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

  (Illustrations Credit 4.1)

  For all of this, he relied on his wife Gertrud, to whom he was very close. Like many philosophers’ wives, she took charge of his schedule and helped him with paperwork, but she also collaborated on his work. Jaspers developed his ideas through his discussions with her, almost in the way that Sartre later worked with Beauvoir, with the major difference that Beauvoir had her own philosophical career. Heidegger was amazed to learn of Jaspers’ work with Gertrud; he would never have thought of involving Elfride so closely in his intellectual life. For him, philosophy was for doing alone in the Todtnauberg hut — or, at best, hammering out with chosen disciples and students.

  Jaspers, far more than Heidegger, believed in the value of of shared thinking. Despite his shortness of breath, he loved talking with people. Hannah Arendt, a lifelong friend, later looked back on their conversations in the 1920s and 1930s: ‘I think about your study … with the chair at the desk and the armchair across from it where you tied your legs in marvellous knots and then untied them again.’ Heidelberg was renowned for its scholarly salons and social circles: the most famous revolved around the sociologist Max Weber, but Jaspers became the centre of another. He had an almost religious reverence for the ideal of the university as a focus for cultural activity, which made him scrupulous even with dull administrative tasks. His communicative ideal fed into a whole theory of history: he traced all civilisation to an ‘Axial Period’ in the fifth century BC, during which philosophy and culture exploded simultaneously in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, as though a great bubble of minds had erupted from the earth’s surface. ‘True philosophy needs communion to come into existence,’ he wrote, and added, ‘Uncommunicativeness in a philosopher is virtually a criterion of the untruth of his thinking.’

  Jaspers’ enthusiasm for philosophical talk drove him, after meeting Heidegger at Husserl’s party, to invite him to Heidelberg for an initial bout of ‘symphilosophising’ in 1920, and then another eight-day stay in 1922. On this second occasion, Gertrud was away, so the two men played like children on a week-long philosophical sleepover. Jaspers became fired up by the idea of publishing a journal together — two editors, two contributors — to be called The Philosophy of the Age. It would be filled with short, clear, decisive essays on their times. This never happened, but their plans brought them closer as friends. Having begun by addressing each other as ‘Professor’ in letters, then as ‘Herr Heidegger’ and ‘Herr Jaspers’, they were hailing each other by late 1923 as ‘Dear Jaspers’ — ‘Dear Heidegger’. Heidegger was more subdued; when they were together, he sometimes sank into silences, which made Jaspers even more inclined to talk, to fill the gap. Yet Heidegger also wrote to tell Jaspers that these first steps in friendship had given him an ‘uncanny’ feeling — high Heideggerian words of praise.

  He and Jaspers both felt that philosophy needed a revolution, but they disagreed on what form it should take. They also disagreed about style. Heidegger thought Jaspers’ mania for lists and columns in his work was boring, while Jaspers read drafts of Being and Time and found them opaque. There were other early signs of disharmony. Once, Jaspers was told that Heidegger had spoken badly of him behind his back, so he confronted him. Heidegger denied it, and added in a shocked tone, ‘I have never experienced anything like this before.’ That left Jaspers puzzled too. The challenge ended with both of them disoriented and affronted, but Jaspers let the matter go.

  The confusion increased. With the rise of the Nazis, something ‘estranging’ entered their relationship, as Jaspers put it in private notes about Heidegger written years later. Jaspers had reason to feel estranged from his friend: he was not Jewish himself, but Gertrud was. Like many others, the couple tended to be dismissive about the Nazi threat at first. They weighed the usual considerations: surely these barbarians could not stay in power long? Even for an eminent professor, it would be hard to flee the country and start again elsewhere, separated from everything that had given context to his life. Besides, leaving always meant paying punitive ‘Reich Flight’ taxes, and obtaining visas. From 1933 on, Karl and Gertrud regularly considered the possibility of escaping, but did not do it.

