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

by Sarah Bakewell

During one of their wild nights out at an émigré Russian nightclub around 1946, the question of friendship and political commitment came up. Could you be friends with someone if you disagreed with them politically? Camus said you could.

It’s a saddening image: sweet confections on a table; philosophers peering at them from different sides. To each of them, the sugar presents itself differently. It catches the light from one side, but not from the other. To one, it looks bright and sparkly; to another, grey and matte. To one, it means a delicious addition to coffee. To another, it means the historical evils of slavery in the sugar trade. And the conclusion? That there is no point in even talking about it.

Camus asked Sartre if he’d thought about what would happen to him personally if the Russians invaded.

They had to thrash out a coherent editorial position on Korea for Les Temps modernes. But Merleau-Ponty had come to feel they should not fire off instant opinions on situations they did not understand.

For Marxists, human beings are destined to progress through predefined stages of history towards a final socialist paradise. The road will be long, but we are bound to get there, and all will be perfect when we do. Camus disagreed on two counts: he did not think that history led to a single inevitable destination, and he did not think there was such a thing as perfection. As long as we have human societies, we will have rebellions. Each time a revolution overturns the ills of a society, a new status quo is created, which then develops its own excesses and injustices. Each generation has a fresh duty to revolt against these, and this will be the case forever.

Moreover, for Camus, true rebellion does not mean reaching towards an ecstatic vision of a shining city on a hill. It means setting a limit on some very real present state of affairs that has become unacceptable. For example, a slave who has been ordered around all his life suddenly decides he will take no more, and draws a line, saying ‘so far but no further’. Rebellion is a reining in of tyranny.

After Korea, he has concluded that one needs a longer perspective to understand history. He no longer wishes to ‘become engaged on every event, as if it were a test of morality’ – a tendency which he describes as bad faith.

Merleau-Ponty went deeply into Communist ideology, then gave it up in favour of a conviction that human life could never be forced to fit the lineaments of an ideal. He had, as he put it, woken up.

Remembering Camus, he wrote wistfully of how they would laugh together: ‘there was a side of him that smacked of the little Algerian tough guy, very much a hooligan, very funny’. He added: ‘He was probably the last good friend I had.’

the English were used to ideas that emerged from a world in which ‘people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus’, whereas the existentialists came from a world in which people commit great sins, fall in love, and join the Communist Party.

death is an outrage that comes to me from outside and wipes out my projects.

It is not one of my possibilities but ‘the possibility that there are for me no longer any possibilities’.

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.

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.

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.

This is a touching story, especially as it is the single documented example I have come across of Heidegger actually doing something nice.

For Heidegger, all philosophising is about homecoming, and the greatest journey home is the journey to death.

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.

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.