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

  Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995): Lithuanian Jewish philosopher based mostly in France; studied with Husserl and Heidegger, then developed a very different post-existentialist philosophy based on ethics and the encounter with the Other. A short early book of his was Sartre’s first primer in phenomenology in 1933.

  Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009): French structuralist anthropologist; friend of Merleau-Ponty, but took issue with phenomenology and existentialism.

  Benny Lévy (1945–2003): Philosopher and activist; Sartre’s assistant and co-author of the controversial series of interviews, Hope Now (1980).

  Karl Löwith (1897–1973): German philosopher and historian of ideas who studied with Heidegger, and wrote memoirs of the experience.

  György Lukács (1885–1971): Hungarian Marxist, often critical of existentialism.

  Norman Mailer (1923–2007): American novelist and polemicist who intended to run for New York mayor as the ‘Existentialist Party’ candidate, but had to delay the campaign after stabbing his wife.

  Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973): French Christian existentialist philosopher and playwright.

  Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979): Philosopher and social theorist associated with the Frankfurt School; former student of Martin Heidegger who criticised him severely after the Second World War.

  Tomáš Masaryk (1850–1937): Served four terms as president of Czechoslovakia after 1918; youthful friend of Husserl who also studied with Franz Brentano in Vienna, and later helped organise the rescue of his papers in Prague.

  Albert Memmi (1920–): Tunisian Jewish novelist, essayist and postcolonial social theorist; author of The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957), a double work for which Sartre wrote a foreword.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961): French phenomenologist and essayist specialising in questions of the body, perception, childhood development and relations with others; author of The Phenomenology of Perception and other works, including polemical essays written at different stages of his life, that argued for and against Communism.

  Max Müller (1906–1994): German Catholic philosopher who studied with Heidegger in Freiburg and later became a professor there himself; he wrote an account of how Heidegger failed to protect him when he was in trouble with the Nazi regime in 1937.

  Iris Murdoch (1919–1999): Anglo-Irish philosopher and novelist, an early writer on Sartre and existentialism who later turned away from it, although she worked on a study of Heidegger towards the end of her life.

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900): German proto-existentialist philologist, aphorist and philosopher, influential on the later existentialists.

  Paul Nizan (1905–1940): French Marxist novelist and philosopher, boyhood friend of Sartre; killed in battle during the German invasion of France.

  Jan Patočka (1907–1977): Czech phenomenologist and political theorist who studied with Husserl and in turn taught many others in Prague, including Václav Havel; one of the key signatories of the dissident Charter 77, he was fatally persecuted for this by the regime.

  Jean Paulhan (1884–1968): French writer and critic who left small anti-collaborationist poems around Paris during the Second World War. One of the co-founders of Les Temps modernes in 1945, he was more noted as long-term director of the Nouvelle revue française.

  Heinrich Wiegand Petzet (1909–1997): German writer, the son of a shipping magnate and a friend of Heidegger who wrote a detailed memoir of the relationship in 1983, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger.

  Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980): Leading French existentialist philosopher, novelist, biographer, playwright, essayist, memoirist and political activist.

  Stephen Spender (1909–1995): English socialist poet and diarist; travelled widely in Europe after the war, and took issue with Sartre on the question of political engagement.

  Edith Stein (1891–1942): Philosopher born in Wrocław in Poland; worked as Husserl’s assistant before leaving to complete her study of the phenomenology of empathy, and then to convert from Judaism to Catholicism and take orders as a Carmelite nun; she died in Auschwitz.

  Olivier Todd (1929–): French biographer, memoirist and journalist, a friend of Sartre and biographer of Camus.

  Frédéric de Towarnicki (1920–2008): Austrian-born French translator and journalist who visited Heidegger on several occasions in the 1940s and wrote accounts of their conversations.

  Herman Leo Van Breda (1911–1974): Franciscan monk and philosopher who heroically organised the rescue of Husserl’s archives and manuscripts from Freiburg in 1938, and then founded and managed the Husserl Archives in Louvain for many years.

  Boris Vian (1920–1959): French jazz trumpeter, singer, novelist and cocktail mixer; a central figure in the post-war Saint-Germain-des-Prés scene and a friend of the existentialists. He affectionately mocked Sartre and Beauvoir in his novel L’écume des jours or Mood Indigo in 1947.

