Heidegger kept trying. He presented early versions of his lecture on technology to, of all people, the members of the Bremen Club — mostly businessmen and shipping magnates, based in the Hanseatic town of that name. The lecture series was arranged by his friend Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, whose family lived there, and apparently it went down well. Perhaps Heidegger found it easier to get through to the general public than to philosophers, who would make more fuss if his points seemed to make no sense, rather than letting themselves be swept up in the mood of excitement.
Thus, all the time that Heidegger was obstinately resisting communication, his range of influence was growing. By the time he delivered the polished version of his technology lecture in Munich in 1953, his friend Petzet was able to note that the audience, puzzled though they were, responded to its closing words with an ‘ovation like a storm breaking from a thousand throats that did not want to cease’. (He does not consider the possibility that they were applauding its being over.)
Even today, Jaspers, the dedicated communicator, is far less widely read than Heidegger, who has influenced architects, social theorists, critics, psychologists, artists, film-makers, environmental activists, and innumerable students and enthusiasts — including the later deconstructionist and post-structuralist schools, which took their starting point from his late thinking. Having spent the late 1940s as an outsider and then been rehabilitated, Heidegger became the overwhelming presence in university philosophy all over the European continent from then on. One Fulbright scholar who arrived in Heidelberg to study philosophy in 1955, Calvin O. Schrag, was surprised to see courses on many other contemporary philosophers, but none on Heidegger. Later his puzzlement disappeared. As he wrote: ‘I quickly learned that all courses were on Heidegger.’
So who, in the end, was the better communicator?
After their failure of mutual comprehension, Heidegger and Jaspers never met again. There was no decision to make a final break; it just happened that way. Once, when Heidegger heard that Jaspers was passing through Freiburg in 1950, he asked for his train time so he could meet him on the platform, at least to shake hands. Jaspers did not reply.
They did resume a very occasional formal correspondence. When Jaspers turned seventy in 1953, Heidegger sent him greetings. Jaspers responded nostalgically, remembering their conversations back in the 1920s and early 1930s, the sound of Heidegger’s voice, and his gestures. But, he added, if they met now, he would not know what to say. He told Heidegger that he regretted not having been stronger in the past — not having forced him to give a proper account of himself. ‘I would have taken hold of you, so to speak; I would have relentlessly questioned you and made you take notice.’
Six and a half years later, Heidegger’s own seventieth birthday came around, and Jaspers sent him good wishes. He ended his brief letter with a memory of an afternoon when he was about eighteen, on a winter holiday on the Feldberg, a skiing resort not far from Heidegger’s part of the forest. Being delicate, not a strong skier like Heidegger, he had stayed close to the hotel and moved slowly on his skis, yet had still been amazed by the mountains’ beauty, finding himself ‘enchanted in a snowstorm at sunset’, watching the changing light and colours on the hills. He closed the letter in the old affectionate way, ‘Your Jaspers.’ Jaspers’ skiing story casts himself as the cautious one, hesitant and sceptical, aware of the attraction of distant vistas but disinclined to venture far towards them. Heidegger, he implies, is more daring, but he may be on the wrong path, in danger and too far gone to call back.
Jaspers was being modest. In reality, he was the one whose mind ranged widely across cultures and epochs, making connections and comparisons — while Heidegger never liked going far from his forest home.
Another former friend who turned against Heidegger was the young man who had playfully mocked Ernst Cassirer in Davos in 1929: Emmanuel Levinas.
Having moved to France before the war and acquired citizenship, Levinas had fought at the front and been captured when France fell. He was imprisoned in a unit reserved for Jewish prisoners of war in Stalag 11B, at Fallingbostel near Magdeburg. A harrowing five years followed, as he and his fellow inmates lived on watery soup and vegetable peelings while being worked to exhaustion chopping wood in the local forest. Their guards taunted them with the possibility that they might be shipped out to death camps at any moment. In fact, being in a POW camp probably saved Levinas’ life. It gave him a degree of formal protection that he would not have had as a Jewish civilian at large, although his wife and daughter did also stay alive by hiding in a monastery in France, with help from friends. Back in his native country of Lithuania, the rest of his family did not survive. After Lithuania was occupied by Germany in 1941, all Levinas’ relatives were confined to the ghetto with other Jews in their city, Kaunas. The Nazis assembled a large group one morning, among whom were Levinas’ father, mother and two brothers. They took them into the countryside, and machine-gunned them to death.
