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

  It was not just Sartrean existentialism that had this moral weight; for some Czechs and Slovaks it was phenomenology. The Czech phenomenological tradition went back to the country’s first modern president, Tomáš Masaryk, student of Brentano and protector of his archive. Husserl himself came from Moravia, and several of his colleagues had connections with the Czech lands. By the 1960s and 1970s, the high profile of phenomenology in Czechoslovakia was owed mostly to one of those Husserlians: Jan Patočka.

  Like many others, Patočka had been swept away by his first discovery of Husserl’s philosophy after hearing the great man speak in Paris in 1929. He arranged to transfer to Freiburg in 1933 — just as Sartre was going to Berlin — and became one of Husserl’s circle of favourites, as well as studying with Heidegger. Husserl even gave Patočka a desktop lectern that Masaryk had originally given to him, which, as Patočka wrote, made him feel anointed as heir to a tradition. He returned to Prague and did his best to make the university a centre of phenomenological research.

  When the Communist Party took over in 1948, Patočka was increasingly harassed by the authorities because his philosophy ran counter to Marxist theory. In 1972, he was forced out of active teaching at the university, and began holding private seminars at his home instead, working through texts in minute detail. His students got used to spending a whole evening on a few lines of Being and Time. He also gave lessons in Prague theatres to actors and writers — Václav Havel among them. Havel recalled how Patočka would bring texts alive for the group and encourage them to seek ‘the meaning of things’ and illumination ‘of one’s self, of one’s situation in the world’. He spoke of his own idea of the ‘solidarity of the shaken’, a bond which united everyone whose life had been jolted out of unthinking ‘everydayness’ by some historical upheaval. Such a bond could become a basis for rebellious action. Patočka’s phenomenology was dangerously political.

  In fact, one could say that Patočka was only revealing the subversive tendency that had always lurked in phenomenology. Husserl’s call to return to the ‘things themselves’ was a call to ignore ideologies such as Marxism. It was a summons to critical self-reliance, with all dogmas set aside in the epoché. One can even trace this anti-dogmatic spirit back to the young Franz Brentano, who refused to accept the infallibility of the Pope and was punished by losing his teaching post. Patočka refused to accept the infallibility of the Communist Party for very similar reasons. Brentano had passed the spirit of sceptical refusal to Husserl; Husserl had passed it to Patočka, and Patočka now passed it to Havel and many others.

  (Illustrations Credit 12.5)

  More directly, Patočka became an activist himself. In 1976, aged nearly seventy and in fragile health, he joined Havel and others in signing the famous declaration of political opposition known as Charter 77. It could almost have been called the Philosophers’ Charter: of its main representatives during the next thirteen years, almost a third (twelve out of thirty-eight) were either philosophers or former students of philosophy, many of them having studied with Patočka.

  The Czech state immediately set about persecuting the charter’s signatories. They brought Patočka in for questioning in Ruzynĕ Prison on a regular basis between January and March 1977. His interrogations were more gruelling than violent, but they would last all day, deliberately exhausting him and making no concessions to his frailties. Havel saw him once in the prisoners’ waiting room where they were left to sit before interrogations — a ritual designed to heighten anxiety. Seeming quite unconcerned, Patočka talked to him about philosophy.

  That same day, after interrogation, Havel was incarcerated. Patočka was freed, only to be called back again and again through subsequent months. Towards the end of this period, he wrote a ‘Political Testament’ in which he said, ‘What is needed is for people to behave at all times with dignity, not to allow themselves to be frightened and intimidated, and to speak the truth.’ It sounds so simple: again, that call to speak of things as they are, unadorned.

  One day early in March, Patočka was subjected to a particularly long interrogation, lasting eleven hours. He had recently angered the regime again by contacting the visiting Dutch foreign minister, Max van der Stoel, to seek his support for Charter 77. The day after this, Patočka collapsed. He was taken to hospital, where he died on 13 March 1977.