  An awkward moment occurred when Heidegger visited Jaspers in March 1933, just before beginning the rectorship. The subject of National Socialism came up, and Heidegger said, ‘One must get in step.’ Jaspers was too shocked to speak, and did not push him, not wanting to hear what more he might say. That June, Heidegger stayed with Jaspers again while in Heidelberg to give a rerun of his speech on the new regime and universities. In the audience, Jaspers was struck by the ‘thunderous applause’ with which students greeted Heidegger’s words. As for himself, he wrote, ‘I sat in front at the periphery with my legs stretched out before me, my hands in my pockets, and did not budge.’ The long legs that made such an impression on Arendt now provided their own commentary on Heidegger’s speech.

  Afterwards, at his home, Jaspers began to remark to Heidegger, ‘It is just like 1914 …’, intending to go on to say, ‘once again this deceitful mass intoxication’. But Heidegger agreed so enthusiastically to the first few words that Jaspers left the sentence in mid-air. Over dinner a little later, the topic of Hitler and his lack of education came up, and this time Heidegger said, bizarrely, ‘Education is completely irrelevant, just look at his wonderful hands!’ Coming from anyone else, this would sound purely eccentric. From Heidegger, with his emphasis on handiwork and the wielding of tools, it was significant. He seemed to be attracted less by Nazi ideology than by the idea of Hitler dextrously and firmly moulding the country into a new form.

  Gertrud Jaspers had been dreading Heidegger’s visit, but she tried to welcome him for her husband’s sake. Before his arrival, she wrote to her parents: ‘Now I must say to myself: you are a lady from the Orient, they know how to cultivate hospitality! And I must simply be kind and keep quiet!’ She did just that, but Heidegger was rude to her on leaving: ‘he hardly said good-bye at all’, wrote Jaspers to Arendt later. For this, above all, Jaspers could not forgive him. Years later, Heidegger would claim he had done it because he was ‘ashamed’, meaning presumably that he was embarrassed about his Nazi episode, but Jaspers was sceptical about this explanation. Their correspondence dried up for a long time, and Heidegger never came to the Jaspers house again.

  Jaspers later thought he might have erred in treating Heidegger too delicately. When Heidegger sent him a printed version of his rectorial address in 1933, Jaspers’ reply was supremely diplomatic: ‘It was nice to see it in its authentic version after reading about it in the paper.’ Should he have been more critical, he wondered later? Perhaps he had failed ‘this intoxicated and enthused Heidegger’. Heidegger perhaps needed what a later generation would call an ‘intervention’, to save him from himself. It was, Jaspers implied, a failure of engagement on his own part — and he linked this to a more general failure of tolerant, educated Germans to face up to the challenge of the time.

  Of course, it is relatively easy for later generations (or for the same people later in life) to see what challenges a particular ‘border situation’ presented; no such retrospective view was available to those living through it. A natural human tendency is to try to continue with as ordinary and civilised a life as possible, for as long as one can. Bruno Bettelheim later observed that, under Nazism, only a few people realised at once that life could not continue unaltered: these were the ones who got away quickly. Bettelheim himself was not among them. Caught in Austria when Hitler annexed it, he was sent first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald, but was then released in a mass amnesty to celebrate Hitler’s birthday in 1939 — an extraordinary reprieve, after which he left at once for America.

  The importance of remaining open to events and seeing instantly when a decision is required was a theme also explored that year by another existentialist philosopher, this time a French one: Gabriel Marcel. A Christian thinker who made his name as a playwright, and who communicated his ideas mainly through essays or throu
gh get-togethers with students and friends in his Paris flat, Marcel developed a strongly theological branch of existentialism. His faith distanced him from both Sartre and Heidegger, but he shared a sense of how history makes demands on individuals.

  In his essay ‘On the Ontological Mystery’, written in 1932 and published in the fateful year of 1933, Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes. Instead, he urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining ‘available’ to situations as they arise. Similar ideas of disponibilité or availability had been explored by other writers, notably André Gide, but Marcel made it his central existential imperative. He was aware of how rare and difficult it was. Most people fall into what he calls ‘crispation’: a tensed, encrusted shape in life — ‘as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him’.

