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

  But Sartre’s was never going to be the kind of farewell to literature that meant stopping writing, as the poet Rimbaud had done. It turned out to mean writing more and more, in an ever greater mania, while abandoning the attempt to revise and give careful shape to his thoughts. Words was, rather, Sartre’s farewell to careful crafting and polishing — a process that may have been becoming more difficult for him, as his vision worsened. He managed to make it sound like a virtuous renunciation, but from the point of view of his readers it feels more like a declaration of war.

  The next stage of Sartre’s life-writing career would lead him to the work he thought would be his greatest achievement in the genre, and which instead is one of the world’s impossible books. The Family Idiot is a multivolume life of Gustave Flaubert, in which Sartre prioritised — as before — the question of what leads a writer to become a writer. But he approached it differently. Sartre traced Flaubert’s way of writing to his childhood in a bourgeois family who had dismissed him as an ‘idiot’ because of his tendency to stare blankly into space for long periods, daydreaming or apparently thinking about nothing. In labelling him as idiot — a typical bourgeois act of exclusion — they cut him out of normal social intercourse. Sartre compares the infant Flaubert to a domestic animal, partly absorbed in human culture and partly separated from it, and haunted by what he is missing.

  What he lacks, above all, is familial love, which would have drawn him into the realm of the fully human. Instead, Flaubert is left with what Sartre calls ‘the acrid, vegetative abundance of his own juices, of the self. Mushroom: elementary organism, passive, shackled, oozing with abject plenitude.’ This abandonment in the mushroom patch of the soul makes him confused about his own consciousness, and about the boundaries between self and other. Feeling ‘superfluous’, Flaubert does not know what his role in the world is supposed to be. Out of this comes his ‘perpetual questioning’ and a fascination with the fringes of conscious experience. As Sartre said to an interviewer who asked why he had wanted to write about Flaubert, it was because of these fringes: ‘with him I am at the border, the barrier of dreams’.

  The project took Sartre’s own writing to the border too — the border of sense. He weaves together a Hegelian and a Marxist interpretation of Flaubert’s life, with much emphasis on the social and economic, but he also brings in a quasi-Freudian notion of the unconscious. He often uses the term ‘le vécu’, or ‘the lived’. Beauvoir and others used this word too, but in Sartre’s hands it becomes almost a substitute for ‘consciousness’. It denotes the realm in which a writer like Flaubert manages to understand himself without being fully transparent to himself — or, says Sartre, in which ‘consciousness plays the trick of determining itself by forgetfulness’. The idea is at once seductive and difficult. Perhaps the best way of putting it is to say that The Family Idiot is Sartre’s attempt to show how a writer becomes a writer without ever becoming fully conscious.

  Sartre himself struggled to manage his immense project. Having begun to write it in 1954, he ran out of steam and put the manuscript aside for a long time, then rolled up his sleeves again and rapidly finished three volumes, which came out in 1971 and 1972. These ran to an astonishing 2,800 pages, or about 2,000 pages longer than one might expect from even the most long-winded biography. Even now, he had not finished: this took the story only to Flaubert’s writing of Madame Bovary. A fourth volume was projected, but never appeared. This makes it unsatisfying, but a greater problem is that the existing volumes are almost entirely unreadable.

  One person enjoyed it, at least. Simone de Beauvoir read it in draft, as she did all Sartre’s books. She read it several times. Then she wrote in her memoirs:

  I do not know how many times I went through L’idiot de la famille, reading long sections out of sequence and discussing them with Sartre. I went right through it again from the first page to the last during the summer of 1971 in Rome, reading for hours on end. None of Sartre’s other books has ever seemed to me so delightful.

  I wish I could see what Beauvoir saw. I have tried — I’ve rarely started a book with such a desire to like it, but it was a desire thwarted. I am saucer-eyed with awe at the achievement of the translator, Carol Cosman, who spent thirteen years meticulously rendering the whole work into English. I am less impressed with Sartre, who had clearly decided that the very nature of the project ruled out revisions, polishing or any kind of attempt at clarity.

  The book has its moments, though. Occasional lightning flashes strike the primordial soup, although they never quite spark it into life, and there is no way to find them except by dredging through the bog for as long as you can stand it.

  In one such moment, while talking about the power of the gaze, Sartre recalls being present at a scene in which a group of people were talking about a dog — a variant on the scene described by Levinas in his prison camp, where the dog looked joyfully at the humans. This time, as the people look down at him, the dog realises they are paying him attention, but cannot understand why. He becomes agitated and confused, gets up, bounds towards them, stops, whines, and then barks. As Sartre wrote, he seems to be ‘feeling at his expense the strange reciprocal mystification which is the relationship between man and animal’.

  Sartre rarely grants other animals the compliment of recognising their forms of consciousness. Until now he had implicitly set them all in the realm of the ‘in-itself’ along with trees and slabs of concrete. But now it seems his view has shifted. Animals may not be fully conscious — but perhaps humans are not either, and this may be what Sartre means by taking us to the border of dreams.

