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

  The Husserl archives survived the war and are mostly still in Louvain, with his library. They have kept researchers busy for over seventy-five years, and have generated a collected edition under the title Husserliana. So far, this comprises forty-two volumes of collected works, nine volumes of extra ‘materials’, thirty-four volumes of miscellaneous documents and correspondence, and thirteen volumes of official English translations.

  One of the first to travel to Louvain to see the archive was Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who already knew Husserl’s earlier work well, and had read about the unpublished manuscripts in an article in the Revue internationale de philosophie. In March 1939, he wrote to arrange a visit to Father Van Breda so as to pursue his special interest in the phenomenology of perception. Van Breda welcomed him, and Merleau-Ponty spent a blissful first week of April in Louvain, absorbed in the unedited and unpublished sections which Husserl had intended to add to Ideas and to The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

  These late works of Husserl’s are different in spirit from the earlier ones. To Merleau-Ponty, they suggested that Husserl had begun moving away from his inward, idealist interpretation of phenomenology in his last years, towards a less isolated picture of how one exists in a world alongside other people and immersed in sensory experience. Merleau-Ponty even wondered whether Husserl had absorbed some of this from Heidegger — an interpretation with which not everyone agrees. Other influences might be seen too: from sociology, and perhaps from Jakob von Uexküll’s studies of how different species experience their ‘environment’ or Umwelt. Whatever the source, Husserl’s new thinking included reflections on what he called the Lebenswelt, or ‘life-world’ — that barely noticed social, historical and physical context in which all our activities take place, and which we generally take for granted. Even our bodies rarely require conscious attention, yet a sense of being embodied is part of almost every experience we have. As I move around or reach out to grasp something, I sense my own limbs and the arrangement of my physical self in the world. I feel my hands and feet from within; I don’t have to look in a mirror to see how they are positioned. This is known as ‘proprioception’ — the perception of self — and it is an important aspect of experience which I tend to notice only when something goes wrong with it. When I encounter others, says Husserl, I also recognise them implicitly as beings who have ‘their personal surrounding world, oriented around their living bodies’. Body, life-world, proprioception and social context are all integrated into the texture of worldly being.

  One can see why Merleau-Ponty saw signs of Heidegger’s philosophy of Being-in-the-world in this new interest of Husserl’s. There were other connections too: Husserl’s late works show him considering the long processes of culture and history, just as Heidegger did. But here there is a great difference between them. Heidegger’s writings on the history of Being are suffused with a longing for some home time, a lost age or place to which philosophy should be traced, and from which it should be renewed. Heidegger’s dream-home often calls to mind the forested Germanic world of his childhood, with its craftsmanship and silent wisdom. At other times, it evokes archaic Greek culture, which he considered the last period in which humanity had philosophised properly. Heidegger was not alone in being fascinated by Greece; it was a sort of mania among Germans at the time. But other German thinkers often focused on the flowering of philosophy and scholarship in the fourth century BC, the time of Socrates and Plato, whereas Heidegger saw that as the period in which everything had started going wrong. For him, the philosophers who truly connected with Being were pre-Socratics such as Heraclitus, Parmenides and Anaximander. In any case, what Heidegger’s writings on Germany and Greece share is the mood of someone yearning to go back into the deep forest, into childhood innocence and into the dark waters from which the first swirling chords of thought had stirred. Back — back to a time when societies were simple, profound and poetic.

  Husserl did not look for such a simple lost world. When he wrote about history, he was drawn to more sophisticated periods, especially those when cultures were encountering each other through travel, migration, exploration or trade. At such periods, he wrote, people living in one culture or ‘home-world’ (Heimwelt) meet people from an ‘alien-world’ (Fremdwelt). To those others, theirs is the home-world and the other is the alien-world. The shock of encounter is mutual, and it wakes each culture up to an amazing discovery: that their world is not beyond question. A travelling Greek discovers that the Greek life-world is just a Greek world, and that there are Indian and African worlds too. In seeing this, members of each culture may come to understand that they are, in general, ‘worlded’ beings, who should not take anything for granted.

