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

  To show how deeply such pretences are woven into everyday life, Sartre describes a waiter — a skilful, supercilious Parisian waiter, weaving between tables, balancing his tray, ‘putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand’. As a human being, he is a free ‘for-itself’ like me, but he moves as though he were a beautifully designed mechanism, enacting a predefined role or game. What game is he playing? ‘We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.’ He does this as efficiently as the thief in G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown story ‘The Queer Feet’, who slips by unnoticed in a gentleman’s club by moving like a waiter when the club members are around, and like a club member when the waiters are around. A waiter playing a waiter performs his actions so gracefully that the effect is like the sequence of musical notes in Nausea’s ragtime song: it seems absolutely necessary. He tries to be a work of art called Waiter, whereas in truth, like the rest of us, he is a free, fallible, contingent human being. In thus denying his freedom, he enters what Sartre calls mauvaise foi, or ‘bad faith’. There is nothing exceptional about this: most of us are in bad faith most of the time, because that way life is liveable.

  Most bad faith is harmless, but it can have darker consequences. In the short story ‘The Childhood of a Leader’, written in 1938, Sartre examined a character, Lucien, who shores up an identity for himself as an anti-Semite mainly in order to be something. He is pleased when he hears someone else say of him, ‘Lucien can’t stand Jews.’ It gives him the illusion that he simply is the way he is. Bad faith here makes an entity out of a nonentity. Sartre developed this thought further in Reflexions sur la question juive (translated as Anti-Semite and Jew), begun in 1944 and published in 1946. He does not argue that all anti-Semitism comes down to bad faith (that would be a hard thesis to defend), but he uses the notion of bad faith to make a connection between two things that no one had put together quite so neatly: the fear of freedom, and the tendency to blame and demonise others.

  For Sartre, we show bad faith whenever we portray ourselves as passive creations of our race, class, job, history, nation, family, heredity, childhood influences, events, or even hidden drives in our subconscious which we claim are out of our control. It is not that such factors are unimportant: class and race, in particular, he acknowledged as powerful forces in people’s lives, and Simone de Beauvoir would soon add gender to that list. Nor did he mean that privileged groups have the right to pontificate to the poor and downtrodden about the need to ‘take responsibility’ for themselves. That would be a grotesque misreading of Sartre’s point, since his sympathy in any encounter always lay with the more oppressed side. But for each of us — for me — to be in good faith means not making excuses for myself. We cannot say (to quote more examples from Sartre’s 1945 lecture) ‘I have never had a great love or a great friendship; but that is because I never met a man or a woman who were worthy of it; if I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so.’ We do say such things, all the time; but we are in bad faith when we do it.

  None of this means that I make choices in a completely open field or void. I am always in some sort of pre-existing ‘situation’, out of which I must act. I actually need these ‘situations’, or what Sartre calls ‘facticity’, in order to act meaningfully at all. Without it, my freedom would be only the unsatisfying freedom of someone floating in space — perhaps a high jumper who makes a great leap only to find herself drifting off in zero gravity, her jump counting for nothing. Freedom does not mean entirely unconstrained movement, and it certainly does not mean acting randomly. We often mistake the very things that enable us to be free — context, meaning, facticity, situation, a general direction in our lives — for things that define us and take away our freedom. It is only with all of these that we can be free in a real sense.

  Sartre takes his argument to an extreme point by asserting that even war, imprisonment or the prospect of imminent death cannot take away my existential freedom. They form part of my ‘situation’, and this may be an extreme and intolerable situation, but it still provides only a context for whatever I choose to do next. If I am about to die, I can decide how to face that death. Sartre here resurrects the ancient Stoic idea that I may not choose what happens to me, but I can choose what to make of it, spiritually speaking. But the Stoics cultivated indifference in the face of terrible events, whereas Sartre thought we should remain passionately, even furiously engaged with what happens to us and with what we can achieve. We should not expect freedom to be anything less than fiendishly difficult.

