At the Existentialist Café (6 page)

When these friendships soured, it was generally because of ideas — most often political ideas. The existentialists lived in times of extreme ideology and extreme suffering, and they became engaged with events in the world whether they wanted to or not — and usually they did. The story of existentialism is therefore a political and a historical one: to some extent, it is the story of a whole European century. Phenomenology was first developed in the years before and during the First World War. Then Heidegger’s philosophy emerged from the troubled situation of Germany between the wars. When Sartre went to Berlin in 1933, he saw Nazi marches and banners everywhere, and the mood of unease found its way into his work. His existentialism, and Beauvoir’s, came of age during the Second World War, with the French experience of defeat and occupation, then went on to fill its sails with wild expectations for the post-1945 world. Existentialist ideas flowed into the widening stream of 1950s anti-conformism, and then into the full-blown idealism of the late 1960s. Through it all, the existentialists changed their thinking as the world changed; their constant shifts of direction kept them interesting, if not consistent — and not always on the right side, to say the least.

In short, the existentialists inhabited their historical and personal world, as they inhabited their ideas. This notion of
‘inhabited philosophy’ is one I’ve borrowed from the English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who wrote the first full-length book on Sartre and was an early adopter of existentialism (though she later moved away from it). She observed that we need not expect moral philosophers to ‘live by’ their ideas in a simplistic way, as if they were following a set of rules. But we can expect them to show how their ideas are lived
in
. We should be able to look in through the windows of a philosophy, as it were, and see how people occupy it, how they move about and how they conduct themselves.

Inspired both by Merleau-Ponty’s mottos about lived ideas and by Iris Murdoch’s ‘inhabited philosophy’, and triggered by my own eerie feelings on retracing my steps, I want to explore the story of existentialism and phenomenology in a way that combines the philosophical and the biographical. This is a mixture many of them were drawn to (although one repudiated it: Heidegger), and this too has fed my desire to try the same. I think philosophy becomes more interesting when it is cast into the form of a life. Likewise, I think personal experience is more interesting when thought about philosophically.

This will be a twentieth-century story, which is why there is very little more on the proto-existentialists Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. I’m also brief on theological existentialists and existentialist psychotherapists: they are fascinating but really need separate books to do them justice. On the other hand, people such as Iris Murdoch, the English ‘new existentialist’ Colin Wilson, the pugnacious Norman Mailer with his ‘Existentialist Party’, and the existentialist-influenced novelist Richard Wright have all found their way in, for various reasons. Some people are only here because they had an interesting role to play in the lives of the others: people like the ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the daring rescuer of manuscripts Herman Leo Van Breda, and the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka, who defied his country’s regime and died for it.

The two gigantic figures in the story are inevitably Heidegger and Sartre — but those who know their
Being and Time
or
Being and Nothingness
may be surprised to find these masterworks chopped in shards and mixed up like chocolate chips in a cookie, rather than being dealt with by the whole bar, as it were. And they may not be the thinkers who, in the end, have the most to say.

These philosophers, together with Simone de Beauvoir, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others, seem to me to have participated in a multilingual, multisided conversation that ran from one end of the last century to the other. Many of them never met. Still, I like to imagine them
in a big, busy café of the mind, probably a Parisian one, full of life and movement, noisy with talk and thought, and definitely an
inhabited
café.

When you peer in through the windows, the first figures you see are the familiar ones, arguing as they puff their pipes and lean towards each other, emphasising their points. You hear clinking glasses and rattling cups; the waiters glide between the tables. In the largest group in front, a dumpy fellow and an elegant woman in a turban are drinking with their younger friends. Towards the back, others sit at quieter tables. A few people are on a dance floor; perhaps someone is writing in a private room upstairs. Voices are being raised in anger somewhere, but there is also a murmuring from lovers in the shadows.

We can enter and take a seat: perhaps in the front, perhaps in an unobtrusive corner. There are so many conversations to overhear, one hardly knows which way to wag one’s ears.

But first, before the waiter comes …

What is existentialism anyway?

Some books about existentialism never try to answer this question, as it is hard to define. The key thinkers disagreed so much that, whatever you say, you are bound to misrepresent or exclude someone. Moreover, it is unclear who was an existentialist and who was not. Sartre and Beauvoir were among the very few to accept the
label, and even they were reluctant at first. Others refused it, often rightly. Some of the main thinkers in this book were phenomenologists but not existentialists at all (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), or existentialists but not phenomenologists (Kierkegaard); some were neither (Camus), and some used to be one or both but then changed their minds (Levinas).

All the same, here is my attempt at a definition of what existentialists do. I put it here for reference, but by all means skip it and come back if the need or want arises.

— Existentialists concern themselves with
individual, concrete human existence
.

— They consider human existence different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am
free
—

— and therefore I’m
responsible
for everything I do, a dizzying fact which causes

— an
anxiety
inseparable from human existence itself.

— On the other hand, I am only free within
situations
, which can include factors in my own biology and psychology as well as physical, historical and social variables of the world into which I have been thrown.

— Despite the limitations, I always want more: I am passionately involved in personal
projects
of all kinds.

— Human existence is thus
ambiguous
: at once boxed in by borders and yet transcendent and exhilarating.

— An existentialist who is also
phenomenological
provides no easy rules for dealing with this condition, but instead concentrates on
describing
lived experience as it presents itself.

