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

The most transformative existentialist work of all was Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering feminist study, The Second Sex, published in 1949. An analysis of women’s experience and life choices, as well as of the whole history of patriarchal society, it encouraged women to raise their consciousness, question received ideas and routines, and seize control of their existence.

For those oppressed on grounds of race or class, or for those fighting against colonialism, existentialism offered a change of perspective — literally, as Sartre proposed that all situations be judged according to how they appeared in the eyes of those most oppressed, or those whose suffering was greatest. Martin Luther King Jr. was among the civil rights pioneers who took an interest. While working on his philosophy of non-violent resistance, he read Sartre, Heidegger and the German-American existentialist theologian Paul Tillich.

as his biographer Rüdiger Safranski has put it, Heidegger ‘states the obvious in a way that even philosophers can grasp’.

Sometimes the best-educated people were those least inclined to take the Nazis seriously, dismissing them as too absurd to last. Karl Jaspers was one of those who made this mistake, as he later recalled, and Beauvoir observed similar dismissive attitudes among the French students in Berlin. In any case, most of those who disagreed with Hitler’s ideology soon learned to keep their view to themselves. If a Nazi parade passed on the street, they would either slip out of view or give the obligatory salute like everyone else, telling themselves that the gesture meant nothing if they did not believe in it. As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim later wrote of this period, few people will risk their life for such a small thing as raising an arm — yet that is how one’s powers of resistance are eroded away, and eventually one’s responsibility and integrity go with them.

Heidegger’s former lover and student Hannah Arendt would argue, in her 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism, that totalitarian movements thrived at least partly because of this fragmentation in modern lives, which made people more vulnerable to being swept away by demagogues. Elsewhere, she coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe the most extreme failures of personal moral awareness.

For Heidegger, the threat of technology goes beyond the practical fears of the post-war years: machines running out of control, atom bombs exploding, radiation leaks, epidemics, chemical contamination. Instead, it is an ontological threat against reality, and against human being itself. We fear disaster, but the disaster may already be under way.

Letting-be became one of the most important concepts in the later Heidegger, denoting a hands-off way of attending to things. It sounds straightforward. ‘What seems easier’, asks Heidegger, ‘than to let a being be just the being that it is?’ Yet it is not easy at all, because it is not just a matter of turning indifferently away and letting the world get on with its business. We must turn towards things, but in such a way that we don’t ‘challenge’ them. Instead, we allow each being to ‘rest upon itself in its very own being’.

Enabling things to un-hide themselves is what humans do: it is our distinctive contribution. We are a ‘clearing’, a Lichtung, a sort of open, bright forest glade into which beings can shyly step forward like a deer from the trees. Or perhaps one should visualise beings entering the clearing to dance, like a bowerbird in a prepared patch in the undergrowth. It would be simplistic to identify the clearing with human consciousness, but this is more or less the idea. We help things to emerge into the light by being conscious of them, and we are conscious of them poetically, which means that we pay respectful attention and allow them to show themselves as they are, rather than bending them to our will.

The astronomer Carl Sagan began his 1980 television series Cosmos by saying that human beings, though made of the same stuff as the stars, are conscious and are therefore ‘a way for the cosmos to know itself’. Merleau-Ponty similarly quoted his favourite painter Cézanne as saying, ‘The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.’ This is something like what Heidegger thinks humanity contributes to the earth. We are not made of spiritual nothingness; we are part of Being, but we also bring something unique with us. It is not much: a little open space, perhaps with a path and a bench like the one the young Heidegger used to sit on to do his homework. But through us, the miracle occurs.

Herbert Marcuse, formerly an impassioned Heideggerian and now a Marxist. He made the journey in April 1947, hoping to get an explanation and an apology from Heidegger for his Nazi involvement. He did not get either. In August, he wrote asking Heidegger again why he would not make a clear disavowal of the Nazi ideology, when so many people were waiting for just a few words from him. ‘Is this really the way you would like to be remembered in the history of ideas?’ he asked. But Heidegger refused to oblige.

