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

He would leave old projects discarded like shavings while he set off on new ones, which in turn he did not finish.

Same, Husserl

The first part of this is straightforward: a phenomenologist’s job is to describe. This is the activity that Husserl kept reminding his students to do. It meant stripping away distractions, habits, clichés of thought, presumptions and received ideas, in order to return our attention to what he called the ‘things themselves’. We must fix our beady gaze on them and capture them exactly as they appear, rather than as we think they are supposed to be.

The word phenomenon has a special meaning to phenomenologists: it denotes any ordinary thing or object or event as it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality.

Understood in this way, the mind hardly is anything at all: it is its aboutness. This makes the human mind (and possibly some animal minds) different from any other naturally occurring entity. Nothing else can be as thoroughly about or of things as the mind is: even a book only reveals what it’s ‘about’ to someone who picks it up and peruses it, and is otherwise merely a storage device. But a mind that is experiencing nothing, imagining nothing, or speculating about nothing can hardly be said to be a mind at all.

One way of thinking about Heidegger is as a literary innovator, and perhaps even as a kind of modernist novelist.

Sometimes the best-educated people were those least inclined to take the Nazis seriously, dismissing them as too absurd to last.

Heidegger’s philosophy forms a dense, complicated whole in which every aspect depends on every other. If you try to remove everything unpleasant from Being and Time, the structure collapses.

It wasn’t that Heidegger had a bad character, Hannah Arendt wrote to Jaspers in 1949; it was that he had no character. Sartre said a very similar thing in an essay of 1944, speaking of Heidegger’s Nazism: ‘Heidegger has no character; there’s the truth of the matter.’ It is as if there was something about everyday human life that the great philosopher of everydayness did not get.