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

  If we pay proper attention to technology, or rather to what technology reveals about us and our Being, we can gain insight into the truth of human ‘belongingness’. From this point, we may find a way forward — which, Heidegger being Heidegger, turns out to mean going backwards into the origin of history, to find a long-forgotten source of renewal in the past.

  He continued to work on this material for years. Most of the above thoughts came together in the full version of his ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, which he delivered as a lecture in Munich in 1953, to an audience including the atomic physicist Werner Heisenberg — a man who certainly knew about the challenging-forth of material energies.

  At the same time, Heidegger continued to rework other writings begun in the 1930s, some of which offered a more positive vision of humanity’s role on the earth. One was ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, which appeared in a revised form in his Holzwege (Off the Beaten Track) in 1950. There he drew on a notion borrowed from the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart: Gelassenheit, which can be translated as ‘releasement’ or ‘letting-be’.

  Letting-be became one of the most important concepts in the later Heidegger, denoting a hands-off way of attending to things. It sounds straightforward. ‘What seems easier’, asks Heidegger, ‘than to let a being be just the being that it is?’ Yet it is not easy at all, because it is not just a matter of turning indifferently away and letting the world get on with its business. We must turn towards things, but in such a way that we don’t ‘challenge’ them. Instead, we allow each being to ‘rest upon itself in its very own being’.

  This is what modern technology does not do, but some human activities do have this character, and foremost among them is art. Heidegger writes of art as a form of poetry, which he considers the supreme human activity, but he uses the word ‘poetry’ in a broad sense to mean much more than arranging words into verses. He traces it to its Greek root in poiēsis — making or crafting — and he cites Hölderlin again, saying, ‘poetically, man dwells on this earth’. Poetry is a way of being.

  Poets and artists ‘let things be’, but they also let things come out and show themselves. They help to ease things into ‘unconcealment’ (Unverborgenheit), which is Heidegger’s rendition of the Greek term alētheia, usually translated as ‘truth’. This is a deeper kind of truth than the mere correspondence of a statement to reality, as when we say ‘The cat is on the mat’ and point to a mat with a cat on it. Long before we can do this, both cat and mat must ‘stand forth out of concealedness’. They must un-hide themselves.

  Enabling things to un-hide themselves is what humans do: it is our distinctive contribution. We are a ‘clearing’, a Lichtung, a sort of open, bright forest glade into which beings can shyly step forward like a deer from the trees. Or perhaps one should visualise beings entering the clearing to dance, like a bowerbird in a prepared patch in the undergrowth. It would be simplistic to identify the clearing with human consciousness, but this is more or less the idea. We help things to emerge into the light by being conscious of them, and we are conscious of them poetically, which means that we pay respectful attention and allow them to show themselves as they are, rather than bending them to our will.

  Heidegger does not use the word ‘consciousness’ here because — as with his earlier work — he is trying to make us think in a radically different way about ourselves. We are not to think of the mind as an empty cavern, or as a container filled with representations of things. We are not even supposed to think of it as firing off arrows of intentional ‘aboutness’, as in the earlier phenomenology of Brentano. Instead, Heidegger draws us into the depths of his Schwarzwald, and asks us to imagine a gap with sunlight filtering in. We remain in the forest, but we provide a relatively open spot where other beings can bask for a moment. If we did not do this, everything would remain in the thickets, hidden even to itself. To alter the metaphor, there would be no room for beings to emerge from their shell.

  The astronomer Carl Sagan began his 1980 television series Cosmos by saying that human beings, though made of the same stuff as the stars, are conscious and are therefore ‘a way for the cosmos to know itself’. Merleau-Ponty similarly quoted his favourite painter Cézanne as saying, ‘The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.’ This is something like what Heidegger thinks humanity contributes to the earth. We are not made of spiritual nothingness; we are part of Being, but we also bring something unique with us. It is not much: a little open space, perhaps with a path and a bench like the one the young Heidegger used to sit on to do his homework. But through us, the miracle occurs.

