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

  For Heidegger, the philosophers’ second-biggest mistake (after forgetfulness of Being) has been to talk about everything as though it was present-at-hand. But that is to separate things from the everyday ‘concernful’ way in which we encounter them most of the time. It turns them into objects for contemplation by an unconcerned subject who has nothing to do all day but gaze at stuff. And then we ask why philosophers seem cut off from everyday life!

  By making this error, philosophers allow the whole structure of worldly Being to fall apart, and then have immense difficulty in getting it back together to resemble anything like the daily existence we recognise. Instead, in Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world, everything comes already linked together. If the structure falls to pieces, that is a ‘deficient’ or secondary state. This is why a smoothly integrated world can be revealed by the simplest actions. A pen conjures up a network of ink, paper, desk and lamp, and ultimately also a network of other people for whom or to whom I am writing, each one with his or her own purposes in the world. As Heidegger wrote elsewhere, a table is not just a table: it is a family table, where ‘the boys like to busy themselves’, or perhaps the table where ‘that decision was made with a friend that time, where that work was written that time, where that holiday was celebrated that time’. We are socially as well as equipmentally involved. Thus, for Heidegger, all Being-in-the-world is also a ‘Being-with’ or Mitsein. We cohabit with others in a ‘with-world’, or Mitwelt.

  The old philosophical problem of how we prove the existence of other minds has now vanished. Dasein swims in the with-world long before it wonders about other minds. Others are those ‘from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself — those among whom one is too’. Mitsein remains characteristic even of a Dasein that is shipwrecked on a desert island or trying to get away from everyone by living on the top of a pillar, since those situations are defined mainly by reference to the missing fellow Daseins. The Dasein of a stylite is still a Being-with, but it is (Heidegger loves this word) a ‘deficient’ mode of Being-with.

  Heidegger gives an example that brings everything together. I am out for a walk, and I find a boat by the shore. What Being does the boat have for me? It is unlikely to be ‘just’ an object, a boat-thing which I contemplate from some abstract vantage point. Instead, I encounter the boat as (1) a potentially useful thing, in (2) a world which is a network of such things, and (3) in a situation where the boat is clearly useful for someone else, if not for me. The boat lights up equipment, world and Mitsein all at once. If I want to consider it a mere ‘object’, I can, but this does violence to everyday Being.

  The surprising thing is that philosophy had to wait so long for someone to say these things. American pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey and William James had explored human life as a practical, active affair, but they did not share Heidegger’s grand philosophical vision, and were more inclined to use pragmatism to bring philosophy down to earth rather than to remind it of its greatest tasks and questions. Husserl did share Heidegger’s scale of ambition, but he had relocated everything in his idealist cavern. For Heidegger, that was a fatal mistake: Husserl had bracketed out the wrong thing. He had bracketed out Being, the one thing that is indispensable.

  Heidegger is philosophy’s great reverser. In Being and Time, it is everyday Being rather than the far reaches of cosmology or mathematics that is most ‘ontological’. Practical care and concern are more primordial than reflection. Usefulness comes before contemplation, the ready-to-hand before the present-at-hand, Being-in-the-world and Being-with-others before Being-alone. We do not hover above the great rich tangle of the world, gazing down from on high. We are already in the world and involved in it — we are ‘thrown’ here. And ‘thrownness’ must be our starting point.

  Or, as his biographer Rüdiger Safranski has put it, Heidegger ‘states the obvious in a way that even philosophers can grasp’.

  Edmund Husserl did not fail to notice that, despite the words of dedication and praise, Being and Time was partly directed against him. He read it several times to be sure. After his first perusal he took it to Italy’s Lake Como on holiday in the summer of 1929 and worked through it in detail, making incredulous notes in the margins: ‘But that is absurd’. He made frequent use of ‘?’, ‘!’ and even ‘?!’ But when he complained, Heidegger seemed to think his interpretation of the book as an attack on him was ‘Nonsense!’

