This is what fascinates me in Sartre too. Whereas Heidegger circled around his home territory, Sartre moved ever forwards, always working out new (often bizarre) responses to things, or finding ways of reconciling old ideas with fresh input. Heidegger intoned that one must think, but Sartre actually thought. Heidegger had his big Kehre — his ‘turn’ — but Sartre turned and turned and turned again. He was always thinking ‘against himself’, as he once said, and he followed Husserl’s phenomenological command by exploring whatever topic seemed most difficult at each moment.
All this was true in his life as well as in his writing. He laboured tirelessly for his chosen causes, risking his own safety. He took his ‘engagements’ seriously — and for every unwise and damaging commitment, there was a worthwhile one, such as his campaign against the government’s abuses in Algeria. He was never able successfully to toe a party line on anything, however hard he tried. Perhaps Sartre’s politics are best summed up in a remark he made in 1968: ‘If one rereads all my books, one will realize that I have not changed profoundly, and that I have always remained an anarchist.’ He was anarchic because he would not stop using his brain. Moreover, to quote Merleau-Ponty again, he was good — or at least he wanted to do good. He was driven to it.
I am also more impressed now than ever by his radical atheism, so different to that professed by Heidegger, who abandoned his faith only in order to pursue a more intense form of mysticism. Sartre was a profound atheist, and a humanist to his bones. He outdid even Nietzsche in his ability to live courageously and thoughtfully in the conviction that nothing lies beyond, and that no divine compensations will ever make up for anything on this earth. For him, this life is what we have, and we must make of it what we can.
In one of his transcribed conversations with Beauvoir, he said to her, ‘It seems to me that a great atheist, truly atheist philosophy was something philosophy lacked. And that it was in this direction that one should now endeavour to work.’ Beauvoir replied, ‘To put it briefly, you wanted to make a philosophy of man.’
When she then asked him whether he wanted to add any final remarks to their dialogues, he said that, on the whole, the two of them had lived without paying much attention to God. She agreed. Then he said, ‘And yet we’ve lived; we feel that we’ve taken an interest in our world and that we’ve tried to see and understand it.’ To do this freshly and (mostly) intelligently for seven decades is an achievement more than worthy of celebration.
One aspect of Heidegger’s engagement with the world that really merits attention from the twenty-first-century reader is his double interest in technology and ecology. In his 1953 lecture ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, he argued that our technology is not merely an aggregation of clever devices: it reveals something fundamental about our existence. It therefore needs thinking through in a philosophical way rather than just in a technical one. We cannot understand our lives if we ask only what our machines can do, or how best to manage them, or what we should use them for. The essence of technology, he said, is ‘nothing technological’. To investigate it properly is to be taken to much deeper questions about how we work, how we occupy Earth, and how we are in relation to Being.
Of course, Heidegger was thinking here of typewriters, celluloid movie projectors, big old automobiles and combine harvesters. Very few existentialists (or anyone else) foresaw the role computer technology would come to play in our lives, although in his 1954 book Existentialism and the Modern Predicament, the German author Friedrich Heinemann warned that the coming ‘ultra-rapid computing machine’ would raise a ‘truly existential question’, namely that of how human beings could remain free.
Heinemann could not have been more right. Later Heideggerians, notably Hubert Dreyfus, have written about the Internet as the technological innovation that most clearly reveals what technology is. Its infinite connectivity promises to make the entire world storeable and available, but, in doing so, it also removes privacy and depth from things. Everything, above all ourselves, becomes a resource, precisely as Heidegger warned. In being made a resource, we are handed over, not just to other individuals like ourselves, but to an impersonal ‘they’ whom we never meet and cannot locate. Dreyfus was writing in 2001: since then, the internet has become even more intrusive and so ubiquitous that we can hardly find an angle from which to think it through: it is the very atmosphere many of us breathe all day. Yet surely we ought to be thinking about it — about what sort of beings we are or want to be in our online lives, and what sort of Being we have, or want to have.
Perhaps fortunately, so far, our computer technology just as frequently reminds us of what it cannot do, or at least cannot do yet. Computer systems perform poorly at navigating the rich texture of lived reality: that complex web of perceptions, movements, interactions and expectations that make up the most ordinary human experience, such as entering a café and looking around for your friend Pierre. They are not even good at distinguishing foreground shapes in a visual image. In other words, as Dreyfus and others have long recognised, computers are bad phenomenologists.
Such tasks are easy for humans because we swim in perceptual and conceptual complexity from a young age. We grow up immersed in the ‘imponderable bloom’ of life and relationships — a phrase borrowed from E. M. Forster’s prescient 1909 science-fiction story, ‘The Machine Stops’. It tells of a future humanity living in isolated pods beneath the Earth’s surface. They rarely meet in the flesh, but communicate through a remote vision-phone system. A woman in her pod in Australia can talk to her son in Europe: they see each other’s images on special plates which they hold in their hands. But the son complains, ‘I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you.’ The simulacrum is no substitute for the real Other. As Forster glosses it, ‘The imponderable bloom, declared by discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was ignored by the machine.’
