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

  Beauvoir found the Hegelian vision of human relationships as a protracted battle of gazes or perspectives a richly productive idea. She had been talking it through with Sartre for years. He too had been interested in the master–slave dialectic since the 1930s, and had made it a major theme in Being and Nothingness. Since his examples illustrating the battle of alienated gazes are particularly lively, let us detour away from Beauvoir for a few moments to visit them.

  In his first example, Sartre asks us to imagine walking in a park. If I’m alone, the park arranges itself comfortably around my point of view: everything I see presents itself to me. But then I notice a man crossing the lawn towards me. This causes a sudden cosmic shift. I become conscious that the man is also arranging his own universe around himself. As Sartre puts it, the green of the grass turns itself towards the other man as well as towards me, and some of my universe drains off in his direction. Some of me drains off too, for I am an object in his world as he is in mine. I am no longer a pure perceiving nothingness; I have a visible outside, which I know he can see.

  Sartre then adds a twist. This time he puts us in the hallway of a Parisian hotel, peering through the keyhole of someone’s door — perhaps because of jealousy, lust or curiosity. I am absorbed in whatever I’m seeing, and strain towards it. Then I hear footsteps in the hall — someone is coming! The whole set-up changes. Instead of being lost in the scene inside the room, I am now aware of myself as a peeping tom, which is how I’ll appear to the third party coming down the hall. My look, as I peer through the keyhole, becomes ‘a look-looked-at’. My ‘transcendence’ — my ability to pour out of myself towards what I am perceiving — is itself ‘transcended’ by the transcendence of another. That Other has the power to stamp me as a certain kind of object, ascribing definite characteristics to me rather than leaving me to be free. I fight to fend this off by controlling how that person will see me — so, for example, I might make an elaborate pretence of having stooped merely to tie my shoelace, so that he does not brand me a nasty voyeur.

  Episodes of competitive gazing recur throughout Sartre’s fiction and biographies, as well as in his philosophy. In his journalism, he recalled the unpleasantness after 1940 of feeling oneself looked at as a member of a defeated people. In 1944, he wrote a whole play about it: Huis clos, translated as No Exit. It depicts three people trapped together in a room: a military deserter accused of cowardice, a cruel lesbian, and a flirtatious gold-digger. Each looks judgementally at at least one of the others, and each longs to escape their companions’ pitiless eyes. But they cannot do so, for they are dead and in hell. As the play’s much-quoted and frequently misunderstood final line has it: ‘Hell is other people.’ Sartre later explained that he did not mean to say that other people were hellish in general. He meant that after death we become frozen in their view, unable any longer to fend off their interpretation. In life, we can still do something to manage the impression we make; in death, this freedom goes and we are left entombed in other’s people’s memories and perceptions.

  Sartre’s vision of living human relationships as a kind of intersubjective ju-jitsu led him to produce some very strange descriptions of sex. Judging by the discussion of sexuality in Being and Nothingness, a Sartrean love affair was an epic struggle over perspectives, and thus over freedom. If I love you, I don’t want to control your thoughts directly, but I want you to love and desire me and to freely give up your freedom to me. Moreover, I want you to see me, not as a contingent and flawed person like any other, but as a ‘necessary’ being in your world. That is, you are not to coolly assess my flaws and irritating habits, but to welcome every detail of me as though no jot or tittle could possibly be different. Recalling Nausea, one might say that I want to be like the ragtime song for you. Sartre did realise that such a state of affairs is unlikely to last long. It also comes with a trade-off: you are going to want the same unconditional adoration from me. As Iris Murdoch memorably put it, Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.

  Sartre derived this analysis of love and other encounters at least in part from what Simone de Beauvoir had made out of Hegel. They both pored over the implications of the master–slave dialectic; Sartre worked out his striking and bizarre examples, while Beauvoir made it the more substantial basis of her magnum opus. Her reading was more complex than his. For a start, she pointed out that the idea of love, or any other relationship, as a reciprocal encounter between two equal participants had missed one crucial fact: real human relationships contained differences of status and role. Sartre had neglected the different existential situations of men and women; in The Second Sex, she used Hegel’s concept of alienation to correct this.