Like Sartre during his interlude in the Stalag, Levinas wrote prolifically while he was incarcerated. He was able to receive writing paper and books, so he read Proust, Hegel, Rousseau and Diderot. He kept notebooks out of which grew his first major work of philosophy, Existence and Existents, published in 1947. Here he developed earlier themes, including that of the ‘il y a’ (‘there is’) — the amorphous, undifferentiated, impersonal Being that looms over us in insomnia or exhaustion. This is Heidegger’s Being presented as a terrible affliction, rather than as a mystical gift to be awaited in awe. Levinas had a particular horror for what Heidegger had called the ontological difference: the distinction between beings and their Being. If you take away individual beings in order to be left with pure Being, Levinas felt, you end up only with something terrifying and inhuman. This was one reason why, as he wrote, his reflections — although initially inspired by the philosophy of Heidegger — ‘are also governed by a profound need to leave the climate of that philosophy’.
Levinas turned away from the fog of Being, and went the other way — towards individual, living, human entities. In his best-known work, Totality and Infinity, published in 1961, he made the relationship of Self with Other the foundation of his entire philosophy — as central a concept for him as Being was for Heidegger.
He once said that this shift in thinking had its origin in an experience he had in the camp. Like the other prisoners, he had got used to the guards treating them without respect as they worked, as if they were inhuman objects unworthy of fellow feeling. But each evening, as they were marched back behind the barbed-wire fence again, his work group would be greeted by a stray dog who had somehow found its way inside the camp. The dog would bark and fling itself around with delight at seeing them, as dogs do. Through the dog’s adoring eyes, the men were reminded each day of what it meant to be acknowledged by another being — to receive the basic recognition that one living creature grants to another.
As Levinas reflected on this experience, it helped to lead him to a philosophy that was essentially ethical, rather than ontological like Heidegger’s. He developed his ideas from the work of Jewish theologian Martin Buber, whose I and Thou in 1923 had distinguished between my relationship with an impersonal ‘it’ or ‘them’, and the direct personal encounter I have with a ‘you’. Levinas took it further: when I encounter you, we normally meet face-to-face, and it is through your face that you, as another person, can make ethical demands on me. This is very different from Heidegger’s Mitsein or Being-with, which suggests a group of people standing alongside one another, shoulder to shoulder as if in solidarity — perhaps as a unified nation or Volk. For Levinas, we literally face each other, one individual at a time, and that relationship becomes one of communication and moral expectation. We do not merge; we respond to one another. Instead of being co-opted into playing some role in my personal drama of authenticity, you look me in the eyes — and you remain Other. You remain you.
(Illustrations Credit 8.3)
This relationship is
more fundamental than the self, more fundamental than consciousness, more fundamental even than Being — and it brings an unavoidable ethical obligation. Ever since Husserl, phenomenologists and existentialists had being trying to stretch the definition of existence to incorporate our social lives and relationships. Levinas did more: he turned philosophy around entirely so that these relationships were the foundation of our existence, not an extension of it.
This adjustment was so radical that Levinas, like Heidegger before him, had to perform contortions with his language to avoid slipping back into old ways of thought. His writing became more and more tortuous over the years, but this priority of the ethical relationship to the Other remained at its centre. As he grew older, his children made a joke of his most famous ideas. When his grandchildren fought over the biggest portions at the dinner table, someone would say of the one who got the lion’s share, and thus who had obviously not prioritised the demands of others, ‘He doesn’t practise Grandpa’s philosophy!’
