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 certainly thought so. In an article the year before, to mark a smaller production being performed in the French zone of Germany, he wrote that Germans shared a similar problem to the French a few years earlier:

  For the Germans, too, I think that remorse is pointless. I do not mean that they should simply wipe out past faults from their memory. No. But I feel sure that they won’t earn the forgiveness they could get from the world just by being obligingly repentant. They will earn it rather by total, sincere commitment to a future of freedom and work, by their firm desire to build this future, and by the presence among them of as many men of goodwill as possible. Perhaps the play can — not lead them to this future — but encourage them to aim in that direction.

  Not everyone in Germany agreed with this analysis, and the debate around the play attracted much attention. This in turn ensured full audiences: Simone de Beauvoir heard that some people were paying 500 marks for a ticket — over twice an average monthly salary. One person even paid two geese, a high price in a city where food was still scarce. Initially Beauvoir had been nervous about making the German trip, after fearing the German occupiers for so long in Paris, but she changed her mind on seeing the scale of the country’s devastation in both the Heideggerian and ordinary senses of the word. It was then deepest winter; the temperature had been as low as –18°C for weeks, yet many Berliners went around without coats, and Beauvoir saw people pushing little trolleys so as to collect any useful item they saw on their walks. It was partly to keep warm that they were so keen on theatre-going, although it sometimes meant long journeys through the snow in inadequate shoes. Berlin was barely functioning, and it was awkwardly split between its Soviet, American, British and French administrative zones, the last three of which would unite to form West Berlin a few months later. It had certainly changed since Sartre saw it in 1933 and 1934. In a spare moment between his public appearances, he sought out the house where he had stayed back then, and found it just standing, but in a tumbledown state.

  The main event was a debate hosted at the Hebbel Theatre itself on 4 February. Speaking in French with a translator, Sartre defended his play against speakers of both Christian and Marxist persuasions who believed it conveyed the wrong message for Germans. Its existentialist philosophy of liberation was all right for the French in 1943, they said, but it was wrong to urge Germans to move on just yet. The Nuremberg trials had barely finished; some of those who had committed crimes had never been held accountable at all. One speaker warned that many might seize on the play as a justification for disowning culpability for real past crimes, evading justice.

  Sartre followed the discussions in German, before using the translator to respond. He argued that existentialist freedom was never meant to be used as an excuse of any kind: that was the exact opposite of what it was about. In existentialism, there are no excuses. Freedom comes with total responsibility.

  His short speech prompted Christian writer Gert Theunissen to shift to a more general attack on Sartre’s conception of freedom. It was just plain wrong to say ‘existence precedes essence’, Theunissen said. Humans do have an essence, which is given to them by God, and their job is to follow it. According to the transcript of the exchange, this remark attracted ‘loud approval in the room. Several whistles. Hilarity.’ Next Alfons Steininger, head of the Society for the Study of the Culture of the Soviet Union, came in from a Communist angle. Sartre’s play risked being taken ‘as encouragement of triviality, of nihilism, of pessimism’, he said — these being the usual buzzwords used by Communists to bash existentialism. In general, the discussion rarely transcended this level. Not for the first or last time, Sartre was stuck between two opponents who both hated him while having almost nothing in common with each other.

  Of course, they had a point. Just because existentialism was not supposed to provide excuses did not mean that people would not try to use it that way. It would not require great skill in sophistry to twist The Flies into an argument for selective forgetfulness. Nor was it clear that the parallels between the French situation of 1943 and the German situation of 1948 went much beyond a feeling shared by much of the rest of the world at this time too: horror at the recent past, and apprehension (mingled with hope) about the future.

  Other aspects of The Flies would have resonated with Berliners in 1948, however, and these had more to do with current sufferings. The stark landscape on stage looked a lot like the Berlin outside the door, and even the theatrical device of the flies might have triggered memories — for, in the hot and terrible summer of 1945, German cities were reportedly infested by an unpleasant large green fly species propagating on the rotting bodies under the rubble.

  Above all, Berlin was itself an occupied city. It was occupied by anxiety and want, by the rival foreign powers, and especially by fear of the Soviet Union. A couple of months after Sartre and Beauvoir left, Soviet forces swooped and cut off all supplies coming into the western side of Berlin. In March 1948 they blocked the railway lines, and in June they cut off the roads. They set out to starve Berlin into submission, just as the Germans had starved Leningrad during the war.

  To this, the Western powers responded with a bold remedy. They simply flew in everything that the city needed: food, coal, medicines. For over a year, absolutely everything necessary for survival came in by air, in an operation known as the Berlin Airlift. At one stage, a plane was landing in Berlin at a rate of one every minute, twenty-four hours a day. In May 1949, a deal was finally struck with the Soviets and the blockade was eased, but the planes kept flying in from the West until the end of that September. Berlin had no wall yet; that went up in 1961. But it was a divided city that would have to survive in a state of prolonged political emergency for the next forty years. Perhaps the drama of haunted, beleaguered Argos had something to say to Berliners after all.

