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

  Of course we have to learn this skill of interpreting and anticipating the world, and this happens in early childhood, which is why Merleau-Ponty thought child psychology was essential to philosophy. This is an extraordinary insight. Apart from Rousseau, very few philosophers before him had taken childhood seriously; most wrote as though all human experience were that of a fully conscious, rational, verbal adult who has been dropped into this world from the sky — perhaps by a stork. Childhood looms large in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and in Sartre’s biographies; Sartre wrote in his Flaubert book that ‘all of us are constantly discussing the child we were, and are’. But his strictly philosophical treatises do not prioritise childhood as Merleau-Ponty’s do.

  For Merleau-Ponty, we cannot understand our experience if we don’t think of ourselves in part as overgrown babies. We fall for optical illusions because we once learned to see the world in terms of shapes, objects and things relevant to our own interests. Our first perceptions came to us in tandem with our first active experiments in observing the world and reaching out to explore it, and are still linked with those experiences. We learned to recognise a bag of sweets at the same time as we learned how good it is to devour its contents. After a few years of life, the sight of sweets, the impulse to reach out for them, the anticipatory salivation, the eagerness and the frustration if told to stop, the joy of the crackling wrappers and the bright colours of the candied concoctions catching the light all form part of the whole. When the infant Simone de Beauvoir wanted to ‘crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset’, it was because her growing mind was already a synaesthetic swirl of appetite and experience. Perception remains this way, with all the senses working together holistically. We ‘see’ the fragility and smoothness of a pane of glass, or the softness of a woollen blanket. As Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘In the movement of the branch from which a bird has just left, we read its flexibility and its elasticity.’

  At the same time, perception is bound up with our own movements around the world: we touch and grasp and interact with things in order to understand them. To discover the texture of a cloth, we rub it between our fingers with a practised motion. Even our eyes move constantly, rarely taking anything in with a single fixed stare. And, unless we have lost vision in one eye, like Sartre, we judge distance by seeing stereoscopically. The eyes work together, calibrating angles — but we don’t ‘see’ these calculations. What we see is the object out there: the thing itself. We rarely stop to think that it is partly constituted by our own shifting gaze and our way of paying attention or reaching out to things.

  Our perceptions also tend to be accompanied by that strange sense called ‘proprioception’ — the sense that tells us whether our legs are crossed or our head is cocked to one side. My own body is not an object like others; it is me. If I sit down with my knitting, says Merleau-Ponty, I might have to hunt for my knitting needles but I don’t hunt for my hands and fingers. And if I rest my arm on the table, ‘I will never think to say that it is next to the ashtray in the same way that the ashtray is next to the telephone.’ Our proprioception is exquisitely sensitive and complex:

  If I stand in front of my desk and lean on it with both hands, only my hands are accentuated and my whole body trails behind them like a comet’s tail. I am not unaware of the location of my shoulders or my waist; rather, this awareness is enveloped in my awareness of my hands and my entire stance is read, so to speak, in how my hands lean upon the desk. If I am standing and if I hold my pipe in a closed hand, the position of my hand is not determined discursively by the angle that it makes with my forearm, my forearm with my arm, my arm with my torso, and, finally, my torso with the ground. I have an absolute knowledge of where my pipe is, and from this I know where my hand is and where my body is.

  Proprioception can also operate through extensions of myself. If I drive a car, I develop a feel for how much space it takes up and what size gap it will fit through, without needing to get out and measure it each time. It starts to feel like part of me, rather than an external piece of machinery controlled by wheel and pedals. My clothes or the things I am carrying all become me: ‘Without any explicit calculation, a woman maintains a safe distance between the feather in her hat and objects that might damage it; she senses where the feather is, just as we sense where our hand is.’

  Normally, we take all these marvels for granted, but when they go wrong they reveal a lot about how ordinary experience works. Merleau-Ponty read case studies in the field, notably those based on a man called Johann Schneider, who, after a brain injury, could not feel what position his limbs were in, or where you were touching him if you laid your hand on his arm. Other studies concerned amputees’ experiences of uncomfortable ‘phantom’ sensations where their lost limbs had been — tingling, pain or just the basic sense of having an arm or leg where there wasn’t one. In more recent times, such sensations have been magicked away by using input from other senses: if an amputee ‘moves’ his or her phantom limb while watching a mirror reflection of the matching real limb on the other side, it can sometimes help to banish the illusion. Oliver Sacks, who in A Leg to Stand On described his own disorder of leg proprioception after an injury, elsewhere tried simple trickery with video goggles and fake rubber arms to create the feeling that he had a third arm, or even that he was embodied in something on the other side of the room. The experiments were fun, but the leg injury wasn’t: Sacks felt an immense relief when normal proprioception came back to him and he had his whole, proper body back. It felt like getting back to his full self, having been forced to make do with an ‘I’ that was in part merely abstract, or Cartesian. His Merleau-Pontian embodied self was so much more him.