It took courage to crack jokes with Levinas. As he went on, he became a formidable figure, prone to snapping at any Others he encountered at conferences or in classes who asked stupid questions or seemed to misunderstand him. In this, if nothing else, he still had something in common with his former mentor.
Other thinkers took radical ethical turns during the war years. The most extreme was Simone Weil, who actually tried to live by the principle of putting other people’s ethical demands first. Having returned to France after her travels through Germany in 1932, she had worked in a factory so as to experience the degrading nature of such work for herself. When France fell in 1940, her family fled to Marseilles (against her protests), and later to the US and to Britain. Even in exile, Weil made extraordinary sacrifices. If there were people in the world who could not sleep in a bed, she would not do so either, so she slept on the floor. Some people lacked food, so she stopped eating almost entirely. She wondered in her journal whether one day someone might develop a form of human chlorophyll, so people could live on sunlight alone.
(Illustrations Credit 8.4)
After a few years of self-starvation, Weil fell ill from tuberculosis complicated by malnutrition. She died in Middlesex Hospital on 2 August 1943, of heart failure. All through these last years, she wrote copious philosophical studies of ethics and society, investigating the nature and limits of what human beings owed to one another. Her last work, The Need for Roots, argues, among other things, that none of us has rights, but each one of us has a near-infinite degree of duty and obligation to the other. Whatever the underlying cause of her death — and anorexia nervosa seems to have been involved — no one could deny that she lived out her philosophy with total commitment. Of all the lives touched on in this book, hers is surely the most profound and challenging application of Iris Murdoch’s notion that a philosophy can be ‘inhabited’. Indeed, Murdoch became an admirer of Weil’s thinking, which pushed her to turn away from her early interest in Sartrean existentialism towards a more ethical philosophy based on ‘the Good’.
Meanwhile, the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel was also still arguing, as he had since the 1930s, that ethics trumps everything else in philosophy and that our duty to each other is so great as to play the role of a transcendent ‘mystery’. He too had been led to this position partly by a wartime experience: during the First World War he had worked for the Red Cross’ Information Service, with the unenviable job of answering relatives’ inquiries about missing soldiers. Whenever news came, he passed it on, and usually it was not good. As Marcel later said, this task permanently inoculated him against warmongering rhetoric of any kind, and it made him aware of the power of what is unknown in our lives.
One striking link between these radical ethical thinkers, all on the fringes of our main story, is that they had religious faith. They also granted a special role to the notion of ‘mystery’ — that which cannot be known, calculated or understood, especially when it concerns our relationships with each other. Heidegger was different from them, since he rejected the religion he grew up with and had no real interest in ethics — probably as a consequence of his having no real interest in the human. Yet every page of his late work suggests some direct experience of the ineffable or ungraspable. He too was a mystic.
The mystery tradition had roots in Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’. It owed much to the other great nineteenth-century mystic of the impossible, Dostoevsky, and to older theological notions. But it also grew from the protracted trauma that was the first half of the twentieth century. Since 1914, and especially since 1939, people in Europe and elsewhere had come to the realisation that we cannot fully know or trust ourselves; that we have no excuses or explanations for what we do — and yet that we must ground our existence and relationships on something firm, because otherwise we cannot survive.
Even the atheistic Sartre showed a desire for a new way of thinking about values. He had been scathing about traditional ethics in Nausea, writing in Levinasian terms of how bourgeois types, professing to be well-meaning humanists, had ‘never allowed themselves to be affected by the meaning of a face’. In Being and Nothingness, he went on to say that the placid old ethical principles based on mere tolerance did not go far enough any more. ‘Tolerance’ failed to engage with the full extent of the demands others make on us. It is not enough to back off and simply put up with each other, he felt. We must learn to give each other more than that. Now he went even further: we must all become deeply ‘engaged’ in our shared world.