  The difficulty of being free was the theme of the play Sartre was rehearsing when Camus introduced himself: The Flies. It opened on 3 June 1943, Sartre’s first real play, if you do not count skits written for his fellow POWs in Stalag 12D. He later called it a drama ‘about freedom, about my absolute freedom, my freedom as a man, and above all about the freedom of the occupied French with regard to the Germans’. Again, nothing about this seemed to faze the censors. This time it may have helped that he gave the play a classical setting — a ploy other writers also used during this time. Reviewers made little comment about its political message, although one, Jacques Berland in Paris-Soir, complained that Sartre seemed too much of an essayist and not enough of a playwright.

  Camus had his Sisyphus; Sartre took his parable from the story of Orestes, hero of the Oresteia plays of Aeschylus. Orestes returns to his home town of Argos to find that his mother Clytemnestra has conspired with her lover Aegisthus to kill her husband, Orestes’ father King Agamemnon. Aegisthus now rules as a tyrant over the oppressed citizenry. In Sartre’s version, the populace is too paralysed by humiliation to be capable of rebelling. A plague of flies swarming over the city represents their demoralisation and shame.

  But now Orestes the hero enters the scene. As in the original, he kills Aegisthus and (after a passing scruple) his own mother. He has successfully avenged his father and liberated Argos — but he has also done something terrible, and must take on a burden of guilt in place of the townspeople’s burden of shame. Orestes is hounded out of town by the flies, who now represent the classical Furies. The god Zeus appears and offers to drive the Furies away, but Sartre’s Orestes refuses his help. As an existentialist hero, rebelling against tyranny and taking on the weight of personal responsibility, he prefers to act freely and alone.

  The parallels with the French situation in 1943 were clear to see. Sartre’s audience would have recognised the debilitating effects of the compromises most of them had to make, and the humiliation that came from living under tyranny. As for the guilt factor, everyone knew that joining the Resistance could bring risks to one’s friends and family, which meant that any act of rebellion brought a real moral burden. Sartre’s play may not have bothered the censors, but it did have a subversive message. It also went on to have a long and equally provocative afterlife in other countries and other times.

  Beauvoir was now exploring similar themes in her work. She wrote the only play of her career, not put into production until after the war (and then to bad reviews). Useless Mouths is set in a medieval Flemish city under siege; the city’s rulers initially propose to sacrifice the women and children so as to conserve food for warriors. Later they realise that it is a better tactic to bring the whole population together to fight in solidarity. It is a clunky tale, so the bad reviews are not surprising, although Sartre’s play was hardly any subtler. After the war, Beauvoir would publish her much better ‘resistance novel’ The Blood of Others, which weighed the need for rebellious action against the guilt that comes from putting people in danger.

  Beauvoir also wrote an essay called ‘Pyrrhus and Cineas’ during this time, which takes the principle of bold action beyond war into more personal territory. The story comes from another classical source, Plutarch’s Lives. The Greek general Pyrrhus is busying himself winning a series of great victories,
knowing that there will be many more battles to come. His adviser, Cineas, asks him what he intends to do when he has won them all and taken control of the whole world. Well, says Pyrrhus, then I will rest. To this, Cineas asks: why not just rest now?

  This sounds a sensible proposal, but Beauvoir’s essay tells us to think again. For her, a man who wants to stop and navel-gaze is not as good a model as the one who commits himself to keep going. Why do we imagine that wisdom lies in inactivity and detachment, she asks? If a child says, ‘I don’t care about anything,’ that is not a sign of a wise child but of a troubled and depressed one. Similarly, adults who withdraw from the world soon get bored. Even lovers, if they retreat to their private love nest for too long, lose interest in each other. We do not thrive in satiety and rest. Human existence means ‘transcendence’, or going beyond, not ‘immanence’, or reposing passively inside oneself. It means constant action until the day one runs out of things to do — a day that is unlikely to come as long as you have breath. For Beauvoir and Sartre, this was the big lesson of the war years: the art of life lies in getting things done.

