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

  At that time, Husserl was still in deep grief for the son killed in the war — and Heidegger was of a similar age to the Husserl children. (Unlike them, he had avoided the front line because he had a weak heart, and was instead given duties as a mail censor and weather-station assistant.) Having the young Heidegger around had an extraordinary effect on Husserl. ‘O your youth — what a joy it is to me’, he wrote. He became uncharacter​istically gushy, adding three postscripts to one letter and then scolding himself for sounding like an old chatterbox. Husserl later looked back and marvelled at how infatuated he had let himself become, but it’s not hard to see why it happened. At his sixty-first birthday party in 1920, Malvine Husserl jokingly called Heidegger the ‘phenomenological child’. Heidegger cheerfully played up to the role of adoptee, sometimes beginning his letters ‘Dear fatherly friend’. He once wrote a thank-you letter for the Husserls’ hospitality by saying, ‘I truly had the feeling of being accepted as a son.’

  In 1924, Husserl helped Heidegger to get a paid job at the University of Marburg, not too far away. He stayed there for four years. In 1928, aged thirty-nine, he returned to Freiburg to take over the chair left vacant when Husserl retired — again with Husserl’s helpful support. It was a relief to be back: Heidegger was never happy in Marburg, which he called a ‘foggy hole’, but it did give his career its first big push, and while there he also had an intoxicating affair with his student Hannah Arendt.

  During the Marburg years, Elfride Heidegger used an inheritance to buy a plot of land just outside the Black Forest village of Todtnauberg, twenty-nine kilometres from Freiburg, overlooking the grand horseshoe sweep of village and valley. She designed a wood-shingled hut to be built on the site, wedged into the hillside. It was a gift for her husband: the family often went together, but Heidegger spent much time working there alone. The landscape, criss-crossed by paths to help him think, was even finer than that of his childhood. Then as now, it was frequented by skiers, sledders and hikers, but in evenings or out of season it was silent and tranquil, with the tall trees looking down like dignified grown-ups on the humans playing between them. When alone there, Heidegger would ski, walk, light a fire, cook simple meals, talk to the peasant neighbours, and settle for long hours at his desk, where — as he wrote to Arendt in 1925 — his writing took on the calm rhythm of a man chopping wood in a forest.

  (Illustrations Credit 3.4)

  Increasingly, Heidegger imported the peasant image into his town job too. He started wearing a specially tailored version of traditional Black Forest dress: a brown farmer’s jacket, with broad lapels and a high collar, set off by knee-length breeches. His students called it his ‘existential’ or ‘one’s ownmost’ look, the latter a reference to one of his favourite phrases. They found him funny, but he did not share the joke because his sense of humour was somewhere between peculiar and non-existent. It didn’t matter: his clothes, his rustic Swabian accent and his seriousness only heightened his mystique. His student Karl Löwith described how Heidegger’s ‘impenetrable’ quality gave him a mesmerising hold over the class; you never knew where you were with him, so you hung on every word. Hans Jonas, who studied with both Husserl and Heidegger, remarked in a later radio interview that Heidegger was by far the more exciting of the two. Asked why, he replied that it was largely ‘because he was much more difficult to understand’.

  According to Gadamer, Heidegger’s trademark style was to raise up a ‘breathtaking swirl of questions’ which would billow forth until, finally, he would roll them up into ‘deep dark clouds of sentences from which the lightning flashed’, leaving the students stunned. There was something occult about this, so the students created another nickname for him: the ‘little magician from Messkirch’. Even amid the clouds and lightning, however, he usually focused his lectures on minutely close readings of the classical philosophers, demanding extreme concentration on the text. According to Hannah Arendt’s memories of studying with him, Heidegger taught them to think, and thinking meant ‘digging’. He worked his way down to the roots of things, she wrote, but rather than hauling them into the light he left them embedded, merely opening up exploratory routes around them — just as his beloved paths wound their way through the forest. Years later, and with a less sympathetic attitude, Daniel Dennett and Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen’s satirical Philosophical Lexicon would define a ‘heidegger’ as ‘a ponderous device for boring through thick layers of substance’, as in, ‘It’s buried so deep we’ll have to use a heidegger.’