The young French writer Frédéric de Towarnicki, having accompanied Heidegger on his quest to collect his manuscripts, next became keen to introduce him and Sartre to each other. He had already given Heidegger a series of articles on Sartrean existentialism by his fellow Frenchman Jean Beaufret. When they discussed these on a later visit, Heidegger marvelled at how Sartre managed to be at once philosopher, phenomenologist, dramatist, novelist, essayist and journalist. Elfride, who was also present, asked, ‘Mais enfin, qu’est-ce que l’existentialisme?’ (‘So what is this existentialism anyway?’)
Next time he called, Towarnicki brought Heidegger a copy of Being and Nothingness. Heidegger playfully weighed its bulk in his hand and said that he had little time for reading at the moment — that time-honoured excuse. (On this occasion, as Towarnicki left, he showed him a treasure of his own, wrapped in sheets of silken paper inside his desk: a photograph of Nietzsche. ‘He doesn’t show that to everyone,’ whispered Elfride.)
This was not encouraging, but Towarnicki did not easily give up on his hope of bringing Heidegger and Sartre together, either for a private meeting or a public debate. He tried to interest Camus too, but Camus wanted nothing to do with Heidegger. Sartre was more intrigued, but, like Heidegger, he kept telling Towarnicki that he was too busy to do anything at the moment. Instead, he invited Towarnicki to write up his own meetings with Heidegger for Les Temps modernes, which Towarnicki did.
Heidegger meanwhile found time to dip into Being and Nothingness after all. He told Towarnicki on his next visit that he appreciated Sartre’s psychological acuity and his ‘feeling for concrete things’. This, at least, was how Towarnicki reported it; since he was writing for Les Temps modernes, he may have been inclined to flatter its editor. Heidegger also gave him a courteous letter to deliver to Sartre. It included a remark that could be read in two ways: ‘Your work is dominated by an immediate understanding of my philosophy the likes of which I have not previously encountered.’
To others, Heidegger was blunter in his response. When the American scholar Hubert Dreyfus saw Being and Nothingness on Heidegger’s desk and remarked on it, Heidegger snapped, ‘How can I even begin to read this Dreck!’ — this rubbish. He began an extended essay in the form of a letter to Jean Beaufret, attacking the humanist version of existentialism that Sartre had presented to such acclaim in his ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’ lecture, with its paean to freedom and individual action. Heidegger wanted nothing to do with this kind of philosophy. H
is piece, published in 1947 as ‘Letter on Humanism’ and filled with evocations of forest clearings and letting-be, stands as one of the key texts in his own decidedly anti-humanist new style of thinking. Sartre did not respond to it.
Heidegger’s earlier letter to Sartre had invited him to come to Todtnauberg: ‘In our little hut we could philosophise together, and go for skiing trips in the Black Forest.’ According to Towarnicki, Heidegger had been impressed by Sartre’s description of skiing in Being and Nothingness — which comes towards the end, suggesting that Heidegger had got well into the Dreck after all. It would be wonderful to imagine Sartre and Heidegger — and perhaps also Beauvoir, who was more athletic than Sartre — flying down the slopes, flush-cheeked, the wind whipping away their words, and Heidegger no doubt going much too fast for anyone to keep up, so as to show off. He liked to do this, judging by Max Müller’s recollections of going out in the snow with him: ‘When we were skiing, he laughed at me a number of times because I made turns and curves where he dashingly raced straight down.’
But the skiing trip never happened. Sartre was always busy; his diary was overflowing with appointments. After all, it would still be a little embarrassing for a Frenchman in 1945 to go off into the Black Forest snow with the former Nazi rector of Freiburg.
Early in 1948, Sartre and Beauvoir did travel to Germany to attend a Berlin production of Sartre’s 1943 play about freedom, The Flies. In its original incarnation, the play had used the classical Oresteia story as a parable for the French situation under Occupation. Now, Jürgen Fehling’s production at Berlin’s Hebbel Theatre applied the same idea to the situation of Germany after the war, making the point clear with a grim stage set dominated by a temple in the shape of a bunker. The implication was that Germany was now similarly paralysed by its shame. Sartre’s play had been designed to urge the French to shake off the past and act constructively for the future; perhaps this message could be reinterpreted to fit the German situation.
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 Page 22