  In private, Heidegger was becoming ever more dismissive about Husserlian philosophy. Even while Husserl was writing glowing letters of recommendation to help him get a job, Heidegger was telling other people that he considered his mentor ‘ludicrous’. To Karl Jaspers, whom he had now befriended, Heidegger wrote in 1923, ‘He lives with the mission of being the founder of phenomenology. No one knows what that is.’ (Since Jaspers had long ago admitted that he did not know what phenomenology was, he could hardly help with that.) Their differences were clear by 1927. When Husserl and Heidegger tried to collaborate on an article on phenomenology for the Encyclopaedia Britannica early that year, they had to give up. For one thing, each felt that the other had problems expressing himself clearly. They were not wrong there. A more serious problem was that they now disagreed on almost every point in the definition of phenomenology.

  Husserl took Heidegger’s rebellion to heart. He had imagined it so differently! They had talked of how Heidegger might take over Husserl’s Nachlass — his legacy of unpublished manuscripts — and carry his philosophy into the future. Having helped him to get the Marburg job, Husserl also helped him to take up his own job in Freiburg when he retired — hoping, as he admitted later, that this would bring Heidegger back into the fold. Instead, with Heidegger installed, Freiburg became the City of Two Phenomenologies. Husserl’s version looked less and less exciting, while Heidegger’s was becoming a cult.

  (Illustrations Credit 3.5)

  Heidegger gave a long speech at Husserl’s seventieth birthday celebrations on 8 April 1929, with slightly insulting subtexts in the guise of a tribute, stressing how Husserl’s philosophy ought to lend itself to rethinking and changes of direction. In his speech of thanks, Husserl said that it was true that he had set out to accomplish a task, but that most of it was not completed. Another subtext there: he was on the right path, despite what Heidegger thought, and everyone should join him to get the job done.

  Heidegger’s behaviour was ignoble, but Husserl was expecting too much. His desire to mould Heidegger into a mini-Husserl for the next generation must have been suffocating. There was no reason to think that Heidegger should follow him without question; that is never how philosophy develops. In fact, the more revolutionary a philosophy is, the more it is likely to be revolted against, precisely because it sets dramatic challenges.

  But Husserl did not see himself as some sort of old guard, from whom the new generation must naturally diverge and grow. On the contrary, he thought that he was becoming ever more radical while the youngsters were not keeping up. He saw himself as ‘an appointed leader without followers, that is, without collaborators in the radical new spirit of transcendental phenomenology’.

  For him, Heidegger’s philosophical error was to remain on the level of the ‘natural attitude’ or ‘common sense’. This seems an odd accusation: what could be wrong with that? But Husserl meant that Heidegger had not cast off the accumulated assumptions about the world that should have been set aside in the epoché. Obsessed with Being, he had forgotten to do a basic step in phenomenology.

  For Heidegger, it was Husserl who was being forgetful. His turn inwards into idealism meant that he was still prioritising the abstract contemplative mind rather than dynamic Being-in-the-world. From the start of Being and Time, he makes it clear that he wants no theoretical investigation, no mere list of definitions and proofs, but a concrete investigation, starting from whatever Dasein is doing at the moment.

  That’s mere ‘anthropology’, retorted Husserl in a lecture of 1931. Starting with concrete worldly Dasein
means giving up on the high aspirations of philosophy and its search for certainty. Husserl could not understand why Heidegger did not seem to get it — but Heidegger was less and less interested in what Husserl thought. He was now the more magnetic figure, drawing Husserl’s protégés away.

  Heidegger’s Being and Time initially conjures up a seamless world of happy hammerers, communing with their fellows in their shared Mitsein while having a vague proto-understanding of Being which they never pause to think about in detail. If that were all there was to Heidegger, he probably would have inspired less passion — and if that were all there was to human life, we would hardly be interested in philosophy at all. Who would need philosophers in such a zipless world? Fortunately for the profession, zips get stuck; things break. And Heidegger analyses what happens next.

  So I am hammering the cupboard; I am barely aware of the hammer at all, only of the nail sinking home and my general project. If I am typing a paragraph about Heidegger on the computer, I pay no attention to fingers, keyboard or screen; my concern streams through them to whatever it is I am trying to achieve. But then something goes wrong. The nail bends, or perhaps the whole hammerhead flies off the shaft. Or the computer freezes on me.