  Georg Picht, who attended Heidegger’s courses as a student of eighteen, recalled the force of his thinking as something almost palpable. It could be felt as Heidegger entered the room, and he also brought with him an air of danger. His lectures were a form of theatre, ‘masterfully staged’. Heidegger urged his students to think, but not necessarily to answer back. ‘He thought that saying the first unthought-out thing that came to mind, which is called “discussion” today, was empty chitchat.’ He liked students to be respectful, but never sycophantic. ‘When a student once read out the minutes, peppered with Heidegger’s own phraseology, he interrupted her: “We do not Heideggerize here! Let’s move on to the matter in hand.” ’

  Picht suspected that some of this Heideggerian rudeness was a defensive reaction: he felt threatened, both by others and from within himself. ‘The history of Being could abruptly make its way into the personal, and the personal into what was to be thought.’ Once, Picht felt he had a terrifying glimpse of what it might be like to be Heidegger: ‘How can Heidegger the person be described? He lived in a thundery landscape. As we were taking a walk in Hinterzarten during a severe storm, a tree was uprooted ten meters in front of us. That touched me, as if I could then visualize what was going on inside him.’

  Even as they made their nervous jests, the students around Heidegger knew they were privileged to be able to watch a great philosophy being developed piece by piece. All through the mid-1920s, as he taught courses on Plato, Aristotle or Kant, he would twist each text into some original and unusual interpretation, until the students felt that whole edifices built by previous philosophers might come crashing down in slabs about their heads. As Hannah Arendt summed it up: ‘Thinking has come to life again; the cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak … There exists a teacher; one can perhaps learn to think.’

  Of all the exciting moments they experienced, few could have rivalled one that occurred early in 1927. His student Hermann Mörchen remembered how Heidegger arrived at one of their seminars, and ‘wordlessly, expectantly, like a child showing off his favourite toy, produced a galley-proof sheet straight from the printer’. It was the title page of his masterpiece, Being and Time — with that great opening call to amazement, followed by pages of strange text that could not be mistaken for anything written by any other philosopher, old or new.

  So what is the being that Heidegger wants us to marvel at in Being and Time, and what are the beings that have it?

  Heidegger’s word Sein (being) cannot be easily defined, because what it refers to is not like other categories or qualities. It certainly is not an object of any kind. Nor is it an ordinary shared feature of objects. You can teach someone what a ‘building’ is by pointing to a lot of different structures from grass huts to skyscrapers; it may take a while but eventually they will get it. But you could go on forever pointing out huts, meals, animals, forest paths, church portals, festive atmospheres, and looming thunderclouds, saying each time, ‘Look: being!’, and your interlocutor is likely to become more and more puzzled.

  Heidegger sums this up by saying that Being is not itself a being. That is, it is not a defined or delineated entity of any kind. He distinguishes between the German word Seiende, which can refer to any individual entity, such as a mouse or a church door, and Sein, which means the Being that such particular beings have. (In English, one way of signalling the distinction is by using the capital ‘B’ for the latter.) He calls it the ‘ontological difference’ �
� from ‘ontology’, the study of what is. It is not an easy distinction to keep clear in one’s mind, but the ontological difference between Being and beings is extremely important to Heidegger. If we get confused between the two, we fall into errors — for example, settling down to study some science of particular entities, such as psychology or even cosmology, while thinking that we are studying Being itself.

  Unlike beings, Being is hard to concentrate on and it is easy to forget to think about it. But one particular entity has a more noticeable Being than others, and that is myself, because, unlike clouds and portals, I am the entity who wonders about its Being. It even turns out that I have a vague, preliminary, non-philosophical understanding of Being already — otherwise I would not have thought of asking about it. This makes me the best starting point for ontological inquiry. I am both the being whose Being is up for question and the being who sort of already knows the answer.