  Michelle Vian, née Léglise (1920–): First wife of Boris Vian, also a part of the Sartre circle for many years.

  Simone Weil (1909–1943): French ethical philosopher and political activist; died in England during the Second World War after refusing to eat or accept any physical comforts while others were suffering.

  Colin Wilson (1931–2013): English novelist and author of popular works of ‘new existentialist’ philosophy and cultural history, notably The Outsider (1956).

  Wols (Alfredo Otto Wolfgang Schulze) (1913–1951): German painter and photographer mostly based in France and friends with some of the existentialist circle; died prematurely of illness related to alcoholism.

  Richard Wright (1908–1960): American writer who lived for many years in Paris; author of works including The Outsider (1953), an existentialist novel of black American life.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book would still be a heap of nothingness without the generous encouragement, advice and help of friends and experts, not to mention experts who have also become friends. To everyone involved: a heartfelt thank you.

  Above all, this means people who read the manuscript in whole or in part, and who pointed me in new directions and/or saved me from disasters (although they are innocent of any disasters that remain): Jay Bernstein, Ivan Chvatík, George Cotkin, Robert Fraser, Peter Moore, Nigel Warburton, Jonathan Webber, Martin Woessner and Robert Zaretsky. I’m grateful not only for the reading, but for the many enjoyable and thought-provoking conversations along the way.

  Thank you also to others who helped in crucial ways through friendly conversation, good advice, or both: Peter Atterton, Antony Beevor, Robert Bernasconi, Costica Bradatan, Artemis Cooper, Anthony Gottlieb, Ronald Hayman, Jim Holt, James Miller, Sarah Richmond, Adam Sharr and Marci Shore.

  Of all these, I’m particularly grateful to Robert Bernasconi and Jay Bernstein for having inspired me to study philosophy in the first place. I was incredibly lucky, back in the 1980s, to happen across the adventurous cross-disciplinary programme they helped to create at the University of Essex.

  Very warm thanks go to Marianne Merleau-Ponty, who generously shared with me her memories of her father.

  I wrote part of this book during a stay as Writer in Residence at the New York Institute of Humanities at NYU, and I am grateful to the institute and to Eric Banks and Stephanie Steiker for their hospitality and friendship during a wonderful, productive two months.

  Much of the rest of the writing was done in the British Library, London Library, Bodleian Library and the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris; thank you to all those institutions and their staff. Thank you to Thomas Vongehr and Ullrich Melle at the Institute of Philosophy / Husserl Archives in Louvain, Belgium. Thank you to Ludger Hagedorn and (again) Ivan Chvatík of the CTS / Jan Patočka Archives. Thank you to Katie Giles at the University of Kingston for help with the Iris Murdoch Archives, and to Dan Mitchell at University College, London for help with the George Orwell Archives.

  For insightful editing, friendship and more valuable advice than ever, I thank Jenny Uglow, who helped me
look for a tree trunk amid the twigs. I am grateful to Clara Farmer and all at Chatto & Windus, but especially to Parisa Ebrahimi, who has guided me through publication with clarity and grace. Thank you to my copy editor David Milner, and to Simone Massoni for the Chatto cover. Thank you to Anne Collins at Penguin Random House, Canada. In the US, thank you especially to my inimitable and life-enhancing publisher Judith Gurewich, especially for the sunny days’ work in Boston, to my copy editor Yvonne Cárdenas and all at Other Press, and to Andreas Gurewich for the cover.

  I am grateful for the constant support and wisdom of my agent Zoë Waldie and everyone else at Rogers, Coleridge & White. Thank you also to Melanie Jackson in New York, and to everyone who has helped with publication elsewhere.

  Finally, two more thank yous: one to my parents, Jane and Ray Bakewell, to whom this book is dedicated because they encouraged me to follow whatever I was curious about in life (and because they endured my ‘teenage existentialist’ years). The other is, as always, to Simonetta Ficai-Veltroni, who has stuck with me phenomenology and all, and that’s just the beginning of it.

  NOTES

  Publication details not given here can be found in the Select Bibliography. Where reference is not to a translated edition of a work, any translations are mine.

  Abbreviations

  ASAD: Beauvoir, All Said and Done.

  BN: Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Barnes translation).

  BT: Heidegger, Being and Time (Macquarrie & Robinson translation). References are to this followed by original German edition.

  FOC: Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance.

  GA: Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe.

  MDD: Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.

