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

  ALSO BY SARAH BAKEWELL

  The Smart

  The English Dane

  How to Live: or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

  Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Bakewell

  First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, 2016

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Drawings at beginning and end by Andreas Gurewich

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.​otherpress.​com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Bakewell, Sarah, author.

  Title: 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.

  Description: New York : Other Press, 2016. |

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015047824 (print) | LCCN 2016000382 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781590514887 (hardback) | ISBN 9781590514894 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Existentialism. |

  Philosophy, Modern — 20th century. | Philosophy — France — History — 20th century. | Philosophers — France — Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Philosophers. | PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Existentialism. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary.

  Classification: LCC B819 .B313 2016 (print) |

  LCC B819 (ebook) | DDC 142/.78 — dc23

  LC record available at http://​lccn.​loc.​gov/​2015047824

  v3.1

  For Jane and Ray

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1 Sir, What a Horror, Existentialism!

  2 To the Things Themselves

  3 The Magician from Messkirch

  4 The They, The Call

  5 To Crunch Flowering Almonds

  6 I Don’t Want to Eat My Manuscripts

  7 Occupation, Liberation

  8 Devastation

  9 Life Studies

  10 The Dancing Philosopher

  11 Croisés comme ça

  12 The Eyes of the Least Favoured

  13 Having Once Tasted Phenomenology

  14 The Imponderable Bloom

  Cast of Characters

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  List of Illustrations

  1

  SIR, WHAT A HORROR, EXISTENTIALISM!

  In which three people drink apricot cocktails, more people stay up late talking about freedom, and even more people change their lives. We also wonder what existentialism is.

  It is sometimes said that existentialism is more of a mood than a philosophy, and that it can be traced back to anguished novelists of the nineteenth century, and beyond that to Blaise Pascal, who was terrified by the silence of infinite spaces, and beyond that to the soul-searching St. Augustine, and beyond that to the Old Testament’s weary Ecclesiastes and to Job, the man who dared to question the game God was playing with him and was intimidated into submission. To anyone, in short, who has ever felt disgruntled, rebellious, or alienated about anything.

  But one can go the other way, and narrow the birth of modern existentialism down to a moment near the turn of 1932–3, when three young philosophers were sitting in the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue du Montparnasse in Paris, catching up on gossip and drinking the house speciality, apricot cocktails.

  The one who later told the story in most detail was Simone de Beauvoir, then around twenty-five years old and given to watching the world closely through her elegant hooded eyes. She was there with her boyfriend, Jean-Paul Sartre, a round-shouldered twenty-seven-year-old with downturned grouper lips, a dented complexion, prominent ears, and eyes that pointed in different directions, for his almost-blind right eye tended to wander outwards in a severe exotropia or misalignment of the gaze. Talking to him could be disorienting for the unwary, but if you forced yourself to stick with the left eye, you would invariably find it watching you with warm intelligence: the eye of a man interested in everything you could tell him.

  Sartre and Beauvoir were certainly interested now, because the third person at the table had news for them. This was Sartre’s debonair old school friend Raymond Aron, a fellow graduate of the École normale supérieure. Like the other two, Aron was in Paris for his winter break. But whereas Sartre and Beauvoir had been teaching in the French provinces — Sartre in Le Havre, Beauvoir in Rouen — Aron had been studying in Berlin. He was now telling his friends about a philosophy he had discovered there with the sinuous name of phenomenology — a word so long yet elegantly balanced that, in French as in English, it can make a line of iambic trimeter all by itself.

  Aron may have been saying something like this: traditional philosophers often started with abstract axioms or theories, but the German phenomenologists went straight for life as they experienced it, moment to moment. They set aside most of what had kept philosophy going since Plato: puzzles about whether things are real or how we can know anything for certain about them. Instead, they pointed out that any philosopher who asks these questions is already thrown into a world filled with things — or, at least, filled with the appearances of things, or ‘phenomena’ (from the Greek word meaning ‘things that appear’). So why not concentrate on the encounter with phenomena and ignore the rest? The old puzzles need not be ruled out forever, but they can be put in brackets, as it were, so that philosophers can deal with more down-to-earth matters.

  The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl, provided a rallying cry, ‘To the things themselves!’ It meant: don’t waste time on the interpretations that accrue upon things, and especially don’t waste time wondering whether the things are real. Just look at this that’s presenting itself to you, whatever this may be, and describe it as precisely as possible. Another phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger, added a different spin. Philosophers all through history have wasted their time on secondary questions, he said, while forgetting to ask the one that matters most, the question of Being. What is it for a thing to be? What does it mean to say that you yourself are? Until you ask this, he maintained, you will never get anywhere. Again, he recommended the phenomenological method: disregard intellectual clutter, pay attention to things and let them reveal themselves to you.