  For a moment, I stand staring stupidly at the broken hammer, or, instead of looking through the computer, I stare angrily at the contraption and jab at its keys. What had been ready-to-hand flips into being present-at-hand: an inert object to be glared at. Heidegger sums up this altered state with the catchy phrase das Nur-noch-vorhandensein eines Zuhandenen — ‘the Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more of something ready-to-hand’.

  Examples of this crop up frequently in everyday life. In Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine, a riveting phenomenological account of one man’s lunch break, the protagonist pulls on a shoelace to tie it, but the lace snaps. Dumbly staring at the fragment in his hand, he flashes on similar incidents: the moment when one pulls on a thread to open a Band-Aid and the thread comes loose instead of tearing the paper, or the moment when one tries to use a stapler but, instead of biting through and closing the staple tightly on the other side, it ‘slumps toothlessly’, revealing itself as empty. (I read the book twenty years ago, and for some reason this little description stuck so fast that I rarely find a stapler out of staples without a murmur of ‘It’s slumped toothlessly’ going through my mind.)

  When such things happen, Heidegger says, they reveal ‘the obstinacy of that with which we must concern ourselves’. This revelation lights up the project in a different way, together with the full context of my concern with it. No longer is the world a smoothly humming machine. It is a mass of stubborn things refusing to cooperate, and here I am in the middle of it, flummoxed and disoriented — which is just the state of mind Heidegger seeks to induce in us when we read his prose.

  A small incident like a stapler running out of staples doesn’t normally cause the collapse of our entire universe. After a skipped beat, the connections knit together again, and we carry on. But sometimes a more comprehensive failure occurs — and it is possible that an empty stapler could be the catalyst for questioning my entire career and path in life.

  A collapse of meanings on that scale was described by Austrian playwright and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal in a 1902 story translated as ‘The Letter of Lord Chandos’. Masquerading as a genuine letter written in 1603 by an English aristocrat, it evokes Hofmannsthal’s own experiences during a breakdown in which the whole structure of things and people around him fell to bits. Everyday items suddenly look to Chandos like things seen too closely through a magnifying glass, impossible to identify. He hears people gossiping about local characters and friends, but can make no coherent narrative out of what they are saying. Unable to work or look after his estate, Chandos finds himself staring for hours at a moss-covered stone, or a dog lying in the sun, or a harrow left abandoned in a field. The connections have gone. No wonder we call an experience like this a breakdown. It may sound familiar to anyone who has suffered depression, and it can also occur in various neurological disorders. For Heidegger, it would be an extreme case of the collapse of everyday Being-in-the-world, a collapse that makes everything obtrusive, disarticulated, and impossible to negotiate with our usual blithe disregard.

  Heidegger gives us a different way of understanding why, sometimes, it can be so disproportionately disheartening to have a nail bend under the hammer, and to feel everything turn against you. If you throw an apple core towards the bin and it misses, to borrow an example from the Philip Larkin poem ‘As Bad as a Mile’, it is not merely annoying because you have to get up and pick it off the floor. It can make everything feel awkward, questionable and uncomfortable. But it is in questions and discomfort that philosophy begins.

  This was the sort of powerful, personal stuff that people craved from philosophy in troubled times: it was one reason why Heidegger acquired such influence. His starting point was reality in its everyday clothes, yet he also spoke in Kierkegaardian tones about the strangest experiences in life, the moments when it all goes horribly wrong — and even the moments when we confront the greatest wrongness of all, which is the prospect of death. There can’t be many people who haven’t experienced a taste of such moments in their lives, even in peaceful, stable times. In the Germany of the 1920s, with everything thrown into chaos and resentment after the First World War, almost everyone could have recognised something in Heidegger’s vision.