  A related but different message emerges from Camus’ ‘resistance novel’, again published only after the war in 1947: The Plague. It is set in the Algerian town of Oran during an outbreak of that disease; the bacillus suggests the Occupation and all its ills. Everyone in the town reacts differently, as quarantine is imposed and claustrophobia and fear increase. Some panic and try to flee; some exploit the situation for personal gain. Others fight the disease, with varying degrees of effectiveness. The hero, Dr. Bernard Rieux, pragmatically gets down to the work of treating patients and minimising infection by enforcing quarantine regulations, even when these seem cruel. Dr. Rieux is under no illusion that humanity can overcome deadly epidemics in the long term. The note of submission to fate is still there, as in Camus’ other novels — a note never heard in Beauvoir or Sartre. But Dr. Rieux concentrates on damage limitation and on pursuing strategies to ensure a victory, if only a local and temporary one.

  Camus’ novel gives us a deliberately understated vision of heroism and decisive action compared to those of Sartre and Beauvoir. One can only do so much. It can look like defeatism, but it shows a more realistic perception of what it takes to actually accomplish difficult tasks like liberating one’s country.

  By early summer of 1944, as Allied forces moved towards Paris, everyone knew that freedom was near. The growing emotion was hard to take, as Beauvoir noted; it was like the painful tingling that comes when sensation returns after numbness. There was also much fear of what the Nazis might do as they retreated. Life continued to be hard: merely finding enough to eat became more difficult than ever. But the faint sound of bombs and artillery brought hope.

  The sounds came closer and closer — and suddenly, one hot day in mid-August, the Germans had gone. Parisians were unsure at first what was happening, especially as they still heard gunfire scattered around the city. On Wednesday 23 August, Sartre and Beauvoir walked to the office of the Resistance journal Combat to meet Camus, now the paper’s literary editor: he wanted to commission a piece about the Liberation from them. They had to cross the Seine to get there; halfway across the bridge they heard the crack of gunshots and ran for their lives. But tricolours were now flying from windows, and the next day broadcasts from the BBC announced that Paris was officially liberated.

  Church bells pealed throughout the next night. Walking the streets, Beauvoir joined in with a group of people dancing around a bonfire. At one point, someone said they saw a German tank, so everyone scattered, then cautiously returned. It was amid such scenes of nervous excitement that peace began for France. The next day brought the official Liberation parade along the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe, led by the Free French leader returned from exile, Charles de Gaulle. Beauvoir joined the crowd, while Sartre watched from a balcony. At last, wrote Beauvoir, ‘the world and the future had been handed back to us’.

  (Illustrations Credit 7.2)

  The first act of the future was settling accounts with the past. Reprisals began against collaborators, with swift acts of brutal punishment at first, followed by a wave of more formal trials, some of which also ended in death sentences. Here, Beauvoir and Sartre found themselves again disagreeing with Camus. After an initial hesitancy, Camus came out firmly against the death penalty. Cold, judicial killing by the state was always wrong, he said, however serious the offence. Before the trial in early 1945 of Robert Brasillach, the former editor of a fascist magazine, Camus signed a petition calling for mercy in case of a guilty verdict. Sartre was not involved, as he was away at the time, but Beauvoir pointedly refused to sign the petition, saying that from now on it was necessary to make tough decisions in order to honour those who had died resisting the Nazis, as well as to ensure a fresh start for the future.

  She was curious enough to attend Brasillach’s trial, which took place on a freezing 19 January 1945 as Paris was covered in deep snow. As the court briefly deliberated and then handed down the death sentence, she was impressed to see how calmly Brasillach took it. Yet this did not change her view that the sentence was right. In any case, the petition made no difference, and he was shot on 6 February 1945.

