At the Existentialist Café (5 page)

I have watched that brief film clip online a dozen or more times, peering into the low-definition images of the many faces, wondering what existentialism and Jean-Paul Sartre meant to each of them. I only really know what they meant to me. Sartre’s books changed my life too, albeit in an indirect and low-key way. I somehow failed to notice the news of his death and funeral in 1980, although I was already a suburban existentialist by then, aged seventeen.

I had become fascinated by him a year earlier. On a whim, I spent some of my sixteenth-birthday money on his 1938 novel
Nausea
, mainly because I liked the Salvador Dalí image on the Penguin cover: a bile-green rock formation and a dripping watch. I also liked the cover blurb, which called
Nausea
‘a novel of the alienation of personality and the mystery of being’. I wasn’t sure what alienation meant, although I was a perfect example of it at the time. But I had no doubt that it would be my kind of book. It was indeed: when I started reading, I bonded at once with its gloomy outsider protagonist Antoine Roquentin, who spends his days drifting disconsolately around the provincial seaside town of ‘Bouville’ (modelled on Le Havre, where Sartre had been stuck as a teacher). Roquentin sits in cafés and listens to blues records instead of getting on with the biography he is supposed to be writing. He walks by the sea and throws pebbles into its grey, porridge-like depths. He goes to a park and stares at the gnarled exposed root of a
chestnut tree, which looks to him like boiled leather and threatens to overwhelm him by the sheer opaque force of its being.

(Illustrations Credit 1.4)

I loved all this and was intrigued to learn that this story was Sartre’s way of communicating a philosophy called ‘existentialism’. But what was all this about ‘being’? I had never been overwhelmed by the being of a chestnut root, nor had I noticed that things
had
being. I tried going to the public gardens in my own provincial town of Reading and staring at one of the trees until my eyes blurred. It didn’t work; I thought I saw something move, but it was just the breeze in the leaves. Yet looking at something so closely did give me a kind of glow. From then on, I too neglected my studies in order to
exist
. I had already been inclined to absenteeism; now, under Sartre’s influence, I became a more dedicated truant than ever. Instead of going to school, I got myself an unofficial part-time job in a Caribbean emporium selling reggae records and decorative hash pipes. It provided a more interesting education than I had ever had in a classroom.

Sartre had taught me to drop out, an underrated and sometimes useful response to the world. On the other hand, he also made me want to study philosophy. That meant passing exams, so I reluctantly applied myself to the syllabus at the last moment and squeaked through. I went to Essex University, where I did a philosophy degree and read more Sartre, as well as other thinkers. I fell under the spell of Heidegger and started a PhD on his work — but then dropped out again, in my second such disappearing act.

In the interim, I had been transformed yet again by my student experience. I managed to spend my days and evenings more or less as the existentialists had in their cafés: reading, writing, drinking, falling in and out of love, making friends, and talking about ideas. I loved everything about it, and thought life would always be one big existentialist café.

On the other hand, I also became aware that the existentialists were already considered out of fashion. By the 1980s, they had given way to new generations of structuralists, post-structuralists, deconstructionists and postmodernists. These kinds of philosopher seemed to treat philosophy as a game. They juggled signs, symbols and meanings; they
pulled out odd words from each other’s texts to make the whole edifice collapse. They searched for ever more refined and unlikely wisps of signification in the writers of the past.

Although each of these movements disagreed with each other, most were united in considering existentialism and phenomenology the quintessence of what they were
not
. The dizziness of freedom and the anguish of existence were embarrassments. Biography was out, because life itself was out. Experience was out; in a particularly dismissive mood, the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had written that a philosophy based on personal experience was ‘
shop-girl metaphysics’. The goal of the human sciences was ‘to dissolve man’, he said, and apparently the goal of philosophy was the same. These thinkers could be stimulating, but they also turned philosophy back into an abstract landscape, stripped of the active, impassioned beings who occupied it in the existentialist era.

For decades after my second dropping-out I dipped into philosophy books occasionally, but lost the knack of reading them with the deep attention they needed. My old favourites remained on the far reaches of my bookcase, making it look like a spice shelf in a demiurge’s kitchen:
Being and Nothingness, Being and Time, Of Time and Being, Totality and Infinity
. But they rarely shifted their dust — until, a few years ago, I picked up a collection of essays by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, looking for one I vaguely remembered about the Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne, whom I was researching at the time.

Merleau-Ponty was a friend of Sartre and Beauvoir (until they fell out), and a phenomenologist who specialised in questions of the body and perception. He was also a brilliant essayist. I became diverted from Montaigne into the volume’s other essays, and then to Merleau-Ponty’s main work
The Phenomenology of Perception
. I was amazed afresh at how adventurous and rich his thinking was. No wonder I used to love this sort of thing! From Merleau-Ponty, I went on to revisit Simone de Beauvoir — whose autobiography I’d discovered during a long student summer selling ice creams on a grey, dismal English beach. I now read the whole thing again. Then came Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre. Eventually I returned to the monumental Heidegger.