  Sartre’s interest in his subjects’ unconscious or semi-conscious minds had developed well before the Flaubert book. Towards the end of Being and Nothingness, he had explored the idea that our lives might be arranged around projects that are genuinely ours, yet that we do not fully understand. He also called for a new practice of existentialist psychoanalysis, to be based on freedom and on worldly being. He never accepted Freud’s picture of the psyche as being arranged in layers, from the unconscious upwards, as if it were a slice of baklava or a geological sediment to be studied; nor did he agree on the primacy of sex. But he did take an increasing interest in the more impenetrable zones of life, and in our mysterious motivations. He was particularly interested in the way Freud — like himself — had changed and refined his own ideas as he went on. Freud was a thinker built on the same monumental scale as himself; Sartre respected that — and of course he too was a writer above all.

  In 1958, Sartre had a chance to explore Freud’s life in more detail when the director John Huston commissioned him to write a screenplay for a biopic. Sartre took the job on partly because he needed the money: a huge tax bill had left him short. But, having agreed to do it, he threw himself into the job with his usual energy, and produced a screenplay that would have made a seven-hour film.

  Huston did not want a seven-hour film, so he invited Sartre to come and stay in his house in Ireland while they worked together on cutting it down. Sartre proved to be an overwhelming guest, talking incessantly in rapid French which Huston could barely follow. Sometimes, after leaving the room, Huston would hear Sartre still raving on, apparently having failed to noticed his listener’s departure. In fact, Sartre was just as puzzled by his host’s behaviour. As he wrote to Beauvoir, ‘suddenly in mid-discussion he’ll disappear. Very lucky if he’s seen again before lunch or dinner.’

  Sartre obediently cut some scenes, but, while writing his new version, he could not resist adding new ones in their place and extending others. He presented Huston with a script that would no longer make a seven-hour film, but an eight-hour one. Huston now fired Sartre and used two of his regular screenwriters to script a much more conventional film, which duly appeared in 1962 with Montgomery Clift playing Freud. Sartre’s name was never credited, apparently by his own request. Much later, his screenplay was published in its multiple versions, so that (if so inclined) one can now pore over all the variant passag
es and reflect on yet another of Sartre’s non-standard contributions to literary biography.

  Flaubert, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Freud were not able to answer back to Sartre’s interpretations, but Genet was. His response was mixed. Sartre enjoyed telling a story that Genet first threw the manuscript into the fireplace, then pulled it out just before the flames took hold — which may or may not have been true. Genet did comment to Jean Cocteau that it made him nervous to have been turned into a ‘statue’ by Sartre. Sartre must have noticed the irony of writing an interpretive study of how a man refused to accept the interpretive gaze of others. It was particularly awkward for the self-mythologising Genet to become a writer written about; he was more used to being on the other end of the pen, and he felt ‘disgust’ at being stripped of his artistic disguise.

  On the other hand, he was also flattered to be an object of such attention, and it helped that he simply liked Sartre. After the remark about being disgusted, he told the same interviewer, ‘It’s very enjoyable to spend time with a guy who understands everything and laughs rather than judges … He’s an extremely sensitive person. Ten or fifteen years ago I saw him blush a few times. And a blushing Sartre is adorable.’

  One major point of disagreement between Sartre and Genet concerned Genet’s homosexuality. Sartre interpreted it as part of Genet’s creative response to being labelled a pariah — thus, a free choice of outsiderhood and contrariness. Instead, for Genet, it was a given fact, like having green or brown eyes. He argued this point with Sartre, but Sartre was adamant. In Saint Genet he even had the effrontery to comment, of Genet’s more essentialist opinion, ‘we cannot follow him in this’.

  Many people now favour Genet’s view over Sartre’s, considering that regardless of other factors that may enter the mix, some of us simply are gay, or at least have a strong propensity in that direction. Sartre seemed to feel that, if we do not completely choose our sexuality, we are not free. But, to turn his own words back on him, ‘we cannot follow him in this’ — at least, I can’t. Why should sexual orientation not be like other mostly innate qualities, such as being tall or short — or being extroverted or introverted, adventurous or riskaverse, empathetic or self-centred? Such tendencies seem at least partly inborn, yet even within the terms of Sartre’s philosophy they do not make us unfree. They simply form part of our situation — and existentialism is always a philosophy of freedom in situation.

  Beauvoir seemed more sensitive than Sartre was to these subtle interzones in human life. The Second Sex was almost entirely occupied with the complex territory where free choice, biology and social and cultural factors meet and mingle to create a human being who gradually becomes set in her ways as life goes on. Moreover, she had explored this territory more directly in a short treatise of 1947, The Ethics of Ambiguity. There, she argued that the question of the relationship between our physical constraints and the assertion of our freedom is not a ‘problem’ requiring a solution. It is simply the way human beings are. Our condition is to be ambiguous to the core, and our task is to learn to manage the movement and uncertainty in our existence, not to banish it.

  She hastens to add that she does not believe we should therefore give up and fall back on a bland Sisyphus-like affirmation of cosmic flux and fate. The ambiguous human condition means tirelessly trying to take control of things. We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir’s view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment.