  For Husserl, therefore, cross-cultural encounters are generally good, because they stimulate people to self-questioning. He suspected that philosophy started in ancient Greece not, as Heidegger would imagine, because the Greeks had a deep, inward-looking relationship with their Being, but because they were a trading people (albeit sometimes a warlike one) who constantly came across alien-worlds of all kinds.

  This difference highlights a deeper contrast of attitude between Husserl and Heidegger in the 1930s. During that decade’s events, Heidegger turned increasingly to the archaic, provincial and inward-looking, as prefigured by his article about not going to Berlin. In response to the same events, Husserl turned outwards. He wrote about his life-worlds in a cosmopolitan spirit — and this at a time when ‘cosmopolitan’ was becoming recast as an insult, often interpreted as code for ‘Jewish’. He was isolated in Freiburg, yet he used his last few talks of the 1930s, in Vienna and Prague, to issue a rousing call to the international scholarly community. Seeing the social and intellectual ‘crisis’ around him, he urged them to work together against the rise of irrationalism and mysticism, and against the cult of the merely local, in order to rescue the Enlightenment spirit of shared reason and free inquiry. He did not expect anyone to return to an innocent belief in rationalism, but he did argue that Europeans must protect reason, for if that was lost, the continent and the wider cultural world would be lost with it.

  In his 1933 essay ‘On the Ontological Mystery’, Gabriel Marcel provided a beautiful image that sums up Husserl’s view of what ‘alien’ encounters and international mingling can do for us. He wrote:

  I know by my own experience how, from a stranger met by chance, there may come an irresistible appeal which overturns the habitual perspectives just as a gust of wind might tumble down the panels of a stage set — what had seemed near becomes infinitely remote and what had seemed distant seems to be close.

  A tumbling of stage sets and abrupt readjustment of perspectives characterise many of the surprise encounters seen so far in this book: Heidegger’s boyhood discovery of Brentano, Levinas’ discovery of Husserl in Strasbourg, Sartre’s discovery of Husserl (and Levinas) via Raymond Aron at the Bec-de-Gaz — with more to come. Merleau-Ponty’s 1939 discovery of Husserl’s late work was among the most fruitful of these moments of discovery. Largely out of that single week of reading in Louvain, he would develop his own own subtle and rich philosophy of human embodiment and social experience. His work, in turn, would influence generations of scientists and thinkers to this day, linking them to Husserl.

  Husserl had perfectly understood the value to posterity of his unpublished works, unfinished, chaotic and barely legible though they were. He wrote to a friend in 1931, ‘the largest and, as I actually believe, most important part of my life’s work still lies in my manuscripts, scarcely manageable because of their volume’. The Nachlass was almost a life form in itself: the biographer Rüdiger Safranski has compared it to the giant conscious sea in Stanislaw Lem’s science-fiction novel Solaris. The comparison holds up well, since Lem’s sea communicates by evoking ideas and images in the minds of humans who come close to it. Husserl’s archive exerted its influence in much the same way.

  The whole hoard would have been lost without the heroism and energy of F
ather Van Breda. It would never have existed at all had Husserl not persisted in refining and developing his ideas long after many thought he had simply retired and gone into hiding. Moreover, none of it would have survived without a bit of sheer luck: a reminder of the role contingency plays in even the most well-managed human affairs.

  Merleau-Ponty’s visit to Louvain took place during the last few months of peace, in 1939. This was the year, as Beauvoir later described it, when history would take hold of them all and never again let them go.

  Beauvoir and Sartre spent that August on holiday in a villa in Juan-les-Pins, with Paul Nizan and Jacques-Laurent Bost. They watched the papers and listened to the radio, hearing with fear and disgust of the Nazi–Soviet pact on 23 August, which meant that the Soviet Union would increase their own power and put up no opposition should Germany advance. This came as a particular blow for anyone who had been supporting Soviet Communism as the great counterweight to Nazism, as Nizan certainly had, and to some extent Sartre and Beauvoir too. If the Soviets would not stand up to the Nazis, who would? Once again, war seemed likely to start at any moment.

