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

  Sartre once remarked — speaking of a disagreement they had about Husserl in 1941 — that ‘we discovered, astounded, that our conflicts had, at times, stemmed from our childhood, or went back to the elementary differences of our two organisms’. Merleau-Ponty also said in an interview that Sartre’s work seemed strange to him, not because of philosophical differences, but because of a certain ‘register of feeling’, especially in Nausea, that he could not share. Their difference was one of temperament and of the whole way the world presented itself to them.

  The two also differed in their purpose. When Sartre writes about the body or other aspects of experience, he generally does it in order to make a different point. He expertly evokes the grace of his café waiter, gliding between the tables, bending at an angle just so, steering the drink-laden tray through the air on the tips of his fingers — but he does it all in order to illustrate his ideas about bad faith. When Merleau-Ponty writes about skilled and graceful movement, the movement itself is his point. This is the thing he wants to understand.

  Merleau-Ponty had even less in common with Heidegger, apart from their prioritising of Being-in-the-world. Heidegger is good on some bodily experiences, such as hammering a nail, but he has little to say about other kinds of physical sensation in Dasein’s body. He avoids ambiguous realms in general. He argues that the meaning of Dasein’s Being lies in Time, yet avoids the whole topic of development. He does not tell us whether there can be a toddler Dasein, just opening up its first ‘clearing’, or a Dasein with advanced Alzheimer’s, for whom the forest is closing in. When he turns to other animals, it is to dismiss them as uninteresting beings that cannot make their own ‘world’, or that have only an impoverished one. The Heidegger scholar Richard Polt has listed a whole range of questions that Heidegger does not ask: ‘How did Dasein evolve? When does a fetus or newborn enter the condition of Dasein? What conditions are necessary in the brain in order for Dasein to take place? Can other species be Dasein? Can we create an artificial Dasein using computers?’ Heidegger avoids these ambiguous zones because he considers them ‘ontical’ matters, worth considering only by such disciplines as psychology, biology and anthropology — not by noble philosophy.

  Merleau-Ponty does not make such distinctions. The edges and shadows of the discipline were what interested him most, and he welcomed anything ontical researchers could contribute. He based his philosophy on human beings who are in constant change from childhood onwards; he wanted to know what happened when faculties were lost, or when people were injured and damaged. By prioritising perception, the body, social life and childhood development, Merleau-Ponty gathered up philosophy’s far-flung outsider subjects and brought them in to occupy the centre of his thought.

  In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France on 15 January 1953, published as In Praise of Philosophy, he said that philosophers should concern themselves above all with whatever is ambiguous in our experience. At the same time, they should think clearly about these ambiguities, using reason and science. Thus, he said, ‘The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste for evidence and the feeling for ambiguity.’ A constant movement is required between these two — a kind of rocking motion ‘which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge’.

  What Merleau-Ponty is describing here is another kind of ‘chiasm’ — an X-like interweaving, this time not between consciousness and world, but between knowledge and questioning. We can never move definitively from ignorance to certainty, for the thread of the inquiry will constantly lead us back to ignorance again. This is the most attractive description of philosophy I’ve ever read, and the best argument for why it is worth doing, even (or especially) when it takes us no distance at all from our starting point.

  11

  CROISÉS COMME ÇA

  In which the existentialists fight about the future.

  Merleau-Ponty observed in a lecture of 1951 that, more than any previous century, the twentieth century had reminded people how ‘contingent’ their lives were — how at the mercy of historical events and other changes that they could not control. This feeling went on long after the war ended. After the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many feared that a Third World War would not be long in coming, this time between the Soviet Union and the United States. The two superpowers’ wartime alliance had broken down almost instantly; they now stood glaring at each other from either side of a weakened, impoverished and self-doubting Western Europe.

  If another war did start, it seemed possible that this time it might destroy civilisation and even life itself. At first only the United States had the A-bomb, but Soviet engineers and spies were known to be working on the problem, and people soon learned of the full dangers from radiation and environmental devastation. As Sartre wrote in response to Hiroshima, humanity had now gained the power to wipe itself out, and must decide every single day that it wanted to live. Camus also wrote that humanity faced the task of choosing between collective suicide and a more intelligent use of its technology — ‘between hell and reason’. After 1945, there seemed little reason to trust in humanity’s ability to choose well.

  After this, each new bomb-test raised the anxiety level. When the Americans exploded a more powerful A-bomb in July 1946, Beauvoir heard a radio announcer say that it had already triggered a chain reaction, making matter itself disintegrate in a slow wave spreading across the planet. Within a few hours, everything on earth would be gone. Now that’s a nothingness at the heart of being. Later that year came rumours that the Soviets were plotting to leave suitcases filled with radioactive dust in key US cities, with timers set to burst their seals and kill millions. Sartre lampooned this story in his play Nekrassov in 1956, but at the time few were sure what to believe. Radiation was all the more terrifying for being invisible and so easily deployed; the power of the universe itself could be packed into a few suitcases.