  ‘You see, mon petit camarade,’ said Aron to Sartre — ‘my little comrade’, his pet name for him since their schooldays — ‘if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!’

  Beauvoir wrote that Sartre turned pale on hearing this. She made it sound more dramatic by implying that they had never heard of phenomenology at all. In truth, they had tried to read a little Heidegger. A translation of his lecture ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ had appeared in the same issue of the journal Bif
ur as an early Sartre essay in 1931. But, she wrote, ‘since we could not understand a word of it we failed to see its interest’. Now they saw its interest: it was a way of doing philosophy that reconnected it with normal, lived experience.

  (Illustrations Credit 1.1)

  They were more than ready for this new beginning. At school and university, Sartre, Beauvoir and Aron had all been through the austere French philosophy syllabus, dominated by questions of knowledge and endless reinterpretation of the works of Immanuel Kant. Epistemological questions opened out of one another like the rounds of a turning kaleidoscope, always returning to the same point: I think I know something, but how can I know that I know what I know? It was demanding, yet futile, and all three students — despite excelling in their exams — had felt dissatisfied, Sartre most of all. He hinted after graduation that he was now incubating some new ‘destructive philosophy’, but he was vague about what form it would take, for the simple reason that he had little idea himself. He had barely developed it beyond a general spirit of rebellion. Now it looked as though someone else had got there before him. If Sartre blanched at Aron’s news about phenomenology, it was probably as much from pique as from excitement.

  Either way, he never forgot the moment, and commented in an interview over forty years later, ‘I can tell you that knocked me out.’ Here, at last, was a real philosophy. According to Beauvoir, he rushed to the nearest bookshop and said, in effect, ‘Give me everything you have on phenomenology, now!’ What they produced was a slim volume written by Husserl’s student Emmanuel Levinas, La théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, or The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Books still came with their leaves uncut. Sartre tore the edges of Levinas’ book open without waiting to use a paperknife, and began reading as he walked down the street. He could have been Keats, encountering Chapman’s translation of Homer:

  Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,

  When a new planet swims into his ken;

  Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

  He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men

  Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —

  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

  Sartre did not have eagle eyes and was never good at being silent, but he was certainly full of surmises. Aron, seeing his enthusiasm, suggested that he travel to Berlin in the coming autumn to study at the French Institute there, just as he had done. Sartre could study the German language, read the phenomenologists’ works in the original, and absorb their philosophical energy from near at hand.

  With the Nazis just coming to power, 1933 was not the perfect year to move to Germany. But it was a good time for Sartre to change the direction of his life. He was bored with teaching, bored with what he had learned at university, and bored with not yet having developed into the author of genius he had been expecting to become since childhood. To write what he wanted — novels, essays, everything — he knew he must first have Adventures. He had fantasised about labouring with dockers in Constantinople, meditating with monks on Mount Athos, skulking with pariahs in India, and battling storms with fisherman off the coast of Newfoundland. For now, just not teaching schoolboys in Le Havre was adventure enough.

  He made the arrangements, the summer passed, and he went to Berlin to study. When he returned at the end of his year, he brought back a new blend: the methods of German phenomenology, mixed with ideas from the earlier Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and others, set off with the distinctively French seasoning of his own literary sensibility. He applied phenomenology to people’s lives in a more exciting, personal way than its inventors had ever thought to do, and thus made himself the founding father of a philosophy that became international in impact, but remained Parisian in flavour: modern existentialism.

  The brilliance of Sartre’s invention lay in the fact that he did indeed turn phenomenology into a philosophy of apricot cocktails — and of the waiters who served them. Also a philosophy of expectation, tiredness, apprehensiveness, excitement, a walk up a hill, the passion for a desired lover, the revulsion from an unwanted one, Parisian gardens, the cold autumn sea at Le Havre, the feeling of sitting on overstuffed upholstery, the way a woman’s breasts pool as she lies on her back, the thrill of a boxing match, a film, a jazz song, a glimpse of two strangers meeting under a street lamp. He made philosophy out of vertigo, voyeurism, shame, sadism, revolution, music and sex. Lots of sex.

  Where philosophers before him had written in careful propositions and arguments, Sartre wrote like a novelist — not surprisingly, since he was one. In his novels, short stories and plays as well as in his philosophical treatises, he wrote about the physical sensations of the world and the structures and moods of human life. Above all, he wrote about one big subject: what it meant to be free.

  Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience, and this set humans apart from all other kinds of object. Other things merely sit in place, waiting to be pushed or pulled around. Even non-human animals mostly follow the instincts and behaviours that characterise their species, Sartre believed. But as a human being, I have no predefined nature at all. I create that nature through what I choose to do. Of course I may be influenced by my biology, or by aspects of my culture and personal background, but none of this adds up to a complete blueprint for producing me. I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along.

  Sartre put this principle into a three-word slogan, which for him defined existentialism: ‘Existence precedes essence’. What this formula gains in brevity it loses in comprehensibility. But roughly it means that, having found myself thrown into the world, I go on to create my own definition (or nature, or essence), in a way that never happens with other objects or life forms. You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that, for Sartre, it is the human condition, from the moment of first consciousness to the moment when death wipes it out. I am my own freedom: no more, no less.

  This was an intoxicating idea, and once Sartre had fully refined it — that is, by the last years of the Second World War — it had made him a star. He was feted, courted as a guru, interviewed, photographed, commissioned to write articles and forewords, invited on to committees, broadcast on the radio. People often called on him to pronounce on subjects outside his expertise, yet he was never lost for words. Simone de Beauvoir too wrote fiction, broadcasts, diaries, essays and philosophical treatises — all united by a philosophy that was often close to Sartre’s, though she had developed much of it separately and her emphasis differed. The two of them went on lecture and book tours together, sometimes being set up on throne-like chairs at the centre of discussions, as befitted the king and queen of existentialism.

  Sartre first realised what a celebrity he had become on 28 October 1945, when he gave a public talk for the Club Maintenant (the ‘Now Club’) at the Salle des Centraux in Paris. Both he and the organisers had underestimated the size of the crowd that would show up for a talk by Sartre. The box office was mobbed; many people went in free because they could not get near to the ticket desk. In the jostling, chairs were damaged, and a few audience members passed out in the unseasonable heat. As a photo-caption writer for Time magazine put it, ‘Philosopher Sartre. Women swooned.’

  The talk was a big success. Sartre, who was only about five foot high, must have been barely visible above the crowd, but he delivered a rousing exposition of his ideas, and later turned it into a book, L’existentialisme est un humanisme, translated as Existentialism and Humanism. Both lecture and book culminated in an anecdote which would have sounded very familiar to an audience fresh from the experience of Nazi Occupation and Liberation. The story summed up both the shock value and the appeal of his philosophy.

  One day during the Occupation, Sartre said, an ex-student of his had come to him for advice. The young man’s brother had been
killed in battle in 1940, before the French surrender; then his father had turned collaborator and deserted the family. The young man became his mother’s only companion and support. But what he longed to do was to sneak across the border via Spain to England, to join the Free French forces in exile and fight the Nazis — red-blooded combat at last, and a chance to avenge his brother, defy his father, and help to free his country. The problem was, it would leave his mother alone and in danger at a time when it was hard even to get food on the table. It might also get her into trouble with the Germans. So: should he do the right thing by his mother, with clear benefits to her alone, or should he take a chance on joining the fight and doing right by many?

  Philosophers still get into tangles trying to answer ethical conundrums of this kind. Sartre’s puzzle has something in common with a famous thought experiment, the ‘trolley problem’. This proposes that you see a runaway train or trolley hurtling along a track to which, a little way ahead, five people are tied. If you do nothing, the five people will die — but you notice a lever which you might throw to divert the train to a sidetrack. If you do this, however, it will kill one person, who is tied to that part of the track and who would be safe if not for your action. So do you cause the death of this one person, or do you do nothing and allow five to die? (In a variant, the ‘fat man’ problem, you can only derail the train by throwing a hefty individual off a nearby bridge onto the track. This time you must physically lay hands on the person you are going to kill, which makes it a more visceral and difficult dilemma.) Sartre’s student’s decision could be seen as a ‘trolley problem’ type of decision, but made even more complicated by the fact that he could not be sure either that his going to England would actually help anyone, nor that leaving his mother would seriously harm her.

  Sartre was not concerned with reasoning his way through an ethical calculus in the traditional way of philosophers, however — let alone ‘trolleyologists’, as they have become known. He led his audience to think about it more personally. What is it like to be faced with such a choice? How exactly does a confused young man go about dealing with such a decision about how to act? Who can help him, and how? Sartre approached this last part by looking at the question of who could not help him.