  PP: Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Landes translation). References are to this followed by French edition of 2005.

  POL: Beauvoir, The Prime of Life.

  Chapter 1: Sir, What a Horror, Existentialism!

  1 Existentialist pedigree: Walter Kaufmann’s 1956 book Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre took the story back to St. Augustine; Maurice Friedman’s The Worlds of Existentialism (New York: Random House, 1964) took it to Job, Ecclesiastes and Heraclitus.

  2 Cocktails: Sartre later thought they were drinking beer, but his memory was unreliable by that stage: Sartre By Himself, 25–6. Beauvoir said it was apricot cocktails: POL, 135, from which most of the ensuing account comes.

  3 ‘To the things themselves!’: Husserl, Logical Investigations, I, 252. It is partly down to Heidegger that this remark became a slogan, as Heidegger calls it the ‘maxim’ of phenomenology: BT, 50/27–8.

  4 ‘Since we could not understand’: POL, 79. For speculation about other previous encounters, see Stephen Light, Shūzō Kuki and Jean-Paul Sartre (Carbondale & Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), 3–4, with Rybalka’s introduction, xi.

  5 ‘Destructive philosophy’: Sartre’s ‘La légende de la vérité’, Bifur, 8 (June 1931), had a byline describing him as ‘at work on a volume of destructive philosophy’. See also POL, 79; Hayman, Writing Against, 85.

  6 ‘I can tell you’: Sartre By Himself, 26.

  7 John Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, in The Complete Poems (ed. John Barnard), 3rd edn (London: Penguin, 1988), 72. Sartre was reading Levinas, La théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Alcan, 1930); later edn translated by A. Orianne as The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995).

  8 Dockers, monks, etc.: MDD, 341.

  9 ‘Existence precedes essence’: Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, 27.

  10 King and queen: FOC, 98.

  11 ‘Women swooned’: ‘Existentialism’, Time (28 Jan. 1946), 16–17. On the lecture, see George Myerson, Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism: a beginner’s guide (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002), xii–xiv, and Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 249–52.

  12 ‘Trolley problem’: for more, see David Edmunds, Would You Kill the Fat Man? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

  13 Student story: Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, 39–43. There are similarities with the situation of his friend and former pupil, Jacques-Laurent Bost, who sought Sartre’s opinion in 1937 about going to fight in the Spanish Civil War: see Thompson, Sartre, 36. In his novel The Reprieve, Sartre lent a similar dilemma to his character Boris, based on Bost.

  14 ‘There is no traced-out path’: Sartre, interview with C. Grisoli, in The Last Chance: Roads of Freedom IV, 15 (originally published in Paru, 13 Dec. 1945).

  15 Sartre on Hiroshima: Sartre, ‘The End of the War’, in The Aftermath of War (Situations III), 65–75, this 65.

  16 Index: J. M. De Bujanda, Index des livres interdits, XI: Index librorum prohibitorum (Geneva: Droz, 2002) lists Sartre’s opera omnia, 808 (Decr. S. Off. 27-10-1948), and Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe and Les Mandarins, 116 (Decr. 27-06-1956). See Thompson, Sartre, 78.

  17 ‘Sickening mixture’: Les nouvelles littéraires, quoted in ‘Existentialism’, Time (28 Jan. 1946), 16–17, this 17.

  18 ‘If you were twenty’: Cazalis, Les mémoires d’une Anne, 84.

  19 ‘Sir, what a horror!’: Marcel, ‘An Autobiographical Essay’, 48.

  20 Private room: POL, 534. Enjoying the bustle of cafés: Contat & Rybalka (eds), The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, I: 149, quoting Roger Troisfontaines, Le choix de Jean-Paul Sartre, 2nd edn, (Paris: Aubier, 1946), which in turn quotes remarks made by Sartre in Brussels, 23 Oct. 1945.

  21 ‘So long as they were interesting’: Grégoire Leménager, ‘Ma vie avec Boris Vian (par Michelle Vian)’, Le nouvel observateur (27 Oct. 2011).

  22 ‘Drowning victim’ and ‘shredded and tattered shirt’: Michelle Vian, Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, 46, 48, quoting Pierre Drouin, ‘Tempète très parisienne’, Le Monde (16–17, May 1948), and Robert de Thomasson, Opéra (Oct. 1947) respectively. Long hair: Gréco, Je suis faite comme ça, 81. Turban: POL, 504; also see Beauvoir, Wartime Diary, 166 (22 Nov. 1939). You can see the ‘look’ in the Lorientais jazz-club scenes in Jacques Becker’s excellent 1949 film, Rendezvous de juillet.

