At the Existentialist Café (12 page)

Heidegger gives us a different way of understanding why, sometimes, it can be so disproportionately disheartening to have a nail bend under the hammer, and to feel everything turn against you. If you throw an apple core towards the bin and it misses, to borrow an example from the Philip Larkin poem ‘As Bad as a Mile’, it is not merely annoying because you have to get up and pick it off the floor. It can make
everything
feel awkward, questionable and uncomfortable. But it is in questions and discomfort that philosophy begins.

This was the sort of powerful, personal stuff that people craved from philosophy in troubled times: it was one reason why Heidegger acquired such influence. His starting point was reality in its everyday clothes, yet he also spoke in Kierkegaardian tones about
the strangest experiences in life, the moments when it all goes horribly wrong — and even the moments when we confront the greatest wrongness of all, which is the prospect of death. There can’t be many people who haven’t experienced a taste of such moments in their lives, even in peaceful, stable times. In the Germany of the 1920s, with everything thrown into chaos and resentment after the First World War, almost everyone could have recognised something in
Heidegger’s vision.

By 1929, the Heidegger cult had spread beyond Freiburg and Marburg. That spring, he spoke at a conference in the Alpine resort of
Davos — the setting for Thomas Mann’s bestselling 1924 novel
The Magic Mountain
, which Heidegger had read, and which included a battle of ideas between the old-fashioned, rationalist Italian critic Luigi Settembrini and the mystical ex-Jesuit Leo Naphta. It is tempting to see parallels in the encounter that now occurred between the conference’s two stars, as Heidegger was set against a great humanist scholar of Kantian philosophy and the Enlightenment: Ernst Cassirer.

Cassirer was Jewish, tall, calm and elegant, with his white hair swept up into a striking but antiquated bouffant style verging on a minor beehive. Heidegger was short, evasive and compelling, with a pinched moustache and hair combed severely flat. Their debates centred on the philosophy of Kant, for their interpretations of that philosopher differed dramatically. Cassirer saw Kant as the last great representative of the Enlightenment values of reason, knowledge and freedom. Heidegger, who had recently published
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
, believed that Kant had dismantled those values by showing that we can have no access to reality or true knowledge of any kind. He also argued that Kant’s main interest was not primarily in the question of knowledge at all but in ontology: the question of Being.

Although no clear winner emerged from the debate, it seemed natural to many observers to cast Cassirer as a throwback to a civilised yet outmoded past, with Heidegger as the prophet of a dangerous yet thrilling future. One person who interpreted the debate that way was Emmanuel Levinas, who had now moved on from his days as Husserl’s
student and was attending the conference as a fervent supporter of Heidegger. As he said to an interviewer later, it was like
seeing one world end and another begin.

Toni Cassirer, Ernst’s wife, found Heidegger vulgar. She remembered his arrival on the first evening: he literally turned heads, coming in after the other delegates had assembled to listen to an after-dinner speech. The door opened — rather as happens in
The Magic Mountain
, where the slinky love interest Clavdia Chauchat habitually enters the dining room late and with a careless bang of the door. Toni Cassirer looked round, and saw a beady-eyed little man. He looked to her like one of the Italian workmen who were numerous in German lands in those years, except that he was wearing his Black Forest garb. He seemed ‘
as awkward as a peasant who had stumbled into a royal court’.

She took an even dimmer view of his entourage later, after she walked in on a performance put on by the students, satirically reenacting the debate.
Levinas played Ernst Cassirer, dusting his hair with white talc and twirling it into a high quiff like an ice cream cone. Toni Cassirer did not find him funny. Years later, Levinas wished he had apologised to her for his irreverence; by then he had abandoned his own adulation of Heidegger, as well as having matured in general.

A few months after the Davos meeting, on 24 July 1929, Heidegger followed it up with a brilliant inaugural lecture in Freiburg, under the title
‘What Is Metaphysics?’ — the text Sartre and Beauvoir would see in translation in 1931 without understanding it. This time Husserl himself was among the huge crowd who gathered to hear the university’s new professor perform. Heidegger did not disappoint. ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ was a crowd-pleaser, containing the most dramatic ideas from
Being and Time
combined with some new ones. It even starts with what sounds like a deadpan joke, a surprise coming from Heidegger:

‘What is metaphysics?’ The question awakens expectations of a discussion about metaphysics. This we will forego.

The rest of the lecture compares nothingness and Being, and contains a long discussion of ‘moods’ — another of Heidegger’s key ideas. Dasein’s moods can range from elation to boredom, or perhaps the diffuse sense of oppression and unease described by Kierkegaard as
Angst
— dread, or anxiety. Each mood reveals the world in a different light. In anxiety, the world shows itself to me as something ‘uncanny’ — the German word
unheimlich
here literally meaning ‘not homely’. It reveals
‘the total strangeness of beings’. In this unhomely, unfamiliar moment, the mood of anxiety opens up the first questioning movement of philosophy — particularly that big question, which forms the climax of Heidegger’s lecture: ‘
Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?’

Heidegger’s performance was terrifying and darkly thrilling. It was also puzzling in places, which added to its effect. As he came to an end, at least one listener, Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, felt on the verge of falling to the ground in an ecstatic faint. ‘
The things of the world lay open and manifest in an almost aching brilliance’, Petzet wrote. ‘For a brief moment I felt as if I had had a glimpse into the ground and foundation of the world.’

Husserl, in the audience, was less ecstatic. He now feared the worst about Heidegger: he was no longer a protégé but a monstrous progeny. Shortly afterwards, he wrote to a colleague that he felt the need to reject Heidegger’s work completely. In another letter looking back eighteen months later, he wrote of this moment: ‘
I arrived at the distressing conclusion that philosophically I have nothing to do with this Heideggerian profundity.’ Heidegger’s philosophy, Husserl decided, was of the kind that must be fought against at all costs. It was the sort of philosophy that he felt obliged to try to stamp out, and ‘render impossible forever’.