  The funeral, at the Břevnov cemetery in Prague, was attended by thousands of people. The authorities did not prevent its taking place, but they disrupted the event in every way possible. Ivan Klíma, who was present, recalled how they sent motorcyclists to rev their engines around a nearby track and helicopters to hover overhead, so the speeches at the graveside could not be heard. Police officers in attendance turned their backs to the grave. Others ostentatiously photographed faces in the crowd.

  The funeral was followed by another of those swashbuckling archive-smuggling operations that feature in the history of phenomenology. A group of former Patočka students and colleagues, led by Klaus Nellen and Ivan Chvatík together with the Polish philosopher Krzysztof Michałski, arranged for Western scholars and diplomats to sneak copies of his papers out of the country in relays, taking some each time they travelled to and from Prague. Bit by bit, the duplicate archive was reassembled in Vienna’s Institute for the Human Sciences, while the originals were hidden in Prague. Patočka’s memory is still preserved today by institutes in both cities. One scholar associated with the Viennese institution, Paul Ricœur, summed up his legacy thus: ‘The relentless persecution of this man proves that, in the event of a people’s extreme abjection, philosophical pleading for subjectivity is becoming the citizen’s only recourse against the tyrant.’

  This idea was also at the heart of a famous 1978 essay by Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, dedicated to Patočka’s memory. In an oppressive state, Havel wrote, people become co-opted in subtle ways. He gives an example: a greengrocer receives from his company’s head office a sign bearing the standard message, ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ He is supposed to put it in his window, and he does so, although he cares not a bean for its message — for he knows that all kinds of inconveniences may ensue if he does not. A customer who sees the notice doesn’t consciously think about it either; she has the same notice in her own office anyway. But does this mean that the sign is meaningless and harmless? No, says Havel. Each sign contributes to a world in which independence of thought and personal responsibility are quietly eaten away. The signs, in effect, emanate from the Heideggerian ‘they’, and they also help to keep it going. All over the country, even in the offices of the most senior figures, people simultaneously suffer from the system and perpetuate it, while telling themselves that none of it matters. It is a giant structure of bad faith and banality going all the way to the top. Everyone is ‘involved and enslaved’.

  For Havel, this is where the dissident must step in, to break the pattern. The rebel demands a return to the ‘here and now’, Havel says — to what Husserl would have called the things themselves. He conducts an epoché, in which the cant is set aside and each person sees what is in front of his or her eyes. Eventually, the result will be an ‘existential revolution’: people’s relationship to the ‘human order’ is overhauled and they can return to the authentic experience of things.

  A revolution did come in 1989; it brought Havel to power as the country’s first post-Communist president. He would not please everyone in this role, and the revolution was not as phenomenological or existential as he might have hoped. At least, few thought of it that way any longer. But there was certainly an overhaul. The phenomenological imperative to go straight to experienced reality may have had a more lasting impact here than Sartre’s more overt radicalism. Perhaps phenomenology, even more than existentialism, is the truly radical school of thought. Brentano, the original phenomenological rebel, would be entitled to feel proud of the long line of influence he had.

  13

  HAVING ONCE TASTED PHENOMENOLOGY

  In which there are departures.


  Forwards, always forwards! was the existentialist’s cry, but Heidegger had long since pointed out that no one goes forwards forever. In Being and Time, he depicted Dasein as finding authenticity in ‘Being-towards-death’, that is, in affirming mortality and limitation. He also set out to show that Being itself is not to be found on some eternal, changeless plane: it emerges through Time and through history. Thus, both on the cosmic level and in the lives of each one of us, all things are temporal and finite.

  This idea of Being or human existence as having an inbuilt expiry date never sat so well with Sartre. He accepted it in principle, but everything in his personality revolted against being hemmed in by anything at all, least of all by death. As he wrote in Being and Nothingness, death is an outrage that comes to me from outside and wipes out my projects. Death cannot be prepared for, or made my own; it’s not something to be resolute about, nor something to be incorporated and tamed. It is not one of my possibilities but ‘the possibility that there are for me no longer any possibilities’. Beauvoir wrote a novel pointing out that immortality would be unbearable (All Men Are Mortal), but she too saw death as an alien intruder. In A Very Easy Death, her 1964 account of her mother’s last illness, she showed how death came to her mother ‘from elsewhere, strange and inhuman’. For Beauvoir, one cannot have a relationship with death, only with life.

