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

  She was buried next to Sartre in Montparnasse cemetery. As had happened with him, her body was put in a smaller coffin inside a large one so that it could be taken for cremation later. Thousands of people watched the hearse process through the streets, piled high with flowers as Sartre’s had been. It was a less grand occasion than Sartre’s, but the throng of mourners was still large enough to create an obstruction at the cemetery entrance. Guards shut the gates, fearing that too many people would crowd in; some climbed over the barriers and wall. Inside, at the graveside, Lanzmann read a passage from the last pages of her third volume of autobiography, Force of Circumstance, reflecting on death, life and loss. She had written:

  I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There wasn’t much she didn’t see! But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and its randomness — the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomblé in Bahía, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I’ve talked about, others I have left unspoken — there is no place where it will all live again.

  At the time she wrote this summing-up, before signing off the book in March 1963, she still had twenty-three years of life to go. Beauvoir was rather given to these premature valedictory reflections. They fill her study Old Age in 1970, as well as the 1972 volume of her autobiography that really did turn out to be the last: All Said and Done.

  Yet these books, ever more tinged with melancholy, also show her resplendent talent for marvelling at life. In Old Age, she writes of gazing at a picture of herself wearing ‘one of those cloche hats and a roll collar’ on the Champs-Elysées in 1929, and feeling amazed at how things that once seemed natural can now look so unfamiliar. In All Said and Done, she describes waking after an afternoon nap and feeling ‘childish amazement — why am I myself?’ Every detail of an individual is unlikely — why did that particular sperm meet that particular egg? Why was she born female? So many things could have been different: ‘I might not have met Sartre; anything at all might have happened.’

  Any piece of information that a biographer can discover about a person, she adds, is a trifle compared to the rich confusion of that person’s real life, with its web of relationships and its countless elements of experience. Moreover, each of these elements means something different depending on perspective: a simple statement such as ‘I was born in Paris’ has a different meaning for each Parisian, depending on his or her background and precise situation. Out of this elaborate perspectival network, a shared reality is woven. No one will ever make sense of this mystery, she says.

  The longest-lived of our main dramatis personae here was Emmanuel Levinas, who died on 25 December 1995, some three weeks short of his ninetieth birthday. The span of his life covers most of the story of modern phenomenology, from his first discovery of Husserl in 1928 to his own late career — in which he took philosophy into such arcane territory that even his fans found him hard to understand. He became increasingly interested in traditional Jewish scholarship and the exegesis of biblical texts, as well as continuing to work on ethics and relationships with the Other.

  Levinas’ ideas were an influence on Benny Lévy, which may be why Hope Now is filled with ideas that sound Levinasian. If true, this is another of those intriguing sidelong contacts between Levinas and Sartre. They barely knew each other, and their ideas were often radically different, yet their paths crossed at significant points. Almost half a century earlier, Sartre had bought Levinas’ book in Paris after the conversation about apricot cocktails in the Bec-de-Gaz bar. Then, in the mid-1930s, they both produced remarkably similar writings about nausea and being. Now, through Lévy, their ideas were brought into unexpected proximity again — perhaps without either one acknowledging or reflecting on the fact.

  The English ‘new existentialist’ Colin Wilson lived until 5 December 2013, angry to the end, but retaining the loyalty of the many international readers who had been excited and enlightened by his books. One can leave worse legacies in the world.

  He outlived two other great communicators: Hazel Barnes, Sartre’s translator, who died on 18 March 2008, and Iris Murdoch, who had given English readers their first taste of existentialism.

  Murdoch died on 8 February 1999, after living several years with Alzheimer’s disease; her last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, shows signs of emerging symptoms. Around the time she was working on it, she decided to abandon a philosophical book called ‘Heidegger: the pursuit of Being’, on which she’d been engaged for six years. Typescript and manuscript versions remain, as disconnected assemblies of chapters of which just a few parts have been published posthumously.

  Heidegger seems to have been an enigma to her, as he was to many others. No doubt she was intrigued by him as a person; many of her novels revolve around charismatic, sometimes dangerous guru types. More importantly, his philosophy kept her attention long after she had turned away from Sartre. She was particularly taken by the Heideggerian image of the mind as a clearing in the forest, which she found beautiful (as do I).

  In Jackson’s Dilemma, her character Benet is also writing a book on Heidegger, and like Murdoch herself he is struggling with the project. He wonders whether the difficulty comes from not being able to decide what he really thinks of Heidegger. Some aspects are attractive while others repel him: the Nazism, the appropriation of Hölderlin, and the relentless ‘poeticisation of philosophy, discarding truth, goodness, freedom, love, the individual, everything which the philosopher ought to explain and defend’. He questions whether he is ‘fascinated by a certain dangerous aspect of Heidegger which was in fact so deeply buried in his own, Benet’s, soul that he could not scrutinise or even dislodge it’. What is it that he thinks about when he thinks about Heidegger? Later, reading through his Heidegger notes again, he says, ‘I am small and I do not understand.’