4

THE THEY, THE CALL

In which Sartre has nightmares, Heidegger tries to think, Karl Jaspers is dismayed, and Husserl calls for heroism
.

Heidegger’s magnetic performances in 1929 enhanced his philosophical appeal in a country that had emerged from war and a 1923 hyperinflation crisis, only to sink into economic disaster again. Many Germans felt betrayed by the socialist government that had taken over in a kind of coup in the closing stages of the war. They muttered about Jews and Communists, and accused them of plotting to undermine the national cause. Heidegger seemed to share these suspicions. He too felt disillusioned and disoriented by the Germany of the 1920s.

Observers who visited the country during these years were shocked by its poverty, and by the way people were responding to it by turning to extremist parties of the left and right. When Raymond
Aron first arrived in 1930, his shock immediately turned into a question: how could Europe avoid being drawn into another war? Two years later, the young French philosopher Simone
Weil travelled through the country and reported back to a left-wing newspaper on how penury and unemployment were destroying the fabric of German society. Those who had jobs were haunted by the fear of losing them. People who could not afford homes became vagabonds or relied on relatives to put them up, which strained family relationships to their limits. Catastrophe could strike anyone; ‘you see elderly men in stiff collars and bowler hats begging at subway exits or singing in cracked voices in the streets.’ The old suffered, while the young, who had never known anything else, did not even have good memories to escape into.

The revolutionary potential of the situation was clear, but it was anyone’s guess which way it would go: to the Communists or to Hitler’s Nazis.
Weil hoped it would be to the left, but she feared that, in desperate times, the severe uniforms and regimentation of the Nazi rallies would have more appeal than vague socialist dreams of equality. She was right. On 30 January 1933, a weak coalition government headed by President Paul von Hindenburg gave in to pressure and appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor. Once a fringe figure of ridicule, Hitler now controlled the country and all its resources. Elections on 5 March increased his party’s majority. On 23 March, a new Enabling Act gave him near-total power. He consolidated it through the summer. Thus, between Aron’s invitation to Sartre after the apricot-cocktail conversation and Sartre’s actual move to Berlin, the country was altered out of all recognition.

The first changes came quickly that spring, and they affected private life in the most basic and intrusive ways. In March, the Nazis awarded themselves new powers to arrest suspects and search homes at will. They created laws that allowed phone tapping and
mail surveillance — areas of privacy previously considered sacred. In April, they announced ‘boycotts’ of Jewish businesses, and removed all public employees deemed Jewish or having anti-Nazi affiliations from their jobs. Trade unions were banned on 2 May. The first spectacular book burning took place on 10 May. All political parties other than the National Socialists were officially banned on 14 July 1933.

Many Germans, as well as other people around Europe, watched this rapid sequence of events in horror but felt unable to do much about it.
Beauvoir later marvelled at how little she and Sartre worried in the early 1930s about the rise of Nazism in Germany — and this from two people who later became fiercely political. They read the papers, she said, but in those days they were more interested in
murder stories or tales of psychological oddity, such as the Papin sisters’ killing of the employer for whom they worked as maids, or a case in which a conventional couple brought home another couple for a sexual foursome then committed suicide the next day. Such incidents were curiosities of individual human behaviour, whereas
the rise of fascism seemed an abstract matter. Sartre and
Beauvoir did have a disturbing encounter with its Italian form in the summer of 1933, just before Sartre’s move to Berlin. They travelled to
Rome with a discount offer from the Italian railways and, walking around the Colosseum late one evening, found themselves pinned by a spotlight and shouted at by men in black shirts. It shocked them, but did not politicise them greatly.

Then came Sartre’s year in Berlin, but for most of it he was so absorbed in his reading of Husserl and others that at first he barely noticed the outside world. He drank with his classmates and went for long walks.
‘I rediscovered irresponsibility’, he recalled later in a notebook. As the academic year went on, the red-and-black banners, the SA rallies and the regular outbreaks of violence became more disturbing. In February 1934, Beauvoir visited him for the first time, and was struck mainly by how normal Germany seemed. But when she went again in June and travelled back with him from Berlin through Dresden, Munich and the Nazis’ favourite city of Nuremberg, the military marches and half-glimpsed brutal scenes on the streets made them both eager to get out of the country for good. By this time, Sartre was having nightmares about rioting towns and
blood splattering over bowls of mayonnaise.

The mixture of anxiety and unreality that Sartre and Beauvoir felt was not unusual. Many Germans felt a similar combination, except for those who were Nazi converts, or else who were firm opponents or direct targets. The country was steeped in the sensation that Heidegger called ‘uncanniness’.

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.

The journalist Sebastian Haffner, a law student at the time, also used the word ‘uncanny’ in his diary, adding, ‘Everything takes place under a kind of
anaesthesia. Objectively dreadful events produce a thin, puny emotional response. Murders are committed like schoolboy pranks. Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like minor incidents.’ Haffner thought modernity itself was partly to blame: people had become yoked to their habits and to mass media, forgetting to stop and think, or to disrupt their routines long enough to question what was going on.

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. The phrase attracted criticism, mainly because she applied it to the actively genocidal Adolf Eichmann, organiser of the Holocaust, who was guilty of a lot more than a failure to take responsibility. Yet she stuck by her analysis: for Arendt, if you do not respond adequately when the times demand it, you show a lack of imagination and attention that is as dangerous as deliberately committing an abuse. It amounts to disobeying the one command she had absorbed from Heidegger in those Marburg days:
Think!