  I myself, then, will be the path. But Heidegger re-emphasises that this does not mean I should sign up for courses in human sciences such as biology, anthropology, psychology or sociology. These merely ‘ontical’ inquiries have nothing to contribute to an ontological investigation. Like the speculative debris cleared away by Husserl’s epoché, they are likely only to get in the way by clogging up our inquiry with irrelevant ideas. If I want to know what a human being is, it’s no good wiring one up to a EEG machine to measure brain waves, or analysing examples of behaviour. Just as Karl Jaspers had turned from psychology to phenomenology in order to practise ‘a different thinking’, Heidegger felt that the question of Being must be truly philosophical or it is nothing. Moreover, it should not be philosophical in the old-fashioned way, focused narrowly on questions of what we can know. A new new beginning is needed.

  For Heidegger, this means not only starting with Being but ensuring constant vigilance and care in thinking. He generously helps us to achieve this by using a frustrating kind of language.

  As his readers soon notice, Heidegger tends to reject familiar philosophical terms in favour of new ones which he coins himself. He leaves the German Sein or Being more or less as it is, but when it comes to talking about the questioner for whom its Being is in question (i.e. me, a human), he strenuously avoids talk of humanity, man, mind, soul or consciousness, because of the scientific, religious or metaphysical assumptions such words conceal. Instead, he speaks of ‘Dasein’, a word normally meaning ‘existence’ in a general way, and compounded of da (there) and sein (to be). Thus, it means ‘there-being’, or ‘being-there’.

  The effect is at once disconcerting and intriguing. Reading Heidegger, and feeling (as one often does) that you recognise an experience he is describing, you want to say, ‘Yes, that’s me!’ But the word itself deflects you from this interpretation; it forces you to keep questioning. Just getting into the habit of saying Dasein takes you halfway into Heidegger’s world. It is so important a term that English translators tend to leave it in the original German; an early partial French translation by Henry Corbin rendered it as ‘réalité humaine’, which created another layer of confusion.

  Why, one often wails, can’t Heidegger speak plainly? His tangled and unnatural terms invite parody — as in Günter Grass’ 1963 novel Dog Years, where a character falls under the influence of an unnamed philosopher and goes around calling underdone potatoes ‘spuds forgetful of Being’, and clearing rodents out of the kitchen’s water pipes while wondering, ‘Why rats and not other essents? Why anything at all rather than nothing?’ One might think that, if Heidegger had anything worth saying, he could have communicated it in ordinary language.

  The fact is that he does not want to be ordinary, and he may not even want to communicate in the usual sense. He wants to make the familiar obscure, and to vex us. George Steiner thought that Heidegger’s purpose was less to be understood than to be experienced through a ‘felt strangeness’. It is something like the ‘alienation’ or estrangement effect used by Bertholt Brecht in his theatre, which is designed to block you from becoming too caught up in the story and falling for the delusion of familiarity. Heidegger’s language keeps you on edge. It is dynamic, obtrusive, sometimes ridiculous and often forceful; on a page of Heidegger, things are typically presented as surging or thrusting, as being thrown forward, lit up or broken open. Heidegger admitted that his way of writing produced some ‘awkwardness’, but he thought that a small price to pay for overturning the history of philosophy and bringing us back to Being.

  For non-German readers, it should be added, some of the awkwardness is an artefact of translation. German welcomes monumental word constructions, but in English they tend to come out as long hyphenated lines, trundling along like mismatched railway carriages. The Question of Being, for example, is an elegant Seinsfrage in German. But even German cannot comfortably accommodate Sich-vorweg-schon-sein-in-(der-Welt) als Sein-bei (innerweltlich begegnendem Seienden), or ‘ahead-of-itself-already-being-in-(the-world) as being-together-with (beings encountered within the world)’.