  Another factor in all of this, for Merleau-Ponty, is our social existence: we cannot thrive without others, or not for long, and we need this especially in early life. This makes solipsistic speculation about the reality of others ridiculous; we could never engage in such speculation if we hadn’t already been formed by them. As Descartes could have said (but didn’t), ‘I think, therefore other people exist.’ We grow up with people playing with us, pointing things out, talking, listening, and getting us used to reading emotions and movements; this is how we become capable, reflective, smoothly integrated beings. Merleau-Ponty was especially interested in the way babies imitate those around them. If you playfully pretend to bite the fingers of a fifteen-month-old baby, he wrote, its response is to make its own biting movements, mirroring yours. (He may have tried this with his own baby, who was about that age while he was working on The Phenomenology of Perception.)

  In general, Merleau-Ponty thinks human experience only makes sense if we abandon philosophy’s time-honoured habit of starting with a solitary, capsule-like, immobile adult self, isolated from its body and world, which must then be connected up again — adding each element around it as though adding clothing to a doll. Instead, for him, we slide from the womb to the birth canal to an equally close and total immersion in the world. That immersion continues as long as we live, although we may also cultivate the art of partially withdrawing from time to time when we want to think or daydream.

  For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness can never be a ‘nothingness’ radically divided from being, as Sartre had proposed in Being and Nothingness. He does not even see it as a ‘clearing’, like Heidegger. When he looks for his own metaphor to describe how he sees consciousness, he comes up with a beautiful one: consciousness, he suggests, is like a ‘fold’ in the world, as though someone had crumpled a piece of cloth to make a little nest or hollow. It stays for a while, before eventually being unfolded and smoothed away.

  There is something seductive, even erotic, in this idea of my conscious self as an improvised pouch in the cloth of the world. I still have my privacy — my withdrawing room. But I am part of the world’s fabric, and I remain formed out of it for as long as I am here.

  ‘Starting from there, elaborate an idea of philosophy’, wrote Merleau-Ponty hastily to
himself in later notes — for The Phenomenology of Perception was just the beginning of his research. He wrote much more, including an unfinished work later published as The Visible and the Invisible. He repeated the image of the folded cloth there, but he also tried a new image.

  This was the idea of consciousness as a ‘chiasm’. The word ‘chiasm’ or ‘chiasmus’ comes from the Greek letter chi, written χ, and it denotes exactly that crossed intertwining shape. In biology, it refers to the crossing of two nerves or ligaments. In language, it is the rhetorical device in which one phrase is countered by another inverting the same words, as when John F. Kennedy said, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,’ or when Mae West said, ‘It’s not the men in my life, it’s the life in my men.’ The interwoven figure calls to mind two hands grasping each other, or the way a woollen thread loops back to grip itself in a knitting stitch. As Merleau-Ponty put it: ‘the hold is held’.

  For him, this was the perfect way of making sense of the connection between consciousness and world. Each clasps the other, as if by criss-crossed, knitted links. Thus, I can see things in the world, but I can also be seen, because I am made of the world’s own stuff. When I touch something with my hand, that thing touches my hand too. If this were not the case, I could neither see nor touch anything at all. I never peer into the world from a safe place outside it, like a cat looking into a fish tank. I encounter things because I am encounterable to others. He wrote: ‘It is as though our vision were formed in the heart of the visible, or as though there were between it and us an intimacy as close as between the sea and the strand.’

  Traditional philosophy has no name for this ‘visibility’, says Merleau-Ponty, so he uses the word ‘flesh’, meaning something much more than a physical substance. Flesh is what we share with the world. ‘It is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body.’ It is because I am flesh that I move and respond to things while I observe them. It is what makes me ‘follow with my eyes the movements and the contours of the things themselves’.

  By the time of these works, Merleau-Ponty is taking his desire to describe experience to the outer limits of what language can convey. Just as with the late Husserl or Heidegger, or Sartre in his Flaubert book, we see a philosopher venturing so far from shore that we can barely follow. Emmanuel Levinas would head out to the fringes too, eventually becoming incomprehensible to all but his most patient initiates.

  With Merleau-Ponty, the further he wades out into the mysterious, the closer he also comes to the basics of life: to the act of picking up a glass and drinking, or to the bounce of a branch as a bird flies away. This is what astonishes him, and for him there can be no question of banishing that puzzle by ‘solving’ it. The philosopher’s task is neither to reduce the mysterious to a neat set of concepts nor to gaze at it in awed silence. It is to follow the first phenomenological imperative: to go to the things themselves in order to describe them, attempting ‘rigorously to put into words what is not ordinarily put into words, what is sometimes considered inexpressible’. Such philosophy can be seen as an art form — a way of doing what Merleau-Ponty thought Cézanne did in his paintings of everyday objects and scenes: taking the world, making it new, and giving it back almost unchanged except in that it had been observed. As he wrote of Cézanne in a beautiful essay, ‘Only one emotion is possible for this painter — the feeling of strangeness — and only one lyricism — that of the continual rebirth of existence.’ In another essay, he wrote of how the Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne put ‘not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence’. One could say the same of Merleau-Ponty himself.