  23 Wols: FOC, 248–9.

  24 Camembert: Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 262.

  25 Singing: MDD, 335. Donald Duck: POL, 324.

  26 Sartre’s face: Aron, Memoirs, 23; Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit, tr. Derek Coltman (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1971), 45–6; Sartre, ‘The Paintings of Giacometti’, in Situations [IV], 175–92, this 184.

  27 Légion d’honneur and Académie française: John Gerassi, ‘The Second Death of Jean-Paul Sartre’, in W. L. McBride (ed.), Sartre’s Life, Times and Vision du Monde (New York & London: Garland, 1997), 217–23, this 218. Beauvoir was offered the Légion d’honneur and rejected it in 1982: Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, 606.

  28 ‘My life and my philosophy’: Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 142 (citing Sartre’s diary, 15 Jan. 1940).

  29 Two million words: M. Scriven, Sartre’s Existential Biographies (London: Macmillan, 1984), 1.

  30 Concluding Unscientific Postscript: The full Danish title is Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift til de philosophiske Smuler. Mimisk-pathetisk-dialektisk Sammenskrift, Existentielt Indlæg.

  31 ‘One was always being pushed’: Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, 313.

  32 Horse and passion: Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 261.

  33 ‘Abstraction is disinterested’: ibid., 262.

  34 Descartes: ibid., 265–6.

  35 ‘Anxiety’: Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 61.

  36 Bus stop: Sartre By Himself, 16.

  37 ‘A kind of involuntary’: Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003), 37 (part 1, s. 6).

  38 King: ‘Martin Luther King Jr. Traces His Pilgrimage to Nonviolence’, in Arthur and Lila Weinburg (eds), Instead of Violence (New York: Grossman, 1963), 71. He read Sartre, Jaspers, Heidegger and others, as well as Paul Tillich, American existentialist theologian. Se
e also: Eugene Wolters, ‘The Influence of Existentialism on Martin Luther King, Jr.’, Critical Theory (8 Feb. 2015), which refers to King’s essay ‘Pilgrimage to Nonviolence’ and his notes in the King Archive.

  39 Slogans: listed on https://​libcom.​org/​history/​slogans-​68.

  40 Demanded freedom: Sartre, ‘Self-Portrait at Seventy’, in Sartre in the Seventies (Situations X), 3–92, this 52.

  41 Sorbonne: Marguerite Duras muttered, ‘I’m fed up with the star system,’ according to Beauvoir. See ASAD, 460–62, and Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 462.

  42 Funeral: ‘Enterrement de Sartre’ on YouTube: https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=C9UoHWWd214. See Hayman, Writing Against, 439; Cohen-Solal, Sartre, 522–3; Lévy, Sartre, 2.

  43 Lanzmann: quoted in Ursula Tidd, Simone de Beauvoir (London: Routledge, 2003), 160.

  44 Chestnut tree: Sartre, Nausea, 183–4.

  45 ‘Shop-girl metaphysics’ (‘une sorte de métaphysique pour midinette’): Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, tr. J. & D. Weightman (London: Penguin, 1978), 71, and in French, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955), 63. ‘To dissolve man’: Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966), 247.

  46 ‘A sense of freedom’: Michel Contat, interviewed for the BBC series Human, All Too Human (1999), episode 3: ‘Jean-Paul Sartre: the road to freedom’.

  47 ‘Life becomes ideas’ and ‘A discussion’: Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and Invisible, 119.

  48 ‘Inhabited philosophy’: Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London & New York: RKP, 2014), 46.

  49 Label: FOC, 46.

  Chapter 2: To the Things Themselves

  1 Population and hikers’ outfits in 1930s Freiburg: Martin S. Briggs, Freiburg and the Black Forest (London: John Miles, 1936), 21, 31.

  2 ‘The City of Phenomenology’ and ‘For the young Germans’: Levinas, ‘Freiburg, Husserl, and Phenomenology’, in Discovering Existence with Husserl, 32–46, this 32, 37. For Levinas’ own discovery story, see interview in Raoul Mortley, French Philosophers in Conversation (London & New York: Routledge, 1991), 11–23, this 11.