As I went on, I got the eerie feeling of blending again with my twenty-year-old self, especially as my copies of the books were filled with that self’s weirdly emphatic juvenile marginalia.

(Illustrations Credit 1.5)

Yet my present-day self also watched over my responses, making critical or sardonic remarks from the sidelines. The two of me alternated as I read, sometimes quarrelling, sometimes being pleasantly surprised by each other, sometimes finding each other ridiculous.

I realised that, while I had changed in those twenty-five or so years, the world had changed too. Some of those fashionable movements that knocked existentialism out of the way have aged badly themselves, going into a decline of their own. The concerns of the twenty-first century are no longer the same as those of the late twentieth century: perhaps we are inclined to look for something different in philosophy these days.

If this is so, then there is a certain refreshment of perspective to be had from revisiting the existentialists, with their boldness and energy. They did not sit around playing with their signifiers. They asked big questions about what it means to live an authentic, fully human life, thrown into a world with many other humans also trying to live. They tackled questions about nuclear war, about how we occupy the environment, about violence, and about the difficulty of managing international relations in dangerous times. Many of them longed to change the world, and wondered what sacrifices we might or might not make for such an aim. Atheist existentialists asked how we can live meaningfully in the absence of God. They all wrote about anxiety and the experience of being overwhelmed by choice — a feeling that has become ever more intense in the relatively prosperous parts of the twenty-first-century world, even while real-world
choices have shut down alarmingly for some of us. They worried about suffering, inequality and exploitation, and wondered whether anything could be done about these evils. As part of all these questions, they asked what individuals could do, and what they themselves had to offer.

They also asked what a human being is, given the last century’s increasingly sophisticated understanding of brain physiology and body chemistry. If we are in thrall to our neurons and hormones, how can we still believe we are free? What distinguishes humans from other animals? Is it only a difference of degree, or are we truly set apart in some way? How should we think of ourselves?

Above all, they asked about freedom, which several of them considered the topic underlying all others, and which they interpreted both personally and politically. In the years following existentialism’s decline, this topic went out of focus in parts of the world, perhaps because the great liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s achieved so much in civil rights, decolonisation, women’s equality and gay rights. It seemed as though these campaigns had got what they wanted, and that no point remained in talking about liberation politics. In a television interview in 1999, the French scholar Michel Contat looked back on the Sartre of the 1960s as someone who had given him and his generation ‘
a sense of freedom that directed our lives’, but he immediately added that it was a topic few took much interest in any more.

But that was sixteen years ago, at the time I’m writing, and since then freedom has come into the spotlight again. We find ourselves surveilled and managed to an extraordinary degree, farmed for our personal data, fed consumer goods but discouraged from speaking our minds or doing anything too disruptive in the world, and regularly reminded that racial, sexual, religious and ideological conflict are not closed cases at all. Perhaps we are ready to talk about freedom again — and talking about it politically also means talking about it in our personal lives.

This is why, when reading Sartre on freedom, Beauvoir on the subtle mechanisms of oppression, Kierkegaard on anxiety, Camus
on rebellion, Heidegger on technology, or Merleau-Ponty on cognitive science, one sometimes feels one is reading the latest news. 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?

In asking these two questions, most (not all) of the existentialists drew on their own life experience. But this experience was itself structured around philosophy. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty summed up this relationship, ‘
Life becomes ideas and the ideas return to life.’ This connection became especially apparent when they talked ideas through with one another, which they did all the time. As Merleau-Ponty also wrote:

A discussion is not an exchange or a confrontation of ideas, as if each formed his own, showed them to the others, looked at theirs, and returned to correct them with his own … Whether he speaks up or hardly whispers, each one speaks with all that he is, with his ‘ideas’, but also with his obsessions, his secret history.

Philosophical conversations between thinkers who had invested so much of themselves in their work often became emotional, and sometimes downright argumentative. Their intellectual battles form a long chain of belligerence that connects the existentialist story end to end. In Germany, Martin Heidegger turned against his former mentor Edmund Husserl, but later Heidegger’s friends and colleagues turned their backs on him. In France, Gabriel Marcel attacked Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre fell out with Albert Camus, Camus fell out with Merleau-Ponty, Merleau-Ponty fell out with Sartre, and the Hungarian intellectual Arthur Koestler fell out with everyone and punched Camus in the street. When the philosophical giants of each nation, Sartre and Heidegger, finally met in 1953, it went badly and they spoke mockingly of each other ever after.

Other relationships were extraordinarily close, however. The
most intimate was that between Sartre and Beauvoir, who read each other’s work and discussed their ideas almost every day. Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty had also been friends since their teenage years, and Sartre and Beauvoir were charmed by Camus when they first met him.