This ‘bloom’ of experience and communication lies at the heart of the human mystery: it is what makes possible the living, conscious, embodied beings that we are. It also happens to be the subject to which phenomenologists and existentialists devoted most of their research. They set out to detect and capture the quality of experience as we live it rather than according to the frameworks suggested by traditional philosophy, psychology, Marxism, Hegelianism, structuralism, or any of the other -isms and disciplines that explain our lives away.
Of all these thinkers, the one who most directly tackled Forster’s bloom was the one from whom I had initially expected nothing very dramatic: Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In The Phenomenology of Perception, he put together the fullest description he could of how we live from moment to moment, and thus of what we are — from the woman who ducks as she enters a room in a tall hat to the man who stands by a window watching the vibrating branch from which a bird has just flapped away. Merleau-Ponty arguably left the most lasting intellectual legacy of all, not least in his direct influence on the modern discipline of ‘embodied cognition’, which studies consciousness as a holistic social and sensory phenomenon rather than as a sequence of abstract processes. Merleau-Ponty gave philosophy a new direction by taking its peripheral areas of study — the body, perception, childhood, sociality — and bringing them into the central position that they occupy in real life. If I had to choose an intellectual hero in this story, it would be Merleau-Ponty, the happy philosopher of things as they are.
Someone else shared Merleau-Ponty’s instinct for the ambiguity and complexity of human experience, and that was Simone de Beauvoir. Besides her work in feminism and fiction, she devoted her philosophical writing to exploring how the two forces of constraint and freedom play themselves out through our lives, as each of us slowly becomes ourselves.
This theme guides The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity, and it also runs through her multi-volumed autobiography, where she depicts herself and Sartre and countless friends and colleagues as they think, act
, quarrel, meet, separate, have tantrums and passions, and generally respond to their world. Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs make her one of the twentieth century’s greatest intellectual chroniclers, as well as one of its most diligent phenomenologists. Page by page, she observes her experience, expresses her astonishment at being alive, pays attention to people and indulges her appetite for everything she encounters.
When I first read Sartre and Heidegger, I didn’t think the details of a philosopher’s personality or biography were important. This was the orthodox belief in the field at the time, but it also came from my being too young myself to have much sense of history. I intoxicated myself with concepts, without taking account of their relationship to events and to all the odd data of their inventors’ lives. Never mind lives; ideas were the thing.
Thirty years later, I have come to the opposite conclusion. Ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so. That is why, among all the existentialist works, the one I am least likely to tire of is Beauvoir’s autobiography, with its portrait of human complexity and of the world’s ever-changing substance. It gives us all the fury and vivacity of the existentialist cafés, together with ‘a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert’ — and all the rest of the exquisite, phosphorescent bloom of life, which reveals itself to human beings for as long as we are lucky enough to be able to experience it.
(Illustrations Credit 14.2)
CAST OF CHARACTERS
A who’s who for reference.
Nelson Algren (1909–1981): Author of The Man with the Golden Arm and other novels of the American underbelly; Simone de Beauvoir’s (mostly long-distance) lover from 1947 to 1950.
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975): German philosopher and political theorist based in the US after fleeing Germany in 1933; former student and lover of Martin Heidegger; author of Eichmann in Jerusalem and other works.
Raymond Aron (1905–1983): French philosopher, sociologist and political journalist; schoolmate of Jean-Paul Sartre; he studied in Germany in the early 1930s and told his friends about phenomenology.
James Baldwin (1924–1987): American author of novels and essays exploring race and sexuality; he moved to Paris in 1948 and spent much of the rest of his life in France.
Hazel Barnes (1915–2008): American translator and philosophical author who translated Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in 1956.
William Barrett (1913–1992): American populariser of existentialist ideas; author of Irrational Man (1958).
Jean Beaufret (1907–1982): French philosopher who corresponded with and interviewed Martin Heidegger and popularised German existentialist ideas; his questions prompted Heidegger to write his Letter on Humanism (1947).
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986): Leading French existentialist philosopher, novelist, feminist, playwright, essayist, memoirist and political activist.
Jacques-Laurent Bost (1916–1990): French journalist who studied with Jean-Paul Sartre, co-founded Les Temps modernes, married Olga Kosakiewicz, and had an affair with Simone de Beauvoir.
Franz Clemens Brentano (1838–1917): German philosopher and former priest who studied psychology and became the first to explore the theory of intentionality, which became fundamental to phenomenology. Edmund Husserl studied with him in Vienna from 1884–6; Brentano’s thesis on Aristotle’s uses of the term ‘being’ also inspired Heidegger.
Sonia Brownell (later Orwell) (1918–1980): English journalist, assistant editor of Horizon; had an affair with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and later married George Orwell.
Albert Camus (1913–1960): French-Algerian novelist, essayist, short-story writer, playwright and activist.
Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945): German philosopher and historian of ideas, specialising in studies of science, Kant and the Enlightement; debated with Heidegger at a 1929 conference in Davos, Switzerland.
