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

In the very period when Sartre was becoming more concerned with questions of action and involvement in the world, Heidegger was retiring almost entirely from consideration of those questions.

Jaspers was being modest. In reality, he was the one whose mind ranged widely across cultures and epochs, making connections and comparisons — while Heidegger never liked going far from his forest home.

As Levinas reflected on this experience, it helped to lead him to a philosophy that was essentially ethical, rather than ontological like Heidegger’s. He developed his ideas from the work of Jewish theologian Martin Buber, whose I and Thou in 1923 had distinguished between my relationship with an impersonal ‘it’ or ‘them’, and the direct personal encounter I have with a ‘you’. 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.

Ever since Husserl, phenomenologists and existentialists had been trying to stretch the definition of existence to incorporate our social lives and relationships. Levinas did more: he turned philosophy around entirely so that these relationships were the foundation of our existence, not an extension of

After it was translated into English in 1953 — three years before Being and Nothingness and nine years before Heidegger’s Being and Time — The Second Sex had an even greater impact in Britain and America than in France. It can be considered the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement.

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

As he wrote of Cézanne in a beautiful essay, ‘Only one emotion is possible for this painter — the feeling of strangeness — and only one lyricism — that of the continual rebirth of existence.’ In another essay, he wrote of how the Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne put ‘not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence’. One could say the same of Merleau-Ponty himself.

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. In both cases, the disaster of loss of life was literally incalculable. Relating this story, Merleau-Ponty deduced that Sartre was talking as a pure philosopher at the time, rather than adopting ‘the perspective of heads of government’.

Sartre and Beauvoir eventually came to agree with Koestler about one thing: it was not possible to be friends with someone who held opposed political views. ‘When people’s opinions are so different,’ said Sartre, ‘how can they even go to a film together?’

During the 1950s, determined to give his time and energy to any cause he thought needed him, Sartre overstretched himself alarmingly. This led to some of his most foolish and reprehensible moments, as when he travelled to the Soviet Union at the invitation of an organisation of Russian writers in May 1954, and afterwards published a series of articles suggesting, for example, that Soviet citizens did not travel because they had no desire to do so and were too busy building Communism.

What you read influences your life: the story of existentialism as it spread around the world in the fifties and sixties bears this out more than any other modern philosophy. By feeding feminism, gay rights, the breaking down of class barriers, and the anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, it helped to change the basis of our existence today in fundamental ways.

As he wrote in Being and Nothingness, death is an outrage that comes to me from outside and wipes out my projects. 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’.

On the island of Norderney one evening, his father took his hand as they walked to the water’s edge. ‘The tide was out, our path across the fresh, clean sand was amazing, unforgettable for me, always further, always further, the water was so low, and we came to the water, there lay the jellyfish, the starfish — I was bewitched,’ said Jaspers. 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.

‘All that is solid, all that is gloriously ordered, having a home, being sheltered: absolutely necessary! But the fact that there is this other, the infinity of the ocean — that liberates us.’

One never finds Jaspers’ open sea in Heidegger’s writing; one does not encounter Marcel’s endlessly moving traveller, or his ‘stranger met by chance’. 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.’

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. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There wasn’t much she didn’t see! But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and its randomness — the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomblé in Bahía, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I’ve talked about, others I have left unspoken — there is no place where it will all live again.

Heidegger intoned that one must think, but Sartre actually thought.