  As she pointed out, woman is indeed ‘other’ for man — but man is not exactly ‘other’ for woman, or not in the same way. Both sexes tend to agree in taking the male as the defining case and the centre of all perspectives. Even language reinforces this, with ‘man’ and ‘he’ being the default terms in French as in English. Women try constantly to picture themselves as they would look to a male gaze. Instead of looking out to the world as it presents itself to them (like the person peering through the keyhole) they maintain a point of view in which they are the objects (like the same person after becoming aware of footsteps in the hall). This, for Beauvoir, is why women spend so much time in front of mirrors. It is also why both men and women implicitly take women to be the more sensual, the more eroticised, the more sexual sex. In theory, for a heterosexual female, men should be the sexy ones, disporting themselves for the benefit of her gaze. Yet she sees herself as the object of attraction, and the man as the person in whose eyes she glows with desirability.

  Women, in other words, live much of their lives in what Sartre would have called bad faith, pretending to be objects. They do what the waiter does when he glides around playing the role of waiter; they identify with their ‘immanent’ image rather than with their ‘transcendent’ consciousness as a free for-itself. The waiter does it when he’s at work; women do it all day and to a greater extent. It is exhausting, because, all the time, a woman’s subjectivity is trying to do what comes naturally to subjectivity, which is to assert itself as the centre of the universe. A struggle rages inside every woman, and because of this Beauvoir considered the problem of how to be a woman the existentialist problem par excellence.

  Beauvoir’s initial fragments of memoir had by now grown into a study of alienation on an epic scale: a phenomenological investigation not only of female experience but of childhood, embodiment, competence, action, freedom, responsibility and Being-in-the-world. The Second Sex draws on years of reading and thinking, as well as on conversations with Sartre, and is by no means the mere adjunct to Sartrean philosophy that it was once taken to be. True, she successfully shocked one feminist interviewer in 1972 by insisting that her main influence in writing it was Being and Nothingness. But seven years later, in another interview, she was adamant that Sartre had nothing to do with working out Hegelian ideas of the Other and the alienated gaze: ‘It was I who thought about that! It was absolutely not Sartre!’

  Whatever had fed it, Beauvoir’s book outdid Sartre’s in its subtle sense of the balance between freedom and constraint in a person’s life. She showed how choices, influences and habits can accumulate over a lifetime to create a structure that becomes hard to break out of. Sartre also thought that our actions often formed a shape over the long term, creating what he called the ‘fundamental project’ of a person’s existence. But Beauvoir emphasised the connection between this and our wider situations as gendered, historical beings. She gave full weight to the difficulty of breaking out of such situations — although she never doubted that we remain existentially free despite it all. Women can change their lives, which is why it is worth writing books to awaken them to this fact.

  The Second Sex could have become established in the canon as one of the great cultural re-evaluations of modern times, a book to set alongside the works of Charles Darw
in (who resituated humans in relation to other animals), Karl Marx (who resituated high culture in relation to economics) and Sigmund Freud (who resituated the conscious mind in relation to the unconscious). Beauvoir evaluated human lives afresh by showing that we are profoundly gendered beings: she resituated men in relation to women. Like the other books, The Second Sex exposed myths. Like the others, its argument was controversial and open to criticism in its specifics — as inevitably happens when one makes major claims. Yet it was never elevated into the pantheon.