  A lifelong Murdoch fan, I had previously avoided Jackson’s Dilemma, expecting it to be a sad read because of the signs of illness. Coming to it now, I was astounded to find such an uncannily recognisable description of how I myself felt about Heidegger. Indeed, I found the whole book moving and thought-provoking. In this last novel, Murdoch gives us a glimpse into what it is like to be a mind (or a Dasein) that is losing coherence and connection, yet retains both the ability to put its experience into words and the fierce desire to do so — to the limits of human capability. It is the phenomenological desire shared by Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and everyone in this book, including even Heidegger himself.

  In the last scene of Jackson’s Dilemma, the title character, Benet’s servant Jackson, sits on a grassy bank by a bridge over a river, watching a spider building a web between blades of grass. As if merging with Benet, he too has been overtaken by the sense that everything is slipping away. Sometimes, he says, he feels a shift, or loss of breath and memory. Has he simply misunderstood what is happening? Is it a dream? ‘At the end of what is necessary, I have come to a place where there is no road.’

  He stands up, but as he does, he feels something: it is the spider, walking on his hand. He helps the spider back to its web, goes down to the bridge, and crosses over the river.

  14

  THE IMPONDERABLE BLOOM

  In which we ponder bloom.

  The famous existentialists and phenomenologists are gone now, and several generations have grown up since the young Iris Murdoch discovered Sartre in 1945 and exclaimed, ‘The excitement — I remember nothing like it.’ It has become harder to rev
ive that initial thrill. We can still find a nostalgic romance in the black-and-white images of the pipe-puffing Sartre at his café table, the turbanned Beauvoir, and the brooding Camus with his collar turned up. But they will never again look as raw and dangerous as they used to.

  On the other hand, existentialist ideas and attitudes have embedded themselves so deeply into modern culture that we hardly think of them as existentialist at all. People (at least in relatively prosperous countries where more urgent needs don’t intervene) talk about anxiety, dishonesty and the fear of commitment. They worry about being in bad faith, even if they don’t use that term. They feel overwhelmed by the excess of consumer choice while also feeling less in control than ever. A vague longing for a more ‘real’ way of living leads some people to — for example — sign up for weekend retreats in which their smartphones are taken away like toys from children, so that they can spend two days walking in the country landscape and reconnecting with each other and with their forgotten selves.

  The unnamed object of desire here is authenticity. This theme also haunts modern entertainment, just as much as it did in the 1950s. Existential anxiety is more closely intertwined with technological anxiety than ever in films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the Wachowskis’ Matrix, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. Existentialist heroes of more traditional kinds, wrestling with meaning and decision, feature in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, Steven Knight’s Locke, and any number of Woody Allen films, including Irrational Man which takes its title from William Barrett’s book. In David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees of 2004, rival existential detectives battle over the difference between gloomy and positive visions of life. In another part of the forest, we find the ecstatic Heideggerian films of Terrence Malick, who did postgraduate research on Heidegger and translated some of his work before turning to film-making. All these divergent styles of film revolve around questions of human identity, purpose and freedom.

  Of these themes, freedom may prove to be the great puzzle for the early twenty-first century. In the previous century, I grew up naively assuming that I’d see a constant, steady increase in this nebulous stuff through my lifetime, both in personal choices and in politics. In some ways, this has come true. On the other hand, unforeseen by anyone, basic ideas about freedom have been assailed and disputed in radical ways, so that we are now unable to agree what it amounts to, what we need it for, how much of it can be allowed, how far it should be interpreted as the right to offend or transgress, and how much of it we are prepared to give away to remote corporate entities in exchange for comfort and convenience. What we cannot do any longer is take it for granted.

  Many of our uncertainties about freedom amount to uncertainties about our fundamental being. Science books and magazines bombard us with the news that we are out of control: that we amount to a mass of irrational but statistically predictable responses, veiled by the mere illusion of a conscious, governing mind. They tell us that, when we decide to sit down, to reach for a glass of water, to vote, or to choose whom we would save in the ‘trolley problem’, we are not really choosing at all but responding to tendencies and associations that are beyond the reach of both reason and will.

  Reading such accounts, one gets the impression that we take pleasure in this idea of ourselves as out-of-control mechanical dupes of our own biology and environment. We claim to find it disturbing, but we might actually be deriving a kind of reassurance from it — for such ideas let us off the hook. They save us from the existential anxiety that comes with considering ourselves free agents who are responsible for what we do. Sartre would call that bad faith. Moreover, recent research suggests that those who have been encouraged to think they are unfree are inclined to behave less ethically, again suggesting that we treat it as an alibi.

  So, do we really want to understand our lives and manage our futures as if we had neither real freedom nor a truly human foundation for our existence? Perhaps we need the existentialists more than we thought.