  By 1929, the Heidegger cult had spread beyond Freiburg and Marburg. That spring, he spoke at a conference in the Alpine resort of Davos — the setting for Thomas Mann’s bestselling 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, which Heidegger had read, and which included a battle of ideas between the old-fashioned, rationalist Italian critic Luigi Settembrini and the mystical ex-Jesuit Leo Naphta. It is tempting to see parallels in the encounter that now occurred between the conference’s two stars, as Heidegger was set against a great humanist scholar of Kantian philosophy and the Enlightenment: Ernst Cassirer.

  Cassirer was Jewish, tall, calm and elegant, with his white hair swept up into a striking but antiquated bouffant style verging on a minor beehive. Heidegger was short, evasive and compelling, with a pinched moustache and hair combed severely flat. Their debates centred on the philosophy of Kant, for their interpretations of that philosopher differed dramatically. Cassirer saw Kant as the last great representative of the Enlightenment values of reason, knowledge and freedom. Heidegger, who had recently published Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, believed that Kant had dismantled those values by showing that we can have no access to reality or true knowledge of any kind. He also argued that Kant’s main interest was not primarily in the question of knowledge at all but in ontology: the question of Being.

  Although no clear winner emerged from the debate, it seemed natural to many observers to cast Cassirer as a throwback to a civilised yet outmoded past, with Heidegger as the prophet of a dangerous yet thrilling future. One person who interpreted the debate that way was Emmanuel Levinas, who had now moved on from his days as Husserl’s student and was attending the conference as a fervent supporter of Heidegger. As he said to an interviewer later, it was like seeing one world end and another begin.

  Toni Cassirer, Ernst’s wife, found Heidegger vulgar. She remembered his arrival on the first evening: he literally turned heads, coming in after the other delegates had assembled to listen to an after-dinner speech. The door opened — rather as happens in The Magic Mountain, where the slinky love interest Clavdia Chauchat habitually enters the dining room late and with a careless bang of the door. Toni Cassirer looked round, and saw a beady-eyed little man. He looked to her like one of the Italian workmen who were numerous in German lands in those years, except that he was wearing his Black Forest garb. He seemed ‘as awkward as a peasant who had stumbled into a royal court’.

  She took an even dimmer view of his entourage later, after she walked in on a performance put on by the students, satirically reenacting the debate. Levinas played Ernst Cassi
rer, dusting his hair with white talc and twirling it into a high quiff like an ice cream cone. Toni Cassirer did not find him funny. Years later, Levinas wished he had apologised to her for his irreverence; by then he had abandoned his own adulation of Heidegger, as well as having matured in general.

  A few months after the Davos meeting, on 24 July 1929, Heidegger followed it up with a brilliant inaugural lecture in Freiburg, under the title ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ — the text Sartre and Beauvoir would see in translation in 1931 without understanding it. This time Husserl himself was among the huge crowd who gathered to hear the university’s new professor perform. Heidegger did not disappoint. ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ was a crowd-pleaser, containing the most dramatic ideas from Being and Time combined with some new ones. It even starts with what sounds like a deadpan joke, a surprise coming from Heidegger:

  ‘What is metaphysics?’ The question awakens expectations of a discussion about metaphysics. This we will forego.

  The rest of the lecture compares nothingness and Being, and contains a long discussion of ‘moods’ — another of Heidegger’s key ideas. Dasein’s moods can range from elation to boredom, or perhaps the diffuse sense of oppression and unease described by Kierkegaard as Angst — dread, or anxiety. Each mood reveals the world in a different light. In anxiety, the world shows itself to me as something ‘uncanny’ — the German word unheimlich here literally meaning ‘not homely’. It reveals ‘the total strangeness of beings’. In this unhomely, unfamiliar moment, the mood of anxiety opens up the first questioning movement of philosophy — particularly that big question, which forms the climax of Heidegger’s lecture: ‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?’

  Heidegger’s performance was terrifying and darkly thrilling. It was also puzzling in places, which added to its effect. As he came to an end, at least one listener, Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, felt on the verge of falling to the ground in an ecstatic faint. ‘The things of the world lay open and manifest in an almost aching brilliance’, Petzet wrote. ‘For a brief moment I felt as if I had had a glimpse into the ground and foundation of the world.’