  Is this further proof of sexism? Or is it because her existentialist terminology gets in the way? English-speaking readers never even saw most of the latter. It was cut by its first translator in 1953, the zoology professor Howard M. Parshley, largely on the urging of his publisher. Only later, reading the work, did his editor ask him to go easy with the scissors, saying, ‘I am now quite persuaded that this is one of the handful of greatest books on sex ever written.’ It was not just omissions that were the problem; Parshley rendered Beauvoir’s pour-soi (for-itself) as ‘her true nature in itself’, which precisely reverses the existentialist meaning. He turned the title of the second part, ‘L’expérience vécue’ (‘lived experience’), into ‘Woman’s Life Today’ — which, as Toril Moi has observed, makes it sound like the title of a ladies’ magazine. To make matters more confusing and further demean the book, English-language paperback editions through the 1960s and 1970s tended to feature misty-focus naked women on the cover, making it look like a work of soft porn. Her novels got similar treatment. Strangely, this never happened with Sartre’s books. No edition of Being and Nothingness ever featured a muscleman on the cover wearing only a waiter’s apron. Nor did Sartre’s translator Hazel Barnes simplify his terminology — although she notes in her memoirs that at least one reviewer thought she should have.

  If sexism and the existentialist language were not to blame, another reason for The Second Sex’s intellectual sidelining might be that it presents itself as a case study: an existentialist study of just one particular type of life. In philosophy, as in many other fields, applied studies tend to be dismissed as postscripts to more serious works.

  But that was never existentialism’s way. It was always meant to be about real, individual lives. If done correctly, all existentialism is applied existentialism.

  Sartre was just as interested as Beauvoir in seeing how existentialism could be applied to particular lives, and in his case it led him to biography. While Beauvoir traced a generic woman’s life from babyhood to maturity, Sartre did the same with a series of individual men (and they are all men): Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Genet, Flaubert and himself, as well as subjects of shorter essays. In Nausea, he had Roquentin give up his biographical project so as not to impose a conventional narrative form on a life, but there is nothing conventional about Sartre’s biographies. He abandons standard chronology and instead looks for distinctive shapes and key moments on which a life turns — those moments in which a person makes a choice about some situation, and thus changes everything. In these crux points, we catch a person in the very act of turning existence into essence.

  The most important such moments tend to occur in childhood. Sartre’s biographies all focus on his subjects’ early years; Words, his own memoir, confines itself to them exclusively. This interest in childhood owes something to Freud, who also wrote psychobiographies unpicking the dramas of a life, often tracing them to a ‘primal scene’. Sartre liked to find primal scenes too, but by contrast with Freud they did not usually have to do with sex. Sartre thought sexual experiences took their power from more basic experiences to do with our very being. He sought out those experiences during which a child in a challenging situation took control and bent that situation his own way. In other words, he interpreted his subjects’ lives in terms of their freedom. This happens above all in his book about the writer Jean Genet, which appeared in 1952 — three years after Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and visibly marked by her influence.

  After first meeting Genet in the Café Flore during the war years, Sartre had followed his career with interest as Genet published erotic, poetic novels and memoirs based on his life in reform schools, prisons, and on the road as a thief and prostitute. His most provocative book, Funeral Rites, told of a French teenager who fights on the German side during the last days of the Occupation, even though the Germans are losing — or rather, because they are losing. Genet tended to sympathise with the defeated or despised in any situation; in 1944 that meant Germans and collaborators, not the triumphant résistants. He went on to support traitors, violent revolutionaries, Baader–Meinhof terrorists, Black Panthers and more or less anyone who was an outsider. He backed the student radicals of the 1960s too, but remarked to William Burroughs, ‘If they ever win, I’ll turn against them.’

  Sartre loved Genet’s contrariness, as well as his way of poeticising reality. He was pleased when his publisher Gallimard asked him to write a foreword for a collected edition of Genet’s works. But then Sartre’s foreword grew to be 700 pages long. Rather than whacking Sartre over the head with the manuscript in a rage, Gallimard agreed to publish it as a separate book, under a title highlighting its theme of transfiguration: Saint Genet. This proved a good decision; it was as much a treatise of ideas as a biographical work. Sartre used elements of Marxist analysis, but mainly he approached Genet’s life as a way of demonstrating his theory that ‘freedom alone can account for a person in his totality’.