  Beauvoir’s brief sketch of these ideas in The Ethics of Ambiguity is one of the most interesting attempts I’ve read at describing the bizarre mixture of improbabilities that human beings are. It is here that she laid out the first foundations of The Second Sex and of her entire novelistic vision of life. Yet, disappointingly, she repudiated parts of The Ethics of Ambiguity later because it did not fit with her Marxist social theory. ‘I was in error when I thought I could define a morality independent of social context’, she wrote meekly. But perhaps we need not follow her in this.

  10

  THE DANCING PHILOSOPHER

  In which Merleau-Ponty has a chapter to himself.

  One thinker in Beauvoir’s circle who shared her vision of the ambiguity of the human condition was her old friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty — the friend who, when they were both nineteen, had irritated her because of his tendency to see different sides of things, at a time when she was given to firm, instant judgements. They had both changed since then. Beauvoir could still be opinionated, but had become more attuned to contradiction and complexity. Merleau-Ponty had spent the war working himself into uncompromising attitudes that went against his grain. He adopted a dogmatic pro-Soviet position, which he maintained for several years after the war before dramatically abandoning it. He often changed his views in this way when his thinking took him in a new direction. But he always remained a phenomenologist at heart, dedicated to the task of describing experience as closely and precisely as he could. He did this in such an interesting way that he deserves a (short) chapter completely to himself in this book.

  We have already met him earlier in life, while he was enjoying his happy childhood. After that, he pursued a conventional academic career while Beauvoir and Sartre were becoming media stars. No photographers or American fans chased Merleau-Ponty around the Left Bank. Journalists did not quiz him about his sex life — which is a shame, as they would have dug up some interesting stories if they had. Meanwhile, he quietly turned himself into the most revolutionary thinker of them all, as became clear on publication of his masterwork of 1945, The Phenomenology of Perception. He remains an influential figure in modern philosophy, as well as in related fields such as cognitive psychology. His vision of human life is best summed up by these brief remarks near the end of The Phenomenology of Perception:

  I am a psychological and historical structure. Along with existence, I received a way of existing, or a style. All of my actions and thoughts are related to this structure, and even a philosopher’s thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold upon the world, which is all he is. And yet, I am free, not in spite of or beneath these motivations, but rather by their means. For that meaningful life, that particular signification of nature and history that I am, does not restrict my access to the world; it is rather my means of communication with it.

  This bears reading twice. The aspects of our existence that limit us, Merleau-Ponty says, are the very same ones that bind us to the world and give us scope for action and perception. They make us what we are. Sartre acknowledged the need for this trade-off, but he found it more painful to accept. Everything in him longed to be free of bonds, of impediments and limitations and viscous clinging things. Heidegger recognised limitation too, but then sought something like divinity in his mythologising of Being. Merleau-Ponty instead saw quite calmly that we exist only through compromise with the world — and that this is fine. The point is not to fight that fact, or to inflate it into too great a significance, but to observe and understand exactly how that compromise works.

  His own career was a case study in the art of compromise too, being balanced neatly between two disciplines that were often considered rivals: psychology and philosophy. Merleau-Ponty worked to bring them together for the benefit of both. Thus his doctoral thesis in 1938 was on behavioural psychology, but he then became professor of philosophy at the University of Lyons in 1945. In 1949, he took over as professor of psychology and pedagogy at the Sorbonne, succeeding Jean Piaget — but next became head of philosophy at the Collège de France in 1952. Throughout these changes of role, he made his psychological studies intensely philosophical, while building his philosophy on
psychological and neurological case studies, including studies of effects of brain injuries and other traumas. He was influenced especially by gestalt theory, a school of psychology which explores how experience comes to us as a whole rather than as separate bits of input.

  (Illustrations Credit 10.1)

  What excited Merleau-Ponty in all of this was not existentialist talk of anguish and authenticity. It was a simpler set of questions — which turn out not to be simple at all. What happens when we pick up a cup in a café, or sip our cocktail while listening to the hubbub around us? What does it mean to write with a pen, or to walk through a door? These actions are almost impossible to describe or understand fully — yet most of us perform them with the greatest of ease, day after day. This is the real mystery of existence.

  In The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty starts with Husserl’s notion that we must philosophise from our own experience of phenomena, but he adds the obvious point that this experience comes to us through our sensitive, moving, perceptive bodies. Even when we think of a thing that is not there, our minds construct that imaginary thing with colours, shapes, tastes, smells, noises and tactile qualities. In abstract thought, we similarly draw on physical metaphors or images — as when we talk of ideas as weighty, or discussions as heated. We are sensual even when we are being most philosophical.

  But Merleau-Ponty also followed Husserl and the gestalt psychologists in reminding us that we rarely have these sense experiences ‘raw’. Phenomena come to us already shaped by the interpretations, meanings and expectations with which we are going to grasp them, based on previous experience and the general context of the encounter. We perceive a multicoloured blob on a table directly as a bag of sweets, not as a collection of angles, colours and shadows that must be decoded and identified. The people we see running around in a field are a soccer team. This is why we fall for optical illusions: we have already seen a diagram as some expected shape, before looking again to realise that we have been fooled. It is also why a Rorschach blot comes to us as a picture of something, rather than as a meaningless design.