  As they sunned themselves at the villa, one subject again dominated the friends’ conversations. ‘Was it preferable to come back from the front blinded, or with your face bashed in? Without arms, or without legs? Would Paris be bombed? Would they use poison gas?’ Similar debates went on in another villa in southern France, where the Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler was staying with his friend Ettore Corniglion; the latter remarked that the shifts of emotion during that August reminded him of how his grandmother ‘used to cure his chilblains by making him put his feet alternately in a bucket of cold and in a bucket of hot water’.

  Sartre knew that he would not be posted to the front because of his eye problems. As a young man he had done his standard military service in a weather station, which meant he would be deployed in similar work now — the same thing Heidegger had done in the First World War. (Raymond Aron too would be posted to a weather station that year; it seems to have been the philosophers’ posting.) Such a role would not involve combat, but it would still be dangerous. For Bost and Nizan the dangers would be greater: they were able-bodied and could both expect to be called up and sent to fight.

  The French holiday season ended on 31 August, and many Parisians went home that day from their country breaks. Sartre and Beauvoir also returned to Paris, Sartre ready to collect the kit bag and army boots stored in his hotel room and report to his unit. He and Beauvoir changed trains in Toulouse, but found the Paris train so crowded they could not get on. They had to wait another two and a half hours, in a dark station amid a mass of anxious people and an apocalyptic atmosphere. Another train came; they got on with difficulty and made it to Paris, arriving on 1 September — the day German forces invaded Poland. Sartre collected his kit. Beauvoir saw him off at the Gare de l’Est early the next morning. On 3 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

  The US visa for Malvine Husserl had never materialised, so she was still in Louvain when the war began. She remained there, discreetly hidden in a nearby convent in Herent. The Husserl collection was moved from the main university library to the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie in January 1940 — just in time. Four months later, much of the university library was destroyed by bombs when the German invasion began. It was the second time the library had been lost: an older building and a priceless original collection of books and manuscripts had been wiped out in the First World War.

  On 16 September 1940, Malvine’s container of possessions, now stored in Antwerp, was hit in an Allied bomb raid. Incredibly, according to his own account, the ever-resourceful Van Breda managed to get to the wreckage and recover one valuable item, the urn of Husserl’s ashes, which he kept in his monastery cell for the rest of the war. Everything else was torn to pieces, including the Brentano portrait. To spare Malvine distress, Van Breda delayed telling her what had happened. He moved the Husserl papers to various locations in Louvain, to keep them safe.

  Another person caught in the Low Countries when war broke out was Husserl’s former assistant, Edith Stein. Having completed her thesis on empathy, converted to Christianity, taken orders as a Carmelite nun, and become Sister Teresa Benedicta, she had moved in 1938 from a community in Cologne to one in Echt in the Netherlands, which at the time appeared to be safer. Her sister Rosa went with her.

  In 1940, the Germans occupied the Netherlands along with the other countries of the region. They began deporting Jews to their deaths in 1942. The Carmelites tried to get the two sisters transferred to another community in Switzerland, but by this time it was impossible to get exit visas. For a brief period, Christian converts were exempted from the deportations, but this soon changed and the Nazis began raids on all Dutch monastic communities in July, searching for anyone non-Aryan. In Echt, they found Edith and Rosa. The two women were taken, along with many other converts of Jewish origin, to a transit camp and then to the camp of Westerbork. Early in August, they were sent on to Auschwitz. On the way, their train passed through their home town of Wrocław. A postal employee working at the station recalled seeing a train paused there for a while; a woman in a Carmelite habit looked out and said that this was her home town. Red Cross records show the two sisters arriving at Auschwitz on 7 August 1942. On 9 August, they were murdered in the Birkenau gas chamber.

  Edith Stein had continued her philosophical work all through her years in the convent, and so she too left behind a collection of papers and unpublished works. The nuns guarded this as long as they could. When the Germans were retreating through the area in January 1945, however, amid chaotic scenes, the sisters had to flee and could not take the papers with them.