  Marcel’s ‘shell’ recalls Husserl’s notion of the accumulated and inflexible preconceptions that one should set aside in the epoché, so as to open up access to the ‘things themselves’. In both cases, what is rigid is cleared away, and the trembling freshness of what is underneath bcomes the object of the philosopher’s attention. For Marcel, learning to stay open to reality in this way is the philosopher’s prime job. Everyone can do it, but the philosopher is the one who is called on above all to stay awake, so as to be the first to sound the alarm if something seems wrong.

  Heidegger believed in vigilance too: he was determined to shock people out of their forgetfulness. But for him, vigilance did not mean calling attention to Nazi violence, to the intrusion of state surveillance, or to the physical threats to his fellow humans. It meant being decisive and resolute in carrying through the demands history was making upon Germany, with its distinctive Being and destiny. It meant getting in step with the chosen hero.

  For Heidegger in the early 1930s, it really was all about the Germans.

  This aspect of his work is easy for us to forget; we are used to reading philosophy as offering a universal message for all times and places — or at least as aiming to do so. But Heidegger disliked the notion of universal truths or universal humanity, which he considered a fantasy. For him, Dasein is not defined by shared faculties of reason and understanding, as the Enlightenment philosophers thought. Still less is it defined by any kind of transcendent eternal soul, as in religious tradition. We do not exist on a higher, eternal plane at all. Dasein’s Being is local: it has a historical situation, and is constituted in time and place.

  At the very beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger promises that the book will take us to a grand finale in which he will make this ultimate point: that the meaning of Dasein’s Being is Time. He never did this because he never finished the book: what we have is just the first part. But he showed clearly which way he was planning to go. If we are temporal beings by our very nature, then authentic existence means accepting, first, that we are finite and mortal. We will die: this all-important realisation is what Heidegger calls authentic ‘Being-towards-Death’, and it is fundamental to his philosophy.

  Second, it also means understanding that we are historical beings, and grasping the demands our particular historical situation is making on us. In what Heidegger calls ‘anticipatory resoluteness’, Dasein discovers ‘that its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up’. At that moment, through Being-towards-death and resoluteness in facing up to one’s time, one is freed from the they-self and attains one’s true, authentic self.

  These are the pages of Being and Time in which Heidegger sounds most fascistic. There can be little doubt that he was thinking in political terms when he wrote his passages on death and resoluteness. Yet, even here, Heidegger’s basic concepts could have led to quite a different intepretation. Just as his ideas of the ‘they’ and authenticity could have led him to a case for resisting totalitarian brainwashing, so his ideas of resoluteness and the acceptance of mortality could have formed a framework for courageous resistance to the regime and its intimidation techniques. It could have been a manifesto for anti-totalitarian heroism. Instead, it is apparent that Heidegger intended a mass of highly charged political meanings to be visible in this text — though perhaps only to those who were already inclined to be sympathetic.

  Hans Jonas, one of Heidegger’s former students, remembered how such coded terms were present even in earlier lectures, although Jonas himself was oblivious to them at the time. He did not see them because he was not attuned that way, but in retrospect — he told an interviewer — he recognised the ‘Blood-and-Soil’ language of the lectures, and the ‘(how should I say it?) primitive nationalism’ in Heidegger’s talk of resoluteness and history, together with his occasional anti-French political asides and his emphasis on Black Forest rusticism. At the time, it seemed a mere eccentricity. Only after Jonas was told of Heidegger’s rectorial address in 1933 did he re-evaluate his whole memory of the long-ago seminars he had taken. ‘That was when I realised, for the first time, certain traits in Heidegger’s thinking and I hit myself on the forehead and said: “Yes, I missed something there before.” ’

  By Christmas of 1933, however, Heidegger was feeling less at home in the role of public National Socialist philosopher than he had expected to be. According to his own account, he spent that winter break coming to a decision: he would resign the rectorship at the end of the next semester. He did just that, dating his letter of resignation 14 April 1934. After this, he later claimed, he had nothing more to do with Nazism. He even ventured a small rebellion by putting the original dedication to Husserl back into the 1935 edition of Being and Time. The new stance came at a significant cost to himself, he asserted, because he was harassed and spied on by party functionaries from then until the end of the war.