  This is the sort of thing that enthralled me when I read Heidegger as a student — and I was most impressed by this post-‘turn’ Heidegger, difficult though he was to grasp. The more pragmatic Being and Time–era material about hammers and equipment was pretty good, but it didn’t have this deeper, more perplexing beauty. The late Heidegger is writing a form of poetry himself, although he continues to insist, as philosophers do, that this is how things are; it is not only a literary trick. Rereading him today, half of me says, ‘What nonsense!’ while the other half is re-enchanted.

  Beauty aside, Heidegger’s late writing can also be troubling, with its increasingly mystical notion of what it is to be human. If one speaks of a human being mainly as an open space or a clearing, or a means of ‘letting beings be’ and dwelling poetically on the earth, then one doesn’t seem to be talking about any recognisable person. The old Dasein has become less human than ever. It is now a forestry feature. There is glamour in thinking of oneself as a botanical or geological formation, or a space in the landscape — but can Dasein still put up a set of bookshelves? In the very period when Sartre was becoming more concerned with questions of action and involvement in the world, Heidegger was retiring almost entirely from consideration of those questions. Freedom, decision and anxiety no longer play much of a role for him. Human beings themselves have become hard to discern, and this is particularly disturbing coming from a philosopher who had not yet convincingly dissociated himself from those who perpetrated the twentieth century’s worst crimes against humanity.

  Besides, even the keenest Heideggerians must secretly feel that, at times, he talks through his hat. An oft-cited section in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ concerns, not a hat, but a pair of shoes. To convey what he means by art as poiēsis, Heidegger describes a Van Gogh painting which he claims depicts shoes belonging to a peasant woman. He goes off on a flight of fancy about what the painting poetically ‘brings forth’: the shoe-wearer’s daily trudge through furrowed earth, the fields’ ripening grain, the land’s silence in winter, and the woman’s fears of hunger and memories of the pains of childbirth. In 1968, the art critic Meyer Schapiro pointed out that the shoes were probably not a peasant’s at all but Van Gogh’s own. Schapiro kept investigating and, in 1994, found evidence that Van Gogh may have bought them second-hand as smart urban shoes in clean condition, only to then distress them with a long walk through the mud. He capped off his research by citing a note in Heidegger’s own hand, admitting ‘we cannot say with certainty where these shoes stand nor to whom they belong’. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, but it seems clear that Heidegger read a great deal into the painting with very little justification, and that what he read in was a highly romanticised notion of peasant life.

  It may be a personal matter: either Heidegger’s thoughts on Van Gogh’s painting speak to you, or they don’t. To me they don’t, yet there are other passages in the same essay which do move me. I always loved his description of an ancient Greek temple that seems to call forth the very earth and sky:

  (Illustrations Credit 8.2)

  Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the mystery of that rock’s clumsy yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. The luster and gleam of the st
one, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, yet first brings to light the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air.

  I’m prepared for the possibility that someone else will find this boring or even odious. But Heidegger’s idea that a human architectural construction can make even the air show itself differently has stayed somewhere behind my perceptions of buildings and art ever since I first read the essay.

  I happily accept that it may have influenced me as a piece of literature rather than as philosophy but, if so, it must be said that this was not Heidegger’s intention. He did not expect his readers to treat his work as an aesthetic experience, or to go away like visitors from an art gallery saying, ‘I liked the temple — didn’t think much of the shoes, though.’ His work was supposed to bring us to what the young Karl Jaspers had called ‘a different thinking, a thinking that, in knowing, reminds me, awakens me, brings me to myself, transforms me’. Besides, since Heidegger now saw all language as poetry, or even as the ‘house of Being’, he would think it totally infra dig to worry about whether a particular piece of language is best classified as poetry or philosophy.

  Reading the late Heidegger requires a ‘letting-go’ of one’s own usual critical ways of thinking. Many consider this an unacceptable demand from a philosopher, even though we are willing to do it for artists. In order to appreciate Wagner’s Ring cycle or Proust’s fiction one has to subscribe temporarily to the creator’s own terms of entry or not attempt it at all. The same may be true of Heidegger’s late works — and I have only quoted some relatively approachable sections here.