  Sartre and Beauvoir had overcome their hesitation about going to Germany, but they still showed no sign of wanting to visit Heidegger. Sartre would not meet him until 1953 — and it would not go well.

  The meeting occurred after Sartre travelled to the University of Freiburg for a lecture. The students were excited and the hall was crowded, but, as Sartre droned on for three hours in difficult French, their eagerness wilted. He probably noticed the drop in adulation levels by the end of the lecture, and this must have put him on the defensive even before he traipsed out to the suburb of Zähringen to meet Heidegger in his main home there. He did not go to Todtnauberg, and there was no skiing.

  The two men had a conversation in German — Sartre’s command of the language was just about up to this. Neither participant gave us a first-hand account of what was said, but Heidegger talked about it to Petzet, and Sartre talked about it to Beauvoir, after which both she and Petzet made notes. According to both, the dialogue quickly went haywire. Heidegger brought up the subject of La dimension Florestan, a recent play by Gabriel Marcel which poked fun at an unnamed philosopher who holed himself up in a remote hut, emitting only the occasional incomprehensible pronouncement. Someone had told Heidegger about it, and, although he had not seen or heard the play himself, he had no difficulty in recognising its target and was unamused.

  Sartre did his diplomatic duty as a Frenchman by apologising on Marcel’s behalf. This was generous of him, considering that he had himself come under attack by Marcel several times, first in a review of Being and Nothingness in 1943 and then in a 1946 essay, ‘Existence and Human Freedom’. Marcel had laid into Sartre’s atheism, his lack of an ethical philosophy, and what he felt was Sartre’s inability to accept ‘grace’ or gifts from others — notably, he implies, from God, but also from fellow humans. But Sartre showed considerable grace now in taking the flak from Heidegger for Marcel’s satire.

  After Heidegger had got the conversation off to a bad start by venting his feelings about this minor awkwardness, it was Sartre’s turn to mount his hobby horse. He was burning to talk about the question of political engagement: the duty he felt writers and thinkers had to be
come involved with the politics of their time. This was, to say the least, an embarrassing topic for Heidegger, and not one he wanted to hear Sartre’s views about. Sartre later told his secretary Jean Cau that, when he first brought it up, Heidegger looked at him ‘with infinite pity’.

  Actually, Heidegger’s face was probably communicating something more like, ‘Must we talk about this?’ Whatever his feelings, the result was more wasted time in a conversation that should have been far more interesting than it apparently was. If Heidegger and Sartre ever got onto discussing subjects such as freedom, Being, humanism, anxiety, authenticity or anything else of the sort, none of it was preserved. They spoke past one another.

  Freiburg, the ‘City of Phenomenology’ that had haunted Sartre’s work for two decades, had let him down, and in any case his own ideas had now departed a long way from Heidegger’s. He left in a savage mood, annoyed even with the organisers of the lecture. When he got to the train and found that they had thoughtfully left a gift of roses in his compartment, perhaps a standard gesture for visiting celebrities, he considered it ridiculous. ‘Bouquets of roses! Armfuls of them!’ he said later to Cau, surely exaggerating somewhat. He waited until the train had left the station, then threw them out the window.

  After his return, he marvelled to Beauvoir at how Heidegger was revered these days: ‘Four thousand students and professors toiling over Heidegger day after day, just think of it!’ From then on, he referred to Heidegger dismissively as the Old Man of the Mountain. The days had long passed when Sartre had seized on Being and Time as his only consolation during the days after France’s defeat in 1940. But Sartre was not the only one who could not go backwards. The war had changed everything, for everyone.

  9

  LIFE STUDIES

  In which existentialism is applied to actual people.

  One day, somewhere around the time of the 1948 Berlin trip, Beauvoir was sitting with pen in hand, staring at a sheet of paper. Alberto Giacometti said to her, ‘How wild you look!’ She replied, ‘It’s because I want to write and I don’t know what.’ With the sagacity that came from its being someone else’s problem, he said, ‘Write anything.’

  She did, and it worked. She took further inspiration from her friend Michel Leiris’ experimental autobiographical writings, which she had recently read: these inspired her to try a free-form way of writing about her memories, basing them around the theme of what it had meant to her to grow up as a girl. When she discussed this idea with Sartre, he urged her to explore the question in more depth. Thus it is in relation to three men that Simone de Beauvoir describes the origin of her great feminist work, The Second Sex.

  Perhaps the starting point had been a modest idea in need of masculine encouragement, but Beauvoir soon developed the project into something revolutionary in every sense: her book overturned accepted ideas about the nature of human existence, and encouraged its readers to overturn their own existences. It was also a confident experiment in what we might call ‘applied existentialism’. Beauvoir used philosophy to tackle two huge subjects: the history of humanity — which she reinterpreted as a history of patriarchy — and the history of an individual woman’s whole life as it plays itself out from birth to old age. The two stories are interdependent, but occupy two separate parts of the book. To flesh them out, Beauvoir combined elements of her own experience with stories gathered from other women she knew, and with extensive studies in history, sociology, biology and psychology.