  The British philosopher Richard Wollheim put all this another way. Death, he wrote, is the great enemy not merely because it deprives us of all the future things we might do, and all the pleasures we might experience. It takes away the ability to experience anything at all, ever. It puts an end to our being a Heideggerian clearing for things to emerge into. Thus, as Wollheim says, ‘It deprives us of phenomenology, and, having once tasted phenomenology, we develop a longing for it which we cannot give up.’ Having had experience of the world, having had intentionality, we want to continue it forever, because that experience of the world is what we are.

  Unfortunately, this is the deal we get. We can taste phenomenology only because, one day, it will be taken from us. We clear our space, then the forest reclaims it again. The only consolation is to have had the beauty of seeing light through the leaves at all: to have had something, rather than nothing.

  Some of the most likeable people to have made their appearance in the sparkling, tinkling, bustling and quarrelsome existentialist café of our story were also the first to leave it.

  Boris Vian was only thirty-nine when he died, on 23 June 1959, of a heart attack, which came while he was in a cinema attending a preview of a film based on his novel I Spit on Your Graves. He disliked the film and was just voicing a protest from his seat when he collapsed. He died on the way to the hospital.

  Just over six months later, on 4 January 1960, Albert Camus was killed in a car crash with his publisher Michel Gallimard, who was driving. The car smashed into one tree and then another, twisting itself round and scattering most of its metal to one side of the tree, its engine to the other, and Camus through a rear window. In the mud a short distance away, a briefcase was found, inside which were Camus’ journal and the unfinished manuscript of The First Man, his autobiographical novel about his childhood in Algeria.

  Beauvoir heard the news about Camus from Claude Lanzmann, who phoned her at Sartre’s apartment. She put down the phone, shaking, and told herself not to be upset. Come now, she said to herself: you are not even close to Camus any more. Then she looked out of Sartre’s window, watching the sun set over the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church, unable either to weep properly or to feel better. What she mourned, she decided, was not the forty-six-year-old Camus who had just died, but the young freedom fighter of the war years — the friend they had lost long ago. Sartre felt this way too: for both of them, the true Camus was that of the Resistance and The Stranger, not the later one. They never forgave him for his political views, but Sartre wrote a generous obituary in France-Observateur. He summed Camus up as an heir to the great tradition of French moralistes, an untranslatable word which implies both a moralist in the English sense and a curious observer of human behaviour and character. He was, said Sartre, a man whose ‘stubborn humanism, narrow and pure, austere and sensual, waged a dubious battle against events of these times’. When Beauvoir was interviewed by Studs Terkel for American radio in the same year, she concluded that Camus was an ethical thinker rather than a political one — but she admitted that young people could learn from both approaches.

  Another untimely death occurred that year. In Paris, Richard Wright suffered a fatal heart attack on 28 November 1960, aged fifty-two. Some of his friends, as well as his daughter, wondered whether he had been assassinated by the CIA: a mysterious woman had been seen leaving his room not long before his final collapse. The US government had indeed continued to harass and obstruct him for years. But Wright had been in poor health ever since a bout of amoebic dysentery in 1957, which left him with liver problems. These were not helped by his taking bismuth salts, which were supposed to be an alternative cure but instead gave him metal poisoning.

  Although Wright had written little fiction in recent years, he had continued to write essays and polemics, and had also developed a love of Japanese haiku. Among his late works is a sequence of beautiful small poems about peach trees, snails, spring rain, storm clouds, snow, chickens that look smaller after being soaked by rain — and a tiny green cocklebur, caught in the curls of a black boy’s hair.

