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

Sartre put this principle into a three-word slogan, which for him defined existentialism: ‘Existence precedes essence’.

— he exhorted his readers to decide what kind of world they wanted, and make it happen. From now on, he wrote, we must always take into account our knowledge that we can destroy ourselves at will, with all our history and perhaps life on earth itself. Nothing stops us but our own free choosing. If we want to survive, we have to decide to live.

‘Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’, wrote Kierkegaard. Our whole lives are lived on the edge of that precipice, in his view and also in Sartre’s.

Sartre remarked, the demonstrators on the 1968 barricades demanded nothing and everything — that is to say, they demanded freedom.

Their philosophies remain of interest, not because they are right or wrong, but because they concern life, and because they take on the two biggest human questions: what are we? and what should we do?

So what exactly is phenomenology? It is essentially a method rather than a set of theories, and — at the risk of wildly oversimplifying — its basic approach can be conveyed through a two-word command: DESCRIBE PHENOMENA.

epoché

If you had to sum up Heidegger’s opening sally in Being and Time in one word, that word might be ‘wow!’

For Heidegger, Dasein’s everyday Being is right here: it is Being-in-the-world, or In-der-Welt-sein. The main feature of Dasein’s everyday Being-in-the-world right here is that it is usually busy doing something.

Heidegger gives an example that brings everything together. I am out for a walk, and I find a boat by the shore. What Being does the boat have for me? It is unlikely to be ‘just’ an object, a boat-thing which I contemplate from some abstract vantage point. Instead, I encounter the boat as (1) a potentially useful thing, in (2) a world which is a network of such things, and (3) in a situation where the boat is clearly useful for someone else, if not for me. The boat lights up equipment, world and Mitsein all at once. If I want to consider it a mere ‘object’, I can, but this does violence to everyday Being.

The surprising thing is that philosophy had to wait so long for someone to say these things.

Mitsein

‘the Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more of something ready-to-hand’.

Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine, a riveting phenomenological account of one man’s lunch break,

Being and Nothingness, published in 1943, Sartre went on to give us many more pages about the physical quality of viscosité, or le visqueux — ‘viscosity’ or ‘gluey sliminess’.

For fifty years, it was a philosophical demonstration of existentialism in practice, defined by the two principles of freedom and companionship.

‘What is so detestable about war is that it reduces the individual to complete insignificance.’

The book also reveals the first signs of a shift in Sartre’s thought. In coming years, he would become ever more interested in the way human beings can be swept up by large-scale historical forces, while still each remaining free and individual.

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.

Being and Nothingness,

Jean-Paul Sartre walks into a café, and the waiter asks what he’d like to order. Sartre replies, ‘I’d like a cup of coffee with sugar, but no cream.’ The waiter goes off, but comes back apologising. ‘I’m sorry, Monsieur Sartre, we are all out of cream. How about with no milk?’ The joke hinges on the notion that the Absence of Cream and the Absence of Milk are two definite negativities, just as Cream and Milk are two definite positivities.

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.

Simone de Beauvoir describes the origin of her great feminist work, The Second Sex.

By now, all these factors have conspired to hold a woman back from establishing authority and agency in the wider world. The world is not a ‘set of tools’ for her, in the Heideggerian sense. Instead it is ‘dominated by fate and run through with mysterious caprices’. This is why, Beauvoir believes, women rarely attain greatness in the arts or literature

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’?

In his first example, Sartre asks us to imagine walking in a park. If I’m alone, the park arranges itself comfortably around my point of view: everything I see presents itself to me. But then I notice a man crossing the lawn towards me. This causes a sudden cosmic shift. I become conscious that the man is also arranging his own universe around himself. As Sartre puts it, the green of the grass turns itself towards the other man as well as towards me, and some of my universe drains off in his direction. Some of me drains off too, for I am an object in his world as he is in mine. I am no longer a pure perceiving nothingness; I have a visible outside, which I know he can see.

Women, in other words, live much of their lives in what Sartre would have called bad faith, pretending to be objects. They do what the waiter does when he glides around playing the role of waiter; they identify with their ‘immanent’ image rather than with their ‘transcendent’ consciousness as a free for-itself. The waiter does it when he’s at work; women do it all day and to a greater extent. It is exhausting, because, all the time, a woman’s subjectivity is trying to do what comes naturally to subjectivity, which is to assert itself as the centre of the universe. 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.

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.

Camus also wrote that humanity faced the task of choosing between collective suicide and a more intelligent use of its technology — ‘between hell and reason’. After 1945, there seemed little reason to trust in humanity’s ability to choose well.

If war is imminent, how can you keep silent? Merleau-Ponty took a gloomy view: ‘Because brute force will decide the outcome. Why speak to what has no ears?’

Then the obvious truth dawned: her generation too would one day be judged by future criteria. She saw that her contemporaries would suffer what historian E. P. Thompson later called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’.

The Second Sex had meanwhile been having ever more powerful effects on women around the world. The makers of a 1989 television programme and book called Daughters of de Beauvoir collected stories from women whose lives were changed by reading her work during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

David Karp’s little-known 1953 novel One is set in a society that enforces complete psychological uniformity. The hero is arrested after the state detects signs of individualism in him so subtle that even he hadn’t noticed them. He is gently but forcibly re-educated — a soothing, medicalised process rather than a confrontational one, and all the more terrifying for that.

‘For years, I haven’t finished anything. I don’t know why. Yes I do: the Corydrane.’ Long-term addictions to Corydrane and alcohol did cause difficulties, but his writing also stalled because, after years of getting by with monocular vision, he was now going blind in the good eye.