  (Illustrations Credit 9.1)

  She wrote quickly. Chapters and early versions appeared in Les Temps modernes through 1948; the full tome came out in 1949. It was greeted with shock. This freethinking lady existentialist was already considered a disturbing figure, with her open relationship, her childlessness and her godlessness. Now here was a book filled with descriptions of women’s sexual experience, including a chapter on lesbianism. Even her friends recoiled. One of the most conservative responses came from Albert Camus, who, as she wrote in her memoirs, ‘in a few morose sentences, accused me of making the French male look ridiculous’. But if men found it uncomfortable, women who read it often found themselves thinking about their lives in a new way. After it was translated into English in 1953 — three years before Being and Nothingness and nine years before Heidegger’s Being and Time — The Second Sex had an even greater impact in Britain and America than in France. It can be considered the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement.

  Beauvoir’s guiding principle was that growing up female made a bigger difference to a person than most people realised, including women themselves. Some differences were obvious and practical. French women had only just gained the right to vote (with Liberation in 1944), and continued to lack many other basic rights; a married woman could not open her own bank account until 1965. But the legal differences reflected deeper existential ones. Women’s everyday experiences and their Being-in-the-world diverged from men’s so early in life that few thought of them as being developmental at all; people assumed the differences to be ‘natural’ expressions of femininity. For Beauvoir, instead, they were myths of femininity — a term she adapted from the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and which ultimately derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘genealogical’ way of digging out fallacies about culture and morality. In Beauvoir’s usage, a myth is something like Husserl’s notion of the encrusted theories which accumulate on phenomena, and which need scraping off in order to get to the ‘things themselves’.

  After a broad-brush historical overview of myth and reality in the first half of the book, Beauvoir devoted the second half to relating a typical woman’s life from infancy on, showing how — as she said — ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’

  The first influences begin in early childhood, she wrote. While boys are told to be brave, a girl is expected to cry and be weak. Both sexes hear similar fairy tales, but in them the males are heroes, princes or warriors, while the females are locked up in towers, put to sleep, or chained to a rock to wait to be rescued. Hearing the stories, a girl notices that her own mother stays mostly in her home, like an imprisoned princess, while her father goes off to the outside world like a warrior going to war. She understands which way her own role will lie.

  Growing older, the girl learns to behave modestly and decorously. Boys run, seize, climb, grasp, punch; they literally grab hold of the physical world and wrestle with it. Girls wear pretty dresses and dare not run in case they get dirty. Later, they wear high heels, corsets and skirts; they grow long fingernails which they have to worry about breaking. They learn, in countless small ways, to hesitate about damaging their delicate persons if they do anything at all. As Iris Marion Young later put it in ‘Throwing Like a Girl’, a 1980 essay applying Beauvoir’s analysis in more detail, girls come to think of themselves as ‘positioned in space’ rather than as defining or constituting the space around them by their movements.

  Adolescence brings a more heightened self-consciousness, and this is the age in which some girls become prone to self-harming, while troubled boys are more likely to pick fights with others. Sexuality develops, but small boys are already aware of the penis as something important, while the girl’s genitals are never mentioned and seem not to exist. Early female sexual experiences may be embarrassing, painful or threatening; they may bring more self-doubt and anxiety. Then comes the fear of pregnancy. (This was written well before the Pill.) Even if young women enjoy sex, female sexual pleasure can be more overwhelming, and thus more disturbing, says Beauvoir. It is generally linked to marriage, for most women, and with this comes the repetitive and isolating labour of housework, which accomplishes nothing out in the world and is no real ‘action’.

  By now, all these factors have conspired to hold a woman back from establishing authority and agency in the wider world. The world is not a ‘set of tools’ for her, in the Heideggerian sense. Instead it is ‘dominated by fate and run through with mysterious caprices’. This is why, Beauvo
ir believes, women rarely attain greatness in the arts or literature — although she makes an exception for Virginia Woolf, who showed, in her 1928 work A Room of One’s Own, what disasters were likely to befall an imaginary sister of Shakespeare’s born with the same talents. Beauvoir sees every element of women’s situation as conspiring to box them in to mediocrity, not because they are innately inferior, but because they learn to become inward-looking, passive, self-doubting and overeager to please. Beauvoir finds most female writers disappointing because they do not seize hold of the human condition; they do not take it up as their own. They find it difficult to feel responsible for the universe. How can a woman ever announce, as Sartre does in Being and Nothingness, ‘I carry the weight of the world by myself’?

  For Beauvoir, the greatest inhibition for women comes from their acquired tendency to see themselves as ‘other’ rather than as a transcendent subject. Here she drew on her wartime reading of Hegel, who had analysed how rival consciousnesses wrestle for dominance, with one playing ‘master’ and the other ‘slave’. The master perceives everything from his own viewpoint, as is natural. But, bizarrely, so does the slave, who ties herself in knots trying to visualise the world from the master’s point of view — an ‘alienated’ perspective. She even adopts his point of view on herself, casting herself as object and him as subject. This tormented structure eventually collapses when the slave wakes up to the fact that she has it all backwards, and that the whole relationship rests on the hard work that she is doing — on her labour. She rebels, and in doing so she becomes fully conscious at last.