Jean Cau (1925–1993): French writer and journalist; Sartre’s assistant from 1947.
Anne-Marie Cazalis (1920–1988): French writer and actor; one of the ‘existentialist muses’ of the Saint-German-des-Prés district in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881): Russian novelist generally considered a proto-existentialist.
Hubert Dreyfus (1929–): American philosopher, professor at the University of California, Berkeley; a Heidegger specialist who also writes about technology and the internet.
Jacques Duclos (1896–1975): Acting Secretary General of the French Communist Party 1950–53; arrested in 1952 on suspicion of plotting to send messages via carrier pigeons. The ‘pigeon plot’ incident helped to radicalise Sartre.
Ralph Ellison (1914–1994): American writer, author of the novel Invisible Man (1952).
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961): Philosopher and political theorist born in Martinique; author of works on postcolonial and anti-colonial politics, notably The Wretched of the Earth (1961), for which Sartre wrote the foreword.
Eugen Fink (1905–1975): One of Husserl’s key assistants and colleagues in Freiburg, later involved with the Husserl Archives in Louvain.
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002): German philosopher, best known for his work on hermeneutics; studied briefly with Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg and recorded anecdotes about both.
Jean Genet (1910–1986): French thief, vagrant and prostitute turned poet, novelist and autobiographer; subject of Sartre’s major work Saint Genet (1952), which began life as a foreword to Genet’s works.
Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966): Italian-Swiss artist, noted for his sculptures; a friend of Sartre and Beauvoir who sketched Sartre and others.
J. Glenn Gray (1913–1977): American philosopher, professor at Colorado College, and translator of Heidegger; also wrote The Warriors, a sociological study of men in war.
Juliette Gréco (1927–): French singer and actor; one of the ‘existentialist muses’ of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district, and a friend of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and others.
Václav Havel (1936–2011): Czech playwright and dissident; studied phenomenology with Jan Patočka, and served as president of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic from 1989 to 2003.
G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831): German philosopher whose Phenomenology of Spirit and dialectical theory influenced most of the existentialists.
Elfride Heidegger, née Petri (1893–1992): Wife of Martin Heidegger; bought and designed their property in Todtnauberg.
Fritz Heidegger (1894–1980): Banker in Messkirch, brother of Martin Heidegger; helped him type his manuscripts and tried to make him write in shorter sentences.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976): German philosopher who studied with Husserl; author of Being and Time and many other influential works.
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843): German poet admired and studied by Heidegger.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938): Philosopher born in German-speaking Moravia; founding father of the phenomenological movement; disappointed mentor to Martin Heidegger.
Malvine Husserl, née Steinschneider (1860–1950): Wife of Edmund Husserl, also born in Moravia; helped to manage the rescue of his archive and manuscripts in 1938.
Gertrud Jaspers, née Mayer (1879–1974): Wife of Karl Jaspers and collaborator on much of his work.
Karl Jaspers (1883–1969): German existentialist philosopher, psychologist and political thinker, based at the University of Heidelberg until 1948 when he and his wife moved to Switzerland; friend of Hannah Arendt and, intermittently, of Martin Heidegger.
Francis Jeanson (1922–2009): Left-wing French philosopher, co-editor of Les Temps modernes; in 1952 he wrote a critical review of Camus’ The Rebel which triggered the falling-out between Camus and Sartre.
Hans Jonas (1903–1993): German philosopher, mostly based in the US; former student of Heidegger, and author of works on technology, environmentalism and other themes.
Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980): German-American philos
opher and translator, born in Freiburg; author of the popular work Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (1956).
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855): Danish proto-existentialist philosopher and contrarian of a religious bent, influential on the later existentialists.
Arthur Koestler (1905–1983): Hungarian novelist, memoirist and essayist; friend of Sartre and others, but fell out with them over politics.
Olga Kosakiewicz (1915–1983): Actor, protégée of Beauvoir and lover of Sartre; married Jacques-Laurent Bost.
Wanda Kosakiewicz (1917–1989): Actor, sister of Olga and lover of Sartre.
Victor Kravchenko (1905–1966): Soviet defector to the US, author of I Chose Freedom (1946), which occasioned a high-profile lawsuit and controversy in France in 1949.
Ludwig Landgrebe (1902–1991): Austrian phenomenologist who worked as Husserl’s assistant and colleague in Freiburg, and then in the Husserl Archives in Louvain.
Claude Lanzmann (1925–): French film-maker best known for his nine-hour Holocaust documentary Shoah; lover of Simone de Beauvoir, living with her from 1952 to 1959.
Elisabeth Le Coin or Lacoin (1907–1929): Childhood friend of Simone de Beauvoir; was briefly engaged to Merleau-Ponty, but died aged twenty-one, possibly of encephalitis.
Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991): French Marxist theorist interested in the sociology of everyday life; initially critical of existentialism, then more sympathetic.
Michel Leiris (1901–1990): French writer, ethnographer and memoirist; friend of Sartre and Beauvoir. His autobiographical style helped inspire Beauvoir in writing The Second Sex.
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 Page 36