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

All these devices work because they allow us to pretend that we are not free. We know very well that we can always reset the alarm clock or disable the software, but we arrange things so that this option does not seem readily available. If we didn’t resort to such tricks, we would have to deal with the whole vast scope of our freedom at every instant, and that would make life extremely difficult. Most of us therefore keep ourselves entangled in all kinds of subtle ways throughout the day. Sartre gives examples: ‘I have an appointment this evening with Pierre. I must not forget to reply to Simon. I do not have the right to conceal the truth any longer from Claude.’ Such phrases imply that we are boxed in, but for Sartre they are ‘projections’ of my choices. They are, in his great vertiginous turn of phrase, ‘so many guard rails against anguish’.

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. It is not that such factors are unimportant: class and race, in particular, he acknowledged as powerful forces in people’s lives, and Simone de Beauvoir would soon add gender to that list. Nor did he mean that privileged groups have the right to pontificate to the poor and downtrodden about the need to ‘take responsibility’ for themselves. That would be a grotesque misreading of Sartre’s point, since his sympathy in any encounter always lay with the more oppressed side. But for each of us — for me — to be in good faith means not making excuses for myself.

For Beauvoir and Sartre, this was the big lesson of the war years: the art of life lies in getting things done.

There is hope, however. Heidegger reaches for his Hölderlin: But where danger is, grows The saving power also. If we pay proper attention to technology, or rather to what technology reveals about us and our Being, we can gain insight into the truth of human ‘belongingness’.

Poets and artists ‘let things be’, but they also let things come out and show themselves. They help to ease things into ‘unconcealment’ (Unverborgenheit), which is Heidegger’s rendition of the Greek term alētheia, usually translated as ‘truth’.

Heidegger does not use the word ‘consciousness’ here because — as with his earlier work — he is trying to make us think in a radically different way about ourselves. We are not to think of the mind as an empty cavern, or as a container filled with representations of things. We are not even supposed to think of it as firing off arrows of intentional ‘aboutness’, as in the earlier phenomenology of Brentano. Instead, Heidegger draws us into the depths of his Schwarzwald, and asks us to imagine a gap with sunlight filtering in. We remain in the forest, but we provide a relatively open spot where other beings can bask for a moment. If we did not do this, everything would remain in the thickets, hidden even to itself.

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.

Levinas took it further: when I encounter you, we normally meet face-to-face, and it is through your face that you, as another person, can make ethical demands on me. This is very different from Heidegger’s Mitsein or Being-with, which suggests a group of people standing alongside one another, shoulder to shoulder as if in solidarity — perhaps as a unified nation or Volk. For Levinas, we literally face each other, one individual at a time, and that relationship becomes one of communication and moral expectation. We do not merge; we respond to one another. Instead of being co-opted into playing some role in my personal drama of authenticity, you look me in the eyes — and you remain Other. You remain you.

Her last work, The Need for Roots, argues, among other things, that none of us has rights, but each one of us has a near-infinite degree of duty and obligation to the other. Whatever the underlying cause of her death — and anorexia nervosa seems to have been involved — no one could deny that she lived out her philosophy with total commitment.

Sartre certainly thought so. In an article the year before, to mark a smaller production being performed in the French zone of Germany, he wrote that Germans shared a similar problem to the French a few years earlier: For the Germans, too, I think that remorse is pointless. I do not mean that they should simply wipe out past faults from their memory. No. But I feel sure that they won’t earn the forgiveness they could get from the world just by being obligingly repentant. They will earn it rather by total, sincere commitment to a future of freedom and work, by their firm desire to build this future, and by the presence among them of as many men of goodwill as possible.

Sartre followed the discussions in German, before using the translator to respond. He argued that existentialist freedom was never meant to be used as an excuse of any kind: that was the exact opposite of what it was about. In existentialism, there are no excuses. Freedom comes with total responsibility.

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. For Beauvoir, instead, they were myths of femininity — a term she adapted from the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and which ultimately derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘genealogical’ way of digging out fallacies about culture and morality. 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’.

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. They find it difficult to feel responsible for the universe. How can a woman ever announce, as Sartre does in Being and Nothingness, ‘I carry the weight of the world by myself’?

For Beauvoir, the greatest inhibition for women comes from their acquired tendency to see themselves as ‘other’ rather than as a transcendent subject. Here she drew on her wartime reading of Hegel, who had analysed how rival consciousnesses wrestle for dominance, with one playing ‘master’ and the other ‘slave’. The master perceives everything from his own viewpoint, as is natural. But, bizarrely, so does the slave, who ties herself in knots trying to visualise the world from the master’s point of view — an ‘alienated’ perspective. She even adopts his point of view on herself, casting herself as object and him as subject. This tormented structure eventually collapses when the slave wakes up to the fact that she has it all backwards, and that the whole relationship rests on the hard work that she is doing — on her labour. She rebels, and in doing so she becomes fully conscious at last.