  The greater difficulty may be to emerge from it intact afterwards. Heidegger himself found it hard to leave his own philosophical universe. Hans-Georg Gadamer remarked that he had seen Heidegger remain closed up in himself, seeming unhappy and unable to communicate at all until the other person ‘came onto the way of thinking he had prepared’. That is a severely limited basis for conversation. Gadamer did add, however, that he became more relaxed after formal lessons were over and everyone enjoyed a glass of fine local wine together.

  Several admirers who had previously followed Heidegger’s path now turned away from him, appalled by both his Nazi past and the qualities of his late philosophy. Hannah Arendt wrote to Jaspers from America in 1949 describing Heidegger’s post-‘turn’ lectures on Nietzsche as a ‘quite awful’ form of ‘babbling’. She also disapproved of his hiding out in Todtnauberg to grumble about modern civilisation, safely remote from potential critics who did not bother to climb up a mountain just to reprimand him. ‘Nobody is likely to climb 1,200 metres to make a scene’, she claimed.

  A few people did just that, however. One was his former student Herbert Marcuse, formerly an impassioned Heideggerian and now a Marxist. He made the journey in April 1947, hoping to get an explanation and an apology from Heidegger for his Nazi involvement. He did not get either. In August, he wrote asking Heidegger again why he would not make a clear disavowal of the Nazi ideology, when so many people were waiting for just a few words from him. ‘Is this really the way you would like to be remembered in the history of ideas?’ he asked. But Heidegger refused to oblige. He wrote on 20 January 1948 to thank Marcuse for a package he had sent, presumably of much-needed supplies, adding that he had distributed its contents only ‘to former students who were neither in the Party nor had any other connections to National Socialism’. He then turned to Marcuse’s questions, adding, ‘Your letter shows me precisely how difficult it is to converse with persons who have not been in Germany since 1933.’ He explained that he did not want to issue a facile statement of repudiation, because so many real Nazis had rushed to do just that in 1945, announcing their change of belief ‘in the most loathsome way’ without really meaning what they said. Heidegger did not want to join his voice to theirs.

  One of the few ever to express sympathy for this response was Jacques Derrida, the great philosopher of deconstruction: in a talk of 1988, he turned the question of Heidegger’s silence around by asking what would have happened if he had made a simple statement along the lines of ‘Auschwitz is the absolute horror; it is what I fundamentally condemn.’ Such an announcement would have satisfied expectations and closed the Heidegger file, as it were. There would be less to discuss and puzzle over. But then, said Derrida, we would feel ‘dismissed from the duty’ of thinking the question through and asking what Heidegger’s refusal implied for his philosophy. By remaining silent, he left us a ‘commandment to think what he himself did not think’ — and for Derrida, this was more productive.

  Marcuse was not willing to accept such an elaborate justification, and in any case Heidegger did not try to win him over. He ended his last letter to Marcuse with what sounds like a deliberate provocation, comparing the Holocaust to the post-war expulsion of Germans from Soviet-dominated zones of Eastern Europe — a comparison made by many other Germans at the time, but also a dig at Marcuse’s Communist sympathies. Marcuse was so disgusted that he addressed his reply almost entirely to that point. If Heidegger was capable of presenting such an argument, did that not mean he must be considered ‘outside of the dimension in which a conversation between men is even possible’? If Heidegger could not speak or reason, Marcuse could not see a way of attempting to speak or reason with him. With that, another silence descended.

  Heidegger’s philosophical ‘turn’ also brought a critical response from his old friend Karl Jaspers, with whom he had been out of contact for years.

  Karl and Gertrud Jaspers had somehow managed to survive in Heidelberg throughout the war, in their cautious way, with Karl neither teaching nor publishing. It was a close thing, for it emerged later that their names were on a list of people due to be deported to concentration camps in April 1945; the US Army had occupied Heidelberg in March, just in time to save them. For now, the couple continued to live in Heidelberg, although in 1948 they came to the belated conclusion that they could no longer feel comfortable in Germany, and they moved to Switzerland.