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.

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 perceive a multicoloured blob on a table directly as a bag of sweets, not as a collection of angles, colours and shadows that must be decoded and identified. The people we see running around in a field are a soccer team. This is why we fall for optical illusions: we have already seen a diagram as some expected shape, before looking again to realise that we have been fooled. It is also why a Rorschach blot comes to us as a picture of something, rather than as a meaningless design.

For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness can never be a ‘nothingness’ radically divided from being, as Sartre had proposed in Being and Nothingness. He does not even see it as a ‘clearing’, like Heidegger. When he looks for his own metaphor to describe how he sees consciousness, he comes up with a beautiful one: consciousness, he suggests, is like a ‘fold’ in the world, as though someone had crumpled a piece of cloth to make a little nest or hollow. It stays for a while, before eventually being unfolded and smoothed away. There is something seductive, even erotic, in this idea of my conscious self as an improvised pouch in the cloth of the world. I still have my privacy — my withdrawing room. But I am part of the world’s fabric, and I remain formed out of it for as long as I am here.

We can never move definitively from ignorance to certainty, for the thread of the inquiry will constantly lead us back to ignorance again. This is the most attractive description of philosophy I’ve ever read, and the best argument for why it is worth doing, even (or especially) when it takes us no distance at all from our starting point.

in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky had summed up a moral dilemma of this kind in a simple question. Ivan Karamazov asks his brother Alyosha to imagine that he has the power to create a world in which people will enjoy perfect peace and happiness for the rest of history. But to achieve this, he says, you must torture to death one small creature now — say, that baby there. This is an early and extreme variety of the ‘trolley problem’, in which one person must be sacrificed in order (it’s hoped) to save many. So, would you do it, asks Ivan? Alyosha’s answer is a clear no. Nothing can justify torturing a baby, in his view, and that is all there is to be said. No weighing of benefits changes this; some things cannot be measured or traded. In 1940s Paris, the writer who followed Alyosha’s position was Albert Camus. In his essay ‘Neither Victims Nor Executioners’ he wrote, ‘I will never again be one of those, whoever they be, who compromise with murder.’ Whatever the pay-off, he would not support formal justifications for violence, especially by the state.

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.

In a paragraph of the final part of The Communists and Peace, Sartre had sketched the outline of a bold solution: why not decide every situation by asking how it looks to ‘the eyes of the least favoured’, or to ‘those treated the most unjustly’? You just need to work out who is most oppressed and disadvantaged in the situation, and then adopt their version of events as the right one. Their view can be considered the criterion for truth itself: the way of establishing ‘man and society as they truly are’. If something is not true in the eyes of the least favoured, says Sartre, then it is not true.

The student demonstrations, strikes, occupations, love-ins and be-ins of the 1960s constitute an extended historical moment to which one might point and say that existentialism had done its job. Liberation had arrived; existentialism could retire. Indeed, new philosophers were already on the scene, reacting against existentialism’s personalised style of thought. New novelists turned against its literary aesthetic too: Alain Robbe-Grillet, in his 1963 manifesto Pour un nouveau roman (For a New Novel), dismissed Sartre and Camus as having too much of the ‘human’ in them. In 1966 Michel Foucault predicted that ‘man’, being a relatively recent invention, might soon be ‘erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ — an image that recalls Lévi-Strauss’ call for studies that would ‘dissolve man’. Later, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the postmodernist Jean Baudrillard dismissed Sartrean philosophy as a historical curiosity, like the classic 1950s films whose old-fashioned psychological dramas and clear characterisation ‘express marvellously well the — already banal — post-Romantic death throes of subjectivity’. No one needs this kind of ‘existential garb’ any more, Baudrillard wrote. ‘Who cares about freedom, bad faith, and authenticity today?’

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.