  In March, with the Germans gone, a couple of the sisters returned, accompanied by Herman Van Breda. They found many papers still lying scattered in the open, and, with help from local townspeople, gathered up everything of Stein’s that they could rescue. Van Breda took the papers to the Husserl Archives. In the 1950s, the scholar Lucy Gelber took them to her own home to laboriously piece together the scattered texts. She published them in instalments, as a collected edition.

  Edith Stein was beatified in 1987, and canonised by Pope John Paul II in 1998. In 2010, in a deliberate move to redefine the Germanic notion of ‘hero’, a marble bust of her was added to Ludwig II’s Bavarian Valhalla, a hall of heroes high in the forest overlooking the Danube. She joined Frederick the Great, Goethe, Kant, Wagner and many more, including another anti-Nazi, Sophie Scholl, who had been executed in 1943 for her resistance activities.

  Malvine Husserl lived out the whole war in Louvain. Only after it ended, in May 1946, aged eighty-six, did she manage to join her children in America for her last few years of life. She died on 21 November 1950. Her body was returned to Germany, and she was buried in the cemetery of Günterstal, just outside Freiburg. Edmund Husserl’s ashes, which she had kept with her in America, were interred with her. They lie there today, with their son Gerhart, who died in 1973, and a memorial stone for his younger brother Wolfgang, the one who died in the First World War. Today one can still walk around the cemetery’s green, quiet paths, and use one of the little watering cans hanging on hooks nearby to water the grave.

  7

  OCCUPATION, LIBERATION

  In which the war continues, we meet Albert Camus, Sartre discovers freedom, France is liberated, the philosophers throw themselves into engaged activity, and everyone wants to go to America.

  In 1939, having seen Sartre off at the Gare de l’Est with his army kit and boots, Beauvoir could only wait for his news; for a long time she did not even know where he was posted. She walked around Paris on the first day after war was declared, and marvelled at how normal everything seemed. There were just a few oddities: policemen were on the streets with gas masks in little pouches, and when evening fell, many cars had headlights glowing like blue gemstones in the dark, their covers having been tinted as a blackout precaution.

  This eerie state
of affairs would continue for months, in the ‘phony war’, as it was known in English. To the French it was the drôle de guerre or ‘funny war’, to the Germans the Sitzkrieg or ‘sitting war’, and to the invaded Poles the dziwna wojna, or ‘strange war’. There was much nervousness but little action, and none of the feared gas or bomb attacks. In Paris, Beauvoir collected a gas mask from the Lycée Molière where she was teaching, wrote entries in her diary, and tidied her room manically: ‘Sartre’s pipe, his clothes.’ She and Olga Kosakiewicz both lived in rooms at the same hotel (the Hotel Danemark on the rue de Vavin — it’s still there). Together they blacked out the windows with a disgusting-sounding mixture of blue dye, oil and suntan lotion. Paris in late 1939 was a city of many blue half-lights.

  Beauvoir settled into work, still drafting and redrafting L’invitée. She found time to have affairs with a couple of her students, Nathalie Sorokine and Bianca Bienenfeld; both young women later became involved with Sartre too. Biographers have been hard on Beauvoir for what looks like a case of sordid ‘grooming’ as well as unprofessional conduct. It is hard to tell what motivated her, since she seemed indifferent to both women for much of the time. Perhaps the explanation lay in the tense, debilitating atmosphere of phony-war Paris, which led many people to odd behaviour. Elsewhere in the city, Arthur Koestler was observing how everything seemed to be turning grey, as though a disease were attacking Paris’ roots. The journalist and short-story writer Albert Camus, who had come to the city from his home in Algeria, holed himself up in a room and listened to the street sounds outside his window, wondering why he was there. ‘Foreign, admit that I find everything strange and foreign’, he wrote in his notebook in March 1940. ‘No future’, he added in an undated note. Yet he did not let this mood stop him from working on literary projects: a novel, L’étranger (The Stranger or The Outsider), a long essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, and a play, Caligula. He called these his ‘three absurds’, because they all dealt with the meaninglessness or absurdity of human existence, a theme that seemed to come naturally during this time.