At the Existentialist Café (31 page)

(Illustrations Credit 8.4)

After a few years of self-starvation, Weil fell ill from tuberculosis complicated by malnutrition. She died in Middlesex Hospital on 2 August 1943, of heart failure. All through these last years, she wrote copious philosophical studies of ethics and society, investigating the nature and limits of what human beings owed to one another. 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. Of all the lives touched on in this book, hers is surely the most profound and challenging application of Iris Murdoch’s notion that a philosophy can be ‘inhabited’. Indeed, Murdoch became an admirer of Weil’s thinking, which pushed her to turn away from her early interest in Sartrean existentialism towards a more ethical philosophy based on ‘the Good’.

Meanwhile, the Christian existentialist Gabriel
Marcel was also still arguing, as he had since the 1930s, that ethics trumps everything else in philosophy and that our duty to each other is so great as to play the role of a transcendent ‘mystery’. He too had been led to this position partly by a wartime experience: during the First World War he had worked for the
Red Cross’ Information Service, with the unenviable job of answering relatives’ inquiries about missing soldiers. Whenever news came, he passed it on, and usually it was not good. As
Marcel later said, this task permanently inoculated him against warmongering rhetoric of any kind, and it made him aware of the power of what is
unknown
in our lives.

One striking link between these radical ethical thinkers, all on the fringes of our main story, is that they had religious faith. They also granted a special role to the notion of ‘mystery’ — that which cannot be known, calculated or understood, especially when it concerns our relationships with each other. Heidegger was different from them, since he rejected the religion he grew up with and had no real interest in ethics — probably as a consequence of his having no real interest in the human. Yet every page of his late work suggests some direct experience of the ineffable or ungraspable. He too was a mystic.

The mystery tradition had roots in Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’. It owed much to the other great nineteenth-century mystic of the impossible, Dostoevsky, and to older theological notions. But it also grew from the protracted trauma that was the first half of the twentieth century. Since 1914, and especially since 1939, people in Europe and elsewhere had come to the realisation that we cannot fully know or trust ourselves; that we have no excuses or explanations for
what we do — and yet that we must ground our existence and relationships on something firm, because otherwise we cannot survive.

Even the atheistic Sartre showed a desire for a new way of thinking about values. He had been scathing about traditional ethics in
Nausea
, writing in Levinasian terms of how bourgeois types, professing to be well-meaning humanists, had ‘
never allowed themselves to be affected by the meaning of a face’. In
Being and Nothingness
, he went on to say that the placid old ethical principles based on mere tolerance did not go far enough any more. ‘Tolerance’ failed to engage with the full extent of the demands others make on us. It is
not enough to back off and simply put up with each other, he felt. We must learn to give each other more than that. Now he went even further: we must all become deeply ‘engaged’ in our shared world.

The young French writer Frédéric de Towarnicki, having accompanied Heidegger on his quest to collect his manuscripts, next became keen to introduce him and Sartre to each other. He had already given
Heidegger a series of articles on Sartrean existentialism by his fellow Frenchman Jean Beaufret. When they discussed these on a later visit, Heidegger marvelled at how Sartre managed to be at once philosopher, phenomenologist, dramatist, novelist, essayist and journalist. Elfride, who was also present, asked,
‘Mais enfin, qu’est-ce que l’existentialisme?’
(‘So what is this existentialism anyway?’)

Next time he called,
Towarnicki brought Heidegger a copy of
Being and Nothingness
. Heidegger playfully weighed its bulk in his hand and said that he had
little time for reading at the moment — that time-honoured excuse. (On this occasion, as Towarnicki left, he showed him a treasure of his own, wrapped in sheets of silken paper inside his desk: a photograph of Nietzsche. ‘He doesn’t show that to everyone,’ whispered Elfride.)

This was not encouraging, but Towarnicki did not easily give up on his hope of bringing Heidegger and Sartre together, either for a private meeting or a public debate. He tried to interest Camus too, but Camus wanted nothing to do with Heidegger. Sartre was more intrigued, but, like Heidegger, he kept telling Towarnicki that he was
too busy to do anything at the moment. Instead, he invited Towarnicki to write up his own meetings with Heidegger for
Les Temps modernes
, which Towarnicki did.

Heidegger meanwhile found time to dip into
Being and Nothingness
after all. He told Towarnicki on his next visit that he appreciated Sartre’s psychological acuity and his
‘feeling for concrete things’. This, at least, was how Towarnicki reported it; since he was writing for
Les Temps modernes
, he may have been inclined to flatter its editor. Heidegger also gave him a courteous letter to deliver to Sartre. It included a remark that could be read in two ways: ‘
Your work is dominated by an immediate understanding of my philosophy the likes of which I have not previously encountered.’

To others, Heidegger was blunter in his response. When the American scholar Hubert Dreyfus saw
Being and Nothingness
on Heidegger’s desk and remarked on it, Heidegger snapped, ‘How can I even begin to read this
Dreck
!’ — this rubbish. He began an extended essay in the form of a letter to Jean Beaufret, attacking the humanist version of existentialism that Sartre had presented to such acclaim in his ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism’ lecture, with its paean to freedom and individual action. Heidegger wanted nothing to do with this kind of philosophy. His piece, published in 1947 as
‘Letter on Humanism’ and filled with evocations of forest clearings and letting-be, stands as one of the key texts in his own decidedly anti-humanist new style of thinking. Sartre did not respond to it.