  One way of thinking about Heidegger is as a literary innovator, and perhaps even as a kind of modernist novelist. I was well into working on this book when, via Janet Malcolm’s study Two Lives, I came across excerpts from Gertrude Stein’s experimental novel The Making of Americans. Stein sets out as if to relate a standard family saga, but abandons conventional ways of writing in order to say things like this about her characters:

  I am always feeling each kind of them as a substance darker, lighter, thinner, thicker, muddier, clearer, smoother, lumpier, granularer, mixeder, simpler … and always I am feeling in each one of them their kind of stuff as much in them, as little in them, as all of a piece in them, as lumps in them held together sometimes by parts of the same sometimes by other kinds of stuff in them … [S]ome … are made of little lumps of one kind of being held together or separated from each other, as one comes to feel it in them, the lumps in them from each other by other kind of being in them, sometimes by other kind of being in them that is almost the complete opposite of the lumps in them, some because, the lumps are melting always in to the surrounding being that keeps the lumps from touching, in some because the kind of being in them is spread out so thin in them, that everything that they have learned, that they like to be in living, all reaction to everything interesting, in them, has really nothing to do in them with the thin spread being in them … Some are always whole ones though the being in them is all a mushy mass with a skin to hold them in and so make one.

  The ‘being’ in them, she explains, ‘can be slimy, gelatinous, gluey, white opaquy kind of thing and it can be white and vibrant and clear and heated and this is all not very clear to me’.

  Heidegger would have disliked Stein’s imprecision, but he might have appreciated the sight of a writer stretching language to its utmost to avoid the dulling effect of ordinary perceptions. He might also have recognised that her distinction between characters and the ‘being’ in them foreshadows his own notion of the ontological difference.

  Thus, it can help to think of Heidegger as an experimental novelist, or a poet. Yet, even while rejecting the traditional philosophical virtue of clarity, he was adamant that he was a philosopher, and that there was nothing merely literary or playful about his language. His purpose was to overturn human thinking, destroy the history of metaphysics, and start philosophy all over again. A little violence done to language is to be expected, given an overall aim that is so extreme, and so violent.

  The biggest overturning that Being and Time inflicts on old-school philosophy is to approach the question of Dasein and its Being in a way that Husserl had been supposed to do but did not make very evident: through everyday life.

  Heidegger gives us Dasein in its weekday clothes, as it were: not in its Sunday best, but in its ‘everydayness’. Other philosophers have tended to start with a human being in an unusual state, such as sitting alone in a room staring into the embers of a fire and thinking — which was how Descartes began. They then go on to use simple, every
day terms to describe the result. Heidegger does the opposite. He takes Dasein in its most ordinary moments, then talks about it in the most innovative way he can. For Heidegger, Dasein’s everyday Being is right here: it is Being-in-the-world, or In-der-Welt-sein.

  The main feature of Dasein’s everyday Being-in-the-world right here is that it is usually busy doing something. I don’t tend to contemplate things; I pick them up and act on them. If I hold a hammer, it is not normally to ‘stare at the hammer-Thing’, as Heidegger puts it. (He uses the lovely word das Hammerding.) It is to go to work hammering nails.

  Moreover, I do my hammering in service of some purpose, such as building a bookcase for my philosophy tomes. The hammer in my hand summons up a whole network of purposes and contexts. It reveals Dasein’s involvement with things: its ‘concern’. He cites examples: producing something, using something, looking after something, and letting something go, as well as negative involvements such as neglecting something, or leaving it undone. These are what he calls ‘deficient’ forms, but they are still forms of concern. They show that Dasein’s Being in general is one of ‘care’. The distinction between ‘care’ and ‘concern’ (Besorgen and Sorge) is confusing, but both mean Dasein is in the world up to the elbows, and it is busy. We are not far from Kierkegaard and his point that I don’t just exist, but have an interest or an investment in my existence.

  My involvements, Heidegger continues, lead me to deploy ‘useful things’ or ‘equipment’ — items such as the hammer. These have a particular Being which Heidegger calls Zuhandenheit: ‘readiness-to-hand’ or ‘handiness’. While I am hammering, the hammer has that kind of Being for me. If, for some reason, I lay down the hammer and gawp at it as a Hammerding, then it has a different kind: Vorhandenheit or ‘presence-at-hand’.