As the play’s much-quoted and frequently misunderstood final line has it: ‘Hell is other people.’ Sartre later explained that he did not mean to say that other people were hellish in general. He meant that after death we become frozen in their view, unable any longer to fend off their interpretation. In life, we can still do something to manage the impression we make; in death, this freedom goes and we are left entombed in other’s people’s memories and perceptions.

Judging by the discussion of sexuality in Being and Nothingness, a Sartrean love affair was an epic struggle over perspectives, and thus over freedom. If I love you, I don’t want to control your thoughts directly, but I want you to love and desire me and to freely give up your freedom to me. Moreover, I want you to see me, not as a contingent and flawed person like any other, but as a ‘necessary’ being in your world. That is, you are not to coolly assess my flaws and irritating habits, but to welcome every detail of me as though no jot or tittle could possibly be different.

By adopting the other person’s objectifying label as a substitute for his unselfconscious self, Genet was performing the same psychological contortion as the one Beauvoir had observed in women. She believed it put a strain on women all their lives, and made them hesitant and full of self-doubt. But Sartre saw Genet as performing the manoeuvre defiantly, reversing the effect: instead of keeping him down, his alienation gave him his escape. From then on, he owned his outsider identity as thief, vagrant, homosexual and prostitute. He took control of his oppression by inverting it, and his books take their energy from that inversion.

In fact, by the time he was writing Words, Sartre was worrying that something was ideologically wrong with this analysis of freedom and self-determination as modes of being enjoyed most fully by writers. Should one really spend one’s life trying to take control of existence solely through art? Is this not self-indulgent?

Sartre obediently cut some scenes, but, while writing his new version, he could not resist adding new ones in their place and extending others. He presented Huston with a script that would no longer make a seven-hour film, but an eight-hour one. Huston now fired Sartre and used two of his regular screenwriters to script a much more conventional film, which duly appeared in 1962 with Montgomery Clift playing Freud. Sartre’s name was never credited, apparently by his own request.

The ambiguous human condition means tirelessly trying to take control of things. We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir’s view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment.

His vision of human life is best summed up by these brief remarks near the end of The Phenomenology of Perception: 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.

Merleau-Ponty instead saw quite calmly that we exist only through compromise with the world — and that this is fine.

But Merleau-Ponty also followed Husserl and the gestalt psychologists in reminding us that we rarely have these sense experiences ‘raw’. 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.

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.

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. What difference was there, philosophically speaking? Sartre replied that there was a mathematical difference, of course, but not a philosophical one, for each individual is an infinite universe in his or her own eyes, and one cannot compare one infinity with another.

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.

Sartre began by writing to tell Merleau-Ponty that a person who was no longer ‘engaged’ politically should not expect to criticise those who were. You are right, Merleau-Ponty replied. Indeed, he has now decided never again to issue hasty responses to events as they occur. 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.

If a lot of people with incompatible interests all claim that right is on their side, how do you decide between them? 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’?

As an idea, this is astoundingly simple and refreshing. At a stroke, it wipes out the weasely cant indulged in by the advantaged — all those convenient claims that the poor ‘deserve’ their fate, or that the rich are entitled to the disproportionate wealth that accumulates upon them, or that inequality and suffering should be accepted as inevitable parts of life. For Sartre, if the poor and disadvantaged do not believe such arguments, they are wrong arguments. This is similar to what one might call the Genet Principle: that the underdog is always right.

Forwards, always forwards! was the existentialist’s cry, but Heidegger had long since pointed out that no one goes forwards forever. In Being and Time, he depicted Dasein as finding authenticity in ‘Being-towards-death’, that is, in affirming mortality and limitation. He also set out to show that Being itself is not to be found on some eternal, changeless plane: it emerges through Time and through history. Thus, both on the cosmic level and in the lives of each one of us, all things are temporal and finite.

Death cannot be prepared for, or made my own; it’s not something to be resolute about, nor something to be incorporated and tamed. It is not one of my possibilities but ‘the possibility that there are for me no longer any possibilities’.

When an interviewer from the magazine Der Spiegel asked Heidegger in 1966 what he thought of the idea that humans might one day travel to other planets, leaving Earth behind — because ‘where is it written that man’s place is here?’ — Heidegger was appalled. He replied: ‘According to our human experience and history, at least as far as I see it, I know that everything essential and everything great originated from the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition.’

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.