  From now on, Beauvoir and Sartre would invariably line up against Camus whenever such issues were at stake. After his bolder and more effective Resistance activity at Combat and elsewhere, Camus now drew clearer lines: he opposed execution, torture and other state abuses, and that was that. Beauvoir and Sartre were not exactly in favour of such things, but they liked to point to complex political realities and means-ends calculations. They would ask whether there really could be cases where harm by the state could be justifiable. What if something very great is at stake, and the future of a vast number of people requires some remorseless act? Camus just kept returning to his core principle: no torture, no killing — at least not with state approval. Beauvoir and Sartre believed they were taking a more subtle and more realistic view.

  If asked why a couple of innocuous philosophers had suddenly become so harsh, they would have said it was because the war had changed them in profound ways. It had shown them that one’s duties to humanity could be more complicated than they seemed. ‘The war really divided my life in two,’ Sartre said later. He had already moved away from some of what he had said in Being and Nothingness, with its individualist conception of freedom. Now, he sought to develop a more Marxist-influenced view of human life as purposeful and social. This was one reason why he never managed to write the follow-up volume on existentialist ethics: his ideas on the subject had changed too much. He did write many draft pages, published after his death as Notebooks for an Ethics, but he could not give them a coherent shape.

  Merleau-Ponty too, having been radicalised by the war, was still desperately trying to be less nice. Having mastered the art of being beastly to Germans, he now far outdid Beauvoir and Sartre in writing fervent arguments for an uncompromising Soviet-style Communism. In an essay of 1945, ‘The War Has Taken Place’, he wrote that the war had ruled out any possibility of living a merely private life. ‘We are in the world, mingled with it, compromised with it,’ he wrote. No one could rise above events; everyone had dirty hands. For a while, ‘dirty hands’ became a buzz term in the existentialist milieu. It went with a new imperative: get down to work, and do something!

  Thus, now that the war in France was safely over, Sartre’s gang raced out like greyhounds from opened racetrack gates. Sartre wrote a series of essays arguing that writers had a duty to be active and committed; these appeared in periodical form in 1947, and then separately in 1948 as What Is Literature? Authors had real power in the world, he said, and they must live up to it. He called for a littérature engagée — a politically committed literature. Beauvoir recalled how urgent all such tasks seemed: she would read of some incident that fired her up, think at once, ‘I must answer that!’, and rush out an article for publication. She, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and other friends produced so much writin
g so quickly that they got together to launch a new cultural journal in 1945: Les Temps modernes. Sartre was the journal’s figurehead, and most people assumed he wrote all its editorials, although in fact Merleau-Ponty put in more work than anyone and wrote many uncredited pieces. The name Modern Times was taken from Charlie Chaplin’s manic 1936 film about worker exploitation and industrialisation, a film Sartre and Beauvoir had enjoyed so much when it came out that they sat through two showings in succession. Their pace of literary production matched that lampooned in Chaplin’s film, and over the coming decades Les Temps modernes became one of the great engines of intellectual debate in France and beyond. It is still being published today. It was in Les Temps modernes that Sartre’s essay on ‘committed literature’ first appeared, and it set the tone for the years that followed.

  The flow of existentialist fiction and drama continued too. Beauvoir’s The Blood of Others appeared in September 1945. Sartre published the first two volumes of his Roads of Freedom novel sequence, both written years earlier and set in 1938. They show his main character Mathieu Delarue progressing from a naive view of freedom as a mere do-as-thou-wilt selfishness towards a better definition, in which he faces up to the demands made by history. By the time the third volume appeared in 1949, La mort dans l’âme (variously translated as Iron in the Soul, The Defeat or Troubled Sleep), we see Mathieu bravely defending a village bell tower as France falls. He uses his freedom to better ends now, but the defeat appears to be the end of him. A projected fourth volume was meant to show him surviving after all, and finding real freedom through solidarity with comrades in the Resistance. Unfortunately, as generally happened when Sartre planned a grand conclusion for a project, the volume was never finished. Only a few fragments appeared, many years later. Just as the ethics question was left hanging in Being and Nothingness, the freedom question remained hanging in Roads of Freedom. In neither case was the problem to do with Sartre losing interest: it was because of his tendency to keep changing his mind philosophically and politically.