— By describing experience well, he or she hopes to understand this existence and awaken us to ways of living more
authentic
lives.

So now let us return to 1933, and to the moment when Sartre went to Germany to learn about those new philosophers who called on him to pay attention to the cocktail on the table, and to everything else in life — in short, to the things themselves.

2

TO THE THINGS THEMSELVES

In which we meet the phenomenologists
.

Sartre’s search for phenomenology took him to Berlin, but he would have found the heartland of the phenomenologists in a smaller city closer to home: Freiburg-im-Breisgau, in the south-west corner of Germany just over the French border.

With the Rhine separating it from France on the west, and the sombre Black Forest sheltering it on the east, Freiburg was a university city of about 100,000 people, a
population often boosted by hikers or skiers passing through on their way to their holidays in the mountains — a fashionable pursuit in the 1920s and 1930s. They livened up Freiburg’s streets with their hobnailed boots and tanned knees and brightly embroidered braces, as well as their walking sticks studded with metal discs showing which routes they had already conquered. Beside them and the students, more traditional Freiburg residents carried on their lives surrounded by elegant university buildings and a tall cathedral, its sandstone tower perforated like lace and glowing a rosy colour in the evening sun. Further out, suburbs climbed over surrounding hills, especially the northern enclave of Zähringen where many university professors had houses on the steep streets.

It was a devoutly Catholic city and an intellectual one, with studious activity revolving around both its seminary and its university. The latter now featured an influential coterie in the philosophy department: the phenomenologists. Initially, this meant followers of Edmund Husserl, who took up Freiburg’s chair of philosophy in 1916. He brought disciples and students with him, and recruited more, so that
Freiburg remained a centre for his work long after his formal retirement in 1928. It was dubbed the ‘City of
Phenomenology’ by one student, Emmanuel Levinas, the brilliant young Jewish Lithuanian whose book Sartre would later buy in Paris. Levinas’ trajectory was typical of many phenomenology converts. He had been studying philosophy just over the French border in Strasbourg in 1928 when he saw someone in the town reading a Husserl book. Intrigued, he read it himself, and immediately arranged a transfer so he could study with Husserl in person. It changed his whole way of thinking. As he wrote, ‘For the young Germans I met in Freiburg, this new philosophy is more than a new theory; it is a new ideal of life, a new page of history, almost a new religion.’

Sartre could have become a late joiner of this gang too. Had he gone to Freiburg, he might have taken up hiking and skiing, and become a lean mountain man instead of the
‘real little Buddha’ which he said he became during his year of Berlin beer and dumplings. Instead, he stayed in the capital’s French Institute reading the phenomenologists’ books, Husserl’s above all, and learning the difficult German terms as he went. He spent the year formulating his ideas
‘at Husserl’s expense’, as he later put it, but never met the master in person. Husserl probably never heard a word about him. Perhaps that was for the best, as he probably would have been unimpressed by the unfamiliar brew the young French existentialist would make of his ideas.

If we could do as disciples like Levinas did, and sign up for Husserl’s classes in Freiburg back in the late 1910s and the 1920s, we might at first be disappointed. He neither looked nor sounded like a guru, or even the founder of a great philosophical movement. He was quiet, with round wire glasses and a delicate look. In youth, he had soft, curly
blond hair, which soon receded to leave a bald-domed head over a moustache and neat beard. When he spoke, he accompanied his words with meticulous hand gestures: one person who attended a Husserl lecture said it reminded him of a ‘
watchmaker gone mad’. Another witness, the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, noticed ‘the fingers of the right hand
circling the flat palm of the left hand in a slow, turning movement’, as Husserl outlined each point — as if he were turning the idea round on his palm to look at it from different angles. In a very short surviving
film clip of him as an elderly man in 1936, walking in a garden with his daughter, one can see him bobbing his hand up and down as he talks. Husserl himself was aware of his tendency to repetitive compulsions: he used to tell people that, as a boy, he was given a
pocketknife as a present and was delighted, but sharpened it so obsessively that he wore the blade away entirely and was left with nothing but a handle. ‘I wonder whether my philosophy is not unlike this knife’, he mused.

(Illustrations Credit 2.1)

It was by no means clear, in his boyhood, that his talents would lie in philosophy at all. Born on 8 April 1859 in the Moravian town of Prostějov (or Prossnitz, to a German-speaker such as himself; it is now in the Czech Republic), Husserl came from a Jewish family but converted to Lutheranism as a young man. His school career was undistinguished. One former schoolmate told a biographer that the young Husserl was ‘
in the habit of falling fast asleep during the lesson, and it was necessary for one of us to push him to wake him up. When the teacher called on him he would stand up sleepily, yawn and gape. Once he yawned so hard that his lower jaw remained stuck.’ But this only happened when Husserl was not interested in the subject. He was more alert in his favourite class of the time, mathematics, and went on to study this at the University of Leipzig. But a fellow Moravian student there, Tomáš Masaryk (later the president of Czechoslovakia) persuaded Husserl to accompany him to the University of Vienna to take classes with a charismatic philosophy teacher named Franz Clemens
Brentano. He spent two years in Vienna from 1884, and was so won over by Brentano that he
resolved to devote his life to philosophy. From then on, there was no more sleeping on the job.