At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

by Sarah Bakewell

Camus asks: if life is revealed to be as futile as the labour of Sisyphus, how should we respond?

Like Sartre in Nausea, he points out that mostly we don’t see the fundamental problem of life because we don’t stop to think about it. We get up, commute, work, eat, work, commute, sleep.

At such moments, we experience ‘weariness tinged with amazement’, as we confront the most basic question of all: why exactly do we go on living?

Camus thought similarly basic collapses in everyday projects allow us to ask the biggest question in life.

for Camus, we must decide whether to give up or keep going. If we keep going, it must be on the basis of accepting that there is no ultimate meaning to what we do.

What astounds Kierkegaard is neither the obedience nor the reprieve, but the way in which Abraham and Isaac seem able to return to the way things were before.

Much as they liked Camus personally, neither Sartre nor Beauvoir accepted his vision of absurdity. For them, life is not absurd, even when viewed on a cosmic scale, and nothing can be gained by saying it is. Life for them is full of real meaning, although that meaning emerges differently for each of us.

For Sartre, the awakened individual is neither Roquentin, fixating on objects in cafés and parks, nor Sisyphus, rolling a stone up the mountainside with the bogus cheerfulness of Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence. It is a person who is engaged in doing something purposeful, in the full confidence that it means something. It is the person who is truly free.

most of us are in bad faith most of the time, because that way life is liveable.

For Sartre, we show bad faith whenever we portray ourselves as passive creations of our race, class, job, history, nation, family, heredity, childhood influences, events, or even hidden drives in our subconscious which we claim are out of our control.

I am always in some sort of pre-existing ‘situation’, out of which I must act. I actually need these ‘situations’, or what Sartre calls ‘facticity’, in order to act meaningfully at all.

Freedom does not mean entirely unconstrained movement, and it certainly does not mean acting randomly.

If I am about to die, I can decide how to face that death.

She, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and other friends produced so much writing so quickly that they got together to launch a new cultural journal in 1945: Les Temps modernes.

the philosophers he had studied in college could have little to offer the post-war world. It would be a new reality, so new philosophers would be needed. And here they were.

Written in the context of the Nuremberg trials, this discussed the awkward question of how Germans should come to terms with their past and move towards the future.

For Jaspers, the outcome of the various trials and denazification inquests was less important than the need for a change of heart in the Germans themselves, beginning with full acknowledgement of responsibility for what had happened, rather than turning away or making excuses as he felt many people were doing.

Every German, he wrote, must ask the question ‘h...

He told Heidegger that he regretted not having been stronger in the past – not having forced him to give a proper account of himself.

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.

Beauvoir’s guiding principle was that growing up female made a bigger difference to a person than most people realised, including women themselves.

Women’s everyday experiences and their Being-in-the-world diverged from men’s so early in life that few thought of them as being developmental at all; people assumed the differences to be ‘natural’ expressions of femininity.

In Beauvoir’s usage, a myth is something like Husserl’s notion of the encrusted theories which accumulate on phenomena, and which need scraping off in order to get to the ‘things themselves’.

Growing older, the girl learns to behave modestly and decorously. Boys run, seize, climb, grasp, punch; they literally grab hold of the physical world and wrestle with it.

Girls wear pretty dresses and dare not run in case they get dirty. Later, they wear high heels, corsets and skirts; they grow long fingernails which they have to worry about breaking.

They learn, in countless small ways, to hesitate about damaging their delicate persons i...

Even if young women enjoy sex, female sexual pleasure can be more overwhelming, and thus more disturbing, says Beauvoir.

Beauvoir sees every element of women’s situation as conspiring to box them in to mediocrity, not because they are innately inferior, but because they learn to become inward-looking, passive, self-doubting and overeager to please.

Beauvoir finds most female writers disappointing because they do not seize hold of the human condition; they do not take it up as their own.

Both sexes tend to agree in taking the male as the defining case and the centre of all perspectives.

Women try constantly to picture themselves as they would look to a male gaze. Instead of looking out to the world as it presents itself to them (like the person peering through the keyhole) they maintain a point of view in which they are the objects (like the same person after becoming aware of footsteps in the hall).

Yet she sees herself as the object of attraction, and the man as the person in whose eyes she glows with desirability.

Women, in other words, live much of their lives in what Sartre would have called bad faith, pretending to be objects.

A struggle rages inside every woman, and because of this Beauvoir considered the problem of how to be a woman the existentialist problem par excellence.

She showed how choices, influences and habits can accumulate over a lifetime to create a structure that becomes hard to break out of.

She gave full weight to the difficulty of breaking out of such situations – although she never doubted that we remain existentially free despite it all. Women can change their lives, which is why it is worth writing books to awaken them to this fact.

He turned the title of the second part, ‘L’expérience vécue’ (‘lived experience’), into ‘Woman’s Life Today’ – which, as Toril Moi has observed, makes it sound like the title of a ladies’ magazine. To make matters more confusing and further demean the book, English-language paperback editions through the 1960s and 1970s tended to feature misty-focus naked women on the cover, making it look like a work of soft porn.

Sartre was just as interested as Beauvoir in seeing how existentialism could be applied to particular lives, and in his case it led him to biography.

but there is nothing conventional about Sartre’s biographies. He abandons standard chronology and instead looks for distinctive shapes and key moments on which a life turns – those moments in which a person makes a choice about some situation, and thus changes everything.

As Sartre interpreted it, the young Genet was frozen in the gaze of the Other: he became an object slapped with a despicable label. Instead of feeling abashed, Genet took that label and changed its meaning by asserting it as his own. You call me a thief? Very well, I’ll be a thief!

Animals may not be fully conscious – but perhaps humans are not either, and this may be what Sartre means by taking us to the border of dreams.

I am a psychological and historical structure. Along with existence, I received a way of existing, or a style. All of my actions and thoughts are related to this structure, and even a philosopher’s thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold upon the world, which is all he is. And yet, I am free, not in spite of or beneath these motivations, but rather by their means. For that meaningful life, that particular signification of nature and history that I am, does not restrict my access to the world; it is rather my means of communication with it.

The aspects of our existence that limit us, Merleau-Ponty says, are the very same ones that bind us to the world and give us scope for action and perception. They make us what we are.

What happens when we pick up a cup in a café, or sip our cocktail while listening to the hubbub around us?

Phenomena come to us already shaped by the interpretations, meanings and expectations with which we are going to grasp them, based on previous experience and the general context of the encounter.

We fall for optical illusions because we once learned to see the world in terms of shapes, objects and things relevant to our own interests.

My own body is not an object like others; it is me.

If I sit down with my knitting, says Merleau-Ponty, I might have to hunt for my knitting needles but I don’t hunt for my hands and fingers.

People will always do violent things, but philosophers and state officials have a duty not to come up with excuses that will justify them.

Merleau-Ponty had once 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.