  Heidegger hated talking about this period, and none of his own explanations of what happened in 1933 were ever satisfactory. In 1945, he wrote just one short piece dealing with the matter, entitled ‘The Rectorate 1933/34: facts and thoughts’. There he admitted that he briefly saw the party as offering ‘the possibility of an inner self-collection and of a renewal of the people, and a path toward the discovery of its historical-Western purpose’. But then, he said, he saw his mistake and extricated himself. The message of the essay can be summed up as ‘oops, I didn’t mean to be a Nazi’. It suited Heidegger to make himself sound this naive. When, also in 1945, the French writer Frédéric de Towarnicki weakened Heidegger’s defences with a bottle of good wine before asking him ‘why?’, Heidegger responded by leaning forward and saying, in the tone of someone solemnly confiding a secret, ‘Dummheit.’ He repeated the word again, with emphasis. ‘Dummheit.’ Stupidity. The implication was that his worst failing was unworldliness. He even convinced the ever-generous Jaspers, who after the war referred to the Heidegger of 1933 as a ‘dreaming boy’ — a child caught up in events too difficult for him to understand.

  The truth is rather different. For one thing, Heidegger clearly retained Nazi sympathies long after his resignation. In August 1934, he submitted plans to the Ministry for Science and Education for their proposed philosophical academy in Berlin, a kind of urban version of the Todtnauberg camps in which teachers and students would live together and pursue ‘scientific work, recreation, concentration, martial games, physical work, walks, sport, and celebrations’, under the guidance of a director and professors who were ‘politically safe’ National Socialists. Heidegger’s submission was rejected, but not for any lack of enthusiasm in his way of presenting it. Two years later, when he travelled to Rome in 1936 to give a lecture on the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, he still wore a Nazi pin on his lapel, and he kept it there even when he and his part-Jewish former student Karl Löwith took a day off to go sightseeing with their families. Löwith was disgusted: regardless of Heidegger’s views, it would have been easy for him to remove the badge if only to make his friends feel comfortable.

  That was not the only time Heidegger showed a rigid shell — an extr
eme form of Gabriel Marcel’s ‘crispation’ — in dealing with people. The philosopher Max Müller, who studied with Heidegger and worked as his assistant, found himself in trouble with the regime in 1937 for writing political articles and working for a Catholic youth group. Freiburg’s vice rector, Theodor Maunz, told Müller that Heidegger had been approached for a report on his student’s politics, and had given him a generally good assessment ‘as a human being, educator, and philosopher’. On the other hand, he had included an observation that Müller had a negative opinion of the state. A single sentence like that meant doom. ‘Go to him,’ Maunz told Müller. ‘Everything else will be fine if he crosses out that sentence.’

  Müller turned to Heidegger — but Heidegger pedantically stuck to his point, saying, ‘I gave the only answer that corresponds to the truth. But I have wrapped it in a cover of justifiable, good things.’

  ‘That won’t help me,’ replied Müller. ‘The sentence is there.’

  Heidegger said: ‘As a Catholic, you should know that one must tell the truth. Consequently, I cannot cross out the sentence.’

  Müller disputed the theology behind this, but Heidegger was unmoved: ‘No, I will stick to what I was asked. I can’t take back my whole report now and say I won’t write one at all, because people already know that I have given one to the university to be passed on. Nothing can be done. Don’t hold it against me.’

  These final words were what astonished Müller most. All Heidegger seemed to care about was justifying his own actions, with no thought to the danger facing the other man. Fortunately, Müller escaped serious consequences on this occasion, but it was no thanks to Heidegger. He remembered his parting remark to Heidegger that day: ‘The point is not that I might hold it against you, the point is my existence.’ His feelings about his former mentor were different from then on: he could never forget his experience of ‘a certain ambiguity in Heidegger’s character’.