  A year later, on 3 May 1961, the fifty-three-year old Merleau-Ponty, looking as slim and fit as ever, died of a heart attack. He had been with friends in his family apartment on the boulevard Saint-Michel. They chatted for a while, then Merleau-Ponty left them talking in the living room while he went into his study to finish some notes for a lecture on Descartes the next day. He never came back.

  Again, Sartre found himself writing an obituary of a friend with whom he had fallen out, this time in a special issue of Les Temps modernes. Again, his obituary was thoughtful and generous, and it became the source of much of what we know about their friendship and disagreements. He mentioned that he and Merleau-Ponty had bumped into each other a short time earlier, when Sartre was giving a talk at the École normale supérieure. Sartre was touched that Merleau-Ponty had come to hear him, and afterwards hoped that they would keep in contact. But Sartre’s own reactions were slowed (he was groggy with a case of flu, he said) and Merleau-Ponty was taken aback; ‘he hadn’t said a word about feeling disappointed, but for a split second, it crossed my mind that his face had saddened.’ Sartre felt optimistic all the same: ‘ “Everything is just as it was,” I told myself. “Everything will begin anew.” ’ A few days later, he heard that Merleau-Ponty was dead.

  Merleau-Ponty’s body lies in his family grave in Père-Lachaise cemetery, together with his mother and his wife Suzanne, who died in 2010. It is on the other side of Paris from Montparnasse, where Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s grave is. Merleau-Ponty can be found in one of the cemetery’s quietest and least frequented corners, surrounded by trees.

  One philosopher who had expected to die of a heart attack at a young age, but did not, was Karl Jaspers. On marrying, he had warned Gertrud that they could not expect long together, perhaps a year or so. In fact, he lived to eighty-six, and died on 26 February 1969 — Gertrud’s birthday. Heidegger sent her a telegram afterwards with the simple words: ‘In remembrance of earlier years, in honor and sympathy.’ She wrote back on the same day, ‘Thinking likewise of the earlier years, I thank you.’ She lived until 1974.

  Perhaps the best way to mark Karl Jaspers’ passing is to revisit a radio talk he gave about his life, as part of a series in 1966–7. He spoke of his childhood by the North Sea, and especially about holidays with his parents in the Friesian islands. On the island of Norderney one evening, his father took his hand as they walked to the water’s edge. ‘The tide was out, our path across the fresh, clean sand was amazing, unforgettable for me, always further, always further, the water was so low, and we came to the water, there
lay the jellyfish, the starfish — I was bewitched,’ said Jaspers. From then on, the sea always made him think of the scope of life itself, with nothing firm or whole, and everything in perpetual motion. ‘All that is solid, all that is gloriously ordered, having a home, being sheltered: absolutely necessary! But the fact that there is this other, the infinity of the ocean — that liberates us.’ This, Jaspers went on, was what philosophy meant to him. It meant going beyond what was solid and motionless, towards that larger seascape where everything was in motion, with ‘no ground anywhere’. It was why philosophy had always, for him, meant a ‘different thinking’.

  Seven months after the death of Jaspers came that of another philosopher who had written about human life as a constant journey beyond the familiar: Gabriel Marcel, who died on 8 October 1973. For him, as for Jaspers, human beings were essentially vagabonds. We can never own anything, and we never truly settle anywhere, even if we stay in one place all our lives. As the title of one of his essay collections has it, we are always Homo viator — Man the Traveller.

  Hannah Arendt died of a heart attack on 4 December 1975, aged sixty-nine, leaving a manuscript of Sartrean dimensions which her friend Mary McCarthy edited for posthumous publication as The Life of the Mind. Arendt never quite resolved the puzzle of Heidegger. Sometimes she condemned her former lover and tutor; at other times she worked to rehabilitate his reputation or to help people understand him. She met him a few times when she visited Europe, and tried (but failed) to help him and Elfride sell the manuscript of Being and Time in America to raise cash. Elements of his work always remained central to her own philosophy.