  But, while some feared The End, others had equally dramatic hopes for a new beginning. Hölderlin had said that ‘where danger is, grows / the saving power also’. Perhaps, some thought, the recent war’s catastrophes would not bring disaster but a total transformation of human life, with war and other evils abolished forever.

  One idealistic wish was for an effective world government that would resolve conflicts, enforce treaties, and render most wars impossible. Camus was among those sharing this hope. For him, the immediate lesson after Hiroshima was that humanity must develop ‘a true international society, in which the great powers will not have superior rights over small and middle-sized nations, where such an ultimate weapon will be controlled by human intelligence rather than by the appetites and doctrines of various states’. To some extent, the United Nations fulfilled these aims, but it never became as broadly effective as hoped.

  Others saw the American Way as the road ahead. The United States had a high stock of gratitude and goodwill in Europe after the war; it consolidated this in the late 1940s with the Marshall Plan, pouring billions of dollars into traumatised European countries to speed recovery, and to keep Communism contained within the parts of central Europe which the Soviet Union had already enfolded in its repressive bear hug. The US even offered money to the Russians and other countries in their ambit, but Moscow made sure that those countries all refused. In Western Europe, some found it humiliating to accept American cash, but they had to admit that it was needed.

  Alongside the internationalists and the pro-Americans, a third group in post-war Western Europe favoured putting their hope in the Soviet Union. This was, after all, the one major nation on earth that had actually tried to put into effect the great Communist ideal for humanity — the prospect that (at some far-off point when all the cleaning-up work was done) human beings would banish poverty, hunger, inequality, war, exploitation, fascism and other evils from existence forever, simply by an act of rational management. It was the most ambitious attempt to change the human condition ever attempted.
If it failed the first time, it might never be tried again, so it seemed worth defending at all costs.

  We are here talking about the events of just seven decades ago — a modest human lifespan — yet it has already become difficult to think ourselves sufficiently into that time to understand how this ideal swayed so many intelligent, sophisticated people in the West. Now, the conventional wisdom has become that Communism would never have worked in any possible world, and therefore that those who failed to see it as futile from the start were fools. Yet, to people who had been through the hardships of the 1930s and the Second World War, it could seem an idea worth believing in despite its acknowledged unlikeliness. People did not see it as a mere dream, of the kind you wake from with a vague impression that you’ve seen something marvellous but impossible. They thought it a practical goal, albeit one to which the path would be long and difficult, with many pitfalls along the way.

  These pitfalls were not hard to spot. That list of beautiful, distant Communist goals was matched by an equally long list of grim realities: labour camps, intimidation, unjust imprisonments, killings, famines, shortages and a lack of personal freedom. The first major shock had come in the 1930s, when news emerged of the Moscow show trials in which disgraced party members ‘confessed’ to acts of sabotage or conspiracy before being sent to their deaths. In 1946, more information came out, some of it through a book called I Chose Freedom, by the Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko. When the book was translated into French in 1947, the Communist-supported journal Les lettres françaises dismissed it as a US government fabrication. Kravchenko’s lawyers sued the journal, and the case was heard in Paris early in 1949, with witnesses brought in to rhapsodise about life in the Soviet Union, and to discredit the author. Kravchenko technically won, but was given a single franc in damages. The following year, another writer sued Les lettres françaises: David Rousset, a Buchenwald survivor who had been attacked by the journal after calling for an investigation into Soviet camps. He won his case. Both trials were contentious, but did much to raise awareness that the Soviet Union was not the Worker’s Paradise it claimed to be — or not yet.

  Even now, many insisted that it was more worthy of defence than the ultra-capitalist model of the United States. The US also lost some of its moral high ground after the government’s extreme fear of Communism led it to crack down on any vaguely leftist organisation, and to surveil and harass its own citizens. Anyone suspected of being a ‘Red’ risked being fired, blacklisted, and denied a passport to travel. In 1951, the naive couple Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sentenced to death for handing atomic secrets to the Russians. The executions, carried out in 1953, shocked many inside and outside the country. Sartre fired off an angry article for the newspaper Libération. In the States, Hannah Arendt wrote to Jaspers that she feared such incidents portended a national catastrophe comparable to the one seen in Germany. ‘An unimaginable stupidity must have taken hold in the USA. It frightens us because we are familiar with it.’

  If both great powers were falling short of their ideals, perhaps the only way to choose between them was to ask which ideals were more worth trying to attain. Leftists felt that, even if America stood for good things like jazz and freedom, it also stood for untrammelled personal greed, economic colonialism and worker exploitation. At least the Soviet Union represented a noble possibility, and for such a goal, what moral compromise might not be worth making?

  Seventy years earlier, in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky had summed up a moral dilemma of this kind in a simple question. Ivan Karamazov asks his brother Alyosha to imagine that he has the power to create a world in which people will enjoy perfect peace and happiness for the rest of history. But to achieve this, he says, you must torture to death one small creature now — say, that baby there. This is an early and extreme variety of the ‘trolley problem’, in which one person must be sacrificed in order (it’s hoped) to save many. So, would you do it, asks Ivan? Alyosha’s answer is a clear no. Nothing can justify torturing a baby, in his view, and that is all there is to be said. No weighing of benefits changes this; some things cannot be measured or traded.