  When, in 1952, Merleau-Ponty was made head of philosophy at the Collège de France, a journalist at L’aurore used the occasion to mock existentialism with an allusion to its popularity with the jazz-club crowd: ‘It is only a cerebral way of dancing the boogie-woogie.’ As it happened, Merleau-Ponty had a flair for the boogie-woogie too. While being the most academically eminent of the Left Bank thinkers, he was also their best dancer: Boris Vian and Juliette Gréco both commented on his talents.

  Merleau-Ponty’s jive and swing moves went along with a generally urbane manner and a perfect ease in company. He liked good clothes, but not flashy ones; English suits were his favourite at a time when they were admired for their high quality. He worked hard, but he spent part of each day in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés cafés near where he lived, popping in regularly for his morning coffee — usually on the late side as he didn’t like early rising.

  He combined his night life with being a devoted family man, with a very different domestic routine from that of Sartre or Beauvoir. He had just one daughter, Marianne Merleau-Ponty, who now looks back fondly on his way of playing, laughing or making funny faces to amuse her as a small child. It was sometimes difficult to be a philosopher’s daughter: she recalls how galling it was to have the teacher say to her years later, after an oral exam in which she had fumbled a particular topic, ‘You do realise that a certain Merleau-Ponty has written about this question?’ It was never her favourite subject, but when she had to resit exams he helped her patiently, and inscribed copies of his books to ‘Marianne, his favourite philosopher’. He seemed more alive than other philosophers, she says — more in life — but this was because philosophy and life were the same to him.

  Despite the fun and games, he retained an elusive quality, especially by contrast with Sartre’s tendency to be upfront and in-your-face. His self-possessed way of smiling off the most serious events could be frustrating, as Simone de Beauvoir found, but it was attractive too. Merleau-Ponty was aware of his appeal and was a noted flirt. He sometimes went beyond flirtation. According to second-hand gossip reported by Sartre in a letter to Beauvoir, he could come on a bit strong after too many drinks, trying his luck with several women over a single evening. They often turned him down, Sartre noted — ‘not that they don’t like him, he’s just too hasty’.

  Although his marriage remained unassailable, he did have a serious affair with at least one other woman: Sonia Brownell, later the wife of George Orwell. They met in 1946 when Sonia sought to commission a piece from him for Cyril Connolly’s cultural review, Horizon, for which she was an assistant editor. They wrote playful letters to each other, then began their affair around Boxing Day 1947, when Merleau-Ponty went to London to spend a week with her. The week did not all go smoothly. Sonia was volatile, moody, and prone to outbursts; her wayward emotions had probably appealed to Merleau-Ponty at first; perhaps she even reminded him of his emotive long-ago girlfriend Elisabeth Le Coin. But his letters show him moving from pained puzzlement to a definite cooling of affection. The affair eventually ended when Sonia arrived in Paris one day, expecting to meet him, but instead found a polite note at her hotel from his wife Suzanne, informing her that her husband had left for southern France. Not long after this, on 13 October 1949, Sonia married the very ill George Orwell at his hospital bed.

  Even before their relationship, Merleau-Ponty had been considering a move to England, and he asked his friend A. J. Ayer to help him get a post at University College London. This never happened. But he liked the country, and spoke and wrote good English — although after he wrote his first English letter to Sonia they switched to French, in which she was more fluent. He practised English by doing questionnaires in Meet Yourself, an eccentric self-help book compiled in 1936 by Prince Leopold Loewenstein Wertheim-Freudenberg and the novelist William Gerhardie. The book would have appealed to Merleau-Ponty’s interest in psychology: it was designed to ‘X-ray’ the reader’s character through a hypertextual mass of questions through which one took different routes depending on one’s answers. Since Gerhardie was a writer with a distinctive sensibility of his own, the book’s questions are sometimes quite weird: ‘Do Mickey Mouse films or other animated cartoons of that sort frighten you?’ ‘Have you ever felt as though the world around y
ou has suddenly become unreal and dreamlike? Do not answer yet. The sensations are hard to describe. They are very complex, but the most characteristic thing about them is an uncanny feeling as of having lost one’s identity.’

  In fact, Merleau-Ponty was almost unique among the existentialist milieu in not being prone to such attacks of uncanniness or anxiety. It was an important difference between him and the neurotic Sartre. Merleau-Ponty was not followed down the street by lobsters; he had no fear of chestnut trees, and was not haunted by the thought of other people staring at him and fixing him in their judgemental gaze. Rather, for him, looking and being looked at are what weave us into the world and give us our full humanity. Sartre acknowledged this interweaving, and he also acknowledged the importance of the body, but it all seemed to make him nervous. Some kind of struggle is always going on in Sartre’s work — against facticity, against being devoured by the quicksand of Being, and against the power of the Other. Merleau-Ponty doesn’t struggle much, and doesn’t seem to fear dissolving into the syrupy or vaporous. In The Visible and the Invisible, he gives us some very un-Sartrean descriptions of erotic encounters, describing how one body embraces another along its length, ‘forming tirelessly with its hands the strange statue which in its turn gives everything it receives; the body is lost outside of the world and its goals, fascinated by the unique occupation of floating in Being with another life.’