Heidegger’s earlier letter to Sartre had invited him to come to Todtnauberg: ‘
In our little hut we could philosophise together, and go for
skiing trips in the Black Forest.’ According to Towarnicki, Heidegger had been impressed by Sartre’s description of skiing in
Being and Nothingness
— which comes towards the end, suggesting that Heidegger had got well into the
Dreck
after all. It would be wonderful to imagine Sartre and Heidegger — and perhaps also Beauvoir, who was more athletic than Sartre — flying down the slopes, flush-cheeked, the wind whipping away their words, and Heidegger no doubt going much too fast for anyone to keep up, so as to show off. He liked to do this, judging by Max Müller’s recollections of going out in
the snow with him: ‘
When we were skiing, he laughed at me a number of times because I made turns and curves where he dashingly raced straight down.’

But the skiing trip never happened. Sartre was always busy; his diary was overflowing with appointments. After all, it would still be a little embarrassing for a Frenchman in 1945 to go off into the Black Forest snow with the former Nazi rector of Freiburg.

Early in 1948, Sartre and Beauvoir did travel to Germany to attend a
Berlin production of Sartre’s 1943 play about freedom,
The Flies
. In its original incarnation, the play had used the classical
Oresteia
story as a parable for the French situation under Occupation. Now, Jürgen Fehling’s production at Berlin’s Hebbel Theatre applied the same idea to the situation of Germany after the war, making the point clear with a grim stage set dominated by a temple in the shape of a bunker. The implication was that Germany was now similarly paralysed by its shame. Sartre’s play had been designed to urge the French to shake off the past and act constructively for the future; perhaps this message could be reinterpreted to fit the German situation.

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. Perhaps the play can — not lead them to this future — but encourage them to aim in that direction.

Not everyone in Germany agreed with this analysis, and the debate around the play attracted much attention. This in turn ensured full audiences: Simone de Beauvoir heard that some people were paying 500 marks for a ticket — over twice an average monthly salary. One person even paid two geese, a high price in a city where food was still scarce. Initially Beauvoir had been nervous about making the German trip, after fearing the German occupiers for so long in Paris, but she changed her mind on seeing the scale of the country’s devastation in both the Heideggerian and ordinary senses of the word. It was then deepest winter; the temperature had been as low as –18°C for weeks, yet many Berliners went around without
coats, and Beauvoir saw people pushing little trolleys so as to collect any useful item they saw on their walks. It was partly to keep warm that they were so keen on theatre-going, although it sometimes meant long journeys through the snow in inadequate shoes. Berlin was barely functioning, and it was awkwardly split between its Soviet, American, British and French administrative zones, the last three of which would unite to form West Berlin a few months later. It had certainly changed since
Sartre saw it in 1933 and 1934. In a spare moment between his public appearances, he sought out the house where he had stayed back then, and found it just standing, but in a tumbledown state.

The main event was a debate hosted at the Hebbel Theatre itself on 4 February. Speaking in French with a translator, Sartre defended his play against speakers of both Christian and Marxist persuasions who believed it conveyed the wrong message for Germans. Its existentialist philosophy of liberation was all right for the French in 1943, they said, but it was wrong to urge Germans to move on just yet. The Nuremberg trials had barely finished; some of those who had committed crimes had never been held accountable at all. One speaker warned that many might seize on the play as a justification for disowning culpability for real past crimes, evading justice.

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.

His short speech prompted Christian writer Gert Theunissen to shift to a more general attack on Sartre’s conception of freedom. It was just plain wrong to say ‘existence precedes essence’, Theunissen said. Humans
do
have an essence, which is given to them by God, and their job is to follow it. According to the transcript of the exchange, this remark attracted ‘
loud approval in the room. Several whistles. Hilarity.’ Next Alfons Steininger, head of the Society for the Study of the Culture of the Soviet Union, came in from a Communist angle. Sartre’s play risked being taken ‘as encouragement of triviality, of nihilism, of pessimism’, he said — these being the usual buzzwords used by Communists to bash existentialism. In general, the discussion rarely transcended this level. Not for the first or last time, Sartre was stuck between two opponents who both hated him while having almost nothing in common with each other.

Of course, they had a point. Just because existentialism was not supposed to provide excuses did not mean that people would not try to use it that way. It would not require great skill in sophistry to twist
The Flies
into an argument for selective forgetfulness. Nor was it clear that the parallels between the French situation of 1943 and the German situation of 1948 went much beyond a feeling shared by much of the rest of the world at this time too: horror at the recent past, and apprehension (mingled with hope) about the future.

Other aspects of
The Flies
would have resonated with Berliners in 1948, however, and these had more to do with current sufferings. The stark landscape on stage looked a lot like the Berlin outside the door, and even the theatrical device of the flies might have triggered memories — for, in the hot and terrible summer of 1945, German cities were reportedly infested by an unpleasant large green fly species propagating on the rotting bodies under the rubble.