  In 1945, the denazification authorities at Freiburg University had approached Jaspers for his opinion on Heidegger: should he be allowed to resume teaching at the university? Jaspers submitted a characteristically thoughtful and balanced report that December. He concluded that Heidegger was a philosopher of the greatest importance who should be given all the university support he needed to pursue his own work — but who should not yet be allowed to teach. He wrote, ‘Heidegger’s mode of thinking, which seems to me to be fundamentally unfree, dictatorial and uncommunicative, would have a very damaging effect on students at the present time.’

  While drafting the report, Jaspers re-established contact with Heidegger himself for the first time since before the war. Then, in 1949, he pointedly sent him a copy of his own 1946 book Die Schuldfrage (translated as The Question of German Guilt). Written in the context of the Nuremberg trials, this discussed the awkward question of how Germans should come to terms with their past and move towards the future. For Jaspers, the outcome of the various trials and denazification inquests was less important than the need for a change of heart in the Germans themselves, beginning with full acknowledgement of responsibility for what had happened, rather than turning away or making excuses as he felt many people were doing. Every German, he wrote, must ask the question ‘how am I guilty?’ Even people who had defied the Nazis or tried to help their victims still shared in some deep ‘metaphysical’ guilt, he thought, for, ‘if it happens, and if I was there, and if I survive where the other is killed, I know from a voice within myself: I am guilty of being still alive’.

  Jaspers’ inner ‘voice’ calls to mind Heidegger’s authentic voice of Dasein, calling from within and demanding answerability. But Heidegger was now refusing answerability and keeping his own voice to himself. He had told Marcuse that he did not want to be one of those who jabbered out excuses, while carrying on as though nothing had changed. Jaspers similarly f
elt that facile or hypocritical excuses were no good. But he would not accept Heidegger’s silence either. The language he considered necessary was not that of ritual disavowal, but that of genuine communication. Jaspers felt that Germans had forgotten how to communicate during the twelve years of hiding and silence, and had to relearn it.

  This cut no ice with Heidegger, for whom communication was a long way down the list of what language could do. When he wrote back to Jaspers he made no comment on the contents of his Schuldfrage, but reciprocated by sending Jaspers some of his own recent writings. Jaspers was repelled. Picking out Heidegger’s pet phrase describing language as the ‘house of Being’, he wrote back, ‘I bristle, because all language seems to be only a bridge to me’ — a bridge between people, not a shelter or home. Heidegger’s next letter, in April 1950, made an even worse impression, filled with talk of the need to wait for the ‘advent’ of something that would take humans over, or appropriate them; the notions of advent and appropriation were also among Heidegger’s post-‘turn’ concepts. This time, it was Jaspers who fell silent in response. When he at last wrote to Heidegger again, in 1952, it was to say that the new writing style reminded him of the mystical nonsense that had made fools of people for so long. It is ‘pure dreaming’, he said. He had already written calling Heidegger a ‘dreaming boy’ in 1950. That had seemed a generous interpretation of Heidegger’s failings, but now he clearly felt it was time for Heidegger to wake up.

  Jaspers retained his belief in the power of communication all his life, and put it into effect by doing popular radio talks and writing about current events in a way that would reach the widest audience possible. But Heidegger also addressed non-specialist audiences, especially while he was banned from teaching, since this became his only outlet. In March 1950, he delivered two lectures to residents and locals at the northern Black Forest sanatorium of Bühlerhöhe, as part of a Wednesday-evening series of talks organised by the physician Gerhard Stroomann, who became a friend. Stroomann wrote afterwards, in enthusiastic Heideggerese, that the lectures were successful, but the Q&A sessions were unpredictable: ‘when discussion begins, it contains the greatest responsibility and the ultimate danger. Practice is often lacking. One has to stay with the point … even if it is only a question.’