  In doing this, he interpreted Genet above all as a writer, who took control of the contingencies of his life by writing about them. But where did Genet get this ablity to transform the events of his life into art, asked Sartre? Was there a definite moment when Genet, a despised and abused child abandoned by his unmarried mother and taken in by an orphanage, began to turn into a poet?

  (Illustrations Credit 9.2)

  Sartre found the moment he was looking for in an incident that occurred when Genet was ten years old and living with a foster family. Such a child was expected to be humble and grateful, but Genet refused to comply, and showed his rebellion by stealing small objects from the family and their neighbours. One day, he was sticking his hands in a drawer when a family member walked in on him and shouted, ‘You’re a thief!’ As Sartre interpreted it, the young Genet was frozen in the gaze of the Other: he became an object slapped with a despicable label. Instead of feeling abashed, Genet took that label and changed its meaning by asserting it as his own. You call me a thief? Very well, I’ll be a thief!

  By adopting the other person’s objectifying label as a substitute for his unselfconscious self, Genet was performing the same psychological contortion as the one Beauvoir had observed in women. She believed it put a strain on women all their lives, and made them hesitant and full of self-doubt. But Sartre saw Genet as performing the manoeuvre defiantly, reversing the effect: instead of keeping him down, his alienation gave him his escape. From then on, he owned his outsider identity as thief, vagrant, homosexual and prostitute. He took control of his oppression by inverting it, and his books take their energy from that inversion. The most degrading elements of Genet’s experience — excrement, bodily fluids, bad smells, imprisonment, violent sex — become the ones held up as sublime. Genet’s books turn shit into flowers, prison cells into sacred temples, and the most murderous prisoners into the objects of the greatest tenderness. This is why Sartre calls him a saint: where a saint transfigures suffering into sanctity, Genet transfigures oppression into freedom.

  Sartre intuited all this largely because he was thinking at least as much of his own life as Genet’s. His own bourgeois childhood had little in common with Genet’s, yet he too had been through dark times. When his family moved to La Rochelle, the twelve-year-old Sartre had been confronted with a stepfather who intimidated him, and with life at a rough school where the other boys beat him, branded him a pariah, and sneered at him for being ugly. In his misery, Sartre decided on a ritual gesture that, he imagined, would make their violence a part of
himself and turn it against them. He stole change from his mother’s purse and used it to buy pastries for his tormenters. This seems a funny kind of violence — depending on what the pastries were like. But for Sartre it was a magical act. It was a transformation: his bullies had taken his possessions from him, so now he would give them something. Through his Genet-like theft and gift, he redefined the situation on his own terms and made a sort of artwork out of it. After that, as he told Beauvoir in later conversation, he was ‘no longer someone who could be persecuted’. Interestingly, he remained a compulsive gift-giver for the rest of his life.

  Like Genet, Sartre also had a more powerful way of taking control: he wrote books. For both of them, being a writer meant giving the world’s contingencies the ‘necessary’ quality of art, just as the jazz singer in Nausea turns the chaos of being into beautiful necessity. All Sartre’s biographies turn on this theme. In his 1947 study of Baudelaire, he shows us the young poet bullied at school but transforming his miseries into literature. The same thing happens in Words, which Sartre began drafting the year after publishing Saint Genet, in 1953. His driving question, he said in a later interview, was: ‘how does a man become someone who writes, who wants to speak of the imaginary?’ Words was his attempt to find out what makes a child like himself fall into the ‘neurosis of literature’.

  In fact, by the time he was writing Words, Sartre was worrying that something was ideologically wrong with this analysis of freedom and self-determination as modes of being enjoyed most fully by writers. Should one really spend one’s life trying to take control of existence solely through art? Is this not self-indulgent? Perhaps one’s energy should be used another way — such as marching shoulder to shoulder with the proletariat in the service of revolution. Working on Words, Sartre filled it with gleeful irony at his own expense — making it one of his most entertaining works by far. He then announced that it represented his ‘farewell to literature’.