  In 1940s Paris, the writer who followed Alyosha’s position was Albert Camus. In his essay ‘Neither Victims Nor Executioners’ he wrote, ‘I will never again be one of those, whoever they be, who compromise with murder.’ Whatever the pay-off, he would not support formal justifications for violence, especially by the state. He stuck to this position from then on, although he never ceased to meditate on it. His Dostoevskian play of 1949, The Just, features a group of Russian terrorists debating whether or not they might kill bystanders as collateral damage during a political assassination. Camus makes it clear that he thinks it wrong. He thought the same when independence struggles began in his own country, Algeria, in November 1954. Rebels planted bombs and killed innocents, while the French authorities inflicted tortures and executions. Camus’ view was that neither could be justified. People will always do violent things, but philosophers and state officials have a duty not to come up with excuses that will justify them. His opinion made him controversial. In 1957, at a talk to mark his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, Camus was asked to explain his failure to support the rebels. He said, ‘People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.’ For Camus there could be no objective justification for either side’s actions, so his own loyalties were the only possible source of guidance.

  Sartre would train himself to see things differently — at least, he did eventually. In the mid-1940s, he could still sound like an Alyosha himself, or a Camus. Merleau-Ponty, in his pro-Soviet phase, asked him what he would do if he had to choose between two events, one of which would kill 300 people and the other 3,000. What difference was there, philosophically speaking? Sartre replied that there was a mathematical difference, of course, but not a philosophical one, for each individual is an infinite universe in his or her own eyes, and one cannot compare one infinity with another. In both cases, the disaster of loss of life was literally incalculable. Relating this story, Merleau-Ponty deduced that Sartre was talking as a pure philosopher at the time, rather than adopting ‘the perspective of heads of government’.

  Later, both Sartre and Beauvoir moved away from this view, and would decide that one could and even must weigh and measure lives in a judicious way, and that the Alyosha position was an evasion of that duty. They came to feel that refusing to do the calculation — setting one baby now against millions of future babies — was merely selfish or squeamish. If this sounds like an antiquated argument advanced only by wild Communist dreamers, we might remind ourselves that apparently civilised countries have sought to justify tortures, imprisonments, killings and intrusive surveillance in the same way in our own time, citing unspecified future threats to an unspecified number of people.

  Sartre, Beauvoir and (for now) Merleau-Ponty felt that they were being tougher and more honest than Camus, because they saw the need to get one’s hands dirty — that favourite phrase again. Of course, the stain was the blood of other people conveniently far away. But Sartre also insisted that he would sacrifice himself if need be. At a writers’ conference in Venice in 1956, the English poet Stephen Spender asked him what his wishes would be if he were wrongly persecuted and imprisoned by a Communist regime. Would he want his friends to campaign for his release, if that campaign damaged Communism’s credibility and jeopardised its future? Or would he accept his fate for the greater good? Sartre reflected for a moment, then said that he would refuse the campaign. Spender disliked this answer: ‘It seems to me that the only good cause has always been that of one person unjustly imprisoned,’ he said. That, retorted Sartre, is the crux of the drama; perhaps in the modern world ‘injustice against one person’ is no longer the point. It had taken Sartre a while to talk himself out of his compunctions about this shocking notion, but by the mid-1950s he was there.

  The imaginary scenario discusse
d by Sartre and Spender resembles the plot of Darkness at Noon, a novel by Arthur Koestler, an ex-Communist turned anti-Communist. The novel, published in English in 1940 and in French in 1946 as Le zéro et l’infini, was based on the case of Nikolai Bukharin, tried and executed during the Soviet purges in 1938. Koestler portrayed his fictionalised version as a man so loyal to the party that he signed a false confession and went voluntarily to his death for the good of the state. This was way too credulous as an interpretation of Bukharin’s real-life case, since his confession was produced under duress. But Koestler gave the intellectuals a story to quarrel over: just how far might a person go to defend Communism? He raised similar questions in his essay ‘The Yogi and the Commissar’, which contrasted the ‘commissar’ type, prepared to do anything for a remote ideal goal, with the ‘yogi’ type, who sticks to present realities.

  Merleau-Ponty, in the first flush of his commissar period, responded to Koestler’s essay with a two-part attack in Les Temps modernes entitled ‘The Yogi and the Proletarian’. He mainly used the rhetorical device sometimes known as ‘what-aboutery’: so the Soviet goal was flawed, but what about the many abuses of the West? What about capitalist greed, colonial repression, poverty and racism? What about the West’s pervasive violence, which was merely better disguised than its Communist equivalent?

  Koestler ignored Merleau-Ponty’s piece, but his friend Camus was enraged. According to Beauvoir, Camus stormed into a party one evening at Boris Vian’s, hurled invective at Merleau-Ponty, then stormed out again. Sartre ran after him. The scene ended in recriminations and resentment, and even Sartre and Camus fell out over it for a while, although on this occasion they made up.