  Having argued myself to that point, I must immediately add that I do not think the existentialists offer some simple magic solution for the modern world. As individuals and philosophers, they were hopelessly flawed. Each one’s thought featured some major aspect that should make us uncomfortable. This is partly because they were complex and troubled beings, as most of us are. It is also because their ideas and lives were rooted in a dark, morally compromised century. The political turmoil and wild notions of their times marked them, just as our own twenty-first-century turmoil is now marking us.

  But that is one reason why the existentialists demand rereading. They remind us that human existence is difficult and that people often behave appallingly, yet they also show how great our possibilities are. They constantly repeat the questions about freedom and being that we constantly try to forget. We can explore the directions the existentialists indicate without needing to take them as exemplary personalities, or even as exemplary thinkers. They are interesting thinkers, which I believe makes them more worth our trouble.

  I first found them interesting thirty years ago, and I still do now — but for different reasons. Looking back at them has been a disorienting and stimulating experience, like seeing familiar faces in a fairground mirror. Some features I had barely noticed before have become more prominent, while others, which used to seem beautiful, have acquired a grotesque cast. Writing this book has brought me surprises all the way, not least with the two colossi of the story, Heidegger and Sartre.

  When I first read Heidegger in my early twenties, I fell under the Messkirch magician’s spell. My whole way of seeing the world was influenced by his raw amazement that there is something rather than nothing, by his way of looking at landscapes and buildings, by his notion of humans as a ‘clearing’ in which Being emerges into the light, and more.

  Reading Heidegger again, I feel the same gravitational pull. But even while I’m sliding back down into his dimly lit world of forest paths and tolling bells, I find myself struggling to get free, for reasons that have nothing — and everything — to do with his Nazism. There is something of the grave in this vegetative world. Give me the open sea of Jaspers, I now think, or the highways frequented by Marcel’s travellers, filled with human encounter and conversation. Heidegger once wrote that ‘To think is to confine yourself to a single thought’, but I now feel that this is the very opposite of what thinking ought to be. Thinking should be generous and have a good appetite. I find life far too valuable these days to shut out most of its variety in favour of digging down into the depths — and remaining down there, as Hannah Arendt described the Heideggerian method of inquiry.

  I also find myself thinking back to Arendt’s and Sartre’s observations about the uncanny absence in Heidegger where ‘character’ should be. Something is missing from his life and from his work. Iris Murdoch thought the missing thing was goodness, and therefore that his philosophy lacked an ethical centre or heart. Indeed, you can never say of Heidegger what Merleau-Ponty said of Sartre: ‘he is good’. One could call this missing element ‘humanity’, in several senses. Heidegger set himself against the philosophy of humanism, and he himself was rarely humane in his behaviour. He set no store by the individuality and detail of anyone’s life, least of all his own. It is no coincidence that, of all the philosophers in this book, Heidegger is the one who refused to see the point of biography. He opened an early lecture series on Aristotle by saying, ‘He was born at such and such a time, he worked, and he died’ — as though that were all one needed to know about a life. He insisted that his own life was uninteresting too: a view that would be convenient for him, if true. The result, despite Heidegger’s mythologising of home, is a philosophy that feels uninhabitable — to return again to Murdoch’s notion of ‘inhabited’ thought. Heidegger’s work is exhilarating, but in the end it is a philosophy in which I cannot find a place to live.

  (Illust
rations Credit 14.1)

  I have been surprised in a different way by the other giant in the field: Sartre — the writer who first tempted me into philosophy with Nausea. I knew he would be a powerful presence in my story, but I was surprised at how much I came to respect him, and even to like him.

  Of course, he was monstrous. He was self-indulgent, demanding, bad-tempered. He was a sex addict who didn’t even enjoy sex, a man who would walk away from friendships saying he felt no regret. He gave free rein to his obsessions with viscosity and gloopiness, and with the feeling that other people were looking at him and making judgements; he never seemed to worry that some readers might not share these idiosyncrasies. He defended a range of odious regimes, and made a cult of violence. He maintained that literature for its own sake is a bourgeois luxury, that writers must engage with the world, and that revising one’s writing is a waste of time — all of which I disagree with. I disagree with quite a lot in Sartre.

  But then there is that question of ‘character’ — and Sartre is full of character. He bursts out on all sides with energy, peculiarity, generosity and communicativeness. All of this is captured in an anecdote by the German historian Joachim Fest, who met him at a party in Berlin in the late 1940s. He describes how Sartre held court amid some thirty people who grilled him about his philosophy; in response, he rambled on about jazz and cinema and the novels of John Dos Passos. Someone who was present said afterwards that Sartre put him in mind of a South American peasant hacking through a jungle of phenomena, sending brightly coloured parrots flying up with their wings flashing in all directions. Fest remarked, ‘Everything that he said seemed to me to be noticeably well informed and yet disordered, in part also muddled, but always touching on our sense of the times. Everyone was impressed. If I sum up my responses, I learned through Sartre that a degree of muddle-headedness can be quite fascinating.’