles and crustaceans. Worse, they refused to go away afterwards. For months, lobster-like beings followed him just out of his field of vision, and the facades of houses on the street stared at him with human eyes.

  He put relatively little of his drug experience into his studies of the imagination, perhaps because it made him fear for a while that he was losing his mind. But he did use it in other works, including the 1937 story ‘The Room’ and the later 1959 play The Condemned of Altona, both of which feature young men under siege by hallucinatory monsters, as well as a semi-fictional 1938 piece called ‘Foods’. This drew both on the mescaline imagery and a 1936 trip to Italy. The narrator, walking alone around Naples on a very hot day, observes terrible things: a child on crutches picks a slice of watermelon crawling with flies out of a gutter, and eats it. Through an open doorway, he sees a man kneeling beside a little girl. While she says, ‘Daddy; my daddy,’ the man lifts up her dress and bites into her buttocks as one might into a loaf of bread. Sartre’s narrator is overwhelmed by nausea — but with it comes an insight: that nothing in the world happens with any necessity. Everything is ‘contingent’, and it could all have happened a different way. The revelation horrifies him.

  Sartre’s own insight about ‘contingency’ must have come earlier,
as he had been collecting notes about it for a while, initially in a suitably random blank notebook which he said he found on a Métro train and which had an advertisement for ‘Midi Suppositories’ on the cover. These notes evolved in Berlin into the draft of a novel, to which he gave the working title Melancholia. This in turn became the novel that I would encounter when I was sixteen: Nausea, the story of the writer Antoine Roquentin and his driftings in Bouville.

  Roquentin has initially come to this dull seaside town to research the life of an eighteenth-century courtier, the Marquis de Rollebon, whose papers are in the local library. Rollebon’s career amounted to a series of wild adventures and would be a gift to any biographer, except that Roquentin now can’t find a way to write about them. He has discovered that life is nothing like these swashbuckling stories, and he does not want to falsify reality. In fact, it is Roquentin himself who has come adrift. Lacking the routine or family which lend structure to most people’s lives, he spends his days in the library, or wandering about, or drinking beer in a café that plays ragtime music on the record player. He watches the townspeople doing their bourgeois, ordinary-folk things. Life resembles a lump of featureless dough, characterised only by contingency, not by necessity. This realisation comes in regular episodes, like waves, and each time it fills Roquentin with a nausea that seems to attach to objects themselves — to the world out there. He picks up a pebble to throw into the sea, but it feels like a disgusting globular mass in his hand. He enters a room, and the doorknob becomes a weird bulbous lump. In the café, his usual beer glass with its bevelled edges and bright brewer’s coat of arms turns horrible and contigent on him. He tries to capture these experiences phenomenologically in a diary: ‘I must say how I see this table, the street, people, my packet of tobacco, since these are the things which have changed.’